Indonesian literature
The languages spoken (and part of them written) in the Indonesian Archipelago number over a thousand, and for that reason alone it is impracticable to survey their entire literary production in one article.
Since the thought of a national Indonesian language only struck root as recently as the 1920s, this means that emphasis in the present article is put on the twentieth century.
Major factors which make for a blurring of distinctions are: During its early history, Indonesia was the centre of trade among sailors and traders from China, India, Europe and the Middle East.
[4] In written poetry and prose, a number of traditional forms dominate, mainly:— Some of these works are: The literature of this period was produced from the year 1870 until 1942.
Literature in Malay rubbed shoulders with works in other languages of the region, from Batak in the West through Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese, to Moluccan in the East.
At the same time, the Dutch colonisers temporarily veered to a point of view which allowed for the education and unification of the Indonesian peoples to self-reliance and maturity, as it was perceived.
The Dutch, however, wished to channel all these forces, nipping any political subversiveness in the bud while at the same time instructing and educating Indonesians, in a way the government saw fit.
For those reasons, an official Bureau (or: Commission) for Popular Literature (Dutch: Commissie voor de Volkslectuur) was instituted under the trade name Balai Pustaka, which became some sort of government-supervised publisher.
Besides preventing criticism of the colonial government, Balai Pustaka blocked all work that might be conducive to any sort of religious controversy, and anything "pornographic" was avoided: even a novel featuring divorce had to be published elsewhere.
During this period, whose heyday was in the 1920s, Indonesian literature came to be dominated by fiction (both short stories and novels), and Western-style drama and poetry, which gradually replaced the earlier syair, gurindam, pantun and hikayat.
Merari Siregar's Azab dan Sengsara was the very first modern novel appearing in Indonesian, constituting a break with the Malay romance tradition.
While not completely successful, in that it rather schematically deals in black-and-white oppositions, and directly addresses the reader, subverting its realism, this may still be regarded as the first treatment of contemporaneous problems (i.e., the issue of forced marriage) in the realist tradition.
[10] Political concerns were more prominent in Sarekat Islam, founded in 1912 as a society of tradesmen, but which soon evolved into a nationalist movement, counting among its members the future president of the republic, Sukarno, and the communist Semaun.
This "Generation of the New Literates (or New Poets)" adopted its very name, Poedjangga Baroe, to emphasise its striving for renewal, attempting to break away both from the set forms of traditional Malay literature and from the yoke of colonial constraints: the objective was a new poetics and a new national consciousness.
To this end, in 1933 they founded the first national literary magazine, Poedjangga Baroe,[17] created by Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana, Amir Hamzah (regarded as the greatest of the poets of the late colonial period),[18] and Armijn Pane.
Although influential as the pioneering platform of an emerging Indonesian literature, sales had never been comfortable: Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana has revealed that the periodical's subscription was never much more than 150.
There was one exception: Beb Vuyk, an Indo-European (Eurasian) author of Dutch nationality but with strong nationalist sympathies, was briefly on the editorial board before the war broke out.
Bikin gua, Masinis mulia, Jadi sekerup dalam masinmu, Yang menjalankan kapal dunia, Ke pelabuhan sama ratamu.
Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana's short novel Layar Terkembang ("The Sail Unfolds") is a sensitive portrayal of young women in contemporary Indonesia.
Angkatan '66 was marked by rising the Horison magazine, led by Mochtar Lubis[32] Dozens of writers previously associated with Lekra or leftist groups went into exile overseas, creating their own literature.
Additionally, poets explored ideas such as femininity, and the women's unique gendered identity that exists in Indonesia, as has been exemplified in the writing of Toeti Haraty, and Sitor Situmorang.
One of notable fruits of this period is the Sastra wangi, a literary movement emerged circa 2000 and written by young, urban Indonesian women who take on controversial issues such as politics, religion and sexuality.
In alphabetising according to the initial of the first name, the present bibliography follows the convention adopted in many Indonesian works (but also in, for instance, Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature).
