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20. A Short History of Indonesia
On Language and Literature
WC 3537
The National Language1 At a conference in Bandung in 1928, delegates swore an oath called the Sumpah Pemuda, “the Youth Pledge”, said to have been inspired by Gaja Mada’s oath when he promised to forego “spice” ⎯ or was that “girls”? ⎯ until all of Nusantara was brought under the control of Majapahit. One of the three articles of the Sumpah Pemuda was to establish a national language, the one we now call Bahasa Indonesia. In English, the oath reads:
Firstly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia, acknowledge one motherland, Indonesia. Secondly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia, acknowledge one nation, the nation of Indonesia. Thirdly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia, respect the language of unity, Indonesian.
Incidentally, it was just before this pledge was made that delegates first heard the song which in 1949 became the Indonesian National anthem, Indonesia Raya by Wage Rudolf Supratman (1903-‐1938).
The Indonesian alphabet
There is not time here to examine properly this partly traditional language based as it was on the Malay spoken in the court of the Riau Islands, and partly fabricated by linguists and more recently, expanded with words borrowed by journalists and others from other languages. Earlier on in this course we saw some of the words borrowed from Portuguese. Even more came from Sanskrit, Tamil, Dutch and of course, Arabic just to name a few 1 Much of what follows was taken from the excellent summary on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_language
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apart from English which in the 1970s was said to have been contributing more than 600 new words a week to Indonesian newspapers, sometimes with surprising results: for example, an old lady courteously asking when my plane left actually said “Djam berapa take-‐offnja?” (Note the old spelling). If you are going to be reading any Bahasa Indonesia, there are a couple of things you need to know about changes in how words are spelled. In the beginning, especially when it was still called Malay, Indonesian used Dutch phonetics. Later, Dutch revised its spelling and Bahasa Indonesia followed suit, replacing the “oe” with the simpler “u” to represent the phoneme [u:] ⎯ so, for example, Soekarno became Sukarno2. Then, in 1972 Indonesia and Malaysia agreed to systematise the spelling of their national languages. Up to this time, Bahasa Malaysia had been substantially the same spoken language as Bahasa Indonesia but based its orthography on English. So for example, whereas Indonesian wrote universitas for “university”, Malaysian wrote universiti, the Indonesian for “water” was air, the Malaysian ayer. The drive to unify the two languages was prompted by the slump in rubber prices at the end of the ‘60s and it was thought that joint marketing would enhance export sales for the two nations. The principal changes which were agreed on were:
Old spelling
New spelling
oe u tj c dj j j y
nj ny sj sy ch kh
To demonstrate the differences these changes make, here is the first article of the Sumpah Pemuda written first, in the old spelling and second, in the new:
(Old) Pertama: Kami poetera dan poeteri Indonesia, mengakoe bertoempah darah jang satoe, tanah Indonesia.
2 “Bung ‘Karno” as he was affectionately known always signed his name Soekarno but most publications after the spelling change have used Sukarno.
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(New) Pertama: Kami putra dan putri Indonesia, mengaku bertumpah darah yang satu, tanah air Indonesia.
Another small change in recent times has been the way in which a general plural is shown in the written language. In Indonesian, a general plural is made by doubling the word. So, for example, “houses” is rumah-rumah, or “dogs”, andjing-andjing. When I learned Indonesian back in the early ‘70s, a shorthand was customary, writing these examples simply as rumah2 and andjing2. Sadly, this seems to be disappearing, perhaps because it is harder to write on a computer.
A People Writing about Themselves
Indonesian literature is generally divided into several periods, the earliest of which includes traditional and older Malay literature. Modern Indonesian literature, according to Teeuw3
…was born around 1920. It was then for the first time that young Indonesians began to express feelings and ideas which were basically different from those current in the traditional indigenous societies, and to do so in literary forms which deviated fundamentally from those found in the older Malay, Javanese and other literatures, oral or written4.
While 1920 might be a good starting-‐point, it is still necessary to recognize that these innovations have their origin as far back as 1908 because, Teeuw says elsewhere,
…that was the year in which Boedi Oetomo5, the first nationalist organization in Indonesia was founded. In the same year the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies set up a Commissie voor de Volkslectuur, a Committee for Popular Literature….. Both the foundation of Boedi Oetomo and the need for an institution for popular literature had something to do with the expansion of modern education in the colony6.
It is also important to remember that Indonesia had literary traditions in other languages dating back long before many European nations were even
3 Teeuw, A: Modern Indonesian Literature, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1967, p.1 4 Ibid 5 Modern spelling Budi Utomo, “Beautiful endeavour” 6 Teeuw, A: The Impact of Balai Pustaka on Modern Indonesian Literature, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1972.
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literate. However, because they recognised Malay as the only language understood by the people throughout the archipelago, the establishment of these two organisations ushered in a whole new generation of writers which historians call the Angkatan Balai Pustaka or the “Generation of the [Colonial] Office for Popular Literature", the Balai Pustaka being the publishing house
set up by the Colonial Office to make books more readily available in the colony. During its long life (1908-‐1980), Balai Pustaka published books in many languages, including Javanese, Madurese and Sundanese, but most importantly in Indonesian, giving many new young aspiring writers their chance to be published for a wide audience. Of course, being a government institution, it did not publish works it considered too controversial, either because they threatened the colonial administration or other social and cultural, moral or religious values. Even so, a surprising
number of books did reach the reading public under the Balai Pustaka imprint which contributed significantly to the growing nationalist consciousness. Several other organisations were formed in these early years of the 20th Century. Importantly, in 1911 the first purely political party, the Indische Partij (The Indies Party) was formed. As we saw in a previous Unit, this mostly appealed to Indons, people of mixed descent. In the following year the Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union), the region’s first truly mass movement, was started. A youth branch of Budi Utomo was formed in 1915 which soon became the Jong Java (Young Java) followed in 1917 by the Jong Sumatranen Bond. The members of these organisations were mostly students at teachers’ colleges and it was from their ranks that emerged most of the new young writers, an exceptionally high proportion of whom were Sumatrans. They had the advantage over others in that they were writing in either their mother tongue, Malay, or a language such as Minangkabau which was very closely allied to it. In comparison, the Javanese for example, could not be so confident in a language which was not their first and often, not even their second or third tongue. In Teeuw’s opinion, the writer who can be properly regarded as the first of this new “generation” was the 17 year old Minangkabau student Muhammad Yamin (or Jamin in old spelling). In the Jong Sumatra journal in the years 1920-‐1922 he published a number of Malay poems which are lyrical and individualistic and without political intent. However, one of his poems, called
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Bahasa, Bangsa (1921), is, in Teeuw’s words, a worthy prelude to the struggle of the Indonesian people for a language and a culture of its own7. This same volume, the 1921 edition of Jong Sumatra, is remarkable because it also contains writing by Sanusi Pané, then still a high school student but who later became one of the most important pioneers of Indonesian literature, and by Muhammad Hatta, who not only wrote sonnets, but on 17 August 1945, along with Soekarno, jointly signed the Declaration of Indonesian Independence and went on to become Vice-‐President of the new Republic. A feature of this Angkatan Balai Pustaka and later generations is that writers were not only using the Malay language ⎯ later called Bahasa Indonesia ⎯ and expressing sentiments not previously part of any earlier tradition, but they were also experimenting with new literary forms and breaking away from older conventional mode of expression. In this course we do not have time to examine many of the older forms of literature or, for that matter, what was happening in the novel, short story, or in plays, all of which were enjoying a rapid and vigorous evolution throughout the period. Instead, we will concentrate on poetry which, as it happens, succinctly reflects all the major innovations in literature in general. The changing forms of Indonesian poetry So, looking to the past, in poetry there were several traditional forms but prominent among them were the pantun and the syair. Of these, the syair was a very stylised form of narrative poetry. We don’t have time to sample this ⎯ syair were often very long and full of the conventions used by professional storey tellers so they sometimes seem rather hackneyed ⎯ but we can look at the pantun which was extraordinarily popular and very short!8 These consist in a quatrain made up of two apparently unrelated couplets. The one I know best is:
Burung kakatua The cockatoo Mencok9 di jendela Crows out the window. Nenek sudah tua Grandpa is old Giginya tinggal dua. And has (only) two teeth left.
This rather punchy format continued to be enjoyed and refined by later generations of Indonesian poets although the sonnet, for a long time, also
7 Teeuw (1969), op. cit p 11. 8 In Malaysia there are pantun competitions. 9 Menkuak is an alternative.
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captured their attention. The sonnet came into Dutch only fairly late in the 19th Century and so for many young Indonesians, it probably seemed relatively new. However, there were problems using this and many other Western poetic forms because Bahasa Indonesia did not basically suit them. Much of European poetry depends on the interaction of stressed and unstressed syllables, as for example, in Shakespeare’s iambic pentameters. Indonesian has only a very weak form of stress so any interplay is often not sufficient to carry rhythm or bring with it that pleasant shock of the new which we Westerners expect of poetry. Furthermore, Bahasa Indonesia has many fewer vowel and dipthong sounds than say English or Dutch, so the opportunity for rhyme is significantly reduced. The Angkatan Balai Pustaka was followed in 1933 by a generation known as Angkatan Pujangga Baru or the "New Literates". Important figures during this period were men like Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana, Armijn Pané and Sanusi Pané, but, according to Teeuw, the most important of all these pre-‐war Indonesian authors was Amir Hamzah.
There can be no doubt that Amir Hamzah is the most important pre-war Indonesian author. It is true that he had neither the outgoing, infectious activism of Takdir Alisjahbana, nor the progressive modernism of an Armijn Pané, nor the lofty aspirations to a synthesis between East and West of a Sanusi Pané. His single but outstanding contribution to pre-war
literature is the creation of a few score poems; poems, however, of such penetrating power that they fully entitle their author to the qualification of “Prince of the Poets of Pudjangga Baru”, as he has been called by H.B. Jassin…10
An advantage Amir Hamzah had over all his contemporaries was that he was not only Sumatran, but he was the son of the Bendahara
Paduka Radja or prime minister of the Sultanate of Langkat and, as was expected of him, he even married the Sultan’s daughter. So, to him ⎯ as Teeuw explains ⎯
Malay was an asset rather than a liability; the language familiar to him from the cradle up was an inspiration instead of an inhibition which it might well have been to many of equal poetic urge and talent.11
10 Teeuw, Op. cit p.84 11 Ibid, p. 85.
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But Hamzah was not only Malay: he received a mostly Western education in Solo in Java, and wrote most of his poems while living in Java12. He was one of the founders of the journal Pudjangga Baru and took an active part in the organization of the same name. Although he loved another woman13, tradition forced him to return to Sumatra and marry the Sultan’s daughter and it was there, on March 16, 1946 he was killed in a bloody massacre of the traditional chiefs and their families. He was only 35. Hamzah’s poems were initially published spasmodically in several issues of Pudjangga Baru but finally appeared in two small volumes, the first called Njanji Sunji (“Songs of Solitude” ⎯ 1937) and the second, Buah Rindu “Longing” ⎯ 1941) although critics believe the poems in Buah Rindu were actually written earlier than those in Njanji Sunji. This young man’s genius lay in exploiting the strengths of Malay and being confident enough to almost abandon any reliance upon rhyme. Instead he preferred wherever possible the basic forms of words, not their more complicated if grammatically correct versions, and rather than relying on stress and rhyme, he employed assonance and alliteration to full advantage. Where he did use rhyme, it was often within the verse rather than at its end as in European models. As mentioned earlier, Indonesian has a reduced repertoire of vowel and diphthongal sounds and, while this limits the opportunities for final rhymes, it increased the chances of assonance. The practise of doubling words to create a plural and the use of base words also help to create a rhythm without relying on stress to produce the meter. One of Hamzah’s early poems and one of the most famous, succinctly tells the story of Hang Tuah, the Malay hero who unsuccessfully attempted to fight off the Portuguese when they seized Malacca. The first half dozen verses out of the total 57 demonstrate the strength and vitality of Hamzah’s poetry:
Hang Tuah
Baju berpuput alun digulung Banju direbut buih dibubung Selat Melaka ombaknja memetjah Pukul-memukul belah-membelah. Bahtera ditepuk buritan dilanda
12 Only two poems are known to have been written after he returned from Java to Langkat. 13 His book, Njanji Sunji, reflects this conflict in his own life between the traditional past and the Indonesian future.
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Pendjadjab dihantuk haluan ditunda.
As anyone knows who has ever tried to translate a poem from one language to another, you might communicate the meaning but it is impossible to convey the music14. Teeuw gives the following translation (but it carries none of the sounds of the waves buffeting and booming):
The wind blows and whips up the waves, And seizes the water causing foam to fly. In the Malacca Strait the waves break Beating against each other and splitting each other. Ships are buffeted, sterns slewed around, War prows are pounded, towed by the bow……15
Perhaps the most famous of all the “generations” of Indonesian poets are those of the "Generation of 1945", the Angkatan ‘45 ⎯ the Empat Puluh Lima which is universally recognized as the defining generation of writers of Indonesian literature. This is the generation who had fought for independence after the end of WWII, a generation whose poetry in particular is full of patriotism and high national ideals. Of all the writers of the Angkatan ’45 the most famous is Chairil Anwar. Born in Sumatra in 1922, he and his mother moved to Jakarta when he was 19. He was proficient in English, Dutch and German and read voraciously in those languages, including the works of poets like WH Auden in English, Rainer Maria von Rilke (German) and Hendrik Marsman (Dutch), this last being one of the main inspirations for Amir Hamzah of the previous generation. As a consequence, Chairil’s poetry acknowledges many of the recent innovations in European poetry and is more concerned with individual and existential issues than the previous generation.
14 I once had to try to translate some of the poems of the French “Symbolists” ⎯ Malarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud, for whom “the music is everything”. With Malarmé in particular I found it better to forget about the meaning and read just for the music, especially so in the case of his “Sonnet allégorique de lui-même” (1868). See my Symbolists & Décadents at http://www.bobhay.org/index_2.html 15 Teeuw, op. cit. p. 262
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In 1942 when Chairil was only 20 years old, his poem Nisan, or “Gravestone” was published. It was apparently inspired by the death of his grandmother and most of his later poems were also inspired one way or another by death. Later, his poems were published in collected form in three books: Deru Campur Debu (“Roar Mixed with Dust,” 1949); Kerikil Tajam Yang Terampas dan Yang Putus (“Sharp Pebbles The Seized and the Severed,” 1949); and Tiga Menguak Takdir (“Three Tear Open Fate,” 1950, a collection of poems with Asrul Sani and Rivai Apin)16. By far the most famous of all Chairil Anwar’s poems is one called Krawang-Bekasi17, inspired no doubt from his military service in that area when he fought against the Allies attempting to restore Java to Dutch control. The following extract is just the first 8 of the 30 verses:
Krawang-Bekasi Kami yang kini terbaring antara Karawang-Bekasi Tidak bisa teriak "Merdeka" dan angkat senjata lagi Tapi siapakah yang tidak lagi mendengar deru kami Terbayang kami maju dan berdegap hati? Kami bicara padamu dalam hening di malam sepi Jika dada rasa hampa dan jam dinding yang berdetak Kami mati muda. Yang tinggal tulang diliputi debu Kenang, kenanglah kami
The translation here was by a friend, Montoro, a young man from Central Java who had completed his engineering degree in Australia but shortly after, suffered a great tragedy. Perhaps this helped him identify with this poem? In October 1969 Montoro wrote:
We who are now lying between Kwawang and Bekasi cannot shout “Freedom” and rise to arms again; But who no longer hears our roar, no longer remembers Our outward march, with throbbing heart? We speak to you in the stillness of the lonely night When the chest feels empty and the clock on the wall is ticking: We died young; what is left is only bones covered by dust. Remember, remember us.
16 For much of this information about Chairil Anwar I am indebted to the web page of the Lontar Foundation, a non-‐profit organization devoted to translating and promoting Indonesian literature overseas: http://LatitudesMagazine.com/LatitudesMain.asp?Vol=Vol15&aid=36&catagory=Literature&author=Tinuk Yampolsky&photo=&flash=n 17 Also spelled Karawang-Bekasi
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Chairil Anwar in some ways is Indonesia’s Arthur Rimbaud and like Rimbaud, he has become an icon of the rebellious, carefree and independent spirit. Stories are told of his shop lifting, his sleeping with prostitutes underneath bridges in Jakarta, his dishevelled appearance and blood-‐shot eyes… Like Rimbaud who was at home, if he was ever anywhere at home, in Paris during
the anarchy of the Franco-‐German war, so too Chairil Anwar revelled in the chaotic life of Jakarta at the end of the War and during the revolution. Teeuw says that there is “something provisional” about his poetry, “reflecting a personality in the making”. And well might that have been: weakened by his chaotic lifestyle, Chairil Anwar died on April 28, 1949 at the age of 26. The anniversary of his death, April 28 is now celebrated as Literature Day in Indonesia. Cover to Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s book, “Guerilla Family”
The last of the “generations” of poets we have time to mention is what is called the Angkatan ’66 but we should not forget that were many other important writers of the Angkatan ’45, foremost of whom would have to be Idrus. And others in the 1950s, including some of the giants of Indonesian literature such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925 – 2006), Sitor Situmorang (b. 1924), Mochtar Lubis (1922-‐2004) and WS Rendra (1935-‐2009). The Angkatan ’66 was the generation of students and others whose actions precipitated the fall of Soekarno and the rise of Suharto. Dissatisfied with events in Indonesia in the mid-‐1960s, students began a series of strikes which became the prelude to the so-‐called Abortive Coup of 1965 and the Year of Living Dangerously. Some suggest this was not an “abortive” but a successful “coup” in that Suharto seized upon what was seen as a threat from the Communists with whom Soekarno seemed to be in sympathy, or even in collusion. Eventually, Soekarno was removed from office and kept under house arrest in the Presidential Summer Palace at Bogor until his death in 1970. When I was in Java on my first visit in 1969, many of the students and recent graduates of the universities I visited had taken part in the strikes and subsequent skirmishes and were proud of the part they had played in ushering in what became known as the Reformasi, or “New Deal” 5-‐year plan to reform the country under President Suharto. Among these latter-‐day revolutionaries were poets including one of my favourites, one of whose poems I will quote here as the last words in this course….
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This man, who like me was born in 1936, came from Tapanuli in North Sumatra and his name is Abdul Wahid Situmeang. His verses have appeared in the magazines Mimbar Indonesia and Sastra and in 1966 in a collection called Pembebasan (“Freedom”) and in HB Jassin’s Angkatan ’66 – Prosa dan Puisi. This, my favourite of his poems is a little touch of humour in what was for so long a serious, if passionate, medium in Indonesia. My kids were probably the same age as his kids and so I could hear their voices also in this poem. But sometimes I wondered if there was not another, allegorical or even satirical meaning behind those words….?
Bapak18
Bapak djadi hewan tapi hewan bukan bapak hewan kasih pada anak Aku ratapi kemalangan bapak bilang: Diam! aku tak mau diam dan kami bermusuhan Bapak djadi hewan tapi hewan bukan bapak hewan kasih pada anak.
My Dad
My Dad is a beast But no beast is as bad As my dad. Animals love their children. It’s just my bad luck ⎯ Dad says “Be Quiet” but I Don’t want to be and so He’s not my friend any more.
18 Jassin, HB: Angkatan ’66 – Prosa dan Puisi,Gunung Agung Jakarta, 1968 p. 425.