Mardijker people
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Mardijker were a community in Batavia (modern Jakarta), comprised of descendants of freed slaves. They were mostly Christian, of Indian ancestry, and spoke a Portuguese-based creole language. The Dutch also referred to them as inlandse Christine ("inland Christians").
[edit] Origins
The ancestors of the Mardijkers had been slaves of the Portuguese in India, and were brought to Indonesia by the Dutch, especially after the 1641 Dutch conquest of Malacca.
The term Mardijker is a Dutch corruption of the Portuguese version of Sanskrit Maharddhika meaning "great and mighty man". In the Malay archipelago, this term had acquired the meaning of a freed slave. The Dutch colonists also used it more generally to describe any freed slaves which were full blood Asian, i.e. swarten ("black").
The Mardijkers mostly clung to their Catholic faith and continued to attend Batavia's Portuguese church, although many were eventually baptised by the Dutch Reformed Church. They were legally recognized by the Dutch East India Company as a separate ethnic group, and kept themselves apart from the native Javanese (Taylor, 1983: 47).
Between the 18th and 19th centuries, the Mardijkers exchanged their original Portuguese-based creole for a Malay-based one, Betawian Malay (Omong Betawi). Nowadays they speak Indonesian, the Indonesian national language, and use Betawian Malay only in informal contexts. The old creole still survives in old song lyrics, in the genre Keroncong Moresco or Keroncong Tugu.
When the Indonesians fought for independence from the Dutch they used the slogan Merdeka ("freedom"), which is derived from Mardijker.
