Kretek

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Kretek

Aprescription for cigarettes may seem highly unlikely in today's world where cigarettes are well known to be harmful to one's health, but just about one hundred years ago in a small town called Kudus, Central Java, smoking cigarettes was the most popular way to cure the common cough. These were no ordinary cigarettes, though. They were the clove-spiced kretek, which today are a ubiquitous feature in the lives of over 200 million Indonesians.

Around 1880, a Kudus resident named Jamahri was suffering from a mild case of asthma. To relieve his suffering, he rubbed oil of cloves (eugenol ) on his chest. Eugenol has been used for centuries as an astringent and today is common in dentistry. While this eased his pain somewhat, he decided he needed to bring the healing powers of the cloves in closer contact with his troubled lungs. What would happen if he mixed cloves with tobacco and smoked it?

According to the legend, this is what he did and his cough ended immediately. He began to distribute his product through the local apotik (pharmacies), and soon his rokok cengkeh, or clove cigarettes, were as common a remedy for coughing as is today's cough syrup. A short time later this new product was renamed kretek (kreh-TEK) because of the pop and crackle the cloves make when burned (keretek-keretek). While Jamahri failed to grasp the commercial potential of his invention, another Kudus resident did. This man, the original father of the kretek industry, was called Nitisemito.

Nitisemito was holding various odd jobs around Kudus when he noticed that more and more people were taking up the habit of smoking tobacco mixed with cloves. At that time, all kretek were rolled by hand, and its ingredients were bought separately. Nitisemito decided to mix the ingredients himself, package them, and sell them as a branded product. He experimented with several names but in the end he chose Bal Tiga ("three balls"), and in 1906 he founded his company as Bal Tiga Nitisemito.

The 1920s and 1930s saw a rapid rise of kretek production, but kretek were unable to displace white cigarettes as the most popular cigarette in the region. Kretek were regarded as cigarettes for the middle classes, while white cigarettes conferred style and prestige. World War IIand Indonesia's occupation by the Japanese halted most production due to the scarcity of tobacco and cloves. Shortly after the end of the war and subsequent independence, Indonesia revived kretek production.

It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that kretek's status changed from just a spicy cigarette to that of a national icon. Two factors contributed to the rapid rise of kretek production and consumption. The first was the oil boom in the early 1970s, which resulted in a cash windfall in the government's coffers and an upsurge in domestic industries, with kretek leading the way. The second and perhaps more important factor was a government decision to allow select companies to purchase machines to automate the manufacturing process. Up until that time, all kretek were rolled by hand and therefore looked rustic when placed alongside the machine-made white cigarettes. That all changed when Bentoel in East Java produced the first machine-made kretek, Biru International, in 1974.

By the end of the twentieth century, kretek commanded roughly 85 to 90 percent of the entire cigarette market in Indonesia. The industry is one of the largest sources of the Indonesian government's excise revenue and it is one of the only domestic industries to survive the country's financial crises nearly unscathed. It is one of Indonesia's most well-known cultural signifiers, with its distinctive scent greeting each visitor who comes to Indonesia.

See Also South East Asia; Therapeutic Uses.

▌ MARK HANUSZ