8/29/2019 Indonesia -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Indonesia
Indonesia, country
located off the coast of
TABLE OF CONTENTS
mainland Southeast
Introduction
Asia in the Indian and
Land
Paci c oceans. It is an
archipelago that lies People
across the Equator Economy
and spans a distance Government and society
Indonesia in its entirety (upper map) and the
islands of Java, Bali, Lombok, and
equivalent to one-
Cultural life
Sumbawa (lower map). eighth of Earth’s
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. History
circumference. Its
islands can be
grouped into the
Greater Sunda Islands of Sumatra (Sumatera), Java
(Jawa), the southern extent of Borneo (Kalimantan),
and Celebes (Sulawesi); the Lesser Sunda Islands
(Nusa Tenggara) of Bali and a chain of islands that
runs eastward through Timor; the Moluccas (Maluku)
between Celebes and the island of New Guinea; and
Mount Bromo (foreground) and Mount
Semeru (background), two active volcanoes the western extent of New Guinea (generally known
in eastern Java, Indonesia. as Papua). The capital, Jakarta, is located near the
© Todikromo/iStock.com northwestern coast of Java. In the early 21st century
Indonesia was the most populous country in
Southeast Asia and the fourth most populous in the world.

Indonesia was formerly known as the Dutch East

Indies (or Netherlands East Indies). Although
Indonesia did not become the country’s of cial name
until the time of independence, the name was used
as early as 1884 by a German geographer; it is thought
to derive from the Greek indos, meaning “India,” and
nesos, meaning “island.” After a period of occupation
by the Japanese (1942–45) during World War II,
Indonesia declared its independence from the
Netherlands in 1945. Its struggle for independence,
Indonesia
however, continued until 1949, when the Dutch
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
of cially recognized Indonesian sovereignty. It was
not until the United Nations (UN) acknowledged the
western segment of New Guinea as part of Indonesia in 1969 that the country took on its
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present form. The former Portuguese territory of East Timor (Timor-Leste) was
incorporated into Indonesia in 1976. Following a UN-organized referendum in 1999,
however, East Timor declared its independence and became fully sovereign in 2002.

The Indonesian archipelago represents one of the most unusual areas in the world: it
encompasses a major juncture of Earth’s tectonic plates, spans two faunal realms, and has
for millennia served as a nexus of the peoples and cultures of Oceania and mainland Asia.
These factors have created a highly diverse environment and society that sometimes
seem united only by susceptibility to seismic and volcanic activity, close proximity to the
sea, and a moist, tropical climate. Nevertheless, a centralized government and a common
language have provided Indonesia with some sense of unity. Furthermore, in keeping
with its role as an economic and cultural crossroads, the country is active in numerous
international trade and security organizations, such as ASEAN, OPEC, and the UN.

Land
Indonesia is the largest country in Southeast Asia,
with a maximum dimension from east to west of
about 3,200 miles (5,100 km) and an extent from
north to south of 1,100 miles (1,800 km). It shares a
border with Malaysia in the northern part of Borneo
Bromo, Mount and with Papua New Guinea in the centre of New
Mount Bromo, an active volcano in eastern Guinea. Indonesia is composed of some 17,500 islands,
Java, Indonesia. of which more than 7,000 are uninhabited. Almost
© Valery Shanin/Fotolia.com
three-fourths of Indonesia’s area is embraced by
Sumatra, Kalimantan, and western New Guinea;
Celebes, Java, and the Moluccas account for most of the country’s remaining area.

Relief

The major Indonesian islands are characterized by densely forested volcanic mountains in
the interior that slope downward to coastal plains covered by thick alluvial swamps that,
in turn, dissolve into shallow seas and coral reefs. Beneath this surface the unique and
complex physical structure of Indonesia encompasses the junction of three major
sections of the Earth’s crust and involves a complicated series of shelves, volcanic
mountain chains, and deep-sea trenches. The island of Borneo and the island arc that
includes Sumatra, Java, Bali, and the Lesser Sunda chain sit on the Sunda Shelf, a
southward extension of the continental mass of Asia. The shelf is bounded on the south
and west by deep-sea trenches, such as the Java Trench (about 24,440 feet [7,450 metres]
deep at its lowest point), which form the true continental boundary. New Guinea and its
adjacent islands, possibly including the island of Halmahera, sit on the Sahul Shelf, which
is a northwestern extension of the Australian continental mass; the shelf is bounded to

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the northeast by a series of oceanic troughs and to the northwest by troughs, a chain of
coral reefs, and a series of submarine ridges. The third major unit of the Earth’s crust in
Indonesia is an extension of the belt of mountains that forms Japan and the Philippines;
the mountains run southward between Borneo and New Guinea and include a series of
volcanoes and deep-sea trenches on and around Celebes and the Moluccas.

The relation between these three landmasses is not

clearly understood. The present land-sea formations
are somewhat misleading because the seas that lie
on the Sunda and Sahul shelves are shallow and of
geologically recent origin; they rest on the continental
mass rather than on a true ocean oor. The Sunda
Shelf in the vicinity of the Java Sea has relatively low
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. relief, contains several coral reefs, and is not volcanic.
The mountain system that stretches along the South
China and Celebes seas of this shelf and that marks the outer edge of the continental
mass of Asia, however, is an area of strong relief and is one of the most active volcanic
zones in the world.

The outer (southern) side of the chain of islands from Sumatra through Java and the
Lesser Sundas forms the leading edge of the Southeast Asian landmass. It is characterized
by active volcanoes, bounded to the south and west by a series of deep-sea trenches. On
the inner (northern) side of the islands the volcanic mountains grade into swamps,
lowlands, and the shallow Java Sea. This sheltered sea was formed at the close of the
Pleistocene Epoch (about 12,000 years ago), and there is evidence of former land bridges,
which facilitated the migration of plants and animals from the Asian continent.

Islands of the Sunda Shelf

Borneo is the third largest island in the world and the

main island on the Sunda Shelf. Mount Kinabalu, the
highest peak in the Southeast Asian archipelago, is
not actually in Indonesia. It rises to 13,455 feet (4,101
metres) in the northeastern corner of the island, in
the Malaysian state of Sabah. Otherwise, the island’s
Mount Agung volcano overlooking rice
paddies in northeastern Bali, Indonesia.
relief seldom exceeds an elevation of 5,600 feet (1,700
©George Love/Photo Researchers metres), and most of the island lies below 1,000 feet
(300 metres). Structural trends are not as well-de ned
as on adjacent islands, although a broad mountain system (which includes Mount
Kinabalu) runs roughly from northeast to southwest. Kalimantan, which constitutes about
three-fourths of the island, consists mostly of undulating lowlands, with alluvial swamps
near the coast and forest-covered mountains in the deep interior.

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The Riau archipelago lies to the east of Sumatra, near the southern outlet of the Strait of
Malacca. These islands have a granite core and can be considered a physical extension of
the Malay Peninsula. With the exception of some highlands in the western and southern
regions, the islands of the Riau group generally consist of low-lying swampy terrain.

Sumatra spans the Equator, stretching from northwest to southeast for more than 1,000
miles (1,600 km), with a maximum width (including offshore islands) of some 325 miles
(525 km). It is anked on its outer (western) edge by a string of nonvolcanic islands,
including Simeulue, Nias, and the Mentawai group, none of which is densely populated.
The Sumatran mainland divides into four main physical regions: the narrow coastal plain
along the west; the Barisan Mountains, which extend the length of the island close to its
western edge and include a number of active volcanoes; an inner nonvolcanic zone of low
hills grading down toward the stable platform of the Asian mainland; and the broad
alluvial lowland, lying no more than 100 feet (30 metres) above sea level, that constitutes
the eastern half of the island. Much of the eastern lowland is a swampy forest that is
dif cult to penetrate.

Java is some 660 miles (1,060 km) long and has a maximum width of about 125 miles (200
km). Its physical divisions are not as distinct as those of Sumatra, because the continental
shelf drops sharply to the Indian Ocean in the southern part of the island. Java can be
divided into ve latitudinal physiographic regions. The rst region, a series of limestone
platforms, extends along the southern coast; in some areas the platforms form an eroded
karst region (i.e., marked by sinks interspersed with abrupt ridges, irregular rocks, caverns,
and underground streams) that makes travel and habitation dif cult. A mountain belt just
to the north, in the western segment of the island, forms the second region; it is partially
composed of sediments derived from eroded volcanoes and includes a number of heavily
cultivated alluvial basins, especially around the cities of Bandung and Garut. The belt of
volcanoes that runs through the centre of the island constitutes the third region; it
contains some 50 active cones and nearly 20 volcanoes that have erupted since the turn
of the 20th century. A northern alluvial belt, the fourth region, spreads across the Sunda
Shelf toward the sea and is extended by delta formations, particularly during volcanic
activity. There are deep inland extensions of this alluvial region, which in central Java cut
through to the southern coast. Finally, there is a second limestone platform area along the
northern coast of Madura (an island off the northeastern coast of Java) and the adjacent
section of eastern Java.

The many islands of the Lesser Sundas to the east of Java are much smaller, less densely
populated, and less developed than Java. The physiography of Bali and Lombok is similar
to that of eastern Java. The Lesser Sunda Islands continue through Sumbawa and Flores,
narrowing progressively until they appear on a map as a spine of volcanic islands that
loops northeast into the Banda Islands. The same volcanic system reappears in northern

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Celebes. Sumba and Timor form an outer (southern) fringe of nonvolcanic islands that
resembles the chain off the western edge of the Sunda Shelf near Sumatra.

Islands of the Sahul Shelf

The islands of the Sahul Shelf appear to have a physiographic structure similar to those of
the Sunda Shelf. They include the northern Moluccas and New Guinea. The western
portion of New Guinea consists of the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua
(Papua Barat), which together account for more than one- fth of the total area of
Indonesia but are home to only a tiny percentage of the country’s population. The two
provinces cover a remote region with a spectacular and varied landscape. Mangrove
swamps seal much of the southern and western coastline, while the Maoke Mountains—
including Jaya Peak, which at 16,024 feet (4,884 metres) is the highest point in Indonesia
—form a natural barrier across the central area. There is a narrow coastal plain in the
north. Much of the region is heavily forested.

Celebes and the Moluccas

Celebes shows some evidence of being squeezed between the con icting forces of the
more stable surrounding masses of the Sunda and Sahul shelves. Its complex shape
somewhat resembles a capital K, with an extremely long peninsula running northeast
from its north-south backbone. There are, therefore, three large gulfs: Tomini (or
Gorontalo) to the north, Tolo to the east, and Bone to the south. The coastline is long in
relation to the size of the island. The land consists of ranges of mountains cut by deep rift
valleys, many of which contain lakes. The island is fringed by coral reefs and is bordered by
oceanic troughs in the south. Its northeastern arm, the Minahasa Peninsula, is volcanic
and structurally different from the rest of the island, which is composed of a complex of
igneous and metamorphic rocks.

The Moluccas consist of a group of roughly 1,000 islands with a combined area that is
about two-thirds the size of Java. Halmahera Island is the largest of the group, followed by
Ceram and Buru. The Moluccas lie in the same geologically unstable zone as Celebes,
although the northern islands are associated more with the Sahul Shelf. Halmahera
Island, in the north, is volcanic, as are the islands of the Banda Sea, which are frequently
rocked by earthquakes. Most of the northern and central Moluccas have dense vegetation
and rugged mountainous interiors where elevations often exceed 3,000 feet (900 metres).
Once commonly known as the “Spice Islands,” the Moluccas—especially Ternate, Tidore,
Ambon, and Banda Besar—were a source of cloves, nutmeg, and mace, particularly during
the 16th and 17th centuries.

Volcanoes

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There are over 100 active volcanoes in Indonesia and hundreds more that are considered
extinct. They run in a crescent-shaped line along the outer margin of the country, through
Sumatra and Java as far as Flores, then north through the Banda Sea to a junction with
the volcanoes of northern Celebes. Volcanic eruptions are by no means uncommon.
Mount Merapi, which rises to 9,551 feet (2,911 metres) near Yogyakarta (Jogjakarta) in
central Java, erupts frequently—often causing extensive destruction to roads, elds, and
villages but always greatly bene ting the soil. Mount Kelud (5,679 feet [1,731 metres]), near
Kediri in eastern Java, can be particularly devastating, because the water in its large crater
lake is thrown out during eruption, causing great mud ows that rush down into the plains
and sweep away all that is before them.

Perhaps the best-known volcano is Krakatoa

(Krakatau), situated in the Sunda Strait between
Sumatra and Java, which erupted disastrously in 1883.
All life on the surrounding island group was
destroyed. The eruptions caused tidal waves
throughout Southeast Asia, killing tens of thousands
of people, and ash clouds that circled the Earth
Mount Merapi
decreased solar radiation and produced spectacular
Eruption of Mount Merapi, Central Java, sunsets for more than a year. Another major incident
Indonesia, May 2006.
occurred in 1963, when Mount Agung on Bali erupted
© Weda—EPA/REX/Shutterstock.com
violently after having been dormant for more than 140
years. In 2006 the drilling of an exploratory petroleum
well triggered the eruption of an unusual mud
volcano in a heavily populated region of eastern Java.
Hot mud owed voluminously from the well for the
next several years, ultimately engul ng dozens of
villages, obstructing roads and railways, and
displacing tens of thousands of residents. In 2010
Mount Sinabung, in northern Sumatra, erupted after
more than 400 years of dormancy, forcing tens of
thousands to evacuate their homes.

Drainage

Because of its insularity, Indonesia has no large rivers

Colour lithograph of the eruption of Krakatoa comparable to those on the Asian mainland.
(Krakatau) volcano, Indonesia, 1883; from
Indonesian rivers generally are relatively short and
the Royal Society, The Eruption of Krakatoa
and Subsequent Phenomena (1888).
ow from interior mountains to the sea. The Kapuas
Hulton Archive/Getty Images (710 miles [1,140 km] long), Barito (560 miles [900 km]),
and Mahakam (480 miles [770 km]) rivers of
Kalimantan are among the longest, but shifting

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sandbars across their mouths reduce their

importance for large-vessel transportation. Western
New Guinea, most of which receives heavy rainfall, is
drained by a number of large rivers, including the
Baliem, the Mamberamo, and the Digul.

There are a number of notable lakes on Sumatra, the

most famous of which is Lake Toba, which lies in the
north at an elevation of about 3,000 feet (900 metres)
Eruption of Krakatoa (Krakatau) volcano, above sea level and covers some 440 square miles
southwestern Indonesia, 1960.
(1,140 square km). Celebes also has several large, deep
Courtesy of the Volcanological Survey of
lakes, including Lakes Towuti and Matama in the
Indonesia; photograph, D. Hadikusumo
southern part of the island and Lake Poso in the
centre.

The seas surrounding Indonesia must also be viewed

as important hydrologic features that serve both as
channels of communication and as barriers
protecting distinctive cultural and environmental
features of the islands. The shallow seas between
Telen River many of the islands are a signi cant source of
Telen River, East Kalimantan, Indonesia. offshore petroleum, natural gas, minerals, and food.
© Gini Gorlinski
Soils

Indonesia illustrates the relation between climate and source rock in the formation of
soils. The rocks on Java are primarily andesitic volcanics (dark gray rocks consisting
essentially of the minerals oligoclase or feldspar), while rhyolites (the acidic lava form of
granite) are dominant on Sumatra, granites in the Riau archipelago, granites and
sediments in Kalimantan, and sediments in western New Guinea. The resulting soils in
humid regions are mainly lateritic (containing iron oxides and aluminum hydroxide) and
of varying fertility depending on the source rock; they include heavy black or gray-black
margalite soils and limestone soils. Black soils occur in regions with a distinct dry season.

Among the most fertile soils are the ando soils, which developed on the andesitic volcanic
sediments of the northeastern coast of Sumatra. Highly fertile soils, also derived from or
enriched by basic andesitic volcanic material, occur on Java and Celebes as well. Valuable
volcanic ash is transported by wind and deposited as a layer of homogeneous, fresh
inorganic material over wide areas; it is also carried as suspended material in streams and
irrigation channels. Minerals that are leached from the soil are replaced by alluvial
deposition from rivers, as in some parts of Kalimantan, or by deposition in impounded
water or rice terraces.

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In general, the perpetual high temperatures and heavy precipitation throughout much of
Indonesia have caused rapid erosion and deep chemical weathering and leaching, which
usually produce impoverished soil. In areas covered with tropical rainforests, such as
Kalimantan, the soils are protected by the forest cycle; as plants die, they decompose
rapidly, releasing nutrients that are reabsorbed by new vegetation growth. Although such
soils support a luxuriant growth, they cannot support a large agricultural population,
because clearing the forest breaks the cycle and can lead to accelerated soil deterioration.

Climate

The climate of Indonesia is determined partly by its island structure and its position
astride the Equator, which assure high, even temperatures. In addition, its location
between the two landmasses of Asia and Australia exposes it to seasonal patterns of
precipitation brought by monsoon winds.

Regional temperature variation is a function of elevation rather than latitude.

Temperatures are highest along the coast, where mean annual readings range from the
mid-70s to the upper 80s °F (low 20s to low 30s °C). Regions above 2,000 feet (600 metres)
are signi cantly cooler, but only the Maoke Mountains of Papua are high enough to
receive snow. The diurnal difference of temperature in Jakarta is at least ve times as
great as the difference between the high and low temperatures of January and July; on an
exceptionally hot day in Jakarta the temperature may reach nearly 100 °F (38 °C), while on
an especially cool one it may drop to about 65 °F (18 °C).

Precipitation is more varied in extremes and distribution. Most of Indonesia receives heavy
rainfall throughout the year, the greatest amounts occurring from December to March.
From central Java eastward toward Australia, however, the dry season (June to October) is
progressively more pronounced; the islands of Timor and Sumba receive little rain during
these months. The highest amount of precipitation occurs in the mountainous regions of
Sumatra, Kalimantan, Celebes, and western New Guinea, where annual rainfall totals more
than 120 inches (3,000 mm). The rest of Kalimantan, Sumatra, western New Guinea,
western and central Java, and much of Celebes and the Moluccas average at least 80
inches (2,000 mm) of rainfall per year. Eastern Java, Bali, southern and central Celebes,
and Timor generally receive between 60 and 80 inches (1,500 and 2,000 mm), while the
Lesser Sunda Islands that are closest to Australia get only 40 to 60 inches (1,000 to 1,500
mm).

The absolute daily maximum of precipitation can be extremely high, with a number of
stations recording between 20 and 28 inches (500 and 700 mm). Local variations, caused
in large part by geographic features, are great. For example, Jakarta, which is near sea
level, has a mean annual rainfall of 70 inches (1,750 mm), while just 30 miles (50 km) to the

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south, at an elevation of about 790 feet (240 metres), Bogor records nearly 170 inches
(4,300 mm).

Seasonal variations are caused by monsoonal Asian air drifts and the convergence of
tropical air masses from both north and south of the Equator along an intertropical front
of low pressure. The monsoon pattern in any given part of the archipelago depends on
location either north or south of the Equator, proximity to Australia or mainland Asia, and
the position of the intertropical front. During December, January, and February, the west
monsoon from the Asian mainland brings heavy rain to southern Sumatra, Java, and the
Lesser Sunda Islands. In June, July, and August, these areas are affected by the east
monsoon, which brings dry air from Australia. Only the Lesser Sunda Islands and eastern
Java have a well-developed dry season, which increases in length toward Australia. By the
time the east monsoon has crossed the Equator—becoming the southwest monsoon of
the Northern Hemisphere—its winds have become humid and a source of rain. Sumatra
and Kalimantan, which are located close to the Equator and far from Australia, have no
dry season, although precipitation tends to be slightly lower during July and August.
Strong cyclones and typhoons, which normally occur in higher latitudes, are absent in
Indonesia, but afternoon thunderstorms are common.

Plant and animal life

Indonesia’s vegetation is similar to that of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Papua New
Guinea. There are some 40,000 species of owering plants, including 5,000 species of
orchids, as well as the monster ower (Raf esia arnoldii [see Raf esiaceae]), which is the
world’s largest ower. There are more than 3,000 tree species, including durian, which
bears large, armoured, odorous yet edible fruit; sandalwood; Shorea macrophylla, which
yields illipe nuts, a fruit that contains a fat substance similar to cocoa butter; and valuable
timber varieties such as teak and ironwood. Woody rattan (supplejack) vines are abundant
in Indonesia’s forests. Thousands of plant species are exploited for economic purposes,
either directly or indirectly.

The most important vegetation type is the mixed

lowland and hill tropical rainforest, which occurs
below 5,000 feet (1,500 metres). It is characterized by a
large number of species, including high-canopied
and buttressed trees and woody, thick-stemmed
lianas (climbing plants). Epiphytes (plants that derive
nourishment from the air and usually live on another
plant) such as orchids and ferns, saprophytes (plants
that live on dead or decaying matter), and parasites
Durian fruit (Durio zibethinus). are well developed. Above 5,000 feet (1,500 metres)
© Hader Glang/Shutterstock.com this forest gives way to temperate upland forest

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dominated by oak, laurel, tea, and magnolia species. Another typical feature of Indonesian
vegetation is the mangrove forest, characterized by the formation of stilt- or prop-rooted
trees, which grow only in salty or brackish water along muddy shores. Mangrove swamps
are extensively developed along the shallow seas on eastern Sumatra, southern
Kalimantan, and the southeastern segment of western New Guinea.

Indonesia is located in the transitional zone between two of the world’s major faunal
regions: the Oriental of Asia in the west and the Australian of Australia and New Guinea in
the east. The boundary of these realms, called Wallace’s Line, runs between Borneo and
Celebes in the north and Bali and Lombok in the south. To the west, the Asian animal
community includes such mammals as rhinoceroses, orangutans, tapirs, tigers, and
elephants. Animals related to Australian fauna include birds such as cockatoos,
bowerbirds, and birds of paradise, as well as marsupials such as bandicoots (small
insectivorous, herbivorous marsupial mammals) and cuscuses (brightly coloured, woolly-
haired arboreal marsupials).

Many of the islands contain endemic species. Among these are such birds as the Javanese
peacock and the Sumatran drongo. A certain mountain goat, the Sumatran serow
(Capricornis sumatraensis), lives on the rugged slopes of the Barisan Mountains of
Sumatra. A unique species of proboscis monkey is endemic to Kalimantan, and the
babirusa (a large wild pig) and the tamarau (a small wild ox with nearly straight horns) can
be found only in Celebes. A giant lizard—the prehistoric Komodo dragon, which attains a
length of 12 feet (3.7 metres)—lives on two small islands, Rinca and Komodo, between
Sumbawa and Flores.

Some of these endemic species have become exceedingly rare. Most of the remaining
single-horned Javan rhinoceroses, for example, are now restricted to the Ujung Kulon
National Park on the western tip of Java. This nearly extinct species is one of the world’s
most highly protected forms of wildlife. Another such endangered species is the
orangutan, which is native to Borneo and Sumatra. Several orangutan rehabilitation
centres and programs have been established in an effort to prevent the capture and
slaughter of the animals and to train those that have been held captive to return to the
wild.

Indonesia has an enormous and varied insect life that includes many unusual species.
Examples include giant walkingsticks that can attain 8 inches (20 cm) in length, leaf
insects (walking leaves), huge atlas beetles, elegant luna moths, and beautiful birdwing
and swallowtail butter ies.

Thousands of species of sh are found in Indonesia’s inland waters, and hundreds of these
are endemic to the region. Many freshwater and marine sh are used for food, while many
others, such as small gouramis, barbs, and anemone sh (clown sh), are bred as

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ornamental aquarium sh. The unusual ying gurnard, with its oversized pectoral ns, is
common off the coasts of Sulawesi.

People
Indonesia is situated at the meeting point of two of the world’s population groups, Asians
in the west and Melanesians in the east. The great majority of Indonesians are related to
the peoples of eastern Asia, although over the centuries there also has been considerable
mixing with Arabs, Indians, and Europeans. In the eastern islands, however, most of the
people are of Melanesian origin.

The Indonesian national motto, “Bhinneka tunggal ika” (“Unity in diversity”), makes
reference to the extraordinary diversity of the Indonesian population that has emerged
from the ongoing con uence of peoples, languages, and cultures. The country includes
more than 300 different ethnic groups and more than twice as many distinct languages,
and most of the major world religions, as well as a wide range of indigenous ones, are
practiced there. Notwithstanding this diversity, most of the people are of Malay ancestry,
speak Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) languages, and profess Islam.

Ethnic groups

The barriers of the mountains and the sea have protected the character and traditions of
many groups. Away from the major cities and areas of dense population, there are
signi cant variations from one valley to the next and almost from one village to the next.
In many cases the highland groups of the larger islands—Borneo, Sumatra, and Celebes—
were relatively untouched by international in uences until the arrival of Christian
missionaries during the 19th century; these upland peoples continue to re ect great
cultural diversity. Each island or group of islands east of Java also has maintained its own
distinct character, in many cases strongly in uenced by different religions. In particular,
Bali—with its long tradition of Hindu and Buddhist in uences rooted in local religious
practices—is quite different in character and customs from any other part of Indonesia.

Western islands

The diverse ethnic populations of western Indonesia

generally may be grouped into three broad
categories. These are the inland wet-rice (irrigated
rice) societies, the coastal trading, farming, and
shing peoples, and the inland societies of shifting
Indonesia: Ethnic composition
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. cultivators.

The rst group, the historically Hinduized (but now

primarily Muslim) wet-rice growers of inland Java, Madura, and Bali, make up nearly three-

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fths of the national population. With an ancient culture informed by strong social and
agricultural traditions, it includes the Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, and Balinese
peoples.

The Javanese constitute Indonesia’s largest ethnic group, accounting for roughly one-
third of the total population. Most Javanese live in the densely settled, irrigated
agricultural regions of central and eastern Java—the most populous parts of the country.
The cities of Yogyakarta and Surakarta (Solo), in the centre of the island, are strongholds of
Javanese culture and maintain traditional rulers, although these leaders have no real
political power. Java’s western region, including the city of Bandung, is the homeland of
the Sundanese, who are related to but quite distinct from the Javanese in language and
tradition. The Sundanese are the second largest ethnic group in Indonesia.

The island of Madura, northeast of Java, is the homeland of the Madurese, Indonesia’s
third largest ethnic group. In addition to cultivating wet-rice paddies, many Madurese
raise cattle. The Balinese, who live just to the east of Java on Bali, are known for their
intricate irrigation systems and terraced rice elds. Of the historically Hinduized
communities in Indonesia, the Balinese are the only nonimmigrant practitioners of
Hinduism.

The second group, the more strongly Islamized

coastal peoples, is ethnically heterogeneous and
includes the Malays from Sumatra and, from
southern Celebes, the Makassarese and Bugis. The
Sumatran Malays inhabit Aceh, a strongly Muslim
region at the extreme northern tip of Sumatra that
has long been noted for its resistance to European
Pura Ulun, a Hindu temple on the bank of in uence; a rich plantation area to the south of Aceh,
Lake Bratan, Bali, Indonesia. along Sumatra’s northern coast; and Bangka and
Brand X Pictures/Jupiterimages
Belitung (Billiton), two primarily agricultural islands
off the southeastern coast of Sumatra. The
Makassarese and Bugis live primarily in the coastal regions of southern Celebes. Like most
Indonesian peoples, they are rice farmers; however, they are also maritime peoples with a
strong tradition of boat making. The Makassarese and Bugis have a pronounced presence
in coastal towns throughout Indonesia, although their in uence has been strongest
outside Java.

The third group, the inland shifting cultivators, plant swiddens— elds that are cleared,
cultivated for a few seasons, and then abandoned for several years to allow the soil to
regenerate—in areas where the climate will not support wet-rice farming. These
communities tend to be small and relatively isolated, and they represent a wide array of
cultures. The most prominent of the swiddeners are the Toraja of southern Celebes, the

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Batak of the highlands of northern Sumatra, and the various communities of the interior
of Kalimantan, such as the Kenyah, Kayan, Ngaju, and Embaloh, who of cially (and
collectively) are called Dayak.

There are two major ethnic groups in the western

islands of Indonesia that do not t into this broad
scheme of cultural categorization. The Minangkabau,
a community of devout Muslim wet-rice farmers in
west-central Sumatra, hold a unique position in
Indonesia as a matrilineal society, whereby
inheritance and descent are reckoned through the
female line. The Menadonese (Minahasan) of northern
Kenyah men planting a rice swidden in East Celebes are also atypical in that they are a historically
Kalimantan, Indonesia. Hinduized, predominantly Christian coastal
© Gini Gorlinski
community.

Eastern islands

Eastern Indonesia is characterized by the traditional Melanesian cultural division between

coastal, or “beach,” peoples and interior, or “bush,” peoples. The Moluccas re ect this
pattern, although their proximity to the western islands makes them a more complex
ethnographic and linguistic area. The islands are populated by a number of distinct ethnic
groups. Typical of the coastal peoples are the Ambonese, who live along the coasts of
Ambon and neighbouring islands, including western Ceram. Some of the people living in
the mountainous interior regions have been relocated to coastal areas, but—unlike the
coastal peoples—they do not usually engage in shing activities.

The distinction between coastal and interior peoples is especially salient in western New
Guinea, where maritime trading communities live along the coast, while agrarian,
noncommercial societies with strongly developed and highly localized customs inhabit
the interior. Those in the foothills and on the coast have af nities with other Melanesian
cultures to the east and south of New Guinea. In addition, Indonesians from the western
islands have mixed with indigenous peoples in the coastal trading settlements. The
people of the interior, such as the Asmat and the Dani, on the other hand, remained
isolated for a longer period of time. Some groups continue to live in remote areas, where
interaction with peoples and cultures beyond their proximate surroundings is limited.
Most Papuans of the interior regions live in small communities and maintain a complex of
dialects, customs, and social structures that is distinct from that of the coastal peoples.

Chinese and other Indonesian peoples

The Chinese account for a small but signi cant portion of the total population and are
regarded as an anchor of the country’s economy. Most of the Chinese have lived in
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Indonesia for generations. The majority of them are of mixed (peranakan) heritage, do not
speak Chinese, have Indonesian surnames, and through intermarrying with Indonesians
have developed distinct dialects and customs. A smaller community considered to be of
totally (totok) Chinese descent is clearly Chinese-oriented in terms of language, religion,
and custom. Of the total Chinese population, most live in the towns and cities of Java and
Sumatra, where they engage in trade. The Chinese also form a signi cant fraction of the
population in western Kalimantan, where many are farmers, shermen, and urban
workers. In the Riau archipelago, many continue a tradition of mining that has spanned
generations.

Most of the former Dutch and Eurasian (locally known as Indo) residents left Indonesia
after independence. Today, Indians and Europeans are relatively unimportant in numbers,
although their in uence in business and other areas of Indonesian society is apparent in
the major cities.

Until the early 21st century the Indonesian population was administratively divided into
“indigenous” (pribumi) and “nonindigenous” (non-pribumi) peoples. The concept of such
a separation had its origin in the Dutch colonial administration’s categorization of the
population on the basis of ancestry. Especially under the Suharto presidency, the term
non-pribumi served primarily to mark those Indonesians who were of Chinese (or part
Chinese) descent, regardless of the length of time they and their families had resided on
Indonesian soil. The “nonindigenous” label ultimately blocked certain Indonesians from
the highest government, military, and academic positions; it also posed obstacles to their
obtaining passports and identity cards. In July 2006, however, landmark legislation
eliminated the pribumi–non-pribumi distinction. Anyone who was born an Indonesian
citizen and had never held citizenship in another country was simply—and of cially—
Indonesian.

Languages

Most of the several hundred languages spoken in Indonesia have an Austronesian base.
The major exceptions are found in western New Guinea and some of the Moluccas, where
different Papuan languages are used. The Austronesian language family is broken into
several major groups within which languages are closely related though distinctly
different. On Java there are three major languages—Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese
—while on Sumatra there are dozens, many of which are divided into distinct dialects.
Within the Toraja group, a relatively small population in the interior of Celebes, several
languages are spoken. In eastern Indonesia each island has its own language, which is
often not understood on the neighbouring islands. Similarly, languages often differ from
one village to the next in the interior of Kalimantan.

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Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) is the national language. It evolved from a literary style of
Malay language that was used in the royal houses of the Riau-Jambi area of eastern
Sumatra, but it also has much in common with other Malay dialects that have long served
as regional lingua francas. The differences between standard Malay and standard
Indonesian reside largely in their idioms and in certain items of vocabulary. In 1972
Indonesia and Malaysia agreed on a uniform revised spelling of the language so that
communications could be improved and literature more freely exchanged between the
two countries.

Because it has no distinctive expressions based on social hierarchy and is not associated
with one of the dominant ethnic groups, the Indonesian language has been accepted
without serious question and has served as a strong force of national uni cation. Since
the early 20th century it has been the main language of print in different parts of the
country; it also served as the medium of political communication among members of the
nationalist movement leading up to the revolution and declaration of independence in
1945. Writers of ethnic Chinese and Sumatran origins produced novels, plays, and poetry
in the language, from which a modern Indonesian literature was born. Today the
Indonesian language is the mother tongue for some city dwellers and a second language
for most Indonesians. It is the medium of instruction in universities, and it is used in
scienti c, philosophical, and legal writings and debates. Radio stations, television
channels, and lms employ it (they rarely use local languages), and most popular songs
with a national audience are written in the Indonesian language as well. (There are,
however, locally popular groups that write and perform songs in regional languages and
dialects.)

Religions

Nearly nine-tenths of the Indonesian population professes Islam. There are, however,
pockets of Christians scattered throughout the country, particularly in Flores, Timor,
northern Celebes, the interior of Kalimantan, and the Moluccas. Most are Protestant or
independent Christian, and the remainder are mainly Roman Catholic. Many Chinese in
the cities are also Christian, but some follow Buddhism or Confucianism, sometimes
blended with Christianity. Hindus account for less than 2 percent of all Indonesians,
although Hinduism is the dominant religion on Bali and has many adherents in Lombok.
Local religions are practiced in some remote areas.

The major religions of Indonesia were all introduced

on the coast and, except in such open areas as Java
and southern Sumatra (which were free of natural
impediments), penetrated slowly inland. Regions
such as central Kalimantan and western New Guinea,
the mountains of northern Sumatra, and the interiors

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Indonesia: Religious affiliation of other mountainous islands long remained virtually

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
untouched by outside religions. However, much 20th-
century Christian missionary activity has focused on
these inland-dwelling peoples.

The earliest recorded Indonesian history shows

extensive religious in uences from India; the early
Indonesian states that centred on Java or Sumatra
evolved through many forms of Hinduism and
Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. During the 9th
century CE, both Hinduism and Buddhism were
practiced as court religions; Shiva and Buddha were
Palembang looked upon as manifestations of the same spiritual
The Great Mosque in Palembang, South being. The blending of the two religions continued
Sumatra, Indonesia. until the 14th century, when Islam, brought by Muslim
Richard Allen Thompson
traders primarily from South Asia, emerged as the
dominant religion along the coasts of Java and
Sumatra. By the 15th century, Islam had gained a rm footing in coastal areas of other
islands of the archipelago as well.

Throughout all the religious changes on the court

level, the common people adopted part of each new
religion as an additional layer on top of their
traditional local beliefs. Consequently, Islam is
expressed differently in Indonesia than it is in the
Stupas at Borobudur, central Java,
Indonesia. Middle East. The religion is most strictly practiced in
© Anna Zhuk/Fotolia Aceh, western Sumatra, western Java, southeastern
Kalimantan, and some of the Lesser Sunda Islands.
On Java, Muslims who follow orthodox practices are referred to as the santri. By contrast,
the abangan adhere to a more syncretic tradition, strongly in uenced by ancestral beliefs
and practices. With the growth of a more religion-conscious middle class, especially since
the late 20th century, the abangan way of believing has been in retreat, while more-
orthodox Muslim practices have been on the rise. However, the many local rituals
connected with birth, death, and marriage are carefully observed by people at all levels,
and ceremonies (selamatan) are held on all special occasions.

Settlement patterns

Rural settlement
Nearly half of Indonesia’s population lives in rural areas. Because volcanoes play a major
role in soil development and enrichment, there is a strong relationship between
agricultural development, density of population, and location of volcanoes. The greatest
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concentration of active volcanoes is on Java, and the greatest population densities occur
in areas such as those to the south and east of Mount Merapi, where the soil is enriched by
volcanic ash and debris. The same pattern occurs on Bali and in northern Sumatra, where
the rich soils are directly related to ows from volcanic eruptions. The islands of Java,
Madura, and Bali have a highly systematized rural structure that is based largely on wet-
rice cultivation. Other areas of high rural population are found in parts of Sumatra and
Celebes. Most of the rest of the country is sparsely settled by small communities that
engage in subsistence agriculture.

On Java the most common settlement is the rural

village, with its rice paddies that spread across the
atland and in many places rise up the hillsides in
terraces. Scattered throughout the countryside are
clusters of coconut, palm, and fruit trees, which
indicate the location of villages. In the heavily
Indonesia: Urban-rural populated areas of central and eastern Java, there are
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. thousands of such settlements, some of which have
sizable populations.

The people of each village form a group that is

homogeneous both in economic conditions and in
social interest and outlook. In many cases, particularly
in irrigated areas, there is much mutual exchange of
labour. Overpopulation in the densely populated
areas has led to a decrease in size of the average farm
and to an increase in the numbers of landless rural

Typical rural housing, Bogor district, Java,

inhabitants, who work mainly as farm labourers,
Indonesia. sharecroppers, or temporary workers in the cities.
W.H. Hodge
Each Javanese village has a stream or a well as its
source of water, a mosque and an elementary school,
and a network of swept-earth paths. There is little
formal commercial activity; goods are obtained from
peddlers and small shops (warung) or from the
market towns, which often are also local government

Bali, Indonesia: rice paddies

centres. Houses are well separated and are normally
of frame and bamboo with roofs of red tile or coconut
Farmer (lower right) tending terraced rice
paddies, Bali, Indonesia. bres; houses constructed of locally made bricks are
David Austen from Stone—CLICK/Chicago increasingly common, especially among the wealthier
families. Goats, chickens, banana and papaya trees,
and a host of small children are characteristic of village life.

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Rural structure varies considerably from region to region. Some Dayak settlements in
Kalimantan, for instance, have maintained traditional multiunit longhouses, often
alongside the newer single-family homes—the construction of which has been strongly
encouraged by the government. Balinese villages are clusters of walled family complexes
with Hindu shrines, public buildings, and larger temples. The Batak villages around Lake
Toba in northern Sumatra, the Minangkabau villages in western Sumatra, and the Toraja
villages in southern Celebes all have their characteristic structures and building styles as
well.

Like settlement structure, rural social patterns vary

considerably across the Indonesian archipelago. On
Java there are few organized groupings above the
level of the household, while villages on neighbouring
Bali have an array of groups related to working,
dancing, and other functions, many of which are
associated with Hindu festivals. Many Dayak
North Kalimantan, Indonesia: longhouse communities use a system of reciprocal labour to
Kenyah (Dayak) longhouse in North work the rice elds during particularly labour-
Kalimantan, Indonesia. intensive phases of the agricultural cycle (e.g.,
© Gini Gorlinski
clearing, planting, and harvesting).

The rural mode of life is controlled by the growing

season and by the productivity of the land. Farming
practices range from the shifting agriculture of many
inland groups through small-scale farming (of sago,
cassava, rice, and other crops) to the mechanized
agriculture of large plantations. In some cases these
activities are combined with some form of cottage
Toraja industry. Most rural Indonesians are small-scale
Temporary housing in a Toraja village, farmers who operate at or near the subsistence level
constructed for guests and relatives
and sell some produce but usually do not accumulate
attending a funeral, on the island of Celebes
substantial capital. In general, the villages are small,
(Sulawesi), Indonesia.
© George Holton/Photo Researchers independent, and largely self-suf cient.

Urban settlement

The overall level of urbanization in Indonesia is low in

relation to other countries that are at a comparable
stage of economic growth. This can be explained in
part by the phenomenon of nonpermanent, or
“circular,” migration on Java and elsewhere:
individuals from rural families live and work in the

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Boy carrying jackfruit, Nias Island, North cities, but they return to their homes at least once
Sumatra, Indon.
every six months. Nevertheless, although there is
Bennett Dean—Eye Ubiquitous/Corbis
some regional variation in urban growth rates, cities
of every population size are, for the most part,
growing rapidly.

With the exception of most of the largest urban areas (e.g., Jakarta, Surabaya, and Medan),
few of Indonesia’s cities have the heterogeneity of a true urban centre. Instead, they are
the economic, governmental, cultural, and social centres for highly populated and distinct
regions. The growth of the cities has not been accompanied by a parallel growth of
industry, and the outlook of much of the urban population is still rural. Large parts of the
population, even in Jakarta, live in settlements that amount to urban kampongs (villages),
maintaining rural customs. Urban dwellers generally have a higher standard of living than
their rural counterparts, but the availability of adequate housing, potable water, and
public transportation services has remained a critical concern.

Four of Indonesia’s ve largest cities—Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, and Bekasi—are on

Java; the other, Medan, is located on Sumatra. These ve cities may be considered
metropolitan areas rather than large provincial towns, since they contain the major
government, nancial, and business of ces. Other large cities, such as Semarang, Padang,
Palembang, and Makassar (Ujungpandang), are centres of provincial government and of
local trade and, with the exception of Semarang, have relatively limited international ties.

The cities have individual characters. Jakarta, as the country’s capital, largest city, and
centre of nance, has well-maintained and historic buildings, broad avenues and large
fountains, and an increasing number of high-rise hotels and of ce buildings. Surabaya,
Indonesia’s second largest city—roughly one-fourth the size of Jakarta’s urban centre—is a
major port and industrial hub. Bandung, a former resort area and military centre, has
much light industry, mostly related to garment production. Bekasi is a rapidly growing
city in the greater Jakarta urban agglomeration. Semarang is the administrative capital
and commercial core of central Java. Yogyakarta, which was the capital of the
revolutionary government between 1946 and 1949, is the seat of the ruling family of the
sultan of Yogyakarta. It also is the site of a major university, Gadjah Mada, and of schools of
art, traditional dance, and music, and it is the centre of the batik cloth industry. In
Sumatra, Medan and its port of Belawan constitute the commercial nexus for the rich
northern agricultural districts, and Palembang, Sumatra’s second largest city, is a major
port for the petroleum industry and for a variety of other industries in the south.

The ethnic composition of Indonesia’s largest cities is highly diverse and re ects the heavy
ow of migration from rural areas. Jakarta shows the greatest diversity; while many
people may have been born or raised there, they often continue to refer to themselves in
terms of their regional heritage—such as Batak, Javanese, or Minangkabau—and it is not

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uncommon for them to use their local languages at

home. These ethnic ties often are strengthened by
trips to home villages during times of harvest or
during the Muslim month of Ramadan (a period of
fasting and atonement).

Indonesia’s urban areas also display great social and

economic diversity, which underlies a social hierarchy.
Women producing batik cloth in Surakarta,
Central Java, Indonesia. The upper class consists of government of cials,
© Miko Bagus/Dreamstime.com military of cers, and business leaders with a Western
orientation; the growing middle class includes civil
servants, teachers, and other professionals, as well as skilled workers who typically must
struggle to maintain their economic position; and the lower class comprises a larger
number of minimally educated and unskilled labourers, traders, and other members of
the informal economy who strongly identify with their villages and frequently move back
and forth to engage in economic pursuits in both areas. This three-tiered hierarchy also
conforms closely to an economic structure that is based on various government
opportunities and on formal and informal business activities.

A transient foreign element of diplomats and company representatives plays a minor role
in city structure. There are people born of immigrant families—mainly of Chinese, Indian,
or Arab origin—who are more fully integrated, but each group maintains its own social
network and patterns of life. Nonetheless, Indonesia is gradually becoming a
cosmopolitan society. This is most conspicuous in Jakarta and those parts of Bali that
have been fully absorbed into an international socioeconomic matrix. Association with
international culture generally implies a degree of wealth and consequently is largely
con ned to the families of of cials, professionals, and prominent businessmen.

James F. McDivitt Thomas R. Leinbach Goenawan Susatyo Mohamad

Demographic trends

The distribution and density of the population in Indonesia vary considerably from region
to region; the bulk of the population lives on the western islands of Java, Bali, and Madura.
Overall, the population nearly doubled between the mid-20th and the early 21st century,
with a moderately high rate of growth. There have been, however, signi cant regional
contrasts in this rate. In Java, for example, population growth has been signi cantly less
than in the outer islands. A sharp decline in fertility rates also has been evident
throughout Indonesia, attributable largely to an increase in the age when people marry
and the widespread availability of birth control products. Lower fertility has been
especially conspicuous in central Java. Mortality rates have declined substantially since
the mid-20th century, largely because of improved health care, better dietary and

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nutrition practices, and improvements in housing and water quality. The rates of infant
and child mortality also have dropped.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Indonesia’s age

structure was becoming more evenly distributed.
More than one-third of Indonesia’s population was
under age 15 in 1990, but the proportion has been
decreasing steadily since that time. Conversely, the
older component of the population has been
Indonesia: population density
increasing, but the average life expectancy and the
Population density of Indonesia.
proportion of those age 65 or older have remained
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
lower than in wealthier countries in Southeast Asia.

Two major migration patterns have become

prominent in Indonesia. The rst involves the growing
ow of rural people into urban areas, particularly
Jakarta, which has resulted in an overall increase in
the proportion of the population living in cities.
Temporary, or “circular,” migration between rural and
Indonesia: Age breakdown urban areas in connection with employment also has
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. become common. The second pattern is that of
people leaving Java for the outer islands. The central
government facilitated much of this movement (called transmigration), especially in the
last quarter of the 20th century, by sponsoring a program of resettling landless Javanese
in sparsely populated areas, such as Kalimantan. The program was terminated in 2000
because of political and administrative constraints.

Economy
Indonesia has played a modest role in the world economy since the mid-20th century,
and its importance has been considerably less than its size, resources, and geographic
position would seem to warrant. The country is a major exporter of crude petroleum and
natural gas. In addition, Indonesia is one of the world’s main suppliers of rubber, coffee,
cocoa, and palm oil; it also produces a wide range of other commodities, such as sugar,
tea, tobacco, copra, and spices (e.g., cloves). Nearly all commodity production comes from
large estates. Widespread exploration for deposits of oil and other minerals has resulted in
a number of large-scale projects that have contributed substantially to general
development funds.

Although Indonesia has remained a major importer of manufactured goods, high

technology, and technical skills since the early 1970s, the country’s economic base has
shifted from the primary sector to secondary and tertiary industries—manufacturing,

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trade, and services. Manufacturing surpassed

agriculture in terms of contribution to gross domestic
product (GDP) in the early 1990s and has continued to
be the largest single component of the country’s
economy. A signi cant portion of the national budget
has continued to be allocated to agriculture, however;
Batak market on the shore of Lake Toba,
consequently, the country has remained self-
Sumatra, Indonesia.
Robert Harding Picture Library suf cient in rice production since the mid-1980s.

During the early years of Indonesia’s independence,

economic mismanagement and the subordination of development to political ideals
under the “Guided Economy” policy of the country’s rst president, Sukarno (1949–66), led
to nancial chaos and to a serious deterioration in the capital stock. With a major change
of economic direction after Suharto assumed power in the mid-1960s, some measure of
stability was regained, and the conditions for an orderly policy of rehabilitation and
economic development were established.

From 1969 to 1998 a series of ve-year plans emphasized the government’s role in
developing the economic infrastructure of the country, notably in agriculture, irrigation,
transportation, and communications. Thus, the government, together with foreign aid,
has been a major force in propelling development in areas where private enterprise has
not been immediately forthcoming; the state-owned oil company Pertamina was a
product of these government initiatives. In the late 20th century, the emphasis in the
public sector tended increasingly toward independent, self- nancing state enterprises.

Substantial expansion of the private sector has been evident since the mid-1990s. Prior to
that time, growth generally had been con ned to a rather small group of conglomerates,
most bene ting from the government’s favour. Small business was slower to develop. The
deregulation of the capital market in the early 1980s triggered spectacular growth in the
stock exchange, but despite the increase in domestic investment, direct participation in
the stock market remained limited to a very small group of investors.

Foreign direct investment spiked in the 1990s but rapidly receded in the aftermath of the
Asian economic crisis sparked by the collapse of the Thai baht in 1997. The government
subsequently inaugurated a four-year national development plan that helped return the
economy to its precrisis strength. By 2003 the country was stable enough to allow the
expiration of an economic reform program that had been sponsored by the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). A new development strategy involving liberalization in some areas
and limitation of foreign ownership in others has aimed to establish Indonesia as a fully
self-suf cient (swasembada) country in the 21st century.

Agriculture, forestry, and shing

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The consistent monsoon climate and almost even distribution of rainfall in Indonesia
make it possible for the same types of crops to be grown throughout the country. Less
than one- fth of the total land surface, however, is devoted to crop cultivation. Most
agricultural land is dedicated to rice or to various cash crops. Intensive cultivation is
restricted to Java, Bali, Lombok, and certain areas of Sumatra and Celebes. In Java much
of the land of the northern coastal and central plains is planted with rice. In the drier
section of eastern Java, crops such as corn (maize), cassava, sweet potatoes, peanuts
(groundnuts), and soybeans dominate the small farms, although such cash crops as
tobacco and coffee also are grown on plantations.

Development in Sumatra and in the outer islands is

less intensive and consists primarily of estate-raised
cash crops. Sumatra accounts for a major portion of
the total area under estate production, and most
plantations are located in the island’s northeastern
coastal region. Around Medan there are extensive
plantations producing tobacco, rubber, palm oil,
Irrigated rice terraces, Bali, Indonesia. kapok, tea, cloves, and coffee, none of which is native
Glen Allison/Getty Images to the region. Rice, corn, and cassava are grown in the
Padang area in the west and around the oil elds near
Palembang in the southeast.

Since the late 20th century there has been a shift from rice toward less-demanding
subsistence crops, such as cassava. Rice has remained the cornerstone of small-scale
agriculture, however, and increased production of it has been an important aim of every
economic development plan. The government intervenes in the marketing of rice to
maintain production at an economically viable level. Various “mass guidance” (bimbingan
massal) schemes to broaden the availability of credit and to promote the use of fertilizers
and high-yielding varieties have increased rice output. Although the country is self-
suf cient in rice production, there has been a persistent tendency since the late 1990s to
import additional rice.

Private enterprises have joined the government in developing Indonesia’s palm oil and
sugar industries, as well as its sheries. Large-scale agribusiness is becoming a more
important component of the country’s economy, with increasing government investment.
Export of cultivated shrimp from sizable farms in western Java and southern Sumatra has
been a boon to middle-sized businesses. Milk sh also are bred through aquaculture. Scad,
tuna, and mackerel are the primary products of open-sea shing.

Indonesia has some of the world’s largest tracts of exploitable tropical forest, especially in
Kalimantan and Papua. There are several small areas of deciduous forest and plantations
(mostly teak), but most of the trees are evergreen tropical hardwoods. The production of

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plywood and veneers has become important for both domestic consumption and export.
Major timber operations are located primarily in Kalimantan, but logging also occurs on
the other large islands; legitimate companies as well as illegal loggers target certain
species, such as meranti (a subspecies of the genus Shorea), which yields an easily
workable, relatively lightweight reddish wood. Teak is extracted mainly from Java.

Since the 1960s the timber industry has grown rapidly, but it has caused considerable
damage through deforestation. Also a threat to the environment are frequent large-scale
forest res, most of which stem from “slash-and-burn” (swidden) subsistence agriculture
or government clearing for plantations; these res not only destroy vast areas of
vegetation but also generate haze that frequently reaches as far as Singapore and
peninsular Malaysia. Deforestation and air quality issues prompted environmentalists to
urge the Indonesian government to curtail clear-cutting of trees, to control burning, and
to implement reforestation programs.

Resources and power

Indonesia has a large, and in many cases unprospected, variety of mineral deposits.
Mining, including the extraction of oil and natural gas, accounts for roughly one-tenth of
the country’s GDP, and through exports and taxation it contributes substantially to
foreign-exchange earnings and development. The mining industry employs only a tiny
fraction of the workforce, however.

Fossil fuels, including petroleum, natural gas, and coal, constitute a major source of
revenue. They are produced primarily in Sumatra and Kalimantan and from offshore sites
in the Java and South China seas. Although re nery production since 1968 has been in the
hands of the government-owned petroleum company Pertamina, foreign oil companies
operate under a production-sharing formula. Under this arrangement, the ownership of
oil resources remains with the government of Indonesia, and the foreign companies act
as contractors, supplying the necessary capital. Since the last decades of the 20th century,
Indonesia has greatly expanded its production of coal, to become one of the world’s
leading exporters. The sale of lique ed natural gas is also increasingly important.

In addition to its hydrocarbon reserves, Indonesia’s mineral resources contribute

signi cantly to the economy. The country is one of the world’s largest producers of tin,
deposits of which are found on the islands of Bangka, Singkep, and Belitung and off the
southwestern shore of Kalimantan. Bauxite is mined mostly on the Riau Islands and in
western Kalimantan and is processed at an aluminum smelter—the rst in Southeast Asia
—at Kualatanjung in northern Sumatra. Celebes, Halmahera and other islands of the
Moluccas, and Papua are sources of nickel. Manganese is present in central Java and on
Sumatra, Kalimantan, Celebes, and Timor. Major copper deposits are mined in the

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Jayawijaya Mountains of Papua; smaller deposits have been found in Sumatra, Java,
Kalimantan, and Celebes. Most of Indonesia’s gold comes from Papua.

The bulk of Indonesia’s electrical power is generated from fossil fuels. Until the late 20th
century, the majority of the country’s power was provided by oil or gas. As the
government stepped up its production of coal, however, it also strove to increase the
domestic use of that resource. By the early 21st century, less than half the country’s power
stations were fueled by oil or gas. Many plants were coal-driven, some were hydroelectric,
and a small portion of plants were powered by geothermal sources.

Manufacturing

In the early 1970s import substitution (replacement of foreign-produced goods and

services with those produced domestically) and support for the agricultural sector were
the two major aims of industrial policy. Import substitution was geared to commodities
such as food, textiles, fertilizers, and cement, and this required consistent government
protection and controls. This policy proved to be both inef cient and expensive, however,
and following the sharp decline in oil revenues in the 1980s, reforms were introduced to
increase the competitive position of Indonesian manufactures in international markets.
The government launched a series of deregulations and encouraged domestic and
international private investment. Although many companies remained in government
hands, the state also participated in joint ventures with the private sector.

As a result, the manufacturing sector has become the single largest contributor to the
economy, constituting well over one-fourth of GDP and employing just over one-tenth of
the labour force. A signi cant proportion of production is handled by medium- and small-
scale privately owned enterprises, which supply consumer goods. Small-scale workshops
manufacture such consumer goods and general products as furniture, household
equipment, textiles, and printed matter. Since the mid-1980s there has been a major shift
toward developing large-scale and high-technology industries, such as
telecommunications and electronics; automobile manufacturing has expanded especially
rapidly in the 21st century. The centre of private industry is in western Java, although
considerable development has taken place in Jakarta.

One of the country’s principal industries based on imported raw materials is textile
manufacturing. Spinning mills are largely state owned or in the hands of foreign
companies, while weaving and nishing factories, which are centred in Bandung, are
generally small-scale and privately owned by local entrepreneurs. Batik production—an
Indonesian method of hand-dyeing textiles—is concentrated in central Java. Although
production of batik remains a major cottage industry, there are a number of larger-scale
operations.

Finance
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Bank Indonesia, the central bank, is responsible for issuing the rupiah, the national
currency. Other major government-owned institutions include the state savings bank,
banks specializing in rural and industrial development, and a large commercial bank with
overseas branches. Each bank is diversi ed and operates independently. Private domestic
banks and foreign banks also operate in Indonesia. Nonbanking nancial institutions are
restricted. Indonesia has stock exchanges in Jakarta and Surabaya.

Generally, the aims of the government’s credit and scal policies have been to provide the
conditions for private incentive within the context of nancial orthodoxy. Before the 1980s,
Indonesia’s capital market had been limited to the state-dominated banking system.
Subsidized credit and interest rates were used in accordance with general government
priorities, and a credit ceiling was imposed to ensure monetary stability. The credit ceiling,
however, resulted in excess reserves held by state banks and ultimately triggered a
restructuring and deregulation of the banking system.

In 1983 a reform package decontrolled the interest rate and abolished the credit ceiling
system. Further reforms in 1988 liberalized licensing for new banks and lowered reserve
requirements. The result was a dramatic expansion in the number of private banks, their
branches, and the banks’ share of total deposits. The Jakarta Stock Exchange also
experienced explosive growth.

The surge, however, was accompanied by a rise in interest rates (both for deposits and for
lending), which effectively sti ed domestic investment. In an effort to curb in ation, Bank
Indonesia tightened the money supply, a move that further destabilized the country’s
nancial sector. When the Asian monetary crisis struck in 1997, Indonesia’s banking
industry was among the rst casualties.

In 1998 the government established the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA) to
extricate the nancial sector from its monumental debt. IBRA accomplished this task
largely through the closure and consolidation of nancially precarious banks. The
remaining banks then prioritized households and small businesses in their lending, which
stimulated growth in the domestic private sphere. By 2004 the banking sector had
stabilized, the country had returned to a general pattern of economic growth, and IBRA
was dissolved—on schedule.

Trade

A complex and reasonably well-developed commercial sector has existed in Indonesia for
many decades, if not centuries, based on the marketing and exporting of agricultural
produce and on supplying consumer goods and services to the domestic market.
Historically, trade has been dominated by Indonesian Chinese, although other segments
of the population, especially people from western Sumatra and southern Celebes, also
have made notable contributions.
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No longer simply an exporter of agricultural produce,

Indonesia has become an established international
supplier of petroleum and petroleum products;
rubber products; garments, shoes, and textiles; wood
and wood products (including paper); machinery of
various sorts (including automobiles); and other
Indonesia: Major import sources commodities, such as electronic products. Primary
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. imports include petroleum and natural gas,
machinery, chemicals, metals, and transport
equipment. Indonesia’s most important trading partners include Japan, the United States,
Singapore, China, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia.

Services

Services constitute a major segment of the

Indonesian economy, generating more than one-third
of GDP. Tourism in particular has emerged as a major
source of income, although the industry’s growth
suffered setbacks with the Asian economic crisis in
Indonesia: Major export destinations
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 1997–98 and with multiple terrorist attacks and the
outbreak of avian in uenza (bird u) in the early 21st
century.

Labour

Indonesia’s industrialization has not produced strong organized labour. This is attributable
in part to a surplus of labour in the job market; most lower-class Indonesians work in
traditional, informal, and marginal jobs. Political repression under the Suharto presidency
(1967–98) also discouraged politically motivated associations of workers. Rather, the
government sought to incorporate functional groups such as those of farmers and
shermen into a quasi-governmental political party.

Thomas R. Leinbach Goenawan Susatyo Mohamad

Transportation and telecommunications

Because Indonesia is an island country, sea transport plays a key role in the movement of
raw materials and agricultural products from their sources to markets. Although the
physical nature of the country has favoured the development of strong sea links for
freight and strong air links for passengers, many parts of Indonesia have not been
adequately served by the transport network, a factor that has critically hampered
economic development. The rapid expansion of telecommunications networks, however,
has helped mitigate the insularity of some regions.

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Roads and railways

Road transport is the dominant mode of transportation on Indonesia’s islands, especially

the smaller ones, such as Java, Bali, and Madura. Some three- fths of the country’s roads
are paved, and most of these are on Sumatra, Java, and Bali, where the network of
highways meets traf c needs in most areas. Much of the remaining paved mileage is on
Madura, Lombok, and Celebes. Western and central Kalimantan have some good roads,
but in Papua road transport has not developed evenly, owing to the size of the territory
and to the government’s budgetary constraints.

Road traf c has been on the rise as roads have improved and as ownership of
automobiles and motorcycles has increased. Trucks and intercity buses, operated by
private enterprises, are central to the transportation system; using ferries to cross between
islands, some cover distances as far as that between Medan in northern Sumatra and
Surabaya in eastern Java. For traveling shorter distances, especially in the urban and
semiurban areas, smaller buses and minivans are popular. In the larger cities, taxis are
readily available, but most people opt to drive their own car, take a motorcycle, or, as a less
expensive alternative, ride one of several types of minivan redesigned to accommodate
additional passengers. The least expensive urban transportation services are provided by
individual entrepreneurs who drive a single passenger on the back of a small motorcycle.
In most towns, the becak (pedicab, or pedaled trishaw) remains a prominent feature of
the streets, although this mode of transport is technically prohibited in Jakarta.

The railway, run by a public enterprise, operates mainly on Java and Madura, with less-
extensive service on Sumatra. The demand for train services has remained strong,
although geographic features limit the expansion of the railroads. Comfortable, reliable
rail transport between major towns in Java has become a popular alternative to intercity
buses and airlines.

Water and air transport

Most of the major population centres are close to the sea, where they can be served and
linked by coastal and interisland shipping services. The adjacent seas are relatively calm
because Indonesia is outside the belt of typhoons and high winds, and, even where
docking facilities are not available, it is usually possible for ships to anchor and discharge
and load from lighters and other craft.

There are numerous ports, some of which have facilities and water depths that allow large
vessels to load and unload at quayside. The major dry-cargo ports are Tanjung Priok, the
outport of Jakarta; Tanjungperak, the outport of Surabaya; and Belawan, the outport of
Medan. Palembang, in southern Sumatra, is the major petroleum port. Other major ports
include Semarang and Cirebon on Java, Telukbayur (the outport of Padang) on Sumatra,

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Manado on Celebes, Ambon in the Moluccas, Jayapura in Papua, and Banjarmasin on the
south coast of Kalimantan.

Although Indonesia has scores of airports, few of them offer international service. Most
international ights operate out of Jakarta and Yogyakarta in Java, Medan in Sumatra,
Denpasar in Bali, and Balikpapan in Kalimantan. Major cities in Sumatra and Celebes also
have limited service to Singapore and Malaysia. Scheduled services are provided by
several companies, the most important of which are Garuda Indonesia (the national
airline) and the privately owned Lion Air, both of which offer domestic and international
ights. Merpati, also state owned, offers domestic service only.

Telecommunications

Since the late 1970s, immediate links between distant places in Indonesia have been
established through telecommunications technology. The use of satellites, purchased by
Indonesian public and private telecommunications companies, revolutionized the system.
A unique solution to the general lack of telecommunications facilities was the
establishment of neighbourhood wartel (“telephone shops”), where customers can make
domestic or international calls and send or receive faxes for a time-based fee. However,
with the rapidly expanding use of cell phones—which has far outstripped that of standard
telephones—the wartel are playing a less critical role in the Indonesian
telecommunications system. An increase in Internet usage has been attributable largely
to the introduction of warnet (“Internet shops”) in major cities. Like wartel, these shops
typically charge by the length of time used.

Government and society

The Republic of Indonesia was declared in 1945, with a proclaimed jurisdiction over the
present area from Sabang in Sumatra to Merauke in Papua, or the entire area of the
former Dutch (or Netherlands) East Indies. Although the Netherlands retained possession
of a large part of this region (including Papua), a provisional capital was established in
Yogyakarta, the stronghold of the revolution.

With the close of the struggle for independence in 1949, the Republic of the United States
of Indonesia was established. The federal system did not last, however, and in 1950 the
federated governments unanimously decided to return to a “unitary”—or more
centralized—form of government, as well as to the name Republic of Indonesia. After
some dif culties, the constitution of 1945 was reinstated by presidential decree. This
constitution has remained the basis of Indonesia’s government, although some
signi cant amendments were made during a period of reformasi (reformation) around
the turn of the 21st century.

Constitutional framework
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The 1945 constitution invests most of the power in the executive branch of the
government, particularly in the president, who is assisted by a vice president and a
cabinet. The constitution also provides for a body of presidential advisers, called the
Supreme Advisory Council (Dewan Pertimbangan Agung)—the advice of which is not
legally binding, however—as well as a presidentially appointed Supreme Audit Board
(Badan Pemeriksa Keuangan), which controls state nance. Until 2002 the president and
vice president were elected every ve years by the People’s Consultative Assembly (Majelis
Permusyawaratan Rakyat; MPR), but in that year a new law decreed that beginning in
2004 both leaders were to be directly elected. In addition, legislation passed in 1999
limited the president to two ve-year terms.

Cabinet ministers are appointed by the president. Ministries manage broad areas, such as
economic affairs, foreign affairs, defense, education, agriculture, information, and religious
affairs. The number of ministers and the nature of their areas of assignment depend on
the president. In addition to appointing the cabinet, the president is the supreme
commander of the army, the navy, and the air force. The president also has the authority
to introduce bills, issue regulations, implement acts, and make agreements with foreign
countries.

The MPR constitutes the legislative branch of Indonesia’s government; it is primarily

responsible for interpreting the constitution and the broad lines of state policy. Formerly
unicameral, the MPR has been a bicameral body since the elections of 2004, with the
Council of the People’s Representatives (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat; DPR) as the lower
house and the Council of Regional Representatives (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah; DPD) as
the upper house. About four- fths of the MPR’s seats belong to the lower house. Members
of the DPD are elected directly from a nationwide pool of nonpartisan candidates, and
members of the DPR are directly elected through a province-based proportional system
that allows voters to cast ballots for individuals as well as particular parties. All legislators
serve ve-year terms.

Local government

Indonesia is divided into some 30 propinsi, or provinsi (provinces), plus the two daerah
istimewa (special districts) of Yogyakarta in central Java and Aceh in northern Sumatra
and the daerah khusus ibukota (special capital district) of metropolitan Jakarta, known as
Jakarta Raya. On the smaller islands, most administrative regions were created to coincide
with traditional regions, the boundaries of which were de ned largely by natural
geographic features; on the larger islands, by contrast, administrative boundaries were
constructed to simplify complex traditional and cultural divisions. The province of Central
Java (Jawa Tengah), for instance, spans not only the core of the island of Java but also the
core of Javanese culture. Within the province’s borders lie the semiautonomous special
district of Yogyakarta and the city of Surakarta (Solo), both of which are historical court

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centres that maintain traditional rulers (albeit without real political power). Similarly, the
provinces of West Java (Jawa Barat) and Banten, on the western part of the island,
coincide with the geographic, cultural, and linguistic terrain of the Sundanese people.

The number of rst-order political subdivisions has changed since the end of the 20th
century. East Timor (declared a province in 1976) gained its independence in 1999. In
addition, largely as a result of the push to decentralize in the early 21st century, several
new provinces were created out of the existing structure. The province of Banten (2000)
was formed from the western tip of West Java. West Papua (Papua Barat; 2006) was
created from the western end of Papua. North Kalimantan (Kalimantan Utara; 2012) was
split off from East Kalimantan. New provinces in Celebes included Gorontalo (2000;
government installed in 2001) on the northern peninsula and West Sulawesi (Sulawesi
Barat; 2004) in the island’s west-central coastal region. The Riau Islands (Kepulauan Riau;
2002; government installed in 2004) and Bangka Belitung (2000; government installed in
2001) were created from islands off Sumatra’s eastern shore.

Each of the more than 300 second-order subdivisions, kabupaten (regencies), is headed
by a bupati (governor) and has a local legislature. More than 5,000 third-order divisions,
kecamatan (districts), and several dozen kota (cities) have obtained autonomous status.
Since 1999 district and city leaders have been chosen through direct local elections.
Members of the Local Councils of Representatives (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah),
which deal more directly with the national legislature, also are selected through general
election.

Villages (kampung) and groups of villages (desa), which exist in both rural and urban
areas, provide the link between the people and the central government on the district
level. Kampung and desa heads are usually elected in rural areas and appointed in urban
ones; they are all local government employees. Normally, a village has two levels of
neighbourhood organization, a rukun warga (RW; community association) and rukun
tetangga (RT; neighbourhood associations). These bodies elect their chairpersons.

Justice

In Indonesia’s judicial system the Supreme Court (Mahkamah Agung) in Jakarta is the
nal court of appeal; high courts, which are located in principal cities, deal with appeals
from district courts. Supreme Court judges are chosen by the president, who selects from
nominees presented by the Judicial Commission, a special body whose members are
appointed by the upper house. The chief justice and his or her deputies are chosen from
among the Supreme Court justices by the justices themselves. According to the original
1945 constitution, the Supreme Court does not have the power of judicial review. In 2003,
however, the Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi) was established to review and
to rule on cases involving charges against the president. Judges are members of the civil

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service and are managed by the Supreme Court, but they also are supervised by the
Judicial Commission. The National Ombudsman Commission, established in 2000, deals
with offenses committed by the state.

Under the colonial administration, the law was a mixture of Dutch law and local
customary law—adat. Since independence, criminal law has been codi ed for all of
Indonesia. Civil law, however, has continued to be based largely on adat, which varies
from one region and ethnic group to another. There are four judicial spheres (for general,
religious, military, and administrative matters), each with its own courts. The religious,
military, and administrative courts deal with special cases or particular groups of people,
while the general courts handle both civil and criminal cases. Muslims may choose to use
Islamic law in some civil cases; since the mid-1970s religious law has applied to all civil
matters dealing with marriage.

Political process

Indonesia’s political process is shaped by the country’s turbulent political history. The rst
election after independence was held in 1955. Almost 170 political parties and factions
contested, and 4 major parties obtained the majority of the votes. The election was carried
out with little disturbance, but the resulting government was beset by unforeseen
political problems. Sukarno—Indonesia’s rst national gure and rst president—
dissolved the elected assembly, introduced a concept known as Guided Democracy, and
reinstated the 1945 constitution in 1959. The period of Guided Democracy was marked by
the creation of a plethora of ministries, by the rise of the Indonesian Communist Party
(Partai Komunis Indonesia; PKI) to a position of political dominance, and by the
emergence of the army as a major anticommunist political force. The structure collapsed
with an attempted coup d’état in 1965, which led to the downfall of Sukarno. Under
Suharto, Sukarno’s successor, Indonesia entered a new political era, of cially called the
New Order.

After a period of stabilization and restructuring, in which the army played a major role, the
second election of the DPR was held in 1971. Contesting this election were nine political
parties and the Joint Secretariat of Functional Groups (Sekretariat Bersama Golongan
Karya; Sekber Golkar, or Golkar), a government-sponsored organization of nonaf liated
groups—including nonparty associations of farmers, shermen, civil servants,
cooperatives, religious groups, students, the armed forces, and veterans—that was
allowed to participate in the electoral process on the same level as political parties.
Backed by the power of the military, the bureaucracy, and a large budget, Golkar came
out of the poll as a single majority. (Golkar went on to win every subsequent election until
1999, when for the rst time in Indonesian history an independently monitored election
took place.)

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In the early years of the Suharto presidency the political process was directed primarily by
the government; as the New Order matured, however, power came to rest almost
exclusively in the person of the president. After the 1971 election, the existing political
parties were consolidated to form two of cially recognized parties, the United
Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan; PPP) and the Indonesian
Democratic Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia; PDI). Technically, these parties were to
base their political platforms on the national ideology of Pancasila (Five Principles)—belief
in one god, nationalism, democracy, humanitarianism, and social justice—also upheld by
Golkar. Unlike Golkar, however, the political parties were prohibited from establishing
chapters at the grassroots level.

The end of the New Order and of the Suharto presidency in 1998 triggered a major
transformation in Indonesia’s political process. New election laws allowed for independent
monitoring of elections; restrictions on the creation of political parties were lifted at all
levels; members of the bureaucracy were permitted to choose a party other than Golkar;
and the military was forbidden from siding with any one political group. The 1999 election
was both euphoric and peaceful, with the PDI (now adding “Perjuangan” [“Struggle”] to its
name to become the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle; PDIP), Golkar, and the
National Awakening Party (Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa; PKB) emerging as the top parties,
with no single majority. These three parties have remained strong, although since the end
of the 20th century several others have gained popularity alongside them. Among these
are the Democratic Party (Partai Demokrat; PD), which became the presidential party in
2004, the National Mandate Party (Partai Amanat Nasional; PAN), and the Justice and
Prosperity Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera; PKS).

The election law states that all citizens who have reached the minimum age of 17 or who
have married may vote in general elections. All those who have reached age 21 may stand
for elections. Elections are direct and voting is by secret ballot.

Security

The Indonesian armed forces were founded shortly after the country’s declaration of
independence in August 1945. The original forces were made up of soldiers who had been
trained by the Dutch and Japanese armies as well as the armed militia groups that had
fought a guerrilla war to wrest Indonesia permanently from Dutch control. Under the
Sukarno and Suharto presidencies, the Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia
(Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia; ABRI) comprised the army, the navy, the air
force, and the police.

Following the Suharto presidency, the armed forces returned to one of their pre-Sukarno
names, the National Army of Indonesia (Tentara Nasional Indonesia; TNI), and the police
were split into a separate unit. The army, constituting more than three-fourths of the

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forces, has remained the largest segment of the TNI. Men must be at least 18 years old to
join the armed forces; selective compulsory service requires a commitment of two years.

The political role of the armed forces increased signi cantly in the second half of the 20th
century, with the ABRI, and later the TNI, justifying their political involvement by citing the
so-called dwi-fungsi (dual function) doctrine. This doctrine declared it both the right and
the duty of the military to take part in most political decision-making processes in
Indonesia.

As the political power of the military grew, however, the allocation of state funds for
defense development declined. The government’s rationale in cutting its military
spending was to promote peaceful relations with neighbouring countries; it meant to
establish territorial control through political intervention, with the aid of a powerful
intelligence network, rather than through the use of force.

Its small budget ultimately forced the TNI to nd other sources of income. Widespread
corruption ensued as the military abused its associations with foundations and
government rms. Finally, the TNI was removed from the political process with the
reformation of the MPR in 2004: all seats in the legislature that were once reserved for the
military were eliminated.

Health and welfare

Indonesia has a national health care network that offers treatment either free of charge or
for a nominal cost through several types of medical facilities. District medical centres, the
most comprehensive of which combine general medical clinics with maternal and child-
health centres, provide services in family planning, school health, nutrition,
communicable-disease control, health statistics, environmental health, health education,
dental health, and public-health nursing. The district centres also supervise the
community and village health centres (puskesmas), which are the primary health
providers in rural areas. A third type of public medical facility is the posyandu, an
integrated health-service post that is designed to serve those whose health is most at risk.
These posts are more widely available than the village health centres and offer a variety of
services to women and children in particular, ranging from immunizations and nutrition
counseling to family planning.

In general, the cost of specialized health care, as provided by private hospitals and doctors,
is beyond the reach of Indonesians in both the low- and middle-income groups. A
government-sponsored health insurance system for specialized care was introduced in
the late 20th century, but has been slow to cover people working in small private
companies or in the informal sector. Many companies provide medical assistance to
employees, but there is no legal requirement to do so.

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Most of the major communicable diseases in Indonesia are well under control. Malaria
and tuberculosis are no longer persistent health problems, but outbreaks of dengue and
cholera still occur. Heart problems and strokes have become more common, owing at
least in part to changes in diet that have accompanied economic growth since the 1970s.
Cancer also has become more widespread. Drug addiction has increased notably,
particularly among young people in the urban centres, and there has been a sharp rise in
HIV infection and cases of AIDS, especially since the end of the 20th century.

One of the most serious public health problems is the shortage of medical and
paramedical personnel, mainly nurses and midwives. Although all new graduates of the
government’s medical schools are required to work for one year in rural areas, few doctors
choose to stay in such regions after ful lling their service obligation. Outside the major
urban centres, many people use traditional healers, called dukun. An indigenous midwife
(paraji or dukun beranak), often with limited training, assists many of the births in
Indonesia; extensive training programs have been implemented to bring the paraji
toward the standards of quali ed midwives. Such programs contributed to a signi cant
drop in the infant mortality rate—from well above to well below the world average—from
the mid-20th to the early 21st century.

Another important public health issue, family planning (keluarga berancana; commonly
called “KB”), conceptually runs counter to traditional views, and there was much
resistance to such programs when they were introduced. A massive attempt has been
made to provide information on family planning to women of childbearing age, typically
through clinics that are run by the Department of Health. This program has achieved
considerable success, particularly in Java and Bali, and has come to be considered a
model in Asia.

Housing

In rural areas the oors of dwellings consist of pounded earth, concrete, or raised wood,
while wooden framing supports walls of woven bamboo matting; the roofs are of dried
palm bre, tiles, or wood. In urban areas oors are of cement or tile, the framing of the
dwellings is of teak or meranti wood, the walls are of brick and plaster, and the roofs are of
tile or shingle.

Although most of the population is nonurban, the

major housing problems are in the cities. In their
desire to escape the restraints of the traditional rural
life and seek the opportunities of the cities, most
rural-to-urban migrants tolerate living conditions that
are less attractive than those of the country.

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Wooden houses along a pedestrian road in The larger cities, such as Jakarta, Surabaya, and
Long Segar, a Kenyah village in East
Bandung, are the ones with the greatest housing
Kalimantan, Indon.
© Gini Gorlinski problems. While there has been tremendous
suburban housing development, pitched primarily to
new members of the middle class, the urban areas themselves lack satisfactory housing,
as well as a dependable supply of water and adequate school and health facilities. Pockets
of substandard temporary housing in densely populated lower-income urban areas have
become permanent settlements, blending with established neighbourhoods. Such lower-
income settlements, called kampung in the manner of their rural counterparts, typically
consist of a cluster of small brick houses that procure their own water and often tap
electricity illegally from the power supply of the national electric company. Subsidized
housing is provided by some employers, including government ministries, for a limited
number of employees.

Education

Before the country’s independence, educational opportunities for Indonesians were

limited even on the primary and secondary levels. The Dutch colonial government did not
provide university-level education to most Indonesians. Only a select few received their
degrees in the Netherlands. Although a postsecondary technical school—now the
Bandung Institute of Technology—was established in 1920, student enrollment was
extremely limited. Since independence, however, the government has placed great
emphasis on primary, secondary, and higher education for all people. By the early 21st
century the great majority of Indonesians were literate.

Responsibility for education is centred in the

Department of National Education, but other
government bodies, especially the Department of
Religious Affairs, also administer extensive
educational programs. The national educational
system involves six years of primary education,
beginning at age seven, followed by six years of
Landmark building of the Bandung Institute secondary education, which are divided into two
of Technology, combining Minangkabau and
three-year blocks. Since the early 1990s the rst nine
Western architectural styles, Bandung, West
Java, Indonesia. years have been compulsory. Although the economic
C. May/Shostal Associates crisis of the late 1990s prevented many children from
furthering their formal studies, Indonesians are
generally inclined to allocate a high percentage of their family budget for education, since
schooling has become a reliable path to improved socioeconomic standing.

Higher education includes dozens of public institutions and thousands of private

postsecondary schools, with the private institutions expanding most rapidly since the

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1970s. Enrollment is about evenly distributed between men and women. Major
universities include the Bogor Agricultural University, the Bandung Institute of
Technology, the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta,
Hasanuddin University in Makassar (Ujungpandang), and Airlangga University in
Surabaya. While a number of universities offer postgraduate education, many students go
abroad—especially to North America, Europe, and Australia—to pursue doctoral degrees.

Cultural life
Cultural milieu

Indonesia exhibits a rich diversity of cultural practices and products. The remote interior
regions of Sumatra, Kalimantan, and western New Guinea feature ritualized speech and
local epic narrative traditions, while in Java and Bali the visual and performing arts are
heavily in uenced by the Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana. In the cities, the
melli uous calls to prayer radiating from mosques, many of which display a markedly
Muslim architectural style, coexist with the ashing lights and vibrant sounds of urban
popular culture. These are just a few examples of Indonesia’s truly complex heritage.

The aura of long-gone Hindu-Buddhist empires lingers in many parts of Indonesia,

particularly in Java, Sumatra, and Bali. From the 8th through the 10th century CE,
extensive temple complexes (candi) were built in central Java. Most of these were buried
or in ruins, but the government has actively engaged in their restoration. The remains of
the rst of the great central Javanese monuments, the Shaivite temple of the Diyeng
(Dieng) Plateau, date to the early 8th century. The Shailendra dynasty, which ruled Java
and Sumatra (8th–9th centuries), built the great Mahayana Buddhist monuments,
including that of Borobudur. Late in the 9th century the kings of Mataram built the Hindu
monuments around Prambanan. Commonly called Prambanan Temple, the complex
consists of six main temples; the three large ones along the west, dedicated to Shiva,
Vishnu, and Brahma, contain ne statues. Of the three smaller temples along the east, the
middle one contains a statue of Nandi, the bull of Shiva. The main temples are heavily
ornamented with stone carvings of the gods and other heavenly beings, and there is a
series of relief panels depicting the Ramayana.

Borobudur, designated a UNESCO World Heritage site

in 1991, is one of the nest Buddhist monuments in
the world. It stands on a hill about 20 miles (32 km)
northwest of Yogyakarta and rises to a height of
approximately 115 feet (35 metres) from its square
base, which measures 403 feet (123 metres) on each
Borobudur, a 9th-century Buddhist side. The monument consists of a lower structure of
monument, Central Java, Indon.
six square terraces (including its base) and an upper
Brian Brake—Rapho/Photo Researchers

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structure of three circular terraces, combining the

ancient symbols of the circle for the heavens and the square for the earth. In the centre of
each side of the square terraces is a staircase leading to the next level. The inner wall on
each level has niches containing statues of Buddha. Bas-reliefs covering the inner walls
and the balustrades depict stories from Buddhist teachings; many of the images
symbolize phases of human life, moving from the sensual stage at the lower level to the
spiritual stage at the top. The circular terraces are not decorated but contain 72 bell-
shaped stupas, each housing a statue of Buddha. In the centre of the upper terrace is the
main stupa, which stands 23 feet (7 metres) high. It contains no statues, other visual
images, or relics of any kind.

Between the 10th and 16th centuries, the centre of

power in the archipelago shifted to eastern Java, and
Buddhism merged with Hinduism, which later gave
way to Islam. Literature in old Javanese (kawi)
ourished during this period, and a number of large
temple complexes were constructed, none of which,
however, approached the grandeur of Borobudur or
Borobudur, Indonesia
Prambanan. The most imposing complex is
Pathway on one of the terraces of Panataran Temple near Blitar, which was constructed
Borobudur, central Java, Indonesia.
at the peak of the Majapahit empire in the 14th
© Ramon Abasolo/Fotolia
century. With the ascendancy of Islam through the
15th and 16th centuries, the temples fell into ruins, and
Hindu culture shifted to Bali, where it remains today.

The arts

Literature

Indonesia possesses a wealth of verbal art. Much of this material, such as the didong
poetry of Aceh or the tekena’ epic tales of the Kenyah of Kalimantan, is transmitted
through oral-traditional performance, as opposed to printed text. A largely nonwritten
tradition of reciting expressive, often witty quatrains called pantun is common in most
Malay areas throughout the archipelago. Some pantun performances are narrative; the
kentrung traditions of central and eastern Java, for instance, use pantun structure to
recount religious or local historical tales to the accompaniment of a drum. In central Java
macapat, a metric and melodic form, is used to present tales from ancient Hindu-
Javanese literature as well as stories, images, and ideas from local sources; the songs may
be performed solo or with instrumental accompaniment. Indeed, much of Indonesia’s
traditional literature forms the foundation of complex mixed-genre performances, such as
the randai of the Minangkabau of western Sumatra, which blends instrumental music,
dance, drama, and martial arts in ceremonial settings.

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Contemporary Indonesian literature was initiated in the early 1930s by a small group of
young writers, who created the journal Poedjangga Baroe (“The New Writer”). Published
in the Indonesian language, as opposed to Dutch, this literary periodical was devoted to
disseminating new ideas and expressions that ran counter to the type of writing
sanctioned by the colonial government. Under the intellectual leadership of S. Takdir
Alisjahbana, a poet, novelist, and philosopher, the contributors to Poedjangga Baroe were
committed to the nationalist cause—to the establishment of a new, modern Indonesia,
free from the constraints of local patterns of cultural expression.

The true modernist temper, however, emerged in the works of Indonesian poets of the
early 1940s, with Chairil Anwar as the leading gure. Although he died young, Chairil
transformed the Indonesian literary scene through the intense imagery of his poetry and
through his rebellious stance toward religion and social convention.

The growth of Indonesian literature suffered some setbacks in the second half of the 20th
century under the Sukarno and Suharto regimes, both of which imposed restrictions on
literary activity. Some writers, such as the internationally recognized novelist and journalist
Mochtar Lubis, were jailed for their nonconformity to governmental ideals and policies. A
cinematic work based on a novel by Alisjahbana was prohibited; Alisjahbana later left the
country to live in Malaysia. Especially during the rst half of the Suharto administration,
politically liberal writers were imprisoned; the renowned novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer
was detained for more than a decade.

Despite some tumultuous moments in its history, Indonesian literature has remained
vibrant. Literary groups in the larger cities often publish local poetic works. Jakarta
produces two of the most prestigious journals of letters and ideas: Horison (“Horizon”),
published since 1966, and Kalam (“The Word”), published since 1994.

Theatre and dance

Most of Indonesia’s oldest theatre forms are linked directly to local literary traditions (oral
and written). The prominent puppet theatres—wayang golek (wooden rod-puppet play)
of the Sundanese and wayang kulit (leather shadow-puppet play) of the Javanese and
Balinese—draw much of their repertoire from indigenized versions of the Ramayana and
Mahabharata. These tales also provide source material for the wayang wong (human
theatre) of Java and Bali, which uses actors. Some wayang golek performances, however,
also present Muslim stories, called menak.

In puppet performances the narrator (dalang) is also the puppeteer and the principal
artist of the show. To animate the characters, the dalang uses an array of vocal qualities
and speech styles, from the most re ned and lyrical to the most coarse and colloquial. An
evening of wayang golek or wayang kulit is inevitably a mixture of poetic elegance and

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base humour. Javanese and Sundanese performances normally last all night, starting
about 8:00 PM and ending near dawn. Balinese performances are usually shorter.

Playwrights trained in the Western tradition have worked to broaden Indonesians’

experience with theatre. In the 1960s the company of Willibrordus Rendra was
instrumental in inaugurating a stream of innovative, modernist, and controversial theatre
performances that were based to a large extent on Western models. Much of Rendra’s
work involved the adaptation for Indonesian audiences of works by Western playwrights
such as Sophocles, William Shakespeare, Federico García Lorca, Bertolt Brecht, and
Samuel Beckett.

Some theatrical traditions incorporate dance to such an extent that they are typically
termed “dance-dramas.” Of these traditions, the wayang wong and wayang topeng
(masked theatre) of Java and Bali, as well as the Balinese plays recounting the tale of the
witch Calonarang, are among the most widely known. Since independence, Indonesian
choreographers trained at the country’s performing arts academies have been well versed
in Western classical ballet and modern dance, in addition to local styles. Consequently,
some have adapted local dance-dramatic works for contemporary audiences. The
sendratari, for example, is essentially an updated form of traditional dance-drama that
combines elements of local theatrical genres (including puppet theatre) with movements,
staging, and costumes derived from contemporary styles; in Java, the form is associated
with the Prambanan Temple.

Apart from its crucial role in dance-dramas, Indonesian dance serves many diverse
functions, from the ritual to the purely recreational. Performances may be subtle and
stylized like the female court genres of pakarena in southern Celebes and srimpi in
central Java, graceful yet masculine like the seudati of Aceh and the kancet laki of the
Kenyah of eastern Kalimantan, or demonstrative, dynamic, and interactive like the
Balinese jangger, which is performed by a mixed group of men and women. The vigorous
silat (martial arts) traditions, for which the Minangkabau of western Sumatra and the
Sundanese of western Java are renowned, also embody an element of dance, in that they
are performed to a particular type of music and use conventional movements and
choreographies.

Music

Puppet theatre, dance-drama, and some nondance theatrical performances are typically
accompanied in Java and Bali by a gamelan, a metallic percussion ensemble consisting
mainly of gongs, metallophones, xylophones, and drums. Some ensembles also include
one or more utes, zithers, bowed lutes, and vocalists. When present, one or two kendang
(drums) lead the ensemble, giving cues and tempi to the musicians, while also
articulating the movements of the puppets or dancers. Female singers, in Java called

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pesinden, sit among the musicians and create the

mood for different parts of the narrative. Male singers
typically form a chorus called gerong. In all-night
performances, the pesinden usually banter with the
puppeteer during the comic interlude around
midnight; the audience also may request particular
musical pieces at that time.

Although performances of the metallic gamelan

ensembles of Java and Bali are the most nationally
and internationally prominent of Indonesia’s musical
traditions, a great variety of other traditions are found
throughout the archipelago. While some of these
traditions are, like the gamelan, gong-based, others
are centred on stringed instruments, wooden or
Kenyah man performing a man's solo dance
bamboo wind instruments, or drums, xylophones, or
(kancet laki), Long Segar, East Kalimantan,
other nonmetallic percussion instruments. For
Indon.
© Gini Gorlinski instance, a matrix of related plucked lute traditions—
most known by a term similar to sampé’ or kacapi—
stretches from Sumatra through Kalimantan to Celebes. The Toba Batak people of
Sumatra are known for their tuned drum ensembles, gondang. In eastern Kalimantan,
xylophone-based dance music is a favorite among Kenyah communities.

Many well-established musical traditions of Indonesia

incorporate instrumental and vocal elements from
international sources. The gamelan ensemble
accompanying a wayang kulit performance may use
horns to signal the battle scene. The Batak in
northern Sumatra and the Ambonese in the
Moluccas, both widely recognized for their vocal

Kenyah boys playing jatung utang virtuosity, use the guitar to accompany most of their
(xylophone) as part of a wedding celebration singing. Kroncong music, which ourished during the
in East Kalimantan, Indon. colonial era and retained its popularity following
© Gini Gorlinski
independence, was a product of the con uence of
western European (particularly Portuguese) and
Indonesian cultures; while the guitar and other Western string instruments constituted
the core of kroncong, the manner in which these instruments were played was
reminiscent of gamelan music.

Contemporary Indonesian popular music, consumed mostly (but not entirely) by the
young, has made kroncong a thing of the past. Dangdut, a synthesis of Indian lm music,
a type of Sumatran Malay music called orkes Melayu (Malay orchestra), kroncong, and

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Euro-American popular music, was pioneered in the 1970s primarily by the former rock-
and-roll musician Rhoma Irama. The style has continued to develop and has retained a
broad following not only in Indonesia but also in Malaysia. As a type of recreational dance
music, dangdut animates city pubs and various rural festivities across the country.

Visual arts

Encompassing sculpture and carving, painting, textile design, beadwork, basketry, and
other forms, the visual arts of Indonesia are as abundant as they are diverse. Some of
these forms have been shaped by ancient cultures of Asia, including those of late Zhou
dynasty China (12th–3rd centuries BCE) and of Dong Son Indochina (3rd century BCE).
Others have drawn in uences from more-recent cultural contacts. Such interaction,
combined with local artistic and aesthetic sensibilities, has produced a spectrum of styles
that are unique to the various peoples and regions of the country.

Carving and painting are among the best known of

Indonesia’s visual art traditions. Bali long has been of
special interest culturally because it has maintained
Hindu traditions for centuries within a predominantly
Muslim environment. Carvings are visible at nearly
every turn; images depicting natural and supernatural
entities from Hindu and indigenous traditions adorn
Nawang Baru, North Kalimantan, temple entrances, animate masked-dance and
Indonesia
puppet performances, overlook the grounds of of ces
Carving at the head of a column in the and homes, and populate the shelves and walls of
community hall of Nawang Baru, a Kenyah
galleries in the towns and cities. In Java the leather
village in North Kalimantan, Indonesia.
puppets for wayang kulit performances are
© Gini Gorlinski
fastidiously carved and painted so as to cast a lightly
tinted, lacelike shadow when held against an illuminated screen. In the Dayak villages of
Kalimantan some of the important structures are elaborately and colourfully decorated
with dense patterns of intertwined curls. Since the late 20th century, the carved wooden
shields, statues, paddles, and drums of the Asmat people in the interior of western New
Guinea have gained international recognition.

Indonesia also has an especially rich and varied

tradition of textile design. Batik making, practiced
almost exclusively on Java, involves a complex wax-
resistance process in which all parts of a cloth that are
not to be dyed are coated on both sides with wax
before the cloth is dipped into the dye. Using a
penlike wax holder called a canting, it is possible to
create intricate designs. It is a time-consuming

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Javanese leather shadow puppets, wayang process, and batik fabrics that are patterned entirely
kulit, against an illuminated screen.
by hand take several weeks to complete. To speed up
Courtesy of the Puppentheatermuseum,
Munich
the process and lower the cost, a copper stamp (cap)
may be used in lieu of the canting to apply the wax.
Large-scale production of such stamped batik has become an economically viable
business.

On woven fabric, which is made everywhere from

Sumatra through the eastern islands, the most
characteristic element is the key-shaped gure
combined with other geometric gures. The rhombus
(an equilateral parallelogram usually having oblique
angles) frequently occurs together with straight lines,
equilateral triangles, squares, or circles, which permit
an enormous number of variations, including stylized
representations of human beings and animals. Each
island or region has its characteristic patterns, which
serve to identify the area in which the cloth is made.

The art of weaving is highly developed. It includes the

A common Javanese batik pattern.
famous ikat method, in which the thread is dyed
Courtesy of the Royal Tropical Institute,
selectively before weaving by binding bres around
Amsterdam
groups of threads so that they will not take up colour
when the thread is dipped in the dyebath. This process may be applied to the warp
(foundation threads running lengthwise), which is most common and is found in
Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Sumba. Weft (threads running widthwise) ikat is found mainly
in south Sumatra, and the complex process of double ikat is still carried on in Tenganan in
Bali, where such cloth has great ceremonial signi cance.

Cultural institutions

Although the arts of Indonesia are not—and likely

cannot be—documented and preserved exhaustively,
a number of museums house notable collections. The
Indonesian National Museum in Jakarta not only
possesses collections of prehistoric and contemporary
arts and artifacts from Indonesia, including textiles,
stamps, sculptures, bronzework, and maps, but also
contains a major collection of ancient Chinese
ceramics. The Wayang Museum, also in Jakarta,
contains important collections that chronicle the
history and development of the country’s traditions of

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Ikat cloth from eastern Sumba, East Nusa puppet theatre. Other museums documenting
Tenggara, Indon.
regional culture have been established in major cities
Holle Bildarchiv, Baden-Baden
(often the provincial capitals) throughout the country.

The Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature Park (Taman Mini Indonesia Indah; “Taman Mini”), in
Jakarta, is a “living museum” that highlights the current diversity of Indonesia’s peoples
and lifestyles. The park contains furnished and decorated replicas of houses of various
ethnic groups in Indonesia; each of these structures is staffed with appropriately
costumed “inhabitants.” Completed in 1975, Taman Mini was one of the rst such
institutions in the region; in subsequent decades similar museums were established in
other parts of Indonesia, as well as in other countries of Asia.

An important arts venue in Jakarta, established by the municipal government in 1968, is

Ismail Marzuki Park (Taman Ismail Marzuki; TIM), named after a prominent Jakarta-born
composer. The centre has generated a fresh approach to both tradition and modernism.
While offering regular performances of local and regional arts, TIM also produces
modernist theatrical works that typically fuse Indonesian and international idioms. In 1987
the Indonesian government completed the renovation of colonial Schouwburg
Weltevreden (1821) theatre to become the Jakarta Arts Building (Gedung Kesenian
Jakarta); this institution also hosts major musical and theatrical productions from across
the globe. Both institutions sponsor an array of international festivals featuring music,
dance, lm, spoken word, and other arts.

Sports and recreation

Football (soccer) is among the most popular team sports in Indonesia. Open elds with
two goals are common sights across the country, and even in big cities children and other
football enthusiasts nd space to play. Indonesia has won medals at several Southeast
Asian Games.

Many of the traditional sports of the archipelago are forms of martial arts. Pencak silat,
which is especially popular on Java and West Sumatra, features weapons, such as knives
and sticks. In the Tana Toraja region of South Sulawesi, sisemba is a handless form of
combat, in which battlers attempt to kick their opponent into submission. Most spectator
sports centre around gambling, and cock ghting is common on Bali and Kalimantan.
Madura is known for its bull racing.

Indonesia formed an Olympic committee in 1946 and debuted at the 1952 Games in
Helsinki. At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, the country won its rst medal, a silver in archery.
Badminton, the national passion of Indonesia, was introduced as an Olympic sport at the
1992 Games in Barcelona, and the country dominated the events, capturing ve medals,
including two golds. The gold medals were won by Alan Budi Kusuma and Susi Susanti.

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Media and publishing

Dozens of daily newspapers circulate in Indonesia,

primarily in Java and Sumatra. Most are published in
Indonesian, but there are also a few in the English
language. Among the dailies with the widest
readership are Pos Kota (“The City Post”), out of
Jakarta, Suara Merdeka (“Voice of Freedom”), out of
Bull racing on Madura Island, Indonesia
© Wolfgang Kaehler Semarang, and Sinar Indonesia Baru (“Ray of a New
Indonesia”), out of Medan. Since the relaxation of
government regulations at the end of the 20th
century, most major Indonesian newspapers have
been accessible through the Internet. The
government publishing house, Balai Pustaka, is in
Jakarta; numerous private publishers also operate in
Jakarta, as well as in other large cities, mainly on Java.

Broadcasting is regulated by the Directorate-General

of Radio, Television, and Film in Jakarta. Radio
Republik Indonesia (RRI) and Televisi Republik
Indonesia (TVRI), the country’s largest radio and
television networks, were government-owned until
2000, when they were passed into public hands.
Private television stations have been permitted to
operate since the late 20th century, and their number
Susi Susanti competing in the 1993 All-
has grown rapidly.
England Championships in badminton.
ALLSPORT UK/John Gichigi
James F. McDivitt Thomas R. Leinbach Goenawan
Susatyo Mohamad
History
The archipelago: its prehistory and early historical records

Remains of Homo erectus (originally called Pithecanthropus, or Java man) indicate that
the ancestors of humans already inhabited the island of Java roughly 1.7 million years ago,
when much of the western archipelago was still linked by land bridges. Some 6,000 years
ago a rapid postglacial rise in sea level submerged these bridges. What remained was the
largest island complex in the world: the Indonesian archipelago.

Not surprisingly, the sea has greatly in uenced Indonesian history, and the boat has long
been a pervasive metaphor in the arts and the literary and oral traditions of the islands.
Monsoon winds, blowing north and south of the Equator, have facilitated communication
within the archipelago and with the rest of maritime Asia. In early times timber and spices
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of Java and the eastern islands were known afar, as

were the resins from the exceptionally wet equatorial
jungle in the western islands of Sumatra and Borneo.
By the rst centuries CE, goods were already being
shipped overseas, and navigable rivers had brought
the Indonesian hinterland into contact with distant
markets.

Although records of foreign trade begin only in the

Sites associated with early Indonesian
early centuries CE, it is possible that people from the
history.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Indonesian archipelago were sailing to other parts of
Asia much earlier. The Roman historian Pliny the
Elder’s Natural History suggests that, in the 1st century CE, Indonesian outriggers were
engaged in trade with the east coast of Africa. Indonesian settlements may have existed
at that time in Madagascar, an island with distinct Indonesian cultural traits. The
geographer Ptolemy, in the following century, incorporated information from Indian
merchants in his Guide to Geography concerning “Iabadiou,” presumably referring to
Java, and “Malaiou,” which, with its variants, may be a rendition of “Malayu,” a term once
broadly applied to various interior regions and kingdoms of Sumatra. (In contemporary
usage and spelling, the term Melayu refers to Malay peoples.)

Regular voyages between Indonesia and China did not begin before the 5th century CE.
Chinese literature in the 5th and 6th centuries mentions western Indonesian tree
produce, including camphor from northern Sumatra. It also refers to two Indonesian
resins as “Persian resins from the south ocean,” which suggests that the Indonesian
products had been added to the existing seaborne trade in resins from western Asia. It is
likely that Indonesian shippers of the time were exploiting southern China’s economic
dif culties, incurred as a result of the region’s having been cut off from the ancient trade
route of Central Asia. Small estuary kingdoms were beginning to prosper as international
entrepôts. Although the locations of these kingdoms are unknown, the commercial
prominence of Palembang in the 7th century suggests that the Malays of southeastern
Sumatra had been active in the “Persian” trade with southern China.

Easy overseas communication did not, however, result in the formation of territorially
large kingdoms. The many estuaries of Sumatra and Borneo, facing the inland seas,
possessed an abundance of nutritious seafood that made possible a settled mode of life,
and for the people of these estuaries, contact with their neighbours was more important
than any connections they could make with overseas lands. Local groups, endowed with
more or less comparable resources, were most concerned with protecting their separate
identities. Such provincial interests similarly prevailed on the island of Java, where the
lava-enriched soil, watered by gently owing rivers, encouraged wet-rice production and a
patchwork pattern of settled areas in the river valleys separated by mountains and jungle.
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Long before records began, many of the coastal and riverine groups of the Indonesian
archipelago were evolving an elementary form of hierarchy, accompanied by artistic
symbols of rank. No single group, however, was large or powerful enough to overrun and
occupy neighbouring territories; rather, the various peoples’ energies were absorbed by
ever more intensive exploitation of their own natural resources. While those living on or
close to the sea knew that geographic isolation was out of the question, they regarded
their maritime environment as a means of enhancing their well-being through imports or
new skills. Their outward orientation, then, ultimately encouraged the pursuit of local
interests rather than inculcating any sense of belonging to a larger community. Indeed,
the structure of Indonesian written and oral sources suggests that the origins of
kingdoms on the coasts of the Java Sea were associated with the success of local heroes
in turning the arrival of foreign trading treasure to their advantage.

Many Indonesian place-names have remained unchanged since the beginning of

documented history. In such places, which were often in close proximity to each other,
each leader saw himself at the centre of the world that mattered to him, which was not,
until later, the archipelago or even a single island but his own strip of coast or river valley.
Some centres achieved local hegemony, but never to the extent of extinguishing
permanently the pretensions of rival centres. Thus, the early history of Indonesia
comprises many regional histories that only gradually intersect with each other.

The historical fragmentation of the archipelago, which was sustained by its rich climate
and accentuated (rather than diminished) by easy access to the outside world, is evident
in Indonesia’s linguistic diversity. The speakers of Austronesian languages almost certainly
drifted into the region in small groups from the Asian mainland or the Paci c Islands over
long periods of time. When they reached the coasts and rivers of the archipelago, they did
not suddenly assume a common identity. On the contrary, they remained scattered
groups, sometimes coexisting with descendants of earlier populations of the Pleistocene
Epoch (roughly 1,800,000 to 10,000 years ago), who in their turn had also learned to make
economic use of their environment over an immense span of cultural time. The hundreds
of languages within the western branch of the Austronesian family (which includes most
languages of Indonesia) are an index of the manner in which the peoples of the
Indonesian archipelago submitted to the social, economic, and natural realities of their
environment.

Stone or metal inscriptions, together with surviving copies of early religious texts, are the
most important sources of documentary information. However, because these
documents are always concerned with speci c places, construction of a comprehensive
narrative history of any extensive area is virtually impossible. The reality behind many
interregional relationships, then, necessarily remains a riddle. Nevertheless, the ideas of
noblemen, as articulated in architecture and literature, re ect varying degrees of exposure
to in uences from beyond the archipelago. Moreover, they reveal points of intersection in

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the beliefs and practices of communities throughout the region; all groups maintained
basic assumptions concerning the dependence of humans on the goodwill of
supernatural entities.

Indonesian “Hinduism”

The arrival of Hindu religious conceptions

The ultimate effects of these cross-cultural (and commercial) exchanges with western and
especially southern Asia are usually described collectively as “Hinduization.” It is now held
that Hinduism was taken to Indonesia not by traders, as was formerly thought, but by
Brahmans from India who taught Shaivism and the message of personal immortality.
Sanskrit inscriptions, attributed to the 5th and 6th centuries, have been found in eastern
Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), a considerable distance from the international trade
route, and also in western Java. They reveal that Indian literati, or their Indonesian
disciples, were honoured in some royal courts. The rulers, called raka, were prominent
heads of groups of villages in areas where irrigation and other needs had stimulated
intervillage relationships and the development of supravillage authority; the inscriptions,
and also Chinese sources, indicate that some of these rulers were involved in warfare,
perhaps in an effort to extend their in uence. The Shaivite Brahmans supervised the
worship of the phallic symbol of Shiva, the linga (lingam), in order to tap the god’s favours
on behalf of their royal patrons. These Brahmans were representatives of an increasingly
in uential devotional movement (bhakti) in Indian Hinduism of the time, and they
probably taught their patrons how to achieve a personal relationship with the god
through “austerity, strength, and self-restraint,” in the words of one inscription from
Kalimantan. The rulers, therefore, were encouraged to attribute their worldly successes to
Shiva’s grace; the grace was obtained through devotional exercises offered to Shiva and
was likely regarded as the guarantee of a superior status in the life after death. These
Shaivite cults were marks of a privileged spiritual life and a source of prestige and royal
authority.

Indonesian religious conceptions

Indonesians, who had been accustomed to constructing terraced temples—symbolizing

holy mountains—for honouring and burying the dead, would not have been perplexed by
the Brahmans’ doctrine that Shiva also dwelt on a holy mountain. Megaliths that had
already been placed on mountain terraces for ritual purposes would easily have been
identi ed with Shiva’s natural stone linga, the most prestigious of all lingas. Indonesians,
who were already concerned with funerary rites and welfare of the dead and who
considered the elaborate rituals of metalworking as a metaphor for spiritual
transmutation and liberation of the soul, would have paid particular attention to Hindu
devotional techniques for achieving immortality in Shiva’s abode. The meditative ascetic
of Hinduism may have been preceded in Indonesia by the entranced shaman (priest-
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healer). In addition, the notion that water was a purifying agent because it had been
cleansed by Shiva’s creative energy on his mountaintop would have been intelligible to
mountain-venerating Indonesians, especially if they already endowed the water owing
from their own gods’ mountain peaks with divinely fertilizing qualities.

The entrance of the Brahmans into the Indonesian religious framework was likely paved
by earlier Buddhist missionaries to the archipelago, who shared the Hindu concern for
religious salvation. The perspectives of those who rst listened to the Brahmans, however,
were certainly informed by indigenous religious concepts. Revered especially as teachers
(gurus), the Brahmans gained the con dence of Indonesians by demonstrating ways to
achieve religious goals that were already important in the indigenous system of beliefs.

Nevertheless, Indonesian circumstances and motivation underlay the adoption of Indian

forms. The use of Hindu terminology in the inscriptions represents no more than
Indonesian attempts to nd suitable metaphoric expressions from the sacred Sanskrit
literature for describing their own realities. Sanskrit literature, imported from India on
manuscripts or as oral tradition, would have been drawn from especially when courtly
literati were seeking to describe those rulers who had achieved an intense personal
relationship with Shiva. The Indonesians, like other early Southeast Asian peoples, had no
dif culty in identifying themselves with the universal values of Hindu civilization as
represented by the sacred literature. While Indian literary and legal works provided useful
guidelines for Indonesian creative writing, they did not bring about a thoroughgoing
Hinduization of the archipelago any more than Indian Brahmans were responsible for the
formation of the early kingdoms of the archipelago.

India, then, should be regarded as an arsenal of religious skills, the use of which was
subordinated to the ends of the Indonesians. Expanding communication meant that
increasing numbers of Indonesians became interested in Indian thought. The rst
reasonably well-documented period of maritime Malay history provides further evidence
of the Indonesian adaptation of Indian religious conceptions.

The Malay kingdom of Srivijaya-Palembang

The kingdom of Srivijaya is rst mentioned in the writings of the Chinese Buddhist
pilgrim I-ching, who visited it in 671 after a voyage of less than 20 days from Canton. He
was on the rst stage of his journey to the great teaching centre of Nalanda in
northeastern India. The ruler of Srivijaya assisted I-ching on his journey.

Archaeological surveys undertaken since the late 20th century immediately to the west of
Palembang city have revealed such a quantity of materials as to make it practically certain
that this was Srivijaya’s heartland in the 7th and subsequent three centuries. Surface
remains of more than a thousand shards of Chinese ceramics, many of which are datable
from the 8th to the 10th century, have been recovered from several sites. Shards from the
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11th to the 14th century found elsewhere in the area may represent shifts of political and
commercial activity in the Palembang region. Shards found on nearby Seguntang Hill
(Bukit Seguntang), on the other hand, span all these centuries. A piece of Romano-Indian
rouletted ware, attributable to the early centuries CE, has been discovered in Palembang
near the river; the same ware has been found in Java near Jakarta. Moreover, the sheer
bulk of Buddhist, Hindu, and other statuary that has been recovered from the Musi River
region has suggested that the basin contained the site of a polity near the sea that
enjoyed considerable international contacts. Finally, stupa remains have been unearthed
at the foot of Seguntang Hill. These discoveries reinforce the textual evidence that
Palembang was indeed the centre of the Srivijaya empire.

Buddhism in Palembang

Srivijaya-Palembang’s importance both as a trade nexus and as a Southeast Asian centre

for the practice of Buddhism has been established by Arab and Chinese historical sources
spanning a long period of time. Its own records, in the form of inscriptions in Old Malay
(Malay language written in an Indian-based script), are limited almost entirely to the
second half of the 7th century. The inscriptions reveal that the ruler was served by a
hierarchy of of cials and that he possessed wealth. The period when the inscriptions were
written was an agitated one. Battles are mentioned, and the ruler had to reckon with
disaffection and intrigue at his capital. Indeed, the main theme of the inscriptions is a
curse on those who broke a loyalty oath administered by drinking holy water. The penalty
for disloyalty was death, but those who obeyed the ruler were promised eternal bliss.

I-ching recommended Palembang, with more than a thousand monks, as an excellent

centre at which to begin studying Buddhist texts. The 7th-century inscriptions, however,
are concerned with less-scholarly features of Buddhism. Showing in uences of Vajrayana,
or Tantric Buddhism, they deal largely with yantras, symbols to aid magical power that
were distributed by the ruler as favours to faithful servants. (Some of the ruler’s
adversaries also dispensed yantras, however.) The Talang Tuwo inscription of 684, which
records the king’s prayer that a park he has endowed may give merit to all living beings, is
especially indicative of the presence of Buddhism within the context of royal power. The
language and style of this inscription, incorporating Indian Tantric conceptions, make it
clear that the ruler was presenting himself as a bodhisattva—one who was to become a
buddha himself—teaching the several stages toward supreme enlightenment. This is the
rst instance in the archipelago’s history of a ruler’s assumption of the role of religious
leader.

The inscriptions show that the teachings of the Tantric school of Mahayana Buddhism,
with its magical procedures for achieving supernatural ends, had reached Palembang
before the end of the 7th century. Tantric Buddhism came into prominence in India only
in the 7th century, and the synchronism of its appearance in Palembang re ects not only

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the regularity of shipping contacts between Sumatra and India but, more important, the
Malays’ quick perception of Tantrism as a source of personal spiritual power. The word for
“curse” in the inscriptions is Malay, and it is reasonable to suppose that the Malays grafted
Tantric techniques onto indigenous magical procedures. The prestige that was accorded
the sacred Seguntang Hill, a site visited by those in search of spiritual power, probably also
re ects the vitality of Malay religion; it is unlikely that the site would have become such a
spiritual centre merely as a result of traf c in Tantric conceptions during the 7th century.
The agitation and adversity revealed in the inscriptions, then, are less likely to have been
the growing pains of a rising kingdom than the efforts of an already important kingdom
to achieve, or perhaps recover, hegemony in southern Sumatra.

The maritime in uence

In the centuries before they undertook long voyages overseas, the Chinese relied on
foreign shipping for their imports, and foreign merchants from afar required a safe base in
Indonesia before sailing on to China. This seaborne trade, regarded in China as “tributary”
trade with the “emperors’ barbarian vassals,” had developed during the 5th and 6th
centuries but languished in the second half of the 6th century as a result of the civil war in
China that preceded the rise of the Sui and T’ang dynasties. Chinese records for the rst
half of the 7th century mention several small harbour kingdoms in the region, especially
in northeastern Sumatra, that were pretending to be Chinese vassals. As illustrated by the
militancy of the ruler in the Old Malay inscriptions, however, the rulers of Palembang,
hoping for a revival of trade under the new T’ang dynasty, were eager to monopolize the
China trade and eliminate their rivals. They indeed succeeded in their aim; before I-ching
left Southeast Asia in 695, Srivijaya had gained control of the Strait of Malacca.

The subsequent power of the higher-ranking rulers—the maharajas—of Srivijaya

depended on their alliance with those who possessed warships. The fact that Arab
accounts make no mention of piracy in the islands at the southern end of the Strait of
Malacca suggests that the seafaring inhabitants of these islands identi ed with the
interests of the maharajas; the islanders therefore refrained from molesting merchant
ships, and they cooperated in controlling Srivijaya’s potential competitors in northern
Sumatra. The maharajas offered their loyal subjects wealth, posts of honour, and—
according to the inscriptions—supernatural rewards. But the grouping of maritime Malays
in this geographically fragmented region survived only as long as the Palembang
entrepôt was prosperous and its ruler offered enough largesse to hold the elements
together. His bounty, however, depended on the survival of the Chinese tributary trading
system, which needed a great entrepôt in western Indonesia. Early Malay history is then,
to an important extent, the history of a Sino-Malay alliance. The maharajas bene ted from
the China trade, while the emperors could permit themselves the conceit that the
maharajas were reliable imperial agents.

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The Palembang rulers’ exact span of territorial in uence is unknown. The Bangka Strait
and the offshore islands at the southern entrance of the Strait of Malacca would have
been essential to their maritime power. According to 7th-century inscriptions, the rulers
also had in uence in southern Sumatra on the Sunda Strait. Elsewhere in the hinterland,
including the Batanghari River basin, which came to be known as Malayu (along with
other regions of Sumatra’s interior), their authority would have been exercised by alliances
with local chiefs or by force, with decreasing effect the farther these areas were from
Palembang.

Malay unity under the leadership of the maharajas was inevitably undermined when, as
early as the 10th century, Chinese private ships began to sail to centres of production in
the archipelago, with the result that the Chinese market no longer depended on a single
Indonesian entrepôt. Toward the end of the 11th century, Srivijaya-Palembang ceased to
be the chief estuary kingdom in Sumatra. Hegemony had passed, for unknown reasons, to
the neighbouring estuary town of Jambi, on the Batanghari River, which was probably
controlled by the Minangkabau people of the island’s west-central interior. With the
decline of the tributary trade with China, a number of harbours in the region became
centres of international trade. Malayu-Jambi never had the opportunity to build up naval
resources as Srivijaya-Palembang had done, and in the 13th century a Javanese prince
took advantage of the power vacuum.

Central Java from c. 700 to c. 1000

Eastern Javanese inscriptions throw little light on happenings before the 10th century, but
the evidence from south-central Java, especially from the Kedu Plain in the 8th and 9th
centuries, is more abundant. This period in central Java is associated with the Shailendra
dynasty and its rivals. An Old Malay inscription from north-central Java, attributed to the
7th century, establishes that the Shailendras were of Indonesian origin and not, as was
once suspected, from mainland Southeast Asia. In the middle of the 9th century, the ruler
of Srivijaya-Palembang was a Shailendra who boasted of his Javanese ancestors; the
name Shailendra also appears on the undated face of an inscription on the isthmus of the
Malay Peninsula; the other face of the inscription—dated 775—is in honour of the ruler of
Srivijaya.

In spite of ambiguous references to Shailendra connections overseas, there is no solid

evidence that the territories of the central Javanese rulers at this time extended far
beyond central Java, including its north coast. Yet the agricultural wealth of this small
kingdom sustained vast religious undertakings; the monuments of the Kedu Plain are the
most famous in Indonesia. The Borobudur temple complex, in honour of Mahayana
Buddhism, contains 2,000,000 cubic feet (56,600 cubic metres) of stone and includes
27,000 square feet (2,500 square metres) of stone bas-relief. Its construction extended
from the late 8th century to the fourth or fth decade of the 9th. Shiva’s great temple at

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Prambanan, though not associated with the Shailendra family, is less than 50 miles (80
km) away, and an inscription dating to 856 marks what may be its foundation stone. The
two monuments, which have much in common, help to explain the religious impulses in
earlier Javanese history.

Borobudur is a terraced temple surmounted by stupas, or stone towers; the terraces

resemble Indonesian burial foundations, indicating that Borobudur was regarded as the
symbol of the nal resting place of its founder, a Shailendra, who was united after his
death with the Buddha. The Prambanan temple complex is also associated with a dead
king. The inscription of 856 mentions a royal funeral ceremony and shows that the dead
king had joined Shiva, just as the founder of the Borobudur monument had joined the
Buddha. Divine attributes, however, had been ascribed to kings during their lifetimes. A
Mahayana inscription of this period shows that a ruler was said to have the purifying
powers of a bodhisattva, the status assumed by the ruler of Srivijaya in the 7th century; a
9th-century Shaivite inscription from the Kedu Plain describes a ruler as being “a portion
of Shiva.”

The divine qualities of these kings, whether of Mahayana or of Shaivite persuasion, had
important implications in Javanese history and probably in the history of all parts of the
archipelago that professed the forms of Indian religion. The ruler was now and henceforth
seen as one who had achieved union with the supreme god in his lifetime. Kingship was
divine only because the king’s soul was the host of the supreme god and because all the
king’s actions were bound to be the god’s actions. He was not a god-king; he was the god.
No godlike action was more important than extending the means of personal salvation to
others, always in the form of union with the god.

The bas-relief of the Borobudur monument,

illustrating Mahayana texts and especially the
Gandavyuha—the tale of the tireless pilgrim in search
of enlightenment—is a gigantic exposition of the
Mahayana path to salvation taken by the king; it may
be thought of as a type of yantra to promote
meditation and ultimate union with the Buddha. But
Borobudur can also be identi ed as a circle, or
mandala, of supreme mystical power associated with
the Vairocana Buddha (one of the self-born Dhyani-
Buddhas), according to the teachings of Vajrayana
Buddhism. The mandala was intended to protect the
Shailendra realm for all time. The pedagogical
symbolism of the Prambanan temple complex is
standing deity revealed in its iconography, dominated by the image
of the four-armed Shiva, the Great Teacher—the

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Standing deity, andesite sculpture from customary Indonesian representation of the supreme
central Java, 9th century; in the Honolulu
deity. Prambanan af rms the Shaivite path to
Academy of Arts.
Photograph by L. Mandle. Honolulu
salvation; the path is indicated in the inscription of
Academy of Arts, gift of Mr. and Mrs 856, which implies that the king had practiced
Christian H. Aall, 1991 (6197.1) asceticism, the form of worship most acceptable to
Shiva. Thus, in Java, Shaivism as well as Mahayana
Buddhism had become hospitable to Tantric in uences. An almost contemporary
inscription from the Ratu Baka plateau, which is not far from the Prambanan complex,
provides further evidence of Tantrism; it alludes to special rites for awakening Shiva’s
divine energy through the medium of a ritual consort.

These royal tombs taught the means of salvation. The royal role on earth was similar. The
kings, not the religious elite, bore the responsibility of ensuring that all could worship the
gods, whether under Indian or Indonesian names. Every god in the land was either a
manifestation of Shiva or a subordinate member of Shiva’s pantheon, and worship
therefore implied homage to the king, who was part of the god. The growing together, as
a result of Tantric in uences, of Shaivism and Mahayana Buddhism meant that over the
centuries the divine character of the king was continually elaborated. His responsibility
was the compassionate one of maintaining his kingdom as a holy land. The bodhisattva-
king was moved by pity, as were all bodhisattvas, while the Shiva-like king, as an
inscription of the 9th century indicates, was also honoured for his compassion.
Compassion was expressed by providing an environment wherein religion could ourish.
Keeping the peace, protecting the numerous holy sites, encouraging religious learning,
and, above all, performing puri cation rituals to render the land acceptable to the gods
were different aspects of a single mission: the teaching of the religious signi cance of life
on earth. The lonely status of the ruler did not separate him from the religious aspirations
of his subjects; Prambanan provides a recognition of the community of interest between
ruler and ruled. The 856 inscription states that a tank of purifying water, lled by a
diverted river, was made available as a pilgrimage centre for spiritual blessings.
Hermitages had been built at the Prambanan complex, and the inscription states that
they were “to be beautiful in order to be imitated.”

The great monuments of the 9th century suggest something of the cultural ambience
within which events took place. One new development in central Java was that capable
raka (local rulers) were gradually able, when opportunities arose, to fragment the lands of
some raka and absorb the lands of others. At the same time, they established lines of
communication between themselves and the villages in order to guarantee revenue and
preserve a balance between their own demands and the interests of the independent and
prosperous agricultural communities. When a ruler manifested divine qualities, he would
attract those who were con dent that they would earn religious merit when they
supported him. Local princes from all over the Kedu Plain constructed small shrines
around the main Prambanan temple in a manner reminiscent of a congregation
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gathered around a religious leader. The inscription of 856 states that they built
“cheerfully.”

Eastern Java and the archipelago from c. 1000 to c. 1300

Documentation in the form of inscriptions and monuments ceased in central Java after
the beginning of the 10th century. For a period of more than 500 years, little is known of
events in central Java, and simultaneous developments in western Java and in the eastern
hook of the island have also remained a mystery. Evidence of the events of these years
comes almost exclusively from the Brantas River valley and the adjacent valleys of eastern
Java. This abrupt shift in the locus of documentation has never been satisfactorily
explained.

Government and politics

Eastern Java did not form a natural political unit. No single town was so exceptionally
endowed in local resources as to emerge as a permanent capital; instead, the residencies
of defeated kings were simply abandoned. There remains no trace of the location of some
of these royal compounds. The problems of government in these conditions are illustrated
by the events of the 11th century.

In 1016 the city of the eastern Javanese overlord was destroyed, likely by a rebellious vassal,
in what an inscription of 1041 (called the “Calcutta” inscription) described as “the
destruction of the world.” The kingdom consequently fell apart, but it was restored by the
dead king’s son-in-law Erlangga (Airlangga), a half-Balinese prince. Erlangga lived with
hermits, probably practicing asceticism, from 1017 to 1019, the year in which he was hailed
as ruler of the small principality of Pasuruan, near the Brantas delta. He could not take the
military offensive until 1028, however, and his nal success was not before 1035; he
dispatched his last opponent by provoking an uprising in the manner taught by Kautilya,
the master of Indian statecraft who recommended the use of subversion against an
enemy. Erlangga’s victories gradually vindicated his claims to divine power, and in the
“Calcutta” inscription he expressed the hope that all in the land would now be able to lead
religious lives.

Erlangga then undid the results of his achievement. Foreseeing that two of his sons might
quarrel, he divided his kingdom so that one son should rule over the southern part,
known as Panjalu, Kadiri, or Daha, and the other over the northern part, Janggala.
Erlangga’s sons refused to honour their father’s intentions. Fighting broke out, and the
Kadiri rulers were unable to establish their uneasy domination over the kingdom until the
early 12th century. The consequences of Erlangga’s decision to split the kingdom are
mourned in the Nagarakertagama, a poem written in 1365 that survives in a manuscript
found in Lombok at the end of the 19th century.

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The chain of command between the capital and the villages—and the number of of cials
involved—had grown since the central Java period. The ideal of a greater Javanese unity,
protected by a divine king, was probably cherished most by the villagers, since they
especially would bene t from peace and safe internal communications. Inscriptions
sometimes acknowledge the king’s gratitude for villagers’ assistance in times of need. The
villages were prosperous centres of local government. As a result of increasing contacts
with the royal court, village society had now become more strati ed, with elaborate signs
of status. But local lords could make dif culties for the villages by tampering with the ow
of the river or exacting heavy tolls from traders. In comparison with these local vexations,
the royal right to the villagers’ services and part of their produce was probably not
resented. No document was more respected than the inscription that recorded a village’s
privileges.

The king’s chief secular responsibility was to safeguard his subjects’ lands, including the
estates of the temples and monasteries that were so conspicuous a feature of the
Javanese landscape. When the king wanted to build a temple on wet-rice land, he was
expected to buy the land, not con scate it. At court he was assisted by a small council of
high-ranking of cials, whose services were rewarded with appanages from royal lands. Of
the council members, the king’s heir seems to have been the most important. Council
of cials conveyed royal decisions to subordinates, typically by visiting village elders while
making a circuit of the country.

Royal rule was probably not harsh. The protests that have been preserved were probably
prompted by unusually weak government. A reasonable relationship between ruler and
villagers may be seen in a Balinese inscription of 1025 that records a king’s sale of his
hunting land to a village after the villagers had complained of their lack of land. Village
elders sat with the of cers of royal law in order to guarantee fair trials and verdicts
re ecting the consensus of local opinion. Customary law was incorporated into the royal
statutes. Aggrieved individuals could appeal to the king for redress; groups of villages
sought his assistance for large-scale irrigation works. The villages paid taxes to the ruler,
who thus enjoyed an economic advantage over other regional lords. Everything
depended on the ruler’s energy and a general agreement that his government served the
interests of all.

The Kadiri princes of the 12th century ruled over a land that was never free from rebellion.
In 1222 the king Kertajaya was defeated by an adventurer, Ken Angrok. A new capital was
established, with Ken Angrok as king, at Kutaraja—later renamed Singhasari—near the
harbours of east Java.

The empire of Kertanagara

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Changed economic circumstances in the archipelago had an important impact on Java

beginning in the 13th century. Long before the 12th century, Chinese shipping had
become capable of distant voyages, and Chinese merchants sailed directly to the
numerous producing centres in the archipelago. The eastern Javanese ports became
more prosperous than ever before. A smaller entrepôt trade developed on the coasts of
Sumatra and Borneo and in the offshore islands at the southern entrance to the Strait of
Malacca. Heaps of Chinese ceramics from the 12th to the 14th century attest to the
existence of an important trading centre at Kota Cina, near present-day Medan on the
northeast coast of Sumatra. As a result of these shifts in the trade pattern, the
Minangkabau princes in the hinterland of central Sumatra, heirs to the pretensions of the
great overlords of Srivijaya-Palembang, were unable to develop their port of Jambi as a
rich and powerful mercantile centre. A power vacuum thus opened in the seas of western
Indonesia, and the Javanese kings aspired to ll it.

Java had probably long been regarded as the centre of a brilliant civilization, and Old
Javanese (Kawi) became the language of the inscriptions of the island of Bali in the 11th
century. The grafting of Tantric ritual onto a megalithic shrine at Bongkisam in Sarawak
(part of Malaysian Borneo), sometime after the 9th century, is indicative of Javanese
cultural diffusion to the maritime fringes of Indonesia. Javanese cultural in uence in other
islands almost certainly preceded political domination.

Disunity in the Malay world and the cultural fame of Java are not suf cient to explain why
the Javanese king Kertanagara (reigned 1268–92) chose to impose his authority on Malayu
in southern Sumatra in 1275. It has been suggested that the king’s concern was to protect
the archipelago from the threat of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan by organizing a religious
alliance. But Kertanagara probably imposed his political authority as well, though his
demands would have been limited to expressions of homage and tribute.

The king’s activities overseas were almost certainly intended to enhance his prestige in
Java itself, where he was never free from enemies. His political priorities are re ected in a
Sanskrit inscription of 1289, attached to an image of the king in the guise of the wrathful
Aksobhya Buddha (a self-born Dhyani-Buddha), claiming that he had restored unity to
Java; his overseas exploits are not mentioned.

The precise doctrinal contents of Kertanagara’s Tantric cult are unknown. In his lifetime
and after his death, his supporters revered him as a Shiva-Buddha. They believed that he
had tapped within himself demonic forces that enabled him to destroy the demons that
sought to divide Java. The 14th-century poet Prapancha, author of the Nagarakertagama
and a worshipper of Kertanagara, on one occasion referred to the king as the “Vairocana
Buddha” and associated him with a ritual consort who was, however, the consort of
Aksobhya Buddha. Prapancha also admired the king’s scholarly zeal and especially his
assiduous performance of religious exercises for the good of mankind.

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The role of the royal ascetic had long been a familiar feature of Javanese kingship. The
king who had been buried in the 9th-century mausoleum of Prambanan was identi ed
with Shiva, the teacher of asceticism. Early in the 13th century King Angrok, according to a
later chronicle, regarded himself as the Bhatara Guru, the divine teacher who was
equated with Shiva. Shaivite and Mahayana priests had been under royal supervision from
at least as early as the 10th century. Consequently, the Tantric concept of a Shiva-Buddha,
taught by Kertanagara, was not regarded as extraordinary. Javanese religious speculation
had come to interpret Shaivism and the Mahayana as identical programs for personal
salvation, with complementary gods. Union with divinity, to be achieved here and now,
was the goal of all ascetics, including the king, who was regarded as the paragon of
ascetic skill.

Kertanagara’s religious status, as well as his political problems and policies, were in 13th-
century Java by no means eccentric or contradictory features. Indeed, such religious and
political authority enabled Kertanagara to take advantage of circumstances stemming
from Chinese trade in the archipelago to extend his divine power beyond Java itself. By
the 14th century the homage of overseas rulers to the Javanese king was taken for
granted.

The Majapahit era

In 1289 the Javanese king Kertanagara maltreated Kublai Khan’s envoy, who had been
sent to demand the king’s submission. The Mongol emperor organized a punitive
expedition in 1292, but Kertanagara was killed by a Kadiri rebel, Jayakatwang, before the
invaders landed. Jayakatwang in his turn was quickly overthrown by Kertanagara’s son-in-
law, later known as Kertarajasa, who used the Mongols to his own advantage and then
forced them to withdraw in confusion. The capital city of the kingdom was moved to
Majapahit. For some years the new ruler and his son, who regarded themselves as
successors of Kertanagara, had to suppress rebellions in Java; not until 1319 was
Majapahit’s authority rmly established in Java with the assistance of the renowned
soldier Gajah Mada. Gajah Mada was the chief of cer of state during the reign of
Kertanagara’s daughter Tribhuvana (c. 1328–50), and in these years Javanese in uence was
restored in Bali, Sumatra, and Borneo. Kertanagara’s great-grandson, Hayam Wuruk,
became king in 1350 under the name Rajasanagara.

Hayam Wuruk’s reign (1350–89) is remembered in the archipelago as the most glorious
period in Javanese history. Prapancha’s poem the Nagarakertagama provides a rare
glimpse of the kingdom from a 14th-century point of view. The poem, originally called the
Desa warnana (“The Description of the Country”), describes itself as a “literary temple”
and endeavours to show how royal divinity permeates the world, cleansing it of impurities
and enabling all to ful ll their obligations to the gods and therefore to the holy land—the
now undivided kingdom of Java. The poem resembles an act of worship rather than a

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chronicle. The poet does not conceal his intention of

venerating the king, and, in the tradition of Javanese
poetry, he may have begun it under the stimulus of
pious meditation intended to bring him into contact
with the divinity that was embodied in the king.

The core territories of Hayam Wuruk’s polity were

probably considerably more extensive than those of
his predecessors. Important territorial rulers, bound to
the royal family by marriage, were brought under
surveillance through their incorporation into the court
administration. Although a network of royal religious
Terra-cotta head identified as Gajah Mada;
foundations was centred in the capital, it remains
in the Trawulan Site Museum, Indonesia
unclear whether a more centralized and enduring
Courtesy of the Balai Penyelamat Benda
Kuno Trowulan, Indonesia structure of government was introduced or whether
the unity of the realm and the ruler’s authority still
depended on the ruler’s personal prestige. Prapancha, at least, did not ascribe to Hayam
Wuruk an unrealistic degree of authority, even though his poem is an undisguised
representation of the attributes of royal divinity and the effects of divine rule in Java. In
their travels around the kingdom, subordinate of cials asserted their royal authority in
such matters as taxes and the control of religious foundations. A sign of the king’s
prestige was his decision to undertake a land survey to ensure that his subjects’ privileges
were being maintained. In the absence of an elaborate system of administration, the
authority of the government was strengthened by the ubiquity of its representatives, and
no one set a more strenuous example than the king himself. According to Prapancha, “the
prince was not for long in the royal residence,” and much of the poem is an account of
royal progresses. In this way Hayam Wuruk was able to assert his in uence in restless
areas, enforce homage from territorial lords, reassure village elders by his visits, verify land
rights, collect tribute, visit holy men in the countryside for his own spiritual
enlightenment, and worship at Mahayana, Shaivite, and ancient Javanese holy sites. His
indefatigable traveling, at least in the earlier years of his reign, meant that many of his
subjects had the opportunity to come into the presence of one whom they regarded as
the receptacle of divinity.

One of the most interesting sections of the Nagarakertagama concerns the annual New
Year ceremony, when the purifying powers of the king were reinforced by the
administration of holy water. The ceremony, attended by scholarly Indian visitors, enabled
the poet to assert that the only famous countries were Java and India because both
contained many religious experts. At no time in the year was the king’s religious role more
emphatically recognized than at the New Year, when the notables of the kingdom, the
envoys of vassals, and village leaders went to Majapahit to pay homage and to be
reminded of their duties. The ceremony ended with speeches to the visitors on the need
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to keep the peace and maintain the rice elds. The king explained that only when the
capital was supported by the countryside was it safe from attack by “foreign islands.”

Since the poem venerates the king, it is not surprising that more than 80 places in the
archipelago are described as vassal territories and that the mainland kingdoms, with the
exception of Vietnam, are said to be protected by the king. Prapancha, believing that the
king’s glory extended in all directions, delineated in detail what he perceived to be the
limits of relevant space. No fewer than 25 places in Sumatra are noted, and the Moluccas,
whose spices and other products were a source of royal wealth, are well represented. On
the other hand, northern Celebes (Sulawesi) and the Philippines are not mentioned.

During Hayam Wuruk’s lifetime Javanese overseas prestige was undoubtedly

considerable, though the king demanded no more than homage and tribute from his
more important vassals, such as the ruler of Malayu in Sumatra. In 1377, when a new
Malayu ruler dared to seek investiture from the founder of the Ming dynasty in China,
Hayam Wuruk’s envoys in Nanking convinced the emperor that Malayu was not an
independent country. Javanese in uence in the archipelago, however, depended on the
ruler’s authority in Java itself. When Hayam Wuruk died in 1389, the Palembang ruler in
southeastern Sumatra saw an opportunity to repudiate his vassal status. He had noted the
Ming dynasty’s restoration of the long-abandoned tributary trading system and its
prohibition of Chinese voyages to Southeast Asia and supposed that foreign traders would
again need the sort of entrepôt facilities in western Indonesia that Srivijaya-Palembang
had provided centuries earlier. He may even have announced himself as a bodhisattva
and heir of the maharajas of Srivijaya. The Javanese expelled him from Palembang, and
he ed to Singapore and then to Malacca on the Malay Peninsula.

Islamic in uence in Indonesia

Muslim kingdoms of northern Sumatra

Foreign Muslims had traded in Indonesia and China for many centuries; a Muslim
tombstone in eastern Java bears a date corresponding to 1082. However, substantial
evidence of Islam in Indonesia exists only from the end of the 13th century, in northern
Sumatra. Two small Muslim trading kingdoms existed by that time at Samudra-Pasai and
Perlak. A royal tomb at Samudra-Pasai, dating to 1297, is inscribed entirely in Arabic. By the
15th century the beachheads of Islam in Indonesia had multiplied with the emergence of
several harbour kingdoms, ruled by local Muslim princes, on the north coast of Java and
elsewhere along the main trading route as far east as Ternate and Tidore in the Moluccas.

The establishment of the rst Muslim centres in Indonesia was probably a result of
commercial circumstances. By the 13th century, in the absence of a strong and stable
entrepôt in western Indonesia, foreign traders were drawn to harbours on the northern
Sumatran shores of the Bay of Bengal, distant from the dangerous pirate lairs that had
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emerged at the southern end of the Strait of Malacca as Srivijaya lost its in uence.
Northern Sumatra had a hinterland rich in gold and forest produce, and pepper was being
cultivated at the beginning of the 15th century. It was accessible to all archipelago
merchants who wanted to meet ships from the Indian Ocean. By the end of the 14th
century, Samudra-Pasai had become a wealthy commercial centre, but it gave way in the
early 15th century to the better-protected harbour of Malacca on the southwest coast of
the Malay Peninsula. Javanese middlemen, converging on Malacca, ensured the harbour’s
importance.

Samudra-Pasai’s economic and political fame depended almost entirely on foreigners.

Muslim traders and teachers were likely associated with the kingdom’s administration
from the beginning, and religious institutions were introduced to make the foreign
Muslims feel at home. The rst Muslim beachheads in Indonesia, especially Pasai, were to
a considerable extent genuine Muslim creations that commanded the loyalty of the local
population and encouraged scholarly activities. There were similar new harbour kingdoms
on the northern coast of Java, several of which—including Cirebon, Demak, Japara, and
Gresik—were mentioned by 16th-century Portuguese writer Tomé Pires in his Suma
Oriental. These Javanese kingdoms existed to serve the commerce with the extensive
Muslim world and especially with Malacca, an importer of Javanese rice. Similarly, the
rulers of Malacca, though of prestigious Palembang origin, had accepted Islam precisely
in order to attract Muslim and Javanese traders to their port. This pro table network of
communication with the Muslim world of Asia, combined with Islam’s assertion of the
equality of all believers, helped propel such areas from the fringe of Shaivite-Mahayana
culture toward positions of in uence within the Indonesian archipelago.

However, events of the 15th and 16th centuries were not merely a consequence of the
in uence of new ideas; the political ambitions of many regional princes also catalyzed
rapid, agitated, and erratic change. Aceh, which succeeded Samudra-Pasai in the 16th
century as the leading harbour kingdom in northern Sumatra, became a self-consciously
Muslim state, although “Hindu” notions of divine kingship might have persisted locally as
late as the 17th century. Aceh had contacts with Muslim India and its own heterodox
school of Muslim mysticism; its sultans also sought an alliance with the Ottoman Empire
against the Portuguese, who had conquered Malacca in 1511. The Malay princes of Malacca
had installed Muslim vassals on the east coast of Sumatra in the 15th century, but when
Malacca was captured by the Portuguese, the princes transferred their capital southward
on the Malay Peninsula to Johor (Johore) and gradually became involved in a con ict not
only with the Portuguese but also with the Acehnese for control of the Strait of Malacca.
Aceh, for its part, was unable to impose its faith on the Batak highlanders in the interior.
The most notable gain for Islam in Sumatra was in the Minangkabau country, where
Shaivite-Mahayana Tantric cults had ourished in the 14th century; by the beginning of
the 17th century, Islam had advanced far into Minangkabau territory by way of the
Acehnese coast.
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Muslims in Java

The Sumatran centres of Islam had commercial ties with other parts of the region, but
they were not closely involved in events outside their immediate neighbourhoods. On
Java, on the other hand, the negligible distance between the Muslim powers of the
coastal fringe and the established kingdoms of the interior allowed tension to develop.
The Muslims did not overthrow the kingdom of Majapahit; rather, the kingdom, weakened
by feuds within its royal family and exclusion from overseas commerce, merely withered
away and disappeared in the early 16th century. The passing of Majapahit hegemony,
however, left a power void in Java that triggered outright con ict not only between
Muslim and non-Muslim communities but also between Islamic power hierarchies and
those of the traditional aristocracy.

The 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries constituted an extremely agitated period in Javanese
history. The militant character of coastal Islam was evident in the enforced imposition of
the new faith on western Java and also on Palembang in southern Sumatra. With the
spread of Islam came an expansion of its power structure. The impact of this expansion,
especially from a political perspective, was evident in the fury with which Mataram, the
great Muslim kingdom of 17th-century Java, lashed out against the princes and Muslim
notables of the northern coast.

The con ict apparently began with the determination of the coastal rulers of the Islamic
sultanate of Demak in the rst half of the 16th century to rule over a great Javanese
kingdom. Especially as their harbours grew richer and their dynasties older and more
con dent, the coastal princes came to see themselves not only as Muslim leaders but as
Javanese royalty. Their pretensions are re ected in Tomé Pires’ statement that they
cultivated the “knightly” habits of the ancient aristocracy. But when Demak sought to
expand inland, bringing with it Islam, its armies were halted in the mid-16th century by
the kingdom of Pajang. Some years later the central Javanese kingdom of Mataram came
to the fore. The climax of the con ict occurred in the rst half of the 17th century, when
Agung, ruler of Mataram, took the offensive and destroyed the coastal states and with
them the basis of Javanese overseas trade.

The Islam that came to Indonesia from India, perhaps from southern India, brought the
heterodox mystic sects of Su sm, the character of which was probably not foreign to the
Javanese ascetics. Both a Su “saint” (wali) and a Javanese guru likely understood and
respected each other’s yearning for personal union with God. The Javanese tradition, by
which small groups of disciples were initiated by a teacher into higher wisdom, was
paralleled in the Su teaching methods. For Muslim theologian and Javanese scholar
alike, the concern was always less with the nature of the divine than with skills for
communicating with God. Arabic texts, moreover, tended eventually to be recited as
meditative aids, just as the Tantric mantras had been.

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The earliest Javanese disciples of Islam were, however, not the thoughtful representatives
of earlier religious systems in Java but humble men of the coast who had been left
outside the traditional teachings of the courts and the anchorites. These men doubtless
saw in Islam a simple message of hope, offering them not only a congenial personal faith
but also opportunities for secular advancement in a trading society where rank was not as
important as fervour. Early Muslim literature has a theme of the wandering adventurer
who comes from obscure origins, makes good, and seeks the consolations of Islam. For
Muslim disciples such as these, the times offered boundless means for achieving success,
either in trade or in the service of ambitious princes. These princes, parvenu aristocrats
and also the product of Islam, needed guardians of their conscience, courtly advisers, and,
above all, military commanders. For the new elite, the progress of coastal Islam brought
both spiritual and material gain.

All of this was greatly disturbing to those in the interior who had been nurtured in older
traditions and saw no reason for abandoning their Shaivite-Mahayana values. For the
aristocrats of the interior, the memories of Majapahit’s hierarchical system of government
under a godlike king represented standards of civilized behaviour that had to be asserted
at all cost against the forces of confusion released by the coastal population. Contacts
between wandering Su dervishes and peasants, at a time of acute distress caused by
warfare, and the pretensions of Muslim court of cials, some of whom claimed a privileged
religious status without precedent in Javanese history, seemed to threaten the
foundations of society. The ruler of the interior kingdom of Pajang is depicted in the
Javanese chronicles as an ascetic and as the son and grandson of ascetics. He was, in this
respect, a true Javanese king. When, several generations later, the ruler of Mataram
destroyed the coastal states, he was ultimately seeking to destroy the forces that
disunited Java. This was in the tradition of earlier Javanese kings. His conquests were as
much a part of his mission as Kertanagara’s had been in the 13th century.

Under Mataram’s hegemony in the 17th century, Islam in Java was permitted to survive
only on Javanese royal terms. Its innovating effects were postponed until the end of the
19th century. As one of several religious activities, Islam therefore became tolerable in
Javanese eyes. Muslim of cials in the court of Mataram became well-rewarded and
obedient servants of the ruler. In time, scholars returned to the study of the earlier genres
of Javanese literature, including texts that taught the nature of government according to
the values of the “Hindu-Javanese” world. In the countryside, Islam remained in uential in
times of social distress, as it preached to aggrieved peasants of the coming of the
messiah. As a literary in uence Islam survived in the form of mystical texts and poems,
romantic tales, and, later, borrowings by inland court historians of material from the Serat
Kanda (“Universal Histories”) of the coastal culture. The borrowings are a testament not
only to the impact of Islam in Java but also to the nature of its incorporation into
traditional power hierarchies.

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Oliver W. Wolters

Expansion of European in uence

Although the presence of Portuguese traders in the archipelago was relatively

unimportant in 16th-century Java, the fall of Malacca on the Malay Peninsula to the
Portuguese in 1511 was a turning point in Indonesian history. By the end of the century, the
level of Muslim Indonesian trade with the Middle East, and thence with Europe, was the
greatest it had ever been. As commerce expanded, the Portuguese strove to secure
control of trade with the Moluccas—the Spice Islands.

At the end of the 16th century, however, an increase in Dutch and British interests in the
region gave rise to a series of voyages, including those of James Lancaster (1591 and 1601),
Cornelis de Houtman and Frederik de Houtman (1595 and 1598), and Jacob van Neck
(1598). In 1602 the Dutch East India Company (formal name United East India Company
[Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie; VOC]) received its charter, two years after the
formation of the English East India Company. The VOC then inaugurated an effort to
exclude European competitors from the archipelago—called the East Indies by
Europeans. It also sought to control the trade carried on by indigenous Asian traders and
to establish its own commercial monopoly.

Monopoly itself was not an innovation in the archipelago; Aceh, for example, had
controlled trade on the northwest and east coasts of Sumatra. The company’s monopoly,
however, was more extensive and came to form the basis of the Dutch territorial empire.
For these reasons many have tended to see either 1511 or the turn of the 17th century as
the beginning of a period of European domination that lasted until the 20th century.

Since the 1930s, however, some historians have criticized the view that Europeans were
the major factor in shaping the history of the East Indies from the 17th century onward. By
contrast, they have stressed an essential continuity of Indonesian history and have argued
that the VOC at rst made little change in traditional political or commercial patterns.
Traditional Asian commerce, according to one view, was a noncapitalistic peddling trade,
nanced by patrician classes in Asian countries and conducted by innumerable small
traders who collected spices and pepper in the Indies for disposal in the port cities of Asia.
In this view the VOC was seen, in effect, as merely another merchant prince, gradually
inserting itself into the existing trade patterns of the Spice Islands and accommodating
itself to them. As Batavia (now Jakarta) became the headquarters from which it
established factories (trading posts) in the Spice Islands and elsewhere, the company
gradually became a territorial power, but it was, at rst, only one power among others and
not yet ruler of the region. Only during the 19th century did new economic forces, the
product of industrial capitalism, burst upon the islands and submerge them under a new
wave of European imperialism.

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Growth and impact of the Dutch East India Company

Regardless of whether Europeans constituted the primary historical force in 17th-century

Indonesia, their presence undoubtedly initiated changes that in the long run were to be of
enormous importance. The VOC itself represented a new type of power in the region: it
formed a single organization, traded across a vast area, possessed superior military force,
and, in time, employed a bureaucracy of servants to look after its concerns in the East
Indies. In sum, it could impose its will upon other rulers and force them to accept its
trading conditions. Under the governor-generalship of Jan Pieterszoon Coen and his
successors, particularly Anthony van Diemen (1636–45) and Joan Maetsuyker (1653–78), the
company laid the foundations of the Dutch commercial empire and became the
paramount power of the archipelago.

During the 17th century the VOC went far toward establishing commercial control in the
Indonesian islands. It captured Malacca from the Portuguese (1641), con ned the British—
after a period of erce rivalry—to a factory at Bencoolen (now Bengkulu), in southwestern
Sumatra, and established a network of factories in the eastern islands. Though it may have
wished to limit its activities to trade, the company was soon drawn into local politics in
Java and elsewhere, and, in becoming the arbiter in dynastic disputes and in con icts
between rival rulers, it inevitably emerged as the main political entity in the archipelago.

In the 1620s Sultan Agung, ruler of the central Javanese kingdom of Mataram and
representative of the old and highly sophisticated Javanese civilization, sought to extend
his power over Bantam (near present-day Banten) in western Java. This brought him into
con ict with the Dutch, and he laid siege to the Dutch fortress at Batavia. Although
Agung’s forces were eventually compelled to withdraw, the result of the confrontation
was inconclusive and left both the Dutch and the Javanese warily respectful of each
other’s strength. Dutch intervention in Javanese affairs increased in the later 17th and
early 18th centuries, however, owing to internal dissensions within Mataram and a series of
wars of succession between pretenders to the throne. In return for its services in 1674 to
Amangkurat I, Sultan Agung’s successor, and then to Amangkurat II shortly afterward, the
VOC received the cession of the Preanger regions of western Java.

This was the rst of a series of major territorial advances. In 1704 Dutch forces assisted in
replacing Amangkurat III with his uncle, Pakubuwono I, in return for which further
territory was ceded. In this way almost all of Java gradually came under Dutch control, and
by 1755 only a remnant of the kingdom of Mataram remained. This was divided into two
principalities, Yogyakarta (Jogjakarta) and Surakarta (Solo), which survived until the end of
Dutch rule. In an attempt to control the pepper trade in Sumatra, the VOC established
footholds in western Sumatra and in Jambi and Palembang over the course of the 17th
century, and it interfered in local con icts in support of rulers who favoured it. The main
Dutch expansion in Sumatra did not take place until the 19th century, however.

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In acquiring territorial responsibilities, the company did not at rst establish a close
administrative system of its own in the areas that were under its direct control. In effect,
the VOC replaced the sovereign of the royal court and, in so doing, inherited the existing
structure of authority. An indigenous aristocracy administered the collection of tribute on
behalf of the company, and only gradually was this system converted into a formalized
bureaucracy. The VOC, like the royal court before it, drew revenue in the form of produce
from the peasantry within its domain.

To implement its commercial monopoly, the VOC established company factories for the
collection of produce, pressured individual rulers to do business solely with the company,
controlled the sources of supply of particular products (clove production, for example, was
limited to Ambon, nutmeg and mace to the Banda Islands), and, in the 18th century,
pushed through a system of forced deliveries and contingencies. Contingencies
constituted a form of tax payable in kind in areas under the direct control of the company;
forced deliveries consisted of produce that local cultivators were compelled to grow and
sell to the company at a set price. There was little difference between the devices. In
theory, forced deliveries were thought of as a form of trade in which goods were
exchanged, but they were, in fact, as the British scholar J.S. Furnivall described it, “tribute
disguised as trade,” while contingencies were “tribute undisguised.” In effect, the whole
system of company trade was designed to extract produce from the East Indies for
disposal in a European market—but without stimulating any fundamental technological
change in the area’s economy. The pro ts belonged to the company, not to the producers.
The indigenous traders of the region were pushed aside by the VOC as it gained control of
more and more of the export trade of the archipelago. The growth of Batavia resulted, for
example, in the decline of the north coast ports of Java, through which much of the spice
trade had been channeled since before the 15th century. In this way the traditional
pattern of trade was checked and distorted.

During the 18th century the VOC ran into nancial dif culties from a variety of causes: the
breach of the company’s monopoly by smuggling, the growing administrative costs as
the company came to shoulder greater responsibilities of government, and the corruption
of the company’s servants. Further complicating matters, the Netherlands (at the time,
the Dutch Republic) succumbed to France during the French revolutionary wars and was
restructured and renamed the Batavian Republic in 1795. In 1799 the (Dutch) government
of the republic terminated the affairs of the Dutch East India Company.

The French and the British in Java, 1806–15

The fall of the Netherlands to France and the dissolution of the company led in due course
to signi cant changes in the administration of the East Indies. Under Napoleon I the
Batavian Republic became the Commonwealth of Batavia and then the Kingdom of
Holland, with one of Napoleon’s marshals, Herman Willem Daendels, serving as governor-

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general. Daendels strengthened Javanese defenses, raised new forces, built new roads
within Java, and improved the internal administration of the island. He attempted to
formalize the position of the Javanese regents, subordinating them to Dutch prefects and
emphasizing their character as civil servants of a central government rather than as semi-
independent local rulers.

In 1811 Java fell to a British East India Company force under Baron Minto, governor-general
of India, who, after the surrender, appointed Thomas Stamford Raf es lieutenant
governor. Raf es approached his task with the conviction that British administrative
principles, modeled in part on those developed in Bengal, could liberate the Javanese
from the tyranny of Dutch methods; he believed that liberal economic principles and the
cessation of compulsory cultivation could simultaneously expand Javanese agricultural
production, improve revenue, and make the island a market for British goods. Along with
his liberalism, Raf es brought to his task a respect for Javanese society. Before his
appointment he had been a student of Malay literature and culture, and during his period
in Batavia (Jakarta) he encouraged the study of the society he found about him. Raf es
rediscovered the ruins of the great Buddhist temple Borobudur in central Java and
published his History of Java in 1817, a year after his return to England.

Raf es carried further the administrative

centralization begun by Daendels and planned to
group the regencies of Java into 16 residencies. By
declaring all lands the property of the government
and by requiring cultivators to pay a land rent for its
use, he proposed to end the compulsory production
system. This, he believed, would free the peasants
from servility to their “feudal” rulers and from the
burden of forced deliveries to the Dutch and allow
them to expand their production under the stimulus
of ordinary economic motives. Raf es oversimpli ed
the complexities of traditional land tenure, however.
Thomas Stamford Raffles, detail of an oil He misread the position of the regents, whom he at
painting by G.F. Joseph, 1817; in the
rst mistakenly believed to be a class of feudal
National Portrait Gallery, London.
landholders rather than an of cial aristocracy. (The
Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery,
London regents, in fact, had no proprietary rights in the land
of their subjects.) But despite a series of adjustments
in his original plan, Raf es was unable to devise an effective means of applying his
theories before the return of Java to Dutch hands as part of the general settlement
following the defeat of Napoleon.

Dutch rule from 1815 to c. 1920

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Before the 19th century, Indonesian societies had experienced considerable pressure from
Europeans, but they had not been consumed by Western in uences. The political order of
Mataram had been eroded, and the rst steps had been taken toward administrative
centralization in Java. In the outer islands, local rulers had been forced to submit in some
measure to the will of the Dutch headquartered in Batavia (Jakarta). The trading patterns
of the archipelago had been changed and constricted. Nevertheless, these were
super cial developments when seen against the continuing coherence and stability of
Indonesian societies. They were super cial, also, compared with the Western impact still
to come.

When the Dutch returned to Indonesia in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, their main
concern was to make the colony self-supporting. During the interregnum, both exports
and revenue had declined sharply, despite Raf es’s hopes for his land-rent system. The
costs of government in Java were rising as a result of the growing complexity of
administration. In restoring their authority, the Dutch retained the main outlines of the
British system of residencies, regencies, and lower administrative divisions, though they
did not, at rst, follow exactly the attempts of Daendels and Raf es to turn the regents
into salaried of cials, speci cally responsible to the residents. Rather, they saw the local
regent as the “younger brother” of the Dutch resident. This difference in theory was
perhaps of slight practical effect, since the tendency in lower levels of territorial
administration continued in the direction of an increasingly centralized control. Several
factors contributed to the trend: one was the need to deal with a series of disturbances,
primarily in Java and western Sumatra but also on a smaller scale in Celebes, Borneo, and
the Moluccas; a second was the new economic policy, adopted in 1830, which increased
the economic responsibilities of local of cials.

The Java War of 1825–30 precipitated from a number of causes. In part, it was the product
of the disappointed ambitions of its leader, Prince Diponegoro, who had been passed over
for the succession to the throne of Yogyakarta. It was also attributable, however, to
growing resentment among the aristocratic landholders of Yogyakarta, whose contracts
for the lease of their lands to Europeans had been canceled by the governor-general.
There was support too from Islamic leaders, as well as other hidden factors—such as the
expectation of the coming of a messianic Just Ruler, who would restore the harmony of
the kingdom—that undoubtedly added to the climate of discontent. From this agitated
atmosphere erupted a revolt that, through the skillful use of guerrilla tactics, continued to
challenge Dutch authority for ve years, until the Dutch seized Diponegoro during truce
negotiations and exiled him to Celebes.

About the same time, the Dutch in western Sumatra were drawn into the so-called Padri
War (named for Pedir, a town in Aceh through which Muslim pilgrims usually returned
home from Mecca). Basically, the war was a religious struggle in Minangkabau country
between revivalist Islamic leaders (called Padris) and the local adat (“customary law”)

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leaders, who were supported by the Dutch. Under Tuanku Imam Bonjol, the Padri forces
resisted Dutch pressure from the early 1820s until 1837. For the Dutch the effect of this
involvement was inevitably a strengthening of administrative commitment in western
Sumatra.

The Culture System

The formation in 1824 of the Netherlands Trading Society (Nederlandsche Handel-

Maatschappij; NHM)—a company embracing all merchants engaged in the East Indies
trade and supported by the government of The Netherlands with the king as its chief
shareholder—did not produce the hoped-for commercial expansion. In 1830, however, a
newly appointed governor-general, Johannes van den Bosch, devised a new method by
which the government could tap the resources of the archipelago. This was the so-called
Culture System, or Cultivation System (Cultuurstelsel).

The Culture System provided that a village set aside a fth of its cultivable land for the
production of export crops. These crops were to be delivered to the government as land
rent. Land rent, then, was the measure of the amount to be produced by each village. If a
village, through the growing of export crops on a fth of its land, returned an amount in
excess of the land rent for which it had been assessed, it would be free of land rent and
would be reimbursed to the extent of the excess; on the other hand, if a village produced
less than the assessed amount of land rent, it would have to make up the difference.

From the government’s point of view, the Culture System was an overwhelming success.
Exports soared, rising from 13 million guldens (the Dutch currency) in 1830 to 74 million a
decade later. The products were disposed of through the Netherlands Trading Society,
and between 1840 and 1880 their sale brought to the Dutch treasury an annual average of
18 million guldens, approximately a third of the Dutch budget.

The effects of the system for the Javanese were, however, of more dubious value. Though
its founder believed that, by stimulating agricultural production, the Culture System
would ultimately bene t the people of Java as well as the home government, it later came
to be considered both by Dutch critics and by outside observers a particularly harsh and
burdensome policy. Van den Bosch’s expectations were not entirely false, however. The
policy did extend village production in certain areas, and the population of Java increased
from 6 million to 9.5 million during the full operation of the system. The range of exports
from Java was broadened, and indigo and sugar were the rst items to be made the
subject of compulsory cultivation; coffee, tea, tobacco, and pepper were subsequently
added. Nevertheless, the system placed a heavy burden on the cultivators and tended to
amplify social and economic inequities within rural society. Dominant peasants, members
of a rural elite, were able to manipulate the system to their advantage. And while the
Culture System brought the islands of the archipelago into contact with a wider overseas

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market, the East Indies government stood between producer and market, and the annual
surplus added to Dutch, not Javanese, prosperity. The system did nothing to stimulate
technological change or economic development for the Javanese people. An increasing
commercial role was played not by the indigenous population but by Chinese
immigrants, who t into colonial rule as a separate caste, engaged in tax collection,
moneylending, and small trading.

There were other consequences. The Culture System accentuated the differences
between Java and the outer islands, and in Java it led to a considerable tightening of the
administrative system. The regent became the kingpin of the system, responsible to the
resident for the delivery of crops from his regency. Secure in the knowledge that they
were backed by Dutch power, regents in some cases imposed additional burdens upon
their subjects—a development that received trenchant criticism in the novel Max
Havelaar (1860), written under the pseudonym Multatuli by the Dutch writer Eduard
Douwes Dekker, a former of cial of the East Indies government. But the long-term effect
of the new functions imposed on regents was to reduce their independence and to
hasten the process, started by Daendels, by which a loosely structured administrative
aristocracy was gradually converted into a salaried civil service. Regents were no longer
able to draw their revenues from their subjects, and the lines of authority were clearly
demarcated. Regents, aided by a junior Dutch of cial (the controleur), became clearly
responsible to the Dutch residents above. By 1860 the administrative divisions of Java had
been rmly established, and the service that staffed them had acquired the character it
was essentially to preserve for the remainder of the colonial period.

In the 1860s the Culture System came under attack not only from humanitarian quarters
but also from private business interests in The Netherlands. The latter appealed to liberal
economic principles in support of their right to share in the riches of the East Indies; their
pressure was effective. Although the Culture System was not abolished and continued for
a number of years to make its contribution to the Dutch treasury, the decision was taken
to encourage also the entry of private investment. The Liberal Policy, as it was called, was
effectively inaugurated in 1870 by the adoption of an agrarian law that provided that
European investors could acquire land under long-term leasehold, either from Indonesian
landholders or, in the case of unoccupied land, from the government. Certain safeguards
were provided for the Indonesian landholders: the provision that Europeans lease rather
than purchase land was intended to prevent the alienation of Indonesian land, and the
government was charged also with preventing Europeans from leasing land that was
needed for the subsistence of village populations.

Within this framework Dutch capital began to ow to the East Indies on a scale that was
to transform the character of the Indonesian economy and society. During the next 60
years there was a 10-fold increase in the value of exports (from 107 million guldens to 1.16
billion). There was a change also in kinds of products exported. Such exports as coffee,

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sugar, tea, and tobacco continued to expand, but such industrial raw materials as rubber,
copra, tin, and oil soon came to dominate the export economy. These remarkable
developments were in large measure the product of a totally different system of
production. Under the company, during the interregnum, and, later, under the Dutch
crown working through the Culture System, export crops were grown by Indonesian
cultivators on their own land. Under the Liberal Policy, however, the new crops were the
subject of estate production. Much economic expansion took place in Sumatra rather
than Java, and Sumatra’s east-coast residency became the seat of a vast new plantation
economy. The estates were company-owned, and the economic developments of the late
19th century were indeed the product of corporate, rather than individual, enterprise.

Dutch territorial expansion

Rapid economic development was accompanied by territorial expansion. Although the

Dutch had established their control effectively over Java by the mid-18th century and had
gradually expanded their original holdings in Sumatra over the course of the 19th, their
control over the rest of the archipelago was patchy and incomplete. It was exercised, in
the main, through agreements with local rulers rather than through direct control over
territory. In the closing years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, rapid
moves were made to round out the Dutch empire and extend it effectively over the whole
of the East Indies.

In northern Sumatra, warfare with the people of Aceh that lasted with varying degrees of
intensity from 1873 to 1908 brought the northern tip of Sumatra under Dutch control. In
Celebes and the Moluccas, where the Dutch had long exercised a general authority, a new
instrument—the Short Declaration (in contrast to the earlier Long Contract)—bound local
rulers to accept the control of Batavia. Dutch authority was extended in this way over
Bone and Luwu in the Celebes, over central Borneo, over Bali and the Lesser Sunda
Islands, and over Ternate, Ceram, and Buru in the Moluccas. Footholds were established
also over parts of western New Guinea. Communications were developed—roads and
railways in Java and Sumatra and expanded shipping services to link Java to the outer
islands—to serve the needs of the new plantation economy. Between 1870 and 1910 the
Dutch had thus effectively completed the process of converting the East Indies into a
uni ed colonial dependency and, indeed, of laying the foundations of the future
Indonesian republic.

The “new imperialism” of the late 19th century may be seen as part of a worldwide
movement whereby the industrial countries of western Europe partitioned among
themselves the hitherto undeveloped areas of the globe. In Africa, in the South Paci c,
and in Burma (Myanmar), Indochina, and Malaya, as well as in Indonesia, a new “forward
movement” was taking place that stood in dramatic contrast to the earlier patterns of
commercial empire. If the European presence created a veritable watershed in Indonesian

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history, it is to be discerned about 1870 (as opposed to 1511, which marked the
establishment of a European base in the archipelago).

The social impact of these developments upon Indonesian society was tremendous. The
economic and political expansion brought a new Dutch population to the East Indies: civil
servants to staff the growing services of government, managers to run the new estates,
and clerks to staff the import-export houses and other businesses. These new Dutch
communities came to form European enclaves within the major cities, and their presence
underscored the social divisions in what was increasingly a caste society divided along
racial lines. The Dutch, however, were not merely a community of expatriates who were
eager to retire as soon as possible to The Netherlands. Many of them regarded the East
Indies as their home. Their sense of belonging was very different, for example, from that of
the British in India, and it was to give an added bitterness to the later struggle to retain
the colony after World War II.

From the Indonesian point of view, the growing cities became the home of a new urban
way of life and stimulated social change. A new elite emerged under the in uence of the
expanding Western impact. So did a new class of unskilled and semiskilled workers who
found employment as domestic servants or as labourers in the light industries that began
to develop. Rural society, though more sheltered, was also altered by the currents of
change. Although agrarian law and the later labour legislation had provisions to protect
existing customary rights over land and to guarantee fairness of contracts for labourers,
the mere fact of contract employment on the estates affected the village society from
which workers were drawn and played its part in hastening the growth of a disoriented
population, divorced increasingly from the shelter of traditional village society but not
absorbed into the new urban culture.

The Ethical Policy

Dutch liberals con dently assumed that, just as freedom of enterprise would maximize
welfare at home, so the application of European capital to the task of developing colonial
resources would gradually improve the lot of colonial peoples. By the end of the 19th
century, 30 years of the Liberal Policy in Indonesia did not appear to have achieved that
miracle. Growing criticism of the Dutch record in the East Indies was given particularly
in uential expression by Conrad Theodor van Deventer, a Liberal Democratic member of
the parliament of The Netherlands, who argued that the Dutch had been draining wealth
from the East Indies and had incurred thereby a “Debt of Honour” that should be repaid.
His suggestion was that The Netherlands turn from its strictly laissez-faire policy in the
East Indies to pursue instead a positive welfare program supported by funds from the
metropolitan treasury. In 1901 a change of government in The Netherlands provided the
opportunity for a new departure in policy along the lines suggested by van Deventer.
According to the Ethical Policy, as it was called, nancial assistance from The Netherlands

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was to be devoted to the extension of health and education services and to the provision
of agricultural extension services designed to stimulate the growth of the village
economy.

The Ethical Policy was seen by its most fervent supporters as a noble experiment
designed to transform Indonesian society, to enable a new elite to share in the riches of
Western civilization, and to bring the colony into the modern world. Its ultimate goals
were, of course, not clearly de ned. Van Deventer looked to the emergence of a
Westernized elite who would be “indebted to the Netherlands for its prosperity and higher
Culture” and who would gratefully recognize the fact. Others hoped for the growth, by
“cultural synthesis,” of a new East Indian society based on a blending of elements of
Indonesian and Western cultures and able to enjoy a large measure of autonomy within
the framework of the Dutch empire.

Despite these rather grandiose visions, the achievements of the Ethical Policy were much
more modest. It neither checked declining living standards nor promoted an agrarian
revolution. It did provide agricultural assistance and advice, but this was directed to the
improvement of techniques of irrigation and cultivation within the existing wet-rice
technology of Java. Its effect, therefore, was to con rm the gulf between the European
economy of the estates, mines, oil wells, and large-scale commerce and the traditional,
largely subsistence, Indonesian economy of wet-rice or shifting cultivation. In education a
little was done to provide a greater degree of opportunity at primary, secondary, and even
tertiary levels, but at the end of the 1930s only a handful of high school graduates were
produced locally, and the literacy rate was calculated at just over 6 percent.

The goals of the Ethical Policy were set too high, and the devices adopted to implement
them were too modest. Given the inertia of traditional societies, it was not to be expected
that a new order would be created as easily as the proponents of the policy had hoped.
Nevertheless, during the years of its operation, the East Indies were exposed to
tremendous forces of social change. These forces, however, resulted not from the
conscious plans of the Ethical Policy but from the undirected impact of Western
economic development. Java’s population, which had risen from about 6 million to almost
30 million over the course of the 19th century, increased to more than 40 million by 1920.
The population increase, together with urbanization, the penetration of a money
economy to the village level, and the labour demands of Western enterprise combined to
disrupt traditional patterns. Where the Ethical Policy was most effective, despite the
limitations of its educational achievement, was in producing a small educated elite that
could give expression to the frustration of the masses in a society torn loose from its
traditional moorings. Western currents of thought had their impact also within Islamic
circles, where modernist ideas sought to reconcile the demands of Islam and the needs of
the 20th century. It is against this background that a self-conscious nationalist movement
began to develop.

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Toward independence

The rise of nationalism

Indonesian nationalism in the 20th century must be distinguished from earlier

movements of protest; the Padri War, the Java War, and the many smaller examples of
sporadic agrarian unrest had been “prenationalistic” movements, the products of local
grievances. By contrast, the nationalism of the early 20th century was the product of the
new imperialism and was part of wider currents of unrest affecting many parts of Africa
and Asia that remained the subjects of Western colonialism. In Indonesia nationalism was
concerned not merely with resistance to Dutch rule but with new perceptions of
nationhood—embracing the ethnic diversity of the archipelago and looking to the
restructuring of traditional patterns of authority in order to enable the creation of
Indonesia as a modern state. It derived in part from speci c discontents, the economic
discriminations of colonial rule, the psychological hurt arising from the slights of social
discrimination, and a new awareness of the all-pervading nature of Dutch authority.
Important too was the emergence of the new elite, educated but lacking adequate
employment opportunities to match that education, Westernized but retaining still its ties
with traditional society.

The formation in 1908 of Budi Utomo (“Noble Endeavour”) is often taken as the beginning
of organized nationalism. Founded by Wahidin Sudirohusodo, a retired Javanese doctor,
Budi Utomo was an elitist organization, the aims of which—though cultural rather than
political—included a concern to secure a mutual accommodation between traditional
culture and contemporary society. Numerically more important was Sarekat Islam
(“Islamic Association”), founded in 1912. Under its charismatic chairman, Omar Said
Tjokroaminoto, the organization expanded rapidly, claiming a membership of 2,500,000
by 1919. Later research suggests that the real gure was likely to have been no more than
400,000, but even with this greatly reduced estimate, Sarekat Islam was clearly much
larger than any other movement of the time. In 1912 the Indies Party (Indische Partij)—
primarily a Eurasian party—was founded by E.F.E. Douwes Dekker; banned a year later, it
was succeeded by another Eurasian party, calling itself Insulinde, a poetic name for the
East Indies. In 1914 the Dutchman Hendricus Sneevliet founded the Indies Social
Democratic Association, which became a communist party in 1920 and adopted the name
Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia; PKI) in 1924.

By the end of World War I, there had thus emerged a variety of organizations, broadly
nationalist in aim, but differing in their tactics and immediate goals and in the sharpness
of their perceptions of independent nationhood. In the absence of rm party discipline, it
was common for individuals to belong simultaneously to more than one organization,
and, in particular, the presence of Indies Social Democratic Association members in
Sarekat Islam enabled them to work as a “bloc within” the larger movement. The idea that

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the time was not yet ripe for communist parties to assume independent leadership of
colonial nationalism later led the Soviet-founded Communist International (also known
Comintern or the Third International) to formulate the strategy of cooperation with anti-
imperialist “bourgeois” parties.

At the end of World War I, the Dutch, in an effort to give substance to their promise to
associate the Indonesian community more closely with government, created the People’s
Council (Volksraad). Composed of a mixture of appointed and elected representatives of
the three racial divisions de ned by the government—Dutch, Indonesian, and “foreign
Asiatic”—the People’s Council provided opportunities for debate and criticism but no real
control over the government of the East Indies. Some nationalist leaders were prepared to
accept seats in the assembly, but others refused, insisting that concessions could be
obtained only through uncompromising struggle.

In 1921 the tension within Sarekat Islam between its more conservative leaders and the
communists came to a head in a discipline resolution that insisted that members of
Sarekat Islam belong to no other party; this, in effect, expelled the communist “bloc
within,” and there followed a erce rivalry between the two for control of the grassroots
membership of the organization. The PKI, once it had committed itself to independent
action, began to move toward a policy of unilateral opposition to the colonial regime.
Without the support of the Comintern, and even without complete unanimity within its
own ranks, it launched a revolt in Java at the end of 1926 and in western Sumatra at the
beginning of 1927. These movements, which had elements of traditional protest as well as
of genuine communist insurrection, were easily crushed by the East Indies government,
and communist activity was effectively ended for the remainder of the colonial period.

The defeat of the communist revolt and the earlier decline of Sarekat Islam left the way
open for a new nationalist organization, and in 1926 a “general study club” was founded in
Bandung, with a newly graduated engineer, Sukarno, as its secretary. The club began to
reshape the idea of nationalism in a manner calculated to appeal to Indonesia’s new
urban elite. After the failure of the ideologically based movements of Islam and
communism, nationalist thinking was directed simply to the idea of a struggle for
independence, without any precommitment to a particular political or social order
afterward. Such a goal, it was believed, could appeal to all, including Muslims and
communists, who could at least support a common struggle for independence, even if
they differed fundamentally about what was to follow. Nationalism, in this sense, became
the idea that the young Sukarno used as the basis of his attempt to unify the several
streams of anticolonial feeling. The ideas of the Bandung Study Club were reinforced by
currents of thought emanating from Indonesian students in The Netherlands. Their
organization, restructured in 1924 under the self-consciously Indonesian (as opposed to
Dutch) name Perhimpunan Indonesia (Indonesian Union), became a centre of radical

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nationalist thought, and in the mid-1920s students returning from The Netherlands joined
forces with like-minded groups at home.

The new nationalism required a new organization for its expression, and in July 1927 the
Indonesian Nationalist Association, later the Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional
Indonesia; PNI), was formed under the chairmanship of Sukarno. The PNI was based on
the idea of noncooperation with the government of the East Indies and was thus
distinguished from those groups, such as Sarekat Islam, that were prepared to accept
People’s Council membership. Sukarno, however, while seeking to create a basis of mass
support for the PNI, also attempted with some success to work together with more-
moderate leaders and succeeded in forming in the party a broadly based, if rather
precarious, association of nationalist organizations.

The nationalist sentiment resonated beyond political parties, however. On Oct. 28, 1928, a
number of representatives of youth organizations issued the historic Youth Pledge
(Sumpah Pemuda), whereby they vowed to recognize only one Indonesian motherland,
one Indonesian people, and one Indonesian language. It was a landmark event in the
country’s history and also is considered the founding moment of the Indonesian
language.

At the end of 1929, Sukarno was arrested with some of his colleagues and was tried,
convicted, and sentenced to four years in prison. He was released at the end of 1931, but by
then the united movement he helped to create had begun to disintegrate. The PNI
dissolved itself and reformed as Partindo. A number of other groups came together to
form a new organization, the Indonesian National Education Club, known as the New PNI.
While Partindo saw itself as a mass party on the lines of the old PNI, the New PNI, under
the leadership of Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, aimed at training cadres who
could maintain continuing leadership of the movement should its leaders be arrested.

In 1933 Sukarno was arrested again and exiled to Flores; he later was transferred to
Bengkulu in southern Sumatra. Repressive action followed against other party leaders,
including Hatta and Sjahrir, who were also exiled. In the later 1930s nationalist leaders
were forced to cooperate with the Dutch, and such moderate parties as Parindra accepted
People’s Council membership. In 1937 a more radical party, Gerindo, was formed, but it
considered support of The Netherlands against the threat of National Socialism (Nazism)
more important than the question of independence.

World War II changed the situation. The fall of the East Indies to Japan early in 1942 broke
the continuity of Dutch rule and provided a completely new environment for nationalist
activity.

Japanese occupation

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Japanese military authorities in Java, having interned Dutch administrative personnel,

found it necessary to use Indonesians in many administrative positions, which thus gave
them opportunities that had been denied them under the Dutch. In order to secure
popular acceptance of their rule, the Japanese sought also to enlist the support of both
nationalist and Islamic leaders. Under this policy Sukarno and Hatta both accepted
positions in the military administration.

Though initially welcomed as liberators, the Japanese gradually established themselves as

overlords. Their policies uctuated according to the exigencies of the war, but in general
their primary object was to make the East Indies serve Japanese war needs. Nationalist
leaders, however, felt able to trade support for political concessions. Sukarno was able to
convince the administration that Indonesian support could be mobilized only through an
organization that would represent genuine Indonesian aspirations. In March 1943 such an
organization, Putera (Pusat Tenaga Rakjat; “Centre of the People’s Power”), was
inaugurated under his chairmanship. While the new organization enabled Sukarno to
establish himself more clearly as the leader of the emergent country, and while it enabled
him to develop more-effective lines of communication with the people, it also placed
upon him the responsibility of sustaining Indonesian support for Japan through, among
other devices, the romusha (forced-labour) program. Later in the year Indonesian opinion
was given a further forum in a Central Advisory Council and a series of local councils. At a
different level, Indonesian youths were able to acquire a sense of group integrity through
membership in the several youth organizations established by the Japanese. Of great
importance also was the creation in October 1943 of a volunteer defense force composed
of and of cered by Indonesians trained by the Japanese. The Sukarela Tentara Pembela
Tanah Air (Peta; “Volunteer Army of Defenders of the Homeland”) would become the core
military force of the Indonesian revolution.

In March 1944 the Japanese, feeling that Putera served Indonesian rather than Japanese
interests, replaced it with a “people’s loyalty organization” called Djawa Hokokai, which
was kept under much closer control. Six months later the Japanese premier announced
the Japanese intention to prepare the East Indies for self-government. In August 1945, on
the eve of the Japanese surrender, Sukarno and Hatta were summoned to Saigon (now
Ho Chi Minh City) in Vietnam, where Terauchi Hisaichi, commander of the Japanese
expeditionary forces in Southeast Asia, promised an immediate transfer of independence.

On their return to Batavia (now Jakarta), Sukarno and Hatta were under pressure to
declare independence unilaterally. This pressure reached its climax in the kidnapping of
the two men, for a day, by some of Jakarta’s youth leaders. On the morning of Aug. 17,
1945, after the news of the Japanese surrender had been con rmed, Sukarno and Hatta
proclaimed Indonesia an independent republic.

The revolution
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The proclamation touched off a series of uprisings across Java that convinced the British
troops entrusted with receiving the surrender of Japanese forces that the self-proclaimed
republic was to be taken seriously. At the level of central government, the constitution
adopted by the leaders of the new Republic of Indonesia was presidential in form, but the
widely representative Central Indonesian National Committee became, in effect, an ad
hoc parliament. Sukarno, as president, agreed to follow parliamentary conventions by
making his cabinets dependent upon their ability to command the committee’s
con dence.

The spontaneous character of the Indonesian revolution was demonstrated by a number

of incidents, notably the struggle for Bandung in late 1945 and early 1946 and the Battle of
Surabaya in November 1945; in Surabaya Indonesian ghters resisted superior British
forces for three weeks. Fighting also broke out in Sumatra and Celebes. Although the
Dutch had expected to reassert their control over their colony without question, and
although they were able to play upon the fears of the outer islands (generally, islands
other than Java and Madura) of a Java-based republic, they eventually were compelled to
negotiate with republican representatives led by Sjahrir, who by then was prime minister.
The Linggadjati Agreement (drafted Nov. 15, 1946, and signed March 25, 1947), by which
the Dutch agreed to transfer sovereignty in due course to a federal Indonesia, appeared to
offer a solution to the con ict. (The Dutch claimed that a federation was necessary
because of the diversity of the East Indies and the difference between heavily populated
Java and the more sparsely populated outer islands.) Differing interpretations, however,
made the agreement a dead letter from the beginning. In July 1947 the Dutch, in an
attempt to settle matters by force, initiated what they termed a police action against the
republic. Its effect was to evoke United Nations (UN) intervention in the form of a
commission known as the Good Of ces Committee, and it ended in the precarious
Renville Agreement of January 1948. In December 1948 a second police action was
launched.

Meanwhile, the government of the republic faced some domestic opposition. In 1946 a
left-wing plot was organized by followers of Ibrahim Datuk Tan Malaka, who opposed the
policy of negotiation with the Dutch. This so-called July 3rd Affair was easily crushed. In
September 1948 a more serious challenge, in the form of a communist revolt (the Madiun
Affair), was also defeated.

The second police action aroused American concern. It also closed Indonesian ranks
rmly behind the republic. In these circumstances The Netherlands, at a roundtable
conference at The Hague, nally agreed in August 1949 to transfer sovereignty over its
colony (with the exception of western New Guinea) to the independent United States of
Indonesia in December 1949; a decision about the ultimate fate of western New Guinea
was to be the subject of future negotiation.

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Independent Indonesia to 1965

The years of constitutional democracy

The initial federal constitution of 1949 was replaced in 1950 by a unitary but still provisional
constitution. It was parliamentary in character and assigned an essentially gurehead role
to the president. From the revolutionary period, Indonesia had inherited a multiparty
system. The main parties after independence were the major Muslim party, Masyumi
(Masjumi); the Muslim theologians’ party, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), which seceded from
Masyumi in 1952; the Nationalist Party (PNI); the Communist Party (PKI); the “national
communist” party, Murba; the lesser Muslim parties, Perti and Partai Sarekat Islam
Indonesia (PSII); and the Socialist Party (PSI). Until the rst elections were held, in 1955, the
parliament was lled by appointment under an informal agreement between parties as to
their probable electoral strengths. The elections of 1955, a remarkable and technically
successful experiment in the exercise of political choice by a largely nonliterate
population, con rmed the position of Masyumi, NU, the PNI, and the PKI as the country’s
four leading political parties.

With the exception of the PKI, the parties did not represent clearly opposing interests or
programs, although some broad patterns of occupational, regional, and cultural support
could be seen. The PNI was particularly strong in the ranks of the civil service, while
Masyumi tended to nd its support in market towns and among the trading classes; NU
was stronger in rural areas. The PSI, an in uential party until it was virtually eliminated in
the elections, had strong support in the higher ranks of the army and bureaucracy. In
terms of the regional distribution of party strengths, the PNI, NU, and the PKI were
essentially Java-based parties, while Masyumi drew most of its strength from outside Java,
particularly from western Sumatra and southwestern Celebes. Masyumi’s support within
Java was to be found mainly in the province of West Java (Jawa Barat), the home of the
Sundanese, as opposed to the ethnic Javanese population. (When resistance reached the
point of open revolt in 1958, the regional character of Indonesian political rivalry was
especially important.) Party af liations also to some extent corresponded to a broad
cultural opposition between the hierarchical rice-based society of Java and the more
strongly Muslim areas where commerce rather than agriculture was (and still is)
dominant. Major social streams (aliran) in Indonesian society that spanned various
interests, classes, and regions were similarly re ected in political parties and their
suborganizations; the division within Java between the santri (devout Muslim) and
abangan (syncretic Muslim) orientations was integral to the rivalry between NU and
Masyumi on the one hand and the PNI and the PKI on the other.

In the early and mid-1950s, there was a rapid succession of governments under a series of
prime ministers: Hatta (December 1949–August 1950), Mohammad Natsir (September
1950–March 1951), Sukiman Wirjosandjojo (April 1951–February 1952), Wilopo (April 1952–

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June 1953), Ali Sastroamidjojo (July 1953–July 1955), Burhanuddin Harahap (August 1955–
March 1956), and Ali once again (March 1956–March 1957). This instability created a
growing disillusionment with the fruits of independence and a sense of contrast between
the heroism of the revolution and the self-seeking party rivalry that followed it. In
particular, con ict between the export-producing outer islands and the heavily populated
island of Java was becoming more marked. In December 1956 these factors of discontent
led to movements of regional dissidence, supported by local military commanders, in
western Sumatra, the Minahasa Peninsula of northern Celebes, and elsewhere.

Introduction of Guided Democracy

Against a background of geographically scattered yet salient dissent, Sukarno, resentful of

his circumscribed position as gurehead president, began to interfere more frequently in
the constitutional processes. In 1956 Vice President Hatta, who had been considered
Sukarno’s partner in leadership, announced his resignation, and in February 1957 Sukarno
announced his own concept for Indonesia’s government. Criticizing Western liberal
democracy as unsuited to Indonesian circumstances, he called for a political system of
“democracy with guidance” based on indigenous procedures. The Indonesian way of
deciding important questions, he argued, was by way of prolonged deliberation
(musyawarah) designed to achieve a consensus (mufakat); this was the procedure at the
village level, and it should be the model for the country. He proposed a government based
on the four main parties plus a national council representing not merely political parties
but functional groups—urban workers, rural farmers, intelligentsia, national
entrepreneurs, religious organizations, armed services, youth organizations, women’s
organizations, etc.—through which, under presidential guidance, a national consensus
could express itself.

The next two years were a period of almost continuous crisis. The resignation of the
second Ali government was followed by a proclamation of a “state of war and siege” and
the formation of a nonpartisan government under Djuanda Kartawidjaja. At the end of
1957, in a series of direct actions across the country, Dutch property was seized as part of a
campaign for the recovery of western New Guinea, which the Dutch had retained even
after formally granting Indonesia independence; the Indonesian government in due
course took over the operation of the con scated Dutch enterprises. The army itself was
drawn into the management of estates, and military entrepreneurs came, in time, to play
a continuing economic role.

Early in the following year, leaders from western Sumatra launched a direct challenge to
Jakarta in the form of an alternative government of the republic, the Revolutionary
Government of the Republic of Indonesia. The rebellion, supported by some senior
Masyumi leaders, was backed also by the military commander of the province of North
Sulawesi (Sulawesi Utara; North Celebes). The central government acted swiftly and

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successfully to suppress the rebellion, however. With the regions defeated, the parties
discredited, and the army’s prestige enhanced by its recent success against the rebels,
Sukarno once more took up the idea of Guided Democracy. Backed by the army chief of
staff, Gen. A.H. Nasution, he proposed a return to the 1945 constitution—a presidential
type of government within which he believed it would be possible to implement the
principles of deliberation and consensus. When the Constituent Assembly (elected in 1955
to draft a permanent constitution) failed to agree to this proposal, Sukarno introduced it
by presidential decree on July 5, 1959.

Sukarno’s policies

Under the 1945 constitution, Sukarno possessed executive responsibility as well as

ceremonial functions as head of state. He quickly created a new government with
Djuanda Kartawidjaja, now prime minister, at its head. Pending elections under a new
electoral law, he appointed (in accordance with the functional representation principle)
members of the legislative bodies required by the constitution: the People’s Consultative
Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat; MPR) and the Supreme Advisory Council
(Dewan Pertimbangan Agung; DPA). In 1960, when the MPR rejected the government’s
budget, he replaced it with a provisional nominated parliament.

Sukarno’s central purpose was the preservation of the

country’s unity and the restoration of a sense of
national identity, goals he pursued through an
increasingly amboyant style. Sukarno’s concern with
symbols of greatness—expressed in grandiose
buildings, national monuments, evocative slogans,
and prestigious acts such as the hosting of the Fourth
Asian Games (1962)—was not accompanied by an
attempt to come to grips with the country’s economic
problems. The damage done to the economy by the
seizure of Dutch enterprises in 1957 and by the
extravagances of his later search for grandeur was
Sukarno, 1965. justi ed in his eyes as integral to the task of making
Fred Mayer/Magnum Photos
Indonesians proud of themselves and of their
independence. Nevertheless, he was evidently
oblivious to the economic consequences of his policies, showing no recognition of foreign
indebtedness, declining exports, or accelerating in ation in the early 1960s.

During the years of Guided Democracy, Sukarno’s power depended in great measure on
the preservation of a balance between the army and the PKI. The period was one of
growth in the communists’ prestige, and Sukarno consistently protected the PKI from
moves made against it by the army. He opposed military attempts to prohibit the PKI’s

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congresses and to suppress its newspapers. He banned movements opposing the party
and advanced PKI leaders to positions of national leadership. To many observers he
appeared to be preparing the way for the communists to come to power. To others he
appeared merely to be redressing a balance that was in constant danger of being tilted
against the PKI.

In foreign policy Indonesia adopted a neutralist stance. At the Bandung Conference

(Asian-African Conference) in 1955, the country staked a claim to leadership of the
developing world. By the early 1960s, however, Indonesia had a new interpretation of the
global order; in ideological terms Sukarno had sketched the world, as he saw it, as a
con ict between Nefos and Oldefos (New Emerging Forces and Old Established Forces).
In this analysis was embodied his ongoing hostility to the West.

In 1962 Indonesia’s campaign to recover western New Guinea achieved nal success. An
agreement was reached with The Netherlands for the transfer of the territory to Indonesia
after a period of UN administration—but with the provision that the inhabitants of the
territory make an Act of Free Choice before the end of 1969 regarding their inclusion in
the republic. This choice was eventually made by representative councils, which
con rmed the continuance of western New Guinea (Papua)—renamed Irian Barat (West
Irian)—as part of Indonesia.

The resolution of this issue was followed by the development of Indonesia’s opposition to
the formation of Malaysia and its commitment, after an erratic series of changes of mood,
to a policy of “confrontation” toward the new Malaysian federation in September 1963. The
confrontation policy was followed by Indonesia’s sudden withdrawal from the UN in
January 1965 in reaction to the seating of Malaysia on the UN Security Council.

John David Legge

Indonesia from the coup to the end of the New Order

The coup

In the early hours of Oct. 1, 1965, a group of army conspirators calling itself the September
30th Movement kidnapped and murdered six army generals. A seventh, Nasution,
escaped. The following morning the movement announced that it had seized power to
forestall a coup against the president by a council of generals. In the meantime, General
Suharto, commander of the army’s strategic reserve, began to gather the reins of power
into his own hands. By evening he had seized the initiative from the conspirators.

The PKI maintained that the coup attempt was an internal affair of the army. The army
leadership, on the contrary, insisted that it was part of a PKI plot to seize power and
subsequently embarked on a mission to purge the country of the perceived communist

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threat. In the following month the military

slaughtered communists and alleged communists
across Java and in Bali, with estimates of the number
of people killed ranging from 80,000 to more than
1,000,000. In the following years communists, alleged
communists, and their families were frequently
denied basic rights (e.g., right to a fair trial, right to
equal opportunity in employment, and freedom from
discrimination). Between 1969 and 1980,
Suharto
approximately 10,000 persons, primarily known or
AP
purported communists, were detained without trial
on Buru Island in the Moluccas.

With the destruction of the PKI, one of the elements of balance that had supported the
Sukarno regime was eliminated, and the president himself came under increasing
pressure. In March 1966, against a background of student action, the army forced Sukarno
to delegate extensive powers to Suharto, now chief of staff of the army. With his new
authority, Suharto banned the PKI and moved gradually to consolidate his position as the
effective head of government. In March 1967 the MPR installed Suharto as acting
president, and in March 1968 he was appointed to the presidency in his own right.
Sukarno was kept under house arrest until his death on June 21, 1970.

Suharto’s New Order

Suharto immediately began to reverse many of Sukarno’s policies. The confrontation with
Malaysia was quickly ended, and Indonesia rejoined the UN. In addition, Indonesia was a
major participant in the creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in
1967. Domestically, the support of the army enabled Suharto to achieve a political stability
that had been lacking under Sukarno. But the major policies initiated by the new regime,
which Suharto designated as the New Order, had to do with economic rehabilitation.
Successful negotiations secured a rescheduling of Indonesia’s foreign debts and attracted
aid through a group of donor countries. The complex regulations governing economic
activity were simpli ed. In 1967 a new foreign investment law provided a framework for
new private capital investment.

Economic development
The results of Suharto’s reformulated economic policies were soon apparent. The rate of
in ation decreased, and the national currency, the rupiah, stabilized; manufacturing
expanded rapidly; and petroleum production increased, owing partly to exploration by a
number of foreign companies operating through Pertamina, the monolithic state oil
corporation. (Pertamina’s position as the centrepiece of Indonesia’s economic expansion
ended in 1975, however, when the government rescued the company from its
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indebtedness.) Military entrepreneurs played a signi cant part in these developments. In

the mid-1980s the decline in oil prices led to a shift in economic emphasis toward private-
sector investment and the production and export of manufactured goods to reduce
reliance on oil and other traditional export commodities.

These new policies had their critics, both inside and outside the country. To some it
seemed that the republic was becoming economically dependent on Western capital
and, in particular, on large transnational corporations, that direct foreign investment had
created an Indonesian merchant class that boosted its af uence and in uence through
dealings with foreign companies, and that new wealth had exaggerated existing
inequalities rather than removing them. Others, however, argued that long-term
improvement depended on the economic growth that would ow from policies designed
to encourage large-scale investment rather than small-scale labour-intensive
developments.

In any case, the economic achievements of New Order policies were spectacular. They
transformed the developmental patterns of the archipelago during the 1970s and ’80s,
especially outside Java. Historically the political centre and economic hub of the East
Indies, Java seemed to retain that position within the modern republic, commanding
about three-fourths of all new investment projects (excluding oil exploration) from the
late 1960s to the early ’80s. The expansion of manufacturing during that period was also
concentrated in Java. This apparent dominance, however, was undermined by the density
of the island’s population. In terms of its per capita share of foreign investment, Java was
outstripped by some of the outer provinces. North Sumatra (Sumatera Utara), the home of
the great plantation expansion of the late 19th century, added mining and oil and natural
gas exploration to its estate agriculture. Mining and oil had an even greater impact on the
development of Aceh, Riau, and East Kalimantan (Kalimantan Timur), as well as
Indonesian New Guinea, called Irian Jaya during this period. Again in per capita terms,
East Kalimantan, with timber in addition to oil, natural gas, and coal, attracted high levels
of both foreign and domestic investment, and it became one of the most rapidly
developing provinces of the republic. By contrast, the provinces of the Lesser Sunda
Islands—West Nusa Tenggara (Nusa Tenggara Barat), East Nusa Tenggara (Nusa Tenggara
Timur), and East Timor (Timor Timur; now an independent country)—were economically
the least developed in both absolute and per capita terms. Successive ve-year plans
implemented by the Indonesian government emphasized the importance of redressing
regional disparities and spreading economic growth more evenly.

Free enterprise grew rapidly during the 1990s, the last decade of the New Order, but the
principal business owners were the sons and daughters of the president. Suharto claimed
that his children, as citizens of the Republic of Indonesia, had the right to run their
businesses; the problem was that they received immense privileges in their business
dealings. Members of the Suharto family ultimately controlled the full range of strategic

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economic sectors—not only the petroleum industry but also toll roads, banking, television
broadcasting, and billboard advertising. Moreover, their economic activities extended into
all realms—international, national, and provincial. The bureaucracy typically had no choice
but to accept the business proposals of the Suharto family, usually without going through
the proper bidding procedures. Discontent grew among the public.

Political developments

Politically, the New Order continued to be a stable regime, partly because of economic
development across the archipelago but mainly because of its military underpinnings. It
would be incorrect, however, to describe the New Order as a military regime, and Suharto,
in the early years of his presidency, was concerned with observing constitutional forms.
His initial government had strong civilian components in the persons of Sultan
Hamengkubuwono IX of Yogyakarta and the statesman Adam Malik (both of whom later
served as vice president). But military strength, allied closely with bureaucracy, was
apparent nonetheless, and the government developed clear authoritarian characteristics.

Suharto acted to control and discipline, and ultimately to rationalize, the political parties.
In 1973 the four Muslim parties were amalgamated to form the United Development Party
(Partai Persatuan Pembangunan; PPP), and the ve non-Muslim parties were
amalgamated to form the Indonesian Democratic Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia;
PDI). More formidable than either was a government-sponsored organization, the Joint
Secretariat of Functional Groups (Sekretariat Bersama Golongan Karya; Sekber Golkar, or
Golkar). In theory, Golkar was a nonpartisan organization representing, like Sukarno’s
functional groups, the elements of which the nation was composed; in practice, it was a
government party, and its sweeping electoral successes owed much to pressure exerted
on voters by government agencies. In 1971 it secured more than three- fths of the seats in
the lower house of the legislature, the Council of the People’s Representatives (Dewan
Perwakilan Rakyat; DPR), and its dominance was con rmed in subsequent elections in
1977, 1982, and 1987. Important also as a measure of political control was the government’s
imposition of the Pancasila, or the Five Principles (belief in one God, nationalism,
humanitarianism, democracy, and social justice), originally formulated by Sukarno, as the
national ideology.

Between 1971 and 1998, parliamentary elections were followed by the unopposed
reelection of Suharto for successive presidential terms. These results were not achieved
without effort. Suharto’s economic policies and, in particular, the attempt to spread
development more evenly across the archipelago contributed to reducing the strong
regional feelings of the 1950s, although there remained perceptions that the regime was
dominated by Java. Irian Jaya presented a special challenge to the New Order. Even after
the 1969 Act of Free Choice had evidently con rmed the desire of western New Guinea to
remain a part of Indonesia, the Suharto government still had to contend with frequent

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outbreaks of violence instigated by the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua

Merdeka; OPM). Encouragement of immigration to Irian Jaya from Java and elsewhere
and the extension of educational opportunities to residents of the region were intended
to integrate the province more fully into the country. These initiatives, however, were
locally interpreted as examples of cultural imperialism. The exploitation of the resources of
the province—oil, natural gas, copper, and timber—was also a source of resentment.

Unlike Irian Jaya, which had always been claimed by Indonesia as a part of the republic,
the Portuguese colony on the island of Timor (settled by the Portuguese beginning in the
16th century) had not been the subject of any such claim until political changes in
Portugal threw the future of the colony into doubt. In 1975–76 Indonesia forcibly
intervened and established Timor Timur (East Timor) as an Indonesian province in a
fashion that drew domestic as well as foreign criticism. This invasion of the former
Portuguese colony effectively engaged the government in an ongoing (and particularly
harsh) struggle to quell the resistance of the Fretilin (Frente Revolucionária de Timor-
Leste Independente), the movement for an independent East Timor. Subsequently, tens
of thousands of pro-independence East Timorese died resisting Indonesian control.

In addition to these areas of speci c resistance, there was some Islamic opposition to the
regime. Muslim thought tended increasingly to blur the old stereotyped distinction
between modernist and traditionalist, or fundamentalist, thinking. Although these shifts
dealt essentially with theological issues, their effect was felt as a movement of Islamic
renewal both within and outside the Muslim PPP. Focused initially on dislike of the
essentially secular ideology of Pancasila, the PPP came to represent a more general
ambivalence toward the government. Especially within some circles of Muslim
intellectuals and students, there were criticisms of the corruption that was seen not only
as built into the structure of the economy but also as extending to the highest levels of
the regime. There were examples of open discontent, as when students chose the visit of
Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei in 1974 to initiate demonstrations against Suharto
and against the role of foreign capital in Indonesia; the demonstrations developed into
open rioting in Jakarta. In 1978, before the reelection of Suharto for a third term, the
government closed sections of the press and arrested student leaders.

In the late 1990s interethnic con icts, which up to that point had been suppressed
successfully, began to resurface. These con icts, too, manifested to some degree along
political lines. Large-scale deadly uprisings broke out in Sanggau Ledo, in West
Kalimantan, and the unrest spread to other parts of the province just prior to the May 1997
general election. The violence erupted between the local Dayak groups, who generally
supported the non-Muslim PDI, and the Madurese, who mostly belonged to the Muslim
PPP. This agitation in West Kalimantan soon triggered uprisings in other regions, most
notably in West Java. Such ethnopolitical antagonisms were ultimately a boon for the
ruling party, Golkar.

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Changes in Indonesian society

The economic successes of the Suharto regime were accompanied by some shifts in the
balance of Indonesian society. Social change accelerated under the New Order in a way
that tended to con rm, rather than modify, the structure of power in Suharto’s Indonesia.
Traditional aristocracies declined in in uence. In their place, however, arose a new
bureaucracy, an Indonesian business class, and Chinese business interests, some of which
operated in association with civilian or military Indonesian entrepreneurs. The army,
moreover, grew more prominent in politics, administration, and commercial activity.
These developments indicated that a new—albeit extremely diverse—middle class was
emerging, de ned variously by economic function, access to political power, and a
lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. Whether it encompassed one class or several, and
whether it simultaneously embraced wealthy capitalists and small rural traders, senior
bureaucrats and low-level clerks, and military of cers and civil professionals, the boundary
of the middle class was in constant motion.

The picture was further complicated by the special position of the Chinese in rural and
urban trade. Increased Chinese immigration during the 20th century con rmed the
distinction between peranakan and totok communities (i.e., between ethnic Chinese who
had been in Indonesia for generations and had adopted Indonesian customs and
language and those who had arrived more recently, retained their language, and
maintained a predominantly Chinese cultural identity). Unevenly spread across the
archipelago and an ethnic minority playing a major economic role, the Chinese tended to
attract Indonesian hostility, which was expressed in part by intermittent outbreaks of anti-
Chinese sentiment. Such adversity notwithstanding, the Chinese continued under the
New Order to expand their participation both in retail trade and in large-scale commerce
and nance.

International relations

Indonesia’s relative domestic stability under Suharto was accompanied by moderation in

external policies. The country’s standing as a leader of the industrializing world was
enhanced in 1985 when it hosted a second Asian-African Conference to commemorate
the one held in 1955. Together with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia sought to contain
incidents on the border between the two countries. In 1989 it reached agreement with
Australia on the exploitation of seabed resources. More generally, Indonesia participated
increasingly in the affairs of the Asian and Paci c region. Through ASEAN it took a rm
stand against Vietnam’s 1978 invasion and occupation of Cambodia, and in 1989–90 it
played a major role in exploring the possibility of resolving the Indochina crisis through
negotiation.

In addition to its involvement in ASEAN, Indonesia gured prominently in the Asia-Paci c

Economic Cooperation (APEC), an organization committed to promoting free trade
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throughout the region. In 1992 Jakarta hosted the 10th conference of the Non-Aligned
Movement, an assembly of politically neutral countries dedicated to the needs of the
developing world; Suharto also served a term as the organization’s chair (1992–95). In 1994
Indonesia hosted the APEC summit that produced the Bogor Declaration, a timetable for
the liberalization of trade and investment in the region within the rst two decades of the
21st century. These activities, along with international accolades for various successes in
agriculture, family planning, and other areas, helped generate a popular view that
Suharto’s accomplishments at the international level had paralleled, if not surpassed,
those of his predecessor, Sukarno.

John David Legge Asvi Warman Adam

Economic crisis, public unrest, and the fall of Suharto

In July 1997 Thailand was struck by a monetary crisis that rapidly spread to other countries
in East and Southeast Asia. Indonesia’s economy was particularly vulnerable because the
rupiah was closely tied to the U.S. dollar and most of the loans in the private sector were
short-term. The Indonesian public, moreover, harboured a growing distrust of the
country’s banking system. The Asian economic crisis effectively crippled the Indonesian
economy. To secure much-needed loans, Suharto signed an agreement with the
International Monetary Fund (IMF). Before funds would be disbursed, however, Indonesia
was required to ful ll certain obligations—something Suharto evidently had no real
intention of doing. Instead, he sought other ways to extricate the country from its
nancial crisis.

Especially after the death of his wife, Siti Hartinah Suharto, in 1996, much of the
Indonesian public began to wonder when Suharto would step down. The president’s
health began to deteriorate, and as it did, the economy also weakened. Indeed, the
rupiah’s exchange rate and the composite index at the stock exchange were both
determined to a large degree by Suharto’s physical condition. Yet despite this atmosphere
of uncertainty, Suharto was once again elected to the presidency in March 1998.

As the economic situation continued to deteriorate, Suharto left the country on May 9,
1998, to attend a conference in Cairo. In his absence Jakarta was racked by violence, in
which some 1,000 people lost their lives. The tragedy had been sparked by the shooting of
four students of Trisakti University in Jakarta, allegedly by members of the armed forces.
After the burial of the victims, angry masses lled the streets, looting and burning certain
sectors of the capital city. The riots started almost simultaneously in different parts of the
city, which suggested that the uprisings were engineered. No provocateurs were
identi ed, however.

On May 20, 1998, a mass gathering was to take place at the National Monument (Monas;
Monumen Nasional) in the centre of Jakarta. Before dawn on the day of the event,
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however, Amien Rais, the promoter of the rally, suddenly canceled it. Students who had
prepared to join the rally then went to the legislative compound instead and managed to
occupy the buildings. Also on that day 14 ministers declined to take of ce in the new
cabinet to be inaugurated by Suharto. The country was in a state of political turmoil.

On May 21, 1998, Suharto announced his resignation from the presidency, and Vice Pres.
B.J. (Bacharuddin Jusuf) Habibie was sworn in as the new president. Habibie inherited a
country whose political and economic currents had grown considerably stronger—but
ever more turbulent—under some three decades of the New Order.

Indonesia after Suharto

Between the elections of 1998 and 2004, Indonesia had four presidents, none of whom
served a full ve-year term. Suharto remained in of ce for just two months following his
reelection in 1998. Habibie, his successor, served for only one year. Abdurrahman Wahid
(1999–2001), who followed Habibie, was replaced after two years in of ce by Megawati
Sukarnoputri (2001–04), the daughter of the late Sukarno. Dubbed an age of reformation
(reformasi), these unsettled years immediately following the end of the New Order were
characterized by increased freedom of the press, public demands for the development of
a strong democracy and effective law enforcement, and calls by some regions for a
greater degree of independence. Meanwhile, various areas in eastern Indonesia were
destabilized by ethnic and religious con icts.

When Suharto resigned, the obligation of delivering the presidential accountability report,
a speech that he had made about every ve years while in of ce, fell to Habibie, who
presented the address in 1999. The report was rejected by the parliament, however, largely
because of the controversy surrounding East Timor, which had seceded from the republic
during Habibie’s presidency. Following this rejection, Habibie declared that he would not
stand for reelection to the presidency.

The next president, Wahid, was an intellectual, newspaper columnist, and leader of
Nahdlatul Ulama, an organization of Muslim religious scholars. Popularly known as Gus
Dur (“Gus” being a reference to both his nobility and his devotion to Islam), Wahid was the
rst candidate to win the presidency through a vote by the People’s Consultative
Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat; MPR), as opposed to the earlier consensus-
seeking process (musyawarah). With liberal views on religion and politics, he was able to
garner votes from both Muslims and non-Muslims in the MPR to defeat Megawati, the
presidential candidate of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (Partai Demokrasi
Indonesia-Perjuangan; PDI-P), which had the most seats in the parliament. Once in of ce,
however, Wahid was unable to promote cooperation between parliamentary factions, the
military, and other political forces beyond his own party. He also was implicated in a

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number of scandals. In 2001, just 19 months after he won the presidency, Wahid was
impeached by the parliament and dismissed from of ce.

Asvi Warman Adam

Wahid was succeeded in of ce by his vice president, Megawati, who maintained some of
his presidential priorities. Among those were the preservation of the integrity of
Indonesian territory and the recovery of the economy. On the domestic level, Megawati
strove to resolve con ict in restless regions such as East Timor, Aceh, and Irian Jaya. East
Timor achieved full sovereignty in 2002. Aceh and Irian Jaya were given special autonomy
and an increased budget; Irian Jaya became Papua in 2002 and was divided to become
two provinces, Papua and West Papua, in 2003. In an effort to solicit foreign investment
and explore additional export opportunities, Megawati traveled extensively during her
rst year in of ce, visiting the nine members of ASEAN, the United States, Japan, China,
North Korea, South Korea, India, and other countries.

Despite Megawati’s accomplishments, however, con dence in her government was

eroded by continuing economic problems, violence associated with separatists, and
political corruption. The PDI-P lost badly in the April 2004 elections for the country’s new
bicameral legislature, with Golkar—the former ruling party under Suharto—winding up
with the largest number of seats in the lower chamber. Three months later Megawati
survived the initial round of voting in the country’s rst-ever direct presidential election,
but she was easily defeated in a runoff vote by her opponent, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
(her former security minister) of the Democrat Party (Partai Demokrat; PD).

Yudhoyono’s administration soon faced a major crisis: in late December 2004 a severe
earthquake off the northwest coast of Sumatra triggered a large tsunami that inundated
the island’s western coastal areas, notably in Aceh province, causing widespread death
and destruction. In spite of that disaster, Yudhoyono succeeded in signi cantly improving
the country’s economic and political stability. In the April 2009 parliamentary elections,
Yudhoyono’s PD garnered the largest proportion of seats in the lower chamber and
formed a majority coalition there. Presidential elections were held again in July 2009, and
Yudhoyono won a second term in of ce.

In late September and early October, however,

Yudhoyono was again confronted with disaster:
another major earthquake and its aftershocks
occurred off the coast of Sumatra, killing more than a
thousand people and injuring thousands more in
Padang, the capital of West Sumatra. More natural
calamities followed in 2010. On October 25 another
Aceh, Indonesia, tsunami tsunami struck the Mentawai Islands off the west
coast of Sumatra, killing some 500 people. Almost
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The aftermath of the December 2004 simultaneously, Mount Merapi in central Java began
tsunami in Aceh, Indon.
erupting, and it continued to do so for several weeks,
Philip A. McDaniel/U.S. Navy
causing the deaths of at least 350 and forcing some
130,000 to evacuate the area.

Indonesia nonetheless was generally prosperous and peaceful for most of Yudhoyono’s
second term. In October 2012 Indonesia’s 34th province was created when North
Kalimantan was carved out of the northern third of East Kalimantan. The country’s gross
domestic product grew by more than 6 percent annually in 2010–12, and in ation fell to
less than 5 percent. Economic growth began to slow in 2013, however, and in ation rose.
His administration was dogged by corruption scandals, which also affected some high-
ranking of cials of the PD. Those factors led to growing public disillusionment with
Yudhoyono’s government, and in the April 2014 parliamentary elections Megawati’s PDI-P
won the largest number of seats in the legislature, in part because of the appeal of Joko
Widodo (popularly known as Jokowi), the party’s nominee that year for president. Jokowi,
who had risen from relative regional obscurity in central Java to win the 2012 election for
governor of Jakarta, defeated former general Prabowo Subianto of the Great Indonesia
Movement Party (Partai Gerkan Indonesia Raya; Gerindra) in the July 2014 presidential
election. Jokowi faced a legislative challenge, however, because Gerindra, led by Prabowo,
was able to form a large-majority coalition in the parliament that included the PD, Golkar,
and the Muslim PPP. In 2015 Indonesia’s economic performance was solid but slightly
lower than expected, and Widodo responded by shuf ing his cabinet.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Indonesia
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 28 August 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Indonesia
ACCESS DATE: August 29, 2019

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