The 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts

CITATION for Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
Manila, Philippines

As a youth in Java, his birthplace, Pramoedya Ananta Toer completed a few years of grammar school and briefly studied radio repair. He was just seventeen when, in 1942, the Japanese invaded and overtook the Netherlands Indies, of which Java was part. In the limbo of wartime he studied stenography and, fixing early on his life's work, wrote a first novel that was subsequently lost. As a prisoner of the Dutch during the ensuing revolution, he drew upon the turmoil of the times to compose The Fugitive and Guerrilla Family, novels that established his reputation. Following independence, Pramoedya wrote prolifically about the corrosive influence of poverty, social confusion, and corruption in the new nation of Indonesia and emerged as the modern fiction master of its national language.

In Indonesia's bitter Left-Right power struggle of the early 1960s, Pramoedya chose the Left. Although never a member of Indonesia's large and legal Communist Party, he affiliated himself prominently with its cultural institute and became editor of the literary page of a left-wing newspaper. He clashed openly with writers and intellectuals of differing views. At the same time, Pramoedya pursued privately an intense study of Indonesian history and wrote The Girl from the Coast, a novel inspired by the unfortunate life of his grandmother.

Pramoedya was arrested in the immediate wake of the September coup attempt of 1965, which ushered in Indonesia's New Order. As other left-wing Indonesians were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, he was detained by the army on Java. His library was looted and burned. Later, the military-led government transferred him to a work camp for political prisoners on remote Buru Island. Denied writing materials until 1975, Pramoedya embarked upon an ambitious historical saga by telling stories out loud to fellow inmates. This Earth of Mankind became the first of his innovative Buru tetralogy: four linked novels depicting the dawn of Indonesian national awareness.

Pramoedya was released in 1979 to the custody of military authorities in Jakarta, where he has lived under "town arrest" ever since. This Earth of Mankind and his other Buru books enjoyed brisk sales when they were ultimately published. But the Indonesian government quickly banned them. Branded as subversive, they remain illegal in Indonesia today, along with all of Pramoedya's writing.

Yet Pramoedya Ananta Toer's fiction is not political in any narrow sense. It dwells on themes of humanity and social justice. Ranged against the aspirations—indeed against the full humanity—of his characters are the historical evils of foreign rule and indigenous feudalism as well as the immediate circumstances of war, poverty, and tumult. His stories are imbued with a painful awareness of the moral frailty of human beings in the face of such domineering forces and extreme conditions. Yet they also celebrate the resilience and dignity of men and, notably, women who survive honorably amidst humiliation, privation, and danger. A master storyteller, Pramoedya writes with compassion but not sentimentality. And although his stories are quintessentially Indonesian, and rooted especially in the Javanese tradition, they speak with eloquence to the universal human condition—the reason, no doubt, that they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Despite the potentially crippling losses of a turbulent lifetime—including countless unpublished manuscripts—Pramoedya carries on today compiling a social geography of Indonesia, the land he loves. Still officially a pariah in his own country, he claims to have no clear political ideas. He says, simply, "I am a writer."

In electing Pramoedya Ananta Toer to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his illuminating with brilliant stories the historical awakening and modern experience of the Indonesian people.