A half-Indo critic of Indies society attacked the pauperism commission early on

Evidence

One particularly avid critique came quickly from one Otto Knaap, born in Cheribon in 1866 of an Indo-European mother and a Dutch father employed in the plantation industry. Schooled in Leiden, self-fashioned as a promoter and critic of the arts, he had just returned to Java at twenty-nine years of age, a few years before the commission was announced. His articles in the Indies press had already shown him to be an agile and ardent commentator on the parochial pretensions of Indies society, so it was fitting that he was among the first to pan the investigation. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 913