Preaching Java to the Javanese

Having lived in Jakarta for one-and-a-half years I've come to appreciate the ethnic and cultural diversity that's present in Indonesia. When I first started travelling here during the mid-nineties I, and probably like many other Malaysians assumed that Indonesians are one homogeneous lot and not very different from the Malays in Malaysia.

That was during the start of the Internet boom and being employed by the company that invented the Java programming language, I used to do a lot of presentations and demos here in Jakarta evangelizing its many virtues.

Chatting with my customers during one of those coffee-break sessions, I was perplexed when one of them told me that she was planning to go home to Java during the weekends. Isn't Jakarta located on the island of Java? Aren't all Indonesians living on the island of Java, Javanese?

I was soon to realise being knowledgeable about the Java programming language doesn't automatically make me an expert on the Javanese.

To Indonesians, Javanese refers specifically to people from Central and East Java, excluding Jakarta. People born and bred in the Jakarta area are called Betawi. Jakarta is not Java. Even the people from West Java, though technically Javanese, makes a distinction of themselves from the Javanese of Central and East Java, preferring to call themselves Sundanese. And mind you, these are not merely geographical distinctions, these different groups actually have their own unique languages and cultures.

Malaysians who know Melayu might be able to understand a bit of the Bahasa Indonesia spoken by the majority of the people here. In Jakarta, the language spoken by the local Betawi people can be loosely considered to be representative of Bahasa Indonesia, even though the Betawi dialect itself contains many Chinese (especially Hokkien), Portuguese and Dutch influences. Malaysians will be surprised that certain words which we normally consider bahasa pasar like the Hokkien gue and lu, are widely used here and even considered hip - quite like the use of I and you instead of saya and awak by the younger generation of Malay people in Malaysia.

The Sundanese people have their own distinct language, and one can find it being spoken quite widely in places like Bandung, the center of Sundanese culture. Malaysians might be able understand 70 percent the Betawi dialect if it is spoken slowly, but don't even bother to try with the Sundanese language. Or Javanese for that matter.

The Javanese language is the most intricate of all. They even have their own writing script - which looks rather similar to Sanskrit. The language is subtle, aristocratic and full of nuances. The Javanese are considered the most cultured of the ethic groups in Indonesia. Though most Javanese are Muslims, theirs is a culture steeped in mysticism with heavy Hindu influences.

I have not even mentioned yet the subtle distinctions between Javanese from Central Java (based mostly in Jogjakarta and Solo) and East Java (based in Surabaya). Nor have I even started talking about ethnic groups from the other islands like the Bataks, Minangkabaus, Acehnese (Sumatra); Bugis and Torajans (Sulawesi); Balinese (Bali) and Ambonese (Ambon).

The book, A Fragile Nation - Indonesia in Crisis written by Lee Khoon Choy, the former Singaporean ambasssador to Indonesia during Lee Kuan Yew's era, helped me a lot in understanding the diversity of culture in Indonesia.

Nowadays I could sometimes be able to tell apart a Javanese from a Sundanese when most Malaysians would not even be able to distinguish the Indonesian Chinese from the native Indonesians. I still have a lot to learn, but I guess I have come a long way since those days of mine preaching the Java programming language to the Javanese.