This man can read and write 30 ancient Indonesian scripts, some up to 500 years old

JAKARTA: Diaz Nawaksara grew up during the boom of the Internet and telecommunications.

When the 30-year-old went to college, he decided to study information management, focusing on storing information through computational methods.

But as modern as his educational qualification sounds, his job today involves something very old: preserving Indonesian scripts that are 500 years old.

“I started in 2012 by first studying Javanese script,” Nawaksara recounted, referring to the native language of Indonesian people and the world’s most populous Javanese island.

Today, you can read and write more than 30 ancient Indonesian scripts. He is fluent in understanding about half of the languages ​​associated with these scripts.

This is a rare skill considering that most Indonesians can only read one or two scripts.

Most Indonesians can read Latin, the script used for the Bahasa Indonesian national language, as well as English. Others also know Arabic to read the Quran or Chinese.

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Nawaksara stated that, in general, it is quite easy to learn the ancient Indonesian scriptures.

“The transformation of a script from time to time can still be traced, perhaps the problem is more in understanding the language and its meaning. Because most of the manuscript languages ​​are rarely used in everyday conversation.

“The (mastery of) vocabulary determines the fluency in reading ancient manuscripts, regardless of the type of writing,” he told CNA.

Once an English tutor and tour guide, Nawaksara is now an independent researcher working to preserve ancient Indonesian scriptures as well as history.

TIMELY ENCOUNTER WITH THE JAVANESE MANUSCRIPT

Nawaksara was born and raised in the city of Bandung, West Java. His parents are ethnic Sundanese.

His attempt to read and write Javanese script occurred by chance.

He was always drawn to antiques. Since high school, he has been collecting items dating back to pre-Indonesian independence in 1945, such as antique radios, gramophones, and holy daggers known as keris.

Upon completing his studies, he moved to Yogyakarta in central Java to work as a tour guide and English tutor in the city often dubbed as the cultural capital of Indonesia.

One day, he went to a local flea market and discovered an ancient Javanese manuscript.

He was intrigued by it and decided to buy it even though he couldn’t read Javanese script. It turned out to be an old manuscript of legislation from the Yogyakarta Sultanate during Dutch colonial times. The manuscript became known as rijksblad.

Coincidentally, his girlfriend was Javanese and could read the manuscript. She taught him to read it.

“Luckily, I was also passionate about languages, so I was able to study them intensively and was focused.

“After a month, I could start writing it. And after two, three months I was able to read it fluently, ”he said.

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It marked the beginning of his quest to find other manuscripts and learn different ancient Indonesian scripts.

“Since then, I started collecting more old Javanese books.

“A year later, I came across an older script called the Kawi script,” he told CNA.

Kawi is considered the ancestor of Javanese script and is believed to be related to Indian scripts that evolved sometime during the 8th to 16th centuries.

To improve his understanding, Nawaksara visited temples and museums displaying the script.

ANCIENT SCRIPTS GIVE ANSWERS ABOUT ANCESTORS

Since then, Nawaksara has traveled throughout Indonesia to find ancient manuscripts and study the scriptures. He said this led him to a better understanding of the story.

There are more than 600 ethnicities in Indonesia and knowing some ancient scriptures leads to a better understanding of how the various ethnicities in the country relate to and even spread to neighboring countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, he said.

He often buys old manuscripts to study them further. Since they can fetch a price of up to Rs 500 million ($ 35,984), he sometimes negotiates with sellers and asks them to rewrite them at a lower price.

The researcher has never spent more than 5 million rupees for a manuscript.

During his search, he also found a Balinese holy script that is believed to have high spiritual values.

He loves to know new things and to give the answers to the questions of the people that he often finds reading the old scripts.

But above all, Nawaksara believes that it is important to know the ancient scriptures of Indonesia and preserve them because it reflects the identity of a nation.

“Many people don’t know their ancestors or what their experience was. They don’t know because they can’t read the source.

“When they can read the manuscripts, it means that they know more details about their ancestors.”

Paraphrasing a quote from Indonesia’s first president and founding father, Soekarno, Nawaksara said: “When you are Muslim, do not be Arab. When you are Hindu, do not be Indian. When you are Christian, do not be Westerner.”

“It’s about identity,” Nawaksara explained.

“Today, there are religious people who are lost because they do not know their identity,” he said.

This is also why Nawaksara now wants to digitize the scripts he knows so that they are not lost in time.

His information management experience gained during college helps him with this. He is working on computer keyboards and websites on old Indonesian scripts for the future public.

For those who want to study ancient scriptures, Nawaksara recommends joining a community to facilitate the process.

He also hopes that the government will be more involved in preserving the ancient Indonesian scriptures.

“As far as possible, as soon as possible, the government should issue a law or a presidential decree that the Indonesian state owns these scripts.”

Read this story in Bahasa Indonesia here.