Sulastri and Sudarmo, the protagonists of Suwarsih Djojopuspito’ novel, Against the Grain, faced the inevitability of such events as teachers in one of the unauthorized (“wild”) schools of 1930’s Java. This strongly autobiographical work depicts the lives of Indonesians, particularly its youth, who were imbued with the ideals of nationalism and independence in the 1930s. But the depicti…