Times of Ind(ones)ia - II

One may wonder as to why I chose the title the way it is. It is to show the civilisational proximity and inseparability of the two countries. It hit me so strikingly that I couldn’t have done differently. You’d get to know about it as follows:

 

 

To begin with, Indian travellers to Indonesia for whatever purpose get visa free, on arrival. This is a big plus on the ‘larger family’ image front. The Indonesians have accepted the Indians to be the earliest settlers in their archipelago & thus the forefathers of the Malay (or Melayu) family to which they belong and which spreads across other countries like Malaysia and Philippines in the region. They make no bones while admitting and being proud about their Hindu heritage. Although most of them now are Muslims & some of them Christians, all of them follow certain traditions viz. rituals marked for certain important occasions in one’s life e.g. birth of a child in the family, which distinctly is a Hindu phenomenon.

 

 

The national language of Indonesia is ‘Bahasa (Bhasha) Indonesia’, containing many Sanskrit or Sanskritised words. The Sanskritised words seem to outweigh the Arabic words e.g. Maaf, Khas, Selamat, Sehat sprinkled in between (thanks to the later spread of Islam) and fewer Dutch words, given their being a Dutch colony for around three centuries. Some proper nouns were pure Sanskrit names e.g. ‘Artha Graha’ was a bank; ‘Karya Guna Mandiri’ was a company, ‘Jiwa Dana’ was a public pension scheme. I also noticed a couple of private properties viz. ‘Aditya’ & ‘Vimala’. The slogan of a business school affiliated to the University was, ‘Atma Jaya’, professing to churn out ‘good professionals with a sense of social responsibility’!

 

I happened to meet a second generation Indian (Punjabi) origin Indonesian, who was a sports goods dealer based in Jakarta but had set up a temporary shop in ‘Singgasana Pradana’, Bandung. He mentioned that not only there wasn’t any discrimination against Indians or any animosity towards them, but they were rather respected & loved by Indonesian people in general and they thus felt at home there.

 

The second person of Indian origin I met was an elderly Sindhi fabrics shop-owner and also a second generation settler there. I had halted at a Central Jakarta locality viz. ‘Pasar Baru’ deliberately while on the move, to come across an Indian Indonesian, as the said locality had a substantial presence of Indian-owned residences & shops. He too was very happy being an Indonesian national and rather teasingly told me that he felt more comfortable in Indonesia than he would have been in India, despite the fact that he is a frequent traveler to India and thus abreast with the latest developments there.

 

There is a Gandhi school in Jakarta, meant especially for children of Indian origin/ex-pat families, though officially open for all. It imparts training in Hindi for an hour, once a week. That being too less, none of such Indian children born there can converse in Hindi. While I was watching a TT match and waiting for my own at the same table later, an elderly Indonesian viz. Sudharma (Muslim with a Hindu name) approached me possibly after noticing INDIA on my jersey. I offered him my chair as a matter of duty and he took it unhesitatingly, as a matter of right, as we do in India. He got into chatting about the Hindu past of his country. I intercepted and asked him as to what he thought to be the reason for Indonesia turning into a Muslim majority nation from a Hindu one. He, in his broken English, mentioned the rigid caste system within the Hindu fold, to be the reason. But he was quick to add that (and he seemed quite keen to do so) that they were a religiously tolerant nation. I could take that claim of tolerance at face value, given the limited sphere of my observations throughout my week’s stay there. The credit may however go to the many centuries of their Hindu past, having created that temperament for such tolerance and also being way too distant geographically, from the ‘mainstream’ Islam of the West Asian origin.

 

 

I never came across a woman on the streets or other public spaces, clad in niqab or burqa, covering her face or the whole body, as is found in India, though over 50% of the womenfolk, both in Bandung as well as Jakarta, wore hijab. However, spotting a man with the skull cap on was a rarity. Interestingly, even inside a mosque hardly one third of the men wore their skull caps while offering namaz or otherwise and nobody seemed to bother. I toured a mosque (Masjid Cipaganti) in my hotel’s neighbourhood in Bandung and noticed it. The said mosque was listed as a heritage structure of Bandung city, constructed in 1933, the architect being a Dutchman Schoemaker. It hardly matched a typical mosque-like structure of our image world. I even found some college students & others sitting just outside the prayer hall and enjoying smoking.

 

The other prominent mosque was ‘Masjid Raya Bandung’, close to ‘Asia Africa Street’ in Jakarta. Although it complied with the Islamic structure image, it practically appeared more as a picnic/outing spot than a seriously holy place. The inside was largely vacant and the open space outside it was packed with families busy in eating & (non-alcoholic) drinking. As I was looking out for a restroom, I happened to step inside inadvertently with the shoes on, but hardly attracted even a second look from anybody.

 

Interestingly, there wasn’t single board in Arabic in any public place anywhere, except in a mosque, that too symbolically. The Bahasa in its Roman alphabet ruled everywhere, unchallenged. It’s a great sign of the Indonesians having successfully desisted from taking to the Arabic script, as if it being a natural thing to do for any follower of Islam, which unfortunately is a case with Indian Muslims, who have abandoned their respective regional languages, much richer in comparison, in favour of Urdu in the Arabic script, in the name of Islam.

 

All the above gives us a picture of a liberal Islam, which we do not find even in a supposedly secular country like India. Does that mean that the ‘noble’ concept of pan-Islamism is completely absent in Indonesia? I guess not, as I happened to notice one banner hanging from the street electric polls in Bandung, that decried the ‘genocide’ of the Rohingyas in Myanmar. Secondly, a few green flags with a crescent, donning name ‘Jamaiyatul Al Washliyah’ standing markedly just in front of one ‘Purna Bhakti Pritwi (Prithvi)’ Museum in Jakarta, as if making it a point to stand guard against any un-Islamic activity like the ‘universal Bhakti’ the said museum was trying to propagate.

I stop here and promise to come back with the concluding ‘Part – III’ soon. See you then!