SUBALTERN VOICES AND COLONIAL DESIRE: RECLAIMING THE NYAI’S AGENCY IN INDONESIAN COLONIAL LITERATURE
Abstract
This study examines the Nyai—a concubine figure situated at the intersection of colonial power, patriarchy, and racial hybridity—in Indonesian colonial literature. It offers a paired reading of Nyai Ontosoroh in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Bumi Manusia and Nyi Sadikem in Artie Ahmad’s recent novel Nyi Sadikem (Marjin Kiri), arguing that both texts reposition the Nyai from a stigmatized object of colonial desire to a speaking subject who negotiates agency within constraining structures. Applying postcolonial theory (Bhabha’s hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence; Said’s Orientalism), the analysis focuses on Nyai Ontosoroh’s struggle to be literate, and building the capability to manage her husband’s business, and Nyi Sadikem’s struggle to survive, which is rooted in vernacular memory and the “gowok” tradition—through embodied knowledge and community ties. Those two novels articulated the politics of resistance and intimacy in colonial eras. By focusing on Nyai, the current study contributes to decolonial feminist reading, especially highlighting subalternity, colonial intimacy, and educational implications, all of which are an effort to reclaim marginalized women as historical and cultural agents.