Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 19:22:34 +0100
Sender: owner-bahasa@auckland.ac.nz
Subject: Re: sejarah bahasa



> Can someone recommend a good source (book, article, guru?), in either English
> or Indonesian, that discusses how and why Malay was adopted as the national
> language? I have a version of events that I tell to impress upon students the
> many aspects of the relative newness of [the concept of] Indonesia, but I would
> like to know that what I am transmitting is more fact than folklore.

The way I read it, that's actually two questions:
(1) How did Malay get to become the generally accepted national
    language in the country?
(2) How did the concept of Indonesia emerge?

That again has two aspects:

(2a) What historical, economical, social, political facts and
     developments led to the formation of both objective geopolitical
     and subjective conceptual phenomenon "Indonesia"?
(2b) What citable historical "happenings" mark the development and
     emergence of the concept and phenomenon "Indonesia"?

1. In 1870, a group of prominent Dutch citizens signed a lengthy petition to the Dutch king, in which a reorientation of colonial policy was urged, that would have a future independence of Netherlands East Indies as its aim.

   But, of course, apart from the circumstance, that the petitioners didn't exactly have the formation of an indigenous national state in mind, the territory of the colony had not yet reached the full extent of Indonesia at proclamation (it only reached that by around the time of World War I, when e.g. Acheh, Bali, Riau-Lingga finally succumbed or got fully included).

2. E.F.Douwes Decker, speaking before a congress of the Indies Party (this must have been 1913, but I may be mistaken by 1 or 2 years), for the first time actually demanded outright the immediate independence of the colony. The IP being a political party mainly of "Indo" Eurasians, having also good ties to parts of the indigenous elite, this came considerably closer to a national independent state conceptually.

   During the World War I years, indigenous and Eurasian newspapers edited by Razoux Kuhr, Marco Kartodikromo, Suwardi Suryaningrat, Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo, H.M. Misbach, and others began to carry anticolonial slogans such as "Hindia lepas dari Belanda" / "Indie los van Holland".

3. In 1918, at a memorial meeting to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Boedi Oetomo, Suwardi Suryaningrat (the later Ki Hajar Dewantara), gave for the first time the formulation of an independent national unitary state in the borders of Netherlands East Indies, and also used Indonesia (well, Indonesië, he was holding his talk in Dutch) as the name of that state.

   In that same 1918, the idea of using "Indonesia" as a geopolitical term to replace "Netherlands East Indies" (i.e. not as anthropological designation of peoples speaking languages of the Western branch of Malayo-Polynesian, or belonging to the "Malayan" racial stock) was also proposed or used by others, both indigenous as well as Dutch (among the latter: Jan A. Jonkman, the later Director for Education and Religion, and H.J. van Mook, the later Lieutenant Governor General as of 1941, and Minister of Colonies 1942-1945, who both used that term in their 1918 doctoral theses).

   Throughout the following decade, the name "Indonesia" gained increasing popularity, to replace "Dutch East Indies" in the names of political parties and organisations, study groups, circles, etc.

4. The first attested use in an international meeting was at the VI Congrès International pour la Paix, held in August 1926 in Paris, at which the Indonesian delegation headed by Mohammad Hatta was subsumed in the official French-languaged list of participating countries as Indonésie.

5. Then comes the famous "Sumpah Pemuda" at the Second Youth Congress in October 1928, in which delegates from as far as Ambon in the East and the Bataklands in the West pledged to one motherland, one nation, and one language, the Indonesian, closing that decade of consolidation of use and meaning of the term. With this, the term Bahasa Indonesia was now also on record to replace Bahasa Melayu as designation of what would be stated as the national language in the 1945 constitution.

6. In 1931 (give or take a year, my memory is a bit fuzzy on this), Soetardjo Kartaningprang forwarded a motion in the Volksraad ("Peoples Council" - a pseudo-parliament with appointed members and only consultative but no legislative powers, set up in 1918), calling for a reorganisation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in which each territory would be equally represented (i.e. as Holland itself), and for the reorganisation of the Volksraad as an elected legislative body. Unlike an analogical motion by Husein Djajadiningrat in 1918, the Soetardjo motion passed the Volksraad with a comfortable majority. But it was rejected by the Dutch government of that time. Furthermore, although referring to a territory identical with that of Netherlands East Indies, the motion did not (I think) use the term "Indonesia".

7. In 1933, Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana and Armijn Pané founded the philological and linguistic journal Poedjangga Baroe aimed at promoting a more uptodate language tradition than that of Balai Poestaka. The language was refered to as Bahasa Indonesia, e.g. in: Alisjahbana, S.T., 1933, "Bahasa Indonesia", Poedjangga Baroe 1:129-178.

8. In 1939, in September, GAPI (Gaboengan Politik Indonesia) held a conference presided by Hoesni Thamrin, Abikoesno Tjokrosoejoso, and Amir Sjarifoeddin, with the aim of formulating constructive proposals to the colonial administration in view of the oncoming war. The conference, in which major political parties and organisations of the "cooperation" as well as "non-cooperation" wings took part, and several senior Dutch colonial officers were present as observers, agreed to mobilize all efforts of the indigenous population to support the defence efforts of the Netherlands, if Indonesia would be permitted to have an elected parliament.

   In December of the same year, the Congress Ra'jat Indonesia organized by GAPI, but with participation of just about all political and cultural parties and organizations of the indigenous population as well as of "foreign oriental" ethnic communities, in short - the most representative assembly of the Indonesian people ever to have convened in the entire colonial history of the country - formulated the same proposal to the colonial power. It was the first time, that the entire politically organized population of the entire colony organized itself to formulate its common political will in an issue of vital national importance as well as of considerable international significance. It did this using Indonesia as self-designation, and it expressed its will to side with the Allies in the oncoming World War II.

9. On Sunday, December 6, 1942, on the first anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Queen Wilhelmina in her exile in London (the Netherlands were occupied by Nazi Germany) held an address on Radio Oranje, in which she made a proposal resembling that of the Soetardjo motion (see above). In this proposal, inspired a.o. by the "surprising" circumstance that Indonesian nationalists in the Netherlands were without exception fighting in the Dutch underground for Dutch independence, she referred to Indonesia as Indonesië. This was the first time, that the name was heard in official utterance from the mouth of a Dutch monarch.

10. On August 17, 1945, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia. In the constitution that was enacted and published some months later, Indonesia is defined as a unitary state having the name Indonesia, and Bahasa Indonesia is declared as the national or state language.

    In legislature passed in the following months, the new country name was installed in the penal and civil codes with formulas like:

    <<Djikalau dalam sesoeatoe peratoeran hoekoem pidana ditoelis 
      perkataan Nederlandsch-Indië atau Nederlandsch-Indisch(e), 
      maka perkataan-perkataan itoe haroes dibatja Indonesië atau 
      Indonesisch(e)>>

    (that's for the penal code in article 3 of Statute No.1 of February 26, 1946, published in 1946, Berita Repoeblik Indonesia 2:45).

11. The proclamation of independence, as all know, was contested by the colonial power, who brought in troops in March 1946, leading to a war that lasted till 1949, with the aim of reconquering the former colony for which the name "Netherlands East Indies" continued to be used (as though to return the "hutang budi" for Indonesian engagement in the Dutch resistance, some 2000 Dutch recruits refused military service and some 4000 more deserted in the 3 years between 1946 and 1949, compared with a total of only around 900 in 15 years from 1924 till 1939; one must not forget this either).

    However, the name Indonesia soon came into general use internationally, not only in the press, and not only by foreign states which recognized Indonesian independence, but also in the proceedings of the United Nations, where a draft resolution on Indonesia was brought in by the Ukraine and a proposal by Egypt in 1946, and initiatives by Australia and India in 1947.

    In Indonesia itself, one of the puppet states set up by the colonial administration in the occupied zones, the "State of East Indonesia" set up in 1947, actually insisted on using the term Indonesia in its official name.

12. On September 4, 1948, in her proclamation to the Dutch people, the newly coronated Queen Juliana of the Netherlands reminded of the 1942 address of her mother, Queen Wilhelmina, and again refered to Indonesia by that name. The occupational administration grasped this opportunity to lift the embarrassing situation with the country name. The legal procedure of installing the name into the legislature was duplicated on the Dutch side, e.g. in article 1 of the Announcement of the Lieutenant Governor General of September 21, 1948 (Staatsblad van Indonesië 1948 no. 224):

    <<Waar bij of krachtens bestaande ordonnanties of andere algemene
      verordningen, waarvan bij ordonnontie kan worden afgeweken, gesproken
      wordt van Nederlandsch-Indië, wordt daarvoor gelezen: Indonesië>>

Thirty years had passed since a young Indonesian journalist, exiled in the Netherlands for anti-colonial publications, had for the first time proposed that name for his country.......