Mardijker people

The Mardijker were a community in amongst others Batavia (modern Jakarta), made up of descendants of freed slaves. They could be found at all major trading posts in the East Indies. They were mostly Christian, of various natives from conquered Portuguese territories, and some Portuguese ancestry. They spoke a Portuguese patois, which have influenced the modern Indonesian language. The Dutch also referred to them as inlandse Christenen ("indigenous Christians").

The ancestors of the Mardijkers had been slaves of the Portuguese in India, Africa and Malay Peninsula, and were brought to Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company, especially after the 1641 Dutch conquest of Malacca, whereby Portuguese speakers in the city were taken as captive. There were also Mardijkers originated from Pampanga, Luzon which called by the Dutch as Papangers.

The term Mardijker is a Dutch corruption of the Portuguese version of Sanskrit Maharddhika meaning "rich, prosperous and powerful". In the Malay archipelago, this term had acquired the meaning of a freed slave. The Dutch colonists also used it more generally to describe any freed slaves which were full-blood Asian, i.e. zwarten ("blacks").

The Census of 1699 in Batavia shows the breakdown of the population as:

3,679 Chinese; 2,407 Mardijkers; 1,783 Europeans; 670 Mixed blood; 867 others.

The Mardijkers mostly clung to their Catholic faith and continued to attend Batavia's Portuguese church, although many were eventually baptised by the Dutch Reformed Church. They were legally recognized by the Dutch East India Company as a separate ethnic group, and kept themselves apart from the native Javanese (Taylor 1983: 47; Bosma and Raben 2008: 46-47). During the VOC era there was already considerable inter-marriage with the Indos in pre-colonial history, who were often also of Portuguese descent. During the colonial era the Mardijkers eventually assimilated completely into the Indo Eurasian community and were no longer registered as a separate ethnic group.

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