Ministry and activism in Dutch East Indies
Van Hoëvell left the Netherlands to become a minister in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, where he led a Malay and Dutch-speaking congregation. In 1838, he received an additional appointment, as historian for the local government, and began traveling throughout the area. He worked in the East Indies until 1848, when he received an official reprimand from the Dutch government for publicizing his views critical of colonialism; consequently he was forced to resign.
Van Hoëvell played an important part in the short-lived protest in Batavia that has been called the "1848 Batavian Revolution". Partly inspired by the February 1848 uprising in Paris, Batavian citizens began to challenge the authorities; one of their grievances was an 1842 decree that dictated that positions in the upper echelons of the Dutch administration could be held only by those who had received the appropriate certificate from the Royal Academy in Delft. The measure discriminated against both "Dutch-born and creole Dutch" who could not or did not want to send their children to the Netherlands for a decade of education. The measure also discriminated against the class referred to as Indo-Europeans, who were thus barred from promotion above the level of "the lowliest civil service jobs." As a consequence of this discrimination across racial barriers, the May 1848 protest could draw a mixed group of citizens, "identified as 'Europeans,' 'creoles,' and 'colored'" by the authorities.
Van Hoëvell emerged as one of the "principal organizers" in the protest and called a meeting, with official approval, to discuss "better access to government jobs for locally born colonizers through expanded educational offerings". Starting on 17 May, van Hoëvell and others met many times with Governor-General Jan Jacob Rochussen to discuss what kind of meeting was to be held and what demands would be made. During this time, van Hoëvell was able to move the proposed meeting place from a private residence to the central hall of De Harmonie, the club house of the Batavian citizen's society, and he organized transportation for whoever wished to come, including his own congregation.
The organizers received permission from Rochussen for their meeting since they had argued that their grievances were social matters, not "matters of state," and that they did not form a political threat to the government. However, on 20 May van Hoëvell printed the kind of anti-government rhetoric he had been asked to refrain from in a journal he published. There were also signals at other public events of growing unease among the locally born Dutch population as well as the large Indo-European population, who had held protests of their own and delivered a petition to Rochussen. Taking all these developments in consideration, Rochussen concluded that the meeting in De Harmonie should be considered subversive and a danger to the state; he let it be known that armed troops were ready to take control of the situation if need be. At 6 PM on 22 May, people were flocking to the club house, and by 7 PM it was packed. Van Hoëvell was quickly proclaimed to be president of the assembly. Soon after, though, the meeting became unruly and the shouts of a few led to a riot. In an increasingly unruly atmosphere, the protestors ousted van Hoëvell from his presidency as quickly as they had raised him to the position, after which he and others left the building. The protest fizzled out soon afterward.
By mid-1848, van Hoëvell had become too controversial and perhaps too important to those who disagreed with the local government, and under pressure from the Governor-General he resigned his post on 19 July 1848. After a packed final service in the Willemskerk in August, he was sent off by "half the population of Batavia"; his final sermon, based on Epistle to the Hebrews 13:18–19, suggested that he hoped to return to the Indies. Later, he characterized the Governor-General as more powerful than the Dutch king: "he is the sun, at which all eyes are aimed; when he laughs, everyone laughs; if he looks serious, then the entire multitude frowns its face."
In Batavia, he was an active scholar, publishing on linguistics, language, and history. In 1838 he founded a journal, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië ("Journal for the Dutch East Indies"), which he edited until 1862, and he edited and translated a fourteenth-century romantic poem written in the Jawi alphabet, the Syair Bidasari. He was chairman of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences and its president after 1845, and published a book on the colony's arts and sciences and one on the colony's history. Van Hoëvell traveled widely, studied languages and artifacts, and visited local Muslim rulers; he judged the threat of Islam to be much less insidious than the restrictions from the Dutch government or the danger posed by domestic Catholics. He was awarded with knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 1847.
He became a friend and correspondent of Eduard Douwes Dekker, who under the pseudonym Multatuli published Max Havelaar, the 1860 satire that exposed colonial corruption in Java; Dekker was one of the first subscribers to Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië. Another acquaintance was W. Bosch, chief of the public health services in the colony, who had written critically on the effects of the colonial system on the health of the population, arguing to his superiors that they should help combat poverty, malnourishment, and communicable diseases. Bosch had provided logistical assistance during the events of May 1848, and they remained friends even after van Hoëvell returned to the Netherlands.
