International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 155

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
Bahasa Indonesia as the contesting melting pot: the interplay of Sanskrit with Hinduism
and Arabic with Islam
Indonesia36 as a name of a state came into existence after World War II. The Republik
Indonesia as a state was established on Independence Day, 17 August 1945, after Dutch and
Japan colonization was ended. At that time, other regions in Africa and Asia also gained
their independence from European colonization. The physical boundaries of Indonesia had
been established by the Netherlands when they took over the many islands and made them
into a single c olony: the Netherlands East Indies.37 Indonesia now is a home to nearly 300
million people and thus the most populous Muslim-majority in the world and the fourth
most populous country in the world. The present Indonesia was formerly named by the
Dutch as “East Indies”. Why East Indies? As the popular colony of British was India,
Indonesia was named after India. East Indies is a term referring to thirteen thousands
islands located east of India. It is located in the South East Asian Archipelago. Sumatra, Java,
Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Papua are among the five largest islands. Within these islands, there
are more than 300 ethnic groups and 200 local languages (Vickers, 2005). The total number
of languages and ethnic groups are more than 742. East Indies was a complex entity before
the arrival of foreign influences. The term Indonesia or East Indies which means “the islands
of India” was given to the archipelago by a German ethnologist and has been used since
1884 (Vlekke, 1959).
The first major foreign influence on latter-day Indonesia emanated from the ‘owner’
of its name: India. This influence was divided into two phases and characterised by the role
of Hinduism. However, compared to India in which around 78% of the total population38
adopted the Hindu way of life, the present day Indonesia is home to the religion of Islam.
Around 82% of the total current population in Indonesia are of the Muslim faith.
Indonesian Hinduism, which apparently originated in India, however, was deeply
rooted in the formation of the many former dynasties of present-day Indonesia, before the
arrival of European colonialism. For nearly seven centuries, Hindu and Buddhist empires had
challenged each other for supremacy in the archipelago (present day Indonesia) east of
India. This unauthenticity and the foreign influences on the “pagan” archipelago then
formed the basis of the identity for the present-Indonesia. The Hindu Mataram was located
in Java and the Buddhist Srivijaya was centred in Sumatra. The most famous Hindu
Majapahit was established in Java in the thirteenth century. These three kingdoms moulded
the sediment of the basis of a longstanding social and cultural legacy for most people in the
Indonesian archipelago.
The so-called “Pagan-Indonesia”, with its indigenous Malay language, learned its first
foreign language, Sanskrit, in the 7th century. Sanskrit was introduced to the islands of
36

Indonesia originated from Greek: IndU.S = India and nesos = islands.
Vickers in the Introduction, A History of Modern Indonesia, 2.
38
Dheram, “English Language Teaching in India” in Braine, Teaching English to the World, 59.
37

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