Oetoesan Hindia and the Making of Regional Political Solidarities in Java and the Ottoman World 1914–1920

Abstract

Between 1914 and 1920, the Surabaya newspaper Oetoesan Hindia brought local grievances in colonial Java into conversation with developments in the Ottoman world. This article examines that relationship as a problem in regional history, asking how a newspaper associated with Sarekat Islam connected unequal experiences of colonial rule with wider projects of Muslim solidarity. Using the historical method of heuristics, source criticism, interpretation, and historiography, it analyses newspaper reports on agrarian expansion, police violence, legal inequality, food shortages, labour organization, Islamic education, and Ottoman affairs. The evidence reveals overlapping rather than successive political geographies. Surabaya provided the institutional centre of publication; reports from other Jnese localities made injustice a shared political concern; and Ottoman sovereignty supplied a language of collective dignity extending beyond colonial boundaries. World War I intensified these connections without creating them. By 1920, calls for local organizational initiative under central leadership coexisted with labour negotiation and public defence of the caliphate. The newspaper helped articulate national consciousness through regional connections and religious affiliation. Its rhetoric nevertheless cannot establish uniform reader responses, completed fundraising, or the factual accuracy of every reported allegation. The contribution is an account of how colonial Java became politically legible through connections among local experience, interurban organization, and a wider Muslim world.