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Preserving local culture through t-shirt design
Being creative: Tjandra Purnama Edhi poses with a T-shirt adorned with Malang style boso walikan (reverse speech)
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Being creative: Tjandra Purnama Edhi poses with a T-shirt adorned with Malang style boso walikan (reverse speech).
'When in Rome, do as the Romans do,' is the principle followed by Tjandra Purnama Edhi, a serviceman's son who moved from city to city with his father's assignments, until he finally went to college in Malang, East Java.
The graduate of Malang's Brawijaya University has a strong spiritual bond with the city even though he isn't native to it. He deems it his duty to preserve the culture of the city where he studied.
One of the cultural traditions there is the local dialect, Malangan, with many of its words spelled in reverse order, known as boso walikan (reverse speech). He highlights this unique feature on his T-shirts. 'I'm not merely selling T-shirts but local culture through garments,' he said.
Born in 1969, Tjandra fears the local culture may be lost with the lapse of time. 'Some commentaries indicate that the history of boso walikan is closely related to the struggle for national independence,' he noted.
This reverse language used to be spoken by City Guerrilla (GRK) members for communication among freedom fighters in Malang to distinguish between friends and foes. It also served as a means of countering Dutch espionage.
At the time, Hamid Rusdi, a leader of a troop against Dutch aggression, was on the wanted last. This reverse language is thought to have arisen in around 1947 to 1949 and believed to have been created by Hamid Rusdi and his aide Suyudi Raharno.
'The letters in this language style are reversed, but not all words can be deciphered by reading them backward,' said Tjandra. This is because boso walikan also constitutes a blend of Javanese, Indonesian, Arabic, Madurese and Chinese.
For example, there is the basics ' bakso (meatball) becomes oskab, manuk (bird) becomes kunam and telpon (telephone) is noplet ' but, there's also ebes, which means parents and can't be decoded backwards. 'Ebes still has adjectival nganal [from lanang or male] for father and kodew [from wedok or female] for mother,' he added.
Tjandra uses boso walikan for his garments after consulting Malang's indigenous elders. But he applies it in a unique way, combining it with the plain dialect and humor. Yet his brand name suitably retains the reverse style, Soak Ngalam, from kaos Malang or Malang T-shirts.
One T-shirt design bears the humorous KLM logo, which may be mistaken for the Dutch airline though here it's an abbreviation of the plain Malangan words kumpulan londo Malang (Malang eurasians). 'In the 1970s there were many Eurasians or Dutch descendants in Malang,' said the father of three.
Another design plays on the name of late Apple boss Steve Jobs, who becomes Steve Jokes. This design appeals to the younger generation in the hope they will maintain boso walikan despite the present era of the iPad. Sam is used as the term of address, not to denote an American, but as a reversed form of mas (brother). Jobs' Apple becomes Apel Utab (apples from Batu), with the tagline 'Malang original fruits'.
The words tend to be comical but Tjandra claims to present social criticisms as well, such as the T-shirt bearing the Ghostbusters logo with the words ayahab nates (bahaya setan, ghost danger). The footnote, in mixed styles, reads 'the dangerous ghosts are those in human form, such as officials who scare their people'.
Another T-shirt design with plain Malangan words warns of the danger of illicit drugs, in this case marijuana, or godong maksiat (wicked leaves). 'T-shirts of this type were once bought up by the National Narcotics Agency in Malang,' he revealed.
Tjandra told of a 92-year-old former Malang resident now living in Rotterdam that had visited his shop. 'He said he was moved and proud to be able to rekindle his youth and show his children and grandchildren the boso walikan that he spoke as a child,' said Tjandra.
Tjandra was already fond of creating T-shirt designs in junior high school. As a college graduate he worked with a bank where he handled clients engaged in the garment business, which got him interested again in garment making.
He finally left the bank and began to manage his own garment enterprise to revive his dormant T-shirt designing talents. Feeling the need to preserve part of Malang's cultural heritage in boso walikan, he found T-shirts to be the right medium.
Starting his garment business in 2008, his T-shirts enjoyed a good public response despite the presence of undershirt producers introducing similar themes. Today, Tjandra has two main outlets with a total of 25 employees, one in Malang and the other in Beji, the border area between Malang and Batu, as well as a unit at the Transportation Museum in Batu.
Every month he fashions at least four new designs. 'These designs have certain periods of display so that new ones will always be forthcoming, unless there's high customer demand to reprint old designs,' he pointed out.
However, some of the T-shirts offered are created by other artists, in addition to various souvenirs crafted by his peers from Asli Malang, a community of Malang promoters whose products and designs display Malang's unique features.
Peduli Malang (care for Malang), or Asli Malang, that he formed using Facebook, manifests his interest in the conditions of Greater Malang, comprising Malang city, Malang regency and Batu town. The community now has over 19,000 listed members.
The topics shared by the members cover socio-economic affairs, environment issues as well as legal norms and ethics. The articles presented are mostly in plain Malangan and sometimes in boso walikan.
Tjandra described the criticisms and suggestions posted by members as one way of conveying the aspirations of common people to the government, as there are also many regional administrators in the community.
He affirmed that Asli Malang was meant for anyone that cared for Malang rather than just indigenous residents. 'They can be workers, students, lecturers, teachers, traders, non-natives of Malang or those who once lived in Malang,' he explained.
In Tjandra's view, cultural preservation and the development of Malang is more a matter of one's feelings and contribution rather than one's indigenousness. He himself has been frequently invited to speak at several discussions on boso walikan.
Tjandra also is still planning another an idea to protect Malang's reverse speech. 'Along with some linguists and historians, I would like to initiate the transformation of this language into printed form or a dictionary of some kind, so as to not let it vanish with the passage of time.'
' Photos by JP/Nedi Putra AW
