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CHAPTER 1

INDONESIA TODAY

A social media-mad nation where old ideas of status and respect still run deep, where easygoing welcomes offset fierce national pride, and where everyone from Sabang to Merauke speaks a single language—which might not be quite as easy to learn as you’ve been told, and which has a youth-speak version that’ll make your head spin. Indonesia today is a frenetic, and at times contradictory, place with an energy all of its own.

INDONESIA IN A SNAPSHOT

It’s a very long way from one end of Indonesia to the other—3,274 miles (5,269 kilometers), in fact. The space between those far-flung points is filled with a magnificent chaos of islands—approximately 17,508 of them, but who’s counting? Seriously, who actually is counting? Previous estimates of Indonesia’s island tally have ranged from a mere 13,667 all the way up to 18,307. What matters more than any precise number of islands is the staggering diversity of human experience that’s going on, right now, within this vast archipelago. Indonesia is home to something like 255,462,000 people, but once again, who’s counting? (Actually it’s Indonesia’s Central Bureau of Statistics in this case). Scattered across that 3,274-mile, 17,508-island space, they range from Internet entrepreneurs to subsistence farmers, from classical musicians to supermodels, and from LBGT activists to religious evangelists, all living out myriad lives to a soundtrack that spans the gamut from dangdut to death metal.

Indonesia’s national flag, Sang Merah-Putih (“The Red and White”), is a potent emblem, closely associated with the country’s bloody struggle for independence from the Netherlands in the 1940s.

FROM SABANG TO MERAUKE

Start at the top: drifting off the northernmost tip of Sumatra you’ll find a ragged little scrap of land by the name of Pulau Weh. Its main town, Sabang, is one of the proverbial poles of the nation. When Indonesians want to invoke the entirety of their supersize homeland they say “from Sabang to Merauke” (Merauke is a small eastern city close to the border with Papua New Guinea). It’s a bit like when Brits say “from Land’s End to John O’Groats”—except that there’s no way in the world you could cycle from Sabang to Merauke in 48 hours…

Lively hip-hop street culture in the Javanese city of Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest.

Pulau Weh is the perfect image of a tropical island, and right at this very moment, in one of the guesthouses back from the beach in the village of Iboih, there’s bound to be a gang of hip twenty-somethings from a big Indonesian city, chilling out after their latest dive excursion, and doing their best not to think about heading back to school or the office next week. And see the one with the laptop? She’s working on a post about this trip for her travel blog.

Modern urban Indonesia is a gritty counterpoint to guidebook images of timeless rural traditions.

Swing up, out, and southeast down the length of Sumatra with its cities shining like bright constellations in a great green emptiness. In Medan there’s a mob of teens queuing for the cinema in the glitzy Sun Plaza shopping mall, and down across the equator in Palembang there’s a couple on a first date in a floating restaurant on the banks of the River Musi. Head on southwards, across the Sunda Strait to Java, and before long you’ll see a smoky smudge up ahead, with a forest of slender skyscrapers rising into clearer air. It’s Jakarta, a massive maelstrom of energy raging above a sludgy tide of traffic. The richest and the poorest, the most radical and the most conservative, and people from every corner of the country and many corners of the globe—they’re all here, and most of them are stuck in that traffic. In a TV studio in the west of the city, a short way off the Jakarta-Tangerang toll road, there’s a glamorous celebrity waiting in the green room of a daytime chat show, and back in the center of town, on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise office block, an intern in an advertising agency is sucking at a cup of take-out coffee and sneaking a look at a blogpost about Pulau Weh he just saw linked on Facebook…

HEADING EAST

Up over the mountains to Bandung, where, in a garage in a northern suburb, there are four skinny kids with electric guitars who, though they don’t know it yet, are going to win an MTV Asia award in 18 months’ time. Onwards, eastwards, weaving in and out of the looming volcanoes that run the length of Java, the sprawl of red-tiled roofs that makes up Yogyakarta appears below. The heart of the city is an old royal palace, still home to a reigning sultan and still governed by ancient protocol. But a little way north, on a busy street near the Gajah Mada University campus, a gang of students are planning an anti-corruption demonstration over bowls of noodle soup—although one of them is a bit distracted by something about Pulau Weh that he’s reading on his iPhone…

Another world: in the hugger-mugger mayhem of the big cities, it’s easy to forget that much of Indonesia still does look just like those glossy guidebook images—a world of forests, mountains and rice terraces, like these in East Java.

In Surabaya the members of a vintage motorcycle club are planning a weekend road trip to the mountains, and in Banyuwangi a group of absurdly talented buskers are singing their hearts out for coins on a Bali-bound bus. Across the next narrow stretch of water, in Bali itself, a trio of thirty-something professional women from the capital are on a shopping spree in Seminyak, while a few streets away a local family with a property portfolio worth millions of dollars are getting dressed up for a major Hindu ceremony. On Lombok student mountaineers are posing for selfies, 12,224 feet (3,726 meters) up on the summit of Gunung Rinjani. Back down at sea level, and one island further east, a ten-year-old village boy with a hand-me-down surfboard left behind by a traveling Australian is paddling out for his daily after-school session in the waves, completely unaware that in a decade’s time he’ll be competing on the World Surf League Men’s Tour.

Indonesia sprawls away to the north and the east, with a hundred passenger jets streaking contrails in all directions. In the middle of Kalimantan there’s a trucker with a load of timber, cramming Iwan Fals into the cassette deck and settling in for the long-haul, and in Makassar a middle-aged woman with a small empire of takeaway food stalls is heading for the Trans Studio Mall with the grandkids. In Ambon some young entrepreneurs are frantically plugging their new alternative clothing distro store on social media, and in a village of thatched houses in the green hills of Flores a ten-year-old in a red-and-white school uniform is trying to download an Agnes Monica song on a weak Internet connection.

And still further east, in the terminal of Merauke’s modest airport, an environmental scientist on his way home to Jakarta after a site visit, is hunched over his iPad scrolling through a pithy description of a far-off island on a travel blog. He reaches for his phone and thumbs a message to his girlfriend—“Next trip, we’re going to Pulau Weh…”

There’s a theory—a serious one—that Jakarta’s addiction to social media is fueled by the amount of time its residents spend thumbing their smartphones while stuck in traffic!

A LAID-BACK NATION WHERE “FACE” AND RESPECT ARE EVERYTHING

One of my earliest impressions when I first arrived in Indonesia was of a sense of casual informality. This, it seemed, was a gloriously laid-back sort of country where people were perfectly at ease in one another’s company and untroubled by crippling social niceties. The average Indonesian scene certainly made a refreshing contrast to a roomful of socially awkward Englishmen, brash Australians or Americans, or conformity-bound Japanese. And on the surface, Indonesian society usually does seem decidedly easy-going. But make no mistake, there are powerful forces at play beneath the surface.

National pride, humor and creativity: when a number of foreign governments issued security warnings about travel to Indonesia in the early 2000s, someone came up with a wry response that has since become a popular tee shirt and bumper sticker.

Of course, in a place this vast and this diverse you won’t get very far trying to identify universal societal norms. A middle class Muslim from a big city in the north of Sumatra is never going to have the same ideas about what makes up normal social behavior as a poor Christian from a remote village in Maluku. But there are a few things that you can generalize about. One is the unavoidable influence of gengsi, and another is the admirable emphasis placed on respect…

You Scratch My Back…

You’ll often hear talk in Indonesia of a concept called gotong-royong. It means something along the lines of “communal effort”, and people sometimes proclaim it the ultimate example of selfless community spirit, part of a supposed Indonesian tradition of folks getting together to get something done for the good of all. All very nice, but those who observe gotong-royong in action find that the truth is a little more complicated.

The classic example of gotong-royong is the way entire villages would traditionally pitch in with donations in cash and kind to allow an individual family to hold a lavish wedding ceremony. But these donations were never meant to be gifts, pure and simple; they came with strings attached. Careful note of who’d given what would be taken on both sides, and a like-for-like repayment would be expected when it was time for another family in the village to hold their own wedding feast. The same sort of careful accounting applied even when the “donations” were only of time or labor. Far from being all about selfless communal action, gotong-royong in its traditional form is really a system designed to bind a community together in a web of debts and credits.

Balinese women get together gotong-royong-style to tackle preparations for a traditional ceremony.

KEEPING UP APPEARANCES

One of the most powerful social forces in Indonesia is a thing known as gengsi. It gobbles up huge chunks of Indonesian salaries each month; it prompts untold anxieties in the hearts of young and old; and it has manufacturers of new smartphone technology rubbing their hands with glee. Gengsi is usually translated as “face”, or “prestige”. Basically, it amounts to the idea that if you’ve got it, flaunt it—or if you haven’t got it, buy it on credit and flaunt it anyway.

Football and friendship—young fans of the Persebaya soccer team hanging out on the streets of Surabaya.

From East Nusa Tenggara to Jakarta Indonesians are seriously sociable people.

The urge to ostentatiously display your wealth is by no means unique to Indonesia, but it does seem to have a particular potency here. It drives choice of schools and universities. It has an impact on where people choose to shop, eat, and holiday. And it definitely affects domestic architecture. When I first moved to Surabaya, the capital of East Java and Indonesia’s second largest city, I lived in a middle class suburb, close to the most prestigious shopping mall in town. The quiet inner streets of each block were lined with modest bungalows, but the much less peaceful outer lots, facing directly onto the busy traffic, were taken up by some of the most flamboyant private homes I’ve ever seen. Their owners had deliberately chosen to build in these noisier, less private positions because they wanted as many people as possible to see their gargantuan concrete and marble concoctions, complete with Doric columns and statues of Greek goddesses. That’s gengsi in action.

The Rough & the Smooth

The degree of emphasis on “softness” in how you handle yourself and your interactions with others varies from region to region across Indonesia. Generally speaking, the people from Java—and in particular southern Central Java around Yogyakarta and Solo—are renowned as the most halus (“soft”, or “smooth”) in their manners, while looking back in the opposite direction the Javanese tend to regard absolutely everyone else as being unattractively kasar (“coarse”)—especially their unfortunate and much maligned neighbors on the stony island of Madura.

Of course, not everyone can afford to build a Greco-Roman extravaganza at a prime roadside location, but gengsi impacts consumer choices across society, not least when it comes to those two Indonesian essentials: the motorbike and the mobile phone. The pressure to have the latest, most keren (“cool”) model is huge, even if the price tag is way beyond your means, and this is where I think gengsi has its most negative impact. Phones (the Blackberry used to be the phone to have; these days it’s the iPhone) and motorbikes are routinely sold on credit, and there are many millions of people on very modest incomes making monthly payments they can ill afford for something that will no longer be at all keren by the time the debt is paid off.

The funny thing is, if you ask almost any Indonesian about gengsi they will insist that it’s a bad thing. They’ll make a clear distinction between gengsi and the much more positive idea of harga diri—“self-worth”, or “dignity”. And someone who is obviously a slave to gengsi beyond their means will probably be mocked as sok kaya—“pretend rich”. But almost everyone feels its insidious pull, because if you don’t happen to have the latest phone and motorbike there’s always the terrible prospect of being seen as kampungan—literally “villagey”, but meaning something close to “hick” in the American sense or “bumpkin” in Britain, also known as ndeso in Javanese. And whether they’ll admit it or not, most people would much rather risk being judged as sok kaya than kampungan!

ALAY: The Way Too Much Kids

Of all the myriad trends that Indonesia’s seething cities have thrown up in recent years, none has matched the impact of the wacky, cartoonish, and downright ridiculous cultural phenomenon known as Alay. No one really knows where the term originated. Some claim it’s an abbreviation of anak layangan (“kite kid”) after the traditional young kite-flyers of working class neighborhoods, but personally I think it’s more likely to be short for anak lebay, which means something like “way too much, kid”!

So what exactly is an Alayer, and why do those Indonesians who consider themselves sophisticated look down on them? The closest English-language equivalents I’ve ever been able to come up with are “try-hard” and “wannabe”. Imagine some wannabe Paris Hilton and her wannabe gangster-rapper boyfriend from Hicksville, Nowhere—that would be kind of Alay. But Alay culture also has some very specific features, inextricably linked to social media.

Have you ever posed for a selfie in front of a famous tourist attraction, trying to get the cutest 45-degree angle possible while at the same time pouting provocatively and putting a finger to your lips? And have you then used your phone’s built-in image editing tech to add pink stars plus your name in sparkly lettering before posting the thing on Instagram? And have you ever written a text message L1k3 7h15? If the answer’s yes, then you’re totally Alay, and any true Indonesian hipster worth his skinny jeans hates you!

The term Alay first went mainstream sometime around 2011, and it was mainly used in a pejorative sense. Alayers were roundly mocked as being not only wildly narcissistic and entirely lacking in taste, but also probably pretty kampungan, which gave a nasty edge of class snobbery to the whole thing. There were even serious campaigns to immediately unfollow or unfriend anyone you spotted using 4L4y 5tyL3 writing on social media. Exactly what prompted this anti-Alay outburst is hard to explain, but the best theory I’ve heard is that it was a moment of embarrassed reflection on the part of Indonesia’s first generation of digital natives—there was some kind of collective realization that for the past social media-dominated decade they’d all been behaving, well, kind of Alay, and that it was now time to grow up.

But Alay just won’t die. These days there are those who embrace the term—proud Alayers, no less. And even the digital hipsters aren’t beyond posting the occasional Alay selfie, usually with an #Alay hashtag—just to show that they’re being ironic, of course…

SHOW SOME RESPECT!

If the debt-inducing draw of gengsi is often a negative factor, a much more positive Indonesian universal is the value given to respect, and the idea of “softness” in interactions between people. Deep respect for your elders and superiors; avoidance of any dramatic displays of emotion, especially anger; and general politeness when talking to others: these things run deep, wherever you are in Indonesia. But if that all sounds like a recipe for stiff upper lips and starchy formality, that’s not the way it works at all. In fact, it’s precisely what underpins the easy-going social warmth of Indonesia. The emphasis is on being at ease, and making sure that others are at ease, and being polite and avoiding emotional outbursts are a big part of that.

Military order gives way to easygoing informality amongst these soldiers enjoying some downtime during a disaster relief operation in Sumatra.

The subtlety of this stuff can, naturally, make it hard for foreigners to spot it in action—and equally hard to spot transgressions. On a number of occasions I’ve been out and about with an Indonesian friend, and I’ve slowly become aware that they are angry about something. When I ask what’s up, it turns out it’s all down to some tiny deficit of politeness on the part of the waiter in a restaurant we left 20 minutes ago, or the ever-so-slightly disrespectful tone of the checkout girl in the convenience store we dropped into for phone credit—things of which I, bumbling foreigner that I am, was entirely unaware.

Inevitably, it’s also very easy for bumbling foreigners to make transgressions themselves, without ever realizing it. For example, standing with your arms folded or your hands on your hips (both poses which, unfortunately, come naturally to me) looks not just arrogant, but also downright aggressive in an Indonesian context. And getting worked up, shouting, and flapping your arms about—even if you’ve got an entirely legitimate reason to be angry—will get you absolutely nowhere.

It’s probably true to say that in modern urban Indonesia the traditional importance of respect and restraint are giving way a little. Waiters and checkout girls are getting a bit ruder, as they are in big cities the world over, and you do sometimes see couples arguing noisily in public. But it’ll be a long time before the value of respect and restraint fades away entirely.

Indonesia’s national emblem is the Garuda—an eagle-like creature from Hindu mythology. It is the embodiment of Pancasila, the national ideology. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, the Old Javanese phrase on the scroll that the Garuda grips in its claws, is the national motto, literally meaning “different but one”, and usually translated as “unity in diversity”.

Is Indonesia a “Muslim Country”?

Whenever I spot the phrase “the world’s biggest Muslim country”—or worse yet, “the world’s biggest Islamic country”—in a news report about Indonesia I growl and reach for my imaginary copy editor’s pen. To my pedantic mind the correct description should be “the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country”, because that’s precisely what Indonesia is. “Muslim country” or “Islamic country” suggests somewhere like Iran or Pakistan where Islam is enshrined as a state ideology, and where the religion is the dominant decider of social values. But Indonesia’s just not like that.

Inside the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, Indonesia’s biggest place of Muslim worship.

If you’ve ever spent time in other Muslim-majority countries—from Morocco to Bangladesh—you’ll sense a subtle difference as soon as you arrive. It’s not simply that Indonesia is markedly more liberal (although it is generally much more liberal when it comes to the position of women, and social values around boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, for example, than anywhere in the Middle East). There’s also the impression that Islam is not what sets the universal tone of daily life here. Sure, there are mosques and people in obviously “Muslim” dress—and in recent years an increasingly noisy and politically influential Islamist fringe, which some fear is beginning to change Indonesia’s long-famed diversity and tolerance for the worse—but in most big cities there are also bars and girls in short skirts.

Islam is just one of six officially recognized national religions in Indonesia, and though it accounts for by far the biggest chunk of the population (something like 85 percent) there are big swaths in the east of the country which are Christian-majority (plus Bali, where most people are Hindu). And religious minorities tend to be disproportionally represented in major urban populations, as well as being disproportionally represented in the ranks of the middle classes, which gives a certain cosmopolitanism to the modern urban scene. But there’s also a vast diversity within the Muslim population itself—from those who take their faith very seriously indeed, to those for whom it’s nothing more than a word on their identity card. There is a minority of women who adopt conservative Muslim dress, but they’re massively outnumbered by those who match a simple headscarf with skinny jeans, or who wander around in shorts and tee-shirt with their head uncovered.

There are some regions of Indonesia where the local culture is more obviously and conservatively Muslim—the north of Sumatra, for example. But despite a definite conservative trend of late, when it comes to lifestyle and social norms, Indonesia is still often closer to the Buddhist-majority countries of mainland Southeast Asia than to the Middle East. So the next time you spot the phrase “the biggest Muslim country in the world”, reach for your red pen…

RELATIONS WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD

Here’s the weird thing: almost everyone who visits Indonesia comes away with the impression that it’s one of the friendliest places on the planet; but this ultra-hospitable nation also has a long tradition of prickly relationships with its neighbors and lapses into xenophobic nationalism. It’s probably all down to history. During Indonesia’s early decades of independence from the Netherlands, the flamboyant first president, Sukarno, realized that one of the best ways to bind a vast and diverse nation together was to start a fight with someone else. He started fights with America, with Britain, and above all with Malaysia.

Those days of open confrontation are long gone, but the legacy remains. Nothing starts an Indonesian Twitter-storm more quickly than a perceived insult from a foreign nation. Malaysia, which has a lot in cultural common with Indonesia, comes in for a particularly large amount of flak, and relations with the other big neighbor, Australia, can get pretty testy at times too—over everything from the history of East Timor to the export of beef. None of this ever seems to impact on how most Indonesians respond to individual foreigners, which is refreshing, but that doesn’t mean that race isn’t an issue in Indonesia…

IS INDONESIA RACIST?

Some grumpy expats—and boy, can some expats be grumpy!—like to claim that “Indonesia is the most racist country on earth”. To my mind this is total hyperbole, and stems mostly from the fact that for the average Caucasian Westerner, living in Indonesia offers a first experience of routinely being viewed in terms of skin color—not something that any African-American or British Asian would find particularly unusual.

But if Indonesia isn’t the most racist country on earth, it’s certainly a place where the idea of “political correctness” hasn’t yet had much impact. Caucasians are routinely referred to using the slang racial designation bule, and people merrily make comments about the “frizzy hair” of Africans and the “slitty eyes” of Northeast Asians. There’s also a high degree of color-consciousness. As in many other Asian countries—as, indeed, in just about every country until comparatively recently—there’s an insidious connection between skin color and social status. Basically, if you’ve got darker skin it suggests that you’re poor. In Indonesia having a suntan doesn’t mean that you’ve just been on holiday; it suggests you’ve just been working in the fields.

Indonesia also has plenty of internal ethnic prejudices. People from the far east of the country, where dark-skinned, curly-haired Melanesian ethnicities dominate, are often subjected to condescending prejudice in western Indonesia, and the famously hard-working economic migrants from the island of Madura are routinely slandered as violent, foul-mouthed thugs—much as Irish migrant laborers were once viewed in Britain.

The single biggest racial issue in Indonesia, however, centers on the Chinese. Indonesia has been home to significant numbers of people of Chinese origin for centuries—and for centuries Chinese-Indonesians have been subjected to prejudice and sporadic hostility. Under the Suharto government during the last three decades of the 20th century, Chinese language, script, and cultural celebrations were officially banned, and Chinese-Indonesians were pushed to adopt “Indonesian”-sounding names.

Two versions of the intercultural encounter: Local kids watching with amusement as a tourist “roasts” herself on a Lombok beach and an Australian trainee teacher lending a hand in an Indonesian classroom.

There’s no getting away from the uncomfortable fact that, even today, Chinese-Indonesians are a disproportionately wealthy group compared to their pribumi counterparts (pribumi is itself a very loaded word, technically meaning “indigenous”, but to all intents and purposes meaning “non-Chinese”), so it’s inevitable that a certain amount of grumbling prejudice continues. But legal restrictions on Chinese language and culture are long gone; Chinese New Year is now a national holiday; and many educated Indonesians are now careful to use the term Tionghoa for Chinese-Indonesians, instead of the cruder Cina—a first step on the road to political correctness, perhaps.

Protesters in Jakarta getting hot and bothered over an international trade agreement.

Is “Bule” a Racist Word?

If you’re a Caucasian foreigner and you spend any time in Indonesia you’ll hear it: bule. It’s just two simple syllables (the pronunciation is “boo-lay”), but it’s a word powerfully primed for controversy. Bule originally meant “albino”, but in its modern colloquial sense it’s generally used for Caucasian foreigners. As far as I’m concerned the most accurate translation is simply “whitey”. So bule is unquestionably a racial designation, and some Caucasian expats get very upset by it. But is it actually a racist word?

Very few Indonesians are even aware of the idea that bule might be a contentious term. And if they do hear expats complaining they are usually defensive: “We don’t use it as an insult,” they protest; “It’s just a word for white people!” The response to this from those determined to be offended is that in 1900s Mississippi, in its average daily usage, the “N-word” wasn’t consciously used as an insult either; it was “just a word for black people”.

For what it’s worth, my personal take is that bule is not, of itself, a racist word. It’s almost never used with insulting intent. If Indonesia had a higher degree of “political correctness”, then it might justifiably be judged as problematic, but for the moment being called bule doesn’t bother me one bit, and I use the word myself. It all comes down to the fact that to be happy as a foreigner living or traveling in Indonesia, you need to remember that you are a foreigner, that you do look different. Keeping this all in perspective can be hard if you spend your time in tourist or expat hotspots. But I know that when I’m riding my motorbike through the hinterlands of Java and I spot another incongruous foreigner, even I find myself staring. In fact, I sometimes have to fight the urge to shout out as I pass — “Hello mister! Hello bule!”

THE OTHER SIDE: IDEAS ABOUT BULES

Some prejudices are just downright funny. The one that makes me laugh most comes in the form of a common question: “Tim, why do you bule guys prefer black girls?” When Indonesians say “black” here, they don’t mean people of African heritage; they mean Indonesian girls with darker complexions. There’s this idea—borne of the clichéd image of aging expats hooking up with youthful bargirls, who, as far as many Indonesians are concerned, look like they should be working in the rice fields—that all Western men actually have a preference for women with darker skin. For many middle class Indonesian girls—who spend a fortune on skin-whitening beauty products—it’s an utterly inexplicable notion. I always do my best to take the assertion in good humor, and to counter it by pointing out that it’s not that your average Western guy—or girl for that matter—has a preference for darker partners; it’s just that they don’t care about what color you are. I don’t think anyone ever believes me when I tell them this.

Speaking of forthright and inappropriate questions, they’re something you have to get used to as a foreigner in Indonesia. It’s not unusual, within five minutes of meeting someone for the first time, for them to have asked your age, your religion, and your monthly income—which in my country, Britain, are precisely the three questions you should never ask anyone! Ever! Maybe not even if you’re in a romantic relationship with them! There’s no point getting annoyed by this—they’re questions Indonesians are always asking each other. I usually try laughing, and good-naturedly explaining what terrible taboos those subjects are where I come from. People usually express very sincere interest in this piece of information. Then they ask me the three questions again…

Senior Indonesian and US military officers getting on fine during an international naval exercise.

A NATION OF LINGUISTS

Indonesia might be home to hundreds of different languages, but you only need to speak one of them to talk to people from the tip of Sumatra to the borders of Papua New Guinea: Bahasa Indonesia, otherwise known simply as “Indonesian”. But what is this language so many foreigners insist on calling “Bahasa”? Is it easy? And do Indonesians speak English?

Bahasa Indonesia means “Indonesian Language”. Bahasa just means “language”, so when, as so often happens, someone asks “do you speak Bahasa?” the logical response is “which one?” You can call it Bahasa Indonesia or you can call it Indonesian; but you shouldn’t call it “Bahasa”. Good to have that cleared up!

Indonesian was originally known as “Malay”, the native language of parts of Sumatra and what is now mainland Malaysia, but used as a lingua franca throughout the region for hundreds of years. During Indonesia’s struggle for independence from the Netherlands it was chosen as the national language and given its new name. Indonesian is part of the vast Austronesian language family, which spans the globe from Easter Island to Madagascar. It is gloriously acquisitive, having sucked up bits and pieces from Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, and English over the centuries. Modern Indonesian and the other versions of Malay spoken in Malaysia and Brunei are still more or less mutually comprehensible.

THE BAHASA GAUL MAELSTROM

Formal Indonesian as taught in schools is a stiff and starchy affair, but it has a maniacal younger sibling by the name of Bahasa Gaul, which means something like “Social” or “Friendly” language. At its more accessible end, Bahasa Gaul is just the colloquial version of Indonesian that people of all ages speak in casual situations, and it’s fairly easy to get to grips with its basic features. Grammar gets simplified; words get abbreviated; first letters get dropped so that the much-used word sudah, “already”, turns into udah. Final-syllable A turns into E, so benar, “true”, becomes bener; and the expressive particles loh, kok, dong, and sih get used incessantly.

Is Indonesian an Easy Language to Learn?

It’s a statement you hear all the time from foreigners who can just about order a beer in Bahasa Indonesia: “Indonesian is the easiest language in the world!” And it’s a statement that drives those who have spent years learning the language to distraction.

The idea that Indonesian is somehow uniquely easy is down to a few of its distinctive features. Like some other Asian languages, its verbs are not conjugated to create tenses, which leads to the misconception that it has no tenses at all. It has no genders; its pronouns are fixed; there are none of the tones that pose such a challenge to foreign students of Chinese; and it is written in the Roman alphabet using a delightfully consistent spelling system. Finally, there’s the fact that Indonesians are remarkably tolerant of fumbling foreigners, and very good at modifying their own speech for the sake of beginners. All this means that Indonesian really is an unusually accessible language for those wanting to learn a basic travelers’ pidgin in a relatively short space of time. But it doesn’t, unfortunately, mean it’s “the easiest language in the world”.

When I first came to live in Indonesia, I already had a decent grasp on the basics, thanks to three previous bouts of backpacking in the country. I was convinced that I was just a few months away from perfect fluency. In truth, I had just about reached the edge of the very wide plateau of basic functional competency, and it would be years before I could comfortably read an Indonesian newspaper or follow the plot of a sinetron.

Getting to the far side of that plateau requires a long hard slog. First up, unlike French, Spanish—or even Farsi or Hindi—Indonesian has absolutely no direct structural relationship with English, and precious little by way of common vocabulary. If you’re a native English-speaker you have to learn everything from scratch, and much of it is at total odds with the hardwired concepts of your own mother tongue. And then you’re faced with the overblown complexities of formal Indonesian on the one hand, and the devilish ultra-colloquialism of Bahasa Gaul on the other. This is why there are so very, very few foreigners, even from amongst the expats who’ve been in the country for decades, who can truly shoot the Bahasa Indonesia breeze like a native…

But stray any further into the realm of Bahasa Gaul as spoken by hip young Indonesians, and you’ll encounter a terrifying maelstrom of flying particles, extreme abbreviations, agglutinations, inversions, and odd bits of English chewed up and spat back out in radically modified form. It’s a linguistic wall of white noise, fit to send any earnest foreign student of Indonesian fleeing in terror.

The most striking thing about this Bahasa Gaul is its sheer dynamism. It was always a rapidly evolving sort of street talk, but modern social media has given its transformative capacity a massive steroids hit, so it now shifts and reinvents itself at ridiculous speed. It’s a brilliantly exciting manifestation of Indonesia’s linguistic vibrancy, even if it is pretty much impossible to keep up with.

DO INDONESIANS SPEAK ENGLISH?

Educated, urban Indonesians sometimes get a bit offended when foreigners assume that Indonesians can’t speak English. But though there is a tiny Jakarta-based elite who speak it at pretty much first-language level, the fact of the matter is, English just isn’t spoken as widely or as well in Indonesia as it is in countries like Malaysia or India. That’s not Indonesia’s fault; it’s down to colonial history.

“Our City is Ready for Disasters”: public education street art in Bahasa Indonesia.

“Please take your ticket”.

When translation goes wrong: the Indonesian phrase here really means “stay away from drugs”!

Still, Indonesians definitely want to be able to speak English, and if you’re a foreigner wandering in a place popular with tourists—Bogor’s Botanic Gardens, Jakarta’s Fatahillah Square, or the Borobudur temple—you will be pounced upon by gangs of students looking to practice their English skills. And they seem to be getting somewhere. English is definitely now more widely spoken than when I first came to Indonesia, and in the last couple of years I’ve started hearing trendy young Indonesians speaking English amongst themselves in cafés and shopping malls. Social media and the Internet has had a lot to do with this—the posts and comments on the average Indonesian Facebook page these days come in a glorious mishmash of English, regional languages, and Bahasa Gaul.

An Archipelago of Languages

Bahasa Indonesia might be spoken from one end of the country to the other, but it’s just the start when it comes to Indonesia’s linguistic make-up. There are something like 700 local languages, plus infinite dialects. The big regional languages are spoken by millions of people, and the biggest, Javanese, with nearly 100 million, has more native speakers than French. Others are the preserve of a vanishing handful. The little island of Alor in East Nusa Tenggara Province is home to just 150,000 people, but it has 15 distinct languages!

INDONESIA: THE SOCIAL MEDIA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

A few years back I spent a night hanging out with a bunch of local mystics at an ancient temple in the mountainous wilds of East Java. Sitting outside a bamboo shack, only an oil lamp to stave off the velvety darkness, they talked to me of supernatural energy and invisible realms. It was the sort of thing that foreign travel writers love to think of as “the real Indonesia”. By the time I got back to Surabaya the next day, three of the amulet-toting mystics had added me on Facebook…

Yogyakarta school kids getting online.

When I first traveled in Indonesia, “Internet” generally meant a bank of rickety old desktops in a warnet—a warung Internet, or “Internet café”—with appalling connection speeds. But these days the whole country sizzles with digital connectivity. There are housewives on Twitter and grannies on WhatsApp, and an army of commuters furiously updating their statuses in the midst of the Jakarta rush hour each morning.

INDONESIANS ONLINE

Go into just about any café in the country—from a rickety roadside coffee stall in rural Sumatra to a branch of J.CO (like Starbucks, only with added donuts) in a Jakarta shopping mall, and look at the customers. As each newcomer takes his or her seat there’s an audible clunk. It’s the sound of a weighty bit of Internet-ready mobile technology hitting the table where it has to sit, in line of sight at all times.

As in many countries with less than perfect infrastructure, lots of people in Indonesia skipped the stage of home Internet connection and went straight to mobile. And it’s always easier to keep up a lively Instagram account when you carry your main form of Internet access with you wherever you go. Something like 90 percent of Indonesians with personal Internet access—and there are about 100 million of them—use social media.

Another reason that’s often cited for Indonesia’s social media addiction—and this is quite serious—is the traffic. Jakarta alone is responsible for 2.5 percent of all the world’s tweets, and most of them are probably composed while sitting stationary in the notorious macet, the gridlock that is one of the city’s abiding features. But personally, I think that Indonesia was always going to be a place that embraced social media with enthusiasm. Millions of Indonesians were using the long-forgotten Friendster network before anyone had ever heard of Facebook. It’s all down to the fact that this is a country where social contact is as fundamental a need as food and water.

Before There Was Facebook:

I’d been working in Indonesia for barely a week when the invites started popping up in my email inbox: Ari wants to add you on Friendster; Fitri wants to add you on Friendster…

The forgotten social media platform Friendster was launched in California way back in 2002. It had many of the features that would eventually make Facebook such a phenomenon, but it didn’t really catch on—apart from in Indonesia, that is. By the start of 2007 Friendster had something like 4 million users in Indonesia, which might not sound like much until you realize that in the entire world only 12 million people had Facebook accounts at that stage. But once the competition heated up, Friendster struggled to keep pace, and by the time it breathed its last in 2015 hardly anyone noticed its passing, not even in Indonesia.

THE INDONESIAN BLOGOSPHERE

There are something like five million Indonesian bloggers, furiously posting on every topic under the sun. The handy thing for foreigners is that a surprising number of the best Indonesian blogs are written in English. There’s the big cheese of the tech blogging scene, Budi Putra, the utterly awesome backpacking ladies of Indohoy, and a whole bunch of seriously glitzy fashion and lifestyle bloggers—amongst who the uncrowned queen is definitely Diana Rikasari, the woman behind the funky Hot Chocolate & Mint blog.

Unsurprisingly, the idea that you can make money—maybe even lots of it—from blogging, has caught people’s attention in Indonesia. In 2014 a cannily considered video appeared online of a 21-year-old high school dropout and sometime duck herder from Semarang named Eka Lesmana, supposedly collecting his monthly 120 million-rupiah pay-out from Google AdSense at his local post office. There was a lot of excitement on social media, and young Eka seemed to be established as something of a blogging-for-cash guru. The thing is though, the URLs of the dozen blogs he supposedly maintained were never revealed. In the world of blogging, as everywhere else, tales of impossible riches are always worth taking with a pinch of salt…

SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLITICS

Protest and activism have long been a phenomenon at the rowdier end of Indonesian politics, but these days there’s usually more noise online than on the streets. In 2012 a viral Twitter hashtag—#SaveKPK—actually succeeded in prompting the then president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to weigh in on the side of Indonesia’s beleaguered Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in a tussle with some very high-level officials. The presidential race of 2014, meanwhile, was one of the most social media-focused elections the world had ever seen. Facebook claimed to have identified 200 million election-related interactions during the campaign, and Twitter totted up 95 million election-related tweets. Inevitably, the dark side of social media was on full display too, with a barrage of malicious online rumors about the winning candidate, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

Community connectivity: “Kampoeng Cyber” is a traditional neighborhood in Yogyakarta with Wi-Fi for all, celebrated in colorful street art.

A Viral Tiger

Indonesia has a knack for online humor, often based on the most bizarre starting points. In early 2017 someone noticed that an army base at Cisewu in West Java had a very bad statue of a tiger for a mascot, snapped a photo of it, and posted it online. Within a few days hilarious memes featuring reworked images of the “Cisewu Tiger” were going viral, not only in Indonesia but around the world. The only people not to see the funny side were the soldiers. After several weeks of embarrassment they demolished the statue!

The crazy thing about all of this is that still only about half of all adult Indonesians use the Internet. If the country makes this much noise while running at 50 percent capacity, imagine the roar once the rest of its citizens get online…

Diana Rikasari, Indonesia’s Online Fashion Queen

One of the biggest names in the Indonesian blogosphere is the funky fashionista Diana Rikasari. Blessed with a canny command of English and a delightfully wacky sense of style, which she describes as “playful, colorful, and adventurous”, she launched her Hot Chocolate and Mint blog way back in 2007. Since then she’s become a veritable phenomenon, with endless awards, her own fashion line, a bestselling book, and more besides. Diana claims that the lucrative career she’s built off the back of her blog was all an accident. “I never planned any of this,” she says, “I didn’t even know that blogs (or mine, in particular) could open so many doors.” Mind you, her background in business and marketing probably helped.

These days she somehow manages to maintain the original blog plus wildly active Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts, a business, and various brand ambassadorships.

“I’m very strict about time management. I have a to-do list for everything,” she says.

As to just why Indonesia has such an addiction to social media, Diana has her own theory: “Indonesians really care about other people, sometimes even too much. I think most Indonesians use social media to stalk other people’s lives!”

www.dianarikasari.blogspot.com