The women Indonesia's history books cannot place

Engku Puteri Raja Hamidah kept the Cogan, the royal regalia of the Riau-Johor sultanate. Without it, no sultan could be lawfully installed, so the object was power in physical form. In October 1822 Dutch troops landed on Pulau Penyengat to take it for the sultan they wanted, and she refused to hand it over. Two years later the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 17 March 1824 cut her world in two, splitting the Riau-Johor sultanate between British and Dutch spheres along a line that later became the border between Indonesia and Malaysia. Three of her male relatives now hold the title of National Hero. She does not, despite years of nominations.

Writing for New Mandala, Myra Mentari Abubakar, a research affiliate at the Center of Islam and Global Challenges at UIII, uses that gap to ask a bigger question: how should a national history deal with people whose political lives happened before the borders existed? Her second example is closer to us in time. Khatijah Sidek was born in Pariaman, West Sumatra, in 1918 and started a student group there in 1935. She then built a career across the water, in Singapore and Malaya, was detained without trial by the British in 1948, joined UMNO in 1953, and a year later led its women's wing, Kaum Ibu, where she reportedly set up 130 branches and signed up 10,000 members in ten months. UMNO expelled her in September 1956, just before independence. She joined PAS and won the parliamentary seat of Dungun from 1959 to 1964.

Each country's history keeps only the part of her life that happened inside its own map. Abubakar's point is not that a name should be added to a list. It is that the shape of the list is the problem: national stories are built around one territory and one founding moment, and lives that moved across the strait do not fit.

Why it matters

The National Hero list is not only an honour. It feeds textbooks, street names, and the version of the past children learn, so who is on it decides what most people think happened. For families in Riau or anywhere with relatives across the strait, this is a familiar experience: a shared past that each country now files separately. Next time you read a hero's biography, notice where it stops, because that edge is often a border rather than the end of the life.