RA Kosasih was born in 1919 in Bogor, a historic city in the rainy hills south of Jakarta. Which is why they call him the ‘father of Indonesian comics’. Kosasih had done exactly that for several generations of Indonesians. Getting yourself lodged in the headspace of an 11-year-old is a powerful thing, because you never leave.
They had all grown up reading Kosasih’s comics, as had countless others. There was Beelong from Bali, of a Balinese-Hindu father and a Javanese-Muslim mother, who was my cab driver in the central highlands of Java. There was Nanang Wibisono, the Batak man from north Sumatra I chatted with at a juice stall. There was Jane Ardaneshwari, the half-Javanese half-Chinese editor-publisher from Jakarta’s Chinatown, who I met at a glittering evening gala. Later, when travelling in Indonesia, I got a sense of Kosasih’s reach in the vast archipelago. There we were: middle-aged strangers, from neighbouring countries that were once close but long estranged, animated about our shared stash and the attached nimbus of childhood. Aditya had never heard of Amar Chitra Katha or of Anant Pai, and I had never heard of Raden Ahmed Kosasih. So what did we have in common? In our respective homes in Makassar and Calcutta, he and I were both fondly holding on to dusty piles of crumbling comics based on stories from the Mahabharata. Aditya Santosa was from Sulawesi, of Chinese ancestry, a practising Christian and a practising surgeon.
I was travelling in the Mekong delta and discovered that I had something remarkable in common with the man sitting next to me on the bus. I knew nothing about Indonesian comics until a chance meeting about a year ago in an unlikely place. And yet, Raden Ahmed Kosasih was doing this many years before Pai. His comics bear an uncanny resemblance to the signature Amar Chitra Katha style.
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