Article

Indonesia

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Indonesia

The term “Indonesia” as a scholarly and administrative designation for the archipelago has a long and contested history, but the region it names—encompassing Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Sulawesi, the Moluccas, and the thousands of smaller islands between them—has been a continuous focus of philological, commercial, and cultural investigation since the earliest European contacts. The records assembled here span from the 1890s to the present day and reveal a discipline that has moved from comparative linguistics and diffusionist speculation through nautical ethnography and trade history to the study of popular culture, literary method, and the politics of memory. Indonesia’s significance to the scholarly record lies in its position as a crossroads of maritime trade, a laboratory of religious and cultural transformation, and a space where the boundaries between the Malay world and the wider Indian Ocean have been repeatedly negotiated and redrawn.

Language, Numeral Systems, and the Question of Origins

The earliest engagement with Indonesia in the Society’s literature is linguistic rather than geographical. R.J. Wilkinson’s 1895 article on Indonesian numerals presents a comparative table spanning six languages—Malay, Maori, Tagalog, Malagasy, Formosan, and Fijian—demonstrating near-identical forms for the basic numerals one through ten across the entire Indonesian–Polynesian–Malagasy area [1, p. 99]. Wilkinson endorses the etymologies of Dr. T.H. Pardo de Tavera, who held that the oldest numerals (two, three, four) were originally collective substantives—“a couple,” “a trio,” “a company”—rather than abstract numerals, and that the higher numbers were built on a quinary system based on counting on the fingers [1, p. 100]. The word lima (five) still means “hand” in many Formosan and Polynesian dialects, and the Malay delapan (eight) is derived from dua-lepan (“two turned down”), preserving the finger-counting logic of the original system [1, p. 100]. Wilkinson’s final footnote catalogues numeral data from 119 languages across Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas, the Philippines, Formosa, Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, Madagascar, and Fiji [1, p. 103].

The article is situated within the broader debate on Polynesian origins. Wilkinson sides with de Quatrefages’ migration theory, noting that the numerals are used by Melanesian tribes along the routes believed to have been followed by migrating Polynesians from Ceram and Bourou, while acknowledging Wallace’s alternative explanation that Malay traders carried the vocabulary to the South Seas [1, p. 102]. He rejects the more radical proposal of the Rev. D. MacDonald that Oceanic numerals are of Semitic origin, on the grounds that the phonological character of Oceanic languages is wholly unlike Semitic, that the Arabic numerals are not collective nouns and do not follow a quinary system, and that MacDonald’s specific etymological pairings are philologically unsound [1, pp. 101–102].

Maritime Commerce and the Western Archipelago

Kenneth R. Hall’s 1981 study of trade and statecraft in the western archipelago from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries provides the most sustained economic analysis in the records. Hall argues that shifting patterns of international spice trade drove the transition from the loose Srivijayan port federation to more integrated territorial states such as Samudra-Pasai, Malacca, and Aceh [2, p. 21]. A 1178 Chinese source ranks the wealthy foreign lands as: Ta-shih (the Arabs) first, She-p’o (Java) second, and San-fo-chi (Srivijaya) third, marking the decline of Srivijaya’s commercial pre-eminence [2, p. 21]. By the thirteenth century, Java with its control of the spice trade was the dominant commercial power, and its dominance influenced much that was going on around it [2, p. 22].

Hall deploys Bennet Bronson’s model of decentralized riverine political systems to explain how coastal entrepots secured hinterland production for international markets [2, p. 33]. Samudra-Pasai emerged by the late fourteenth century as the most important port on the Sumatra coast, its success dependent upon the concentration of the marketing of Sumatra’s pepper production and its ability to draw pepper and other goods from its own interior [2, p. 37]. Pires estimates Pasai’s annual pepper exports at roughly 8,000 to 10,000 bahars in the early sixteenth century; import duties were six per cent (foodstuffs exempt), and export duties were one maz of gold (one-sixteenth of an ounce) per bihar of merchandise [2, pp. 36]. Before 1511, sixteen junks of rice from Pegu and thirty from Ayudhya annually supplied Malacca and Pasai, indicating that these commercial centres depended on bulk food imports to feed their cosmopolitan populations [2, p. 38].

The foundation of Malacca in the early fifteenth century withdrew certain benefits from Samudra-Pasai. The shift of the Javanese spice trade to Malacca was chiefly responsible for a transition in Southeast Asian commercial patterns, and Indian Ocean traders soon joined the Javanese in Malacca to acquire Java’s spices [2, p. 36]. Ultimately, in the early sixteenth century, the Pasai river system fell under the authority of Aceh, which thence became the dominant force in northern Sumatra’s pepper trade [2, p. 44]. Hall concludes that the increasing importance of local products in international trade, and the intensity of Javanese, Chinese, and India-based shipping, encouraged a policy of territorial expansion that was actively pursued by important states in the Straits of Malacca, replacing the loose federations of port towns characteristic of the Srivijayan age [2, p. 46].

C.A. Gibson-Hill’s 1950 study of Indonesian trading boats reaching Singapore provides a complementary nautical-ethnographic perspective. Based on direct observations of over sixty boats in Singapore roads during 1947–1949, Gibson-Hill systematically describes six categories of Indonesian trading vessel: the Palari (Makassar trader), the Golekkan (Madura trader), the Leteh-Leteh, the Sekochi, the Lambok, and two Sumatran coasters [3, p. 108]. The Palari, built primarily at Bira and Lemo Lemo in southern Celebes, measures 50–70 feet overall; a 53-foot example sets approximately 1,000 square feet of canvas and carries a crew of seven to eight men earning $10–20 per month plus food, and masters reckon the 1,200-mile passage from Makassar to Singapore takes eight to nine days with the north-east monsoon [3, pp. 112–113]. The double-masted Lambok ketch from Bonerate reaches 58–80 feet overall with a sail area of about 2,000 square feet and a cargo capacity exceeding 700 piculs, yet requires only six to seven men—demonstrating the efficiency advantage of the European-modelled design over the traditional Palari and Golekkan [3, p. 134]. Gibson-Hill traces the Palari’s origins to the Pajala hull of southern Celebes, modified with a raised deck and overhanging stern that he attributes partly to sixteenth-century Portuguese contact with Gowa, and dates the introduction of the ketch rig to the last forty to fifty years before 1950 [3, pp. 118–120].

The late seventeenth century anti-kafir movement in the Indonesian archipelago is examined by J. Kathirithamby-Wells through the figure of Ahmad Shah ibn Iskandar, known as the Yang di-Pertuan Raja Sakti [4, p. 48]. Kathirithamby-Wells argues that Dutch colonial sources, preoccupied with commerce and political control, misread the religious and cultural dimensions of indigenous resistance, reducing a complex movement to the activities of a “troublesome pirate” [4, p. 48]. The movement was not monolithic but a patchwork of local rebellions—Trunajaya’s revolt in Java (1674–1680), the Macassarese adventurism following the fall of their sultanate in 1669, the west Sumatran uprisings, and the Ambonese “tasbih” movement—that briefly cohered around a single charismatic figure [4, p. 52]. Ahmad Shah first appeared at Billiton in 1685 with five perahu and 200 men, and rapidly assembled a fleet of approximately 300 vessels and a force of nearly 4,000, composed mainly of Macassarese and Minangkabaus with recruits from Riau-Johore and Jambi [4, pp. 53–54]. His credentials drew on the common Malay-Javanese legendary heritage in which royal houses traced lineage to Iskandar Dzu’l Karnain (Alexander the Great), one of the 99 children of Nabi Adam, giving his claims a wide and immediate appeal that transcended regional and ethnic boundaries [4, p. 55]. The broader anti-kafir phase concluded with the defeat of Surapati in 1706 and the surrender of Sunan Mas Amangkurat III in 1708 [4, p. 63].

Ermita Soenarto’s 2005 study traces the textual metamorphosis of the Wali Songo—the Nine Saints credited with Islamizing Java in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—from mystical Sufi figures in traditional babad literature into sharia-centred “dakwah warriors” in modern comics, films, and cartoon storybooks [5, p. 33]. The transformation is driven by three interlocking mechanisms: form, context, and language. Visually, the saints are rendered through a hybrid of Chinese kung fu, American superhero, and Japanese manga styles that inflate their superheroic qualities while retaining Javanese spiritual attributes such as wahyu (divine light) and halus (emotional restraint) [5, pp. 45–47]. Contextually, the Hindu Majapahit kingdom is vilified as the embodiment of tyrannical, exploitative adat (custom), creating a clean binary against the saints’ sharia-centred Islam [5, pp. 57–61]. Linguistically, the narratives deploy revolutionary vocabulary (perjuangan, rakyat) borrowed from Indonesian independence rhetoric, recasting the saints’ missionary work as a populist struggle to liberate the masses [5, pp. 50–52]. The post-1965 political climate, in which mass killings of communist abangan (nominal) Javanese Muslims led some to abandon Islam entirely or become “Islam KTP” (identity-card Muslims), explains why violent aspects of the saints’ missionary adventures have been systematically omitted in favour of peaceful, gradualist dakwah strategies [5, p. 54].

Spatial Cognition and the Malay World

V. Wee’s 2018 article examines how indigenous populations in the Riau Archipelago conceptualize movement across the Straits of Melaka, Singapore, and Riau, and how this relates to the broader Malay world (Alam Melayu) [6, p. 124]. The Riau colloquial term jemberang (a local pronunciation of menyeberang, meaning to cross a body of water) reflects a pre-national, sea-centred spatial logic that predates and transcends the modern nation-state boundaries drawn by the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty [6, p. 125]. The term menyeludup (to sneak across without a passport) carries no colloquial pronunciation, marking it as belonging to a formal legal rather than vernacular framework [6, p. 125]. The Riau Archipelago comprises approximately 3,214 islands, described by inhabitants as “a measure of black peppercorns” (segantang lada hitam) [6, p. 127]. Wee argues that the civilizing process in Riau is fundamentally a process of increasing sedentism, whereby permanent settlement becomes a marker of social superiority and nomadic origins become a source of stigma requiring genealogical amnesia [6, p. 129].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on Indonesia reveals a discipline that has shifted its priorities markedly over time. The earliest record, Wilkinson’s 1895 numeral study, is a compact comparative-linguistic review engaging with contemporary philological debates rather than presenting original fieldwork [1, p. 99]. The 1950s mark a period of intense methodological experimentation: Quaritch Wales’s diffusionist argument for Sabaean and Egyptian influences in Javanese temple iconography [7, pp. 36–42], Gibson-Hill’s first-hand nautical ethnography [3, p. 108], and Hall’s application of Bronson’s riverine model to Sumatran statecraft [2, p. 33] all represent distinct analytical frameworks competing for explanatory authority. Wales’s categorical statements and reliance on typological comparison of motifs rather than independent verification of transmission routes mark his work as a product of the diffusionist paradigm just before the discipline’s post-war turn toward indigenous development models [7, p. 42].

The 1970s and 1980s bring a revisionist turn. Kathirithamby-Wells’s reinterpretation of Indonesian resistance through indigenous religious and cultural frameworks rather than the Dutch colonial lens of “unrest” and “piracy” explicitly positions itself as a preliminary study inviting further research [4, p. 48]. Sweeney’s methodological critique of Teeuw’s framework for studying Indonesian “historical” texts argues that the distinction between “literature” and “history” is a construct of the observer’s own cultural position rather than a feature of the texts or their societies [8, p. 35]. Ding Choo Ming’s introduction of the UKM Library’s collection of over 1,500 titles of Indonesian Peranakan literature challenges the Balai Pustaka-centric narrative of modern Indonesian literature and argues for the integration of Peranakan Chinese fiction into the broader literary and social historical record [9, p. 54]. Kratz’s survey of 37 German-language travel books from the VOC era resists the temptation to treat these texts as sources for conventional colonial history, repositioning them instead as sources for the history of European mentalities and the social conditions of the common man [10, p. 74].

The most recent records reflect a maturation of the field. Petrů’s centennial appreciation of Harry J. Benda (1920–1972) traces the intellectual trajectory of a scholar whose unique position as a “triple minority”—a Sudeten Jewish Czech in the United States—combined with his synthesis of Central European intellectual traditions, Dutch scholarship, and direct experience of the closing years of the Netherlands East Indies, enabled him to comprehend transformational processes in Southeast Asia with particular depth [11, p. 113]. Soenarto’s study of the Wali Songo in popular genres demonstrates how mass media mediates between traditional babad literature and contemporary Islamic reformism, a nexus previously unexamined in the Javanese Islamization literature dominated by Geertz, Woodward, and Hefner [5, p. 33]. Wee’s ethnographic work links Geertz’s pasisir typology with indigenous spatial cognition, reframing the civilizing process as a process of increasing sedentism rather than a linear progression toward fixed territoriality [6, p. 127]. Together, these records document a field that has moved from the question of where Indonesian culture came from to the question of how Indonesians themselves understand, narrate, and transform their own heritage.

Antiquities

For Indonesian antiquities, see Archeology: China, Indonesia, Thailand and Borobudur, Java.

Language and literature

MBRAS Sources

Commerce

Culture and society

Language and literature

History

References

  1. R.J. Wilkinson (1895). The Indonesian numerals JSBRAS 28: 99–103.
  2. Hall K.R (1981). Trade and statecraft in the western archipelago at the dawn of the European age JMBRAS 54(1): 21–47. Read on JSTOR
  3. C.A. Gibson-Hill (1950). The Indonesian trading boats reaching Singapore JMBRAS 23(1): 108–138.
  4. J. Kathirithamby– Wells (1970). Ahmad Shah Ibn Iskander and the late 17th century ‘holy war’ in Indonesia JMBRAS 43(1): 48–63. Read on JSTOR
  5. Ermita Soenarto (2005). From saints to superheroes: The Wali Songo myth in contemporary Indonesia’s popular genres JMBRAS 78(2): 33–82.
  6. V. Wee (2018). Jemberang and Alam Melayu: crossing the Straits of Melaka, Singapore and Riau JMBRAS 91(2): 124–133. Read on JSTOR
  7. H.G.Q. Wales (1950). The Savaeans and possible Egyptian influences in Indonesia JMBRAS 23(3): 36–42.
  8. A. Sweeney (1983). The “literary” study of Malay-Indonesian literature: some observations JMBRAS 56(1): 33–46.
  9. Ding Choo Ming (1978). An introduction to the Indonesian Peranakan literature in the library of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia JMBRAS 51(1): 54–61.
  10. E.U. Kratz (1981). The journey to the East: 17th and 18th century German travel books as sources of study JMBRAS 54(1): 65–81. Read on JSTOR
  11. T. Petrů (2020). A centennial appreciation of Harry J. Benda: a Czech pioneer of Southeast Asian studies JMBRAS 93(1): 91–116.