thumb|300px|A 1985 painting in Indonesia commemorating the [[Independence of Indonesia bearing the words "Merdeka!"]] thumb|Tunku Abdul Rahman as he proclaimed Malaysian independence on 31 August 1957, chanting "Merdeka!" seven times|300px Merdeka (Jawi: ; , ) is a term in Indonesian and Malay which means "independent" or "free". It is derived from the Sanskrit maharddhika (महर्द्धिक) meaning "rich, prosperous, and powerful". In the Malay Archipelago, this term had acquired the meaning of a freed slave. The term is also used in other Indonesian languages.
thumb|300px|A 1985 painting in Indonesia commemorating the [[Independence of Indonesia bearing the words "Merdeka!"]] thumb|Tunku Abdul Rahman as he proclaimed Malaysian independence on 31 August 1957, chanting "Merdeka!" seven times|300px Merdeka (Jawi: ; , ) is a term in Indonesian and Malay which means "independent" or "free". It is derived from the Sanskrit maharddhika (महर्द्धिक) meaning "rich, prosperous, and powerful". In the Malay Archipelago, this term had acquired the meaning of a freed slave. The term is also used in other Indonesian languages.
The term Mardijker is a Dutch corruption of the Portuguese version of the original Sanskrit words and was used to designate former Portuguese and Dutch slaves from India in the East Indies, known as Mardijkers, whence the Malay meaning of "free(dom)" is derived. The Mardijkers were former Catholic slaves brought from India and the East Indies, who were liberated by the Dutch if they abandoned Catholicism and joined the Dutch Reformed Church.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).