Capital move? Indonesia unveils Nusantara
Why countries change the seat of government. Fairy tales retold. And a lost city
Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s big news story. In our second year, a big thank you to our community of more than 10,000 subscribers in 114 countries.
🎧 Would you rather listen? The podcast drops at the w/e.
This Week, Those Books is taking a break, so the spotlight in the next three weeks will be on the gems we unlock from the archives. I’ll be back September 11 to join the week’s big news story to the world of books.
– Rashmee
The Big Story:
There’s a new capital on the world map as Indonesia formally inaugurates Nusantara1 to replace crowded, traffic-clogged Jakarta, which is sinking faster than any other city on the planet.
But can moving capitals really solve a country’s problems? Or do the troubles simply migrate, with the office supplies, to the new seat of government, as Egypt, Myanmar and Nigeria have found?
The name Nusantara, Javanese for archipelago, was chosen to reflect President Joko Widodo’s “Indonesia-centric”2 push to rebalance development to the geographic centre of the country of 13,000 islands.
Brazil did something similar in 1960 when it changed its capital from the southern port of Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia in the middle.
This Week, Those Books:
Throughout history, capital cities have served as a giant political theatre.
Fairy tales and other delights from the wider Nusantara region.
And a bonus pick – about a lost city.
The Backstory:
Nusantara city is being built in East Kalimantan province, some 1,200 km from Jakarta, which is in Java. Construction delays have affected plans to relocate bureaucrats and government ministries to the new capital, which is expected to be complete by 2045. Experts say Nusantara is “perhaps the biggest undertaking — both technocratically and politically — in Indonesian history”.3 It certainly has a colossal price tag – more than $30 billion.
Egypt’s grand “New Administrative Capital”, some 50 km from Cairo, is another expensive and controversial work in progress.
Myanmar’s purpose-built capital Naypyidaw has been described as a “ghost city”4 for the nearly 20 years since it replaced Yangon.
The 1991 move of Nigeria’s capital – from Lagos in the south, to Abuja in the middle of the country – did not end the wrangling between Christians and Muslims over perceived privilege.
This Week’s Books:
Political Landscapes of Capital Cities
Edited by: Jessica Joyce Christie, Jelena Bogdanović and Eulogio Guzmán
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Year: 2016
My rating: Insightful
Ten case studies of capitals – both ancient and modern – in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas examine the canny use of architecture and urban design to consolidate political (and/or religious) authority. For example, Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten’s founding of a new capital Amarna. It was on a site the Pharoah claimed was ordained by the Sun God and executed by his earthly incarnation. This meant leaving the old capital, Thebes, demoting the traditional triad of gods and assuming a “a certain divine status [by] facilitating the union of the god and the king, of sky and earth…”
In the 18th century, Siam’s King Rama I built Bangkok as “a living monument” to the glories of a much-admired earlier dynasty and also gave the capital religious significance by acquiring the Emerald Buddha, a regionally revered sacred icon.
Rome features heavily in the book, first as capital of the Tetrarchy, the four joint rulers in the third century AD, who took care to decentralise power and did not even live in the city. Another essay explores Rome as a template for capitals, not least Constantinople in the Byzantine empire. A third looks at how Rome changed as capital of fascist Italy.
The Inca and Aztec capitals, as well as the constant remaking of Tehran are also covered.
The editors say the essays confirm the argument advanced by Cornell University anthropologist Adam T Smith that “the creation and preservation of political authority is a profoundly spatial problem” and that capital cities really do serve as “political landscapes”.
Choice quotes:
“…over the more than two decades of Fascist rule, the urban landscape of the capital [Rome] became a canvas upon which the regime sought to express its revolutionary roots…large swaths of urban fabric were removed in order to ‘liberate’ the ancient ruins below…Mussolini played an active role in shaping the final designs…”
“Tehran’s urban space is, and has always been, the condition for political contestation…”
Nusantara: A Sea of Tales
By: Heidi Shamsuddin
Publisher: Penguin Random House SEA
Year: 2021
My rating: Enchanting
Malaysia-born Heidi Shamsuddin’s5 magical collection of 61 fairy tales and fables are drawn, she says, from “the whole of the Nusantara”. She writes that Nusantara encompasses “the ancient sea routes of Southeast Asia” and loosely includes countries that share “the Austronesian language”. This means a broad canvas, which includes Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, Timor Leste and Madagascar, as well as countries with “Austronesian minorities” – Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan.
Growing up with bedtime stories from the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Arabian Nights, Shamsuddin says she knew “icy winter scenes, princesses with golden hair”. When she came upon Si Tanggang, the tale of an infamously disobedient son that’s known in Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, she realised the shared richness of regional variations. Shamsuddin documents the many avatars of each story featured in the book. The Youngest Fairy Princess of Kayangan, for instance, comes from Malaysia, but this tale of deception and eventual female empowerment is also found in Indonesia and other parts of the Nusantara region.
Choice quote:
“Like the seas and waterways which surround the Nusantara, these tales have ebbed and flowed without a care for national borders”.
Bonus Pick: The Call of Cthulhu
By: H P Lovecraft
Published in American pulp magazine Weird Tales
Year: 1928
My rating: Gripping
This short story,6 intimating the demise of civilisation, is seen as H P Lovecraft’s most influential. It has spawned fiction by other writers, comic books, film adaptations and a clutch of video games. Relevant in the context of sinking Jakarta’s replacement as Indonesia’s capital because the story features R'lyeh, which “had sunk beneath the waves” and serves as the prison of the monstrous Cthulhu.7
I hope you find This Week, Those Books useful, thoughtful, and…a conversation starter. It’s a small operation here at TWTB, and support from readers like you helps keep this news literacy project going.
Email thisweekthosebooks@substack.com to say ‘hi’. Or connect with me: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Threads
Ready for another read on the city? The marathon is now 'everyman’s Everest'
Nusantara city’s website
President Jokowi made these remarks in June 2022
Paper by Yanuar Nugroho and Dimas Wisnu Adrianto of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a Singaporean think-tank
2017 Business Insider report: Inside Myanmar’s ghost town capital city, which is 4 times the size of London with a fraction of the population
Heidi Shamsuddin shares stories from the Nusantara region on YouTube
Lovecraft is said to have explained how to pronounce Cthulhu “as something like Khlûl'-hloo”