Samin Surosentiko

The teaching of Samin Surosentiko, spread around Blora and Bojonegoro from the late nineteenth century, turns on speaking truthfully, not taking what is not one's due, and not acknowledging authority that cannot be explained. From that principle descend the refusal to pay land tax to the colonial government, the refusal of corvée, and the refusal to register marriages with an institution not acknowledged.

The form of the resistance was unarmed and had no centre. It was conducted through answers — replying to an official's question in terms literally true and practically useless, professing not to know the words the official used, and continuing work without argument. The colonial government classed it as a disturbance of order and exiled Samin in 1907; he died in exile in 1914, and the teaching continued without him.

Resistance of this kind is hard for any government archive to record, since it produces no events. The surviving record is therefore largely the reports of exasperated officials, and reading the movement through those reports yields a picture shaped by the exasperation of the reporters.

The heirs of the teaching call themselves Sedulur Sikep and not “Samin people”; the latter is used by outsiders, and in ordinary Javanese usage the word samin has come to mean someone obstinate and hard to reason with. The written statement of the Sedulur Sikep elders at Sukolilo concerning this naming is the basis for how the name is written in the related entries of this encyclopedia.

Since 2006 the group has become widely known again through its opposition to planned cement works and limestone quarrying in the Kendeng hills, which form the catchment for the rice fields below. The opposition has been conducted in the same form as a century before — stating objection, not signing, not going — with one new form added: the encasing of feet in cement before the State Palace in 2016 and 2017.

The dispute continues through the courts with alternating outcomes, including a Supreme Court ruling in 2016 in the plaintiffs' favour. This encyclopedia records the matter as part of this figure's entry because a teaching formulated in the nineteenth century is today being conducted in a mining dispute, and that continuity is the point of the record.