Nur St. Iskandar and His Early Novels

Abstract

Rusli’s novel was followed by many books dealing with problems of Minangkabau people who tried to free themselves from the ties of traditional society. By far the best writer of this type of novel was Nur Sutan Iskandar, a gifted story-teller. As a corrector and editor at Balai Pustaka he had a strong influence on the moulding of the typical pre-war standard Malay, a language based on Malay classical literary tradition, but with strong Minangkabau influence, in vocabulary as well as in syntax and morphology. The remarkable uniformity in language of nearly all these pre-war novels is largely due to the activities of Nur St. Iskandar and his colleagues, all teachers, many of them trained at the famous teachers’ training college in Bukittingi. There would be some justification for postulating that this institution, in which the spirit of the former inspector of schools in Sumatra, Ch. A. van Ophuijsen, subsequently professor of Malay at Leiden University, was pre-dominant,⁹⁰ has been the cradle of modern pre-war standard Malay, and that the trainees, the guru bahasa Melaju, have been the devoted nurses of the new-born baby. Nur St. Iskandar was outstanding amongst them, not only because of his literary talent, but because of his zeal and activity. He was born in 1893 in Sungai Batang, Manindjau, Minangkabau, and received his teacher’s training in Bukittinggi.