10 - Conclusions

Summary

The issues surrounding the biography genre canvassed in Chapter 1 included the connections between biography on the one hand and power and ideology on the other, and the question of the genre's legitimate boundaries. Problems of biography included claims that it was elitist, that it could obscure the wider picture by focussing on one individual, and that the impression of coherence given by narrative could cloak the true chaos and discontinuities of a subject's life. On Asian subjects (and indeed any subjects from a different culture), the main issues related to the need to bridge cultural gaps and the difficulties in doing so. We also examined the claimed advantages of biography in revealing connections between apparently disparate elements of history and in providing a new and perhaps unique perspective on well-known events. I attempt here to select some of these issues for further discussion in the context of Hamengku Buwono's life.

In the present case, perhaps “the text has constituted the life” and this work has created a power relationship with the subject, his family, or Indonesian historiography as a whole. But as noted previously, if power exists everywhere, this tells us little. Nevertheless, it is advisable to try to meet the assertion that the writing of Asian history by foreigners represents an attempt to exert hegemony in some way, imposing an alien discourse and set of prejudices on an exotic culture. Is the present study part of such an effort? Since this is the first study in English about this historical Indonesian figure, will it hold the field and present to the readers (such readers as it may have) a misleading, patronizing or distorted picture of the subject, uncorrected by more knowledgeable Indonesian (or other) commentators? How does a historian answer such charges?

The first part of a possible answer has to be a careful attention to the facts and sources, and it is here that the opinions of professional historians quoted in Chapter 1 become relevant. Historians are dealing with “something real”, with the central distinction “between historical statements based on evidence and those which are not”. This account of Hamengku Buwono's life is intended to rest firmly on the available sources, allowing them to lead where they may.