Dutch Indies literature

Dutch Indies literature or Dutch East Indies literature (Dutch: Indische letteren or Nederlands Indische literatuur, Indonesia: Sastra Hindia Belanda) is the Dutch language literature of colonial and post-colonial Indonesia from the Dutch Golden Age to the present day. It includes Dutch, Indo-European and Indonesian authors. Its subject matter thematically revolves around the VOC and Dutch East Indies eras, but also includes the postcolonial discourse.

Even though the socio-economic environment of the Dutch East Indies' colonial society was not particularly conducive to literary pursuits ^[why?] an influential Dutch literary subgenre developed described as follows:

[...] a descriptive quality about them in the way they treated ordinary aspects of life in the Indies. This set them for ever apart from those writings in Europe, even if the language was still Dutch. It was this backdrop, or decor, that was different. The idea that whilst the language was Dutch, the scene, the scenery, everything was somehow different. This sense of the different permeated all that was written, even if their own (authors) reference point was still a belief that they were part of the metropolitan literary tradition.

—Ian Campbell, Sydney University, 2000.^[2]

Most masterpieces in this genre have international appeal and have been translated to English. In December 1958 for instance American Time magazine praised the translation of Maria Dermoût's The Ten Thousand Things, and named it one of the best books of the year.^[3] Since 1985 academic working groups on Dutch Indies literature have existed in the Netherlands and the USA. The University of Massachusetts Amherst maintains a Library of the Indies and describes this literature as follows:

It is a literature of great creativity and irony, a record of the lost cause and expectations of a colonial power.^[4]