Dutch-Indonesian Community

Eurasian has been subject of study in many field, including sociology, anthropology and history. I’m amazed how hard these days to find eurasian-related academic literatures. In Indonesia history books, Eurasian is associated solely as Dutch. If you ask average Indonesians about eurasian, they will probably call you “Kompeni”, a allusion to East Indies Company. The myth of eurasian being pure dutch is still going strong in Indonesia. Government doesn’t really bother to teach the 3rd generations Eurasian in Indonesia of their history.

It is sad  because many of my 3rd generations friends actually very interested to know their own history, but they just don’t know where to ask. It’s very lucky for us that we have internet and could meet our own kin and sharing our experience.

Eurasian literature is virtually non-existing in any Indonesia language. People simply forget the eurasian and indische did exist. The 3rd and 4th generations would probably as well to forget their identity in future, calling them “irrelevant” to the social context.

The study of eurasian in Indonesia, fortunately, still conducted by insitutes outside Indonesia. I just found out that Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies has a very neat library containing ton of journals related to Indonesia-related study, and few among them are about eurasians. I also compiled relevant online articles in this page. Some literatures are not easy read because they are based on academical. But they are too good to be missed.

Please visit KITLV homepage for more information: