why after over 300 years of dutch rule, contrary to other former colonies, Indonesia neither has significant leftovers of dutch culture nor is the dutch language spoken anywhere.
In: 9430
There are a couple of important points here. First, the Dutch were expelled through a brutal war by the people who lived in Indonesia, and anyone who was allies with the Dutch (e.g. those Indonesians with mixed heritage, often referred to as Indos) were sent packing with them. The bad blood between the Dutch and the Indonesians was reason enough to make sure that there would be little to no remnants of Dutch culture left, and the Dutch speaking Indonesian population was essentially pushed out of Indonesia. They mostly reside in the Netherlands now.
But actually, asking why Indonesia in general doesn’t have a lot of Dutch culture is a much more interesting question than one might think at a glance. This is due to the fact that the way that the Dutch were racist is somewhat different than how other colonial nations were racist.
See, Indonesia as a country ‘shouldn’t exist’. I say that, because the nation is formed through hundreds of small islands haphazardly thrown together, with many different native populations coming together to form a unity. This unity did not occur naturally, because most of these populations were so different from one another. So to foster unity, you need a tool. The tool in this case was education.
But while there were most definitely schools that taught in Dutch, most schools were teaching in Malay, as the Dutch had decided that this should be the de facto language. This was partially due to racism – ‘Inlanders could never learn our sophisticated language and culture’ – but also because the language was already ‘natively’ found within that region with a couple of groups that had joined this new ragtag group of islands to form Indonesia.
Another interesting point is that the Dutch didn’t block anyone from entering high level positions. In other colonies it was only possible for a select group of people to get into high ranking positions. The Vietnamese in French Cambodia for example were the only group to attain prominent positions, and thus they saw the people from Laos and Cambodia as ‘lesser’ and wanted their independence from them.
But in Indonesia, this was not the case. Everyone, no matter where you were from, could make it to Java. The Dutch actually succeeded in fostering a sense of Indonesian identity (where again: it’s not supposed to exist) and were very clear in keeping a good separation between The Netherlands and its people versus Indonesia and its people.
So to roughly bring it back to your question, the reason that there is almost no influence to be seen from the Netherlands is because that was by design. Partially because the Dutch believed that the Indonesians would not be able to adapt, and partially because the country by and large should not exist, and so to make it prosper and thrive, they needed to push an identity on the Indonesians, to make them believe they were a unity.
For more reading on this subject, I highly recommend at least reading the following books/articles to get an idea of what had happened, and if you’re interested then the sources in both pieces will help you on your way.
* Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, 3rd edition (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 113-133.
* David Henley, “The origins of Southeast Asian nations: a question of timing”, in John Breuilly (ed.), The Oxford handbook of the history of nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 263-286.
Latest Answers