Southeast Asia, Student Economy Edition

Past and Present

D R SarDesai

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429972683
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Política asiática

This book is concerned with Western activity in the southeast Asia and the indigenous reaction to it. It deals with the traditions of the people of Southeast Asia, traditions that, apply to both urban and rural populations. The book includes the early European intrusion in insular Southeast Asia.

PART ONE

Cultural Heritage

This part, entitled “Cultural Heritage,” covers traditional Southeast Asia from the time small kingdoms arose in mainland Southeast Asia (the area covered by modern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) and in insular Southeast Asia (covering modern Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia, East Timor, and the Philippines).

Historians of the ancient times in Southeast Asia—whether they were French, Dutch, Indian, or Chinese—long labored on the division of the region into two cultural spheres influenced deeply by India and China. The rulers and the ruled may not then have seen the entire region as a whole, as we do in modern times, particularly after World War II and even more so since the birth of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967, with Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines as founding members and subsequent enrollment of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Brunei, and Myanmar. True, two different styles of housing, dress, communications, and cuisine developed, but the region shared many common factors, such as the monsoons and the cultivation and consumption of rice as a staple.

Imperial China, since the Han times, was satisfied with the acknowledgment by the Southeast Asian polities, both mainland and insular, of Chinese hegemony through its celebrated tributary system and of direct rule over the Tongking region for very long periods (III BCE to 939 CE and for a decade and a half in the fifteenth century). With a single exception in the eleventh century of direct rule over Srivijaya in West Indonesia for more than two decades, the Indian influence was pervasive throughout the region from about the beginning of the Common Era, when small states were born and chose to invite Indian Brahmans and other conduits of culture to their courts. North Vietnam was possibly the only exception to resist Indian control, instead falling under the spell of Chinese literature, court etiquette, and Confucian political philosophy, to mention only a few aspects of life and culture.

Another distinction made by analysts, historical or political, has hinged on the major religions in Southeast Asia. Roughly speaking, considerable parts of insular Southeast Asia—including Malaysia, Indonesia, and the southern Philippines—are overwhelmingly Muslim. The conversion of such large numbers beginning in the thirteenth century and becoming a massive wave in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries applied in two contexts. First was the conversion of people from Hinduism and Buddhism in Malaya and Indonesia without abandoning the predominant Hindu-Buddhist culture. Those who were responsible for the conversion came from India, a land conventionally acceptable to Southeast Asians as a cultural source. The shift occurred in the same way Hinduism and Buddhism had taken hold in the first millennium CE: without the use of force or political pressure. Second, as the Portuguese advanced through Southeast Asian waters seeking “spices and Christians,” as Vasco da Gama had declared when he first landed in Calicut in South India, the people and their rulers living along the path of the Portuguese advance converted to Islam to escape forcible conversion to Christianity. Eventually, Southeast Asia became home to more Muslims than lived in any other region, such as the Middle East or South Asia.

Post-World War II historiography and the emergence of independent states in Southeast Asia not only underline the existence of a cultural infrastructure prior to the advent of the Indian culture, but also highlight that Indian influence arose through a deliberate choice by the region’s numerous rulers to prohibit adoption of certain Indian cultural elements, particularly its caste system and the declining importance of women in India. The pervasive Indian influence in art and architecture, language and literature, dance and music, and court etiquette and legal structure has not been denied by modern writers. Indeed, these commentators have rightly underlined the substructure already existing. This was true not only in art and architecture but also in music and dress, notably in the Indonesian gamelan (musical group) and batik (hand-printed fabric). The predominantly Hindu-Buddhist culture in both the mainland and the insular regions was not replaced in cultural terms by the advent of Islam, mainly in the insular region from about the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

The whole of Southeast Asia never came under the rule of a single person or dynasty. On the mainland, the Khmers created the largest empire, which at its height in the ninth to the thirteenth centuries embraced the region from Lower Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. There were large polities in insular Southeast Asia, but they did not cover the entire region, although modern historians of Indonesia cite an exception among the early Majapahit rulers, notably under Prime Minister Gajah Mada (1331–1364). In addition, during one short period in the second half of the eighth century, an insular ruler from Java’s Sailendra dynasty apparently conquered and ruled over large portions of Cambodia and central and South Vietnam. As discussed in the second part of this book, none of the Western colonial powers was able to bring all of Southeast Asia under a common rule.

Important sources for historians of Southeast Asia’s early past are Chinese records, both governmental and travelers’ accounts. Although inscriptions appeared in South Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Central Vietnam, they were much fewer than the Chinese accounts. The Chinese tradition of maintaining court records, including the accounts of tribute bearers from the “barbarian” vassal kingdoms in Southeast Asia, has yielded a mine of valuable information for historians. This does not mean the Southeast Asians lacked regard for history; they too produced documents, notably in “independent” Vietnam after it overthrew the millennium-long Chinese direct rule. The shorter Chinese direct rule (1407–1428) over Vietnam after the Ming invasion was condemned by the Vietnamese for many reasons, one of which was the brutal and systematic removal by the Chinese and, in some cases, destruction of all Vietnamese books, which were replaced with Chinese classics. The periodic Cham invasions from the South also helped to destroy Vietnamese documentation.

Part One sets the tone for the book, inasmuch as it deals with the traditions of the peoples of Southeast Asia, traditions that, in most parts, apply to both urban and rural populations, especially the latter. Rural dwellers account for more than 75 percent of the population, a demographic that modernity has not overtaken.

Part One also includes the early European intrusion in insular Southeast Asia. It began with the Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1510 and was followed, after almost a century, by the English, the Dutch, the French, and even by the Spaniards in the Philippines. Except for the last, European contacts with the indigenous people were overwhelmingly coastal and commercial in this early period. Because there was only minor cultural contact, Europeans had only negligible influence over the region. This changed from the middle of the eighteenth century, when territorial conquest replaced what was until then predominantly a trading activity.

MAP 1.1 Southeast Asia Today

1

The Land and Its People

THE REGION’S NAME AND SIGNIFICANCE

The term Southeast Asia is of recent origin. It became popular during World War II, when the territories south of the Tropic of Cancer were placed under Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia command. The command included Sri Lanka, and at least one study covers that island country along with Southeast Asia because of “similar” experience with Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonialism and because it is “closely related to the Malay Archipelago.”¹ On the other hand, D. G. E. Hall excluded the Philippines in the first edition of his monumental History of South-East Asia because that country lay outside the region’s mainstream of historical developments.² Most scholars presently use the term Southeast Asia to include the geographical areas bounded by the states of Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, Timor Leste, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Older books on Southeast Asia designated it variously but mostly in reference to either of the two large neighboring countries. Thus, many British, French, and Indian scholars called it Farther India, Greater India, l’Inde Exterieure, and the Hinduized or Indianized States. On the other hand, most Chinese writings identified the region as Kun Lun or Nan Yang (Little China). Still others have referred to the landmass between India and China as Indochina, from the term French Indochina, to include Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The noted geographer George B. Cressey has suggested that the region be called “Indo-Pacific,” since it lies between two oceans and cultures.³

The variety of terms is perhaps suggestive of the minimal role Southeast Asia played in world affairs until well into the twentieth century. For the famous British political geographer Halford Mackinder, Southeast Asia was a peripheral region, a part of the “rimland.” A series of events—beginning with the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II, the independence of India and Pakistan and the rise of India as a functioning democracy, the emergence of the People’s Republic of China, and the long, drawn-out conflict and eventual unification of Vietnam—has transformed the entire region into one of the most strategic and sensitive areas of the world. To use Mackinder’s geopolitical term, it is the “heartland” of our times. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, both the superpowers were vitally interested in the politics and the economic potential of the region. Neither of them would permit Beijing to bring the states of Southeast Asia into a subservient relationship, as China had done periodically over the previous two millennia. Such an eventuality would enlarge the parameters of the Communist world, enhance China’s power, and deny the Southeast Asian peoples the fruits of freedom that most of them had secured after bitter struggles against Western rule. Besides, dominance by any single power might deprive the rest of the world of the largely unexploited, immense, and precious mineral and oil deposits of the area, in addition to denying an easy access from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. The last is a matter of the gravest concern for Japan, whose survival as an economic and industrial giant depends upon the transportation of oil and raw materials from the Middle East, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia as well as the ability to dispatch finished goods to the markets of all these areas and Europe through the Southeast Asian sea-lanes. It should be noted that at any given time, there is a Japanese tanker or freighter situated almost every one hundred nautical miles in the Indian Ocean area. Thus, Southeast Asia may have been a marginal area during most of recorded history, but the various factors briefly outlined here have underlined its strategic importance and made it (along with the Middle East) a potential tinderbox of a global conflict in the past three decades.

The Southeast Asian region is not a unit in the religious, historical, geographical, or ethnic sense. There are at least four different religions in Southeast Asia: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Historically, the region never underwent political consolidation, as India and China did. In fact, colonial history has only helped to enhance separatist development among Southeast Asian peoples. Five non-Asian powers ruled the region until various times in the twentieth century: the British in Myanmar, Malaysia, and Singapore; the Dutch in Indonesia; the French in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam; the Americans in the Philippines; and the Portuguese in East Timor. Only Thailand managed to remain free. The differing orientations of each of these colonies in the spheres of administration, education, trade, currency, and shipping, to mention only the most important aspects, have been responsible for erecting additional barriers between Southeast Asian people that impede easy and effective communication among them.

ECOLOGICAL SETTING

Geographically, Southeast Asia is included in the Monsoon Belt and, except for a small portion of Myanmar, located between the tropics. However, nature has divided the land here as nowhere else in any of the Asian segments, effectively fractionalizing it into diverse social and political units. This fragmentation complicates any attempt to develop a common approach to the entire region.

Southeast Asia can be seen as two geographical regions: “mainland” Southeast Asia, to include the countries of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and “insular” Southeast Asia, comprising Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, Timor Leste, and the Philippines. The inclusion of Malaysia in the latter group is justified by the Malay Peninsula’s greater exposure to the sea and its ethnic, cultural, religious, and geographical affinities with Sumatra and Java. Indonesia and the Philippines are groups of islands, large and small, fertile and barren; there are seventeen thousand in Indonesia and seven thousand in the Philippines. Along with Malaysia and the Philippines, the Indonesian islands constitute the Malay world.

Some physiographers advocate a separate treatment for the Philippines and Sulawesi (the Celebes) because of their location between two geological shelves: the Sunda platform, covering Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and the Malay Peninsula to the west, and the Sahul platform, linking New Guinea and Australia. Between these two “massifs” lies a transitional zone of deep valleys in the seas around the Philippines and Sulawesi, at least partly responsible for the unusual configuration of those islands. In the Sunda-platform area, the sea is often only a few hundred feet deep, in contrast to the six- or seven-mile depth of ocean troughs east of the Philippines. This geographical factor explains why the Philippines lacked much historical relationship with the rest of Southeast Asia before the advent of Islam in the middle of the second millennium of the Christian era.

Mainland Southeast Asia is noted for its diverse mountain ranges and rivers running north-south, most of them originating in Tibet. Following George Cressey, one might imagine eastern Tibet as a “complex knot or core area from which great mountain ranges radiate like the arms of an octopus,” dividing the Asian peoples.⁴ Thus, the Arakan Mountains stand between India and Myanmar; the Dawna, the Bilauktaung, and the Tenasserim between Myanmar and Thailand, passing farther through Malaya; and the Annam range between Laos and Vietnam, cutting the latter in two. Finally, such ranges as Nu Shan, Kaolikung Shan, Wuliang Shan, and Ailao Shan together separate Southeast Asia from China. The principal rivers and streams also flow north-south, providing little help in east-west communications. The numerous river basins, which have become the principal areas of human settlement, are hundreds of miles apart. The primary rivers of mainland Southeast Asia are the Irrawaddy, the Chindwin, and the Salween in Myanmar; the Chao Phraya in Thailand; the Song Koi (Red River) and Song Bo (Black River) in North Vietnam; and the international stream of the Mekong, passing through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. These rivers meander over hundreds of miles, bringing rich alluvial deposits to the deltas, which are like gateways open to the Indian Ocean. Four richly fertile deltas created by these rivers—the Lower Myanmar, central Thailand, Tongking, and Mekong—constitute the most populous areas of mainland Southeast Asia but are hundreds of miles apart. On the other hand, rapids in the northern reaches of the rivers obstruct intraregional travel and trade. Thus, the physical features of mainland Southeast Asia, with its numerous mountains and valleys, rivers and rapids, have militated against the development of a common focal point in the region.

Except for equatorial latitudes, where rainfall is well distributed throughout the year, most of the Southeast Asian region is affected by the monsoons. The monsoons—southwest and northeast—are a factor the region’s inhabitants must reckon with in cultivating their crops and navigating in open seas. Precipitation averaging one hundred inches annually comes with the southwestern monsoon winds that hit the leeward side of the various mountain ranges between late May and the middle of September and with the northeastern monsoons that bring the much-needed rains between December and February. The accompanying gusty winds, developing at times into devastating hurricanes and typhoons, compel the mostly nonpowered boats to sail only in the direction of the winds and at times wait three to four months for a change of winds before resuming their return journeys. The Monsoon Belt is generally synonymous with the Rice Belt; most of Southeast Asia is known for both dry- and wet-rice cultivation. Rice is the principal crop and staple diet of the people of the region. Rice cultivation began in Myanmar and Thailand around 3500 BCE, though the technique of wet-rice cultivation may not have been known in Southeast Asia until after the impact of Indian culture in the beginning of the Christian era.⁵ The much-awaited monsoons are often erratic, requiring sophisticated hydraulic controls to ensure water supply. Such equipment and techniques were devised and mastered in ancient times by agrarian leaders, who often assumed political and spiritual leadership as well. The location of houses and temples (preferably on elevated ground), the tapering design of the roofs, and the drainage and irrigation systems are conditioned by the often merciless monsoons flooding the dwelling areas and causing untold miseries to the population.

PREHISTORIC ROOTS

Early Man in Java

Archaeological discoveries in the past one hundred years, notably in Java, have pushed our knowledge of Southeast Asia to a couple of million years ago. The oldest of the skulls found was that of a child, at Mojokerto in eastern Java, belonging to the species Homo erectus, which is deemed to have evolved from the first toolmaking ancestor of the human species, H. habilis, some 1.5 million years ago. The skull was found with the ...