Reading Habits & Poverty
Nov 1st, 2010, in Featured, News, by PatungWhy Indonesians are not big book readers; ‘Reading Ambassador’ Tantowi Yahya holds forth on the issue and blames poverty.
Reading Ambassador (Duta Baca Indonesia), television celebrity Tantowi Yahya said at the proclamation event in Pontianak for the “West Kalimantan Reads” movement that Indonesians were not voracious readers for largely reasons of poverty:
“Above all it’s based on economic factors, on whether families can afford to buy books and newspapers.”
Poor families would naturally prioritise food, school fees, and school textbooks, over the purchase of recreational reading material.
He suggested two methods to ameliorate the problem:
- libraries; from the national down to the village level, to enable poor people access to books for free
- parents, especially mothers, should read in front of their children regularly, to sow an interest in reading in their spawn
Tantowi Yahya extolling the virtues of reading
However on at least the first point – libraries – Tantowi said Indonesia still had very far to go in providing adequate public facilities, and that most regional government heads had little interest in developing library facilities:
How many local politicians campaign on building up library infrastructure?
There was one bright spot, he said, that being the province of Riau, where the Governor had built a very big and comprehensive public library right next door to his own office building: antara
The example of Riau has to be followed in other regions.
60 Comments on “Reading Habits & Poverty”
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timdog says:
it wouldn’t simply have been possible to make Javanese the national idiom and cultural binding agent because the language isn’t a ‘neutral’ one
Interestingly, this is one thing that Indonesia got very right and which India didn’t. There has, to the best of my knowledge, never been any hint of political contentiousness around the Indonesian language.
In India there are two national languages – English and Hindi. Hindi is not neutral in the way that Malay-Indonesian is. It is the language of the “cow belt”, the heartland stretching from Delhi east through Uttar Pradesh towards Bengal, long the politically and socially dominant part of the country. There is a good deal of resentment of Hindi in other parts of the country, and a good few calls for English, which is supposedly neutral, to be the only national language. Except that English isn’t really neutral – because it’s the first language (or joint first language) of the real top of the pile creme-de-la-creme elite. It’s not ethnically/geographically exclusive the way Hindi is, but socially it most certainly is…
Indonesia just doesn’t have these issues at all, which it would have done had Javanese (or Dutch) been made the national language. On the complexities of Javanese, this may have been much less of an issue than you might think – a sort of “practical” middle Javanese for modern literature actually did emerge, with newspapers, pamphlets and translated books in the 19th Century.
But my line was just an idle pondering point, a “what if”…HOWEVER…
This is why the nationalistic movement in the 20ies had chosen the more egalitarian and geographically widely used Bahasa Melayu spoken in Riau for their common idiom, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda.
It’s worth noting (picking up Arie Brand’s idea of “circulation of elites” and the suggestion that with Independence very little changed except the colour of the people at the top), Malay was long, long, long established as the practical day-to-day language of business and administration and for inter-ethnic communication – by the Dutch!
By picking up on its use the founding fathers were simply co-opting an apparatus that was already in place, not coming up with some radical nation-building inovation. It was a smart move, but not a stroke of original genius…Interestingly, until well into the 19th Century Malay was the household language of many, possibly most, “Dutch” families in Indonesia. Many “Dutch” women (who were actually usually Indo-European) couldn’t speak anything except Malay…
poorly stuffed with quality literature from abroad
Didn’t say they were popular; just said that they were available! I’ve been arguing all along that Indonesia is not a reading nation…
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Except that English isn’t really neutral – because it’s the first language (or joint first language) of the real top of the pile creme-de-la-creme elite. It’s not ethnically/geographically exclusive the way Hindi is, but socially it most certainly is…
This is not my area but I can’t remember where I noticed this the other day, the story’s been around for a while Dalits Turn to the Goddess of English, fascinating stuff in there generally about Macaulay’s evident attempts to batter away at the bits of local culture he didn’t like…. here’s the Goddess..
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Arie Brand says:
Timdog wrote:
“Interestingly, until well into the 19th Century Malay was the household language of many, possibly most, “Dutch” families in Indonesia. Many “Dutch” women (who were actually usually Indo-European) couldn’t speak anything except Malay…”
Just the other day, after reading in the Java Post some remarks on the correct preparation of the food that was offered Obama, I had occasion to check up on nasi goreng with chicken in a Dutch language cook book that was published in 1925 by the then well known Netherlands Indies publisher G.C.T. van Dorp.
In the list with ingredients alone occur the following Malay words
ketoembar
sioong
bawang poetih
daons kemangie
trassi
lombok
djienten(incidentally, the last word is totally unknown to me and I couldn’t track it down in the Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia)
Apparently even Dutch housewives just arrived from Holland were also supposed to know these terms (for which there are quite good Dutch equivalents).
After about 1850 Petjoh became the group language that was developed among Indo Europeans. The vocabulary is largely Dutch but the grammar has Malay features. I am not a linguist but it seems to me when I listen to it (there are quite a few recordings) that there are more aspirated consonants in it than in ordinary Dutch. This gives the language quite an emphatic character. In Papua I have often heard it spoken among Indo Europeans and it probably survives in some ” Indies” enclaves around the Hague. The well known Indo European writer Tjalie Robinson used it as a written language.
One didn’t have to be Indo European to pick it up. The novelist Johan Fabricius who was born in Bandung from fully Dutch parents and left the Indies when he was 14 later made quite a few recordings in it that sound to me amazingly authentic.
Here is one of them with the story of Bluebeard:
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ET says:
Although the Indonesian vocabulary is loaded with Dutch loan words, it is worth noting that, notwithstanding centuries of cross-cultural influence, the opposite isn’t true and if so mostly limited to food and culinary terms or items for which there is no Dutch equivalent (e.g. klamboe).
I wonder if the same applies between English and Hindi.
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There are some more:
kaki
piekeren (pikir)
pienter (pintar)
brani
tabeh
senang
kasar
kongsiNavy terms:
matje (macam)
katje (gaji)Afrikaans has also some Malay loanwoards:
baie (banyak)
Baaitjie (baju)
Pisan (pisang)
Sjambok (Cambuk)Incidentally the Dutch word for ‘klamboe’ is ‘muskietennet’
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I had a look for djienten, it might be equivalent to this – gemalen komijnzaad, it’s all Greek to me though, and it’s mentioned in quite a few recipes, and the book “Faded portraits” By Robert Nieuwenhuys
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Djienten? You couldn’t work it out?
It’s a wacky way of spelling jinten, which is cumin. I suppose you probably should put it in a traditional nasi goreng (intead of nothing more than great dollops of kecap manis and tomato sauce…
Ketmubar, by the way, is corriander, and still spelt the same way. The two spices together make up two-thirds of the great curry trinity: cumin, corriander and turmeric (the latter’s kunyit in Indonesian, incidentally)…
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Aprianti says:
FYI, djienten = jinten = cumin (in English).
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Oops, timdog beats me to it. 🙂
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@Aprianti – sorry! 😉
(btw all, the M and the U came out the wrong way around in ketumbar in my above post)…@Arie – that certainly is weird sounding stuff, that Petjoh. How much of it can you pick out as a Dutch speaker?
@Patung – you see why I find India so endlessly weirdly fascinating/disturbing?
@ET:
I wonder if the same applies between English and Hindi.Yes and no…
Sometimes the item described has changed a bit, rather than the word.
A juggernaut is clearly no longer a large temple-on-wheels.
A bungalow in English suburbia is’t quite the same as the Indian version.
Pyjamas were no originally meant for sleeping in.
And the drink “punch” no longer has five ingredients (punch/panj = 5; same word as the panc in pancasila btw).A few bits of pidgin Hindustani army-speak survive, pukka being almost certainly the best known of them
There are dozens more but my mind’s gone blank.
What is interesting is that in India the British used a much wider local language-sourced vocabulary (often monstrously mangled in pronunciation). Get yourself a copy of Hobson-Jobson, the big dictionary-encyclopaedia of Anglo-Indian terms, and you’ll find the examples listed above, but also hundreds of others that have fallen by the wayside… -
“Arie – that certainly is weird sounding stuff, that Petjoh. How much of it can you pick out as a Dutch speaker?”
The vocabulary is, as I said, largely Dutch – so it is easily understandable also because the sentence structure is simplified along Malay lines. There is an occasional Malay word in it but mostly a well known one.
It is for a Dutch speaker much easier to follow than some of our regional dialects or spoken Afrikaans (which, on the other hand, is easy to read).
Thanks David, Timdog and Aprianti for the clarification of “djienten” = “jintin”
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Btw, one of the funniest examples of a Dutch loan word in Indonesian that lost its original Dutch meaning but retained its derived one is the term naar boven, which means ‘upstairs’. A typical house in Holland was a two story buiding with its living quarters on the ground floor and the bedrooms upstairs. So the term ‘naar boven’ became a euphemism for certain activities that usually take place in a bedroom. As Indonesian houses consisted mostly only of a ground floor construction naar boven didn’t make any sense literally but it maintained its derived interpretation in the sense that it came to mean ‘going to mountain resorts for amorous adventures’.
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So, “naar boven” has taken almost the same path with “in het hooi”?
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@ timdog & Arie Brand
Thanks for the clarifications.Arie, Muskietennet is indeed a Dutch original equivalent for klamboe. I didn’t know that piekeren, pienter and branie are derivations of Indonesian words and not vice versa but I’ll take your word for it.
timdog, that pyjamas and bungalows originated in India is also new to me, but it can only enhance their exotic appeal.
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Aprianti
So, “naar boven” has taken almost the same path with “in het hooi”?
Indeed, except that the gender of hooi changed from the neutral het to de male or female (indehoi) but the reason for that escapes me. Maybe it didn’t matter because as far as I know gender designation has no function in Indonesian grammar.
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I didn’t know of that meaning of “naar boven” . In the ‘zaman belanda’ it was also used for going to some hill resort, from Jakarta generally to Bogor (Buitenzorg) as a weekend trip, to get a “fresh nose” (“frisse neus”).
I don’t know of any Dutch equivalent of Hobson-Jobson. Dutch loan words are, I think, often avoided on principle in the relevant dictionaries. I remember one particular example. I once wanted to buy binoculars in Bandung and checked up in Echols & Shadily what the appropriate Indonesian term was: teropong it said. However, the shopkeeper didn’t have a clue. So i tried to explain what I wanted. Ah, kijkerr … he said finally – which is the Dutch word with a rolling r. When I met Professor Teeuw I complained about this avoidance of loan words as if they were infected. He seemed to agree. However, in his 1991 Kamus Indonesia Belanda the word ‘kijker’ is also nowhere to be found. He just gives teropong.
Perhaps that shopkeeper was an exception.
I remember one occasion when Indonesian helped me out in Spain. I wanted to buy butter and tried out the English term – no success. I didn’t get any response to the French and German terms either. In despair I finally tried ‘mantega’. Ah, mantequilya they said. If I am not mistaken ‘mantega’ is the Portuguese term. Portuguese was, of course, also for a long time a lingua franca in the Archipelago. My wife calls it ‘mantika’ in Visayan.
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I didn’t know of that meaning of “naar boven” .
It’s mentioned in Echols & Shadily.
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I love the term indehoi… Indonesians writing it these days quite often semi-anglicise it, making it “in the hoy”, which just makes it even saucier and sillier…
Is piekeren from pikiran, as in “thought”? If so, then it’s a double loan. Pikir is an Arabic loan (with the F turned to a P, as if common in SE Asian loans…
I’ve got a strong suspicion berani is Sanskrit origin too, so that would be another double loan.Indonesian-Malay is almost as much of an acquisitive mongrel as English.
It’s achingly obvious, for example, though I only realised the other day that dokar, as in a little horse-drawn trap, is “dog cart”…
And this is something that has always puzzled and intrigued me: in Hindi (and therefore I presume Sanskrit) BIG and SMALL are bura and chota, which are close, but no cigar… But in Persian, of all things – Buzorg and Kuchik… Now how did that happen?
And the Portuguese too:
mentega, bendera, jendela, meja etc Things they didn’t have until the Portuguese turned up, just as they didn’t have roti until the Indians showed them how to make it (incidentally, and picking up from my Persian pondering, the word for wheat in Hindi is close(ish) to the Indonesian, but the word for wheat in Persian is identical- gandum! Sorry, I’m going off on one here…).
I think it’s highly appropriate too that the word for Friday is from Arabic, and the word for Sunday is from Portuguese…
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Hobson-Jobson is an absolute treasure house. Every time I get it out to look up something in passing, I find myself a hour later still buried deep in anecdotal examples of the usage of “rum johnny” or some such…
It was compiled by Henry Yule, who was one of the great 19th Century British Orientalists, and the best translator of Marco Polo’s Travels… -
timdog
Is piekeren from pikiran, as in “thought”?
Yes, but not exactly. Piekeren in Dutch has a pejorative connotation, in the sense of ‘worrying’, ‘brooding’, while in Indonesian it comes closer to ‘pondering’.
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while in Indonesian it comes closer to ‘pondering’.
That may well be true in general but as an anecdote where i once lived there was a garbage scavenger who was always roaming about and then suddenly for no apparent reason he would shout very loudly and angrily at no-one in particular, so the general neighbourhood consensus was that he was bonkers, I mentioned him to a satpam one day sort of asking ‘what’s up with him?’ and his reply was just “pikirannya”, ie ‘his thoughts [are disordered]’, that’s the impression I got anyway.
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empressnasigoreng says:
And the Portuguese too:
mentega, bendera, jendela, meja etc
Does the word ‘mereka’ originate from Portuguese as well? I don’t know Portuguese but the word ‘mereka’ has always stood out to me as a possible loan word.
Re Sanskrit/Hindi, doesn’t the word Bharat mean India (which is to the West of Indonesia)? Barat is probably the direction from which Indian sailors approached Indonesia.
Even further off topic, I am also really interested in the way certain Indonesian/Malay words have found themselves into Australian Aboriginal languages, eg, in Arnhem land, Belanda means white person. Would be fascinating to know whether any Aboriginal words made their way back into Indonesian languages.
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ET, my edition of the Indonesian-English part of Echols & Shadily is a rather early one – the second (1962) in fact. It doesn’t have “naar boven”, neither as one single word, nor as two separate ones. I couldn’t find it in Teeuw’s Kamus Indonesia Belanda (1991) and the Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (1989) either.
What edition of Echols & Shadily did you find it in?
I complained too early about the avoidance of the loan word kijker (binoculars). Both Echols & Shadily and Teeuw have it but in a different spelling viz. Keker. A pre-war dictionary I have (Ridderhof & Janssen) limit that particular usage to Java.
One of the most conspicuous Dutch loanwords is “indekos” (Dutch: “in de kost”) which has for me an overtone of Dutch cosiness.The Malay Kamus Dewan has it as well but with the indication IB. However, the Malays missed out on ‘indehoi’ – that probably went too far.
In looking for “mereka” I found another Dutch loan word “merek”. That too I could find in the Malay Kamus Dewan. With again the indication IB. The related word “cap” makes me think of the little packets black Van Nelle tobacco which I often took with me on patrol in Papua. The Papuans were quite fond of it and because each packet had the inscription ‘warning’ (against imitation) that particular brand was called ‘cap warning’. One further memory in relation to this: during the UNTEA-time there was an outbreak of cholera which had not been in the region before. I went on patrol with the poilice boat to find out what the situation was in the various kampungs and to stop perahu traffic in the residency Fak Fak. At one particular spot we saw canoes coming out to meet us. We thought that that was not a good sign. They shouted from afar: “Susah tuan …” and, coming nearer, “Susah tuan, tidak ada tembakau …” Happily I had armed myself with ‘cap warning’ then as well.
Coming back to “mereka”: I suspect it is of Sanskrit origin. My old Portuguese dictionary (Elwes 1942) has nothing even remotely similar. The various forms of “they” in Portuguese are: elles, ellas, estes.
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A remarkable form of Portuguese-Asian culture transfer, that even seems to have penetrated the Dutch backwoods, is krontjong (keroncong). It seems to originate with Portuguese-Asian African slaves who were liberated by the VOC after they had abjured catholicism and accepted Calvinism. They settled in Tugu near Batavia (the so-called Mardijkers). Their music is supposed to be based on Portuguese folk songs that gradually acquired the rhytmic structure of the gamelan. I read that one of the sweetest Indonesian songs I know (Nina Bobo) is also supposed to be of Portuguese origin.
When I searched for “krontgjong” on Youtube the first item that came up was a krontjong performance not in Amsterdam or the Hague but in Diepenveen, a small village in the East of the country. The dancers look therefore like pastoral Dutch clots rather than agile Asians.
Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99jOB8E1zzI
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David
his reply was just “pikirannya”, ie ‘his thoughts [are disordered]‘, that’s the impression I got anyway.
You are right, pikiran is also used in the broader sense of ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’, even ‘opinion’. This is one example of the fuzziness of the Indonesian vocabulary that I mentioned before.
Arie Brand
What edition of Echols & Shadily did you find it in?
Mine is the 3rd edition, printed in 1998.
they settled in Tugu near Batavia (the so-called Mardijkers).
which itself is a Dutch corruption of the Indonesian word merdeka meaning ‘free’ or ‘liberated’.
Their music is supposed to be based on Portuguese folk songs that gradually acquired the rhytmic structure of the gamelan.
and also got a touch of the Dutch smartlap (tear-jerker) genre.
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“also got a touch of the Dutch smartlap (tear-jerker) genre.”
Quite possible but I must confess I rather like it.
Mardijkers derived from ‘merdeka’ – I never thought of that. Amazing that that word which seemed, when it was on everybody’s lips, of recent coinage already had a 17thC. application.
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Lairedion says:
Interesting stuff.
Aesthetically I find standard Indonesian (baku) a dread-boring language. Paradoxically well-trained bules are the best in baku as Indonesians use their own language/dialect in day-to-day conversations and very few can hide this when forced to switch over to standard Indonesian.
Must admit I’m not an avid user of Indonesian. Back home it’s mainly Priangan Sundanese with some Dutch and a few words of modern Indonesian I tend to pick up from my younger relatives.
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Lairedion
Aesthetically I find standard Indonesian (baku) a dread-boring language.
I’m not going to contradict. Unfortunately for bule its the only practical choice if one wants to learn to communicate with local people over great distances. It is also the only idiom for which books, newspapers, periodicals and language courses on different levels of advancement exist. I have tried to learn Balinese but gave up, firstly because no written courses exist beyond SD level, secondly because I don’t fit in the local social stratifications but am more or less a pendatang like Indonesians from other islands, and last but not least because no one bothers to let me practise because they are all aware I already speak Bahasa Indonesia. As a result my daily conversations are made into something of a bahasa gado-gado consisting of colloquial Indonesian interspersed with Balinese words I picked up here and there. Mula keto (memang begitu).
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No need for excuses, ET.
It’s just a boring language but since it’s the national language and indeed for practical reasons we must learn it and, in my case, maintain it. But I can’t be bothered with baku, I’ll stick with whatever dynamic locale variant reaches me from Jakarta, Bandung and Manado.
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Reading one of my previous posts it occurs to me that that tobacco hungry Papuan probably said “Tembakau tidak ada” rather than the bit of ungrammatical text I gave him.
Lairedion, perhaps you find Indonesian dull because it is to most Indonesians a second language rather than their mother tongue.
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Although in sheer numbers it was and is the most widely spoken, it wouldn’t simply have been possible to make Javanese the national idiom and cultural binding agent because the language isn’t a ‘neutral’ one. As you know there are at least three levels of speech – ngoko, madya dan kromo – based on social stratification, not a very useful quality if your aim is to forge unity against a common enemy. This is why the nationalistic movement in the 20ies had chosen the more egalitarian and geographically widely used Bahasa Melayu spoken in Riau for their common idiom, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda.
I never had an opportunity to go lihat-lihat in Jakarta’s Gramedia bookstores, but the ones here in Bali, except for the posh illustrated coffee table decorations and the kind of blockbusters you mentioned, seem poorly stuffed with quality literature from abroad and if their translations would be of the same standard as the subtitles on DVD-movies they wouldn’t be worth the paper they’re printed on.