Indonesia

Theatre and dance

Bali: girls performing a choreographed group dancePaul Chesley—Stone/Getty ImagesMost 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 refined and lyrical to the most coarse and colloquial. An evening of wayang golek or wayang kulit is inevitably a mixture of poetic elegance and 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.

Balinese dancingContunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, MainzSome 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.

Kenyah: Kenyah men’s solo dance© Gini GorlinskiApart 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

gamelanCourtesy of the Indonesian Tourist BoardPuppet 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 flutes, 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 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.

Kenyah: Kenyah boys playing the jatung utang© Gini GorlinskiAlthough 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 bamboo wind instruments, or drums, xylophones, or other nonmetallic percussion instruments. For 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 virtuosity, use the guitar to accompany most of their singing. Kroncong music, which flourished during the colonial era and retained its popularity following independence, was a product of the confluence 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 film music, a type of Sumatran Malay music called orkes Melayu (Malay orchestra), kroncong, and 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

carving: column, East Kalimantan, Indonesia© Gini GorlinskiEncompassing 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 influences 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.

wayang kulitCourtesy of the Puppentheatermuseum, Munich 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 temple entrances, animate masked-dance and puppet performances, overlook the grounds of offices and homes, and populate the shelves and walls of galleries in the towns and cities. In Java the leather puppets for wayang kulit performances are 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.

textile: Javanese batikCourtesy of the Royal Tropical Institute, AmsterdamIndonesia 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 process, and batik fabrics that are patterned entirely by hand take several weeks to complete. To speed up 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 figure combined with other geometric figures. 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.

ikat: cloth from Sumba TimurHolle Bildarchiv, Baden-BadenThe art of weaving is highly developed. It includes the famous ikat method, in which the thread is dyed selectively before weaving by binding fibres around 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 significance.

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 puppet theatre. Other museums documenting regional culture have been established in major cities (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 first 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, film, spoken word, and other arts.

Sports and recreation

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

Madura: bull racing© Wolfgang KaehlerMany 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 cockfighting is common on Bali and Kalimantan. Madura is known for its bull racing.

Susanti, SusiALLSPORT UK/John GichigiIndonesia formed an Olympic committee in 1946 and debuted at the 1952 Games in Helsinki. At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, the country won its first 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 five medals, including two golds. The gold medals were won by Alan Budi Kusuma and Susi Susanti.

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 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 has grown rapidly.

James F. McDivittThomas R. LeinbachGoenawan Susatyo Mohamad

History

The archipelago: its prehistory and early historical records

Indonesia: early Indonesian historyEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.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 influenced 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 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 first 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 early centuries ce, it is possible that people from the 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 difficulties, 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 flowing rivers, encouraged wet-rice production and a patchwork pattern of settled areas in the river valleys separated by mountains and jungle.

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 Pacific 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 specific 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, reflect varying degrees of exposure to influences from beyond the archipelago. Moreover, they reveal points of intersection in 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 influence. 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 influential 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 identified 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-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 flowing 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 first listened to the Brahmans, however, were certainly informed by indigenous religious concepts. Revered especially as teachers (gurus), the Brahmans gained the confidence 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 find 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 difficulty 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 first reasonably well-documented period of maritime Malay history provides further evidence of the Indonesian adaptation of Indian religious conceptions.

¹Has limited legislative authority.
Official name	Republik Indonesia (Republic of Indonesia)
Form of government	multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Regional Representatives Council¹ [132]; House of Representatives [560])
Head of state and government	President: Joko Widodo
Capital	Jakarta
Official language	Indonesian
Official religion	monotheism
Monetary unit	rupiah (Rp)
Population	(2015 est.) 255,729,000 Expand
Total area (sq mi)	737,815
Total area (sq km)	1,910,931
Urban-rural population	Urban: (2014) 53% Rural: (2014) 47%
Life expectancy at birth	Male: (2013) 69.3 years Female: (2013) 74.6 years
Literacy: percentage of population age 15 and over literate	Male: (2010) 95.8% Female: (2010) 91.5%
GNI per capita (U.S.$)	(2014) 3,650

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