Tjilik Riwut (1918-1987) and the creation of Agama Hindu-Kaharingan in Central Kalimantan

On the same day of the first day of the Hizmet Conference in Brussels, police searched for complices of the last November attacks of paris. But one week later, Tuesday 22 March, terrorist attacks took place on Zeventem Airport and in the metro, on the very place of the Wetstraat where also had passed on the 15th.

Another topic: in Leiden I met last week Risa Aizawa from Rikkyo University in Tokyo. She wrote a PhD on Traja conversion to Christianity and holds now a Postdoc fellowship for two years in Leiden for research onthe rise of Kaharingan religion and its ambivalent relation to Protestant missions. Maybe there is a Catholic factor as well. Rikkyo University is the Anglican counterpart of the Sophia University in Tokyo, which is a Catholic and Jesuit institution.
I will still have to do my own homework for the MSF missionaries of Banjarmasin and their contact with Kaharingan. I have read some more material than I did for the chapter in A History of Christianity in Indonesiai (pp 497-9). I mention here Tjilik Riwut as a Protestant assistent to Heinrich Schärer, the Basler Mission scholar and missionary, but also as a short-term convert to Catholicsm in the 1940s (because of a marriage in Java). Anyway, he further developed as a cultural, political and religious nationalist. I have to ask P.M. Laskon further about him!

An interesting study on Kaharingan is by Martin Georg Baier, who read the books published in Central Kalimantan for primary and secondary schools, classes of Kaharingan religious instruction. Baier notices developments in Kaharingan, adaptations to modern Indonesian monotheism (as is also clear in Balinese Hindu booklets). In his discussion of the sources Baier is quite critical and suspicious about Riwut. What Riwut writes is often not documented. He takes long quotes from Adatrechtbundel when it is only written about one tribue and proclaims this as something valid for all Kaharingan (or all Dayaks). The High God of the Dayak has a co0nsort, a lady who is labelled by him as an 'angel', always close to the Highest God.  He identifies Ranying Hatalla 'with the Muslim and Christian God, who has no wife, no children and degrades the members of his family to angels'. (Dari Agama politeisme ke Agama Ketuhanan yang maha esa (2008?, 32).
This is an interesting observation of what also happens with Hinduism and Buddhism in Indonesia. I will have to give more attention to this interesting phenomenon in Indonesian religiosity.