On an April day in 1948 a small plane landed in Bukittinggi, a mountain town in West Sumatra. At the time Indonesia was in turmoil, divided between Republican forces attempting to forge an independent state from the post-World War II chaos, and the resurgent Dutch, determined to regain and retain their former colonial territories. Bukittinggi was an isolated republican outpost, and the plane had had to run a Dutch air blockade to get there.

Aboard the aircraft was a 31-year-old Englishman named John Coast. This was his very first visit to Indonesia. And yet, he was already a committed recruit to the anti-colonial cause, "a fairly sincere example of that type of Englishman which for odd, idealistic reasons, becomes emotionally mixed up with remote causes..."

Coast's extraordinary memoir of his time working for the Indonesian cause in the late 1940s, Recruit to Revolution, was first published in 1952. It has now been reissued in an excellent scholarly edition edited by Laura Noszlopy.

The book is a combination of high adventure, partisan politics, and astute observation, and as a first-hand account by a man who was at once insider and outsider in the Republican milieu, it is highly unusual among literature on the Indonesian revolution.

Coast's journey to Indonesia had been an improbable one. It began when, as a prisoner of war in Japanese-occupied Burma, he was introduced to the delights of Javanese and Balinese classical dance by Indonesian fellow inmates. Coast was a serious dance aficionado, and this glimpse was enough to incline him towards Indonesian nationalism. He always insisted that, all political sympathies aside, his primary reason for committing to the cause was that "eventually I wanted to take a really perfect Indonesian dancing company round the world to convince all those who saw its performances that the culture of Indonesia was a thing of excellence…"

It was an ambition that he would eventually realize, once Indonesia had finally gained its independence (a story he told in another memoir, Dancing out of Bali). But before that point, there was a battle to win.

One of the most interesting aspects of Recruit to Revolution is the light it casts on the far-flung stages upon which minor acts of Indonesian revolution were played out. Coast's active involvement began in the draughty bedsits and stark meeting rooms of post-war London, where inexperienced Indonesian diplomats, attempting to champion their cause internationally, rubbed shoulders with British socialists and sundry other radicals. From here, Coast travelled to Bangkok, where he had been taken on by the British Foreign Office to work as a press officer–but where much of his energy was dedicated to the Indonesian cause. The Thai capital was a hub of diplomacy, where Indonesian and Dutch spokesmen, overseas journalists, Thai politicians, and freebooting airmen mingled in a scene that might have been drawn from the pages of a Graham Greene novel.

Released by the British Foreign Office in 1948, Coast finally reached Indonesia itself, touching down in the temporary Republican capital at Yogyakarta after his stopover in Bukittinggi. There he was employed as a sort of international press attaché cum special advisor. One of his most important early tasks was in organizing the terrifying blockade-running flights which carried supplies, missives, and officials between republican territories and Singapore and Thailand.

In the story of these flights, Recruit to Revolution features a cast of forgotten figures from the sidelines of Indonesia's independence struggle. The flights were generally piloted by Bangkok-based airmen originally from Britain or America, men like Dave Fowler, Wade Palmer, and Bob Freeberg whose statuses and motivations teetered between mercenary and idealist. Other bit-players, otherwise lost to history, appear in Coast's account here too–including Pungpit, an understandably bad-tempered Thai stewardess who somehow ended up handing out drinks on the rickety blockade-running flights.

It is in the sections about blockade-running that Recruit to Revolution contains its greatest air of adventure, and there are echoes of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in the accounts of the tiny, poorly maintained planes dodging both Dutch antiaircraft guns and tropical weather systems in settings of ethereal, if hazardous, beauty: "Landing in Singapore by night is a luxurious experience. The island lies below you like a gigantic piece of thick, black velvet, and the pale greens and yellows and whites of its myriad lights seem somehow to be deeply embedded in its rich texture, exactly as if a fantastic number of precious stones have been carelessly tumbled out into the darkness below..."

For students of Indonesian history, meanwhile, the book's greatest interest lies in Coast's first-hand account of life within the beleaguered Republic, a scene he convincingly describes as "a mixture of the gallant and the pathetic, of high hope and fatalistic resignation."

Coast was, of course, a committed and self-conscious partisan. When he spoke of "us" and "we" at the time, he notes, he meant "we Indonesians," and he was inclined to regard the belligerent Dutch as "armored hoodlums."

But he was enough of an outsider to retain an ability to judge the nascent Indonesian state and its leading figures critically at times. He also displayed an intelligent grasp of the complexities and the contexts of the political situation, and had no particular inclination to inflate the significance of his own role. In this Recruit to Revolution stands in marked contrast to the memoir of another notorious foreign recruit to the Indonesian revolution, the self-styled "K'tut Tantri", a British-American woman whose Revolt in Paradise, while highly entertaining, is mainly a wildly unreliable exercise in self-glorification. Tantri had already departed Indonesia by the time Coast arrived, and he mentions her only once, in passing, as "a lady from the Island of Man."

Coast also had a sharp eye for the humanizing details so often lost in grand historical narratives: the exhaustion of the veteran independence leader Agus Salim; Mohammad Hatta's tendency to rapidly gain and lose weight. The book also contains one of the finest accounts available of Sukarno, Indonesia's flamboyant first president, in oratorical action. Coast notes that: "His power can be frightening, for the man who can command the mob is the man who can control the most potent, the most fearful and the most primitive of all forces," an observation given a chilling frisson by the knowledge that, before World War II and before his subsequent and total political about turn, the young Coast had flirted seriously with fascism.

John Coast remained with the Indonesian Republic after its existence was finally accepted by the former colonial power in 1949, taking a post as a public relations expert at the Foreign Ministry. Later he engineered a permanent leave of absence and moved to Bali, where he was at last able to put into action his plan–first conceived in a prison camp in Burma–for bringing Indonesian dance to the wider world.

Later he returned to London, where his life remained distinctly colorful: he became a popular music impresario, working with everyone from Bob Dylan to Ravi Shankar, and was also involved in screenwriting and documentary making, until his death in 1989. All this will surely make rich material for the Coast biography upon which editor Laura Noszlopy is currently working. In the meantime, readers have access to a unique personal view of the birth of modern Indonesia, and an intriguing introduction to the person of John Coast, through this new edition of Recruit to Revolution.

Tim Hannigan is an author and journalist specializing in Indonesia and the Indian Subcontinent. His Raffles and the British Invasion of Java won the 2013 John Brooks Award

Reprinted with permission from The Asian Review of Books