What Does ‘Nusantara’ Mean?
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
YOU MAY HAVE SEEN that the new Indonesian capital city, which is to be situated in a beautiful part of eastern Borneo, is going to be named ‘Nusantara’. Jakarta will cease to be the seat of government in a few years’ time, after this long-promised construction project in Kalimantan gets off the ground, and Indonesia will soon have a swanky new planned capital city à la Brasilia or Naypyidaw (Figure 1). The choice of name strikes me as rather odd, truth be told, although I suppose the word does have a nice rhythm to it.
In this post I’m going to explain the meaning and etymology of nusantara/Nusantara. My intent here isn’t to change the Indonesian government’s decision or propose an alternative name — far be it from me to influence Indonesian politics — but merely to explain a little of the history of an interesting word. First, we’ll look at the modern meaning of the word, then at its origins, and finally at some of its uses in medieval and early modern Javanese literature. It’s not quite what you might expect.
The Modern Meaning of ‘Nusantara’
In modern Malay/Indonesian, the word Nusantara (with a capital letter) is used as a name for what I tend to call the Indo-Malaysian archipelago — that is to say, for the huge network of islands and peninsulas now comprising the nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Timor Leste, Brunei, and (sometimes) Papua New Guinea (Figure 2). (The Philippines is not included, so ‘Nusantara’ and ‘island/maritime Southeast Asia’ mean slightly different things.) This is how the word is used in Indonesian public policy and how it is defined in a number of Malay/Indonesian dictionaries, including the KBBI.
This word has been adopted in part because the names for most of the countries there are both new and arbitrary, as are the borders of the countries themselves. Indonesia is more or less equivalent to the lands of the former Dutch East Indies, and the name ‘Indonesia’ only dates to the nineteenth century, when it was created by a British geographer to refer to the archipelago as whole. Malaysia is essentially a federation of the former British colonies in the area. As concepts, these nations don’t have long histories, and the nations’ borders ignore earlier ethnic and national divisions. The appropriation of the Old Javanese word Nusantara to refer to this entire space is an attempt to anchor national histories in pre-colonial terms.
You might then wonder why I don’t use the word ‘Nusantara’ in my work or in the title of my blog. There are several reasons; one obvious one is that ‘Nusantara’ isn’t widely recognised outside Southeast Asia, and I want people elsewhere in the world to have some idea of what I’m writing about. The main reason, though, is that Nusantara didn’t originally refer to the Indo-Malaysian archipelago or island Southeast Asia at all. It was originally an Old Javanese word meaning ‘allies/vassal (of Java)’, which isn’t the same thing — and as this usage dates to the period I write about, it might make things rather confusing if I used it in the modern sense.
You might also wonder why the Indonesian government would choose a name for its capital with such a well-established meaning. I don’t really have an answer for that. I can say a little about the word’s etymology, though, so let’s have a look at that.
The Antara in Nusantara
The derivation of the word Nusantara is simple enough: it comes from a combination of the Old Javanese words nusa and antara. Nusa on its own is a little complicated — we’ll come to that in a moment — but antara should be translated here simply as ‘other’. The word antara is, in fact, etymologically related to the English word ‘other’; its origin is the Sanskrit word antara, which, like ‘other’, descends from the proto-Indo-European *h₂énteros.
Antara has other meanings in both Sanskrit and Old Javanese, including ‘in between’ and ‘in the middle’, but ‘other’ seems to be the intended meaning in nusantara. We might then translate nusantara as ‘the other nusas’. (Old Javanese did not systematically mark a distinction between singular and plural.) But what is a nusa?
Nusa
In modern Malay/Indonesian, Sundanese, and Javanese, nusa means ‘island’ and little else. This word goes back to the reconstructed form *nusa, meaning ‘island’, in proto-Malayo-Polynesian, the ancestor of most of the region’s languages. It can be found in the names of Nusa Kambangan, a small island off Java’s southern coast, now home to a maximum-security prison, and Nusa Barong, another tiny island near Java. Clearly, nusa usually means ‘island’.
However: In lots of old texts from the archipelago, it’s equally clear that nusa (and nūsa/nūṣa, its Old Javanese forms) could also refer to places that were not islands at all. Several lists of prominents nusas survive in Old Javanese and Old Sundanese and these lists mention many places that were clearly not islands — nor could they have been believed to be islands by people in Southeast Asia at the time. These include the names of several places on the Malay Peninsula, the names of kingdoms on various islands that were not themselves islands, and the names of huge countries elsewhere on the Afro-Eurasian mainland.
A list of nūṣa famously appears in cantos 13, 14, and 15 of the Old Javanese kakawin Deśawarṇana, written in 1365 AD/CE. (The work will be more familiar to Indonesian readers under the name Nagarakretagama.) The ‘islands’ listed include Palembang, Barus, Minangkabau, and Lampung, all places on the island of Sumatra, as well as Kelantan and Terengganu on the Malay Peninsula (Figure 3). These places could only be considered ‘islands’ in an extremely broad or figurative sense, and it seems to me that the word nūṣa in a list like this should best be translated as ‘country’ rather than ‘island’.
And that’s not all. In the fifteenth-century Old Sundanese text Bujangga Manik, we find references to Nusa Dilih (‘the island of Delhi’), Nusa Cina (‘the island of China’), and Nusa Lampung (‘the island of Lampung’). In the Old Sundanese encyclopaedia Sanghyang Siksakandang Karesian, other nusa include Jenggi (East Africa) and Banggala (Bengal). None of these are islands. I don’t think we can assume that the writers of these texts were ignorant of this fact, either; they knew what they meant when they wrote the word nusa, and it wasn’t ‘island’ in the sense that we understand it today. The term seems to have a political meaning, referring not to neutral geographical entities but to countries or kingdoms.
Nusantara
The same applies to Nusantara; in the (relatively rare) early contexts in which it appears, it isn’t clearly or unambiguously a name for the archipelago. The word first appears in the thirteenth-century Old Javanese Mūla Malurung inscription and then features sporadically in literary texts of the Majapahit period, like the aforementioned kakawin Deśawarṇana. In these texts, the places encompassed by the term all seem to have been located in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago — even if, as noted above, many of them were not actually islands — and that simple fact appears to have misled some philologists and early Indonesian nationalists into thinking that it was a name for the archipelago as a whole. (You can read more about early appearances of the term in this Historia.Id article.) This change appears to have taken place in the twentieth century, after the Deśawarṇana was first published in print, spurred by the rising and ultimately victorious anti-colonial Indonesian nationalist movement.
In some texts, however, even some rather late ones, the term nusantara is used in ways that suggest that it was not simply a geographical term — ways actually incompatible with such a meaning. In the Caritanira Amir, a probably sixteenth-century Javanese version of the Persian Hamzanama, which recounts the legendary exploits of one of the Prophet’s uncles, the term nusantara refers to vassals or allies of the Persian emperor. These kingdoms were all on the Asian mainland, and it is unlikely that the Javanese writer/translator of the text thought that they were islands (let alone islands in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago).
This all suggests that the original meaning of nusantara was not ‘the other islands’ in a purely geographical sense, but ‘the other countries (within the Javanese sphere)’ or ‘the vassals/allies (of Java)’. The political meaning is primary and, in Old Javanese, always was. The derived meaning of ‘Indo-Malaysian archipelago’ is fundamentally based on a misunderstanding of the Old Javanese, although it’s now so well established that little can (or should) be done to get rid of it.
Here’s the path this word has taken, as I understand it:
PMP *nusa ‘island’ > nusa ‘island’ > nusa ‘country, polity; island’ > + antara = nūsāntara ‘other countries; network of allies’ > Nusantara ‘the Indo-Malaysian archipelago’ > Nusantara ‘the capital city of Indonesia’.
This is perhaps a more complex term than it first appears. And while I, of course, support all manner of anti-colonial measures and the adoption of non/anti-colonial terminology, I hope you can understand why I have not enthusiastically taken up the term ‘Nusantara’ to refer to the archipelago in a geographical sense (nor its derivatives, like ‘Nusantaria’, a name proposed by Philip Bowring). The application of the name to the new Indonesian seat of government is guaranteed to confuse things even further, so for now I shall stick with ‘Medieval Indonesia’, because at least everyone knows that both those words are arbitrary and arguable.
A. J. West — Leiden, 2022 (posted here 2024).
