Basa Jawa

The streets are always full of people. Everywhere. This is a people's city. I stay in a losmen, a very modest boarding house in an alley where there are many houses. It is full of tourists but equally as full of locals. There is a small mosque and a field where people may play volleyball in the evening. A warung with food can be found on one side of the field right across the alley from the small mosque. There are very simple, makeshift benches where people can sit and rest and watch the game in the evening. There are children running about, and people are often sitting by their doorsteps. The street outside is actually a kind of similar environment: people, warung, houses and lots of very small shops as well as larger businesses. Jalan Malioboro is throbbing with people all the time. There is no sidewalk in the Western sense of the word as this is lined with hundreds and hundreds of stalls selling all kinds of things (lots of batik, of course). If you take a stroll along the sidewalk it is very slow-going as buyers move languidly past the stalls and often stop right on their tracks to look at something.

The lane immediately outside the often arched and covered sidewalk is actually a parking lot for many motorbikes, becak, and even horse-drawn four-wheel carts (these function as taxis). Juru parkir - parking men - move around and direct people as well as take their fees from them. It looks fairly chaotic but upon close observation there is a good deal of system to it. You have to move through the crowds and slowly. Nowadays there are only two international flights that arrive in town, and only one - the flight to and from Kuala Lumpur - is a daily flight. Most tourists therefore arrive by land or via Jakarta or Bali. This is perhaps good. As it is, the city receives a good deal of tourists - including many Indonesians - but is not a city where everything seems to turn around tourism. Also, the common people also benefit from the tourism, not only the sharks who have lots of money to set up shops and large hotels. Therefore, though it looks chaotic, in fact the city seems fairly well-managed. A banner put up by the Universitas Muhammadiyah - a university belonging to a very important Muslim association - in fact proclaims that according to a survey over 90% of inhabitants want to keep Yogya's special status within the Republic (as Daerah Istimewa or Special Region). Over 90% also want to keep the sultan as the governor of the region. It is peculiar to have a governor from a royal lineage. However, considering that government mismanagement in Indonesia seems to reach incredible levels even for Brazilian standards, Yogya seems well-governed by its sultan. As long as that is the case, the sultan perhaps should stay. I remember my frustration - and that of many people I knew - in Rio as election after election invariably returned run-of-the-mill politicians to both the city and the state government. Once we even had a small town former evangelical cosmetic saleswoman as governor succeeding her husband in office. Both her husband's and her own term in office are now considered the most corrupt local government administration in recent history. Local sharp tongues say her major contribution was popularising Japanese perms in town. That is a perm that lasts longer than a normal perm but requires that you sit up an entire night for if you lie down on the day you get it you ruin it.

Yogya is a funny place. It is a small city that is growing. People live their lives enmeshed in the fabric of family, neighbourhood and workplace. Even as a stranger navigating its streets as an outsider, I can feel I am being observed and assessed by various curious locals, and not only because, just as India, the tourist is as much a tourist attraction as the sights in town. It is also not necessarily because my presence here may mean some potential business deal (say a batik sale or at least a becak ride). People are curious. They want to know where you are from, and they want to talk. The fact that I can speak Bahasa - whereas in Malaysia I'm considered someone who cannot speak the local Bahasa - means even more questions may be asked than would otherwise have been the case. Bahasa is of course not the ethnic language here. That is Javanese which I cannot understand at all. Basa Jawa is however the woof and weft of local society. It is not only the language of the streets and of households: it is the language of the court, the language of an ancient culture, and a language of prestige. Indonesian moves around and through it somewhat effortlessly. It is as if basa Jawa had graciously made space for Bahasa Indonesia on its very own turf.

No books in basa Jawa at Gramedia, the largest and best stocked bookshop in town (it has three outlets), except for bulky dictionaries and a phrase book. No magazines or newspapers either. But then there are posters with aksara jawa that can be bought on the sidewalk. I have bought two versions but they are almost identical. They show the twenty main letters (syllables in fact) plus short vowel signs, punctuation marks, and possible conjuncts as well as the numbers. To me it has a very Indic look to it though I cannot readily associate it with any Indian script I am familiar with. It is not round enough to be close to Kannada, Oriya, Sinhala, or even Telugu; it is not linearized enough to be similar to either Tamil or Malayalam. It is also a far cry from devanagari (used for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and also Sanskrit), or Gujarati or Bangla. I do think there is a vague resemblance, however, to Malayalam in the shape of some of the letters (that I associate in my mind to m-like shapes).

The vendor tells me it is Samskarta. Sanskrit. I am fascinated when he says that. I always take seriously what common people tell me about their bahasa. Bambang in fact told me in Gajah Mada that basa Jawa is actually even more heavily sanskritized than Bahasa Melayu (the informal name of Bahasa Indonesia). I find Malay very Sanskritized. This is an Indic culture in the world's largest Muslim country. In the vendor's words, the script is not basa Jawa only; it is also Sanskrit, the sacred language. It therefore establishes a direct link to a past and origin that we know associate with a nation-state called India (a colonial creation, in fact, even more than Indonesia). The aksara look very beautiful and are used in street name boards and above the entrance to government and other public buildings (the entrance to my alley also has an inscription in aksara Jawa, namely, the name of the alley). I couldn't find any literature in it, however. Also, only a very large kiosk on the way to the kraton sells basa Jawa magazines. These are cheaply made and are not glossy at all compared to their Indonesian-language counterparts. The kiosk also had plenty of back numbers for sale. The kind of exercise book that I easily buy in Malaysia for Jawi (Malay in Arabic letters) or Tamil, for instance, is not available here for basa Jawa. Namely, exercise books for children that teach them how to draw the shape of the letters. You can even find such exercise books for Chinese characters, but not for basa Jawa. I ponder that maybe it is because they are not needed. Basa Jawa is not something external to local communities. You can probably even learn how to write it at home, and if not you will certainly learn it at school. Everybody seems to know aksara Jawa, though they seldom read in it after finishing school. Aksara Latin is much more common and must be the language of sms's and email messages as well as facebook and twitter. Right next to the entrance to the kraton, I come across a school for learning to read and write basa Jawa. It is not meant for foreigners, I am afraid. It is also very simple and humble-looking. Inside, a teacher and a couple of students are literally singing aloud as they go through their books fairly fast. I like the sound of the recitation. It is almost like a balm to me.

Just as in Malaysia for Jawi (that is when Jawi is still used which is not very often), here too the Javanese name comes in both aksara Jawa (also called huruf - an Arabic word - Jawa) and aksara Latin. That is great for me as I can then train myself to read basa Jawa slowly, just as a child. However, children have a huge edge over me: namely, they can speak the language quite fluently whereas to me it is very opaque even though it is clearly related to Malay.

The muezzin is calling for the mid-afternoon prayer at the mosque in my alleyway. I notice that he seems to use his own voice - no gogó as we say in Brasil - instead of a public address system as is almost invariably the case in Malaysia (I also doubt very much that there the muezzin actually ever climbs to the top of the minaret these days. I imagine that is not bad if you are advanced in years. Going up the steps five times a day seems quite a good deal of exercise especially if the minaret is tall). There are entirely veiled women here but they are rare (a mother and child, both entirely veiled, come out of the mosque as I pass by). Women with tudung are fairly common but most women don't wear any veil. The Malay language and Islam are therefore well-rooted here, but this is most definitely not Malay(sian) country. The Chinese are also here - there is even a Persatuan Islam Tionghoa, which I believe would be impossible in Malaysia. This place is therefore quite intriguing: it is somehow a colonial product but was also at the very heart of the anti-colonial movement. Besides, it has a local culture that has very ancient roots in pre-colonial polities. People in Malaysia for instance, unless they are Indian and moderately well-informed, do not normally know that Malay is heavily Sanskritized. Here the street vendor is aware of the link. But then the link is a living one if for no other reason that the aksara is visible everywhere you go in Yogya. It is therefore virtually part and parcel of the cityscape.

During their short stay in Java in the early 1800s, the English were here - namely, Raffles and his wife Olivia. This last was horrified at the creolized lifestyle of the local Dutchwomen. She also banned spittoons from government house in Batavia - these are very important for betel nut chewers. She danced with the Susuhunan (sultan) at the time of her visit here. For the first time in recorded Javanese history the Susuhunan had to produce a queen so that Raffles - a foreigner and outsider - could dance with her. The court must have been amused and perhaps even astonished. I guess Java has been a very creolized place for a very long time now, hence Islam and Sanskrit somehow belong together, just as betel nut chewing, sarongs and women of European status used to.

The English left in 1816 never to return. Olivia died in Java, if I am not mistaken. Raffles went on to become the founder of Singapore (in colonial and postcolonial history) and then sink a whole shipload of Malay and other precious manuscripts before his death in 1826. Munshi Abdullah, the pioneer of modern Malay writing, and an accomplished linguist from Melaka (as well as kite-maker), provided him with many of those manuscripts.