Michael Vatikiotis – I first met Pramoedya Ananta Toer when he was still restricted to a small house in a Jakarta suburb in the dying days of the Suharto regime that had first jailed him, then sent him into internal exile, and finally allowed him to live under 'city arrest'. There was an air of disarming humility about the man. He liked to smoke clove cigarettes, as did I. Our first bonding experience was through tobacco; we established a relationship by lighting each other's cigarettes.

Pram had an infectious laugh and a broad grin. His bony hands would grip you and, because he was partially deaf, he communicated with gestures and expressions. His eyes shone brightly. I was luckier than some – the tone of my voice somehow penetrated Pram's damaged eardrums and we had quite long conversations.

The economy with which he navigated the rich Indonesian language encouraged less fluent speakers like myself. Pram was not your typical cultural grand master, or budayawan. He had no airs, made no sweeping generalisations. His observations were couched in pithy epithets and grounded in the gritty perspective of the common man.

For his ability to represent the common Indonesian and give voice to the disappointment and despair of more than a half century of unrealised national aspiration in one of the largest nations on earth, Pram was, for me, one of the great literary figures of our age. Sadly, he died without the world, and too many of his Indonesian compatriots, fully recognising this.

One of my favourite short stories by Pram is titled Gambir. It is a simple story of two coolies living along the railway tracks outside Jakarta's Gambir station. There is nothing too deep here, no great symbolism or larger meaning.

But what Pram does so well is to reveal the seamy underside of a nation that has never managed to uplift the well-being of millions who still live in poverty and despair. His coolies sleep in the open, catching chills and forever dealing with runny noses and stomach ailments. They awake scratching the crust from their eyes, coughing, spewing out the phlegm that had risen in their throats again and from time to time scratching themselves from their asses to their necks.

These Tales From Djakarta were written in the 1950s, but the same people can be seen along the streets of Jakarta today. They suffer the same ailments and have no recourse to modern health facilities. Last year, Jakarta was shocked to hear the story of a street sweeper who was found at Gambir station carrying the corpse of his dead daughter.

Today in Jakarta there are cases of malnutrition among young children. Indeed, it was hard for someone like myself, with great affection for Indonesia, to talk to Pram about this country. For Pram, the history of Indonesia was one of unremitting disappointment. A nation of coolies, he would say, talking about the present day.

First enslaved under the Dutch, and then under the feudal Javanese elite who assumed the reigns of power after independence. Javanism, he insisted, keeps the country enslaved.

And yet for me Pram epitomised the eclectic creativity of the Javanese. He was born in Blora, Central Java, in 1925. His father was a teacher and a nationalist. His mother was a strong Javanese matriarch who imbued in Pram a strong sense of the mystical world and a deep faith in women. He was not sent away to Holland for an education. All his experiences until manhood were indigenous and rooted in Java. Of all the great interpreters of Javanese culture, Pram was the one with his feet planted firmly on the ground.

Like many of the world's greatest writers, Pram was something of an unreconstructed leftist and a closet revolutionary. I remember some three years ago Pram came to Hong Kong for a literary festival. On his arrival, he was besieged by old friends from the communist era in Indonesia – mostly Indonesian Chinese still living in exile.

He addressed a lunch hosted by the Asia Society full of bankers and stockbrokers at a five-star hotel and railed against the sins of capitalism.

There was something rather earthy and anachronistic about Pram's politics. Yet he could point to modern Indonesia and all its ills and ask: Has anything really changed?

The hardest thing of all for an outsider like myself was to deal with Pram's domestic detractors. There was the bitterness of an earlier age. In the 1950s, Pram had been a literary commissar who was said to have lorded it over those deemed ideologically impure. So, there was rancour, and perhaps professional rivalry.

So much of Indonesia's talent is crushed or suppressed by jealous impulses and individual resentment. Even to the point where there are those who turn a blind eye to Pram's long and abusive period of imprisonment that helped rob the country of a talented writer's gifts.

Now the worry I have is about Pram's legacy. For there is not a shadow of doubt in my mind that he is one of the world's greatest modern literary figures. He is up there with Albert Camus, Rabindranath Tagore, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gunther Grass as a writer who saw in his art the need to convey political ideas derived from the realities of human existence.

But in a world today where literature is judged by levels of escapism and frivolity, I am not sure Pram's legacy is all that secure. The other day I met an Indonesian writer of some repute. I asked what she felt about Pram and she said: "Oh we have gone past him. We have moved on."

I felt the anger rise in me, but didn't want to seem presumptuous about a culture that isn't my own. But then again, Pram wasn't writing just for Indonesia. His world of despair and disappointment in the back streets of Jakarta, or the small towns of Java, should remind us all of mankind's great folly when it comes to the consideration of fellow man.

[The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.]