It was yet another international conference. A nice one. The language was English as usual, and just as usual very few people spoke it as their mother tongue. The Dutch spoke it fluently as well as very distinctly because of their accent; the Indonesians spoke it less fluently in their own accent. That they spoke it less fluently was to be expected. They did not grow up right next door to England as the Dutch did. There was Indian English (Badri's) as well as Brazilian via South Africa (mine). I noticed a Dutch participant who spoke the language without a Dutch accent and was somewhat surprised - it turned out she was in fact from Sweden. Sutarto is from India but as he grew up in the United States his accent is therefore American.
We all managed to communicate. Almost all of us also managed to maul the English language repeatedly throughout the proceedings regardless of our nationalities or level of fluency in it. It got so bad for me that at one point I felt it as a balm when one of the mother tongue speakers would start talking. However, I was then presented with another problem which is that I am not used to the accent of many mother tongue speakers. The only English-speaking country where I have spent more than a couple of weeks in my life is South Africa (last time I checked they had eleven official languages plus at least over a dozen more that have never been made official). There was Henrietta from Scotland and her English, though very clear, strained a couple of times my ability to understand it. I wonder whether we could not have had at least two languages instead of only one - say English and Indonesian. Having Dutch might also have been an option as well as so many of the presenters came from the Netherlands. They all know English well but it is always easier to speak in one's mother tongue. But then interpreter's fees are steep. I wonder however whether that was really the problem. We have come to a point where English is almost the only acknowledged international language, and yet it is also the time to acknowledge that English will never be the language of most people, not even inside academia. We use it mostly instrumentally - we don't really have a feeling for the language. For all my fluency, editing what I write in English takes at least three times as much time and effort as it takes to edit my own writing in Portuguese, if not more. The results are also not nearly as good. When speaking I am often reduced to a vocabulary that is far less extensive than that of the British and also less than that of Americans and Australians (Brazilians usually also employ fewer words than the Portuguese do as I noticed again and again in Macau).
Then there are the other languages around. My Bahasa is limited but has been quite useful. Javanese I cannot understand, not even in Latin script. It is related to Bahasa but the link seems almost too tenuous for me to be able to make much use of it. There is a good deal of vocabulary that seems to be common, however. Tomorrow I am taking a ride to Solo with Margono. He is a regular visitor to the Mangkunegara palace archive and library. He has written at least one whole book based on the sources there (the book is about the Yogya and Surakarta sultanates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). I won't be able to read at that library however, just as I was not able to read at the Pakualaman library in Yogya when I visited it with Ratna Sakti, Dewantara's grand-daughter and a professor of basa Jawa at the university. I cannot read Javanese, especially not in aksara Jawa or the traditional script. Margono and Sakti are privileged in a way, also because they have ready access to holdings that are truly unique. As principalities that kept a modicum of self-government throughout the colonial era, the courts in both Yogya and Solo therefore also kept records. However, those records were kept in the local language, not in the colonial one usually employed by the colonial administration side by side with Malay. In this way, there is an enormous wealth of material waiting to be researched. However, there are few researchers with the necessary tools - an excellent knowledge of basa Jawa and its script - as well as mastery of the necessary scholarly apparatus. One of the consequences of late colonial policies - in which Dewantara had a say - is that basa Jawa, especially in aksara Jawa, is not nowadays necessarily well-mastered by the general population.
I am of course very attracted to basa Jawa. Scripts interest me and almost naturally hold a great appeal to me. As usual however I don't know where they fit in my research or even in my life. Last night I spent an hour or so improving my Jawi through reading one of Munshi Abdullah's travelogues from the mid-nineteenth century. Pim, the curator from the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, was trained in aksara Jawa but has now forgotten it. He told me however that occasionally he will get his basa Jawa chart out - I have bought two since I got there - and read the name scribbled on a wayang puppet. The chart is one of those school charts that one hangs on the wall with all the letters and their Latin equivalents. There are twenty letters but there are also quite a few conjuncts or combinations. These can be tricky as is usually the case with Indic scripts. No wonder students learn it and then half-forget aksara Jawa. There is not a single publication in aksara Jawa nowadays as far as periodicals or newspapers are concerned. Unless it is a scholarly edition of some ancient text, it is also very rare to find a book with aksara Jawa texts on it. In fact, I don't think that books in aksara Latin are commonly published either. Basa Jawa has slowly become a language people speak and seldom read outside school. I have searched for Javanese newspapers and magazines: I could only find one, and it is a cheaply made, thin weekly publication.
I had a very extensive conversation with Mona from Jakarta about languages. Just as in Malaysia, today's official Bahasa is actually a creation from the 1970s and the official body for the language, namely, Pusat Bahasa (in Kuala Lumpur it is the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka). Mona told me that Suharto's Bahasa is in fact based on Balai Pustaka Malay. That was a language in Latin script (instead of the traditional Perso-Arabic script employed in the region in earlier times) more or less created by the Dutch just over a hundred years ago. The Balai Pustaka was - and still is - a government body devoted to the publication of literature in local languages for educational and (in the colonial era at least) civilizational purposes (I wonder whether these last are still part of their mandate. Indonesia is a bit scary, not unlike Brasil. The education of the uncouth masses is always very close to the heart of the state and its elites. All over the Fakultas Ilmu Budaya there are signs entreating students not to wear sandals but instead wear shoes - I was on campus with my havaianas today - and also not to wear t-shirts, the 'wrong' kind of sarong, not to be late for classes and so on and so forth). I think a colonial figure of renown, namely Abendanon, was closely linked to its creation. If I remember right he was also very important in colonial education. Therefore, though Dewantara was a pioneer in the field of both education and language, he seems to have followed to some extent in the footsteps of his Dutch predecessor.
Colonial literature in Indonesia started in great part through the efforts of the Peranakan who wrote in Malay in aksara Latin. They were great publishers, writers, and readers (and still are according to Mona). Also, though some eventually went over to Mandarin, most stuck to Malay (unlike the Chinese in Malaysia, the vast majority of Indonesian Chinese don't really know Chinese, namely, they don't know either the so-called 'dialects' or the official language, Mandarin). That Malay however was not - and still is not - Balai Pustaka Malay or Bahasa Indonesia (this last is officially based on Malay as standardized in the late colonial era through Balai Pustaka). It is a language that is now apparently used mostly in Jakarta, and then by an increasingly narrower circle, though it used to be more widespread. One of the interesting things about nation-building in Indonesia is that the language issue - as addressed by Dewantara and Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana among others - has been handled by the state in such a way that a common national language did arise more or less all over the archipelago. There are of course local varieties of non-official Malay, just as in Malaysia. However, differently to Malaysia, where local varieties of Malay often hold sway to a large degree (as in Kelatan for instance), Bahasa Indonesia has had apparently a greater degree of success than Bahasa Malaysia. It certainly has become a national language in a way Bahasa Malaysia has not in spite of four decades of government efforts (and certainly a more generous state budget than Indonesia's). Bahasa Malaysia to me is a strange language: in West Malaysia it is both an ethnic language - namely, the language of the Malays (though many Malays in fact speak local varieties instead of the official language) - and a language of inter-ethnic communication. Only in East Malaysia - namely, in Sarawak and Sabah - has it become something of a common language. In Indonesia I use Indonesian every single day; in Malaysia I seldom speak Malay.
Bambang for instance tells me that his home language, in spite of his Javanese origin, is Bangka Malay, a kind of Malay that diverges considerably from Bahasa Indonesia. He told me Bangka people who moved abroad many years ago - in fact, as far as Liverpool in the early nineteenth century - still write only in the local Malay. I wonder how they learned to write it. It has never been the language of the school, not even in the colonial era (instead Balai Pustaka Malay was). Ding Choo Ming with the Institut Alam dan Tamadun Melayu at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in Bangi has published a major work on Baba Pantuns, namely, traditional poetry in Malay written by Baba or Straits Chinese in places such as Melaka. The great mystery of Baba Pantuns is that they are all written in Latin script. As non-Muslims, the Chinese usually did not learn the Perso-Arabic script (that has now been discarded more or less everywhere, except in Brunei and among some Sufi circles as well as in Kelatan and southern Thailand). However, they were not schooled in Latin script. Namely, they did not learn how to write Malay in that script at school. Just as in the case of Jawa, therefore, there is in Malaysia too a local literature developed in a local language by Peranakan Chinese independently of any state power whether colonial or postcolonial. Ding in fact doesn't know how the writing of Malay in Latin script first developed among Straits Chinese. Some of them probably learned some English in missionary schools in Melaka - there were quite a few in the nineteenth century - or else were self-taught and the script therefore developed through conversations and trial and error within their own communities. There is also the possibility that those that became Christians learned to read Hokkien in Latin script - a common thing in Melaka in former times (there are still some Bibles and other religious books around in Hokkien in Latin script. Nowadays it is seldom employed as far as I know. Instead, simplified Chinese is used, though of course then the preferred pronunciation is that of Mandarin, not Hokkien). That knowledge - of Hokkien written in Latin script - may have then been adapted to writing Malay.
According to Mona, a similar kind of exchange still happens in Jakarta where some people insist in writing in bahasa Betawi, the local traditional Malay. This is also some times called Melayu Pasar or Bazaar Malay, a kind of trade lingua franca of the markets and streets. Apparently Melayu Betawi, Melayu Pasar, and Melayu Peranakan are somehow closely related. As none has ever been standardized, it is rather difficult to tell. Borders between different spoken language varieties are famously porous. Besides, as we are now living in the post-standardization era, it is not necessarily easy to retrieve what was what, when and for whom. The people Mona has mentioned don't publish their writings but instead share it among themselves. It is peculiar how a people who ultimately comes from a very ancient literate tradition somehow keep that tradition but in another language, another script, and in a wholly different environment too. However, as many other things that have historically happened in old colonial port cities such as Batavia-Jakarta and Melaka, all this remains more than a little mysterious. As this pertains to the writing traditions of minoritie, the subject in fact seems to me even more obscure than that of old Javanese court records. In fact, these seem to be pretty straightforward by comparison. In Malaysia Mandarinization has proceeded very fast through the private Chinese school system (though gossip has it that Malaysians speak and write bad Mandarin). There is therefore a whole linguistic history that is fast disappearing. Another generation and Malaysia will perhaps be where Singapore now is, namely, the time of effacement of a complex creole past.
Of course, just as in Melaka, in Batavia-Jakarta too Hokkien was a very important contributor to local Malay. Hokkien however seems to be no longer spoken by large numbers of people, differently to what happens in Melaka or Penang. Also, Mona insists that Orang Betawi and Peranakan are somehow synonymous though there are - or there were (it is all very confusing to me) - Orang Betawi who were indigenous, i.e., pribumi or non-Chinese. There is a dictionary of Betawi Malay (in two volumes) published in the Netherlands a long time ago. There is also the famous work of Claudine Salmon, a French scholar, on the literature of the Peranakan Chinese in Java. I remember Leo Suryadinata, a Singapore-based Indonesian scholar, has also published a book on the subject (well he is the editor of the book: Salmon also has a chapter in it). I still remember the title of his book: Sastra Peranakan Tionghoa Indonesia. It was the first book in Indonesian that I ever bought in my life. I bought it at the Pasar Malam in The Hague years ago. I was so happy to finally hold an Indonesian book in my hands. I had never seen one in my life. There are none in Brasil as far as I know.
In the Pendopo Taman Siswo near where I am writing this, there is in fact a whole collection of Sastra Melayu Lama that used to belong to Ki Hadjar Dewantara. They are all very thin volumes. I took a couple of them out of the shelf. Coming from Malaysia, at first I thought that by Old Malay literature it was meant ancient Malay literature originally written in Jawi. Not at all. It is mostly twentieth century literature, often published in the 1930s from what I saw, written by Peranakan Chinese in Jawa. The orthography used is of course out of date. However, Mona points out to me that this is the least of the problems confronting a modern Indonesian reader when tackling those works. Mira Sidharta, a resident of Jakarta who owns a sizeable collection of those works, has lent them to Gramedia who has now published about a dozen volumes with some of those works. However, instead of only modernizing the spelling, they have also changed vocabulary that they thought contemporary readers would not be able to recognize. Mona in fact tells me that a good deal of the words are now unrecognizable by modern readers. However, I agree with her that was not a clever idea. They could have instead provided vocabulary lists at the end of the book or else footnotes. According to Mona, who should know as she grew up speaking that language and even reading it (though she says she cannot now write in it any more), the flavour of Betawi Malay is entirely in its vocabulary and the structure of the sentences. You take either away and the language is gone. Gramedia has therefore apparently Balai-Pustaka-ized the works it has (re-) published.
Even more than in the case of Malaysia, therefore, national literature in Indonesia in fact began in the late colonial era largely through the writings and journalism of Peranakan Chinese. In fact, even in Malaysia the Peranakan were important: the Baba Pantuns, which are still being recited in Melaka to this day according to a friend there, are the product of the same environment that put forth Munshi Abdullah, Malaysia's revered pioneer of modern Malay literature. Interestingly the Munshi was in fact a man of mixed origins: his mother tongue was Tamil. He eventually became fluent in Malay, wrote his books in Jawi (and translated into Jawi a whole book from Tamil) and also learned both Arabic and Hindustani as well as English. He was quite an asset to the colonial administration as well as to local missionaries. Intriguingly, therefore, the roots of modern literature in both Malaysia and Indonesia are entangled in the complex histories of old port cities rather than in the deep recesses of Javanese kratons and their libraries or the old manuscripts in the sultan's palaces in the Peninsular.
I am beginning to think that I should go back to the Pendopo Taman Siswo and get my hands dirty again - those thin volumes (all uncatalogued just as the rest of Dewantara's fairly extensive library) are covered in fairly thick layers of dust even though they are kept behind glass. Fortunately however there is a tap in Dewantara's former garden where I can wash my hands as the children get training in Javanese traditional dancing under the pendopo a few steps away.
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| Candi Mendut - Source: Tropenmuseum, Wikimedia Commons |
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