Listen, friend. I’m going to tell you a story about
ghosts—not the kind that rattle chains or whisper in attics, but the kind that
live in words. Baterai. Bioskop. Debat. Say them out loud in Jakarta and you’re
speaking the tongue of dead colonizers, though most folks don’t even know it.
These Dutch words swirl through Indonesian conversations like smoke from old
cigarettes, remnants of three centuries when white men in tropical suits ruled
over islands they had no business ruling.
But here’s the thing that’ll twist your brain if you think
about it too long: nobody speaks Dutch there anymore. Not really. It’s gone,
evaporated like morning mist over the Ciliwung River. And that’s the peculiar
horror of it—the paradox that separates the Dutch East Indies from every other
colonial nightmare in history.
See, in India, the Philippines, Indochina—places where other
white men set up shop with their God and guns—the colonizer’s language stuck
around like a bad habit. It became the language of power, of the suits and the
bureaucrats. But in Indonesia? Dutch vanished. Poof. Like it was never there.
Why?
Because the Dutch never wanted to spread their
language. Oh, they were clever bastards, alright. They understood something the
British and French didn’t: linguistic segregation was a weapon. Dutch
wasn’t meant to be a bridge—it was a wall. High and thick and topped with
broken glass.
And you want to know the real kicker? That strategy—that
cruel, calculated decision to keep the natives in the dark—ended up being their
undoing. Because while they were hoarding their language like Gollum with his
precious ring, another language was growing in the shadows. Malay. Once just a
trading tongue, the kind of pidgin merchants used to haggle over spices and
silk, it transformed into something else entirely. Something dangerous.
The Economics of Exclusion
The Dutch East India Company—the VOC, if you want to sound
like you know what you’re talking about—didn’t come to the Indies to save souls
or civilize the savages. They came for money. Pure and simple. Economic
exploitation was the name of the game, and cultural integration was about as
appealing to them as a case of dengue fever.
A fellow named Joss Wibisono figured it out: it was cheaper
to make VOC employees learn Malay than to teach Dutch to millions of
brown-skinned people who, in the colonizers’ eyes, probably couldn’t learn it
anyway. Cost-benefit analysis with a side of racism. Very efficient.
This ugly calculus continued even after the VOC went
belly-up at the end of the 18th century and the Dutch Crown took over. Same
song, different verse. Dutch remained what it had always been: a ticket to
colonial modernity, but only for a chosen few. European officials,
businessmen, native aristocrats who played the game and bent the knee—they got
to learn the magic words that opened doors.
For everyone else? The door stayed locked.
The Dutch knew exactly what they were doing. By restricting
access to their language, they were also restricting access to dangerous
Western ideas like equality and human rights. Can’t have the natives getting
uppity, after all. They needed to be “kept in their place,” like animals in a
well-ordered zoo.
Schools of Separation
The education system—and I use that term loosely—was
designed to keep people down. Village schools taught basic literacy in local
languages or what they called “low Malay,” bazaar Malay, the kind of broken
speech that was good enough to take orders and count money. Just enough to
produce cheap labor. Not enough to ask uncomfortable questions.
The elite schools, though—the Europese Lagere School
(ELS) and Hollands-Inlandsche School (HIS)—they used Dutch and “high
Malay.” Those were the golden tickets to higher education and bureaucratic
positions. But getting in? Harder than finding a Democrat in Castle Rock,
Maine. By 1850, out of 3,500 ELS students, only 50 were native kids. Fifty. The
rest were little white children who’d never set foot in Holland.
There were exceptions that proved the rule. The Kartini
Schools, scattered across various regions, actually had Dutch teachers and used
Dutch as the language of instruction, particularly for Indonesian girls. As the
teachers from the Kartini School in Buitenzorg—that’s Bogor, for those keeping
score—wrote: they were trying to break down the wall the Dutch had built.
Trying to give those girls what they needed.
But it was drops in an ocean of deliberate ignorance.
According to a census from 1930—and this number will freeze
your blood—only 0.3 percent of natives could write in Dutch. And we’re
not talking about crafting sonnets here. We’re talking about short, simple
letters. “Dear Sir, Please send rice. Sincerely, The Help.”
The Language Underground
While the elite prattled on in the colonizer’s tongue at
garden parties, sipping gin and tonics and complaining about the heat, ordinary
people spoke local languages and bazaar Malay. And that language—humble,
practical, looked down upon—was quietly weaving itself into the fabric of
something larger. The colonial policy that tried to keep Malay in its place was
actually sharpening it into the main weapon of nationalist movements.
There’s a bitter irony there that would make you laugh if it
wasn’t so tragic.
A scholar named Kees Groeneboer dug into the archives and
found another reason the Dutch gave for not spreading their language: the “limited
intellectual capacity” of natives. Read that again. They actually believed—or
claimed to believe—that brown people were too stupid to learn Dutch. Colonial
arrogance wearing a lab coat and calling itself science.
Groeneboer found an example from Nias Island. Christian
missionaries wanted to use Dutch for instruction and social
interaction—presumably so they could more efficiently tell people about
Jesus—but the locals weren’t buying it. So in late 1858, they decided education
in Nias would be conducted in Malay instead.
By 1865, native schools were using regional languages:
Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Batak-Mandailing. Between 1877 and 1900,
the list grew longer: Bawean, Bugis, Dayak, Gorontalo, Makassar, Nias, Sangir,
Tumbulu. The Dutch weren’t being generous. They just understood that people
learn better when you’re not forcing foreign words down their throats.
A Dutch Royal Decree on May 30, 1868 made it official
policy. If a regional language couldn’t be used, Malay should step in. The
language of traders and marketplace hagglers was becoming the language of
education.
The Fear
Colonial fear ran deep. You could smell it on them like
cheap cologne. Governor-General A.W.F. Idenburg supported expanding
education—give the man credit—but most officials fought it tooth and nail.
European parents were terrified their precious children might have to sit next
to native kids in school. God forbid.
The fear wasn’t about education, though. It was about control.
The Dutch understood, in their bones, what every tyrant throughout history has
understood: give people the tools to think, and they’ll start thinking
dangerous thoughts. Grant them linguistic access, and you’ve granted them the
means to resist.
In the end, their exclusivist strategy worked beautifully—at
maintaining hierarchy. At keeping people in boxes. At preserving the colonial
order.
But it failed spectacularly at suppressing rebellion.
By refusing to make Dutch a unifying language, by allowing
Malay to survive and even thrive in the shadows, they had strengthened the
very medium that would unify voices of resistance. They’d built their own
gallows and braided the rope themselves.
The Awakening
As the 20th century rolled in like fog off the Java Sea,
something changed. In 1917, the colonial government founded the Kantoor voor
de Volkslectuur—later called Balai Pustaka—to control information and
writing. They were trying to manage the narrative, as we’d say now. But the
voices of dissent were already growing too loud to silence.
The nationalists—many of them products of the Dutch “Ethical
Policy,” which was neither very ethical nor much of a policy—saw Malay not as a
tool but as a weapon of identity and ideology. It became the medium of
resistance. From the halls of the Volksraad to the pages of newspapers
that multiplied like mushrooms after rain.
The Volksraad—the “People’s Council,” though that
name was about as accurate as calling a snake a garden hose—was established on
May 18, 1918 in Batavia. Dutch was the official language, naturally. This made
it nearly impossible for native members to express themselves with any
eloquence or power.
One member, Pangeran Aria Achmad Djajadiningrat—try saying
that three times fast—proposed allowing Malay. “Learning Dutch is not easy for
us natives,” he said, with what must have been superhuman patience, “who first
had the opportunity to do so only at a relatively late age.”
The Dutch rejected the proposal. Of course they did. Pieter
Bergmeijer and his cronies understood the danger: Malay might become a channel
for political aspirations and nationalist fervor. And brother, were they right
to be scared.
Using Malay in the Volksraad became an act of
defiance, a middle finger delivered in polite tones.
In August 1939, M.H. Thamrin, Soetardjo, and Soekawati
submitted a motion to replace Nederlandsch-Indië, Inlander, and Inlandsch—Dutch
colonial terms dripping with condescension—with Indonesia, Indonesier,
and Indonesisch. The proposal was addressed a year later, in August
1940.
Rejected.
But outside those marble halls, the real battle was being
fought on newsprint.
The War of Words
According to Hilman Farid, the press became the main
battleground for nationalist ideas. Print capitalism—that beautiful, dangerous
thing—opened a new public space where native writers could spread ideas like
wildfire through dry brush.
New political vocabulary emerged, words transforming before
people’s eyes:
Bangsa no longer meant your ethnic group, your tribe.
It meant nation—one nation, transcending all those old divisions.
Kemajuan—progress—was no longer the colonizer’s
exclusive property. It was a right to be fought for, seized, claimed.
Merdeka—freedom—evolved from personal liberty into
something grander and more terrifying to the colonizers: collective
aspiration. National independence.
Resistance newspapers like Medan Prijaji and De
Expres became the voice of the people, publishing news, complaints,
criticism, and hope in equal measure. Readers began to see themselves not as
Javanese or Sundanese or Malay—separate and divided—but as one people.
Before they could have political independence, the founding
fathers understood, people had to imagine themselves as a nation. And
Malay—not Dutch, never Dutch—was the language that made this imagination
possible.
The Pledge
October 27-28, 1928. The Second Youth Congress in Batavia.
Youth organizations that had been divided by regional identity came together
under a shared national vision. What emerged was the Sumpah Pemuda—the
Youth Pledge.
The third vow declared the use of Bahasa Indonesia.
Not Malay. Indonesian.
The term came from Mohammad Tabrani, who understood the
power of naming things. “The Indonesian nation does not yet exist,” he wrote. “Create
it! The Indonesian language does not yet exist. Create it!”
Tabrani wanted to detach language from ethnicity, to
make it belong to everyone. It was a linguistic proclamation that preceded
political independence—saying the thing into existence before the thing
could be.
The colonial government saw the danger clear as day. They
banned Malay instruction in Java schools in 1930, across the archipelago by
1932. But repression only made the language stronger, turned it into a symbol
of unity and resistance.
You can’t kill an idea whose time has come. You can only
watch it grow.
The Occupation
Then came the Japanese. 1942-1945. A different kind of
nightmare.
The Japanese completely banned Dutch in public life. Gone.
Erased. They wanted to replace it with Japanese, but that plan was about as
realistic as expecting a cow to lay eggs. The linguistic vacuum they created
was filled by the only language that already reached every corner of the
archipelago: Indonesian.
For the first time, Indonesian was used officially
everywhere—newspapers, radio, government documents, education at every level.
Language commissions formed to translate technical and administrative terms.
Vocabulary expanded like a living thing, and society experienced full
immersion.
By the time the Japanese were done, Dutch was a ghost story
told by old men.
The Proclamation
August 17, 1945. Sukarno and Hatta read the Proclamation of
Independence.
They chose Indonesian—not Javanese, not Dutch.
There was no debate. The choice had already been made
decades earlier, in newsrooms and meeting halls and the hearts of people who’d
learned to imagine themselves as one.
Article 36 of the 1945 Constitution made it official: “The
national language shall be Indonesian.”
The language the Dutch tried to suppress. The language they
dismissed as bazaar talk, trader’s pidgin, not worthy of serious consideration.
That language became the tongue of a nation.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere, about the unintended
consequences of cruelty. About how walls can become weapons in the hands of
those you’re trying to keep out. About how ghosts can haunt the living, but
sometimes—just sometimes—the living can exorcise the ghosts.
The Dutch words remain. Baterai. Bioskop. Wortel.
Little fragments of a dead empire, harmless now, stripped of their power.
But the language belongs to Indonesia.
And that, friends, is how you kill a ghost.
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