Fetish, Recognition, Revolution

James T. Siegel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691026527, 9780691026534
• eBook ISBN: 9780691224008
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book concerns the role of language in the Indonesian revolution. James Siegel, an anthropologist with long experience in various parts of that country, traces the beginnings of the Indonesian revolution, which occurred from 1945 through 1949 and which ended Dutch colonial rule, to the last part of the nineteenth century. At that time, the peoples of the Dutch East Indies began to translate literature from most places in the world. Siegel discovers in that moment a force within communication more important than the specific messages it conveyed. The subsequent containment of this linguistic force he calls the "fetish of modernity," which, like other fetishes, was thought to be able to compel events. Here, the event is the recognition of the bearer of the fetish as a person of the modern world.


The taming of this force in Indonesian nationalism and the continuation of its wild form in the revolution are the major subjects of the book. Its material is literature from Indonesian and Dutch as well as first-person accounts of the revolution.

PART I

The Fetish of Appearance

CHAPTER ONE

The “I” of a Lingua Franca

MELAYU AS A LINGUA FRANCA

How does it happen that a language comes into existence? Where does one look for its precedents? One cannot say that at 10:00 A.M. Language A did not exist and that at 6:00 P.M. it came into being. No doubt one thinks that speakers of a certain language became isolated from one another and began to speak dialects that became incomprehensible to one another. New languages seem to mark a limit of communication; common sense demands a sociological explanation for their formation.

Perhaps. But although all known languages must have had their origins in previous ones, there are examples of another sort of development. In what is now called Indonesia and what was called the Dutch East Indies and on the Malay Peninsula, there was a language, Melayu, that was the language of certain courts and of villages, though not the language of the largest groups of the archipelago.¹ A language similar to this became a lingua franca, used first in trade. It developed apart from the traditions in which Malay was embedded and with different linguistic features. The lingua franca became the national language of Indonesia, called “Indonesian,” and is spoken now throughout the archipelago alongside the approximately eight hundred local languages. Here it was not mutual incomprehension but the extension of communication across the boundaries of languages that brought a new language into being.²

As Pramoedya Ananta Toer points out, the translators used by traders tended to be Arabs or other foreigners to the archipelago. Such people were unattached to the literature and customs of traditional Malay and so the spread of the lingua franca did not bring with it the culture of the courts or the villages where the language may have originated.³ Melayu, the lingua franca, was thus unsettled, lacking the contexts that stabilize usages. As the Dutch established their hegemony in Indonesia, they used Melayu as the language of administration. But as John Hoffman points out, they were continually worried that they could not make themselves understood in the language.⁴ The problem was not Dutch grasp of Melayu but their subjects’ use of what they termed a low form of the language, “low Malay,” and their subjects’ ignorance of what Dutch administrators considered the real language, court Malay. Dutch felt that the Melayu that came to be used in the major cities of the Indies was inadequate. They searched for the source of Melayu and claimed to have found it in the Riau Archipelago. In these islands, remote from the big cities, they felt they had the developed form of the language which, if only it could be taught to those later called “Indonesians,” would make communication certain. They made increasing efforts to encourage “standard” or “high” Malay and to discourage “low Malay.”⁵

Dutch needed Melayu because very few non-Dutch spoke their language. Partly this was because the colonial government did not make a great effort to teach Dutch to any but a few. But partly it was because there seemed to be an inability to learn the language even when the opportunity was present. In her outstanding study of Batavia, the historian Jean Taylor points out that the children of Dutch fathers and Indies women often could not speak their fathers’ tongue unless they were sent to study in the Netherlands.⁶ Indos, as the children of Europeans and ‘natives’ were called, could nevertheless be considered Dutch in the eyes of the law if their fathers either married their mothers or legally attested that they were the childrens’ fathers. If these conditions were not fulfilled, such Indos were subjected to the laws of their mothers and missed the privileges the law accorded Europeans.⁷ Separate legal codes were, indeed, a feature of what J. C. Furnivall calls “the plural society,” a society in which Europeans, ‘natives,’ and ‘foreign orientals’ lived separately, without a common culture.⁸

Melayu was the language of the plural society, used between ‘natives’ speaking different local languages and between them and Indos and Dutch. It was the tongue that connected most of the ‘native’ world with Europeans and European culture as well as the rest of the world outside their local communities. It was the language of authority meaning not only governmental but also sometimes parental authority. In the major cities, Melayu became a creole, the first language of many speakers. But even as a creole it kept much of its character as a lingua franca. In the first place because, from the Dutch point of view, that was its function. Dutch used it to speak to those whose first language was or should be Javanese, Sundanese, or other local languages. Even as a creole, Melayu lacked some of the characteristics of first languages. In particular, it only weakly defined its speakers’ identities. We have seen already that Indos who were creole speakers and nonspeakers of Dutch could be considered “Dutch,” for instance. But these were only a small minority. Consider this ironic characterization by H. M. J. Maier, the leading contemporary Dutch scholar of Melayu literature:

One thing was clear: the Malay that was used in Batavia and the other big cities . . . was gibberish, not at all in tune with the rules for use in administration and trade that scholars and administrators were tentatively formulating behind their writing desks. Would it be possible for a foreign elite to actively engage in creating a standard Malay that was alien to almost everyone?⁹

The native speakers of Melayu were told by the colonial authorities and sometimes by their fathers, that their first language was not a language. It was, perhaps, almost one, or merely the degraded remnants of one spoken somewhere else, far away. In effect, they were told, they could not communicate with authority; neither in the language of authority, Dutch, nor in the one they had learned from their mothers if their mother spoke Melayu and not a local language. The Dutch message went further; the daily communications that speakers of the creole no doubt found satisfactory when speaking to each other were “gibberish.” What they surely must have assumed made sense did not do so. They learned from the Dutch that they could not fully inhabit their “own” language. This is of course usually the case also for speakers of a lingua franca that is not the first language of either speaker and that does not have to be fully mastered to be used in trade. Speaking Melayu as a lingua franca meant that one could not rely on the same assurance about the language that one had in one’s own language and one often did not need it.

But at the same time, the weightlessness of a language that is severed from culture makes it less intimidating. One can chance speaking it without the fear that it is the tongue of Racine, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or the Gouverneur Generaal of the Dutch East Indies. It offers one the opportunity for a certain excursion if not into a new identity, at least away from an old one. In the case of Melayu as a creole, speakers did not form a cultural group in the same sure sense that, say, Balinese, Chinese, Javanese, or others did whose languages were at the source of some of the vocabulary of Melayu. There was a fantastic side to the culture of Batavia, as we will see, that can be attributed to its retention of some characteristics of the lingua franca.

The spread of Melayu as a lingua franca was rapid and strange. Pramoedya reports, for instance, that Dutch missionaries learned to preach in high Malay and did so to groups particularly in eastern Indonesian sometimes without realizing that their audiences did not understand them. Nonetheless, missionaries were important in introducing the lingua franca into certain parts of the archipelago. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say not “introduce” but “produce.” Maier, in a remarkable sentence, lets us see how this could be:

This language was the result of learning by reciprocal imitation of rudimentary language forms.

That is, one learned the lingua franca by imitating what the other said while the other was doing the same. One pictures the 'natives’ who heard but did not understand sermons in high Malay, simulating what they heard, repeating it to their preachers who, not understanding, imitated them in return. The lingua franca took shape in the middle, between the speakers. Eventually they could comprehend each other. In the process, the language was stripped to “rudimentary language forms.” It may be a historical fable, but one is necessary to imagine how communities separated from each other by different languages begin to communicate.

Maier describes a changing of places, each speaker taking the part of the other, as the normal course of the development of Melayu. It was a language that one learned by taking on the speech of the interlocutor while he did the same with one’s own utterances. In such a situation, the speaker could have no assurance of his language, the second person being the superior judge of his words. This would be the normal course of learning any language were it not that the same was true for the second person when he came to speak. A community that begins with mutual imitation starts without the definitions that promote differentiation. And it begins without the usual generational transmission that establishes its authority. It is the opposite of the case we first sketched; it was not a question of the discovery of mutual incomprehension between communities, each concerned to defend their own linguist property and therefore to mark their mutual difference. It was a matter of each saying the same as the other, taking from the other what they found he had but which had no property rights attached to it. No important social distinctions can be generated at that stage of development. Instead, one feels the force of the medium in the way that one often does learning a foreign language before one starts to speak it.

Melayu was thus a language without the built-in authority the taking on of which gives one not only a sense of mastery but, as a speaker, the reassurance of having a place in the world. What Maier says about the first writers of the language must have been true of other speakers as well:

In the shadow of Dutch authority, Malay-writing authors in the big cities of Java cannot have felt much self-confidence, not about the language they had to use, not about the topics and material they were supposed to use. Educated in a defective manner and thus moving between all sorts of cultural and linguistic communities, ... it was impossible for them to accept blindly the Dutch concept of a knowable community : they did not know their place, they did not know the colonial community.

Their “defective education” consisted in not knowing what the Dutch knew about literature and history and about themselves. What they should write about and in what form were better known elsewhere. And not understanding the Dutch view of themselves, they did not know colonial society. Ordinarily, a language is a tool to make one’s way through the world. Learning the language usually includes learning a map of the society of its speakers. Maier, however, pictures those who learned low Malay as never gaining the usual advantages of a language. When it connected them with authority, it was only to find out that someone else knew their language better than they did and that their grasp of the words in their minds meant only that there were matters they could not know. Turning to each other, they could only find themselves locked in ceaseless alternation. Such a community would be riven with anxiety. One could only know that being in the world meant being no where locatable. I subscribe to Maier’s description. I would only qualify it by adding that their angst became apparent only at a certain moment, toward the end of the nineteenth century, and only in oblique ways. Maier goes on to say this:

A new structure of feeling arose among the nonwhite population, inspired by an ambiguous desire to self-definition in reaction to Dutch claims of improvement which the natives themselves did not necessarily conceive of as an improvement. This search for a new identity manifested itself in a staggering polyphony and heterogeneity in printed materials, aimed at an inchoate readership.

The “desire to self-definition” here is “ambiguous” because it lacks the usual basis. One speaks of “self-definition” ordinarily when in a certain sense one feels one is someone already but lacks a form of expression. But Maier speaks of an “inchoate readership,” for instance. He means that the readers of the works that began to be published in Melayu were not identifiable by ethnic group. Chinese, Javanese, Batavians, and Indos all read the same things. The identifications given by colonial society in terms of ethnicity were not shaken. But, despite these terms, uncertainty about language itself set in motion “a search for a new identity.” It took the form not of defining relationships, as searches for identity usually do, but of a “staggering polyphony and heterogeneity in printed materials.”

We will comment later on this "polyphony.” But for now I only want to correct an impression of tone. One reason there could be such enormous diversity of material, without discernable direction, is because anxiety about language was concealed by the auxiliary character of Melayu. It was thought of, I believe, even by many of those for whom it was a mother tongue, as a second language. Its function as a lingua franca continued and gave the impression that, after all, there was (another) first language to fall back on, even if one did not know it oneself. This accounts for the fact that what was read in the language tended to lack weight, as both Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Maier have pointed out.¹⁰

By the end of the nineteenth century, a multitude of translations from world literatures began to appear in Melayu.¹¹ These appeared most often in newspapers as well as in book form. But it was not solely in print that these translations became available. They were also copied by hand and rented out in lending libraries. What is remarkable is that what was translated and what was written in Melayu was so diverse. It includes not only the literature produced at courts throughout the archipelago, Persian tales, and Chinese stories but also accounts of the Russo-Japanese war and of local events, including a bank robbery. There had always been translations into regional languages, but these were of a different order. In Aceh, a Muslim sultanate at the time, there were, for instance, translations into Acehnese of Arabic texts, particularly religious ones, and of historical or epic stories that connected the situation of Aceh with what it took as its relevant neighbors. The same is true of Javanese, mutatis mutandis. But Batavian newspapers published an epic about Napoleon, Chinese sagas, Persian tales, Sherlock Holmes, and various Dutch literature. It did not seem to matter who the readers were. It was not felt that readers would read in their own ethnic identities. And, indeed, there is evidence that the borrowers of traditional Malay works from lending libraries included, for instance, Chinese. Furthermore, such lenders cannot accurately be called readers. They were, often, listeners, the works being read aloud for small groups of people in the fashion of recitation of traditional literature.

One is dealing here with the formation of new audiences in the sense that the ethnic composition of audiences no longer seemed to matter.¹² The question of who listened to traditional literatures is more difficult than it might seem. For instance, wealthy Chinese commissioned the performance of Javanese shadow puppet plays and ordered the construction of Javanese orchestral instruments. This is rightly taken as an indication of their Javanization. But with Melayu literature and translations, it is not possible to say what effect on identity such broadening of reading and listening had. Readers of Melayu included people from many of the ethnic groups of Indonesia and prominently included among not only readers but also translators and writers “Indos,” those of mixed European and Indies parentage.

This new audience did not always depend on a new mode of reception. One does not have isolated readers who silently picture to themselves what they read. The newspaper eventually had its own mode of reading, the one we know today. But at the time of its expansion in the Indies, at the end of the nineteenth century, modes of reading and listening were unsettled.¹³ Before the displacement of chanting by silent reading was completed, the Melayu language world was invaded by the world at large. Melayu, the lingua franca, began to bring to the Indies the literatures and the events of the world and of one’s neighbors. Manuscripts were recopied, borrowed from lending libraries in big cities, and recited in front of small groups. The contents of these manuscripts were often the same, and sometimes even borrowed, from what appeared in newspapers. There was an interchange between the newspaper and traditional rhymed forms. The newspapers printed traditional literatures while contemporary events sometimes based on newspaper accounts were retold in old forms on hand-copied documents. The impulse in both cases is not toward the enclosure that governs the formation of a new language when dialects become mutually incomprehensible. Rather, the possibility of speaking to a broad range of peoples in a lingua franca and the interest in hearing of a wider variety of events and listening to a broader range of narratives than was previously the case occurred together.¹⁴ Somewhat abruptly, via the medium of the lingua franca, most places in the world began to be felt in the Indies. The messages of the world could speak to anyone and, for a while, it seemed that many did not shrug off what they heard around them with the thought that it was not intended for them. The feeling that there was something to be heard, and no one could know in advance just what it might be, loosened the constrictions imposed by identity. Even though anonymity of readership was not a feature of the lending library, nonetheless it seems inherent in it in the sense that one could not entirely predict what people would listen to by knowing their ethnic identification.

We have seen that translations existed in the courts but that they were chosen according to assumptions of identity. It is difficult to imagine, for instance, an Acehnese version of an epic about the Russo-Japanese war. But the listeners of the lending library or the readers of Melayu newspapers seem to have heard about nearly anything at all. If they still were interested in traditional Melayu texts, it seemed that they did not value them more than the story of the robbery of the Java Bank. One might see this as the vitality of the traditional form in which it was tol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Fetish of Appearance
• Part II: Recognition
• Part III: Revolution
• Notes
• About the Author