A Brill Calendar: November 18

The Battle of Lombok

Few military campaigns demonstrate the spirit of the age in which they occurred so strikingly as the expedition to Lombok in the Dutch East Indies.

This expedition was scrupulously planned and relentlessly executed by a colonial army of the Kingdom of the Netherlands - some 4400 men, roughly one third of them of European stock. Lombok is a small island between Bali and Sumbawa, the size of a Province in the the Netherlands. This armed force tried to get total control over the brisk opium-trade that ran in those parts; an economic resource still hindered then by Balinese warriors ‘in situ’. An earlier attempt had failed utterly that August, and was the worst defeat suffered by the Dutch during the 19th century.

Bali, an island still independent from Batavia and colonial Java, was an undesirable competitor on the international market for the drug. A clash bent on revenge for that August defeat was a foregone conclusion; the final battle ended November 18, 1894. The predictable triumph entailed also possession of the ‘Lombok Treasure’: precious objects, jewels and bullion measuring - when thrown together - some eight cubic metres: splendid spoils of war to be celebrated and proudly exhibited by the European victor.

In the colonial history of South-East Asia, it is seldom that such unenlightened slaughter and robbery went hand in hand with the flowering interest in ‘patria’ in its languages and cultures. A few days before the bloody disgrace of August 1894 a scholar, as eminent as he was eccentric, Hermann Neubronner van der Tuuk, died on Bali: the patriarch of comparative linguistics of Indian Languages, and seminal ‘auctor intellectualis’ of the publishing company ‘v.h. E. J. Brill’. Incidentally, the Lombok Treasure included the priceless ‘Negarakertagama’, a manuscript written on palm-leaves; for a long time supposed to be the only documentary source of Hindu history on Java.