Happy Birthday, Pramoedya Ananta Toer!
From Google Doodle archive:
It might be said that Pramoedya Ananta Toerâs pen was his sword. Â Known as âPramoedyaâ or âPram,â this Indonesian writer was a proponent of human rights and freedom of expression who fought against Japanese and Dutch colonialism in his country.
Born on February 6, 1925, in a village called Blora on Java, Pram was exposed to political activism through his father, and came to journalism while working as a stenographer for a Japanese news agency. Incarcerated from 1947â1949 for being âanti-colonial,â he wrote his first novel,The Fugitive behind bars.
His novels throughout the 1950s continued to hold a mirror up to the impact of colonialism. Following a coup and suspected of ties to the Indonesian communist party, Pram was sent to the Indonesian island of Buru in 1969 where he spent over a decade as a political prisoner. When refused pen and paper, Pram turned to oral storytelling, sharing a story with his fellow prisoners about a Javanese boy named Minke who spurns Indonesiaâs hierarchical society in the last years of Dutch colonization. Granted a typewriter towards the end of his term, he brought Minkeâs tale to life through the four-volume Buru Quartet, his most well-known work. In fact, the books were smuggled out of Indonesia by Pramâs friend, a German priest, to avoid being taken or destroyed, and have now been translated into more than 20 languages worldwide.
Todayâs Doodle celebrates Pramâs birthday with an animation of the industrious novelist seated at his typewriter, hard at work. Â