LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

Court Malay to Bahasa Indonesia

Sumatra’s great size and cultural diversity is reflected in its wealth of languages, which range from the elegant and elaborate court Malay still spoken in the former palace centers of Palembang and Riau, to the rapidly vanishing dialects spoken by a few coastal, boad-dwelling  orang laut  (sea nomads). Most of Sumatra's languages are closely related, and belong to the huge family of Austronesian languages which stretches in great island arc from Madagascar on the African coast to Easter Island in the easters Pacific.
                northern Sumatra is dominated by the 1.5 milion speakers of Acehnese, who surround a much smaller pocket of Gayo speakers. To the south, around Lake Toba, lie the Batak heartlands, with their many Batak dialects, some to different as almost to constitute separate languanges. The most widely-spoken dialect is Toba Batak, followed by karo, Angkola, Mandailing, Dairi, Simalungun and Alas. Four million Minangkabau speakers the second largest linguistic group in the island are found in  the fertile highlands of West Sumatera, while moving farther south, the provinces Riau, Jambi and South Sumatera are home to numerous dialects of Malay. Rejang is spoken in parts of Bengkulu, and Lampung is spoken on the southern tip of the island. Several distinct languages are found in the four island groups along the west coast of Sumatra-Simuelue, Nias, Mentawai and Enggano.

                Attached like a single-hued lining to this linguistic coat of many colors is the Malay language-for centuries the lingua franca of the archipelago, and forerunner of the national language, Bahasa Indonesia. Spoken as a mother tongue by about 11 million Sumatrans, Malay is indigenous to the east of the island but has spread throughout the archipelago as the language of trade and islam, superseding local languages as a literary and courtly medium in the kingdoms of Aceh, West Sumatra And Riau.

                When Sultan Iskandar Muda of Aceh coresponded with King James I of England in 1615, he wrote in Malay, not Acehnese. At the other end of the social scale, Malay has long served as the language of the market place in Sumatra's cosmopolitan port cities. the first Malay phrasebook for foreign merchants, printed in Amsterdam in 1603, contains sample conversations for purchasing provisions, weighing pepper and extracting funds from a recalcitran debtor, as well as colorful phrases for driving a hard bargain.

Traditional literature

Traditional Sumatran scripts can be divided into two types-those that trace their origin to a south India script, and those that derive from a Persian-Arabic script. The earliest example of the latter is an Old Malay stone inscription from 7th century Srivijaya (Palembang). The ravages of the tropical climate have left no traces of texts on more perishable materials from this period, but the Batak and Lampung scripts also belong to this indic group, and are still in occasional use. The arrival of Islam led to the development of a modified from of the Arabic script known as Jawi-used to write Malay, Acehnese and Minangkabau until the early decades of this century.

                 Manuscripts from Sumatra come in all shapes and sizes, and use bamboo, tree-bark, palm leaf and bone as well as paper. Sumatra's most important literature is written in the Malay language. Prose works include histories and romances; tales of the Prophet and Muslim heroes, like Alexander the Great (known in Malay as Iskandar Zulkarnain, the "two horned"); and theological, legal, moral treatises. The Hikayat Raja-raja Pasi, which relates the coming of Islam to the north coast of Sumatra in the 13th century, is the oldest known Malay history.

                The two main genres of Malay poetry are the narrative syair and the pantun. The fourline stanzas of the syair with their a-a-a-a endrhyme are believed to be the creation of  Hamzah Fansuri, a mystic poet who lived in Barus in the 16th century. The pantun is a quatrain with an a-b-a-b rhyme in which  the first  couplet  contains a veiled allusion, the meaning of which is usually elaborated in the final couplet. Written literatures also  exist in Acehnese-in prose (haba) and poetry (hikayat)-and in Minangkabau, where the most important epic is the Kaba Cindur Mata.

                In Sumatra, as in many parts of Indonesia, the dividing line between written and oral literature is blurred, for in semi-literate societies texts were usually composed and written down to an audience. Professional Sijobang singers in West Sumatra are still in demand at weddings, circumcision ceremonies and other feasts, where recitations of the adventures of Prince Anggun Nan Tungga last all night. (Sijobang performances are now also marketed on cassettes.) Sumatran peoples have a rich stock of folklore, including proverbs, mantras and animal fables-the mousedeer being the hero.

                One of the most intriguing written traditions of Sumatra are pustaha, the bark books of the Batak. These concertina-shaped books are concerned solely with magic, divination and medicine, and were used as aide-memoires by apprentice sorcerers during their period of study with a Batak priest or dato. Amongst their contents might be oracles for reading the entrails of a chiken, or for divining the portents of the time of day of a child's birth ("a boy-child born at a certain moment will die in war or of smallpox; if it is a girl, she may die of suicide," etc.) as well as recipes for love philtres and poisons.

Modern literature

By the beginning of the 20th century, increasing Western influence manifested itself in a growing popular literature in Malay. Medan became a center for the publishing of "penny dreadfuls;" the melodramatic romances, adventure detective booklets owing much to the stories of Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle.

          In the 1920s, when Balai Pustaka-the Dutch colonial government publishing house in Batavia-began to issue novels in Malay, the earliest works were by Minangkabau writers. Many novels centered on the cultural clash between the modernizing influence of Western education and the strictures and arranged marriages of traditional Minang society. Both in the period before Independence and afterwards, Sumatran writers have been in the forefront of modern Indonesian literature.
               Armijn Pane's Belenggu (Shackles), published in 1940, has been hailed as the first Indonesian psychological novel, and poets like Chairil Anwar and Rivai Apin were influenced by T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden.  Yet the homeland of Sumatran writes often shines through their work-from the forests of Mochtar Lubis' childhood, which from the backdrop to his novel Harimau (tiger), to the images of Lake Toba which permeate the existentialist poetry of Sitor Situmorang.