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.
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I grew up in Indonesia and I was taught that the reason British influences are more apparent in India than Dutch influences in Indonesia is that the Dutch didn’t appoint locals to administrative positions. The Dutch had Dutch people working in all administrative levels even the low ones.
What I mean is the British appointed Indians to many different positions and made them civil servants/involved in municipal work etc. That was why when the Dutch left, the Indonesians had to learn a lot from scratch and did not prosper as well as India did when the British left.
That’s what I was taught, not sure if it’s true but it sounds feasible to me.
A Dutch professor once made a good point nobody seems to have mentioned yet. In Indonesia it was the practice that the peasants spoke a different language than the rulers. So when the Dutch East India Company took over, they where advised that they shouldn’t teach the locals their language otherwise they would see the new Dutch overlords as equals. The Dutch only held a relatively small portion of today’s Indonesia till the 19th century, when they expanded it to the rest of the islands. Only after that, in the late 19th and 20th century the Dutch were teaching their language to the local population, but only in small numbers and not long enough to stay a strong part of Indonesian culture. In other colonies of the Dutch the language did in fact survived in a way, bear in mind that the standardisation of Dutch only began in the 19th century and was discussed over a lot, so mainly dialects stayed. Examples are Suriname and the Caribbean islands of the former Dutch Antilles where Dutch is still spoken and South Africa where Afrikaans is a breakaway Dutch dialect. Dutch also existed in New York state until the 19th century and there are also a lot of smaller dialects who stayed around for a while in other regions of the world but eventually disappeared.
Hey a weird question I’m qualified for. My family is mixed Indonesian and Dutch but we look passably “white”. This is the primary reason why we speak Dutch. The Dutch did want to interact with the local population in Indonesia but not too much. They wanted intermediaries from mixed families, and being 1/4 Dutch got my family the job. My great grandmother spoke Dutch to the Dutch plantation owners and traders, and Her native languages to everyone else. The civil war in Indonesia was very culturally divided and very brutal, and everyone who spoke Dutch/Indonesian was essentially stuck in the middle.
My family fled to other dutch colonies as they were not accepted anywhere in the Netherlands, nor Indonesia, so we ended up in the Caribbean.
There are still parts of Jakarta that have the decaying remains of traditional Dutch houses fronted by now rubbish filled canals
My family is Dutch Indonesian. Batavia which is now Jakarta still has a lot of architectural influence from the Dutch. The Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia wasn’t the same as say the British colonies, where they essentially suppressed the local culture nationally. The Dutch and the Dutch East India Company were there to trade and make profit and a lot of outlying territories were largely independent. Hence why places like Bali don’t show any of their influence. The Dutch language was never forced on the native population, some hypothesise this also helped to enforce the ruling class of Dutch with an elite status, however the Babus or nannies were required to learn it. Still they greatly influenced things like Indonesia’s current legal system which was adopted when they declared independence, and also public infrastructure like roads and rail. Coffee was introduced by the Dutch along with other crops like tea, sugar and rubber which is still to this day one of Indonesia’s larger exports. So there is still evidence of the Dutch colonial rule, it’s just not as glaringly obvious as some other countries.
Hey OP, everyone is going on about Japan (for some reason), but you mentioned significant leftovers of Dutch culture or the _language_.
On the topic of language we _did_ leave our mark, mostly with loan words.
In Indonesia you pay belasting, in the Netherlands you pay belasting as well. In English that would be taxes.
A kakhus is a kakhuis, is a toilet ;).
Lots of words derived from Dutch. For a full list, check this [wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dutch_loanwords_in_Indonesian)
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.
We were never there to impose our culture or our religion, we were there to make money, as others have said.
Also, the decolonization process wasn’t a gentle one. People in Indonesia probably call it a liberty war, like the one the USA had. And they wouldn’t be wrong. (Which is, until this day, not a popular opinion in The Netherlands. Though if you found me a dutch historian who diasgreed, you’ve probably found one with otherwise suspect opinions)
Many of the most dutch-aligned people in the conflict came here after we lost. Amd the new Indonesian government did a fair bit of stomping out dutch influences as well. Twenty years ago, you’d have found many more dutch-speaking people there, although most of them were old by then too. Now most of them have just died off.
That’s not true. There are many Dutch words in the Indonesian language. Office and ashtray come to mind immediately. There are still classic Indonesian Dutch cultural mixes in the food scene like Rijstafel. Jakarta has preserved a lot of it’s Dutch history. I only lived there for a year but it was obvious back in the 80s.
I’ve been to Indonesia a lot, my fiancée is Indonesian, I can tell you why.
The Dutch for the most part didn’t set foot on the populated islands during most of their time there. They set up military trading outpost bases on smaller islands just off the coasts of them. They used an ethnic minority (the Indonesian/Chinese) as a middleman for trade between themselves and the natives. Essentially creating a caste system. The Dutch did business the indo chinese, the Indo Chinese did the work in the islands.
To this day, Indo Chinese are an upper class ethnic minority in Indonesia. They are less than 5% of the population, yet control 90% of its wealth. Indonesia is a majority Muslim country. 80% of Indonesians are Muslim. Yet, Indo Chinese are a catholic minority.
There is plenty of Dutch culture. It’s just maintained within Indo-Chinese gated neighborhoods and communities for the most part. I’ve been in them.
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