8/12/2019 Biography of Soekarno

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BIOGRAPHY of SOEKARNO 

Sukarno (June 6, 1901 –  June 21, 1970) was the first President of Indonesia. He helped

the country win its independence from  the Netherlands and was President from 1945 to 1967,

 presiding with mixed success over the country‟s turbulent transition to independence. Sukarnowas forced out of power by one of his generals, Suharto,  who formally became President in

March 1967

The spelling “Sukarno” has been official in Indonesia since 1947 but the older spelling

Soekarno is still frequently used, mainly because he signed his name in the old spelling. Official

Indonesian presidential decrees from the period 1947-1968, however, printed his name using the

1947 spelling. 

Indonesians also remember him as Bung  Karno or Pak  Karno . Like many Javanese people, he

had only one name; in religious contexts, he was occasionally referred to as „Achmad Sukarno‟. 

Background 

The son of a Javanese primary school teacher, an aristocrat named Raden Soekemi Sosrodihardjo

and his Balinese wife named Ida Ayu Nyoman Rai from Buleleng regency, Sukarno was born as

Kusno Sosrodihardjo in Blitar, East Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Following

Javanese custom, he was renamed after a childhood illness. He was admitted into a Dutch-run

school as a child. When his father sent him to Surabaya in 1916 to attend a secondary school, he

met Tjokroaminoto, a future nationalist. In 1921 he began to study at the  Technische Hogeschool  

(Technical Institute) in Bandung. He studied civil engineering and focused on architecture.

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Atypically, even among the colony‟s small educated elite, Sukarno was fluent in several

languages. In addition to the Javanese language of his childhood, he was a master of  Sundanese

and of Indonesian, and especially strong in Dutch. He was also quite comfortable in German, 

English, and French, all of which were taught at his HBS. Sukarno once remarked that when he

was studying in Surabaya, he often sat behind the screen in movie theaters reading the Dutch

subtitles in reverse because the front seats were only for elite Dutch people.

In his studies, Sukarno was “intensely modern,” both in architecture and in politics .

Sukarno interpreted these ideas in his dress, in his urban planning for the capital (eventually

Jakarta), and in his socialist politics, though he did not extend his taste for modern art to pop

music; he had Koes Plus imprisoned for their allegedly decadent lyrics despite his reputation for

womanising. For Sukarno, modernity was blind to race, neat and Western in style, and anti-imperialist.

Family 

Sukarno officially married eight wives .Namely Oetari, Inggit Garnasih, Fatmawati, Hartini,

Ratna Sari Dewi Soekarno, Haryati, Yurike Sanger, and Kartini Manoppo . Megawati

Sukarnoputri,  who served as the fifth president of Indonesia, is his daughter by his wife

Fatmawati. Her younger brother Guruh Soekarnoputra (born 1953) has inherited Sukarno‟sartistic bent and is a gifted choreographer and songwriter,  who made a movie Untukmu,

 Indonesiaku  (For You, My Indonesia) about Indonesian culture. He is also a member of the

Indonesian Parliament for Megawati‟s PDI-P party. His siblings Guntur Soekarnoputra,

Rachmawati Soekarnoputri and Sukmawati Soekarnoputri have all been active in politics.

Sukarno had a daughter named Kartika by Dewi Sukarno. In 2006 Kartika Sukarno married Frits

Seegers,  the Netherlands-born chief executive officer of the Barclays Global Retail and

Commercial Bank.Other offspring include Taufan and Bayu by his wife Hartini, and a son

named Toto Suryawan Soekarnoputra (born 1967, in Germany), by his wife Kartini Manoppo.

Popular ladies‟ magazines such as  Femina  and  Kartini  regularly run features about newly

discovered lookalike sons and daughters throughout the archipelago, who often miraculously

disappear when pressed to take a DNA test by the official Sukarno children .