Biography of pramoedya ananta toer
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Doubting that he would ever be able to write the novels down himself, he narrated them to his fellow prisoners. Though the work is considered a classic by many outside of Indonesia, publication was banned in Indonesia, causing one of the most famous of Indonesia's literary works to be largely unavailable to the country's people whose history it addressed.
Progressive , October 1999. He went on to the Radio Vocational School in Surabaya but had barely graduated from the school when Japan invaded Surabaya (1942).
During World War II, Pramoedya (like many Indonesian Nationalists, Sukarno and Suharto among them) at first supported the occupying forces of Imperial Japan.
He was also a heavy smoker of Kretek (clove) cigarettes and had endured years of abuse while in detention. But he felt that the family name Mastoer (his father's name) seemed too aristocratic. As he prepared material, he began to realise that the study of Indonesian language and literature had been distorted by the Dutch colonial authorities.
As it is written in his semi-autobiographical collection of short stories "Cerita Dari Blora", his name was originally Pramoedya Ananta Mastoer.
Financial Times , May 1, 2006. He was eventually imprisoned by the Dutch in Jakarta in 1947 and remained there until 1949, the year the Netherlands recognized Indonesian independence.
The English titles of the books in the tetralogy are This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Glass. He died on April 30, 2006 at the age of 81. The transition to Suharto's New Order followed, and Pramoedya's position as the head of People's Cultural Organisation, a literary group with connections to the Indonesian Communist Party, caused him to be considered a communist and enemy of the "New Order" regime.
He rejected those who used religion to deny critical thinking, and on occasion wrote with considerable negativity to the religiously pious.
Release and subsequent works
Pramoedya was released from imprisonment in 1979, but remained under house arrest in Jakarta until 1992.
"A Chat with Pramoedya Ananta Toer," Michigan Today , http://www.umich.edu/∼newsinfo/MT/99/Sum99/mt9j99.html (January 13, 2007).
Pramoedya also shares a personal history of hardship and detention for his efforts of self-expression and the political aspects of his writings, and struggled against the censorship of his work by the leaders of his own people.
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With the support of the other prisoners who took on extra labor to reduce his workload, Pramoedya was eventually able to write the novels down, and the published works derived their name "Buru Quartet" from the prison where he produced them.Most notably, he published a series of letters addressed to an imaginary Chinese correspondent discussing the history of the Indonesian Chinese, called Hoakiau di Indonesia (History of the Overseas Chinese in Indonesia). He worked as a typist for a Japanese newspaper in Jakarta. He believed the Japanese to be the lesser of two evils, compared to the Dutch.
His maternal grandfather had taken the pilgrimage to Mecca. In this war, Pramoedya joined a paramilitary group in Karawang, Kranji (West Java) and eventually was stationed in Jakarta. He sought out materials that had been ignored by colonial educational institutions, and which had continued to be ignored after independence.
Having spent time in China, he became greatly sympathetic to the Indonesian Chinese over the persecutions they faced in postcolonial Indonesia.