The biggest invisible thing

In 1906 and 1908, on the island of Bali, thousands of people dressed in ceremonial Hindu attire walked towards Dutch gunfire in acts of mass suicide known as puputan. These were not the first events of mass violence by the Dutch against the indigenous people of what we now call Indonesia – nor the last. In 1621, the native inhabitants of the Banda Islands were slaughtered en masse to secure Dutch access to nutmeg; it was the starting point for Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant non-fiction work The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). The only Bandanese who survived were enslaved. During the so-called Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s, Batavia (now Jakarta) was home to 27,000 people – half of whom were enslaved. In 1740, the Dutch massacred almost all ethnic Chinese residents of Batavia, establishing what would become a dark history of anti-Chinese violence in the archipelago.