Indonesia Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation – review

How do you make 260 million people on 6,000 islands feel like they are all the same nation? Elizabeth Pisani takes a look at post-independence Indonesia
people partaking in games to celebrate Indonesia's independence
Archipelago nation … people partaking in games to celebrate Indonesia's independence. Photograph: Crack Palinggi/Reuters

Nation states did not accrue great power in the 19th and 20th centuries by making concessions to the regions that constitute them. Central power has usually monitored centrifugal tendencies very closely, and clamped down on them if feeling threatened. If one piece of the puzzle goes flying off in a different direction, the whole is seriously weakened – as the prime minister will doubtless discover if Scotland votes for independence.

What was it that bound Catholic Bavaria to Protestant Prussia? It clearly wasn't religion, or language. One could argue that they shared a fearful memory of the destruction wrought during the Thirty Years War in the first half of the 17th century. Or that Bismarck steered them into a pragmatic union.

Whatever it was, the builders of Germany felt it necessary and desirable to devise and nurture a series of myths that most of their constituent parts felt able to share. This pattern has been repeated around the globe in the past two centuries, and shared myths of nationhood come thick and fast in the form of inter alia national anthems, a manicured or mendacious version of the past, and the elevation of people who supposedly represent the best of a country, not always deservedly. Occasionally, the task is too great: since Franco's death, the Spanish people have given up trying to write lyrics to the national anthem because the regions cannot agree on what sentiments they should express.

New nation states also had to ensure that the regions would support central government. They can do so by offering incentives, political or economic; they can use force; or they can suggest how, without the support of the centre, the periphery could be vulnerable to outside predators.

"Exploring the Improbable Nation" is the subtitle of Elizabeth Pisani's Indonesia Etc. At first, I thought this ill‑advised, as I think you can make a case for all nations being improbable in their own ways. But I soon saw that she had a point, and it would even have been fair to call it something like the Really Improbable Nation or the Ludicrously Improbable Nation.

This is a country of between 13,500 and 17,000 islands, depending on whose figures you believe. About 6,000 of them are inhabited, and they stretch over 5,200km, from Sumatra in the north-west to Papua in the south-east. These host hundreds of different languages, five recognised religions (plus many unrecognised ones) and dozens of ethnicities. Indonesian, a form of Malay, is the lingua franca, which has consolidated its position in the last two decades thanks to the spread of television and the popularity of local sinetrons, or soap operas.

Java makes up 7% of the country's landmass, yet is home to 60% of the country's 260 million inhabitants. Since independence the Javanese have been by far the most influential group. The two towering figures of postwar politics, Presidents Sukarno and Suharto, were Javanese, and in many ways their perception of Java blurred with their perception of Indonesia, not unlike how many English feel about Britain.

More recently, Indonesia's farming, mineral and industrial potential has elevated it to one of Jim O'Neill's MINTs (with Mexico, Nigeria and Turkey), the tigerish developing powers whose current economic dazzle, O'Neill suggests, is now brighter than that of his earlier acronym, the BRICS. The country's importance politically and economically increases steadily. Its size and its strategic significance, as one of the countries through which the Straits of Malacca run, ensure it will play a key role in the unfolding territorial disputes in the South China sea.

But back to its improbable nature and indeed that "Etc". In her prologue, Pisani writes that when "the country's founding fathers declared independence from Dutch colonists in 1945, the declaration read: 'We, the people of Indonesia, hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters relating to the transfer of power etc. will be executed carefully and as soon as possible.' Indonesia has been working that 'etc.' ever since."

It is a delightfully casual way of asserting a country's independence, but that insouciance also suggests the leaders of the new country had only a vague idea about wherein its identity lay. The only reason for this disparate archipelago to regard itself as a unit was a rather negative one – all the islands were part of the colonial system underpinned by the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch government.

For just over a year, Pisani wandered the country in order to find out if there was any more to Indonesia's identity than this rather modest 'etc'. She had lived in Jakarta in the late 1980s as a young correspondent for Reuters, and speaks Indonesian well. Only a tenth of the inhabitants speak it as their mother tongue but almost all speak it fluently as a second language. From the book it seems Pisani is as well-versed in it as most of them.

Her second trump is her indefatigability and her willingness to embrace the modest lifestyles most Indonesians enjoy outside Jakarta and the other large cities. She is relentlessly curious and able to strike up not just conversations but entire friendships with a range of people. Sometimes she is invited to stay in people's homes for days or weeks, sleeping on her trusty portable mat. At other times, she is squeezed under a tarpaulin on a packed ferry. Her ability to pitch up anywhere and grasp the essence of the place is truly impressive.

What this means is that while this book is low on dates, statistics and historical analysis, it does give a vivid sense of what Indonesia feels, smells, and tastes like. She journeys from villagers who joust on horseback in balletic circular movements on one island to another where the fishermen's clan hang whale meat out to dry after catching it using ancient techniques.

By doing so she decodes the peculiar bonds of family, clan, village and island that the Indonesians have developed over centuries, and which have mutated in an independent state. There have been many agents of this, but perhaps most important are the "transmigrants", a term reserved for the (usually) Javanese civil servants who have spread through the islands in order to confer a sense of Indonesian-ness.

The Indonesian dictator, Suharto, is probably best known outside the country for the orgy of anti-communist violence that brought him to power in 1965, the Year of Living Dangerously. Through her meticulous, colourful and often funny examination of several communities and how they have developed since the late 1980s, Pisani shows how Suharto's fall in 1998 also signalled the end of the state-sponsored supremacy of Javanese culture.

East Timor, a former Portuguese colony annexed by Jakarta in 1975, was able to exploit this to gain independence, while the brutal fight between separatists and government in the Sumatran province of Aceh came to an end when both sides agreed to a compromise after 2004's tsunami. Decentralisation has been an important force in the re-invention of Indonesia.

The uncertainty following Suharto's death did trigger some nasty conflicts around the archipelago. But although Pisani cannot really explain all of Indonesia's et ceteras, she does project a more optimistic and warmer picture of a fascinating country than most outside commentators. For anyone about to visit the place, her book is an essential companion.

I also suspect that it will be eagerly read in Indonesia itself. The country is so spread out, and getting around so difficult, that many Indonesians have little idea about what goes on in the rest of their country.