THIS torrid dusty farming community deep in the heartland of Central Java was not the sort of world that Raden Ajeng Kartini knew. The sheltered daughter of Javanese nobility, she was bred in a refined environment of spacious rooms, house servants, polite conversation in High Javanese and daily journal writing in quiet studies, far from the toiling peasants of the hinterlands.

Long rambling limasan on dry 1-acre tracts faced the rocky roadway that