Batak ethnie nationalism

Dutch, British and French empires with modern ideas of sovereignty and bureaucracy. All Southeast Asians became aware of the claims and functions of modern statehood aristocrats were deprived of their arms and their slaves all were subjected to the monopoly of a single state system of laws, with origins far distant from them. This imposition of a new order was resisted passionately by some, in the name of dynastic pride (Burmese, Vietnamese, Acehnese, Balinese), nascent ethnie nationalism (Vietnamese, Acehnese, Batak, Javanese), or OSH-flavoured Islam (Tausug, Magindanao, Acehnese). Most however adapted quickly to the modern opportunities offered by the broader worlds they now entered. The new states were useful, and above all they were identified as modern by the new educated groups, but they remained for the most part alien and remote—as indeed they were intended to. 

Aceh follows as the ethnie nationalism most threatening to the Indonesian state. Chapter 5 demonstrates that the strength of this ethnie nationalism, by contrast with the stateless examples that follow, is precisely its memory of state. Acehnese may be less distinctive as a minority than Indonesia s Bataks or Malaysia s Kadazan, but they inherit an unusually strong sense of state resistance to outside control. The Batak and Kadazan cases, in chapters 6 and 7, reveal the different paths of political identity formation and assertion of previously stateless peoples that were possible in Indonesia and Malaysia respectively. The different outcomes are largely set by the gulf between the two state nationalisms with which they contended post-revolutionary, centralising civic nationalism in Indonesia evolutionary, federal and ethno-nationalist Malaysia. 

The growing ethnie nationalism of the Toba Batak, in other words, was emphatically not shared by the Mandailing of this period, who made religion the decisive criterion of identification , as Castles puts it, and unlike the Muslims of Angkola and Sipirok, let Islam rob them of their ancestors (Castles 1972 280). Besides religion, the emotive power of anti-imperial nationalism also played a role in defining Batak identity, less in competition with ethnie nationalism than in a layered merging with it. 

Despite the transformation into a diasporic community forming a vigorous part of modern Indonesian identity, Bataks have remained extremely committed to their ethnies as re-imagined in the twentieth century. In the seventy years of nationalism and modernisation between the two censuses that recorded ethnic self-identification, 1930 and 1970, those... 

Indonesian exclusively in the towns, while even the ethnie churches cannot hold the line on the use of Batak languages. They know they cannot hold young people unless they offer services in Indonesian, and the complete transfer to the national language in urban parishes seems only a matter of time. 

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