Sanskrit language (1)

President Soeharto's recent warning on the unnecessary but offensive use of foreign words on billboards or as names of apartment buildings and other real estate projects could not have happened at a more opportune time. Such use of foreign languages reflects a tragic lack of respect for our national language, especially considering that the advertisers or real estate owners could have found suitable equivalents in Bahasa Indonesia with little or no effort.

However, another aspect in the development of Bahasa Indonesia which I find quite unfortunate is the continuing inclination to use Sanskrit language on the part of certain people in the government and the armed forces. Millions of Indonesians, including myself, simply do not understand such Sanskrit phrases as Eka Prasetya Pancakarsa, Jalesveva Jayamahe, etc. I remember a former cabinet minister was complaining several years ago that he felt like he was in a foreign country whenever he was inside the House of Representatives building in Jakarta because all the main halls and rooms in the building were given Sanskrit names. All this in spite of Sanskrit virtually being a dead language. Some 99.99 percent of Indonesians do not understand it and even hundreds of millions of Indians themselves (particularly those who are Moslems or come from southern India) have no special love or affinity for it.

So why is it that some Indonesians seem to love Sanskrit so much? They should remember that Malay, or, rather, Old Malay, was used as an official language in the Malay Empire of Sriwijaya from as early as the seventh century A.D. Subsequently, but mainly from the 15th to the 19th. centuries, it developed into a classical literary language in the Malaccan Sultanate and the Riau-Johore Kingdom and became at the same time the lingua franca in the whole of the Nusantara Archipelago. Indeed, the adoption of Malay in 1928 as Bahasa Indonesia was the culmination of a long and old heritage of which we Indonesians should be proud.

In any event, to my Indonesian ears such Indonesian words as Berbeda Tapi Bersatu sound a lot more beautiful than the Sanskrit Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, which is our national motto. Furthermore, this particular use of Sanskrit is quite ironical because in Singapore, where ethnic Chinese make up 79 percent of the population, their national motto and national anthem are all written in Malay, not in Mandarin or Sanskrit!

Finally, the excessive use of Sanskrit or (Old) Javanese in Bahasa Indonesia will undoubtedly make the latter more difficult for our Malaysian neighbors to understand. This would be most regrettable as Malaysians are not only our ethnic kin but also our best partners in ASEAN and potential allies in the future. We should therefore make every effort to promote the existing similarities between the languages of the two countries and refrain from driving them apart with the needless use of a dead foreign language like Sanskrit.

MASLI ARMAN

Jakarta