This is Indonesian Language

Far more critical attention has been devoted in recent years to the way an in which writers from former colonies have ‘decolonized’ major imperial languages like English or French and appropriated them for their own, non-‘standard’ uses, than to the fate of non-Western languages and literatures in the post-colonial world (see, for example, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1995: 283-318; Loombba 1998:206). The exception to this rule is provided by ‘third World’ authors, like Pramoedya Ananta Toer from Indonesia, whose work has been translated into Westernlanguages and hence brought to the critical attention of the Western academic institutions where ‘postcolonial studies’ are largely taught. Translation is a powerful means for establishing and maintaining unequal relation of power between languages and literatures, as well as canons of literary taste, around the world. There is a need for much more detailed discussion of how translation has functioned in this way in Indonesia and in the study of Indonesian literature both at home and in the West than we can attempt here. Interestingly, although multilingualism and translations between Western, regional-language and Indonesian literary works were-instrumental in the creation of all of the literary works discussed in this volume, the Sydney conference failed to identify and discuss translation as a central issue in its own right in postcolonial approaches to the study of Indonesian literature. At this point we confine ourselves to making the observation, one which Will Derks and Ward Keeler provocatively develop in their essays in this collection, that whether it is European-language originals of translation by postcolonial studies generally has focused narrowly on the work of a tiny elite of authors whose writings have been found ‘readable’ and worthy of critical attention in the West. This attention has largely been the result of the role played by international publishers, influential academics, Western readerships and the ideological assumptions that inform the literary tastes of all three groups in forming a ‘canon’ of postcolonial ‘literature’ (Venuti 1998; 160-70).

Yet, if it is both uncontroversial as well as true to assert that ‘language provides the terms by which reality may be constituted’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1995:283), then the language of any literature produced in conditions affected by colonialism is likely to be an important site for the study of postcoloniality. The essays in this volume attest to the rich potential of Indonesian literature as a subject of postcolonial criticism, despite the fact that so few Indonesian works have been translated into languages known to those engaged in ‘postcolonial studies’. As such, we are drawn directly into a consideration of Indonesian as a language of literature, and the way in which its defining features help to shape the representation of reality in that literature.

The characteristic that seems most  crucial for understanding the ways in which postcoloniality is expressed in Indonesian literary texts is the fact that the Indonesian language continues to develop out of a centuries-old lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago. The study of Indonesian literature cannot  be slotted into a Western historical framework for examining the overthrow of elite ‘sacred’ languages by popular, revolutionary ‘vernaculars’, as Anderson has suggested in his writings on Indonesian as a language of revolutionary nationalism (see Anderson 1991:9-36, 67-82; Anderson 1996). Rather, as Henk Maier argues in his essay in this volume, when the particular variant of Malay known as ‘Melayu’ crystallized as the dominant medium of everyday  communication between social classes and across cultures throughout the Indonesian archipelago for centuries.