Banditry in West Java

Banditry was rife around Batavia (modern Jakarta) during the late colonial period. Banditry in West Java identifies the bandits and describes both their working methods and their motives, which at times went beyond simple self-enrichment. The author also explores the world of the victims of the robbers, mainly city-dwellers, who viewed the bandits as the antithesis of civilization and made them into convenient objects onto which respectable citizens projected their own preoccupations with sex, violence, and magic. Banditry was brought under control following reforms to the colonial police force in the Dutch East Indies in the early 1920's, but the bandit tradition lived on in Javanese popular imagination and folk culture. In particular it is found in tales of Si Pitung, a Robin Hood figure who flourished in nineteenth-century Batavia.

Margreet van Till is a Researcher at the Institute of Netherlands History, and deals primarily with the colonial Netherlands East Indies.