The culture of Indonesia: one national language over 700 others

Why a Malay language became the national one

Indonesian is a standardised form of Malay based on the Riau-Johor literary tradition. Malay had long served as the archipelago's lingua franca, and the nationalists who swore the Youth Pledge on 28 October 1928 adopted it as the language of unity. It became official in 1945, and Article 36 of the constitution names it: "The national language shall be Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia)". It is written in the Latin alphabet.

Javanese is the most widely spoken local language, and the Javanese are about 40% of the population according to Wikipedia's article on the country. Indonesian spread through the schools and the civil service and then the mass media, and the same article records that local languages remain part of regional identity "even as Indonesian dominates national public life". Javanese has official regional status in Yogyakarta. Dutch never became widely spoken, because Malay was already the common language, though it survives in some legal contexts.

The number of languages is large and the number of peoples depends on who counts. More than 700 languages are spoken, divided between two families: Austronesian in the west and centre, Papuan in the east. The census of 2010 listed more than 1,300 suku bangsa, ethnic groups; a study of 2015 reclassified them into about 600.

Britannica sorts the western islands into broad ways of life. The wet-rice societies of inland Java, Madura and Bali, the Javanese and Sundanese among them, make up nearly three-fifths of the national population. Coastal peoples such as the Malays, the Bugis and the Makassarese are traders and boatbuilders as well as farmers, with a presence in port towns across the country. Inland, shifting cultivators such as the Toraja of Sulawesi, the Batak of northern Sumatra and the Dayak peoples of Kalimantan clear fields, farm them for a few seasons and let them recover. The Minangkabau of western Sumatra fit none of the categories: devout Muslim rice farmers who reckon descent and inheritance through the female line. In the east, the division Britannica draws is between coastal and inland peoples, sharpest in western New Guinea, where groups such as the Asmat and the Dani of the interior stayed isolated longer.

How six recognised religions share one state

The state recognises six religions: Islam, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. In 2025, according to Wikipedia's article on the country, Muslims numbered 251 million, 87.15% of the population; Christians made up 10.44%, Hindus 1.66% and Buddhists 0.69%. Christians form majorities in several eastern provinces. Hindus are concentrated in Bali.

The constitution's settlement is Pancasila's first principle, belief in the one and only God, with freedom of worship for every religion or belief. In practice, Wikipedia's article records, recognised religions get administrative recognition for religious affiliation and marriage and for houses of worship. Followers of indigenous belief systems such as Sunda Wiwitan, Kejawèn and Kaharingan receive weaker recognition, and religious minorities face local bylaws and restrictions on worship.

Islam arrived in layers on top of older practice, and Britannica draws the consequence: Islam "is expressed differently in Indonesia than it is in the Middle East". On Java the distinction is between the santri, who follow orthodox practice, and the abangan, whose tradition draws strongly on ancestral beliefs. Britannica records the abangan way in retreat since the late 20th century as a more observant middle class has grown. The rituals of birth, marriage and death are still kept at every level of society, and so is the selamatan, the communal ceremony held on special occasions.

What Bali kept when Java converted

When Islam spread through Java in the 15th and 16th centuries, the temples there fell into ruin and Hindu culture moved to Bali, where it remains. The Balinese are, in Britannica's phrase, the only non-immigrant practitioners of Hinduism among the historically Hinduised peoples of Indonesia. Balinese villages are clusters of walled family compounds with their own shrines. Britannica contrasts them with Java, where there are few organised groups above the household: a Balinese village has groups for working and for dancing, many of them tied to temple festivals.

The clearest institution is the subak, the cooperative that shares out irrigation water. UNESCO inscribed the Cultural Landscape of Bali Province, the subak system as a manifestation of the Tri Hita Karana philosophy, as a World Heritage Site in 2012. Its description records about 1,200 water collectives on the island, each with between 50 and 400 farmers drawing on one source, and networks of water temples that have managed whole watersheds since the 11th century. Water from springs and canals flows through the temples before it reaches the fields. Tri Hita Karana is the principle that joins the spirit with the human world and with nature, and the water-temple rituals are its practice.

Three genres of Balinese dance were added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2015.

How wayang and gamelan carry the epics

The best-known theatre in Indonesia is the puppet play. In wayang kulit, the Javanese and Balinese shadow play, the puppets are cut from leather and seen as shadows; in the Sundanese wayang golek, wooden rod puppets are seen directly. Both take most of their stories from local versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and some wayang golek performances tell Muslim stories called menak. The dalang narrates and works the puppets at once, voicing every character from the most refined to the coarsest. Britannica gives the hours of a Javanese or Sundanese performance as roughly 8 pm until near dawn; Balinese performances are shorter. UNESCO listed wayang puppet theatre in 2008.

The puppets move to a gamelan, an ensemble mainly of gongs, metallophones, xylophones and drums, sometimes joined by flutes, zithers, bowed lutes and singers. One or two kendang drums lead, cueing the players and marking the puppets' movements, and the female singers, pesinden, banter with the puppeteer in the comic interlude around midnight. Gamelan was inscribed by UNESCO in 2021. Outside Java and Bali the music is built on other instruments: plucked lutes from Sumatra through Kalimantan to Sulawesi, the tuned drum ensembles of the Toba Batak, xylophone dance music among the Kenyah of eastern Kalimantan. The bamboo angklung of western Java was listed in 2010.

Popular music grew where traditions met. Kroncong, played on guitars and other Western strings in a manner Britannica compares to gamelan, is a legacy of the Portuguese presence. Dangdut, pioneered in the 1970s, mixes Malay orchestra music and Indian film music with kroncong and Western pop, and it plays at city clubs and village festivities alike.

What batik and the kebaya carry

Textiles in Indonesia mark rank and occasion. Batik, cloth patterned by a manual wax-resist dyeing technique, is made above all in central Java, as a cottage industry and in larger workshops. The Batik Museum in Pekalongan runs a training programme that UNESCO added to its register of good practice in 2009, the year it listed Indonesian batik itself. Batik shirts are commonly worn by men, especially on Java. The kebaya, the fitted blouse worn with a batik skirt, was listed in 2024 through a joint nomination. Elsewhere the textiles differ: Minangkabau cloth woven with gold thread, and the ikat traditions of the Batak and of many communities in eastern Indonesia.

The kris was listed in 2008. The list reaches across the archipelago: the saman dance and the noken, the knotted or woven bag of Papua, are both on the list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding, and pinisi boatbuilding in South Sulawesi was listed as a craft. Regional architecture is as distinct. The Javanese pendapa is an open pavilion; the Dayak build longhouses, the Minangkabau the rumah gadang and the Toraja the tongkonan.

How village life and the city connect

Nearly half of the population lives in rural areas, by Britannica's account, and the Javanese village is its commonest form: rice paddies across the flat land and in terraces up the hillsides, clusters of coconut palms and fruit trees marking where the houses are, a stream or a well, a mosque and an elementary school. Goods come from the warung, the small shop, or from the market town. Houses of timber frame and bamboo, roofed with red tile, are giving way to brick among wealthier families. Dayak settlements in Kalimantan have kept some multi-unit longhouses beside newer single-family homes.

The cities have grown from the villages without leaving them. Britannica describes much of Jakarta as urban kampung, neighbourhoods that keep rural customs, and a pattern of "circular" migration in which people from rural families work in the cities but go home at least once every six months. Migrants who were born or raised in Jakarta often still name themselves by their regional heritage, Batak or Javanese or Minangkabau, and speak their local language at home. The ties are renewed by trips to the home village at harvest time or during the fasting month of Ramadan.

What a rice meal is built from

Rice is the staple across most of the country, served with meat or fish, vegetables, sambal and other condiments. The common ingredients include chilli and coconut milk, shrimp paste, peanuts and tamarind; peanuts make the sauce for sate and gado-gado. Tempeh, a soybean product, originated in Java, and tahu (tofu) is eaten as widely. Nasi goreng and noodles are eaten everywhere, and rendang comes from the Minangkabau kitchen. The tumpeng is the Javanese ceremonial rice dish for life-cycle events. Trade added Indian, Chinese and Middle Eastern influences and, from the 16th century, European ones, and the traffic ran the other way too: Indonesian food reached the Netherlands by the late 19th century. Jamu wellness culture was listed by UNESCO in 2023.

How modern writing and film found their audience

Modern literature arrived with the reading public. Balai Pustaka, set up in 1917, distributed books and ran libraries across the archipelago, and from 1933 the journal Pujangga Baru, published in Indonesian, not Dutch, gathered writers committed to the nationalist cause. The poet Chairil Anwar, writing in the early 1940s, brought what Britannica calls the true modernist temper. Both Sukarno's and Suharto's governments restricted writers: the novelist and journalist Mochtar Lubis was jailed, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer was detained for more than a decade. After 1998 writers could treat subjects that had been off limits, and the Press Law of 1999 prohibited censorship and publication bans along with press licensing.

Film began under the Dutch with Loetoeng Kasaroeng in 1926, served nationalist politics under Sukarno and was censored under the New Order; after 1998 independent filmmakers and festivals revived it.

Sport follows its own map. Indonesia has won both the Thomas Cup and the Uber Cup, the men's and women's world team championships in badminton, and most of its Olympic medals have come from badminton and weightlifting; at the Paris Olympics of 2024 it won gold in sport climbing and weightlifting. As the Dutch East Indies it played at the football World Cup of 1938. Pencak silat, the martial art, was listed by UNESCO in 2019, and at the Asian Games of 2018, held in Jakarta and Palembang, Indonesia won all 14 gold medals in the sport.