Pramoedya: Autodidact, Example, Guide

This paper argues that Pramoedya Ananta Toer, as an autodidact, exemplifies the potential for critical and creative appropriation of knowledge; and that in his writings he presents material on the dynamics of learning which is itself instructive. Though his career on the schoolbench was curtailed and apparently difficult, Pramoedya has made himself a considerable historian and critic as well as a formidable writer of fiction.

His fictional and non-fictional works have long been informed by issues of pedagogical experience, by the coercions and resistances, humiliations and enlightenments that accompany processes of learning. Authenticity is revealed as a matter of what one has taken to heart and made one's own. Authorization, then, is not borrowed from an outside source: it is a matter of personal courage.

Pramoedya thus provides example and guidance for Indonesian students caught in the disloyalty to and estrangement from "home" (place, people, language) generated by the exilings of higher education. He challenges intellectuals who through education and position have become complicit in a system that reproduces privileged knowledges, received opinions and official facts.

He does so by demonstrating how to win a degree of independent agency in one's acquisition of knowledge. Precisely because he is politically ostracized and his writings are banned, Pramoedya's life and work have come to represent the potential for intellectual autonomy in contemporary Indonesia.

Alex G. Bardsley, Cornell University