Language barriers can be used to keep power

By Sam Wright

This is the first of two articles on the role foreign languages in Indonesian history.

JAKARTA (JP): We are what history makes us. In the present, we struggle with the past. Past mistakes live on, as do long rejected power arrangements that are institutionalized in today's structures or culture.

To point out that some of today's problems stem from what groups of people did in the past is not to blame any of these groups as they exist today. "The sins of the fathers are not the sins of the sons."

In the modern world, what groups and individuals do today is the measure for today's judgments. The following deals with how past power relationships have produced present language dilemmas in today's Indonesia.

Linguistically, modern Indonesia is fractured. The present confusion of voices evolved out of centuries of exploitative colonialism. Some obvious fractures are rooted in the language based caste/class system set up by the Dutch to dominate and control pribumi (indigenous).

The Dutch speakers set themselves up as authoritarian class with language barriers to deny access. This made them a class with caste attributes. These colonials came to use existing Chinese, Indians and Arabs traders as middle-class castes, each in turn with its own separating language. These middle castes were ultimately used as colonial tools to subdue the larger pribumi caste/class, who had their own languages. These pribumi languages were to become virtual, "verbal prisons", for the pribumi as a result of conscious colonial policy.

In sum: The Dutch "divided and conquered" by promoting language multiplication and language access barriers.

For example, for over 300 years, Indonesians were kept from learning Dutch. During this whole time, not one self produced local language-Dutch dictionary was compiled for local's use for communication with the external world, according to Benedict Anderson in Making Indonesia. Access to language is power. It is knowledge. It is the means to contact outsiders to gain their understandings about the world, to express your own views to a wider audience, to gain allies. Des-empowerment was maintained by preventing this access. Indonesians were trapped in their own word realm.

In Java, local feudal leaders, the priyayi who were in a position to help, were instead co-opted. "Dutch colonial administration turned the Javanese ruling class into a bureaucratic elite." By devoting themselves to carrying out Dutch policy, the priyayi "... elite was no longer a feudal aristocracy ..." Instead they became "professional civil servants", according to Barbara S. Harvey in Making Indonesia. It is therefore not surprising that for centuries "...as harbingers of Western domination, it seems never to have occurred to any indigenous ruler to commission a dictionary", according to Anderson.

It was not until the 1890s that colonial sanctioned schools made a sustained effort to teach Dutch.

Yet, up to liberation 90 percent of Indonesian history books, economic records, cultural ethnographies, daily newspapers, court records, colonial administration files, port documents, maps, ethnic and local language studies, legal codes, surveys of animals, plants and minerals were all in Dutch! Through language barriers, Indonesians were excluded from gaining knowledge of their own Indonesia. Denied language access became a first order weapon of control and, ultimately, oppression.

A caste system works by prohibiting your movement into a group by setting membership criteria beyond your ability to achieve. In the same manner, you are locked into your own caste by factors also beyond personal control. You can be kept in one caste and out of another caste for one or a combination of reasons. e.g., because of your caste birth location, parents occupation, of ethnic group background, or racial features, or your ancestors were or were not members, or because, as we are focusing on here, you can not speak the other caste's language. If you add caste requirements to a class system, you stop normal class mobility and lock people into an economic class location that they cannot rise out of, no matter what they do.

This caste isolation by language barrier allowed the Dutch speakers to go unchallenged as they forcefully prevented pribumi's upward class mobility.

For example, "Dutch colonial policies had discouraged indigenous entrepreneurship and trade," according to John T. Sidel in Indonesia 66. At one historical juncture, pribumi began to greatly flourish in trade, small businesses and commerce. Threatened by this power development and the pressure of pribumi upward class mobility, the Dutch caste over time gave the rights to all the pribumi business activities exclusive to the Chinese, Indians, and Arabs castes. They thereby forced the pribumi back into being dependent, cheap, lower-class labor. The oppressed Indonesians had no language attainments, which would have allowed them to be heard. They were silently locked into a caste reinforced class system.

Indonesia still struggles with the consequences of these historical colonial arrangements, which are now institutionalized.

For example, Chinese-Indonesians remain major members of the business community. In August 1998, 43 of the 50 conglomerates listed on the stock exchange were ethnic Chinese owned. To physically enter many of these top national and international businesses is to see that mostly Chinese-Indonesians are employed therein. One also quickly hears that Chinese is the language of daily intercourse, not Bahasa Indonesia. Collectively all too aware of this, these businesses and banks were targets of remarkable violence in the May 1998 riots. Strong resentment of being excluded from these economic opportunities in their own country runs through every social grouping.

For another example of this note that, via the invisible power of language, "de facto Dutch colonialization" still continues in many ways.

If you want to know the background of or study many areas of specialization, you must still access it through Dutch power realms and their language. They still control these gateways and actually hauled off to Holland high amounts of Indonesian heritage and resource materials. To even become an Indonesian lawyer means you normally must learn Dutch. Ironically, now the Dutch welcome and encourage the Indonesians to learn Dutch. For perversely, the Dutch language is still a tool for asserting control over important areas of Indonesian life.

There was, however, one foreign language during the colonial period that pribumi were allowed, even encouraged, to learn. That is Arabic. The reason for this is clear if you know European religious history and understand that most colonial policy aimed to suppress pribumi development, not help it.

Historically, the Protestant Dutch in Europe had themselves been part of a tremendous struggle to free their Christian beliefs from Catholic Church control. Key to this was demands that church rituals be held in local languages and not the "dead" Latin language, which only Catholic priest used for communication. The Protestants objected to the control over their spiritual life by Latin speaking priests. These religious leaders had followers "memorizing religious verses that the followers did not understand". All over Europe major military battles took place, until the freedom to worship in one's own native language was won.

The colonial powers therefore welcomed the spread of the Muslim religion in Indonesia. They knew that Arabic was not a language used by power players in any of the developed world, so there was no communication access gained by pribumi who learned it. Likewise, it was not a language that was going to make people aware that they were being ruthlessly taken advantage of. And, as their own Dutch experience had shown them and which they rebelled against, having people dedicated to learning an exotic spiritual language keeps them marvelously under control.

The writer holds a PhD in social psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles and is presently completing a book on the "ninja" killings of last fall. His e- mail address is sssam21@yahoo.com.