An Epithet Called Freedom: Maharddhika, Merdeka, and the Unmaking of a Word for the Divine

The first Malay word I learned was makan. It means to eat, and does duty for food and for a meal besides, though I did not learn any of that from a book. I learned it from Adam Uncle, who worked in my family's restaurant in Singapore, where I spent a good part of my childhood eating alongside the paying customers. Makan, Arun? he would ask, which meant, had I eaten. Most of the Malay I picked up came from him: names for things, instructions, jokes, the small vocabulary that accumulates when you spend enough time around a kitchen. I knew the words long before I knew anything about where they had come from.

Makan is Malay, and in Singapore it has travelled so thoroughly into ordinary English that Chinese and Indian Singaporeans use it without necessarily registering that they have switched languages. The word crossed over the way most borrowings do, through use rather than decision, and after a while it stopped being anybody's in particular.

For most of my life, that was more or less how I thought about words like these, which is to say that I hardly thought about them at all.

It took Kafka, rather unexpectedly, to change that.

I took a course on Franz Kafka taught by Dr. John T. Hamilton at Harvard, as one of my international relations electives. The teaching was in English, but we worked constantly against the German, and the habit the course left me with was an attention to the insides of words: their roots, their older meanings, the things they go on carrying after ordinary use has made those histories invisible. German holds onto its seams more visibly than English does, which is part of why it rewards that kind of looking: a dictionary there is a Wörterbuch, a word-book, where English reaches for a Latin abstraction and hides the joins. Once the habit had formed, though, it did not confine itself to one language.

Anyone who has seen Arrival has felt the pleasure of this without needing a course for it. It is one of my favourite films, and Denis Villeneuve gets a great deal of credit for what is, in the end, a film about a linguist doing her homework. Amy Adams plays Louise Banks, who, having failed to talk her way onto the job, asks the colonel recruiting her whether he is going to Berkeley next, and tells him that before he commits to the rival linguist there, he should ask the man the Sanskrit word for war and its translation. The colonel turns up on her lawn the following morning with the answer. Gavisti, and the rival says it means an argument. Banks says it means a desire for more cows, and gets the job.

The film is having some fun here, though a smaller liberty than it looks. Yuddha is the ordinary Sanskrit word for war; gaviṣṭi has to do with the seeking of cattle, built on go, cow, and the root iṣ, to seek, and in Vedic usage it could mean a cattle raid, or a conflict, or a battle. The idea underneath the scene survives the liberty taken with it. A word can carry its own prehistory around in public for centuries while everybody goes on using it for something else entirely.

I was well into adulthood before I learned that merdeka has an etymological ancestor in Sanskrit. By then the word was so familiar that reading about its earlier life felt like learning something unexpected about a person I had known for years. Some of the curiosity that followed went into reading toward a thesis on the political development of Tamil communities in Singapore and Malaysia. The rest led here, to a question I had simply never thought to ask: what had merdeka meant before it meant independence?

Singapore, where I lived for close to twenty years, is an unusually good place in which to miss a question like that. Words with very long histories of travel sit beside one another without announcing themselves. Negara does not arrive in conversation carrying an etymological footnote, and neither does Singapura. Tamil, my family's language, though not the one I mostly grew up speaking, is one of four official languages alongside Malay, Mandarin, and English. Growing up, none of this appeared to me as an argument about civilisations or cultural transmission. It was the vocabulary of the place.

For Malaysians, the word is inseparable from 31 August 1957. Inside Stadium Merdeka, built for the occasion and named for the word, Tunku Abdul Rahman, who would become Malaya's first prime minister, read the Proclamation of Independence and called out Merdeka seven times to a crowd of more than twenty thousand, who returned it each time. The ceremony also carried the azan (the call to prayer), the raising of the new flag to Negaraku ("My Country", the new national anthem), and a hundred and one rounds of artillery. At Malaysia's sixty-ninth National Day in August 2026, in Putrajaya, the seven cries were heard again.

The oldest dated appearance of the word in Old Malay is on the Kota Kapur inscription, cut on the island of Bangka in 686 AD and belonging to Srivijaya, the Buddhist maritime power centred on Sumatra. The inscription is a curse, promising ruin to anyone who might betray the polity, and the gods called to witness the oath are described in it as maharddhika. The Sanskrit behind that compound is mahā-ṛddhi-ka, possessed of great ṛddhi. In Buddhist usage, ṛddhi names a specific class of attainments: walking on water, passing through solid ground, becoming invisible, flying, touching the sun and the moon with one's hand. Buddhist texts apply the same compound to the guardian gods of the directions, and to sages and others who were held to have acquired such powers. I would not want to insist that the engraver on Bangka meant every technical shade of it, but the register is unmistakable. In the Old Malay record, the word begins in the vocabulary of the supernatural, a long way from anything political.

So who carried it from there to a stadium? The question wants a poet for an answer, or a sultan, or at worst some colonial administrator with an ear for the local languages. The surviving record gives the change to no one person and no one century, and shows the word changing hands in the least ceremonious circumstances available to it. It changed hands over paperwork.

In Javanese, the same root attached itself to ground. Tax-exempt land appears in Javanese charters from the ninth century under the Sanskrit-derived name sīma; the Tri Tepusan inscription of 842 records one such dedication, and in 907 King Balitung granted the village of Mantyasih the same standing. Perdikan, which belongs to merdeka's own family, later became the Javanese term for a closely related kind of privileged village. The arrangement proved remarkably durable. The Dutch preserved a version of it, called such places vrije desa, free villages, and went on keeping registers of their exemptions. Alongside it, mardika could describe a person free from service, and could be used of a freed slave. In both senses freedom is defined against what authority could ask, dues in the one case and service in the other. Freedom, in this stretch of the word's history, is something close to an administrative category. It shows up as a change in what somebody else may demand of you long before it shows up as a principle, which is either a deflation of the idea or the most honest account of it, and I go back and forth on which.

By the early seventeenth century, the word-family was established enough in Malay to sit inside the language Frederik de Houtman recorded in the most improbable classroom imaginable. Aceh is the northern tip of Sumatra. Houtman arrived there in 1599 on a Dutch trading voyage commanded by his brother Cornelis, who had already managed to fall out with one local ruler on an earlier voyage and proceeded to antagonise the Acehnese court as well. Relations broke down, an attack that September killed Cornelis, and Frederik was left a prisoner until August 1601, when the intervention of Prince Maurits of Nassau finally got him out. He used the intervening two years to learn Malay and to make further observations of the southern sky, and published them together at Amsterdam in 1603 as the Spraeck ende woord-boeck, a Malay and Malagasy wordbook, with the first catalogue of the most southerly constellations bound in behind it. The title page promises that the star tables will be no less entertaining for all curious lovers of strange things, which is the best description of a research method I have ever read on a title page.

The colonial records leave no clean sequence from one meaning to the next. Batavia, though, makes the direction of travel much harder to miss, because there the word-family also became the name of an actual community. The Mardijkers were the free Asian Christians of the Dutch colonial city, many of them former slaves or the descendants of enslaved people, drawn out of the slave systems, garrisons, and trading worlds of Portuguese and Dutch Asia, with backgrounds running to Coromandel and Bengal, to Malacca and the Moluccas. Their Dutch name belongs to the same family of words as mardika. Manumission and conversion were closely entangled in Batavia, and by 1661 twenty-three Mardijker families had settled east of the city at Tugu, most of them holding land titles from the Company. Freedom here was no metaphor at all. It was a legal status with paperwork behind it, the difference between one condition and another, with consequences for where a person could live and work and belong.

That settlement became Kampung Tugu, and the families there built something out of the arrangement that no land title had provided for. In Tugu tradition, they made small five-stringed instruments from local woods, and the music that grew up around the community became known as keroncong, which Indonesia still loves and which the Tugu families claim as their own. Mimi Abrahams, described as the last competent speaker of the Tugu Portuguese creole, died in 2012. Krontjong Toegoe, a band of Tugu descendants, recorded a song called "Mardijkers" that was nominated at the Anugerah Musik Indonesia awards in 2018. The Dutch had used the word to mark out a community by its legal status; it is now a song title on an awards shortlist.

By the twentieth century, the word was available for something far larger than an exemption. When Sukarno, who would become Indonesia's first president, proclaimed independence on 17 August 1945, kemerdekaan (independence, built from the same root) stood in the text, and merdeka became one of the defining words of the revolution that followed. The next year the new Republic passed Law 13 of 1946, on the abolition of the perdikan villages, and the older freedom, the one that had meant exemption from a ruler's dues, was ended in the name of the newer one. Twelve years later, in Kuala Lumpur, the same word accompanied an independence secured by constitutional negotiation, even as the Malayan Emergency went on around it. The word did not require the two experiences to be alike. It had grown large enough to hold both.

Scholarship from the first half of the twentieth century gathered the much longer movement of South Asian forms into Southeast Asia under the name "Indianisation": Sanskrit and scripts, religious traditions, literary conventions, political vocabularies, ideas of kingship. The term is still useful, though it can make the process sound more one-directional than it was, since it puts the emphasis on what came from India and leaves what happened afterwards in the shade. O. W. Wolters, a historian of early Southeast Asia, proposed localisation as the better description, on the argument that Southeast Asian rulers were not passively receiving Indian ideas at all; they were selecting the ones that made them more legitimate at home, and leaving the rest. The clearest evidence for that is the gap between what the vocabulary carried and what it did not. Varṇa, the Sanskrit term that in India names the fourfold social order, turns up by name in Cambodian inscriptions, and the institutions using it there did not reproduce the Indian caste system; Khmer varṇas could be elite, courtly or occupational groupings, the borrowed word fitted to local arrangements. A region that could take the language of kingship and the terminology of rank without reproducing the social order they came from was not having a culture done to it. It was shopping.

Religious, linguistic, and political forms travelled across the Bay of Bengal far more durably than South Asian rule ever did. Rajendra Chola I's expedition of 1025 is the conspicuous military exception, and it mattered, to Srivijaya's standing and to the trade of the Straits, but the campaign established no lasting Chola administration there. When decolonisation came in the twentieth century, there was no South Asian imperial administration in the region to dismantle alongside British or Dutch rule.

Singapore keeps the rest of that inheritance in plain sight without remarking on it. Yusof Ishak, the first Malayan-born Yang di-Pertuan Negara and later the republic's first president, held an office whose negara goes back to Sanskrit nagara, a city and then a polity. Merdeka had a Singapore life of its own. The constitutional negotiations that took Singapore toward self-government in the 1950s were called the Merdeka Talks. When the first round collapsed in London and Chief Minister David Marshall resigned, the government named the new bridge over the Kallang Basin the Merdeka Bridge, to express, in the works minister's phrase, the confidence and aspirations of the people; thousands of them gathered at both ends of it the day it opened in August 1956. When a later settlement gave Singapore internal self-government while Britain kept foreign affairs and defence, and a hand in internal security, Lee Kuan Yew called the result tiga suku merdeka, three-quarters merdeka, which tells you the word had become ordinary enough to do arithmetic with.

He could do more than arithmetic in it. In the Malaysian Parliament in May 1965 he spoke off the cuff in English and in Malay, insisting that his party accepted the constitutional provision for Malay special rights and arguing that special rights would never on their own lift a poor Malay out of poverty. Tunku Abdul Rahman later called that speech the straw that broke the camel's back, and Singapore was out of the federation inside three months. In 2018, the government gave a cohort of older Singaporeans the name Merdeka Generation and attached a package of healthcare support to it, which makes the word an administrative category again, thirteen centuries after Bangka and three and a half after Batavia. None of this was ever put in front of me as evidence of anything while I was growing up. It belonged to the language and the political world in which I met it, the way makan reached me through Adam Uncle and a kitchen, and not through any argument about where Malay words come from.

In August 2027, Malaysia marks seventy years since Malayan independence, and India and Malaysia mark seventy years of diplomatic relations begun in the same year. Merdeka will be heard again, and almost nobody hearing it will need to think about Bangka, or Srivijaya, or Batavia, or the sea routes its ancestor travelled. I will, now that I know how to, and it will make no difference whatsoever to what the word is doing. That seems to me the right arrangement.

A note on sources. The Kota Kapur inscription was edited by George Cœdès in "Les inscriptions malaises de Çrīvijaya" (BEFEO 30, 1930); C. O. Blagden's English reading, "The Kota Kapur (Western Bangka) Inscription," appeared in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 64 (1913), 69–71, and can be read at the Internet Archive. For ṛddhi and the compound mahā-ṛddhika I used Monier-Williams's Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899) and Franklin Edgerton's Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary (1953), both available through the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon. For the Javanese senses I used P. J. Zoetmulder and S. O. Robson's Old Javanese-English Dictionary (1982), consulted in its digital edition at SEAlang, alongside the epigraphic record of sīma grants, including the Tri Tepusan inscription of 842 and Balitung's Mantyasih charter of 907. Soetardjo Kartohadikoesoemo's Desa traces perdikan back through merdika to maharddhika; an archival inventory of the Dutch Department of Internal Administration held by Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia lists a 1903–06 register of exemptions relating to perdikan villages; Law 13 of 1946 abolishing those villages is held in the Republic's own legal database. De Houtman's 1603 Spraeck ende woord-boeck, star catalogue and all, is digitised at Utrecht University; his own account of the captivity is the Cort Verhael of 1601, and Verbunt and van Gent have written on the astronomy. On the Mardijkers I relied on Manilata Choudhury, "The Mardijkers of Batavia: Construction of a Colonial Identity, 1619–1650" (Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 75, 2014); for Tugu after 1661, on Raan-Hann Tan's doctoral study Por-Tugu-Ese? The Protestant Tugu Community of Jakarta, Indonesia (ISCTE-IUL, 2016); and for Krontjong Toegoe, on the work of the musicologist Victorius Ganap. Reporting in The Jakarta Post and NOW! Jakarta supplies the community's own testimony and the recent details. On localisation, O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives; on varṇa in Angkor, I. W. Mabbett, "Varṇas in Angkor and the Indian Caste System" (Journal of Asian Studies 36, 1977); on the Chola expeditions, the essays collected in Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa (ISEAS). On makan in Singapore English I followed Buang, Abdul Halim and Ramakresinin's study of Malay lexical borrowings in Singapore Colloquial English (Journal of Modern Languages 18), which takes makan as one of its worked examples of a fully integrated borrowing. Singapore's National Library Board covers the Merdeka Talks, the Merdeka Bridge, and Yusof Ishak's swearing-in on 3 December 1959 in succession to Sir William Goode; the National Archives of Singapore holds the tiga suku merdeka remark and the transcripts of Lee Kuan Yew's 1965 speeches, including the federal parliament speech of 27 May; the four official languages are set out in Article 153A of the Constitution; the Merdeka Generation Package was announced at the 2018 National Day Rally. Arkib Negara Malaysia, the national archives, describes the 1957 ceremony, and Bernama reported the 2026 National Day. The text of the Indonesian proclamation is held by the Sekretariat Negara. The dialogue from Arrival (2016) is quoted from the released screenplay.