Composed in prison, Dialita’s musical repertoire memorialises the affects and effects of imprisonment, exile, trauma, and survival. More specifically, Dialita uses their experiences and positionalities as women to perform an alternative collective memory for younger generations of Indonesians. In this article, I show how the Dialita women’s choir uses music to contest the ongoing denial of state-sponsored violence that followed the Indonesian tragedy of 1965–66, particularly as it impacted women. Despite various and conflicting ideological approaches about what kind of culture Indonesia should have, there was a common conviction that ‘being Indonesian’ was an issue of culture. There, the overriding concern with ‘Indonesianness’ leaps to the fore. But in order to understand what really held the nation together after December 1949, once independence had been finally recognized and the harsh realities of political and economic life set in, one has to look at cultural expression of the time. Socially, the nation inherited from the 1945-1949 period a shared sense of revolution and change, and faith in the future (Reid 1974). Culturally, Indonesia was held together primarily by its national language, Indonesian Malay, which the nationalist movement had named ‘Bahasa Indonesia’ and declared the ‘language of unity’ back in 1928, but which received its real boost during the Japanese occupation (1942-1945) when the speaking, teaching and publication of Dutch had been prohibited. Economically, it inherited an extract economy developed for colonial interests (Taufik Abdullah 2009 Schulte Nordholt 2009) and a huge debt to be repaid to the Netherlands, as stipulated by the Round Table Conference negotiations in late 1949 (Gouda and Brocades Zaalberg 2002). Politically, it inherited a Dutch-devised and imposed federal system that in mid 1950 was overturned in favour of the unitary republic long envisaged by the Indonesian nationalist movement. Administratively, Indonesia inherited a colonial state with its civil service designed for the efficient management of a colonial economy. In 1950, there was little holding the new nation together beyond goodwill.
Over the next 15 years, until the coup and counter-coup of 30 September-1 October 1965 – the period that frames the research presented in the essays in this volume – Indonesia faced enormous challenges, first and foremost that of forging a sense of nationhood to outlast the euphoria of the achievement of sovereignty. Titiek Puspa played an important role in each regime's ideology of modernity, but she also articulated the disjuncture between a woman's voice and the reigning political order. The patriarchal orders used her as a symbol of proper womanhood in her role as wife and mother, but she developed an image as an independent and successful modern woman who supported her husbands and other family members. Titiek's voice and body were contested terrain in both presidential regimes they patronized and celebrated her, but also wanted to control her. However, she was not a mouthpiece of these divergent political "orders" that is, her relatively autonomous voice did not align neatly with either regime.
Titiek Puspa (hereafter Titiek) cultivated a proximity to state power-to Sukarno, one of Indonesia's founding fathers, and Suharto, the "Father of Development" (Bapak Pembangunan)-that amplified her voice and enabled it to circulate more widely and freely than other female singers.
This period of Indonesian history is divided politically by first president Sukarno's anti-imperialist "Old Order" (Orde Lama, 1950-1965) and second president Suharto's pro-Western "New Order" (Orde Baru, 1966-1998). Chanteuse and composer Titiek Puspa (1937-) vocalized the tensions and contradictions of gendered modernity in Indonesia during the socially turbulent 1960s and 1970s.