Bilawa Ade Respati, jee chan and jelena golubovic

I visit this library, the state library, because I want to read some of these books written by Sultan Takdir Ali Shabana, who is this Indonesian philosopher.

He's actually an author, well-known as an author, and he was part of this literary movement called Pujanga Baru.

So the new poets translated, literally.

For me, his work is interesting because I think he He was the first one who somehow pushed this agenda of modernity in Indonesia and explicitly using this term, modern, in the context of thinking about what Indonesian culture would be.

And he sparked debate and it's remembered as the cultural polemics because he polemized the idea of what Indonesian culture would be in the context of this modernity.

And what's interesting, this took place before Indonesian acquired independence.

So it's already like in the 30s that this debate was sparked.

And it was controversial, it was a polemic, because he said, for me, the definitions of Indonesian culture must be differentiated from the so-called pre-Indonesian.

So he somehow tries to delink whatever that comes before the idea of Indonesia came to be.

So that means the Javanese culture, the Sundanese culture, Balinese, whatever regional cultures which already were.

And instead, he said, we should think about the future.

and only look at the future.

But what's interesting about his imaginations of the future is the West.

So he said the modern Indonesian culture should take the example from the West.

In the later works of him, it is clear that he's also opposed some ideas of modernity that come from the West.

So that means the West that he imagined, and this is We come to the idea of imagined identity, I would say, the idea of West as an imagined entity, because he then rejects all of this avant-garde art, for example, all this avant-garde literature and modern work of art.

He actually prefers what I still consider somewhat conservative or classicist view of the aesthetics.

Since language becomes the vehicles of this culture, he needs an Indonesian language which is modern.

And for him, a modern language must be able to facilitate technology, so advances in technology.

It must be able to accommodate the language of science.

the language of, I put it under philosophy, but what he meant by philosophy is these traditions of formulating thoughts, like in Western European traditions of philosophy.

Rationality.

Exactly.

And I think the way that he derived the idea of modernity is from the Enlightenment.

I think today I feel like coming back together among the three of us, it really pulls my focus back to this image.