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The roots of batik are ancient, everywhere, and difficult to trace. No one knows exactly where and when people first began to apply wax, vegetable paste, paraffin, or even mud to cloth that would then resist a dye. But it was on the island of Java and nearby Madura that batik emerged as one of the great art forms of Asia. Batik is known to have existed in China, Japan, India, Thailand, East Turkestan, Europe, and Africa, and it may have developed simultaneously in several of these areas. Some scholars believe that the process originated in India and was later brought to Egypt. Whatever the case, in A.D. 70, in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder told of Egyptians applying designs to cloth in a manner similar to the batik process. The method was known seven hundred years later in China. Scholars have ascertained that batik found in Japan was Chinese batik, made during the Tang Dynasty.

Thus batik was already an ancient tradition by the time the earliest evidence of such Javanese work appeared in the sixteenth century. Records from the coast of Malabar in 1516 suggest that painted cloth for export may have been batiked. The first known mention of Javanese batik occurred two years later, in 1518, when the word tulis, meaning "writing," appeared; the term survives today to specify the finest hand-drawn batik. One hundred years later, the word baték actually appeared in an inventory of goods sent to Sumatra.

The word batik does not belong to the old Javanese language; in fact, its origin is not at all clear. Most likely batik is related to the word titik, which in modern Indonesia and Malaysia refers to a point, dot, or drop. Even that accomplished linguist, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, although he knew the word, neglected to translate batik. However, in compiling a list of occupations he did include Tukang batik, a "cotton printer."

Whatever its origins, the designs and uses of Javanese batik have reflected the vicissitudes of Java's ever-changing society. Three major religions have left their mark, as have a number of ethnic groups with their distinctive languages and customs. And over the years any number of invaders, explorers, and colonists have also brought changes to Java and to its highest form of art.

Java is a five hundred-mile-long connecting link in an archipelago of nearly fourteen thousand islands that constitutes Indonesia—the world's fourth largest nation, with the world's largest Muslim population. About the size of Alabama, Java has an east-west mountain range flanked by limestone ridges and lowlands, with rivers that are navigable only in the wet season. Thirty-five of its one hundred twelve volcanoes are active. With nearly two thousand people per square mile, it is the world's most densely populated island. The great majority of Java's 120 million people live in rural villages, their lives governed by the rhythmic cycles of their crops—rice, corn, sweet potatoes, and tobacco. Because of the fierce overpopulation, most exist at a subsistence level.

By tradition and history, Java is divided into three sections: west, central, and east. To the west lie the Sunda Strait and the cities of Jakarta (formerly Batavia), Bandung, Garut, and Tasikmalaya. This area was once the empire of the Sunda, and people there still call themselves Sundanese. Central Java, with its rich farmlands, is dominated by the cities of Yogyakarta and Surakarta—and features the great temples of Borobudur and Prambanan. To the east is the great port of Surabaya and the island of Madura. Stretching the length of Java lies the island's north coast with its mixed and vibrant heritage.

For two thousand years, Java's north coast was a lucrative trade area, luring sailors and merchants from all parts of the world. Situated in the calm and tranquil Java Sea, beyond the belt of typhoons and angry oceans, the island was on a spur of the trade route between Cairo and Nagasaki, Lisbon and Macao, London and the Moluccas, Amsterdam and Macassar. In Java, cloves and nutmeg from the Spice Islands to the east were traded for tea, silks, porcelains, and opium from China; for brightly patterned cloth from southern India; for cinnamon from Ceylon; camphor from Siam; and a cornucopia of goods from Europe, Africa, and Japan. It was via the north coast of Java that Greeks, Malays, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Portuguese, Dutch, British—as well as numerous pirates—sailed from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and thence to farther ports,

THE LURE OF JAVA

As long ago as the first century A.D., Syrian and Macedonian navigators discovered that seasonal monsoon winds enabled them to sail across the Indian Ocean without hugging the coastline. In about A.D. 150, Ptolemy wrote about Java in his Geography, and in the fourth century the Chinese Buddhist monk Fa-Hsien wrote that he had reached Java ". . . where heresies and Brahmanism were flourishing, while the faith of Buddha was in a very unsatisfactory condition." Within another two hundred years, the silk routes—both overland and by sea—were well established, and the Strait of Malacca, between the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, became increasingly busy.

West and north of Java, on the island of Sumatra, the city of Palembang was a center of commerce for Southeast Asia in the fifth and sixth centuries. It was from here that the powerful Malay kingdom, Srivijaya-Palembang, came to dominate coastal Sumatra as well as the Strait of Malacca.

The main sea route from India via the Strait of Malacca and north toward China and Japan, To reach the Spice Islands ships skirted northern Java.

Three Religions

First Buddhism, then Hinduism, then Islam came to Java, and each profoundly affected its sacred and secular life as well as the development of its batik. Both Buddhism and Hinduism emphasized the "liberation of the soul from mortal ties as the ultimate purpose of life." But typically, the Javanese would adopt particular aspects of each religion that they found appealing and would mingle them with the others. Buddha and the Hindu god Siva (Shiva), for example, were both looked upon as manifestations of the same being, and powerful rulers built monuments to each. The Sailendra family, of the princely courts in central Java, erected Borobudur in the ninth century. Its galleries and terraces and images of Buddha celebrated the spirit of Buddhism and the kinship between the secular leader and his god. Fifty miles away and about one hundred years later at Prambanan, another sacred monument called Lara Jonggrang was built; there the kings were united after death with the Hindu god Siva. Design elements used in batik are found in both Buddhist and Hindu temples—the lotus, for example, in the reliefs of Borobudur; and the interlocking and intersecting circular designs—known in batik work as kawung—in the later Hindu temples of east Java.

With the spread of Hindu influence, a caste system was introduced: "No one dares stand in the presence of a superior . . . from the common laborer upward." The Javanese language developed different vocabularies and forms of salutation, depending on the age and position of the person being addressed. In the economic realm, the Hindus introduced such powerful innovations as wet-rice cultivation, wheeled vehicles, and draft animals, each in its own way contributing to the trading strength of the Indies. But for every grain of rice grown, tribute was extracted in a feudal system that was to endure for more than twelve hundred years.

By the thirteenth century, the Hindu-oriented kingdom of Majapahit claimed most of Java. It was a golden age, with Majapahit rulers spreading the idea of the divine right of kings, secure in the knowledge that royal divinity would flood the world and thereby cleanse it. On the political front, Majapahit rulers succeeded in defeating Kublai Khan's invading envoy on the northern coast of Java. But internal feuding and lack of access to overseas trade eventually eroded Majapahit power, and within two hundred fifty years the mighty kingdom had been reduced to the royal courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta.

In the meantime, Java's north coast was becoming commercially active. Small harbor states, usually founded by rulers of obscure ethnic origin, began to appear. These states—Cirebon, Gresik, Japara, Demak, and Tuban among them—prospered because of their strategic location on the coast. They were on the sea route to the spice-producing Banda and Molucca islands farther east.

For thousands of years spices were valued by faraway people as medicines, aphrodisiacs, preservatives, and flavorings. Roman, Chinese, Indian, Arab, and European traders fought for centuries for the highly lucrative spice monopoly. Spices were light and compact and far easier to transport than bulky goods such as timber, porcelain, or even cloth. Great quantities of spices could be packed into the hold of a single small ship.

Malacca, about two hundred miles north of Singapore on the southwestern coast of Malaysia, is a sleepy town today, and it is hard to realize that it was once the greatest commercial center in Southeast Asia. Geographic position accounted for Malacca's importance: at a time when deep-water ports were not necessary, it dominated the Strait of Malacca through which nearly all shipping passed, east and west. Malacca was also a trading post for religious ideas, and it was in this realm of the mind and the spirit, as much as in the marketplace, that Malacca's influence on Javanese batik would make itself felt.

Although Muslim communities had existed in Java as early as the twelfth century, it was from Malacca and Sumatra that the major drive for Javanese conversion came. The port became the meeting place for Chinese merchants from the east and for Muslims—Arabs and Indians—from the west. Traders from Java carried rice from Demak and Japara, nutmeg and cloves from Gresik and Tuban. If Javanese merchants were to win Arab support, they would have to open their doors to Islam.

The commercial and political advantages that attended religious conversion gave merchants real incentives to adopt Islam. Commercially, the Muslims were the world's leading traders, with connections throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa: association with them meant new routes and more riches. Politically, a community benefited when a former Hindu kingdom became Muslim because to some degree the caste system was eroded. A Muslim was judged by his fervor, not his rank. All believers were equal. By the end of the fifteenth century, there were twenty Muslim kingdoms on the north coast of Java, and Javanese traders from the north became the most influential people in Malacca. By 1523 Gresik's Muslim population totaled more than thirty thousand.

Like Hinduism and Buddhism, Islam also worked its way into the designs and uses of batik. The textile was "encouraged by the Muslim rulers as a major element of social expression in garments and hangings." Not only did Muslim traders expand the batik market but because of the Muslim prohibition against depicting human forms, design motifs also changed. New shapes—flat arabesques and calligraphy—were introduced and became integral in the evolution of batik.

Near Borobudur, the temple complex of Prambanan (also known as Lara Jonggrang) rises majestically. This sacred monument was built in the tenth century to honor the Hindu trinity of Siva, Visnu, and Brahma.

A seventeenth-century Malay and his wife selling their goods in Batavia.

It is difficult to imagine that today's sleepy Strait of Malacca was once the main commercial thorough fare of Southeast Asia.

The Urban Chinese

The influence of the Chinese on Javanese batik was as profound as that of the Muslims, the Buddhists, and the Hindus. Trading such prestigious commodities as silk and porcelain for Java's textiles—not to mention its birds' nests—the Chinese had long been doing business in the area. From the ninth to the twelfth centuries, the princes of Java sent colored cotton cloth as tribute to Chinese leaders; indeed, they even sent silk to China. Now the Chinese brought mythical lions and lyrical flowers to batik designs along with a bright new palette of colors.

The city of Tuban, near the eastern end of Java's north coast, was known to the Chinese as early as the eleventh century, and by the fifteenth century it had become Java's greatest trading center, with many immigrants from southern China:

In this city dwell very many noblemen who do great trade in the buying and selling of silk . . . cotton cloth, and also pieces of cloth which they wear on their bodies, some of which are made there. They have ships that they call junks, which . . . are laden with pepper and taken to Bali, and they exchange it for pieces of simple cotton cloth, for they are made there in quantity, and when they have exchanged their pepper there for that cloth, they carry the same . . . to other surrounding islands . . . and exchange the cloth in turn for mace, nutmeg, and cloves, and being laden . . . they sail home once more.

Whether the king of Tuban, pictured in the sixteenth-century book illustration (opposite), was Chinese we do not know. We do know from the vivid description that there was considerable pomp and ceremony as he sat on an elephant and received his Dutch visitors.

This king, in addition to treating the Dutch men in a humane manner, had his keris presented to Prince Mauritius . . . . The king's dress was a black silk tunic with wide sleeves. The elephant . . . was as high as two men one on top of the other . . . . History says that this king was able to gather several thousand armed men ready for war within 24 hours . . . . After the Dutch men had rendered to him the proper honor . . . [he] showed them his magnificence and majesty.

Nearby Gresik rivaled Tuban, and in the fourteenth century it boasted a Chinese-born ruler. Fair Winds for Escort, a navigation guide, gave instructions for sailing to Lasem, Tuban, Jaratan, Demak, and Banten. Farther west along Java's north coast, Cirebon had been visited by Chinese traders hundreds of years earlier.

Direct trade between China and Java virtually ceased after the beginning of the sixteenth century. The long-reigning Qing Dynasty (1644-1894) in fact forbade Chinese trade and overseas settlement. Yet, by 1700, Java had about ten thousand Chinese residents; within another hundred years there were one hundred thousand Chinese, many of them married to Javanese.

And even in those early times, the people now referred to as "overseas Chinese" exerted an influence beyond their numbers. The Chinese were mostly urban dwellers, settling in such large centers as Batavia (now Jakarta), Semarang, Surabaya, and Cirebon. A seventeenth-century observer wrote: "The Chinese drive here a considerable traffick being more industrious . . . mainly they are in merchandising and are great artists of thriftiness." They became entrepreneurs and middlemen, and their orders were big enough to cause batik making to become something of an industry, with factories spotted along the Java coast.

How the King of Tuban received the Dutch men.

Explorers from the West

Javanese history from about 1400 to 1600 was tumultuous and is still not well understood. By the sixteenth century, power in Europe had shifted from countries with armies to those with navies, and a struggle began among the European nations for control of Asia's riches. Portugal came to dominate a vast trade route, extending from Goa on the west coast of India to Malacca, thence to the Spice Islands, to Macao, and northward to Japan. The critical port of Malacca was in Portuguese hands. As Portuguese traders increasingly pushed the Javanese out of the spice trade, the reaction was predictable: local Javanese rulers bitterly contested the spreading Portuguese power. The ruler of Demak, for example, built up Banten in an effort to create a new trade route through the Sunda Strait to the south of Sumatra. Several coastal cities joined together to launch repeated and massive attacks against the Portuguese, resulting in the exhaustion of the cities' manpower and resources.

And from the kingdom of Mataram in central Java came more bad news for the north coast. With the northern cities already decimated, Mataram's ruler, Sultan Agung, decided that the time was ripe to strike. Japara, Gresik, Cirebon, Tuban, Madura, and Surabaya all fell. The devastation was frightful.

The environs of Surabaya were completely laid waste, so that famine and loss of life forced the city to capitulate. Forty thousand Madurese were carried off prisoner to Java . . . . Countless inhabitants of the coastal centers took refuge on other shores.

The coast of northern Java was never to recover from such wanton destruction.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to Java. They proved to be good organizers. Rather than relying on dozens of individual free lances to capture the spice trade, in 1602 the Dutch put together the Dutch East India Trading Company, known by its initials, VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie). The VOC included a military force; more important, it was a monopoly operating in a single large geographic area. The VOC was the foundation of the Dutch commercial empire that was to last for nearly two hundred fifty years.

The VOC established a commercial settlement in Java. The Dutch settlers called it Batavia and built steep-roofed houses and dug canals that reminded them of home. Batavia flourished. Within fifty years it had become a center for trans-shipment of goods from the entire world. Wrote Adam Smith, the laissez-faire economist:

What the Cape of Good Hope is between Europe and every part of the East-Indies, Batavia is between the principal countries in the East-Indies. It lies upon the most frequented road from Hindustan to China and Japan . . . . Batavia is able to surmount the additional disadvantage, of perhaps the most unwholesome climate in the world.

Holland was now firmly established in Asia. Not only was Batavia thriving, the Dutch had also destroyed Banten in western Java, seized Malacca from the Portuguese, and were aggressively expanding their power. In return for Dutch protection, the sultans of the courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta were forced to give the Dutch a strip of land on the north coast. They also granted the VOC permission to sell cotton cloth there, competing with Java's own home-grown cotton. By 1755 VOC control was established throughout Java, except in the courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta. And just as surely as Dutch influence would change all aspects of Javanese life, so would the establishment of the VOC affect north-coast batik,

At the end of the eighteenth century, several events were to seal the fate of the VOC and very nearly doom the prospects for later Dutch rule. The spice trade became less lucrative. Money was now to be made in produce shipped directly from Java: coffee, tea, and palm oil among other items. What virtually bankrupted the VOC, however, were savage doses of dysentery and malaria—along with piracy and corruption. Finally, the Napoleonic wars changed the fate of Java as well as Europe. Coincidentally, they also led to the first authoritative chronicling of batik.

The children's hospital of Batavia was actually an orphanage. built of brick with lodgings for servants and maintained by voluntary contributions.

Johan Nieuhoff was one of numerous brave, and sometimes foolhardy, seventeenth-century explorer.

BATIK AS COSTUME

Until well into the twentieth century, batik was. used almost exclusively for clothing and for ceremonial occasions. In a rank-conscious society, class distinctions were made by the type of cloth worn and its pattern. In a tropical, humid climate such as Java, batik was ideal. As a costume, it was ingenious because batik demanded no zippers, buttons, or pins.

A sarong, usually sewn together at the ends, is only two yards long (180 cm.). A sarong has a "body," or badan, and a "head," or kepala. The badan is about three-quarters the length of the sarong. The kepala is a wide perpendicular band, usually in the middle or at the end of the sarong. Sometimes the kepala has two rows of equilateral triangles running down each side with the points of the triangles facing each other, much like a backgammon board; this design is called a tumpal.

The dodot, made by sewing two lengths of batik together, is a prerogative of royalty; dodots are usually worn only by the sultan, a bride or groom, or dancers at the courts, and are usually of unsurpassed quality. The dodot is worn draped and folded as an overskirt, sometimes with a train of fabric hanging at one side. Silk trousers are often worn underneath, with the pattern of the trousers showing in front.

Sarong is a Malay word, but the idea of draping a cloth as a skirt probably originated in India. A young nineteenth-century girl from western Java wears a typical sarong with tumpal at its head.

A kain panjang or "long cloth"—often simply called kain—is an ankle-length batik about forty inches wide (107 cm.) and about two and a half to three yards long (about 250 cm.). The entire surface is decorated, often with borders at the shorter ends. Worn by both men and women, a kain is usually considered more formal than a sarong. When worn by women, it is usually wrapped left over right, sometimes with narrow pleats in the front; men usually wear a kain with broader front pleats, wrapping it loosely right over left.

A pagi-sore or "morning-evening" batik is the Javanese version of reversible clothing. A little longer than a kain, the pagi-sore is divided diagonally, each half with a distinctive design and color. It is a simple matter to arrange the same cloth for two strikingly different effects.

The selendang (or slendang) is a long narrow cloth used exclusively by women as a carryall or a shawl. Draped over the shoulder, it can hold a baby, the day's marketing, or anything else that needs carrying. Selendangs often have striped borders at each end suggesting an imitation fringe; they are sometimes finished by a true fringe, which is attached, knotted, and twisted.

The iket kepala, worn only by men, is a square headcloth, tied elegantly to form a turban. The pattern of the iket may be distributed evenly over the surface of the cloth, but in the middle there is usually an undecorated area called tengahan. Often the perimeter has finely drawn stripes, imitating a real fringe.

A kemben is a "breast cloth," which is a narrow batik wrapped around the upper part of the body used to secure a kain or sarong. It is worn instead of a kebaya (a long-sleeved blouse usually decorated with lace and embroidery) or sometimes under the kebaya.

Cotton for Sale—and to Wear

Cotton had been grown and spun in India for five thousand years, and by the middle of the fourteenth century it was probably the most important medium of exchange among Muslim, Hindu, and Arab traders. Within another three hundred years most merchants, except the Chinese—who traded mostly in porcelain—were carrying cotton throughout the East Indian archipelago. A single length of three or four yards was worth about forty pounds of nutmeg, and one ship might carry thirty or more different kinds of cloth, most likely including batik.

The export of batik from southeastern India to Java, Sumatra, Persia, and Siam reached its peak in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Early batik designs imitated woven textiles and were called djelemprang; they were popular because the simulated woven design took far less time to produce than actual woven cloth. The double ikat weave (patola) was often copied as a batik design, and this and other geometrically patterned djelemprangs were to find their way into the batik of both central Java and the north coast.

The Indian textiles suggested the possibility of multicolored patterns, as well as new designs. They probably also inspired a new organization of the textile surface—as a framed rectangle. That seemingly simple change brought about a profound revolution in perspective: now the cloth could be viewed as a picture-plane to be filled with something other than stripes or plaids. All these innovations may well have suggested to local craftsmen the idea of filling major design elements in batik with a network of finer designs. This would later lead to the development of isén—the fine "filling" or pattern within a motif.

In a 1662 book by the Dutch explorer Johan Nieu-hoff, numerous Javanese are shown dressed in what appear to be batiked garments. Shortly thereafter, a Dutch official visiting the central Javanese kingdom of Mataram reported four thousand women who were "painting" cloth. The numbers may have been inflated, but batik by then had become important enough to rival Dutch imported cloth. In fact, the ruler of Mataram encouraged his people to grow cotton in a vain attempt to free his people from the yoke of Holland.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the common people of Java were wearing plaid cloth (called lurik); others, more exalted, "preferred baték, or painted cloth," which came in a hundred different patterns. Not all these patterns were available to everyone, however. Certain designs, especially those used in the courts of central Java, were "forbidden" to commoners. But the freewheeling people of the north coast generally ignored such strictures.

Cotton, both locally grown and imported, was a key ingredient in the development of batik. Two types of cotton were grown in seventeenth-century Java. Je- rondo was "used instead of feathers to stuff cushions, bolsters, and quilts . . . but not long enough for combing or weaving." A second type called Kapas was spun by the Javanese: "As soon as the flowers are gone, there buds out a knot, containing the cotton wool, this cotton fit for weaving." The labor required to produce handspun cloth limited the production of locally woven goods. Seven hours of continuous labor were required to produce one meter of cloth on a traditional Javanese loom, and this work, as well as the spinning of yarn, was done by women.

The women of the family should provide the men with the cloths necessary for their apparel and from the first consort to the sovereign to the wife of the lowest peasant, the same rule is observed. In every cottage there is a spinning wheel and a loom, and in all ranks a man is accustomed to pride himself on [the] beauty of cloth woven by either his wife, mistress, or daughter.

For the women, only the planting and harvesting of crops took precedence over these homespun duties.

For the last four hundred years, however, cotton has not been a major commodity in Java's agricultural economy. As early as 1598, Jan H. Linschoten was persuaded that "if cloth of Holland were [in Java] to be found, it would be more esteemed than cotton linen out of India." Even under Dutch colonial rule, when a plantation system prevailed, coffee, rice, tobacco, and copra far outstripped cotton in importance. Batik makers have always relied on imported cotton, first from India and then from Holland and England. These imports were undoubtedly expanded in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, as Java's population tripled. The increased labor force, in turn, increased the production of batik.

An Arab of Java, from a mid-nineteenth-century lithograph.

Raffles the Remarkable

The leading witness to the development of batik was that extraordinary man, Thomas Stamford Raffles, who arrived in Java in 1811 as the English began a brief but important interregnum there. Some twelve thousand Englishmen landed in Java, capturing it from the Dutch. Raffles was appointed lieutenant governor of the island and forthwith set out to learn everything he could about his new surroundings. He abolished forced and "contingent" deliveries, upon which both the Dutch and Javanese had based their economy. Shocked that a country like Holland, which valued political liberty, would tolerate thirty thousand slaves in Java, Raffles set about eradicating slavery.

Not content with such far-reaching economic and social changes, Raffles steeped himself in the local culture. He studied the Javanese language; he uncovered the ancient monument at Borobudur, which by then was buried deep in the jungle; he encouraged restoration of other ancient temples. Raffles also wrote a monumental History of Java, which to this day stands as the most authoritative and exhaustive chronicle of the island and its folkways. He amassed one of the greatest collections of flora, fauna, textiles, and artifacts ever collected in the archipelago and packed it all up for shipment home. The boat and its contents burned fifty miles offshore. Undaunted, Raffles began a second collection, which he brought back safely to England.

Raffles may well have collected batik by the gross—he wrote that there were a hundred identifiable patterns—and his History of Java includes the first systematic study of the art. Only two of Raffles's Javanese pieces survive, and they seem to be the earliest in any collection. Illustrations in the Raffles History show numerous ways of wearing batik, along with many different patterns. He also wrote in detail about how batik is made.

During Raffles's time England began exporting its own printed cottons to Java, and local batik makers acquired a new perspective on their own work when they found the English prints were not colorfast. The English also exported a high-quality, tightly woven white cloth. This, along with European-made mori, as cambrics were called, began to replace Javanese hand-woven textiles. The smoother, mill-made textiles from Europe became the groundcloth of most nineteenth-century batik: it was possible for wax to be drawn in more detailed designs on these finer fabrics, and the motifs themselves began to change accordingly.

The subsequent hundred years witnessed a great flowering of batik, particularly on the north coast with its cosmopolitan exposure. Whereas Raffles had recognized a mere hundred designs, a century later the batik scholar G. P. Rouffaer described more than a thousand.

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the remarkable man whose monumental History of Java is still important to our knowledge of batik.

One of the earliest (ca. 1810—1820) surviving examples of Javanese batik, this piece (right) remained in the Raffles' family until it was donated to London's Museum of Mankind in 1939, Its border was made separately and stitched to the fabric.

Birth of an Industry

In 1815, only four years after Sir Thomas Raffles and the British arrived in Java, the victorious nations at the Congress of Vienna decided that, in order to achieve world harmony, a balance of power would have to be imposed. Thus, the East Indies came to be restored to the Dutch who promptly revoked the reforms of Raffles.

The Dutch remained in the East Indies for almost another century and a half, turning much of the area—especially land-rich Java—into a vast state-owned plantation, cultivated by forced labor with product quotas. Java became a keystone of Holland's commercial empire in the Indies. Its pluralistic society, strengthened by Chinese immigration in the seventeenth century, now became stratified: Dutch on top, Chinese (and sometimes Arabs) in the middle, and the indigenous population at the bottom.

For most Javanese—excepting some Eurasians, a few nobles, some merchants and their families and friends—life was hard indeed. "No Dogs or Inlanders" was not an uncommon sign in public places. Dutch schools were closed to non-Dutch; land could be bought only by the Dutch. Although slavery was finally abolished in 1860, and a civil service was established along with some educational reforms, life for the people of Java continued grimly.

Nevertheless, profound changes were taking place beneath the surface. Between 1815 and 1860, the population of Java doubled, then doubled again by 1900. The plantation system, which had cultivated cotton, tea, and coffee, now began to grow rubber and nut palm as well. The discovery of petroleum brought vast new wealth to the Netherlands, and a flood of Dutch civil servants came to oversee the empire—thousands of administrators and clerks, many of whom would come to view Java as "home."

An 1855 lithograph entitled A Native School in the Kampung. Javanese village life is still much the same, more than a century later.

Chinese musician plays a popular instrument called the Kong-a-Hian.

All this was significant for the history of batik. The population explosion, both Javanese and Dutch, increased the availability of labor. New roads and railroads brought raw cotton and finished batik to growing markets. As the economy grew, there were more batik producers and more people who could afford to buy batik. From 1850 to 1939 the Javanese produced some of their finest work.

There were interruptions along the way, most notably the worldwide depression that began in 1929. Already threatened by cheap Japanese imports, Java's textile markets shriveled, and many men and women trudged from town to town in desperate search of employment. The economic dislocation was long and severe, resulting in the permanent loss of many local batik styles and specialties.

Then came the awful disruption of World War II as well as the culmination of the anticolonial struggle, which closed most batik factories and killed or exiled many of Java's batik entrepreneurs, their talents lost forever. In light of these travails, it was appropriate that when Indonesia achieved independence after the war, batik became the symbol of a unified nation.

A wealthy nineteenth-century Chinese is borne by two Javanese in a hammock with a bamboo roof.

This imposing house belonged to the mayor of the Chinese community in Batavia in the last half of the nineteenth century.

A session of the colonial court in either Kudus or Japara after an uprising of the poor protesting famine. The Dutch resident acted as judicial chief, aided by representatives of the Chinese and Islamic communities as well as the local chief.

LIFE IN 19TH CENTURY JAVA

Raden Saleh, photographed in a costume he designed, was a nineteenth-century Javanese painter who had visited the courts of Europe.

Raden Aju, wife of the regent of Kudus, with retainers.

A dancer, probably from the regent's court.

Three girls, one reclining on a balek balek, or bamboo bench.

Concubines, perhaps of the regent, or of some lesser official.

Wife of a Raden or regent, the highest non Dutch official.

The resent of Cianjur astride a splendid beast.

This regent of Kudus was also a writer and poet.

Lower court officials.

Lounging in a palanquin or tandu.

Opium smokers with tools of their habit.

Javanese textile vendors.

Two Javanese women, one delousing the other.

The Batik Process

To appreciate batik fully, one must understand the extreme intricacy of the process and the great patience, care, and skill that it demands.

In Java, the long and laborious batik process begins at home or in factories that evoke William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" of nineteenth-century England. Since electricity is precious, workshops tend to be dim and dark. Often batikers must work by the natural light that somehow sneaks through the cracks and crevices of a workshop's roof.

With the unrelenting Javanese humidity and the unremittent vapors of molten wax, air hangs heavy in these factories, whose dirt floors are often muddied by rain. Women sit barefoot on mats or low stools, huddling in small circles around pans of heated wax, sharing the contents. Six days a week, they work from dawn to midafternoon for the equivalent of eighty cents to one dollar and fifty cents a day, about what it costs to feed a family. They range in age from ten to seventy, and they are considered no more than common laborers. From such sweatshop conditions come some of the most splendid textiles in the world.

In every true batik, wax is painstakingly applied to the cloth to resist successive dyes so that wherever the cloth is waxed, dyes cannot penetrate. For example, if the desired design is a red flower on a blue background, wax is first applied to the area that will become the flower. The white cloth is then immersed in blue dye and dried. After drying, the wax which covered the flower pattern is scraped from the cloth. Because the wax resisted the blue dye, there is now a white flower on a blue background. To make the flower red, the blue background is then covered with wax and the entire cloth is immersed in red dye. When the wax is scraped from the cloth for a second time, a red flower emerges on a blue background.

This process is repeated over and over again as more colors are used. The finest batik is reversible. Motifs are drawn, waxed, and dyed, first on one, then the other side of the fabric. Since the greatest Javanese batik is multicolored, it is not surprising that designers, waxers, dyers, and finishers take twelve months or more to complete a single piece of a yard or two.

Both silk and cotton are used for batik, and in certain areas, such as Juana on Java's north coast, silk is particularly popular. Unlike cotton, silk requires little preparation; its fibers are quite receptive to wax and dye without the elaborate series of treatments needed by cottons. Nevertheless, among Javanese batik makers the overwhelming preference is for cotton.

Children drawing batik designs on paper.

A typical tulis batik workshop, Several women share a pan of heated wax while each works on her own piece.

Centuries ago, cotton resembling coarse homespun was grown, spun, and woven in Java. That was serviceable for simple batik work. But to achieve sharp, and intricate details of certain motifs, a finer cotton was necessary—and the Dutch were happy to oblige. About 1824, they introduced a fine, white, machine-woven cotton, and for more than a hundred years Java was dependent on this for its better batik. Sen was the name of one Dutch manufacturing company that exported a cloth that came to be known as Tjap (Cap) Sen, synonymous with finest quality. Javanese factories now produce machine-loomed cotton, but it is not as fine as the earlier Dutch material.

Before cotton is batiked, it must be prepared to receive wax and dyes. The cloth is first measured, torn into appropriate lengths, and hemmed at the ends to prevent fraying. Sometimes it is boiled to remove sizing or stiffness in the fibers. After boiling, the cloth is treated with oil and lye to give it a base color and to prepare the fibers to receive the dyes. The cotton is rinsed in yet another bath and while still wet, it is folded in approximately twelve-inch widths along its warp. Placed on a wooden baseboard, the cloth is then beaten with a mallet, to soften the fibers and enable the material to absorb wax.

After the baths and the beating, a design is applied by pencil to the prepared fabric. Some workers are so familiar with patterns—from a lifetime of repetition—that they can draw from memory. But for others, the designs are drawn on paper first, then fastened by pins (or even a few grains of cooked rice) to the fabric and finally traced in pencil on the cotton. The cloth is then ready to receive its first waxing, known as ngrengreng.

Mixing the Wax. Beeswax, often imported from the islands of Sumba and Timor, is the wax most commonly used in the batik process. The wax is mixed with resins: gandarokan (resin of the eucalyptus tree), matakucing (the Javanese word for "cat's eye," another resin), and kendal (the fat from cows). Because the composition of the wax mixture affects the appearance of the finished product, the recipe varies according to the type of design, and the proportions are always a well-guarded secret. Mrs. Oey Soe Tjoen of Kedungwuni, for example, believes the beauty of her exquisitely detailed designs is due to her wax recipe: the ingredients are known to many, the proportions only to her.

A Simple Tool. Hand-drawn batik is called tulis, after the Javanese word for "writing." Combining the finest designs with the best cottons, tulis is the most time-consuming, expensive, and highly prized batik. Except in the Cirebon area where, more than half a century ago, hand-drawing was a male prerogative, tulis batik is usually made by women. The basic tool is the canting (also spelled tjanting) with which liquid wax is drawn on cloth. This simplest of tools is not found in any other batik region in the world.

The canting works much like a fountain pen. It has a bamboo or reed handle, about six inches long, with a small, thin copper cup from which a tiny pipe protrudes. (Copper is used for both cup and pipe because it conducts heat and keeps the wax warm and fluid.) A woman holds the canting by its bamboo handle, scooping up the heated wax and blowing through the tip of the pipe to keep the wax fluid. Then, using the canting's pipe as a pen, she draws the design on the fabric, outlining with wax instead of ink.

The first waxing, or ngrengreng, is nearly completed. A worker would sit on a low stool with the wax and canting near at hand.

The essential tool of hand-drawn batik is the canting, which may have one or several spouts depending upon the design.

A worker blows through the canting's tip to keep the wax flowing smoothly.

The size and diameter of the canting's copper bowl and pipe are determined by the job at hand—whether the tool is to be used for coarse outlining or for fine details. Some cantings have two pipes, others as many as seven, with openings varying in size and shape—some are square instead of round. When there is a large area to be waxed, a wad of cotton is attached to the mouth of the pipe, to spread the wax more freely.

Before wax is applied, the cloth is draped over a bamboo frame called gawungan and weighted on one side to keep it from blowing in the wind while the waxing takes place. The batiker sits between the cloth and the pan of wax and begins her work with the canting. Her free hand supports the underside of the fabric, and she covers her lap with a napkin or taplak to protect herself from dripping hot wax.

Skilled workers are usually chosen to apply the first wax outline, the ngrengreng, to the cloth, because this will largely determine the quality of the batik. Less skilled workers perform the next step, retracing the outline in wax. Depending on the number of colors, the waxing process may be repeated again and again, each time by a different worker.

Enter, the Cap. Around 1840 the invention of the cap (or tjap)—a copper block that applies an entire design onto the cloth with a single imprint—revolutionized the batik industry. With cap, a worker can wax twenty pieces a day rather than spending up to forty-five days to hand-wax a single piece of cloth. Traditionally, men had dyed and women waxed, but with the introduction of the cap, a heavy block more easily handled by men than women, men became more important to the batik industry.

The cap, made by soldering copper shapes into the desired pattern, resembles a flat iron and is held by a metal handle attached to the back. In the cap process, the cloth is spread on a padded table, and the design is applied by dipping the copper block in wax and stamping it on the fabric. Small metal pins attached to the corners of the cap are used to align one cap impression with the next.

As with tulis batik, in fine cap work wax is applied to both sides of the cloth. Often two or three different caps are used for one batik, one for each successive color or design. Quite commonly, both tulis and cap techniques are combined to produce a piece of batik.

Another tool, used in both tulis and cap batiks, is the cemplogen (also tjemplogen). Especially common to the Indramayu region on Java's north coast, the cemplogen is a block of short gold, silver, or steel needles attached to a wooden handle—rather like a wire brush. Young school children spend their afternoons using this tool to puncture wax on solid background areas, and the dye then penetrates the small holes, producing hundreds of tiny dots.

With the efficient cap, the Javanese could begin to build a batik textile industry. The growing business also attracted Chinese and Arab middlemen who had the capital to acquire caps, cotton, wax, and dyes and to pay the workers. Eventually, the trade in cap batik extended beyond the East Indian archipelago to Singapore, Africa, and Europe.

Interestingly, the invention of the cap did not mean the end of fine, hand-drawn tulis; instead there evolved an almost symbiotic relationship between tulis and cap batik, with different classes of people adopting the two—or combinations of them. Competition from cap, of course, encouraged the tulis makers to find ways to get their goods to market faster.

Unlike tulis, which is made by women, batik made by a printing block, or cap, is the work of men. Each man stands at a padded table with his own wax and caps, imprinting the white cotton.

The cemplogen, often used in tulis batik, punctures wax that has been poured onto a solid background. Dye penetrates these holes, producing hundreds of tiny dots on the finished batik Cemplogens are especially common to the Indramayu area.

Of several new production systems two were important. In the first, the work was organized by villages. Cloth and patterns would be consigned to women in a particular village by entrepreneurs or their agents, and the entire tulis process would be completed in that village. Either that, or people in one village might be assigned only to wax the cloth; middlemen would then take the waxed cloth to another village for dyeing and finishing.

The second system of production was an attempt to industrialize. Entrepreneurs established a series of batik factories, mostly on the north coast, so that they could control the quality of the cloth, designs, wax, and dyes. They introduced new motifs and techniques. With the introduction of aniline dyes at the end of the nineteenth century and synthetic dyes twenty years later, they were able to change the spectrum of colors. The factories proved that batik, even if hand drawn, need no longer be made at home. Batik, both cap and tulis—and sometimes a combination of the two—was now more readily available to a growing market.

Dye recipes are passed from generation to generation. Stones are often used to weigh down the batik while it is immersed in the secret dye.

Dyeing and Finishing. A well-executed dye is judged by its rich penetrating tone, the degree to which it is colorfast, and how well it resists abrasion. Small wonder that, in batik making, dye recipes are as secret as the wax mixtures, often passed by word of mouth from one generation to the next. Originally, the colors found in batik reflected the place of origin, as well as the cultural attitudes of the people who produced them. That is usually not the case today.

Though synthetic dyes have now largely replaced natural dyes, it was from nature that batik received its original colors. Certain roots and leaves of plants are known to produce color when boiled and mixed with special ingredients. Local water and local plant species greatly affect shades of color and thus each region of Java was to have its own characteristic tints.

Among the many colors found in Javanese batik, four are by far the most popular. The most common one, also believed to be the oldest, is indigo, derived from the plant of the same name and called torn by the Javanese. Forty of indigo's many species produce this particular shade of blue. Batik using this blue is called biron (from biru, the Javanese word for "blue").

A second common dye is mengkudu, a deep red from the bark and roots of the Morinda citrifolia plant; batik using this color is called bangbangan from abang, meaning red. Tegerang, from the Cudriana javanesis plant, is yellow. And soga is a rich, uniquely Javanese brown characteristic of batik from the central Javanese towns of Yogyakarta and Surakarta; it comes from the bark of the Pelthophorum ferrugineum tree. The Mangkunegara family in Surakarta was famous for its method of dying cloth with soga and the process is still used today by a family member, Ibu Praptini.

After each waxing cycle in the batik process, the cloth is ready to be dyed. In batches of twelve kodi—one kodi equals twenty pieces of batik—the cloths are placed in appropriate dye baths three times a day for ten days. They are then put into a bath of lime and water, which sets the dye. Traditionally on the fourth Sunday of each month the batik is dried on bamboo racks, ready for sale.

Under ordinary circumstances, cloth is usually dyed in boiling solutions. Not so with batik. Because wax has such a low melting point, batik must be dyed in a cold or lukewarm bath. This solution contains a pharmacopoeia of secret ingredients to facilitate penetration of the dye into the fiber and to enhance the luster of the finished batik. These mysterious potions include oils from fruit seeds, brown palm sugar, fermented casava, bananas, even shredded chicken.

Caps were first developed in the 1850s to "industrialize" the batik process. Made of copper, the finer ones today are collectors' items.

The cloth is immersed as often as necessary in a coloring vat to achieve the desired shade. It is then soaked in another solution of lye and water, to fix the dye. After each color has been set the wax is scraped off and reapplied; sometimes additional designs are drawn on the cloth between dyeings. Overdyeing is used to produce certain colors. Green, for example, starts off as a light blue (from indigo), which is then overdyed in a yellow bath; black is produced similarly, by overdyeing indigo with red or brown.

At the turn of the century, advances in science and technology produced synthetic dyes that gradually replaced the natural dyes of the Indies. Aniline dyes were used after 1898 in Java, and naphthol dyes became available in 1926. Other synthetic dyes used today include synthetic indigo, reactive, and Indrathrene dyes, which are easy to maintain and use and do not require the long preparation of natural dyes. Synthetic dyes made possible the pastel tints and jeweled tones so characteristic of north-coast Javanese batiks.

After dyeing is completed and the last of the wax is either scraped or boiled from the cloth, the finished batik is draped over bamboo racks or laid on the ground to dry. It is then folded and put under a press for "ironing." If the batik is destined for Chinese customers, another process takes place before the cloth leaves the factory: shells are rubbed across the surface of the cloth to give it a chintzlike quality. After a thorough rubbing—usually done by two men who sit on a bench facing each other with the batik between them—the piece is shiny and crinkly, a Chinese preference when buying "new" cloth. Numerous washings will eventually remove this chintzlike surface.

Wax is boiled from the cloth to prepare it for the next waxing and final wash.

After dyeing is completed and the last of the wax is laid out to dry, as in this Surakarta cooperative, which dyes and dries cloth for local batik manufacturers.

When the batik is finally ready for packaging, each piece is folded and wrapped in cellophane. Five pieces are bound together by pattern, not color, and counted by kodi. Special tulis pieces are always boxed or wrapped individually, while yardage goods are normally rolled on tubes.

Let us now look at the spectacular works of art created in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by this intricate process. Here is a visual archive of the geographic and historic forces that have pressed upon Java for centuries. Batik was recast by the coastal Javanese eye into a vibrant cloth with a diverse artistic vocabulary. The following pages chronicle some of the finest examples.