Portal:Indonesia/Selected biography/15

Marco Kartodikromo (1890–1932) was an Indonesian journalist and writer with Communist leanings. He first found employment with the national railway. After quitting over discrimination, in 1911 he made his way to Bandung and began working as a journalist; during the rest of his career he moved to several cities, including Surakarta and Semarang. In Surakarta he wrote scathing criticisms of the Dutch colonial government, for which he was imprisoned. He began writing fiction with an anti-colonial message during his time as a correspondent in the Netherlands. Involved with the Communist Party of Indonesia, Kartodikromo was exiled to Boven-Digoel prison camp in Papua after a failed rebellion in 1926, where he died of malaria. Kartodikromo was an early member of the Indonesian social realist movement and experimented with Malay language at a time when the state publishing house Balai Pustaka was attempting to standardise it. The Dutch considered him "crazy", while the leftist literary critic Bakri Siregar described Kartodikromo as the first truly Indonesian writer. (Read more...)