Abstract
This study investigates Java’s urban middle classes and their importance in the formation of ‘modern’ lifestyles in Indonesia. They formed the backbone of both the Dutch colonial project and the resultant Indonesian nation-state. By foregrounding lifestyle as the defining factor of middle-class identity, we demonstrate how language and images provide a methodological framework to reconstruct this group’s ambitions and aspirations. Their language, an urban variety of Malay, was key to accessing and, in fact, creating discourses of modernity. This transformation was accelerated by the ‘visual turn’ in the late-colonial Netherlands Indies—and, indeed, globally. Advertisements and other visual messages, typically through the medium of the Malay language, promoted new ways to dress, work, travel, and consume. Yet Java’s middle classes were by no means uncritical recipients of these colonial and global novelties. A counter-discourse soon emerged, which questioned the consequences of being modern and the dangers of losing traditional values.
Highlights
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Dutch Ethische Politiek (Ethical Policy) promised to bring development, prosperity, and modernity to colonial Java
Before we address the importance of the Malay-language press, it is necessary to first delve deeper into the composition and size of Java’s urban middle classes
We do not deny that urbanization and educational opportunities for Indonesia’s middle classes and the associated processes of emancipation were instrumental to the rise of nationalism, but we argue that modernity, as articulated in the linguistic and visual arena, was a much broader phenomenon that via free access hoogervorst and schulte nordholt gave shape to a brand-new middle class
Summary
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Dutch Ethische Politiek (Ethical Policy) promised to bring development, prosperity, and modernity to colonial Java. From the early twentieth century, newspapers and books written in colloquial Malay provide lively vistas into the nature and nuances of modernity in colonial Java These sources make it clear that modernity (kemodernan) denoted a cluster of related elements: notions of movement and mobility, progress and development, individual agency and the ideal of equality, consumerism, and a general longing for everything new, including in the realm of language. Written in local Malay littered with Dutch loanwords, the following extract provides a snapshot of the lifestyles desired by a new generation of women across late-colonial Southeast Asia (Lewis 2009) and globally (Weinbaum et al 2008): She learned French, English and German, in short, all the languages she wanted to learn, and there was no language in which she was incompetent. The question of whether being modern was at all compatible with non-European values grew increasingly louder in Malay-language publications
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