Kalimasada Silat Academy

Kalimasada Silat Academy begins as more than a school for combat: founded in the aftermath of civil war, it was intended to redirect former guerrillas toward safer, sustainable lives. Under its founder’s son, that broad rehabilitation mission narrowed into martial-arts instruction, and the academy became a place where Iteung sought the ability to protect herself. Its history links personal training to the larger transformation of former fighters into participants in a violent postwar order.

Foundation and Postwar Setting

The academy stood not far from the public hospital, and its name was drawn from the Mahabarata: the Kalimasada, a sacred book of mystical knowledge associated with Yudhistira, leader of the Pandawas. Its founder, Kyai Abdul Kadir, had been a veteran of the twelve-year civil war between the republican army and Islamic rebels. He was described as the most elusive commander, controlling jungle territory along Java’s southern coast from Cilacap through Pangandaran, Parigi, and Cijulang to Port Ratu. After the republican army captured rebel leader R. M. Kartosuwirjo and the militias’ morale collapsed, guerrilla commanders surrendered one by one.

The surrender did not lead to a single common fate. Some former fighters were executed; others were imprisoned and later pardoned. Those who emerged to find the world changed could be left without work or a place to live. Some turned to robbery and theft, while others became market “security” providers—in practice, petty extortionists. Their relationships with soldiers who had captured them could continue into this new life: former guerrillas needed armed protection, and soldiers supplied it. The academy was founded within this unsettled landscape, where military relationships could support livelihoods while also sustaining coercive activity.

Rehabilitation Through Training and Work

Kyai Abdul Kadir sought to gather former fighters, including men who had served under him and who had joined the guerrillas as children. He established the academy to teach self-defense, religious wisdom, and, crucially, a way to earn a living. His program recognized that former child soldiers could not easily leave behind a guerrilla existence they had learned while young. The school’s ambitions therefore extended beyond physical skill: it was meant to make life outside armed struggle possible.

That practical purpose was reflected in instruction beyond martial arts. Under the founder, students learned to sew and cultivate land, and received guidance in managing loans if they wanted to start a small business. The academy offered a route toward ordinary economic independence as well as a place to reunite former fighters. Yet only a few of them wanted to join. Others made their own arrangements with soldiers, who might enlist their manpower to maintain order—or to disrupt it. When those soldiers no longer needed them, they could kill them. Kyai Abdul Kadir had foreseen this danger; the academy was a limited attempt to avert it. He died of old age before the soldiers turned against and exterminated the ex-guerrillas.

A Changed Institution

The academy passed to Kyai Abdul Kadir’s son, who had also joined his father as a guerrilla and had been born in the jungle. But succession did not preserve the founder’s whole project. The son lacked his father’s deep religious knowledge and cancelled the religion classes. He also abandoned the instruction in practical work and finance, leaving students without the livelihood planning that had once accompanied their training.

Under the son, Kalimasada became a conventional martial-arts academy. Students attended to learn how to beat people effectively and to discover what courage felt like. This change is not merely a difference in curriculum: the school’s original effort to redirect former combatants into religious study and work gave way to the cultivation of fighting ability and personal nerve. The academy remains a site of instruction, but its means of answering insecurity have narrowed to the body and its capacity to fight.

Iteung’s Purpose and the Academy’s Meaning

Iteung arrives at the academy with a direct objective. Asked why she wants to learn to fight, she says she wants to protect herself, gesturing between her thighs. Her reason gives the school’s martial training a personal, defensive stake: she is not seeking combat as spectacle or status, but the means to resist a danger she identifies as intimate to her own body.

Her training is marked by deliberate endurance. While others have stopped or slowed during a run around the soccer field, Iteung continues after more than fifty circuits, determined to complete seventy. She refuses to let fatigue persuade her to stop before the final lap she has chosen, and her teacher watches her from a distance and calls her frightening. The episode presents discipline as something she imposes on herself, not simply something delivered by the academy. In the institution’s narrowed form, the founder’s broad program of rehabilitation has receded; for Iteung, its remaining martial instruction becomes a means of acquiring agency and protection.