Parliament adopted, on Tuesday January 18, the bill authorizing the relocation of the current capital, Jakarta, on the island of Java, to Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. The Indonesian daily Compass explains the etymology of the name “Nusantara” chosen by the president, Joko Widodo, for the future capital.
“On the page of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, which quotes the Big Indonesian Dictionary, word ‘archipelago’ refers to the entire Indonesian archipelago”, note Compass. This name, chosen by President Joko Widodo for the future capital he has dreamed of since 2019, was in fact born long before the Indonesian Republic in 1945. Of Sanskrit origin, it is composed of two ancient Javanese words: nusa, “island”, and Among, “between”, “middle”.
The Indonesian daily explains that it was invented “to the XIVe century by the powerful Javanese Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit to designate its sphere of conquest or influence, namely a series of islands located between the continents of Asia and Australia, including even the Malay Peninsula”. Fell into oblivion for several centuries, it was reused in the 1920s by Ki Hajar Dewantara, a figure of Indonesian nationalism, as an option to the name given by the Dutch colonists to their “Dutch East Indies”.
National brand
For some years, archipelago has become the trademark of Indonesia’s cultural products. We talk about “Islam archipelago” to emphasize the tolerant nature of Indonesian Muslims or even “batik archipelago” or “the spice route archipelago”.
National Development Planning Minister Suharso Monoarfa told Compass :
‘Nusantara’ is our national and international emblem, it is an easy name to pronounce and perfectly describes the archipelagic state that is the Republic of Indonesia.”
The cost of building this “Middle Island” in East Kalimantan is estimated at 32 billion dollars, an amount which will be financed up to 19% by the Indonesian State, the rest by private investments from the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank or the United Arab Emirates.
The first stage of the transfer is scheduled for 2024, and will involve the relocation of 25,000 civil servants each year until 2027.
Source
Founded in 1965 to oppose the communist press, written in Indonesian, “Boussole” is the largest national daily, the reference, with in-depth investigations on social events and reports on the “outer” islands, Indonesian
[…]
Read more