density and changing employment req

density and changing employment requirements.26 By the time the Dutch established a
municipal government {gemeente) in 1906, giving the Westernized city and the
Europeans in it special and separate legal status, kampung residents viewed that
community with suspicion and growing hostility. Popular memory, indeed, refers to the
nearby Gedangan revolt of 1904, in which disgruntled villagers from a sugar-growing
area declared a holy war on Europeans, as the specific event that brought about the
founding of the gemeente, which was a tool, it was said, to separate and protect
Europeans from the native population.27
Surabayans' sensitivities did not mislead them, for the first decades ofthe twentieth
century saw kampung inhabitants separated legally ever further from the municipal
government that exercised increasing control over the city. Yet at the same time,
kampung folk were more and more subjected to intrusion from municipal police,
medical workers, inspectors, and taxes of many kinds.28 Put somewhat differently,
Surabaya's indigenous residents were increasingly subjected to the forces of a Western
colonial order, but were also increasingly prevented from dealing with these forces on
anything like equal terms. The gemeente became known in a popular piece of word play
as gua minta, literally "the cave that begs", but more nearly "the bottomless pit".29
In the extremely rapid physical growth of the period, kampung areas were severely
pressured by dwindling lands and growing population, and they began to suffer
economically as a result.30 Iron rings of Western housing and business establishments
grew up around many long-established kampung, hemming them in and encroaching on
thier lands. In most areas, fruit trees and small gardens disappeared, and both private
property improvements and community projects became difficult to finance. Virtually
everywhere the arek Suraboyo blamed the municipal government for their woes. Many
kampung gained special reputations for their hostility to police and other city officials,
whom residents believed were Europeans or Eurasians though they were in fact usually
Javanese.31
In the early 1920s the general discontent of kampung dwellers began to be felt outside
kampung boundaries and in the European city. Perhaps because the place of
employment, rather than the walled and artificially isolated Indonesian neighborhood,