The Languages of Indonesian Politics - Benedict O'Gorman Anderson

8/6/2019 The Languages of Indonesian Politics - Benedict O'Gorman Anderson

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Colonial Indonesia was a bureaucratic Wonderland: a clusterof interacting but basically separate linguistic and culturaluniverses, linked by the miracle of modern bureaucratic andtechnical organization. Each language, be it Batak, Sundanese,Javanese or Dutch, was the product of separate historical experi-ences, community organizations, literary and cultural specializa-tion and metaphysical outlook. The discontinuities between theselinguistic-cultural universes were fundamental to the structureof colonialism. The response to these discontinuities on thepart of "Indonesian" literati was inevitably therefore primarilyand primordially expressed in bi-lingualism, since only throughth e mastery of the language of the Other could the chasm betweeenth e universes be bridged and the colonial system challenged onsomething like even ground.

But the leap out of (say) Batak into Dutch meant far morethan the acquisition of a new technical vocabulary and the abilityto peer into the arcana of Dutch domination. It also involved thedevelopment of two inter-acting or conflicting modes of con-sciousness. The new generation of bi-lingual literati (whicharose about the end of the 19th Century) thus became cultural"middlemen, rf bu t inevitably middlemen who were as much involvedin the effort to control two mental universes as facilitatingcommunication between them. In the colonial situation, bi-lingualism was not merely a technical, but also a grave psycho-logical and ultimately religious > problem.

For the acquisition of the colonial language implied a changein the modalities of consciousness. It was far more than justthe discovery of a radically different set of phonetic equivalentsfor the inventory of one's own language. The structure of Dutch(and through it of European) thought and consciousness was it-self fundamentally different from those of the traditionalIndonesian languages, and the advance to bi-lingualism thereforein itself created profound mental and spiritual displacement -what our modern economic-cultural missionaries like to call"cultural shock," but at a much deeper and more human level. Theprofounder the knowledge of the acquired language, and the morethis language substituted itself for the aboriginal language asth e medium of thought and discourse, the more destructive and/orcreative (according to individual talents and situations) becameth e two-mindedness of the literati.

It is one of the ironies of colonial history that, since thepsychological effort to maintain equilibrium between two universesis so immense that few can sustain it, the "radicals" who leaptou t into Dutch and "conquered" the organization and methodology ofcolonial society, found themselves increasingly isolated from theaboriginal Indonesian world, an d having acted as pioneers theyfound themselves later for a large part culturally marooned onthe farther Western shore. A newer generation grew up for whomthe "conquest" was a thing of the past, an d whose basic task wa s


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the development of a counter-language to Dutch, a modern, nation-alist language, which would re-establish the connection withIndonesian traditions in itself, without compelling each individualto master the crisis internally through a bi-lingual conquest.While one generation struggled to work its way out of thetraditional modes of thinking, the next has been trying to re-establish contact with and build on them. In this attempt, animmense act of social and national creativity is involved.

The theoretical implications of this quest for a fundamentalnational unity (not basically a question of inter-regional homo-genization but on.e of spiritual unity between mental universes)have too often been ignored, and reduced to superficial main-tenance of "folk-culture" in a quite synthetic way. There hasbeen too much focus on bureaucratic "marination" of the externalemblems of aboriginal tradition (costumes, adat, etc.), and toolittle on the deeper communal quest for a sense of rootedidentity, expressed at all levels of the population, through theadventures and transformations of the national language.

The main thrust of what follows below therefore is the searchfor the over-all lines of this act of creativity. The main focuswill be on the Javanese, for a number of reasons, the most im-portant of which is that the combination of political power,numbers and strength of cultural identity of the Javanese hasmade them the single most creative force in developing the newIndonesian. How has "Revolutionary Malay" set about the taskof disciplining and uniting the bureaucratic colonial vocabulary,the Western democratic-socialist vocabulary, the nationalist-revolutionary vocabulary, and that of Javanese tradition? Howhas this "synthesis" been stretched or transformed to adjust tothe "realities" of urban Indonesia today? I believe that themost satisfactory perspective for understanding this developmentis a growing imposition of Javanese "flesh" on the "skeleton"of "Revolutionary Malay" - though this is in fact only a partof an immensely complicated and perhaps ultimately incomprehen-sible process.

It may be helpful to start with some consideration of anearlier confrontation between the Javanese and an alien civiliza-tion - that of Middle Eastern Islam - since the pattern ofmodalities is quite clearly visible in that now-distant clash.

While secular power in Old Java was largely held by bureau-cratic functionaries of the rulers, particularly the Bupati,religious and intellectual power was wielded, particularly inthose areas where royal authority was weakest, by the kjai. Onefound them in the Pasisir, and in traditional "rebel" areas(remote valley-fortresses like Bagelen and Ponorogo). The kjaiwas essentially a man of greater knowledge and wisdom than his


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fellows, and accordingly the main institution of kjai was thepesantren or rural Islamic school. The pesantren education wasquite explicitly an inwijding, an initiation into the higherwisdom. The social structure of the pesantren, in which theholy kjai himself was assisted by more or less advanced pupils,reflected the conception of education as a path to wisdom (ratherthan knowledge). Now the prestige of the kjai rested on manyfactors, on his reputed ancestry, his magical healing powers,his experience, and his personal character - but above all onhis mastery of an esoteric vocabulary. The most important ele-ment in this vocabulary was^generally speaking, Arabic.

The normal method of instruction of boys and youths in thepesantren was the inculcation by rote of extensive passages ofArabic or Koranic texts - and their subsequent elucidation bythe Master. It has often been claimed that this rote-learningof the Koran represents the decadence or fossilization of Islamin Java. Yet it seems much more comprehensible to see it as amost important and convincing sign of Java's defence againstArabic culture, and its final conquest of this alien infiltra-tion. The "domestication 1 1 of Islam and Arabic by the Javanesecultural impulse was done through the transformation of theKoran into a hermetic text-book of riddles and paradoxes. Arabicwas maintained as the language of "initiation" precisely becauseArabic was not understood (vide the present disastrous attemptsto make the Latin mass "comprehensible!")} the whole point of aspiritual ritual in an uncomprehended language is that it mani-fests power, limitless power, and implies a deliberately non-rational mode of cognition. Islam had forbidden the continuedused of Shivaitic and Tantric mantra; Java answered by turningthe Koran into a book of mantra.

(The fact that until quite recently it was forbidden to"translate" the Koran under Islamic law itself simply servedto justify a "principle" which derived from the local culture.)

The pupils in the pesantren then acquired their Koranictexts by rote, and the excelling pupil was the boy who couldrecite without mistakes. Since the youth clearly "understood"nothing of what he was saying, the importance attached to recitalerrors has clear "magical" overtones, recalling for example balianincantations in Central Kalimantan, where mistakes forebodetrouble and difficulties for the community if they are notcorrected.

The second step in a pesantren education was the "decoding"of the Koranic texts and of Javanese-language riddles andparadoxes. This part of the educational system is marvellouslydepicted in the pages of the Serat Tjentini, in which much ofthe action revolves around wandering santri (the original meaningis "pupil") travelling from one pesantren to another, testingeach other's skill in unravelling puzzles and religiousconundrums.


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The essential point of the conundrum is that it defies

everyday reality by removi ng logic from the phenomenologicalto the linguistic plane. Asking the question: "When is a mannot a man?" is phenomenologically nonsense. The resolution islinguistic: "When he is a lemon." The point thus turns on apun in the word "lemon." In this case the pun is totally"culturally deprived." But the religious function of the punis to bridge two levels of cognition, and to create a kind oflinguistic-religious causality (compare for example, some of thepoems of St. John of the Cross). Taking a specifically Javaneseexample, one of the best-known religious puns is made on thename of the wajang hero Judistira's magical weapon, the Kalimasada,which takes the form of a piece of esoteric writing, an incom-prehensible document of^great power. It is in fact not whatis written in the Kalimasada that is important, but that certain

syllables are inscribed on it in a certain^order by a certainperson at a certain time. While the Kalimasada is an authenticsymbol of a pre-Islamic cultural tradition, it is common to findit referred to in Jav ane se Islamic circles: but now unde r theguise of the Kalimah Sahadat, the Koranic credo or confessionof faith. (Therei" even a legend describing how Judistira gavehi s weapon to Sunan Kalidjaga, one of the nine pioneering Islamic"apostles" in Java). One might then reverse our original riddleand ask: "When is the Kalimasa da not the Kalimasada?" Answer:"When it is the Kalimah Sahadat." ~

The pun is of great importance to the Javan ese Islamic tradi-tion since it represents a sort of "capsulated" formula of anintuition. Neither historical nor linguistic analysis has any

real purchase on this intuition, because it is built into themiraculous quality of the pun itself (How can it be coincidental?Is the idea of coincidence meaningful only in certain cultures?),revealing another level of Being flowing in and out of the phenomena ,(From an outsider, "reductivist" point-of-view of course the punexpresses the will-to-unity of the Java nes e cultural tradition,th e urge to unite or absorb conflicting cultural streams throughlanguage or linguistic symbolism.)

Thus the innerlijke wijsheid of the pesantren (and this iseven truer of the more abangan "religious thought of South CentralJava) consists almost entirely of ascetic practices, rituals andth e presentation an d analysis of spells, conundrums an d paradoxes(prenesan). The common denominator is invariably: the phe nome na

are not always what they seem to be; what real ly is , may not ap-pear to be so. One finds simple paradoxes such as the old tag:"Sing ana, ora ana; sing ora ana, ana." (What is, is not; whatis n o t , i s . ) M o r e concretely th e paradox is div ined in the wordlongan, which literally means the space under a chair, table orbed. The riddles of b e i n g an d non-being ar e fondly expressed inthe conundrum that longan exists, yet does not exist. No chairca n exist without it, yet it cannot exist without a chair.


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Th e third aspect of the pesantren education which should be

noted, since it runs through much of contemporary Indonesian ed -ucation including the Universities, is that education has anunmistakeable metaphysical dimension; it is part of a long processof spiritual and mental training, an initiation into somethinginaccessible to the outsider. Far from being "pragmatic 11 in theDeweyan sense, education is seen as the key to an otherwise lockeddoor. This is also one way of interpreting the well-known "re-lativism" of the Javanese Weltanschauung The characteristiclinguistic paradoxes and polar juxtapositions of traditionalJavanese education allow for considerable tolerance of ambiguityin th e phenomena - far more at least than an American or Dutcheducation - and this is because th e paradoxes are an expressionof a certainty and a truth - a metaphysical intuition of thecommonality of being. Thus the psychological strain of accepting

paradox and ambiguity is small, since they are seen less asconflicting ppposites than as inter-related complementarities.By contrast, in Atlantic societies, precisely because an y realsense of "certainty" in this ultimate sense ha s long since van-ished, if it ever exis ted , and because we are trained to thinkin terms of conflict rather than complementarity, overt paradoxan d manifest contradictions arouse anxiety and the sense of skatingout to sea on fast-melting ice. An ev ide nt ontological certitudeunderlies th e shifting relativism of Javanese philosophy. Thephenomena do not have to be saved, s ince the y ar e never the sumof what Is. The real and the really real are closely connected,but not identical, and therefore it ne ve r does to be too closelycommitted to either.

I t should now be clear that the whole mode of old JavaneseIslam is in sharp contrast to that of the Middle East. Sincethe rise of reformist Muhammadijah Islam in Java in the earlyyears of this century however, which took Middle Eastern "Reform"Islam as its model, there has be en a sharp break in the Islamicummat on Java. Th e "Reform" elements in Masjumi, for example,havenade so bold as to say that the Koran means what it says!With Talmudic li teralism t hey hav e transformed the Koran froma key to a sort of religious Highway Code, and denied the comple-mentary dualism which is fundamental to traditional Javanesethinking. Hence th e violent N.. hostili ty to Masjumi.

Whereas for the "ideal" modernist Arabic is the languageof religion, whic h therefore must be directly unders tood, th e

affective non-liturgical language of the pesantren traditionalistsis Javanese . Partly this is becaus e J avanes e is the mother-language, with all the secret inflexions and resonances which noforeign language can ever conve y, partly bec ause for the Javane setheir language is so strongly felt to be the major expression oftheir col lect iv i ty s identity. The allusive alliterativeness,th e highl y develope d onomatopoeia of Javanes e, and i ts r ich ,sensory vocabulary provide a treasury of non-causal causalitiesan d interconnections and an enduring sense of a hidden continuity


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flowing in and around th e phenomena, down to the most intimatesphere of people's lives. When the pes inden at a wajang per-formance wishes to rest and warn the dalag to take over, sheweaves the word ron ing mlindjo (leaves of the mlindjo tree) intohe r song. Since these leaves are also known as so and theJavanese word for rest is ngaso, the connection is at once felt,and to the mystification of the uninitiated, the dalang takesover the burden of the singing.

The Javanese sense of the inter-relatedness of the phenomenaand yet scepticism about their ultimate reality is fundamentalto any understanding of the Javanese political style. In Javanesesocial intercourse, great stress was traditionally laid on anemptiness between facial expression and mental attitude. Regard-less of one's emotions, one f s face should express "appropriate"feelings or complete impassivity. This sense of the face as a

kind of built-in mask ha s been commented on by travellers an dstudents of Javanese life. But it is generally misunderstoodas: the real person is the "emotion," the false person is the"mask" or face. In fact it is not nearly as simple as that. Inthe mask-dance for example, the relationship of the dancer tohis mask is highly ambiguous: the mask may "formally" expressan emotion that the dancer feels but dare not express (the maskprovides an alibi), or it may simply be "distracting," a disguisemisleading the audience, or it may be magnetic (there is a com-mo n belief that women will fall madly in love with a masked manbu t not with the same man unmasked), or again it may take pos-session of him, so that the man becomes the mask. The relation-ship between the real and really real is thus once again obscureand intricate. It is difficult or impossible to say which iswhich. And when th e dialang sits behind th e screen, manipulatingth e puppets as he chooses, imitating their various voices, ideas,passions and personalities, he becomes at once all of them andnone of them.

The Pamongpradja

Whereas the most asli type of Javanese authority, such aswe have just considered, was mono-lingual, or at least bi-lingualonly in a very special sense - that he had acquired a store ofesoteric Arabic mantra - the elaboration of a colonial bureaucracy(the Binnenlands Bestuur) with largely secular powers, requiredthe cultivation of bi- or even,later, tri-lingualism. Long before

the rise of the modern nationalist intelligentsia, the Javaneseliterati, in their function as lower-level administrators of thecolonial government, had started to face the challenge of Dutchrule by the slow acquisition of Dutch and Dutch-Western modesof thinking. The typical figures in this respect were theBupati, particularly the Bupati in areas rather remote fromSurakarta and Jogjakarta (D epara, Rembang, Tuban, Banjumas,Banten are all good examples). Since the Bupati was par excel-lence th e main nexus between th e rural Javanese populace and the


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colonial government, and thus positionally the vital middlemanbetween two mutually uncomprehending worlds, he was forced to

cultivate the two-mindedness that we have mentioned very earlyon. Whereas vis-a-vis the Dutch his position was weak (in spiteof Max Havelaar!) and clearly subordinate, vis-a-vis the Javanesepopulation he remained the apex of the social order in a societyintensely conscious of status hierarchies. While the Dutch didwhat they could (within the logic of the colonial system) tomaintain the outward grandeur and pomp of the Bupati y s position,it was clear to those concerned that this was pretty much asandiwara; that the 'formal 1 apparatus of power was quite dif-ferent from the 'real 1 ; that for example the controleur, thoughbelow the Bupati in rank and dignity,nevertheless effectivelyran the government. A similar development had after all longsince been in evidence in the royal capitals, where, in spiteof the immense formal majesty and prestige of the Sunan and Sultan,

it was everywhere understood that effective power was in thehands of the Rijksbestuurder or Patih, a Dutch appointee. Therelationship contrSleur-Bupati and Patih-Sunan were in manyrespects dissimilar, but in one critical respect they were alike -in their disassociation of what our scholars call charismaticand administrative functions. In each case the magico-religiousfigure was powerless on a day-to-day level; yet his authoritywas essential for the smooth > rking of the system controlled byhis opposite number. Once again one detects complementarities,and an ambiguous, symbiotic relationship, recalling the mask andits wearer, the dalang and his wajang.

Although from the colonial point of view the Bupati wasbasically an official or administrator, from the Javanese pointof view he was first and foremost the most eminent prijaji inhis area - and prijaji is perhaps best defined as the literateman. The prestige of literacy in a land where illiteracy ranto well over 90% of the population, is at once easy and impos-sible to comprehend. The written word assumes a character quitedifferent to the literate and the illiterate man. For the oneit is a means of communication; for the other a sign or symbolof an inaccessible world. The power of the Bupati was, atbottom, the power of literacy against illiteracy. In the languageof the Javanese, the reflection of this "stratification" appeared,probably not earlier than the late 17th Century, in the structuraldifferentiation between the two major levels of discourse, kramaand ngoko. Krma, par excellence the language of the prijaji,is a consciously archaizing Sanskritic sub-language, developedlargely to emphasize and "build into" the larger Javanese languagethe increasing hierarchization of Javanese society under theinfluence of Dutch pressure and later control. While krama isessentially an honorifc language, and thus largely spoken upthe social hierarchy, full mastery of the vocabulary requiresa high initial degree of education. To this day social prestigeamong the Javanese is indicated most clearly by an individual'smastery of the finer forms of this langage de politesse. Therolling, melodious, polysyllabic k r c L m l L forms serve to emphasize


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in themselves the measuredness, sense of distance and spacebetween the ranks of Javanese society. Ngoko on the other handis terse, acerbic, humorous and sensuous in a direct, almostphysical way. It is spoken down the social hierarchy and amongvery close equals, friends or family. The duality of these twosublanguages however does not only reflect the stratificationsof Javanese social structure but a dualism in the Javanese mind.Krama is official, aspirative, and a little like a mask. Ngokois private, cynical and/or humorous and a little like the heart.Bu t neither can be fully appreciated without the other, and both"live" in their mutual complementarity.

In his relationships with the Javanese world then, theBupati was bounded and conditioned by the structures of Javaneseas a language. The values and orientations of that languagepersisted in his life since they had real application to whatwas still largely a traditional community. But in his rela-tionship with his Dutch superiors and with his prijaji colleaguesand equals in and outside the pamongpradja, who shared a Dutcheducation with him, the younger Bupati of the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries W^F. compelled to leave Javanesebehind him. The acquisition of Dutch (and also Malay, thoughMalay had a special role of its own, not in the least comparableto Dutch), was necessary to an adequate performance of theincreasingly technical-managerial aspect of his role, partic-ularly with the introduction of the Ethical Policy around theturn of the Century, calling for a great expansion of govern-mental services both in the economic and social fields.

In the Indies world - as opposed to the purely Javanese -Dutch came thus to assume some of the functions of krama, a highstatus language which denoted th e degree of the individual ! s"literacy, 1 1 and in which the operations, particularly of thegovernment, were most honorifically expressed.(1) Whereas forthe Dutch in Java the Dutch language remained, among themselves,a language without any particular nuances or prestige, it assumeda quite different place in the Weltanschauung of the youngerJavanese pamongpradj . Precisely because Dutch educationalpolicy, in contrast to British policy in India for example, wasto limit the number of Dutch-speakers to what was strictly neces-sary for the purposes of the colonial regime, Dutch acquired an"esoteric" aura of being the language of the inner elite, whichit has not lost to the present day. Moreover since Dutch educa-tion tended

to begiven

topeople

ofknown lineage

-people

of"good family" naturally - by a reverse process, knowledge of Dutchwas generally taken to indicate breeding and literati ancestry.

(1) One still often hears Dutch^referred to jokingly as kramainggilnja Djakarta - the krama inggil of Djakarta. Krim5inggil is a specially high-status form of krama generallyconfined to the old royal court capitals.


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I t rapidly became fashionable for the younger pamongpradja

families to speak Dutch in their homes, often with a heavyJavanese accent and including many Javanese words. Particularlyin the larger cities, among professional people, Dutch tended tobe used also for those situations for which the older regionallanguage seemed ill-adapted: for example, writing love-letters,discussing women's fashions, and the Western amusements andappliances available in the metropolis.

But it was in the offices of the colonial bureaucracy thatthe political effects of the new bi-lingualism were most immedi-ately felt. From their Dutch superiors the younger Javaneseofficials divined a new vocabulary of politics, which theyrapidly absorbed. For the conventional colonial official, theworld divided normally into two: praters and werkers. Praters

(talkers) were especially the politicians, parliamentarians,idealists, "reds" and ideologues. Werkers (doers) were busy andpractical men of affairs, who kept their mouths shut, "ran atight ship," had a strong sense of hierarchy and knew their placedown to the last e. The division was in many ways a conventionalpejorative distinction between administrators and politicians.Furthermore Dutch officialdom clearly defined their Great Societyas consisting of Rust en Orde (Tranquillity and Order), whichwas constantly being threatened by "chaos," relletjes, opstanden,revolutionnaire uitbarstingen (in ascending order of seriousness).An y reading of Dutch colonial literature astounds one with itsobsessive concern with a (supposedly fragile) orde.(2) Society(in all serious matters) was divided between law-givers and law-takers, the regulators and the regulated. The politician was

an intruder and an outsider, to be kept firmly in his place. Theessential danger was always that the hierarchy would be disturbed(3)by "lower" elements making claims to power in the name of communal,revolutionary and/or democratic forces.

1*) The good political

state is stabiel, the bad labiel.

(2) In those palmy days it was still Orde, not yet tata-tertiband keamanan.

(3) Thus General Soeharto recently expressed his relief that withthe suppression of the P.K.I, "the hierarchy - of the Revolu-tion - would no longer be disturbed."

(4) One finds this as the basis of Al,ers fascinating and much neg-

lected study of modern Indonesian politics, Om een Rode ofGroene Merdeka, where th e basic conflict is drawn between th e"green" and "red" forces. These colours do not represent Islamand Communism, but rather the forces of order-rule-hierarchyand those of revolution-spontaneity-community. Alers ! evidentsneaking sympathy with th e "reds" in no way takes away from th efact that the whole descriptive analysis is essentially thecolonial administrators

political perspective stood on its

head. These categories are neither sociologically noreconomically rooted. They ar e much more projections of theCalvinist spirit, or the battle between Ego and Id.


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A curious osmosis or mutual acculturation took place betweenth e Dutch an d Javanese bureaucratic hierarchies, which can notbe properly traced here, based on a certain communion of inter-ests and outlooks (bureaucrats of the world unite?). In the19th Century, the osmosis had mainly taken th e form of Javaniza-tion of the Dutch, most frequently in bed or in the kitchenthrough the Dutch official f s huishoudster or "native" mistress.Javanese regalia an d paraphernalia (golden umbrellas, Javanesetitles, etc.) were happily adopted by Dutch administrators. Inth e 20th Century however, especially after th e opening of theSuez Canal had permitted a massive immigration of Dutch women,this Javanization came to an end, signalized by the Van HeutszHormat Circular, which forever banned the use of Javanese ceremonyand regalia by Dutch officials, and the rapid decline of the oldertype of inter-racial marriage. The osmosis then began to workthe other way, with Javanese literati acquiring (mainly in Holland)Dutch wives, and the regalia of Dutch authority.(5)

Th e osmosis between Dutch and Javanese administrator wa srendered all the easier in that certain aspects of Dutch andJavanese bureaucratic culture ran along surprisingly similarlines. The hostility of many of the older ambtenaren to therising, thrusting capitalist class in the Indies, which oftenha d the ear of The Hague, an d which increasingly threatened th epower-monopoly of the Binnenlands Bestuur, was not far (especiallyas the ambtenaren, in contact with the Javanese, often liked toassume aristocratic and pseudo-aristocratic airs) from theJavanese prijaji f s disdain for dagang (trade). The Dutch obses-sion with detail, rule and rank, categorization and classifica-tion accorded well with the Javanese prijaji love of clearhierarchies and the naming of the phenomena. Especially with th erise of the Ethical generation of Dutch administrators, steepedin romantic ideas of adat and the need to protect th e inlander

(5) Alers has an intriguing analysis of what he calls the Mokoloof colonial society. The Mokolo are, apparently, the alien,aristocratic rule-givers of certain communities of SouthSulawesi, whom Alers takes as the model fo r certain typesof "green" rule. The Mokolo are typically a closed caste,filled with a ! Nietzschean ! consciousness of superiority anddisdain for the rest of society, whom they alternatelyregulate, patronize and exploit. T h e y do not mingle with therest of society, an d live by their ow n quite separate code,which is not imposed on the rest of the community. Alersdescribes th e Dutch bureaucracy as typically Mokolo (theultimate of "green-ness"), with race-coloration substitutingfor aristocratic-hegemonic esprit-de-corps. The ! inner 1

bourgeois character of the Dutch colonial rule thus assumedan f external ! aristocratic Mokolo character vis-a-vis th ebrown-skinned populations. Foreign observers of post-revolu-tionary Javanese administrators in the non-Javanese islandshave noted th e trend towards Mokolo-ism in their behaviour.


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from the ravages of Westernization, mutuality was quite close.The pamong-pradja, whose whole position rested on adat, naturallytended to find this outlook agreeable; and the "moral 11 emphasisof Ethical rule, in which concern for what was conceived to bethe good of the rul ed, echoed older Javanese ideas about th eduties of the ruling class. To the classical motto of theprijaji administrator: sepi ing pamrih, rame inggawe, mangaju-ajuning buwana (be disinterested, work hard, to perfect theworld),the ambtenaar of the Ethical school could gladly sayAmen. Here Leiden and Jogjakarta met and fully understood oneanother. The ideal prijaji administrator, as the man who carriesou t his duty to the state in a gentlemanly manner, with a minimumof (overt) ambition, elegant, polite and honorable, has more thansuperficial resemblances to the old-fashioned Ambtenaar 5 the man ofee r and hoffelijkheid.

For the pamong-pradj a prij j then, the type of Dutch thatwas acquired tended in many cases to reinforce, or at least notstrongly disturb, traditional attitudes. The inner language ofthe Dutch civil service classified political phenomena (on thegrand scale) in terms not too far from those already familiarto the Javanese civil service; the fact that the two organizationswere functionally complementary also helped to ease the processof mutual assimilation, or rather, in the 20th Century, the slowassimilation of Javanese modes of rule to Dutch methods. On asmaller scale the inner vocabulary of Dutch bureaucratic intriguean d office gossip percolated rapidly through to the Javanesecounterpart. The pamong-pradj a official would also (rarely)have ruzie met zijn baas (trouble with his boss), complain thatsome colleague was erg koppig (very obstinate), shake his headthat some too outspoken friend had been strafovergeplaatst(transferred to a remote station for punishment), and worryabout the herrie (trouble) caused, say, by the unaccountablespread of Sarekat Islam. He might worry about het volk aftera bad harvest, an d would certainly fuss that his office be keptnetjes with everything in orde.

The crucial aspect however of the whole bi-lingualism ofth e pamong-pradj was that in most cases it provided a means tocope with the real social-political position of this class, bothvis-a-vis Dutch superiors and Javanese subordinates. The con-servatism of the pamong-pradj as a group, the fact that theirinterests lay in defending an older and established order, alsomeant that it was easy to absorb out of the Dutch universe onlywhat was essential to buttress the gaps in the Javanese universe.In this respect Dutch played a fulfilling an d adaptive role, withJavanese remaining the dominant "mode" in the official mind. Withno mission to fulfil except the maintenance of an existing order,the pamongpradia class wa s able to make a much more f s t ab l e f

adjustment to its own bilingualism, and undergo far less psycho-logical stress in the process, than the nationalist intellec-tual class. Nonetheless, since the great majority of the youngernationalist intelligentsia wa s intimately related to the pamong-pradja, and indeed simply formed one part of the larger prijaji


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class, the experience of the older generation pamongpradja formed

a bridge b e tween the purely Javanese experience an d that of thenationalist revolution. Rather than simply absorb and adaptDutch f partially ,to reinforce Javanese traditions, the youngerintelligentsia, drawn mainly from the professions, was to buildon the older generation ! s experience, and advance to the radicalabsorption of Dutch as a "whole" - including the metropolitanspectrum of Dutch culture - and consequently in the long run todestroy Dutch colonial power from within.

Th e Nationalist Intelligentsia

Whereas the pamong-pradja was to the end well-adapted tothe maintenance and continuation of Dutch rule, it was very earlyrecognized by colonial conservatives that even the limited Dutch-language education provided by the colonial authorities wa screating a new class of Indonesians (Javanese in our case),unprecedented in Javanese history an d whos e very existence presagedth e end of Dutch rule. This group of so-called half-intellectuelen,

ladakkers, ruziemakers, even sloebers, was contrasted in theutch colonial mind with a sentimentalized adel (nobility) an deenvoudige tani's (uncorrupted peasants), who served the regimein a more or less f m y st i f i e d * way.

For these intellectuals, without a real function within thestructures of the colonial system, but the potential leaders ofa post-colonial society, bi-lingualism was not the key to a"modernization" of regional tradition. It open ed the way to acritical conception of colonial society as a whole , and a possiblevision of a society after the disappe arance of the colonial regimeitself, be it in the simplest and most abstract terms. It ishere that the role of Dutch was of crucial importance: it provide dth e necessary means of communicat ion between th e anti-imperialistan d anti-colonial critiques of West Europe an and later RussianMarxism and the potential revolutionary elite in Indonesia. Thisprocess is of course a commonplace of colonial studies. What isoften insufficiently stressed is the clarity of this revolutionarysocial-democratic mode of thin king within the mystagogic colonialliterature: its coherence, simplicity, organization, and compre-hens iveness vis- a-vis the factitious (and real) discontinuitiesand "complications" of racial division, adat particularity,religious schism, etc., which made an y attempt to think in atotalist wa y about Dutch power so difficult within th e frameworkof the regional languages, even ones as highl y organized asJavanese. Just because Dutch power wa s wider than any "ethnic-linguistic" group, and spread deeper than th e stratification oftraditional society, it could only be responded to within termswhich it laid down itself. The mode of comprehension wa s there-fore necessari ly Dutch; th e mode of onslaught an d attack wassubsequen t ly to be Indonesian (Revolutionary Malay). The spreadof Indonesian as a national language was impossible, paradoxically,


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except once Dutch had been developed as the inner language of

th e intelligentsia: only thus could Indonesian be developed toreceive a frame of reference and a formed and coherentWeltanschauung, ready for further diffusion within colonialsociety.

It can be safely said that whereas openly "conservative"Dutch thinking had virtually no impact whatever on Indonesians(the disguised conservatism of the Ethici of course did havesignificance in pamongpradja circles), Dutch socialist andcommunist writing affected virtually the whole of the intel-ligentsia of the ! 20s and ! 30s. For this reason a socialist-communist vocabulary became the common property of the entirenationalist elite of those years. It is important however tostress that this vocabulary was basically "dual" in that it

provided at once a critique^ of the existing order and a programfor its replacement, which though within the West Europeanframework (possibly) inseparable, once outside that environmentwere quite easily disassociated. Precisely becaus e the critiqueoffered by Marxism was brilliantly apt, and ruthlessly "clear,"it was taken over wholeheartedly by all important segments ofth e elite. The subseque nt Marxist program was nei ther terriblyapt nor in the least clear, especially across cultures, and soremains ambiguous to the present day. While th e Marxistcriticism of colonial society was b ase d on the observe d factsof that society, the futures profferred b y Marxism were based onvery little which had meaning in itself for th e literati ofJava; and the meaningfulness of Marxism as a practice variedlargely according to the real degree of assimilation to Dutch

culture and the Dutch language.

All Indonesian intellectuals of the T 2 0 s and ! 30s were posedth e problems of cultural and spiritual dualism in their harshestforms. Rare indeed was it to find anyone wh o could hold th etw o universes completel y separate or in balance. There was ageneral tendency for the wei ght of ind iv idua l s personali tyto be laid on either the Dutch or the regional-traditional "leg."Those who rested on the Dutch "leg" came to find that dialoguean d intercourse with th e Dutch e n e m y wa s easier than with th eprovincial and rural Indon esian masses . Many of them l ived fo rat least some years in Holland and in Europe. Man y also bec ameactive m emb ers of the Dutch Left, w he the r as socialists or com-munists. On their return, it was common for them to adopt a

political strategy of "cadre-forming" among Dut ch-e ducate d you nge rintellectuals to whom t hey could talk in the same general languagethat they had used with their Dutch socialist or communist counter-parts. It was no coincidence that the strategy of the Hatta-Sjahrir group in the early thirties wa s thus devoted to bui ld ingup an elite circle of Dutch-speaking "radical" intellectuals.Ne e d le ss to say, neither intellectual ever had anysignificant mass support. On the other side there were


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intellectuals whos e assimilation of Dutch was much more super-ficial, who had few close relationships with Dutchmen, and

wh o felt more comfortable within the traditionalist milieuthan in the "international" socialist-communist intellectualworld. For such men the determining experience of life wasnot the "break-through" into internationalist "modernism."The fact was that for them political action became meaningfulan d successful not through dialogue with the Dutch, but withtheir own regional traditionally-minded communities. Whe reasintellectuals in the first group were closer to like-mindedDutchmen than unlike-minded Javanese or Sundanese, the reversewas the case with the second group. To a large extent, thoughacting as intermediaries of "outside" ideas down into thetraditional world, they never moved effectively or comfortablyoutside it. For this reason the natural line of politicalstrategy was the mobilization of the masses, within an intel-

lectual universe largely incomprehensible to the Dutch. Pre-cisely be cause this was their strength, their grip on pro-grammatic Marxism remained extremely weak - indeed the consciousdilemmas of post-revolutionary Indonesi a with regard to theorganization of her future results largely from this fact, (6)

Nonetheless , the two groups abstracted in this analysis(actually there were no such groups, but a whole range ofpersonalities between the two polar "types") were united bythe language of the colonial ruler* Since it was the schoollanguage of this whole generation of intellectuals which grewup before th e Japanese O ccupation, it remained th e inner lang-uage of elite discourse, especially between nationalists ofdifferent ethnic groups. It was the medium for thinking about

an d ab sorb ing ideas and institutions from the West (includingRussia) which promised to liberate and elevate th e peoplesof Indonesia from the grip of their white masters. It alsobui l t up elite cohesion vis-a-vis th e Dutch and the indigenousmasses . And because , as mentioned previously, Dutch educationwas largely given to the children of prijaji (even upper levelpr i jaji) families, it was sub seq uen tly to appear as a sort ofdiploma of hig h status within traditional society. To this daythe vague l ine divid ing those who are b in n e n (in) an d those whoare kuten (out) in Djakarta politics remains fluency in thecolonial language .

In spite of the elitef

s full or partial mastery of Dutch,the colonial government's educational policies made it clear

(6) One could say that the difference lay between those whobasically ' thought* in Dutch and those w ho, howeve r fluenttheir Dutch, subconsciously translated as thev went alongfrom the structures of their own regional languages. Later,as we shall see, both translated into Indone sian, Sjahrir fromDutch an d Sukarno from Javane se. This is made strikingly clearin Sjahrir's Perdjuanga Kita (November 1945) and Sukarno'sLahirnja Pantjasa (June 1945 )>nei ther of which are fullycomprehensible without th e reader knowin g something of themother- tongues invo lved .


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that there would be no possibility of using Dutch (as Englishwa s used in India) to unite th e regional nationalisms into asolid anti-Dutch front. A language had to be found whichcould be used across the complications of ethnic and statuslines to fulfil the unifying function at the mass level whichDutch performed among the elite. The language would thus, sinceit was called into being by the nationalist struggle, representin itself the pure spirit of resistance to the domineeringmonopoly of Dutch as the bridge to "modernity." It wouldin itself declare the cultural defeat of centuries of Dutchrule.

As is very well known, pasar (market) Malay had long beenthe lingua franca of the archipelago, and this became thebasis of an essentially political language, Indonesian (Revo-lutionary Malay). It wa s a language simple and flexibleenough to be rapidly developed into a modern political language,analogous but, as it were, verso to Dutch, without strongtraditional traits (mainly syntax and honorofics) exercisingtheir own contradictory influences. This was all the morepossible because Malay as an "inter-ethnic" language, orlingua franca, had ipso facto an almost statusless character,like Esperanto, and was tied to no particular regional socialstructure. It had thus a free, almost "democratic" characterfrom the outset, which had its own appeal to an intellectualclass, which at one level (the desire to be on equal termswith the colonial elite) aspired to egalitarian norms.(?) Itha s often been said (mainly by the Javanese of a later day)that the adoption of Indonesian as the national language wasa magnanimous concession on the part of the Javanese near-majority. It seems more likely however that, since even forthe more traditionally oriented intellectuals th e drive formodernity was at that time still partly seen in terms ofbreaking out of "Javanism" and the hierarchical modes of Java-nese social intercourse, the simple modalities of Indonesianha d their own ideological appeal. The language moreover of-fered the possibility of relating sociallv in an essentiallyDutch manner, bu t without th e mediation of the Dutch language.Th e very awkwardness and unfamiliarity of the new languagereflected the sense of creativity and exploration of a "socialist"and would-be egalitarian experience. Being at once "national"and modern it was able to satisfv, at least in part, bothideological requirements and the need for a sense of culturalidentity within a common enterprise.

(7) The inter-ethnic character of the language made it all themore successful as an unifier, since it was not tied inwith the interests of any major ethnic-linguistic groupin th e struggle fo r inter-regional ascendancy.


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Th e Adventures of a New Language

Th e major public function of Indonesian and its keypolitical significance has lain in its role as national unifier.Though it began to play this part in the 1920 f s it was notuntil the Japanese Occupation that it formally became theNational Langu age, to be taught in schools and used in officesas a matter of official policy. And during the Revolution itwas above all the language of resistance to the returningDutch and the language of hope for the future. Th e Revolutionalso started the process of filling I ndone sian with the emotion-ally resonant words which give any language its culturalidentity and aura, and which seem to express its speakers 1

most intimate experience. The key words Rakjat (People),Merdeka (Freedom), perdjuangan (struggle), gerakan (movement),

kebangsaan (nat ionali ty) , keda'ulat an (sovereigntvT, se man gat(dynamic spirit), and above all Revousi ; all stem from'the seedtime of the Republic, th e time of its most violentlyanguished awareness of itself as the expression of a hopefulne w enterprise and solidarity. Virtually all the emotive wordsin Indonesian are centred round the struggle and violence ofth e physical revolution and almost all have highly political-heroic connotations. They live and vibrate because they arepart of the historical memory of a still surviving generation,and were "coined" within the most important experience ofmodern Indonesian life. The contrast with Jav anese , whereth e emotive words, sonorous and onomatopoeic, have grown indepth and resonance over generations, on a withdra wn aestheticand religious level, is striking.

Aside from the key words born of the Revolution and thestruggle that preceded it, Indonesian is a language withoutextensive historical memories and connotations to it. Itlooks to the future, and as such it is par excellence thelanguage of youth and rebellion. For the majority of literaryartists too, who feel the oppressiveness of the Dutch andJavanese literary traditions, Indonesian offers an attractivemedium of expre ssion. Its very flatness and simplicity allowwriters to feel that they can create and mould it in theirown image and according to their own aspirations. But thoughfor the chosen few Indonesian's lack of "given-ness" createsa sense of liberation, both literary and political, there hasalways been an underlying cultural risk involv ed. Especially

since the Revolution the language's lack of cultural resona nces,of a solid tradition, has led to considerable transformationof the language, as we shall se e below.

Furthermore, precisely because Indonesian representedin essence a "project", an aspiration to unity and equality,a generous wager on the future - in the face of some increas-ingly intractable social facts - the language has graduallydeveloped a "formal" character which has till now scarcelybeen commented upon. Modern Indone sian has something curiouslyimpersonal and neuter about it, which sets up psychological


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distances between its speakers. This is not because of anysocial stratification "built into" the language, but, para-doxically, because of its democratic-egalitarian characterin a society still so largely and traditionally status-orientedin its deepest thinking. (By contrast, the extremely strati-fied modalities of Javanese create a strong sense of communalidentity!) The vitality of Indonesian depending less on itshistorical antecedents than its symbolic character as anexpression of the anti-colonial project (at once the unifi-cation of the whole former Dutch colonial empire into aharmonious nation, the democratization of the national com-munity and the growth of a free spirit of fraternity), thepost-revolutionary fate of this project has had decisiveeffects on the language. Forming a new and thin topsoil tothe cultures of Indonesia, it has proved only too liable tosuffer erosion once the winds of change began to blow.

Th e development of the language in the post-revolutionaryperiod shows clear signs that this has b e e n happening. It isnot so much that th e language acquires a new vocabulary assuch (though this indeed is also occurring) but that the olderwords acquire a f Satanic 1 reversed meaning, expressing almostgeologically the transitions from the hopeful years of therevolution to the harsher, grimmer years that have followed.Th e most celebrated example of this has been the fate of theword bung, which has suffered a kind of amoebic fission.During the Revolution the word b u n g (brother) expressed thereal fraternity of the national struggle, and was used freelyby all active participants in that struggle. Today,with theexception of a few national figures like Sukarno, Hatta andSutomo, (and in their case b u n g is spelt Bung), virtuallyno one of importance is referred to in this way (outside smallnostalgic leftist cliques). While the Bung half of b u n g hasstayed high and honorific, the lower bung half has slippedlower an d lower, and is now generallv a peremptory, disdainfulmeans of summoning an oplet-driver, waiter, doorman or streetcigarette-seller. Another example is the word aksi, which inthe heyday of Tan Malaka's Massa Aksi meant Action, Revolu-tionary Mass Action, an d even no w crops up in the names ofsuch organizations as KAMI (Kesatuan Aksi Mahasiswa Indonesia- Indonesian S tuden t s 1 Action Union). More often today, however,it is the saanic reversed meaning of aksi which is widespread,in the sense of a "show" (pretentious, fake, artificial). Suchfurther examples could readily be provided. The point is notthat these words are used cynically, but precisely that theyar e not. People us e Bung an d bung , Aksi and aksi, quite unself-consciously, in their disassociated meanings.

This fission within some of the most important emotivewords of the Indonesian language reflects both sociologicalan d metaphysical characteristics of post-revolutionary Indonesia.It represents the re-stratification of contemporary Indonesian


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society, and the metaphysical determination to maintain theaspirations and idealism of Indonesian in a changing socialcontext by a traditional process of (so to speak) "dualization"and disassociation.

This is revealed all the more clearly when one takes intoaccount that even today, twenty years after the Revolution,Indonesian is by no means th e everyday language of more thana tiny segment of the population. One can say with some con-fidence that in fact in only two cities in all Indonesia isIndonesian the normal medium of communication outside officialchannels. The great provincial capitals, Makassar, Padang,Palembang, Bandung, Surabaja, Solo and Semarang, all speaktheir own regional languages - be it Makassarese, Minangkabau,Sundanese or Javanese. Only in Medan and Djakarta is Indonesianth e real urban language. Even here, Medanese is really, forhistorical reasons, more "Malay" than Indonesian, and has muchof the character of a provincial dialect.

It is only in the melting pot of Djakarta that Indonesianhas developed and shown it s creativity in the post-revolution-ar y years. This ha s partly b e e n a product of an immenseinflux of fortune-seekers, especially from Java, but also fromall the other islands, into a Capital where so much power andwealth is concentrated. It also reveals the peculiar personalityof Djakarta, its sense of solidarity vis-a-vis the daerah andth e rapid, brutal, commercial, power-oriented and humorouscharacter of metropolitan life. The main aspect of Djakarta'sinfluence on Indonesian ha s been th e growing incorporation ofthe so-called bahasa Djakarta, or at least major parts of it,into th e national language.

Bahasa Djakarta or bahasa Betawi has long been in exis-tence"^developed over decades by Balinese, Sundanese, Buginese,Javanese and Chinese settlers there. It is a rough, urban,lower-class speech, totally without "high" moral or aspirativetraits. It is virtually impossible to be "serious" or even"pompous" in bahasa Djakarta, so brutally earthy, direct andhumorous is the l an g u ag e .By an unexpected turn of historyhowever, this lumpen-language has increasingly become the "in"language of the Djakarta elite, especially in the later fiftiesand sixties. Particularly for the younger generation of politi-cians, officials and students,bahasa Djakarta, in slightlyrefined form, has become a normal mode of social intercourse.Its popularity clearly derives from its intimate, jazzy, cynicalcharacter, which forms a satisfying counter-point to the formal,official Indonesian of public communication. It provides an "id"for Indonesian's "ego," It expresses the danger, excitement,humour an d coarseness of the new Djakarta as no other languagecould do. Its harsh, acrid onomatopoeia parallels the flavourof ngoko in Javanese, while bahasa Indonesia grows more an d moreintcl~Form of krama.


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The most interesting external manifestation of this is themetropolitan newspaper, which, for ou r purposes, can be dividedinto two quite clearly separable portions. First, the portion^

n kah as a Indonesia, which covers all news items, all features,and" all editorials (about 95% of the newsprint). Second, theportion in b ah as a Dj akart , which covers only the podjok. Though

rarely run more than half a column, they are normallyth e first thing in the paper that the Djakarta reader turns to.The essence of the podjok is biting, anonymous comment on thelatest news or the general political or economic situation.Often they will indirectly refer to events which are "opensecrets", though the censorship will not permit them to bementioned elsewhere. The pod j ok frequently take the form ofdialogues between two (supposed) proletarians or petty traders:Bang Dul, Pak Otong, etc., etc. The art of po d j ok-writ ing isone of allusion, innuendo, sarcasm, mock surprise , poker- faced

apophthegms, and dot-dot-dot, almost impossible to convey inanother language. But as a simple example, a podjok ma y quotea senior Minister or Army officer making an uplifting speechin Indonesian about th e need to live simply, avoid corruptionand work hard. On a separate line comes the rejoinder: Benerdeh! (Quite right). Evidently a simple agreement with wiatthe" great man has said. But the metropolitan reader immediatelynotes that the po d jojc -writer has used the Djakarta bener notth e Indonesian Eenar (bener has strong come-off-it connotations) ,and ha s added the untrahsTateable but salty particle de h(something like

1 indeed 1 which is typically Djakarta andpithily expresses sarcasm, ridicule and disbelief. In justtw o words then, the podjok formally praises the Minister orOfficer, while at the same time implying that he is hypocriti-

cal, lazy, corrupt and pompous. Or again th e podjok ma y simplysay: Hasilnje ad e djuga. Ikan gede ^ketangkap. Alhamdulillahl(It finally worked. They got a b ig fish. Praise be ! . Fromth e sarcastic "Praise be!" and the Djakarta suffixes, thereader will immediately know or guess that an important politi-ca l figure has b e e n arrested fo r corruption, though th e caseitself, an d even th e arrest, may never be made public.

The contrast between th e Indonesian and Djakartan sectionsof the newspapers is complete and immediate. Th e Indonesianparts are high-minded, serious, and moralizing, usually sermonsby the President, Generals, Ministers or editors. They ar edoubtless very improving, but also official, aspirative , ideo-logical, patronizing an d authoritarian. All are directed down

the social-political hierarchy from the Great to the Small, fromthe p_emimpir (leader) or tokoh (bigshot) to the rakjat (people),won^g jt jTlik" ( th e little mariT or the massa (the masses . TheEfS: parts are snide, corrosive, democratic, humorous andabove-al l intimate. The empty distances of Indonesian ar eimmediately scaled down to the knowing intimacy of Djakarta.As th e Djakarta- speakers put it, it conveys a pervasTve atmos-phere oF ? TST "(tahu sama tahu - we understand each other).

It is not just the inflections which are in striking contrast


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it is also the vocabulary itself. Th e editorials centre roundwords like: imperialisme, pembangunan (upbuilding), kemadjuan

(progress), amanat penderitaan rakjat (message of the people'ssufferings), kontra-revolusoner (counter-revolutionary) andperdjuangan (struggle).The podjok speak in terms of: masukcantong (filling o n e f s pockets), sepak ke atas (kick upstairs),njatut "(to chisel), djatuh ke kasur (fall on a mattress - i.e.,be removed from office but be given a fat sinecure as consolationprize), main kaju (playing it rough an d dirty) an d ngakunje(so he claims).The editorial may speak of demokratis (democratic)- the podjok echoes it as dia mau gratis (he wants it fornothing).

The question arises therefore as to what is really takingplace with this emergence of Djakarta as a key element in themetropolitan language of politics. It is clearly unprecedented

in Indonesian history in its terminology, which derives fromth e post-independence situation, where Indonesians controltheir own government, and rulers and ruled (higher-level ruled)engage in some form of intimate dialogue. There is the temp-tation to regard Djakarta as the "real" language, the "in"language, while Indonesian is merely fo r show, propaganda orself-aggrandizement. The cynical wit of the podjok and of themetropolitan gossip network are easy enough to take as the"reality" until one recognizes that Djakarta is still thelanguage of one city, with virtually no roots outside, and thatfor the great mass of Indonesians at all involved in politics,Indonesian retains it s hold as the symbol and promise of thefuture, and has a reality which transcends the hopes and fearsof the present elite.

We are back with the problem of the mask. Public mask,and private face, which is real? Why is the mask so important?What is the private face without th e public mask? Does th emask mislead, attract, symbolize or possess?

Javanese Modalities and the Present Cultural Crisis

Th e deepening crisis which has preoccupied all politically-minded Indonesians since at least as far back as 1956 (that isno w for almost a decade), while many-faceted, centres psycho-

logically an d culturally on the petering out of the earlierrevolutionary impulse within the revolutionary elite. Socio-logically it is manifested in the growing stratification ofIndones ian society, the increasing isolation of the elite fromth e masses, and the development of parasitic bureaucraticstructures in all fields of social activity. Politically theslow narrowing of the government's political base, the uncrea-tive conservatism of its policies, and the ever more franticeffort to protect its own vested interests reflects th e samecondition. The economic situation is in no way more promising.Th e impact of these changes on the language of Indonesian


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politics and Indonesian nationalism has been of great importance.Part of what has been happening has been an inevitable process ofJavanization of Indonesian, both in terms of vocabulary and interms of modalities. Part of it has been the drying up Indonesian(Revolutionary Malay) as a well-spring for renewed social crea-tivity. Very probably th e most important development ha s beenthis last: the slowdown of the revolutionary essor at the centreof Indonesian politics. But the two are intertwined, the rela-tive ascendancy of Indonesian and Javanese is in itself an in-dicator of the internal psychological and metaphysical state ofthe nation and of the general road down which the Indonesianelite has been heading. Given th e growing paralysis of therevolutionary impulse, "revolutionary" Indonesian has been in-creasingly felt as "out of touch," almost dysfunctional tocommunication within the emerging system. The only mode forgrappling linguistically with this change has been to rely moreheavily on an older, more elaborate, an d possibly more enduringtradition. The problem is not, as has been so often vulgarlyexpressed, the cultural imperialism of the Javanese, but theimpending defeat of Indonesian (for the nonce at least), not asa language, but as an autonomous modality of thought. TheIndonesia-thinkers have been few and far between, and have notbeen able to impose this mode of being as such on the politicalpublic.

The Javanization of Indonesian has a number of facets to it,all of which ar e closely connected to the objective social andpolitical situation.

1. The kramanization of public Indonesian. As the "reality"of revolutionary Indonesian has increasingly been undercut byevents , official Indonesian ha s tended to become a language ofpolitical politeness, in which any educated modern prijaji shouldbe fluent, and which in effect separates him from the rakjatjang bodoh.(8) This "etiquette" helps to disassociate th e prijajiin at least part of his spirit from the rawer crudities, andto maintain contact with th e more ideal, halus_ aspects of con-temporary politics. The acquisition of the vocabulary ofIndonesia krama in itself involves a form of inwijding, or initia-tion into a higher level of political sophistication an d civiliza-tion. It is a kind of spiritual self-discipline in itself tobecome fully aware of the nuances and ambiguities of the publiclanguage.

(8) The newcomer Is often struck by the unselfconsciousness withwhich the prijaji (even 'leftist 1 prijaj i) refer to the'masses 1 as bodoh,since this word is usually translated as'stupid. 1 I t seems intolerable snobbery, an d indeed oftenis . But when one hears the same man talking about the peopleas masih bodoh (still stupid), the difficulty becomes clear.For the West stupidity is determined, and is a trait of a"fixed" personality. W e never talk of people being 'stills tupid. ' For the Javanese 'stupidity' is the reverse of being'educated' or 'awakened.' It is therefore a failing which can(in theory) always be remedied.


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Just as krama itself originally represented a literary-religious glorifying an d archaizing of the basic ngoko vocabulary,one finds that th e kramanization of bahasa Indonesia naturallyturns in the same direction, at once both by glorification andarchaism, which, as always, is intended to link and identify thepresent with the heroic past. The archaisms and honorifics tendto come from Javanese and Old Javanese, s ince both for sonorityan d fo r glorious historical reson ances thes e tw o languages formthe richest treasury. Thus Pantjasila, I n d o n e s i a * s 'modern 1

political ideology*was originally a set of Buddhist principles,mentioned in the earliest know n Java nese epic, the Nagarakrtagama.Th e modern krama name for the Mobile Brigade of the Police,Bhayangkari, is the same as that used in Old Javanese for 'PalaceG u a r d . T h e Sapta Marga, ideological charter of the IndonesianArmy, is again Old Javanese for the Seven Paths* There aredozens of these archaisms now current und er late Gui ded Democracy:Tri Uba ja Sakti, Pantjatunggal, Pantjawardhana, Mandala, SatyaLent3ana, Pramuka, etc. etc. Ma ny of the m are true krmcL wordsin that there are r ord inary ' or ngoko e veryday equivalents :(e.g. Mobrig for Bhayangkari). All of them tend to be used moston occasions of high ceremonial importance, and to be applied toobjects an d institutions of the high est political prestige.While almost none of these words ar e understood fully in theiroriginal sense, the fact that they are of Sanskritic or OldJavanese origin is well understood , and therefore the moderninstitutions ar e seen as inheriting th e prestige an d majestyof the originals.

2. The new ngoko. It has already been suggested above thatbahasa Djakarta has at least partially b ee n abso rbed into politicalIndonesian to perform th e role of ngoko, as Revolutionary Malayhas gradually move d up to krama status. This is undo ubt edl y thecase, an d shows how Java nese modalities hav e penetrated Indo nesianeven more than Javanes e as a language. But it is also true thatthere has b een a s teady influx of ngoko Ja vane se words intoIndonesian at all levels (almost none from conte mporar y Java nes ekrama). This partly reflects th e actual an d growing power of theJavanese, and especially Sukarno, at the centre of Indonesianpolitics s ince 1956. Since Sukarno and the P.K.I, (also h eav ilyJ avanes e ) have been the only two consciously creative or innova-tive forces in develo ping the modern language of Indones ianpolitics, this verb al Javan izatio n (which is now even quitefashionable) shows its ancestry rather clearly. The most well-known J avanes e imports, words like: gan jang (eat up), krumus(chew up), gontok-gon tokan (brawling), nggr ogot i (undermine bygnawing), bbrok (hopelessly rotten), p 1 n t a t - pi. n tut (half-hearted), b erkiprah (strut in victory), not only ha ve the typicalJavanese sensual immediacy (by onomatopoeia), but are almostinvariably words implying danger, d isas ter and phys ical v io lence.This in turn is unm ist aka bl y a s ign of the d e e p e n in g socialconflicts and tensions of the past dec ade , as the economic and


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social plight of the Javanese has become markedly worse , and ashatreds ha ve been turned inward on the society itself rather

than on the outside world.

3, The neutralization or capture of revolutionary symbols.This can be described as the process of assimilating those sym-bols to an unrevolutionary, even anti-revolutionary tradition-alism. It is done in two w ays :

(a) by burying words of great symbolic power like revolusi ,sosialisme, demokrasi, which have real historic roots, withinh e rme t i c ac ro n y ms l i k e Resppim, Djarek, Usde k. These combina-tion-words are not fu n c t i o n a l 1 in the sense that sovkhoz or Neponce were - convenie nt abbreviat ions fo r practical policies an dconcrete institutions. They ar e what on e could half-paradoxicallycall synthet ic syntheses of ideas which ma y hav e neither con-crete reality or communality, but which by verbal manipulationma y be thought to acquire a life of their own. Djalan Revolus iKita (The Course of Our Revolut ion) is still an attempt to usewords syntactically to con ve y an idea or an appeal. Djarekhow ever is not a word at all, but quite literally a thing, intowh ic h th e ingredient *revolusi* has been stirred. I t ha s becomea mantra in which the overt meanin g is of no importance. InWestern eyes it has been reduced to one of the Charms (Azimat)of the Revolution. Looked at somewhat differently, it representsa transformation of alien symbols an d messages , precisely parallelto what we have observed happe ning to Arabic and Is lam in o ldertimes. Like Arab ic th e external language of revolutionarysocialism has been taken over an d g iven an esoteric sense,scarcely connected at all to its overt sense. The esotericsense is to be grasped largely by intuition. Th e acquisitionby rote of the newe r acronyms thus forms an exact parallel tothe learning of the incomprehensible ajat of the Koran in thepesantren; it is part of a spiritual training. We can attr ibutequite similar functions to Usdek or Takari and the formulaBismillahirochanirochim.(9)

(b) by "reifying" action and process into essence and quality.Sukarno has cons tant ly been accused by his Western judges of b e t r a y i n g socialism, democracy and revolution. What man yhave failed to realize is that the se wor ds are no longer trans-lations of sosialisme, demokrasi and revolusi, which ha ve nowindependent , free-floating meaning s of their own. Whe nLie utena nt-G ener al Soeharto talks quite seriously of "the

(9 ) Thus the use of thes e mantra should be seen nei ther as "magic ! ^as certain Gallic commentators have su p p o se d , nor as hypo-critical s loganizing^a s too man y of our economic mission arieshave ins is ted , but as something l ike praye r, in the s ens eused by Jim Siegel in the first article of this issue.


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disintegrates into successively lower and more miserable eras,culminating in the era of disaster, the Kaliyuga or Djaman dan(The Age of Madness) in which all values are transvalued, allsocial institutions turned upside dow n, and society is brokenapart. But the wh ee l of tie continues to revolve, and out ofthe darkness of the Djaman Edan, a new golden age begins againunder a new Ratu Adil (Just King). Here is "revolution iscontinuity" with a vengea nce! The metaphors of cycle andrevolution come together without too great a shock within thislarger perspective. Suk arn o s Sosialisme a la Indonesia is muchcloser in ever y way to the D jaman Mas (Golden A g e ) t h a n it isto Marx's classless society. It is a restoration above all:th e old order re-emerging in technical, mode rn dress; the goldenage at a much higher level of average income per capita, butwith the older verities and structures scarcely altered.

Th e Javanese image of the components of their own societyis another case in point. Th e dominant division is undoubted lybetween the aliran (stromingen, streams), and not between classesor even political persuasions. The aliran are basically dis-continuous mental universes and ways of life, which flow acrossclass lines, and can not be easily subsumed under th e rubricideology. Th ey l ie under the political parties but are not ofthem. The N U , PSII, Perti, can all be seen as part of the Islamicor santri aliran, for example, but that aliran includes quitenon-political peasants, teachers, traders, etc. There is (still)a communist aliran (part of a larger abangan aliran) and aprijaji-nationalist aliran. The division of the community byaliran is a peculiarly Javanese 'analysis 1 of society, which isincreasingly imposed upon Indonesia's own internal view of herpolitics. Yet the se aliran are (and this in spite of the presen tbrutal massacres perpetrated against the communists) "givens" inthe Java nes e political landsca pe. There is no real expectation(pace General Nasution) that the y are anything but permanentaspects of Javane se society, sometimes up, sometimes dow n, butpart of an ongoing order.

Finally there is the image of the mask and the puppet , whichwe have al luded to at intervals throughout this discussion. Theostensible vocabulary of Indone sian political language has in-creasingly b e e n dominated in recent years with words whichexplicitly or implicitly evoke these images: ialang, mendalangi,wajangnja, lakon, gara-gara, prang tanding, djedjer, Bratajuda,Duma, are all political words drawn from the language and universeof the shadow-play. Kedok (mask), as used in phrases like terbukakedoknja , dengan kedok..., refer to the images of the mask, bothin th e topeng mask-dance and in the dualistic structures ofJavanese social relationships. These are al l terms which have aspecial resonance for the Javane se, indeed the words themselvesare almost all Javan ese in origin. So dee ply imb edde d are theseimages in the Jav ane se mind that conceptions of the "game ofpolitics" are invariably coloured by them. It is very hard for


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Javanese, an d increasingly for al l metropolitan Indonesians, tobel ieve in any form of political spontaneity - in the accidentalor fortuitous. Something is always going on "behind th e screen"where unseen dalang are at work. The public "appearance" of thegreat is always regarded, less with cynicism than with th e faiththat to some extent at least it is a mask. The obsession withintrigue, with th e sandiwara (stageplay) of politics, even withthe aesthetic side of political be hav iou r (the art of playingpolitics) are characteristic of a view of politics in whichvirtu (adeptness) in sudden transformations and role reversalsis an accep ted political val ue. Politics as elaborate and magni-ficent drama, rather than as a process for the attainment ofspecific ends and the satisfaction of concrete interests - thisis a viewpo int which at least in its symbolism derives from thecentral role of traditional religious drama (wajang) in the

Javanese experience.(11)

Bu t here perhaps we can see also that Indonesian (and perhapsf m o d e r n i t y f ) is hav ing it s revenge. Fo r though th e image of the

mask is as powerful as ever, i ts ambiguity appears to be declining.This is , historically, th e result of the buffeting which th eolder traditional conceptions of opposites as complementaritiesand as expressions of an underlying continuum are receiving incontemporary Indone sian conditions. There is a growing uncertaintyabout the rela t ionship between th e seen and the unseen, th e realan d the Real. The idea of the mask thus increasingly beco mespurely and simply the idea of a factitious disguise for a hi dde npurpose, worn to deceive or to conceal a truth. The growingpopularity of words to describe "hypocrisy": munafik, gadungan,sok, palsu, plintat-plintut, bermukadua is thus significant. Allthese words imply a single Real reality, w hich is beinq be t r ayedby hypocritic al and two-faced elements. Thus the language andimagery of Javane se tradition here surviv e, but within anI n d o n e s i a n - We s te r n modality which has largely str ipped it of i tsmetaphys ical r ichness .

To conclude then, it appears that th e languages of Indones ianpolitics are approach ing a fusing point, which will be all themore rapidly attained when th e old Dutch- speak ing elite die s out.The radical gaps between J avanes e and its traditions an d revolu-tionary In dones ian and its aspirations seems destined to disappear,

by assimilation and the chang ing character of the contemporaryIndonesian experie nce. The structural Javanization of Indo nesianand the imposition of Jav ane se modalities does not alter the fact

(11) For further discussion of the pictures of politics d e v e lo p e dthrough a waj_anj education, see B. R. Anderson, M y t ho l o g y ^an dand th e Tolerance of the Javanese , Cornel l Modern Indones iaProject, Monograph Series", 1965.


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that the national language remains Indonesian, an d that the

aspirations contained in the Indonesian project are now per-manent within Indonesian society. The whole process is obscure,complex and immensely significant: for it symbolizes and ex-presses the conquest of modernism via a new language which atthe same time is becoming anchored in a traditional conceptionof the world, and a deep-rooted vision of the nature of being.

Be n AndersonFebruary, 1966

Documents

The Languages of Indonesian Politics - Benedict O'Gorman Anderson