Books and the Fate of a Nation (12)

One of the benign rational fa?ades exercised by imperialists to justify colonialism was to civilise the indigenous inhabitants of the colonies. If the language of the former colonial masters can be considered as a civilisational gift to the becoming independent colonies, then The Netherlands lagged behind other major European colonial powers. Nowadays, Dutch speakers are around 30 million in total. As a comparison: Portuguese is spoken by approximately 250 million speakers, French by nearly 500 million, Spanish by around 600 million, and English by roughly 1.5 billion. Had the Dutch language been spoken in Indonesia today, it would have potentially over 300 million speakers worldwide. But the reality is completely different. The number of Dutch speakers in Indonesia is meagre, mostly among the older generation who had exposure to Dutch-speaking communities either for employment or through education.

Personally, the falling behind reality left several questions lingering in my mind. Why and how did the British succeed in expanding the usage of their language, English in British India which had a much larger territory and population than the East Indies? Why and how French is even spoken by hundreds of millions either as a mother tongue or a second language in francophone countries regardless of – in certain cases – the bloody struggles for independence from France and Belgium? As a matter of fact, the penetration of Dutch colonialism in the East Indies was not shallower in terms of depth and breadth than that of in the aforementioned colonies.

Fortunately, this exhibition has shed light on the curiosity by presenting two reasons, namely the practical circumstances and colonial political choice. However, it can be argued that political choice and racism played a major role in the lagging. Classifying the limited number of Dutch language teachers into the practical condition seemed an embellishment. The coercive colonial rules could swiftly manifest and be decisively implemented per what the rulers wanted. If it wished, Batavia’s political will could easily regulate to increase the quota of Dutch language teachers or tutors.

Batavia applied the policy of language apartheid. Dutch language acquisition and proficiency were seen as a kind of prestige and status demarcation of who were the rulers and the ruled. Some harshly argued that Indonesians did not possess the aptitude to learn a new language. Other than the children of the Europeans, only the children of local aristocrats, noblemen and their gelijkgestelden could enjoy Dutch-speaking education. These selected few young Inlanders were educated and trained to fill in certain gaps in the labour market to support the colonial administration. Some of these Dutch-educated youth later became leading figures in the movement for Indonesia’s independence.

Meanwhile, the local children who were not from elite families and represented the largest body of the population were excluded from learning Dutch. They were allowed to follow a limited education given in Maleis. Batavia provided reading books for these children printed in Maleis containing original stories for European children such as the Gelaarsde Kat and Odysseus. They were also taught about Holland costumes as if the subject was appropriate for the Indonesian children.

The gubernemen in Batavia furthermore worried that Dutch language acquisition by the Inlanders would open the door of Western knowledge and key developments in world politics which could boost awareness for Indonesia’s independence. At the core of this colonial language policy is ‘keeping the Inlanders in the dark’.

The politics of language segregation in the East Indies had pushed Bahasa Indonesia to play a unifying role in the growing sense of Indonesia – however imaginary the concept was – as a nation. The aspiration and national movement for independence seemed unstoppable from the second decade of the 20th century onwards in which the publishing industry played a pivotal and disruptive function in multiplying and tremendously expanding the distribution range of nationalist ideas and agendas. Then the bloody and unamicable course of Indonesia’s parting from The Netherlands had helped make the situation more complicated. The combination of all of these factors has created a history we reluctantly have to accept that is the fading reality of the Dutch language in Indonesia.

Highlighting the ‘hesitation’ lexis does not suggest that it should replace the contemporary position of Bahasa Indonesia as the national language as we cannot change what has been historical. We only lament why it was unable to enhance a larger aperture of speakers in Indonesia and reciprocally to the case of Bahasa Indonesia in The Netherlands. Whereas, next to the language economies, that can potentially allow these two deeply connected nations to exchange ideas and converse about the past, today and the future more conveniently in the setting of ‘tempo doeloe of equal footing’ with the vernaculars both readily comprehensible.