Abstract
Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, when the native movement in the East Indies got its start, the more extreme elements among Indonesian nationalist groups have looked to the figure of Prince Diponegoro, the early nineteenth-century mystic and leader of the native rebellion against the Dutch known as the Java War (1825–30), as a source of inspiration in their struggle for independence. Members of the nationalist movement still commemorate his death and are hailing him today as “the hero of liberty of the Indonesian people.” Many are also sympathetic to Diponegoro's old program of national purification with its emphasis upon the distinctive Hindu-Mohammedan antecedents of the Indonesian, as opposed to the “contamination” of Western civilization brought in the wake of more than three centuries of Dutch rule over the East Indian Archipelago.
