On the Ideology of Indonesian I,Anguage Deyelopment: the State of a Language of State

Pragmatics2:3.417 -426 InternationalPragmatics Association

ON THE IDEOLOGY OF INDONESIAN I,ANGUAGE DEYELOPMENT: THE STATE OF A LANGUAGE OF STATE

J. Joseph Errington

In an era of resurgent,bloody, exclusivistethnic nationalismsit seemsn overstatement to call the successof Indonesia'snational language"the envy of the multilingual world" (lnwenberg 1985: 3). Fifty years ago Indonesian,like it's nation, was no more than a colonialintelligentsia's project; now it is the fully viable and universallyacknowledged languageof a nation of 190 million people, most of whom speak natively one of four hundred or so distinct ethnic languages. Indonesian's and Indonesia's rapid codevelopment,which seem nowadayseven more "miraculous" (Fishman 1978: 338) thanfifteen years ago, has been bound up with state-driveneconomic development to whichit has been means,and with the idea of the nation of which it is a central symbol. The history and uses of Indonesian incorporate all the political and cultural tensions inherentin a "partly unconsciousproject for the assumptionof "modernity" within the modalitiesof an autonomous and autochthonoussocial-political tradition" (Anderson 1966:89). Indonesian has been both means and topic for nationalist discourse,both figuringand figured in the public discourseof Indonesian nationalism. As questionsabout Indonesian'sviability fade a new, official rhetoric is arising about threats which the dynamic of national development now poses to Indonesia's ethniclanguages and cultures. A long dominant development ideology is now being broughtto bear by the government on long muted ambiguities in Indonesian political culture,now reframed as a public concern. Most important among the nation's ethnic languagesand groups thus addressedare the Javanese,and most conspicuousin this regardwas a well-publicizedJavanese I-anguage Congress (Kongres Bahasa Jawa) which theIndonesian government sponsored in the summerof 1991.There some six hundred Indonesiantechnocrats, politicians, and intellectuals(mostly Javanese) met to discuss (mostlyin Indonesian) the current state of their nation's dominant ethnic language (their native language) in the dynamic of national development. At the behest of PresidentSuharto (himself Javanese),they framed a new institutionalversion of and responseto the current problem of "languagedevelopment." That congressand the issuesit addressedare consideredhere as a refraction of enduringcultural and ideological tensionswithin the project of national development. Neitherethnographic nor baseddirectly on fieldwork,this paper nonethelesstakes up theJavanese l-anguage Congress as a kind of diagnosticevent (Moore 1987:730)which both embodied and also framed contemporaryproblems in the political culture of languagein Indonesia.Read againstthe institutionalgrain, the congressappears in a 418 J. JosephEnington supralocal national context as a governmentalmove to deal with problems engendered by the government sponsoredideology and practice of development.In relation to Javanese language and ethnicity it counts as a conspicuousstep toward a national version of a "local culture," one which will serve as a kind of counterweight or prophylactic for some of the social consequencesof state-sponsoreddevelopment viewed by the Indonesian (and Javanese) elite as pernicious. But this strategic appropriation of Javaneselinguistic tradition presagesa radical break with traditional Javaneseconceptions of esoteric language,knowledge, and power.

1. Historical background

Indonesian's remarkably rapid elaboration and disseminationtestifies not just to the fortuitous sociohistoricalcircumstances of its selectionas potential national language, but the efficacy of the state-dominatedinfrastructure in which it has come to be used and propogated. From a structural point of view standard Indonesian is virtually identical to Malay, which was native languageto only a small minority of the peoples of what is now Indonesia,what were the Dutch East Indies prior to the 1942Japanese invasion. But varieties of Malay had served as the lingua franca of trade throughout coastal Southeast Asia before and during the era of European penetration. Already widely spoken in pidginized and creolizedforms in major trading venues,Malay became for the Dutch a convenient auxiliary language of trade, and then of colonial administration. In the Dutch East Indies, the original plural society (Furnivall L939), Malay served as languageof wider communicationbetween members of social groups set off by congruent ethnic, economic,political, and linguisticdivisions. Put oversimply, the Dutch - unlike, for instance, the English in Malaya or India - restricted native access to Dutch language education, and had recourse for purposes of colonial administration, religious conversion,etc., to a version of Malay. But Malay was also developing as a print languageamong ethnically heterogeneous,polyglot populations in burgeoning coastalcities which were entry points for modern technologiesand ideas. By the turn of the century social forces in both dominant and dominated fractions of colonial societyhad made Malay the common tongue of multiethnic urban society,and its intelligentsia. (A very good introduction to and overview of this complex topic is Hoffman 1979.) By 1928,when a young proto-nationalist elite nominated Malay as Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia) and language of their nation-to-be, it was wholly associatedwith neither the colonial regime nor any of the colonies'most politically or demographically important ethnic groups. The choice of Malay, as is often pointed out, therefore permitted the strategic bypassingof Javanesewhich, with the largest group of native speakers in the colonies and a "high" courtly and literary tradition, was an obvious candidate.The motto formulated by that young group of intellectuals- One island, one race, one language - hardly rings hollow sixty-three years later. At the time of the declaration of independence in 1945 only a few million spoke regional and urban dialects of Malay. The l97l national censusshowed 40 percent of the national On the ideologt of Indonesian language development 4L9 populationof 118 million to be speakersof Indonesian;the 1981census showed half of 150million Indonesiansspeaking the language;the governmenthas projected,not disinterestedly,that 60 percent of the country's 190 million citizens now speak Indonesianand that the percentagewill rise to not quite 70 percent in a population of 240million by 2001 (Abas 1987). Indonesian'sstatistical success is primary evidenceof Indonesians'apparent acquiescenceif not allegianceto their government'sself-legitimizing rhetoric of national development.Such statistics likewise provide a basis for worries expressed at the Javaneselanguage Congressabout effectsof Indonesiannational developmenton local linguistictraditions. But for at least two reasons the rhetoric of threatened ethnic languagesand culturesis least appropriate for "the Javanesecase." One is the obvious fact that the Javanese,who number some eighty million, have always been the demographic and politicalcenter of gravity of the nation, and have alwaysdominated the nation's military andstate apparatus.This was true when PresidentSukarno declared independencein 1945,and through his increasinglychaotic rule and deposalin 1965.It was true during and after the ostensible 1965 coup attempt of the Communist Party which was put down in series of nationwide bloody massacres.It has been true under the regime establishedby the military faction, headedby PresidentSuharto, which moved after the massacresto establish the state apparatus called the "New Order," (Orde Baru, vs. Sukarno's Orde Lama "Old Order") and the "Development Order" (Orde Pembangunan). The Indonesian term pembangunan'development'has thus servedas a keyword (in the sense of Williams 1983) in almost thirty years of governmental nationalist discourse,and served in state justifications for a wide range of policy decisionsmade mostly in top-down manner, many with massively disruptive effects on local communities.So too Suharto, for twenty-sixyears president of the New Order, has 'Father accededto the title of Development' (Bapak Pembangunan), and heads a cohesive, authoritarian regime in which Javanese figure quite prominently. Concomitantwith its moves to modernize Indonesia'seconomy and infrastructure have beensteps by the New Order to disseminateIndonesian rapidly and widely. Among the first and most significant of the New Order decrees by President Suharto's was his 'Presidential instruction' (lnstruksi Pesiden) that a vast network of elementary schools (sekolahInpres) be establishedthroughout the country,with a primary goal of teaching literacy in Indonesian. Census figures cited earlier testiff to the success of the developmentproject, at least as far as the government and the national language is concerned. A less obvious reason for questioning the rhetoric of the "threat to Javanese tradition" emerges from those same census figures, considered on a province-by-provincebasis. Lumping together figures for the provinces of Central and EastJava - which, along with the specialdistrict of Yogyakarta, are home to the great majorityof Javanesespeakers in the nation - it appearsthat all saveone other province (out of twenty-seven)have greqterpercentages of Indonesian speakers. One factor in this lag may be the relative ethnic homogeneity of Central and Eastern Java, which 420 J. JosephEnington lessensthe need for a language of wider (interethnic) communication. In more heterogeneous provinces the same national development processeswhich have increasedthe need for interethniccommunication have likewiseprovided Indonesian as obvious linguistic means.Figures comparableto those for Central and East Java are found for the similarlydensely populated, ethnolinguistically homogeneous populations of West Java and Bali. But there remainsa kind of sociolinguisticparadox: that part of Indonesiawhich is home to most of the national elite, and which is among hte most highly integrated into the national economyand infrastructure,has the lowestpercentage of speakersof Indonesian. By governmentprojections it will be among the very last (in 2041) to achieveuniversal competence in the nationallanguage. So a motivatingcontext for the JavaneseI-anguage Congress needs to be soughtelsewhere, in broader aspectsof the current sociopoliticalcontext. The Development Order's developmentpolicies have had social and cultural effectsit did not foreseeand hasbeen unableto fully control.Economic development, fueled by international capital, has led to a flood of commodities and a growing consumerist-basedculture. Sprawling urban areas have become scenes for localversions and mediationsof transnationalmass culture, for which millions of rural Indonesians are a passiveaudience thanks to national massmedia. In cities,where the state elite are most concentrated, changinghabits and attitudes are often markedly at odds with traditional values,Javanese and othenvise.(See for further discussionFoulcher 1990.) The state thus finds itself in an ambiguousposition with respect to effects of modernization: images of sexuality,gender relations and family, fashions, music, clothing,and much else.Incipient middle classconsumerism, essential for the practice and ideology of development,is giving rise to social change which is exogenous, undomesticated,and viewed with apprehensionby thosein the New Order concerned to preservetraditional political,moral, and culturalvalues. This circumstancemay have been.stimulusas well as theme for the Javanesel.anguage Congress which President Suharto opened in Semarang,on the north coastof Central Java,in July of 1991.

2. The Javaneselanguage congress

Claiming rather disingenuouslyto speak not as President of the Republic but a Javanese,Suharto began by urgingthe variouslanguage experts in attendanceto discuss the usesof Javanesephilosophy, especially as containedin the Javaneseorthography, to develop and disseminatea Javanesecharacter. His wish was that the Indonesian people possessa noble spirit necessaryfor proper socialrelations, relations between people and the environment,as well as betweenpeople and God. (In the interestsof brevity and readability I translate here freely from reports of the congresswhich appeared in two newspaperspublished in Jakarta,thenational capital: Kompas and Suara Pembaruan.) Presupposedby the fond hopesSuharto expressed and the papers given at the congressis the assumptionthat Javaneseneeds not to be "developed"but preserved On theideologt of Indonesianlanguage development 427 from exogenous,possibly pernicious social forces which threaten to render it corrupt or extinct. Commonly assumedalso was a broad range of concerns - philosophy, orthography,character - for which the term bahasa, glossableas "language,"was a convenientrubric. That broader topic can be called for present purposes "linguistic tradition."(On senseof the Indonesianword bahasaand its Javanesecognate basa see Heryanto1989.) Reports on the congressmake clear also sharedassumptions that the linguistic traditionunder discussionwas associatedwith a very small,exemplary, ethnic elite: the literate courtly pnyayi who traditionally resided in two royal principalities of Central Javaup to the time of Independence.Javanese literacy and literaturewere traditionally theprovince of this tiny literati, and integral elementsin their symbolicdomination of an illiterate rural populace.Suharto's allusion to Javaneseorthography noted above bespeakshis concernfor the very traditionallinkage between Javanese characters, the esotericliterary tradition written and transmittedwith them, and the ideal, cultivated Javanesecharacter which accessto traditional literature made possible.So too much attentionwas given to the complex systemof Javaneselinguistic etiquette which, several papersgiven at the congress noted, was correctly used by fewer and fewer young Javanese.l-argely ignored, correlatively,was the fact that exemplary control of these "speechlevels" never extendedwidely beyond the traditional elite circles.An image of the traditional elite was thus doubly salient at the congress:as the community which defined"standard" varieties of Javanese,and as inheriiors of a high Javaneseliterary tradition.Both are perceived,it seems,as threatened endogenous resources for national development. Whatever the state of Javanese linguistic tradition, this traditional elite communityis certainlymoribund: most of its youngermembers have in fact moved to centersof nationalactivity, and manyhave entered the larger,newer elite of the nation. (For discussionsee Errington 1985.) So there are groundsfor doubting that a "high" Javaneselinguistic tradition, now recedingfast into the past of its traditional bearers, mightbe easily made relevant for a far larger group of JavaneseIndonesians. Such doubtscan be read from a politicalcartoon about the congressby Pramana(apparently Javanese)reproduced below from the national newspaper Kompas in which it appeared.It depictsa governmentofficial recitingthe Javanesesyllabic orthography - representedin the cartoon along with its alphabeticequivalents - as he holds up a puppet from the Javanese shadowplay,the most famous of Javanese linguistic traditions.In the corner a youngboy dressedin modern,not to sayhigh-class style says to his father, in very idiomatic Indonesian,"Well, if you, Dad, of Javanesedescent, don'tunderstand it . . . all the more for me . . ." It is interestingthat the boy attributes Javanese-nessto his father indirectlyas a matter of ancestry,rather than directly as a matter of ethnic identity, i.e., as being a Javanese(orang Jawa). And although this Indonesian/Javaneseyouth might not deny his own Javanesedescent, the cartoon suggeststhat he would by the sametoken be little concernedwith Javanesetraditions whichseem to figure hardly at all even in his father'scultural heritage. However daunting the task, congress attendants collectively acceded to President'sSuharto's wish, recommending that the considerable power of the 422 J. JosephEnington

Department of Educationand Culture be lent to the project of disseminatingJavanese languageand orthographythrough all levelsof governmentallysponsored education in Central and East Java. They thus sanctioneda regularized,institutionally treated version of their linguistictradition, to be superposedon local communitiesthrough a supralocallyorganized school system.

&ffi-Yott;

This attempt to preservean apparentlyanachronistic "high" culture may promote the ongoing project (recalling Anderson'sterms) of an autonomous,autochthonous version of Indonesianmodernity; a strongersociopolitical diagnosis would be that this officially legitimized, reinvented ethnic tradition will serveto legitimize state responses to social and cultural consequencesof the economic development program it has sponsored. An official version of Javanesetradition may then serve to mediate the ambiguitiesbetween good developmentand its "bad"consequences, and betweenethnic and national identities. Thus figured, Javaneselinguistic tradition will serve as one 'local among many kinds of ethnic content' (muatan loknl) which are insertable into a translocal state education framework. The rhetoric of preservationalso elidesthe gap betweenthe linguisticface of nationalistdevelopment ideology and the cultureof the traditionalJavanese elite whose tradition is to be "preseryed." Glossed over at the congresswere larger cultural On the ideologt of Indonesian language development 423 consequencesof subordinatingand assimilatingJavanese linguistic tradition to the nationalidiom. That exemplary tradition will be transformed from an esoteric to a reinventedexoteric body of cultural knowledge,distributed homogeneouslythroughout oneethnic part of the national citizenry.As an instanceof standardizedpublic culture, Javanesewill thus be reconstituted on a smaller scalein the geosociallyhomogeneous, publicimage of Indonesian.

3. The language of development,the developmentof language

I concludeby touching briefly on ideologicaldifferences which might underly nationalist and ethnic visions of language, but which are effectively elided by an ideology of languagedevelopment. Indonesian ideology intertwines exogenous conceptions of development and indigenous visions of national community so closely that it is impossible to avoid taking seriously "the substantive overlap between nationalist ideologyand social science theory" which, Handler argues, "constitutes one of the greatestobstacles to our understandingof nationalism."(1988: 8) In that spirit, I opportunisticallyinvoke European social theory on'one hand, and an Indonesian's observationson development ideology on the other, to foreground some contrasts betweenIndonesian and Javaneselinguistic ideologies. The national vision of Indonesiancan be calledinstrumentalist and constructivist, but also teleological.The former pair of terms servesto invoke the general model of nationalism and national language developed by Gellner (1983), whose quasi-functionalistargument resonateswell enough with the rhetoric of Indonesian developmentto ventriloquate crucial aspectsof Indonesian languageideology. To a Durkheimian notion of division of labor Gellner adds the need for what he calls, invokingWeber, a linguistic instrument for "cool, rational gauging of means and ends (1983:20)." Such a language counts as "a universal conceptual currency . . . for the generalcharacterization of things . . . all facts are located within a single continuous logicalspace . . . in principle one single languagedescribes the world and is internally unitary(1983: 21)." Though I quote Gellner slightlyout of context- he describeshere "our society" - his vision of the nation fits with the presumable goals of national development,what Gellner would in any casesee as the endpoint of the long hard road which eventually leads to where we are. Indonesianas languageof national developmentis available,in Gellner's words, for "all referential uses of language [which] ultimately refer to one coherent world t . . . It] can be reduced to a unitary idiom; and [ . . .l it is legitimate to relate [those uses]to each other." State level thinking in Indonesiaconforms likewise with Gellner's viewthat a national languagemust be developedand propogated by a centralizedstate sponsoredschool system (like Suharto's sekolah Inpres) as a supralocally codified, elaboratedlanguage of "exo-education."(7983:32) Particularly telling is the convergence between Gellner's social theoretical accountof national languagesand Ariel Heryanto's diagnostic social history of the Indonesianword pembangunan'development' in nationalistrhetoric. He arguesthat in 424 J. JosephEnington 'instrument' the state dominated development view language is "primarily an of communication,used to expressthoughts and feelings . . . Essentially,the studentsof both development studies and language studies see bahasa ('language') and Pembangunonas two things with separaterealities, even though they are thought to be connectablefor practical purposesat any time." (1986:7) I passover Heryanto'scareful discussion of the severalsignificances of the root bangun and its derived forms, including the nominal pembangunen,to foreground his assessmentof the current statusof the term. "Fundamentally,pembangunan does not refer to natural process,but to a processof ENGINEERING [his emphasis],with primary orientation to the man-madeor artificial PRODUCT which it yields,which has the characteristicsof being NEW; or to the processof CREATING somethingwhich was formerly non-existentby mobilizing forces from OUTSIDE the object concerned . . ."(1986:16) It is in this sensethat Indonesianis viewed,like the project it subserves, as the outcome of a processof consciousconstruction, rather than organic growth. It is an ongoingly constructableartifact equally availablein all contexts,for all topics, to all speakers. Coupled with this vision of engineeredlinguistic, social, and economic change is an unobvious but important teleological moment. Development ideology justifies present actions through a vision of the "developed"future to which those actions are oriented as means, and toward which they collectivelytend. Taken as a continuum, "development" depends therefore on a tacitly assumed endpoint or telos which is nonethelessundefined by any criteria extrinsicto ideologyitself. In this respect,the envisionedend state of developmentis indefinitely deferrable,and counts as what Mannheim (1936: I92) called "[an] object alien to reality which transcend[s]actual existenceand can neverthelessstill be effectivein the realizationand the maintenance of the existingorder of things." In these three respectsIndonesian language ideology contrasts markedly with traditional Javaneselinguistic tradition, in which, to invoke Gellner again, "the most striking trait [is] of . . . the co-existence . . of multiple, not properly united, but hierarchicallyrelated sub-worlds, and the existenceof specialprivileged facts, sacralized and exemptfrom ordinarytreatment." (1983: 21) Strippedof its functionalistovertones, Gellner echoesreceived academic wisdom about the relation in traditional Javanese political culture between power, knowledge,and esotericlanguages (Anderson 1972). The recent history of Indonesiannationalism and political culture suggestsless a linear progressionfrom traditional to modern, as is suggestedby Gellner's model, than a complex process of reciprocal influence and partial assimilation. The "development"of an Indonesianvocabulary of exogenousEnglish and endogenous Javanesewords, for instance, can be read as evidence of the ongoing relevance of traditional Javaneseviews of languageand power among Indonesia'spolitical elite (Anderson 1966;Errington 1986,1989). But the political asymmetrybetween modern ideology and traditional culture ensuresthat such reciprocal influence can only be covert and tacitly noted, running as it does so clearly against the appearanceof ideologicallyproper national languagedevelopment. Javaneseand the Javaneselinguistic tradition, on the other hand,can be and are On the ideologt of Indonesian language development 425 objectsof an overt project of transformation, to become exoteric public resourcesfor enrichingand justiffing national developmentin local terms. They may also serve to valorizeas non-native and foreign those effects of development uncongenial to state policy.A loss of traditional marks of social distinctionis unavoidablein this project, whichrequires that formerly esotericlinguistic resourcesthus come to be standardized andpublicized. But in the national political schemeof things this may bea fairly small pricefor the JavaneseIndonesian elite to pay, hardly greater cost than the two hundred andfifty thousand dollars which the government spent for the Javanesel-anguage Congresswhich acted in its interest.

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