Promotion of Bahasa Indonesia

Let me start first with Mr S.K. Srivastava's letter (The Jakarta Post, June 20, 1995). Had he carefully read my letter of June 15, 1995, he would have noted that what I said was: Urdu is the main language of Indian Moslems." Evidently the wording of the sentence does not logically preclude the possibility of some Moslems of West Bengal, Kerala or Indian Punjab speaking non-Urdu languages as Mr Srivastava mentioned so eagerly. Nonetheless the fact remains that Urdu is the main language of Indian Moslems, as the Indian demographic statistics of 1991 shows that at least 60 percent of Indian Moslems do speak Urdu. Please, Mr Srivastava, do not drag in the Moslems of Bangladesh and Pakistan because I was referring only to Indian Moslems.

However, all this rather involved debate about the linguistic situation in India is relatively of little importance to the subject matter of my first letter of June 9, 1995. In the following paragraphs, therefore, I would like to make further comments on the background and nature of Bahasa Indonesia itself.

I have noticed amazing opinions occasionally published in the mass media in the past 20 years or so to the effect that the adoption of Malay in 1928 as Bahasa Indonesia was supposed to be the result of a magnanimous or generous act on the part of the ethnic Javanese who decided not to ask for the adoption of their own language instead.

I am sure most Indonesians will agree with me that the choice of Malay was dictated more by suitability and advantages rather than by any act of magnanimity of any kind. As is well known, Javanese is a highly stratified and feudalistic sort of language, whereas Malay is not. This means, I think, that although ethnic Javanese are certainly free to use those feudalistic words and forms of address as a mark of extreme deference and politeness among themselves (if they so insist), in the wider Indonesian society at large the much more egalitarian Malay or Malay based Bahasa Indonesia would surely be more appropriate. Besides, I expect that in a modern and industrialized Indonesia beginning early next century there will be even less place for such feudalistic and other undemocratic customs and traditions.

Another factor that made Malay the preferred choice, for which no magnanimity was needed, was the fact that by 1928 it was already the lingua franca in the whole of Indonesia (not to mention Malaysia, Brunei and southern Thailand), while Javanese was mostly spoken in a much smaller territory, namely Central Java and parts of East Java. In this connection, I also would like to remind my fellow citizens of Javanese descent that they are not really a "majority" group since they constitute only 39- 40 percent of the total population of the country, not 60 or 70 percent some of them sometimes claim. I wrote about the population of ethnic Javanese at great length in my long letter to The Jakarta Post (June 16, 1993), based on pre-war and post- war census results and opinions of experts.

What I am very much opposed to is the adoption or attempted adoption of English, Sanskrit, Javanese or other words for which Bahasa Indonesia equivalents are already available. If this substitution process (or "linguistic enrichment" as some people would euphemistically describe it) continues much longer, we could easily end up with our language being so much anglicized, "Sanskritized" or "Javanized" that no Indonesian with truly national interests in mind could possibly accept. On the other hand, I think borrowing from English or the various local languages such as Batak, Timorese, Javanese, Madurese etc. should be welcome if the word being borrowed represent ideas or concepts for which bahasa translations do not yet exist in the strict sense of the word.

MALI ARMAN

Jakarta