Cleanliness" was also ambiguous in Ibu Rubi's account because the term is
as charged in the present as it was in the past. Like disiplirz, which also frequently
punctuated people's accounts, "cleanliness" was both part of the repertoire
of concepts that Dutch household manuals used to prescribe domestic relations
and a catchword of the New Order. Government-sponsored billboards
urged "disiplin" and "a culture of cleanliness" as requisite virtues for a "developed"
Indonesia." The historically dense vocabularies called upon by former
servants raise basic problems of interpreting the politics of memory. To what
degree are people's descriptions of the colonial past to be read as commentaries
on the postcolonial present? And given that they must be to some extent "about"
both, how to calibrate the relative "weighting" of the two? Ibu Rubi's account
evokes a relation to Dutch sensibilities that shifts over time, that swings between
rejection and attraction-both in the colonial past and looking back from
her vantage point of the present