‘Just don’t ask me about politics’: How an Indonesian epic warns against staying silent

The legend

The novel opens with an episode from the Mahabharata. A king has three daughters, Amba the eldest, and twins Ambika and Ambalika. Amba is promised to King Salwa, but fate intervenes. The sisters are abducted, and Amba falls in love with her captor, Bhisma, who loves her in return. Torn and uncertain, she asks Bhisma to send her back to Salwa. Salwa, believing the princess dishonoured, refuses her. She returns to Bhisma, only to learn he has sworn celibacy and been granted invincibility.

In her next life, Amba becomes Srikandi, marries Arjuna, and kills Bhisma. The prologue closes with the author wondering whether the story might have ended less brutally, whether Amba, Salwa, and Bhisma might have escaped a fate as heavy as the red and white of the Indonesian flag. In Javanese culture, a name carries history, and with it, the weight of fate. Here, red appears for the first time.

Myth and reality collide

The main story picks up where the epic left off, and the timelines of Amba, Bhisma, and Salwa begin to intertwine. The book opens at the climax. Amba visits Bhisma’s grave and is stabbed by Mukaburung. She is rushed to hospital, and red appears again, this time as blood. The reader soon meets Samuel, an Ambonese man guiding Amba through Buru Island. They met on a ferry. Through them, we learn the term tahanan politik, meaning political prisoner, and the history behind it, twelve thousand prisoners held in isolation on the island. Pamuntjak captures the silence around it starkly, writing that in Buru, people grow used to asking questions no one answers, and to looking away. The line lands hard on a reader living through an age of algorithm-muffled voices and self-censorship.

In the hospital room, Samuel has a nightmare, and red returns, now the colour of atrocity. Pamuntjak writes of a woman slipping into Amba’s room with a carving knife, cutting her throat like an animal until the room turns red. The image recalls Animal Farm, the pig as the power-hungry official, the hoarding capitalist. It leaves us with a harder question. Did Amba betray someone? Bhisma? Salwa? Herself?

The colour of ideology

Red settles into its clearest meaning, communism, an ideology with its own colour. We learn more about Bhisma, a political prisoner from the third intake, called the best communist among his comrades for how much he gives to the cause, and the worst for poems that serve no revolutionary purpose. Pamuntjak writes a line that seems to foretell everything. History, she says, is a long, twisted joke, and you never know when the punchline will land. It cuts like a blade near the ribs, a prophecy that folds the past into the present. The news today reads the same way, nothing static, the punchline always hidden until it isn’t.

Amba herself is red, restless, passionate, unwilling to fit the mould. Her eyes, cat-shaped, watch the world closely. She reads widely and startles her father with sharp questions. She is thoughtful but unsettled, working out love as she comes of age. Her ties to Salwa and Bhisma sit in a grey zone, undefined, half-abandoned, until one event reshapes all three lives, breaking and remaking them at once. Some things in life stay unresolved no matter how long we carry them. You might walk a shoreline wanting to row out to an island and relive a memory, only to find the past stays out of reach no matter how hard you try.

Amba lives with exactly this longing. Her guilt and confusion surface most clearly in a letter to her father, “Beloved Bapak,” that opens with a story he once told her as a child. The letter is steeped in guilt, yet she writes it with conviction, unwilling to abandon the path she chose. That mix of guilt, care, and conviction is enough to break a reader’s heart. Many women will recognise themselves in it.

A childhood conversation with her father gives red its final meaning, in the novel and in the world we live in now. He tells her that the dead do not sleep, that they exist alongside the living. Reincarnation may belong to Hinduism and Islam, he says, but in Java, they live with both, and are Javanese because they hold both. Red is blood, the same blood in every human vein. It is the colour of oneness, the colour of being human.
Indonesia’s past seemed to plead with India’s present, urging it to hold on to its diversity, its inclusiveness, its sense of oneness. The father’s words impose no single identity on his daughter. They merge different ones and root her in the land that shaped her.

Some mornings, in the 60 seconds it takes your office coffee machine to finish brewing, a political argument rises with the steam. You hesitate. Should you say something? “I know something about responsibilities. Just don’t ask me about politics.” The words are close at hand, and hiding behind them is easy. But somewhere, a headline has already changed lives, maybe even touched the coffee in your cup. Amba: The Question of Red asks you to notice the shades of red woven through your own life, whether you choose to see them or not.

The author is an intern with The Indian Express.

As I See It is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word. Views expressed are personal.