The Low Countries. Jaargang 7

Language

The History of Dutch Language Policy in Colonial Indonesia 1600-1950

In 1843, upon the conquest of Sind, victory was reported by Sir Charles Napier in a telegram famously consisting of just one word in Latin, ‘Peccavi’. Such an English pun (‘I have sinned / Sind’) in Latin garb marks the classical style so typical of the British empire, itself built on the Roman model. Its leaders, steeped in classical learning, regarded the classics as the model for British civilisation, and in 1835 Macaulay, against the objections of the Orientalists, put this western model at the heart of the educational policy for India, aiming to train a class of anglicised ‘brown sahibs’ for the Indian Civil Service. From then until Independence in 1947, this British policy led to the active dissemination of English language, education and culture in India. Universities were established - the first three, in Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, as early as 1857 - and publishers such as Macmillan's exported millions of books to India. Today, as a direct legacy of this British cultural policy, there is a very large English speaking middle class in India.

In Indonesia today, there is no such Dutch speaking middle class, and that too is the direct result of the cultural policies pursued by the colonial Dutch. Empire building in the Indonesian archipelago, from the first arrival of the Dutch in 1596 until their departure in 1949, was always subject to pragmatic and financial considerations. Not until the twentieth century were serious efforts made to invest in Dutch language education, but by then it was too late. And it did not help that government control of the colony extended well into the domains of religion, education, politics, the press, literature and ideas. But the crucial difference between this and the British approach is that Dutch colonial policies followed the orientalists' view of East and West as essentially and totally different in culture. Dutch colonial civil servants therefore did not go out to the East with a classical, western education, but were given an orientalist training and had to learn one or two indigenous languages. And by the middle of the nineteenth century the Dutch had explicitly rejected the educational and language policies of the British in India, and decided against giving education in their Indonesian colonies a pronounced Western orientation. Not surprisingly, by 1940 no more than 2% of the population knew Dutch.

Comparisons such as these between the Dutch and British empires in Asia may reveal significant and far reaching differences between the cultural policies they pursued. This in turn may help to explain why in Indonesia today Dutch has all but disappeared. And why Dutch, in contrast to the languages of other European colonial powers, has never become a world language. Many other such comparisons and insights can be found in Kees Groeneboer's Gateway to the West, in which, with admirable clarity, he sets out the discussions and decisions that have shaped the colonial language policies of the Dutch.

Historically, the Dutch settlements in the East Indies were never large. By 1795, there were no more than 543 Dutchmen living in Batavia amidst a large mestizo community, and the Dutch language had practically died out. Although in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the colonial ruling class greatly increased in number, it always remained a small minority: in 1930 there were only 190.000 Europeans, as against an indigenous population of 18 million. Dutch was the language of this small European governing class and their Indonesian associates; and Dutch language education was traditionally aimed at the children of this elite.

Unlike the British in India, the Dutch in the East Indies did not proceed to disseminate their own language and culture amongst the great mass of the indigenous population. This restrictive education policy was motivated by the fear that the Dutch language, as ‘gateway to the west’, would bring all kinds of dangerous western ideas to the archipelago; since, surely, once the natives could read Dutch, they would not con-

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fine themselves to reading harmless books. Government control of education and censorship of libraries and the media were therefore necessary to ensure that the modernisation of the colony could be given the right direction.

In language policy, the starting point for the Dutch was their realistic recognition of the fact that amidst the enormous linguistic diversity of the archipelago Malay was the lingua franca, the commonly used language of contact. In 1864 it was therefore decided to disseminate this language - and not Dutch - throughout the colony. To this end, the colonial government stimulated the study, standardisation and modernisation of Malay, imposing it via its institutions, via education, the missions and the media, and via the literary works produced by the state publishers Balai Poestaka. In this respect, the Dutch pursued a non-chauvinistic cultural policy that consciously avoided the linguistic imperialism of the British and other European colonial powers.

For the Dutch language itself, meanwhile, the norm always remained the mother tongue as spoken by its European native speakers. As a consequence, all attempts to simplify the spelling of Dutch for the benefit of indigenous learners of the language were rejected; creolisation and so-called Indo-Dutch met with a sustained social and educational backlash; and ‘pure’ Dutch was often used as an instrument of social exclusion. The language thus became the symbol of colonialism, and when independence came it was quickly abolished and replaced by Bahasa Indonesia as the official national language of the Indonesian Republic. Dutch has now all but vanished from the archipelago, although there are still some 300 laws from the Dutch era, and Indonesian archives contain many miles of documents in Dutch.

The rest, as they say, is history. It is a history very well told by Groeneboer, with a wealth of documentation, an excellent bibliography and many fascinating pictures, in a book that vividly demonstrates why for the foreseeable future Dutch will remain an indispensable language of scholarship in the field of Indonesian studies.

reinier salverda

Kees Groeneboer, Gateway to the West. The Dutch Language in Colonial Indonesia 1600-1950. A History of Language Policy (Tr. Myra Scholz). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998; 400 p. isbn 90-5356-323-7.