Introduction

In the plays of Vondel and Van Steenwyk the Orient was manifested in different incarnations. While in Vondel's Zungchin, the Orient was forsaken in favour of God, Van Steenwyk centred Thamas Koelikan on an Oriental king whom his Dutch audiences may have yearned to call their own. Although the VOC was the principal agent in conveying the Orient onto the Dutch stage, it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the time seemed ripe to allocate the enterprise itself a role in Dutch drama. When it made a rather belated debut on the stage in 1769, the VOC was curiously cast in a role the characterization of which was to be berated by audiences. The Company was counter-intuitively cast as a villain that fed on sovereign Asian kingdoms to satisfy its hunger for domination while the protagonist of the drama was an “Oriental” who was courageous, virtuous and wise. The playwright responsible for this act of daring was Onno Zwier van Haren, and his play, a work regarded as one of the first Dutch anti-colonial texts, was Agon, Sultan van Bantam.

The play is wary of the colonialism and strident expansionism of the Dutch East India Company. These views are not hidden away in the literary crevices of the 1,500 odd verses of the drama. Rather, Van Haren's work wears its anti-colonial and anti- Company credentials on its sleeve, and the entire play is awash with this, at the time, unorthodox rhetoric. Agon, Sulthan van Bantam describes the travails of the last bastion of indigenous rule in the Indies as it battles the giant wave of Dutch imperialism before succumbing. The nemesis of the kingdom of Banten, which has long withstood the covetous gaze of the Dutch East India Company in Batavia, comes in the form of a succession feud. When Sultan Agon decides to abdicate, he resolves to partition his kingdom between his two sons, Abdul and Hassan, so that neither is left discontented with his inheritance. Just as Agon proceeds to put the proposed plan of succession into force, his elder son, Abdul, reckons he has lost the most from his father's unfair decision and seeks the aid of the VOC. The Dutch East India Company readily supports Abdul's cause and dispatches a fleet commanded by Saint Martin to force Agon into submission.