The New Order's Historiography: State Control, Dissent, and Alternative Narratives

The second national seminar on history-writing in 1970 solidified the rise of a multi-dimensional social science approach pioneered by Sartono Kartodirdjo. Trained by Dutch sociologist W. F. Wertheim and influenced by American historian H. J. Benda, Sartono advocated for an Indonesia-centric methodology. His approach synthesised social, economic, cultural, and political factors, applying interdisciplinary theory in contrast to earlier descriptive narratives. While aiming for political ‘neutrality’ and scientific historical methodologies, scholar Rommel Curaming argues the Sartono school's influence was often confined to Gajah Mada University, with Universitas Indonesia dominated by the more state-aligned Nugroho Notosusanto.

Sartono’s innovative inclusion of peasant studies directly conflicted with the New Order mantra, "rakyat masih bodoh" (the people are still stupid), which justified public depoliticization. His seminal national history, published in six volumes in 1975, spanned from prehistory to the 1965 coup, integrating social change and mobility into the political narrative. Notably, it provided academic justification for the military’s dwifungsi (dual function) doctrine. Revised editions in 1984 and the 1990s, published without Sartono, added chapters celebrating New Order stability, development, and its controversial integration of East Timor, aligning history with state propaganda.

Under Nugroho Notosusanto, historiography shifted toward overt state-centred narrative and demonization. While Nugroho’s own analysis of the 1965 coup was nuanced, the official discourse he presided over presented a simplistic tale of a communist betrayal heroically thwarted by the army. This narrative, propagated through museums, monuments, and textbooks, involved the total erasure of the 1965-66 mass killings. As scholar Saskia Wieringa has documented, official accounts fabricated horrific details about the generals' deaths while silencing the torture inflicted on imprisoned leftists.

The state’s control manifested in high school textbooks that emphasized material development like the Green Revolution while avoiding political critique. Professional historians, facing low salaries and severe reprisals for dissent, often pursued non-sensitive socioeconomic studies. This environment produced what Henk Schulte Nordholt critiqued as histories without people—structural analyses lacking "empirical imagination." The chilling effect was clear in the state’s response to the Petition of 50 (1980), whose signatories faced ruinous financial persecution for questioning the regime’s use of state ideology.

Despite this repression, alternative histories emerged. Historian Onghokham pioneered studies on everyday life and regional interaction, while implicitly comparing the New Order to traditional jago (banditry). The most formidable challenge came from novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose historical fiction, like the Buru Quartet, analysed the colonial state’s repressive foundations as a mirror for the New Order. By resurrecting figures like journalist Tirto Adi Soerjo and creating the resilient heroine Nyai Ontosoroh, Pramoedya provided a subversive counter-narrative. His banned works earned severe persecution but established a vital alternative historical consciousness.

Beneath the state's radar, local histories proliferated, representing oral traditions transitioning to text due to rising literacy. These artless, grassroots accounts, while not directly contesting national narratives, preserved community perspectives absent from academic works. Thus, Indonesian historiography under the New Order existed in layered tension: a hegemonic, military-celebrating state narrative, a marginalized academic tradition, powerful dissident literary challenges, and a flourishing underworld of local memory, each vying to define the nation's past.