The Legacy of Multatuli in Indonesia

Multatuli Reading Garden

It was Sigit Susanto, a Kafkaist and a member of the James Joyce Foundation’s  Ulysses Novel Reading Group in Zurich, who first introduced me to Multatuli and his novel Max Havelaar. The Reading Group is an affordable, large-scale literary reading method with a strong social value.

At that time, I was a civil servant teacher at SMPN 3 Sobang, a junior high school in a remote village in Lebak Regency, precisely in Kampung Ciseel, Sobang Village, Sobang Subdistrict, Lebak Regency, Banten. This village is around 57.7 km or 2.14 hours from Badur Village, where Multatuli wrote as a center story of Max Havelaar. In 2009, specifically in November,  I began bringing books from my home in Depok to Kampung Ciseel. By the end of that year, I founded the Multatuli Reading Garden. In March 2010, I bought 40 copies of Max Havelaar in Indonesian and began group reading sessions.

Every Tuesday from 4:00 to 6:30 p.m. local time, we read through thus 400-page novel. Each word and sentence were explained and discussed. Participants ranging from elementary to high school students. The first reading cycle took 11 months to complete. The second one took 2 years and 5 months. The third lasted 3 years.

Multatuli Museum

Six months after returning from Amsterdam, on January 1, 2017, I was asked by the Regent of Lebak to begin curating the then-empty Multatuli Museum at the East Square of Rangkasbitung. The museum occupies the former Wedana building of Rangkasbitung, constructed in 1914, which originally functioned as the office and residence of a colonial district head during the Dutch East Indies era. It was initiated by the Lebak Regency Government and officially opened to the public on February 11, 2018, by Lebak Regent Hj. Iti Octavia Jayabaya and the Director General of Culture of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology, Hilmar Farid.

The Multatuli Museum carries the tagline “Indonesia’s First Anti-Colonial Museum.” It consists of seven rooms; each thematically tied to the renowned novel Max Havelaar. The first room is the welcome visitors. The second depicts the arrival of colonialism in the archipelago. The third focuses on the Dutch Cultivation System. The fourth focuses on Multatuli and his works. The fifth room presents Banten’s history. The sixth highlights Lebak, and the seventh room explores Rangkasbitung.

Since its opening, we’ve received a remarkable number of visitors—school children, university students, researchers, historians, international tourists, readers of Max Havelaar, and Multatuli enthusiasts from around the world. We host public programs for both students and the general public, including dance lessons, pencak silat (traditional martial arts), literary writing, traditional arts, and painting classes held every Sunday morning. We also organizecompetitions such as vlogging, storytelling, and painting. Additionally, you can watch school student performances every Friday afternoon, and we regularly hold book seminars and other events.

Although the museum has limited space and located in a relatively small city, the Multatuli Museum received an average of 35,589 visitors annually between 2018 and 2024. During the pandemic, we launched the Virtual Multatuli Museum, accessible at www.museummultatuli.id

The museum is open every Tuesday to Sunday, from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM (local time). It is closed on Mondays, public holidays, and collective leave days.

Multatuli Arts Festival

Since its opening, we have continued to grow and evolve. Carrying the prestigious name of Multatuli and his famous novel Max Havelaar hasn’t made us complacent. The Multatuli Arts Festival, initiated by the Lebak government and several community figures such as historian and current member of the Indonesian House of Representatives, Bonnie Triyana. This annual festival highlights modern literature as the ecosystem it promotes.

This festival showcases a wide array of artistic and cultural expressions inspired by Max Havelaar. There’s a buffalo parade, reflecting the deep loss experienced by a young couple from Lebak, Saidjah and Adinda, as victims of colonial injustice in Max Havelaar. There are theatrical performances based on Max Havelaar, symposia on postcolonial ideas and reinterpretations of the novel, and film festivals that help young people in Lebak delve deeper into cinematography. We also staged an opera titled Saidjah and Adinda features real buffaloes on stage. We also organize historical walking tours tracing Multatuli’s presence in Rangkasbitung—visiting Multatuli Street, the former Multatuli House, the Ciujung River mentioned in the novel, the Regent’s Pavilion where Multatuli gave his speech to Lebak officials on his second day of duty, the Multatuli Clinic, Multatuli Pharmacy, and more.

The festival also features traditional music unique to Lebak Regency, a region that will celebrate its 197th anniversary in 2025. The festival is also a meeting point for researchers and readers of Max Havelaar. One of the groups, Indonesia Korea Culture Study (IKCS), was inspired to translate Max Havelaar into Korean in 2019. They restructured the original 20 chapters into 39, adapting it to suit modern readers.

The Multatuli Museum continues to conduct research and publish findings. We were thrilled when, in 2021, we were invited to collaborate with the Multatuli Museum in Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam to launch the website www.multatuli.online.

In 2022, we conducted a study titled The Influence and Translation of Max Havelaar Around the World. Since its first publication in the Netherlands in 1860 to present time, Max Havelaar has been translated into 39 languages and 14 scripts. What’s unique about these translations is that they were often carried out independently and sporadically. Translators were usually motivated by the story and the author’s views, which resonated with their own ideologies, rather than economic incentives. This has made the influence of Max Havelaar and Multatuli on its translators and readers more profound and personal.

Thank you.

Lebak, June 6 2025