Let’s start with a thing you can hold in your hands.
On March 9, 2025, the Ministry of Culture put out a vinyl
record. A compilation, eight versions of “Indonesia Raya,” the national anthem,
pressed into black grooves and slid into a cardboard sleeve. Somebody in an
office looked at the finished product and felt, I imagine, a quiet pride. Look
at what we’ve done. Look at what we’ve brought back.
On the cover, in clean type, is a track listing: Indonesia
Raja 1928 (Solo Vocal W.R. Supratman). By Populair Orchest dir. W.R. Supratman.
It looks like a simple thing, and that’s what bothers me.
Because there’s a question under that cover, and it has been sitting under
there for more than fifty years, patient as a cellar door: where did the
sound come from? Every recording has to come from somewhere. A needle rides
a groove, and the groove was cut into a disc, and the disc is an actual object
that was in an actual room at an actual time. So which disc? Whose hands held
it last?
To find out, we have to go back to another record. The one
the government asked for in 1957. And we have to be ready for the possibility
that it’s the kind of record that doesn’t want to be found.
---
December 2, 1957.
A letter goes out from the Cultural Affairs Office of the
Ministry of Education, Teaching, and Culture. Number 2725/S/57. It is addressed
to a man named Yo Kim Tjan, YKT to those who wrote about him later, who owned a
shop called Toko Populair in Pasar Baru, Jakarta. The subject line is dry as
dust: Copyright of Indonesia Raya.
But read the body and you feel something move under the
bureaucracy. The government wants YKT to hand over “a phonograph record of the
national anthem ‘Indonesia Raya,’ the product of a phonograph recording by you
in 1927.” They call it the “primary material” for settling the copyright
question.
Primary material. A nice, clean phrase, the kind of
phrase you use when you want to keep your voice steady.
Now, I want to be careful here, because what follows is a
story about carefulness, about the gap between what a piece of paper says
and what we want it to mean. The letter proves that the government asked for a
record tied to a 1927 recording. That’s all. It doesn’t prove the record
arrived. It doesn’t describe what was on the disc. It makes no mention of
returning it, and it is not a receipt. And that year, 1927? It sits there in
the typewriter ink, but nobody has confirmed why the letter says 1927,
whether the date came from a contemporary record of the recording session or
from somebody’s memory, thirty years soft around the edges.
One more name in that letter: Kusbini. The government says
it is following up on discussions between Kusbini and YKT. So here is a man
standing between the shopkeeper and the state, carrying messages, carrying something.
What did the two men say to each other? The letter doesn’t tell us. It leaves
the door open an inch and lets the dark show through.
---
Four years earlier.
November 11, 1953. The Radio Affairs Office of the Republic
sends a letter to YKT, signed by R. Maladi, about “the manufacture of a
phonograph record of the song Indonesia Raya.” It refers back to a conversation
on November 3 about reproduction rights. It mentions that a committee had
changed the song and its words. Mulia, mulia became merdeka, merdeka.
Noble, noble became freedom, freedom. Think about that for a second. A whole
country’s hope, edited by committee.
And in the same letter, almost in passing, is a man’s oral
willingness to transfer the reproduction rights to “the old song Indonesia
Raya,” along with his request that the willingness be put in writing.
Some accounts say this letter records a refusal. It doesn’t.
The photographic copy that has been examined records YKT’s consent,
spoken, not signed. His written reply, if it ever existed, has not turned up.
It’s the kind of gap you could lose a lifetime in.
And here’s the distinction that matters, the one you want to
carve into the desk: the 1953 letter is about rights. The 1957 letter is
about a thing. The right to reproduce a recording is not the same as
having the original disc in a drawer. You can own the shadow without owning the
object that casts it. Without more paper, the two can’t be made one.
---
Then the brochure.
There’s a brochure from the Department of Education and
Culture. Its text is dated December 7, 1972, though the year of publication isn’t
given, which tells you something about how this whole affair has been handled.
The brochure says YKT handed the record over to the government in July 1958.
It carries Kusbini’s statement that Soepratman transferred
the manufacturing rights and the commercial rights to the song to YKT’s shop.
It says the recording was made so discs could be pressed overseas, but the plan
died, strangled by a colonial government ban. YKT, the brochure says, brought
home a single copy. One. On page 62 it adds that the Cultural Affairs Office
obtained the manufacturing rights from YKT in 1958, and that he surrendered “the
one and only phonograph record containing the original recording of INDONESIA
RAYA.”
The one and only.
You hear that phrase and the hair on your arms stands up a
little, because anyone who has ever lost anything knows what “the only one”
means. It means there is no backup. It means that when it’s gone, it is gone.
The brochure also has a transcription, labeled “Kusbini 1972”:
6/8 time, Tempo di marcia, the refrain “Moelia.” Documentation of the
disc from Toko Populair. But a transcription is a map, not the territory. It is
not a sound. And the brochure never says which disc it was made from, or
where that disc was kept. As for who sang on the recording, and who played, the
sources disagree. That’s outside the scope of this piece. But the claim that
you can hear Soepratman’s own voice? That still has to be tested against audio
you can actually verify.
---
The label.
On page 40 of the brochure there’s a photograph of a record
label. The caption calls it the label of “the one and only phonograph record of
the original INDONESIA RAYA recording, which was handed over to the Government
of the Republic of Indonesia by Yo Kim Tjan.”
But turn back to page 39 and the brochure undercuts its own
caption. The markings on the label were added later. Kusbini wrote “in
6/8 rhythm, year 1927/1928 with initials.” YKT wrote “3461, Indonesia Raya,
W.R. Soepratman,” and signed. And then the brochure says the thing that should
make every careful reader sit up straight: the label “is not an authentic label
but one affixed later.”
So the dates on it, 1927/1928, are not witnesses. They’re annotations.
Memory writing over the record of memory.
Look closer at the photograph. There is a store-address
stamp, and the letters at the end read “-akarta.” The first letters are hidden
under a scratch. Whatever it says, it doesn’t say Batavia, the name
everybody used for the city in 1927. In 1957 and 1958 the official spelling was
Djakarta; it became Jakarta only in 1972, with the Enhanced
Spelling System. So if that hidden letter pair is “Dj,” it fits the late
fifties. But that alone can’t tell us when the label was stuck on. And if the
letter is a plain “J”? Then you have a stamp that needs explaining, and nobody’s
explained it.
The photograph turned up again on Instagram, posted by
@madilog_team on September 11, 2021, credited to the collection of Jaap
Erkelens at the KITLV archives, “PHOTO via Ir Bambang Eryudhawan.” The caption
says the record was “Recorded by Yo Kim Tjan, sold at Toko Populair, Passer
Baroe, Batavia.” But that line comes from the person who posted it. It is not
written on the label.
Three discs keep wandering through this story, and they keep
getting mistaken for one another. There’s the Indonesia Raja disc by
Populair Orchest in the Leiden University Library. There’s a keroncong disc
that, according to YKT’s grandchild, was still with the family in 2020. And
there’s the record the government requested in 1957. Three discs. Without
matrix numbers, labels, or a documented chain of custody, you can’t call them
the same thing. You can only want them to be.
---
Star Weekly, August 16, 1958.
Now we come to the best clue and the coldest one.
Star Weekly No. 659 says YKT kept the record for
nearly thirty years before handing it to the government, through the Cultural
Affairs Office, at the end of the previous year. And then, in a box on the same
page, the magazine writes a sentence I can’t stop hearing:
“Who knows where that historic phonograph record is
stored now.”
The magazine floats two possibilities: Gedung Proklamasi, or
the Museum of the Struggle in Bogor. Possibilities. Not facts. In August 1958,
barely a year after the letter, the press already couldn’t say where the record
was.
Even the date of the handover won’t sit still. Star
Weekly says the end of 1957. The brochure says July 1958, which matches a
thank-you letter dated July 25, 1958, confirming the record had been received.
But Star Weekly quotes a letter from the head of the Cultural Affairs
Office that sounds very much like that July letter. If it’s the same document,
the timeline might run like this: requested December 2, 1957; handed over
around the end of that year; thanked on July 25, 1958; magazine printed three
weeks later, shrugging. Who knows where. Maybe the writer simply didn’t
have the facts. Maybe.
But that’s a hypothesis. A story we tell so the pieces will
fit. No document confirms the day the disc actually changed hands.
---
1985.
Soebagijo I.N. wrote that Kusbini passed the record along to
Joedakusumah, head of the Cultural Affairs Office. He also reported that
searches at the museum in Bogor had turned up nothing. Nothing. You can almost
picture someone running a flashlight along a shelf, and the beam finding only
dust and the shapes of other things.
That tells us earlier searches failed. It does not take the
place of an official inventory, or a complete record of who had the disc and
when.
---
So back to the cover.
That brings us home, to the vinyl record from March 2025,
the cover reading 1928, while the 1957 letter says 1927. I don’t think this
mismatch proves the new audio is wrong. Metadata gets sloppy; dates drift. The
cover lists two tracks, both dated 1928, both credited the same way: “First
Recorded National Anthem” on side A and “Solo Vocal W.R. Supratman” on side B.
But it never says whether they come from one disc or two.
And that leaves the question standing in the doorway with
its arms folded. Did the audio come from the record the government asked for in
1957? From a later copy? A transfer of a transfer? Some other recording
altogether? Without the source object, a photograph of its label, its matrix
numbers, and the history of every hand it passed through, nobody can say. Not
me. Not you. Maybe not even the people who made the record.
The documents we have establish neither where the disc is
nor who last held it. And the public has a right to know. The government should
open the inventories, report the results of its searches at the two places Star
Weekly named, and say plainly what physical object the 2025 audio came
from. Transparency isn’t a courtesy here. It’s how a country keeps its own
memory from slipping through its fingers.
Soebagijo said it better than I can, in 1985, and I think he
was angry when he wrote it:
“It turns out that historic objects connected with the
national movement of the Indonesian people simply vanish. They disappear
without a trace, and not a single person is willing to take responsibility.”
Somewhere there may be a shelf, or a drawer, or a box with a
scratched label on it. It might be sitting in the dark right now, keeping its
one and only song to itself.
Or it might not be anywhere at all.
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