#1: Why Indonesia in English?
The world's fourth largest country by population doesn't get the level of coverage that it should get, and that it deserves to get
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In today’s edition I’ll start to the answer the question of why this Substack is needed. I’ll discuss the my interest in Indonesia, why Indonesia is rarely covered in the West, and why it should be. Also you’ll find comment on what kind of topics you’ll find in this newsletter going forward, some of the key themes I’ll be covering.
Why Indonesia in english?
I first visited Indonesia more than ten years. I was impressed, especially by the scale of the city. It was a city that quickly captured my interest. Of course, Jakarta has its problems. Poverty, pollution, traffic congestion, and many other challenges that are standard in fast developing cities around the world. But the one thing that stands out about Jakarta, from a western viewpoint, is that despite being a mega-city with an energy and dynamism not seen in many other parts of the world, it’s a city that’s rarely spoken about outside of Asia.
Interestingly, compared to other capital cities in South East Asia, such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, or Bangkok, you see very few foreigners in Jakarta. Kuala Lumpur has a high proportion of toursts, and especially Chinese tourists. Singapore is a real international melting pot. This is a generalisation, but from my experience in Jakarta, it’s possible to go a day or two without hearing non-Indonesian languages or seeing tourists, except for the historic parts of Kota Tua (old town).
By some measures Jakarta will be the world’s most populous city by 2030, it’s population will reach 35.6 million, and it’ll overtake Tokyo. At the same time, Jakarta is sinking, and the capital city will move to a Nusantara in East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. The new capital is more than a two hour flight from Jakarta.
It’s not just Jakarta that the world is seemingly unfamilar with. Indonesia is a whole is a relatively unknown country. For instance, how many people know that Indonesia’s most populous island Java, has a population of over 150 million people? It’s the most populated island in the world, with a population 50% larger than Japan’s largest island (Honshu), and more than double the population of the entire United Kingdom.
What about Bali you may be thinking? We’ll come onto Bali soon. But to illustrate the point, that Indonesia is largely unknown in the West, I’d like to reference a passage from Revolusi, Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David Van Reybrouck:
Indonesia [is the] quiet giant you rarely if ever hear about outside Southeast Asia. It’s a very peculiar thing, really – in population, it’s the world’s fourth-largest country after China, India and the United States, which are all in the news constantly. It has the largest Muslim community on earth. Its economy is Southeast Asia’s biggest, and it supplies large parts of the world with palm oil, rubber and tin. But the international community just doesn’t seem interested. It’s been that way for years. In a quality bookshop in Paris, Beijing or New York, it’s easier to find books about Myanmar, Afghanistan, Korea and even Armenia (countries with tens of millions of inhabitants or fewer) than Indonesia with its population of 268 million. One out of every twenty-seven humans is Indonesian, but the rest of the world would have a hard time naming even one of the country’s inhabitants..
It’s hard to disagree with any of this. When I look in bookshops in London, books about Indonesia are few and far between, and the ones you do find are often long sweeping histories rather than anything specific. It seems publishers are not interested in books about Indonesia, at least not in English. Partly, this is likely related to colonialism. In the UK we tend to have a greater interest in countries or regions where we had a colonial footprint, and from which we have immigrant communities.
Many of the large news organisations in the UK and US, don’t have any full time correspondents in Indonesia, which is surprising given its population and geographic location in the heart of Asia. Yet, other parts of the world, which are much smaller in terms of population get much more coverage. At times there may be reasons that other part of the world get the level of courage that they do. It may reflect the geopolitics and the human impact - see the Middle East - but did the Indonesian election earlier this year get even 1%, or even 0.1% of the coverage that the US election has received in the UK? Of course not.
(Note: The UK did control Java island for a time period, Sir Stamford Raffles captured the island from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars, but it was returned some years later. British interest then turned to the areas which we know today as Singpore and Malaysia. But this period in British history has largely been forgotten, and Indonesia is seen as a Dutch colonial endeavour - any British links have been long forgotten.)
At this point it’s worth making a comment about Bali. Many foreigners visit Bali for vacation, and in the past years it’s become a key destination for digital nomads. Sometimes I wonder how many of the foreign tourists that goto Bali even know that it’s part of Indonesia. I’ve seen business figures talk about Bali as if it’s its own state, rather than one of the thousands of islands of Indonesia. Yes it’s quite different in many ways to the rest of the country, being majority Hindu not Muslim, and also having an economy focused mainly on tourism. Many visitors compartmentalise their experience of Bali as something seperate to the wider nation of Indonesia. For Bali’s locals, alongside the happy holiday makers, there’s a dark side to Bali, captured in this recent ABC documentary titled Is Instagram ruining #Bali.
It’s useful to reference once more Revolusi, Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David Van Reybrouck. It’s only from reading this book that I got an understanding of the history of Bali. Unlike the island of Java, which came under full Dutch control in the early 19th century, the Dutch didn’t fully colonise the island of Bali until 1908. I wonder how many visitors to Bali are aware of the depth of the history, and what the island went through not too long ago.
More horrifying still were the scenes in Bali, where in 1906 and 1908 the complete courts of a number of principalities chose to commit collective suicide (puputan). Hundreds of men, women and even children walked straight towards the Dutch rifles and artillery. They were dressed in traditional white garments and carried only staffs, spears and the finely wrought traditional daggers called krises. ‘The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire went on, the fighting grew fiercer, people fell on top of each other and more and more blood flowed.’ A pregnant Balinese woman was one of the few who lived to tell the tale. ‘Persisting in passionate fury, men and women advanced, standing up for the truth without fear, to protect their country of birth, willing to lay down their lives.’ The KNIL [Dutch] soldiers couldn’t believe their eyes: women hurled their jewellery at them mockingly, courtiers stabbed themselves with their daggers and died, men were mown down by cannons. The wounded were put out of their misery by their relatives, who were killed in turn by the Dutch bullets. Then the colonial army plundered the corpses. In the puputan of 1906, an estimated 3,000 people died. ‘The battlefield was completely silent, aside from the rasp of dying breath and the cries for help heard from among the bodies.’
This is not a point about colonialism. Rather, I wanted to highlight, that Indonesia has a rich complex history which is rarely understood outside of the region. Even if you don’t care about history, Indonesia has other layers of intricacy, and complexity, whether it’s in religion, ethnic groups, traditions, food, language, natural landscapes. It’s a country that has something to offer everyone, although they may not know it yet!
In this Substack various topics will be covered with news and commentary, I want this newsletter to be a source of what’s going on in Indonesia in terms of current events, but also open to exporing wider topics of interest. In starting this Substack I was inspired by seeing excellent Substacks about China (Sinocism, Baiguan, Following The Yuan), Japan (Observing Japan), Vietnam (Vietnam Weekly), but there isn’t enough being written about Indonesia in the English language, whether on Substack or anywhere else.
If you have any suggestions, recommendations, or collaboration ideas please reach out.
Thanks for reading!
I'm Indonesian and looking forward to your writings!
Can't wait to read about the Indonesian Football Team