Unlike most present day history students, I enrolled in the Department of History by conscious personal choice. While most of my high school classmates preferred to enter the faculties of economics, law, or social and political sciences, I opted for the commonly assumed economically less promising subject of study. In a time when the youthful idealism of the newly sovereign nation state was still very much part of the game — after all my classmates and I were the living witnesses of the bloody national revolution — I thought some of us should study the history of our newly independent country, so I consciously made the sacrifice “for the sake of our future”. Well, I must confess, liking the subject matter did not exactly make this a difficult sacrifice. I made the decision on the ship taking me and my friends to Java from Sumatra.

The Department of History of the Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta was then a part of the Faculty of Letters, Pedagogy, and Philosophy. In 1956, two years after I matriculated, the faculty was divided into two and the Department of History became a part of the Faculty of Letters and Culture. Looking back at the first two or three years of my study, I can now remember my bewilderment with the way the department was run. Not only because I had to follow the Continental system of free study, but there was also no clear-cut boundary between the subjects to be examined in the first year and those in the third year. Or, perhaps I was not properly aware of it. Since it was entirely dependent on my decision, I just attended the lectures on whatever subjects were offered. The lecturers and professors were apparently not too certain about the subjects of study to be offered to future historians. After all, the study of history was still something new in the tradition of higher learning in Indonesia. None of them had a formal degree in history. Now, several decades later, I can only express my gratification to the rather awkward programme of the department, as it exposed me to different kinds of disciplines and subjects of study.