Language barriers can be used to keep power

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.