Banditry in West Java, 1869-1942

Banditry was rife around Batavia (modern Jakarta) during the late colonial period. Banditry in West Java identifies the bandits and describes both their working methods and their motives, which often went beyond simple self-enrichment. The author also explores the world of the victims of the robbers, mainly city-dwellers, who viewed them as the antithesis of civilization and made them into convenient subjects onto which respectable citizens projected their own preoccupations with sex, violence, and magic. Banditry was brought under control following reforms to the colonial police force in the Dutch East Indies in the early 1920s, but the bandit tradition lived on in Javanese popular imagination and folk culture. In particular it is found in tales of Si Pitung, a Robin Hood figure who flourished in nineteenth-century Batavia.