Прияйи: Яванская знать эпохи колониализма и современности.

Constituency in Perak, Malaysia

Priyayi (former spelling: Prijaji) was the Dutch era class of the nobles of the robe, as opposed to royal nobility or ningrat (Javanese), in Java, Indonesia. Priyayi is a Javanese word originally denoting the descendants of the adipati or governors, the first of whom were appointed in the 17th century by the Sultan Agung of Mataram to administer the principalities he had conquered. Initially court officials in pre colonial kingdoms, the priyayi moved into the colonial civil service and then on to administrators of the modern Indonesian Republic.

The Mataram Sultanate, an Islamic polity in south central Java that reached its peak in the 17th century, developed a kraton ("court") culture from which the Sultan emerged as a charismatic figure who ruled over a relatively independent aristocracy. Named para yayi ("the king’s brothers"), nobles, officials, administrators, and chiefs were integrated into a patron client relationship with the Sultan to preside over the peripheries of the kingdom. The homeland of priyayi culture is attributed to Mataram’s center, namely the Javanese speaking middle and eastern parts of Java. Although "Javanized" by Mataram’s political expansion, the Sundanese speaking western part of Java, the easternmost parts of Java, and the nearby island of Madura retain ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences from the Mataramese heartland.

After the arrival of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the collapse of Mataram, the Sunanate of Surakarta and Sultanate Yogyakarta became centers of Javanese political power since the 1755 Treaty of Giyanti. Although Dutch political influence severely limited their autonomy throughout the colonial period, the two kingdoms continued to serve as symbols of Javanese courtly culture. In the lowland rural areas of Java, the presence of a centralized indigenous bureaucracy strengthened state control over uncultivated land and helped transform the peasantry from independent smallholders to agricultural laborers.

Outside of the areas ruled directly by Yogyakarta and Surakarta, Dutch colonial authorities established two civil service bodies: the Binnenlands Bestuur ("Interior Administration"), staffed by Dutch officials, and the Pangreh Praja ("Ruler of the Realm"), the indigenous bureaucracy. By 1926, the Binnenlands Bestuur in the directly ruled areas of Java and Madura consisted of the following offices with territorial responsibilities, in descending order: In Java, a class distinction existed between priyagung ("upper priyayi"), a group well connected to the aristocratic elite in Surakarta and Yogyakarta, and priyayi cilik ("lower priyayi").

In 1901, the Dutch East Indies government established the so called Ethische Politiek ("Ethical Politics") as an official policy. The Ethical Politics paradigm extended the colonial state control through educational, religious, agricultural, resource extraction, and political surveillance institutions over the native population until the Japanese occupation of 1942. Among the Javanese, priyayi men were the first to be educated at Western style institutions before entering the colonial civil service. Nationalistic sentiments among Javanese elites who received Dutch education were formative in the era of the Indonesian National Awakening. The Boedi Oetomo, the first indigenous political society in the Dutch East Indies, was established by a group of priyayi doctors and medical students in 1908. Although the group was confined to a Javanese, male priyayi following, the Boedi Oetomo was the first in a series of indigenous political activism in the Dutch East Indies. The emergence of other ethnic nationalist groups and Indies nationalist political parties in Java later eclipsed Javanese nationalism and gave rise to the emergence of a broader, Indonesian language nationalism throughout the 1920s and 30s.

The recognition of the Republic of Indonesia in 1949 by Dutch authorities resulted in the integration of bureaucratic institutions from Dutch controlled federal states into the new Republic. The number of civil servants in Indonesia thus grew from 115,000 in the late 1920s to 400,000 in the early 1950s. Although the status of a priyayi does not have a formal presence in post independence Indonesian law, proximity to the executive branches of the state, which it symbolizes, remained a popular mode of upward socio political mobility from the 1950s and after. The New Order government of Suharto encouraged traditional priyayi and corporatist values in the Indonesian civil service, especially through the establishment of the Indonesian Civil Servants' Corps (KORPRI) in 1971.

Literacy and command of multiple Javanese language registers were sources of priyayi prestige during the Dutch colonial era when the majority of Java’s population was illiterate. The two major levels of discourse in the Javanese language are krama ("formal") and ngoko ("informal"). The colonial era priyayi, therefore, became a largely bilingual class. Since independence, Indonesian has been adopted as a national language, and new styles of Indonesian and Javanese have emerged as a continuation of the krama and ngoko registers in official publications and popular literature.