Southeast Asian History

Essential Readings

D.R. SarDesai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429972676
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Designed to stand on its own, or to accompany the seventh edition of D. R. SarDesai's Southeast Asia: Past and Present, this updated reader includes classic and recent works on the history of Southeast Asia. SarDesai has selected literary and historical writings that address crucial controversies in the region of Southeast Asia. The readings are organized in four sections (Cultural Heritage, Colonial Interlude, Nationalist Response, and the Fruits of Freedom) and cover the entire range of Southeast Asian history from ancient to contemporary times. Geographically, the book includes Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia, East Timor, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.The revised second edition retains the most popular readings from the first edition, while replacing some of the historical chapters, updating the contemporary and recent coverage, and adding new readings to pertinent subject areas. Southeast Asian History: Essential Readings provides valuable context and critical background to events of this region.

PART I
Cultural Heritage

1

The “Indianization” of Southeast Asia

Ian W. Mabbett^*

Most scholars of Southeast Asia before 1950—British, Dutch, French, and Indian— held that with the exception of Vietnam, the culture of Southeast Asian countries was a superstructure built on foundations borrowed overwhelmingly from India. In their view, the cultural dissemination did not come through political conquest but through Brahmans and traders from India, who were responsible for the spread in Southeast Asia of Indian religions, script and literature, art and architecture. Only Vietnam, which was directly under Chinese rule from 111 BC to AD 939 and from AD 1407 to 1428 and indirectly up to 1885 through China’s tributary system, was considered to be in the Chinese sphere of cultural influence.

This neat division discounted the existence of an advanced culture in many parts of Southeast Asia prior to the advent of Indian culture and the possibility that Southeast Asian monarchs initiated the selective importation of particular aspects of Indian culture. A new genre of writings goes even further in the opposite direction and lauds the Southeast Asians as “cultural pioneers” from whom both China and India benefited. In 1977, Ian Mabbett wrote two important journal articles examining the phenomenon of the “Indianization” of Southeast Asia, one focusing on prehistoric sources and the other on historic sources. In the article focusing on prehistoric sources, reproduced here, Mabbett demonstrates that India and Southeast Asia were not two separate “organic cultural units” but were linked by “a complex pattern of cultural interaction” spreading across Asia. He also draws a distinction between processes that occurred in two separate time periods: the rise of principalities or city-states with Indian culture in the first two or three centuries after Christ and the later “growth of peasant societies supporting civil, priestly and military elites.”

How did Indian influence spread in Southeast Asia during the opening centuries of our era? The following quotations give some idea of the extent to which authorities are agreed:

It seems almost to be a universal law, that when an inferior civilization comes into contact with a superior one, it gradually tends to be merged into the latter, the rate and extent of this process being determined solely by the capacity of the one to assimilate, and of the other to absorb. When the Hindus first settled in Suvarnabhumi and came into close association with her peoples, this process immediately set in, and produced the inevitable result.¹

It is well known that a group cannot adopt an important development from another group if it is not, approximately, on the same technological and social level.²

There were, then, no ‘Hindu colonization’ in which ‘colonial states’ arose from intermittent trading voyages followed by permanent trading settlements; no ‘Hindu colonies’ from which the primitive indigenous population and first of all its headmen took over the superior civilization from the west; and no learned Hindus in the midst of Indian colonists as ‘advisers’ to their countrymen.³

One is therefore led to characterize the eastward expansion of Hindu civilization at the beginning of the Christian era as the result—at least to a great extent—of a continuous influx of navigators from within a ‘sea-merchant’ milieu.⁴

Until a decade or so ago it was believed that this important development [the emergence of kingdoms with ideas of royalty based on Hindu or Buddhist cults] was brought about by Indian traders themselves, who were conceived as proselytizing colonists, but we now know that this was not so.⁵

These propositions, presented here out of context, are not necessarily as mutually inconsistent as they are thus made to appear. Indeed, it would be possible to agree with most of the authorities who have written on the ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia—to a greater extent, perhaps, than some of them agree with each other. But there can be no doubt that the character of Indian influences in the lands across the Bay of Bengal is a complex matter of dubiety and debate. A survey of the evidence and of modern opinions about it, even a superficial one which is all that can be achieved in a narrow compass, is obviously desirable. It is all the more desirable because there is reason to think that recent developments in the prehistory of Southeast Asia have made it possible to view the ‘Indianization’ process in a perspective which historians have been slow to use; it is this perspective which will be the subject of the present article.

The new interpretations are far from an established orthodoxy; indeed, many of them are tenuous and speculative, and many are contested. Final judgment must wait on the consensus of prehistorians and on the passage of time, which brings new discoveries constantly. But it should be stressed that, for the purposes of the present discussion, it is not actually necessary to accept the view that most of the attributes of civilization except for stratified societies and political centralization were pioneered in Southeast Asia long before China or India had them. On the contrary, the product of recent research most important to the following analysis is one of the less controversial—the new recognition that people in Southeast Asia need not have turned decisively at a particular point in time from ‘folk’ hunting and gathering to ‘peasant’ agriculture: for a long period they may have followed an eclectic subsistence pattern, with agriculture constituting often only a minor segment. With such a pattern, communities could have been highly self-sufficient, and thus when we turn to the beginnings of the historical record, it begins to seem likely that the early stages of ‘Indianization’ could take place with extremely few repercussions among the indigenous societies, and that therefore the development of stratified peasant societies such as in Sailendra Java or Angkorian Cambodia must be thought of as a later process distinct from the introduction of Indian culture in the early ‘kingdoms’ such as ‘Funan.’

Traditional Theories

Pre-eminent among an older generation of scholars is R. von Heine-Geldern, whose theories, though not achieving the status of orthodoxy, have been widely influential. For him, the relatively sophisticated cultures of the societies that became subject to Indian influence belonged to the Austronesians, who were distinguished by their use of adzes of quadrangular section. In his view their ancestors, possibly related to the bearers of the North Chinese Yangshao culture, migrated to the Southeast Asian archipelago between about 2000 and 1500 BC.⁶ Perhaps associated with them were the ‘Austro-Asiatics’ represented by mainland groups such as the Mons and Khmers. The coming of these people ushered in the neolithic period. Following this line of thought, descendants of the displaced mesolithic peoples, whose cultures are familiar to archaeology under the heading ‘Hoabinhian,’ are to be sought chiefly in hill tribes. Throughout these arguments, the idea of discrete cultures and waves of population is explicit.⁷

For von Heine-Geldern, the bronze age of the Dongson culture (named after its northern Vietnamese type-site) was introduced, not by a new migration, but by the importation of a cultural package from the north. Arguing from the similarity of artistic motifs, he traced Dongson culture to a European origin, in the Black Sea area, and postulated its diffusion to parallel destinations in China and Indochina, and ultimately to Oceania, through migrations from the west from the eighth or ninth century BC.⁸

One other important item in the established inventory of prehistory sometimes seen as evidence of migrations is the megalithic culture of Southeast Asia, represented by slabs, menhirs and massive funerary jars in many parts of the region—for example, the funerary monoliths and jars in Tran Ninh province, Laos, or the menhirs in the Hua Pan province.⁹ Megaliths, which cannot be associated with dated strata in the ground, are difficult to date and megalithic chronology is problematic.¹⁰ It is probably erroneous to regard the ‘megalithic’ as in any sense a homogeneous culture. Megaliths pertain to disparate cultures without natural unity. As for jar burials, W. G. Solheim II considers that they represent an isolated practice which spread independently among different peoples; the differences between burials in different parts of East and Southeast Asia are too great to be the product of the passage of time, and there is thus no real evidence that they represent migrations.¹¹

If we were to regard ‘Indianization’ as the experience or activity of distinct neolithic racial groups with an imported bronze culture, there would be no need to dig back further to the so-called middle stone age in order to examine the context in which Indian influences appeared. But traditional periodizations and migration theories have been challenged; terms such as ‘neolithic’ are of limited value outside Europe. It is necessary to recognize that those who adopted Sanskrit names and Indian religion are likely to have been descended fairly directly from some of the possessors of the mesolithic cultures known as Hoabinhian; further, their way of life may not have been in all respects radically different. It is therefore necessary to take some account of the archaeological evidence even from early times, and it is desirable to start with the ‘Hoabinhian’ culture or cultures which were in existence for most of the last ten millennia BC.

The Archaeological Record

The identification of the Hoabinhian (named, like Dongson, after a type-site in Vietnam) was largely the work of M. Colani in the 1930s; it connotes a cluster of traits found in various parts of the region.¹² These traits, particularly the use of stones worked on one side, place their cultures in the middle stone age or mesolithic period, but the utility of terms such as ‘mesolithic’ or ‘palaeolithic’ sometimes has been contested as an arbitrary periodization. J. M. Treistman has defended the idea as representing a cultural if not a chronological reality, indicating populations that were ‘anchored’ to particular localities where they could intensify plant collection and river exploitation.¹³ The term ‘Hoabinhian’ has itself been described as a ‘technocomplex,’ a grouping of cultures sharing certain techniques, rather than as a single culture.¹⁴ As such, it spans a large area and a long period.¹⁵ The earlier sites are riverine, chiefly upland but also in coastal areas which were by the sea even when the sea level was lower. Conceivably, there were lowland sites since obliterated by rising seas, but C. Gorman thinks it likely that only late in the life of the Hoabinhian cultures did the appearance of agriculture cause populations to shift from mountain valleys to the hilly edges of the plains. (No lowland agricultural sites have been found dating from before the development of iron and irrigation technology.) By the end of the period, he suggests ‘Hoabinhian’ included edge-ground tools, cord-marked ceramics, and possibly early plant domestication (discussed further below).¹⁶

There are debated interpretations behind some of the conclusions mentioned above. But scholars have recognized for some time that Southeast Asia is a priori a likely scene for the early emergence of plant domestication. N. Vavilov noted in 1949 that the occurrence of many wild species (including various roots and fruits, and rice) made the area a likely hearth of cultivation.¹⁷ Other writers have pointed to the presence of the humid tropical conditions which made it possible for populations originally dependent on other forms of subsistence, especially ‘progressive fishermen,’ to experiment with cultivation without risking their sustenance.¹⁸ K. C. Chang has suggested a second link between fishing and plant cultivation: the fisherman’s use of fibres for his nets and oakum for caulking.¹⁹

Rice is likely to have been first cultivated in a zone including parts of India and Southeast Asia. According to A. G. Haudricourt and L. Hédin, rice cultivation may have originated in the Ganges delta but in any case spread to Indonesia and Indochina.²⁰ In a recent study, R. D. Hill, appealing to Vavilov’s principle that cultivation of a plant is most likely to have begun where the largest number of wild species is to be found, identifies a zone covering Orissa, Bihar, Bengal, Burma and perhaps Indochina as the area of origin.²¹ Following Haudricourt,²² he emphasizes that it is a mistake to suppose that dry rice cultivation came first, irrigated later; rice has some of the physiological characteristics of a marsh plant,²³ and could well have been first used by men in large swampy areas of grassy vegetation (ecologically, plagio-climaxes).²⁴ On general groun...