Shawn Donnan – In recent years, the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who died yesterday at age 81, came to be known as a chain-smoking curmudgeon and consistent critic of the corrupt legacies of the Suharto regime and western-style consumerism.
But if anyone ever deserved the right to be the grumpy contrarian – a south-east Asian Gunther Grass, the German author known for his pointed social criticism – then Pramoedya was it.
His leftist politics led to his imprisonment in the weeks after the still-mysterious 1965 coup that ushered in Suharto and led to the slaughter of between 500,000 and 2m alleged communists, and the imprisonment of thousands of intellectuals. For the next 14 years, his home became a succession of prisons, the most famous of which was Buru Island, a notorious prison camp where he spent a decade.
His time on Buru Island yielded his most famous work, the Buru Quartet, four historical novels that highlight the inequities of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia.
It also prompted part of what became his personal legend. Banned from writing during his imprisonment, the Buru Quartet's books first took form as stories that he narrated to fellow prisoners who eventually agreed to do his chores for him so that he could secretly write the tales down.
Released from Buru Island in 1979, Pramoedya remained under house arrest until the early 1990s and it was not until after the May 1998 fall of Suharto that he was allowed to leave Indonesia.
The combination of his life story and a remarkable body of work led to a flurry of attention and overseas accolades. In recent years he was mentioned regularly as south-east Asia's best candidate for a Nobel Prize.
"Just as [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn with Russia, Gunther Grass with Germany and Yukio Mishima with Japan, you get to know Indonesia through him. I put him alongside all of those writers," said John McGlynn, the US editor and translator of Pramoedya's 1999 autobiography, The Mute's Soliloquy.
The impact on his health of his prolonged imprisonment and decades of chain-smoking kreteks – Indonesia's pungent clove cigarettes – left him largely deaf and otherwise weakened, and by 2000 he stopped writing.
But he remained pugnacious to the end. His hospitalisation last Thursday as a result of complications from diabetes and other health problems saw him briefly slip into a coma. Awaking on Saturday afternoon, he requested a cigarette and to go home, where he died yesterday with friends and family in attendance.
"He pulled the tubes out of his body and said 'Now take me home'," Mr McGlynn said. "That says a lot about him. He dealt with life on his own terms. Heaven, or hell, be damned."
Despite not writing in the final years of his life, Pramoedya continued to oppose what he saw as the lingering influence in Indonesia of Suharto, who has never faced trial for his family's alleged embezzlement of up to $35 billion during his rrule.
The writer joined other former political prisoners in a failed effort last year to sue Suharto and other Indonesian presidents for compensation.
In an interview with the FT last year, Pramoedya also called his writing on Buru Island a challenge to Suharto's "New Order" and gloated that he had already outlasted the regime.
"Let us see whether it is the New Order or me who will be the loser before Indonesian history," he said, sitting before walls covered in memorabilia drawn mostly from his recent trips abroad. "I have won," he declared. "The New Order has fallen and my writings have been translated into 40 languages."