Dutch travellers continually marvelled at the Indies ponies: they found something both ‘familiar’ and ‘exotic’ in them. Many colonial travel books from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cast these animals in a comical supporting role. Europeans found the ubiquitous ‘cat-like’, fast horses to be headstrong and unpredictable creatures that evoked both ridicule and admiration. The European visitors’ encounter with the Java pony brought out their awkwardness and ineptitude in the tropics. In this sense, the small horses can be seen as a not too threatening metaphor for the limits to Dutch authority and control in the Indonesian archipelago, as the historian Mikko Toivanen argues.
Two photos of tourists on horseback in the mountains of East Java:
1. Tourists on small horses climbing Mount Lawu near Magetan (East Java), around 1928. [KITLV 44002]
2. Europeans on horseback with an Indonesian guide near a holiday cottage in the Tengger Massif in Tosari (East Java), 1919. [KITLV 49847]