Sutan Takdir: A Legendary Figure

The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in October will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the late writer and philosopher Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana with a night of performances by celebrated dancer Nyoman Sura, readings of his works, and tributes from friends and colleagues. Titania Veda finds out more about the man they call the father of Bahasa Indonesia.


A well-educated man from Natal, North Sumatra, who loved a challenge and vigorously ignited debates on linguistics and culture.

A renaissance man who understood the essence of modernity lay in globalization and the integration of cultures and boundaries.

A determined soul who as a child was derided for having only four fingers on his left hand, cementing his resolution to achieve success and driving him to become an entrepreneur whose printing company created a family legacy.

An Indonesian hero who unified a nation through his linguistic endeavors and faced constant criticism from his literary peers for his push toward the Western cultural values of individualism, intellectualism, egoism and materialism.

The year was 1928, the year the spirit of Indonesia was born. The year the youth of the country pledged to create one nation, one people and one language, bringing democracy to the archipelago. Inspired by the fervor of the time, Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana founded Semangat Muda (Youth Spirit), a magazine promoting the ideals and aims of the Youth Pledge.

The year marked a beginning for Pak Takdir, a renaissance man who embraced everything from botany to language to law. He wanted to propel the country into modernization by adopting Western ways of scientific analysis; he wanted the country to develop its science, technology and economy instead of simply accepting the world based on faith. A firm believer in democracy, he was most interested in the third Youth Pledge of 1928 – One Language – and stated “you have to think in an economic way, to be practical, and the individual should be allowed to speak and create”.

As an advocate for modernism and a man ahead of his time, Pak Takdir received his fair share of censure from established writers and philosophers, confrontations that he reveled in for their ability to create new ideas and synergies.
“My father loved polemics,” said Tamalia Alishajbana, head of the Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana Foundation and executive director of the National Archives. “He did tend to exaggerate things in order to trigger a polemic. He believed in the power of discussion, dialogue and polemic. To him that was what democracy was about.”

That Pak Takdir was interested only in foreign culture was a common misconception that persists to this day. Friends and family say his interests actually lay in the culture of Indonesia and its role in the modern world. To him the culture of the country encompassed everything from Sabang to Merauke, not one particular ethnic group or dominant society. He himself was a man influenced by the archipelago: Born in Natal with Minangkabau roots, and raised in Bengkulu, he worked in the capital for more than 40 years but his heart belonged to Bali for the Balinese people’s creativity and artistic endeavors.

From the 1930s, he unflaggingly urged the nation to find its cultural identity. He believed that by knowing your identity and where you come from, you can know your future. With a country steeped in a profusion of tribal cultures and local dialects, he understood that to forge a common language for the nation would be the answer for the creation of a common identity.

Although the works he is best known for are the novel Layar Terkembang (Setting Forth to Sail) and the Tatabahasa grammar books, his daughter Tamalia considers Kalah dan Menang (Losing and Winning), a novel about an Indonesian nationalist and a Japanese soldier in Indonesia during the Japanese occupation, as the most noteworthy for its sensitivity and understanding of another culture.

According to Pak Takdir, who died in 1994, in this age of globalization the world has no boundaries. “There is no other culture for everything is open to us. There are only your possibilities and potentialities,” he said.

Yudha Kartohadiprodjo, his grandson and a director of the Femina Group, remarked, “His thinking went beyond language and poetry. When people think of Pak Takdir, they only know him as a poet and a professor, not that he thought ahead and formed the umbrella for the people to develop the Indonesian language.”

The truth was that Indonesian language and culture both owed much to him. A lover of polemics, he kicked off the cultural debate of the 1930s through his writings and magazines. The publication of Pujangga Baru in 1933, originally a magazine for emerging writers, expanded to become one of literature, culture and language for the new emerging Indonesia, providing the nationalist movement with a platform to develop their ideas through culture and linguistics.
In his opinion, language needed the ability to grow by being flexible, borrowing and adopting from other languages to survive. “To him, Bahasa Indonesia is a modern language that needed to be able to adapt and evolve,” recalls Pia Alisjahbana, former lecturer at the University of Indonesia, journalist and chairperson of Femina Group.

“He gave us a modern language that could take us into the 21st century, to survive through millenniums, bring us to the sciences and technologies that we need, into the family of nations, a language that could unify us,” says Tamalia Alisjahbana.

“He laid the foundations for an Indonesian culture that could give us an identity.”