Before embarking on our exploration a word of caution is in order. The following is not meant to be a full-fledged scholarly paper pulling out all the available evidence. All it intends to do is to throw out a couple of suggestions which hopefully may give rise to discussion. It is, therefore, an unabashed exercise in speculation. Also it will endeavour to compress within the compass of a brief paper complicated and diverging developments taking place during a period of more than a thousand years over a diverse and widely stretched area. At best it may serve as an essay in the sense of a speculative ‘attempt’; in short, a discussion piece. It arose from previous discussions with students and colleagues, especially with Andre Wink, who may recognise a blurred reflection of their own ideas.

One may not always agree with the term used as the title of the book, but in his already classic study on ancient Southeast Asia, Coedès has shown that despite local differences and regional variations, this region shares similar sense of unity. Hinduisation or, rather, Indianisation in statecraft and religion was the basis of this sense of unity. Not only were Sanskrit and Pali the official languages of the original texts of the religion, Hinduisation also provided commonly shared high cultural symbols. In other words, despite political instability in inter-state relations and trading competition that continued to disturb whatever type of stability had been attained, the world of Southeast Asia, and particularly the historic Indonesian archipelago, shared a number of cultural traits, that were clearly manifested in the conduct of political affairs and religion.

The study of Islam and Muslims in relation to local non-Muslim population and their religious beliefs and social practices in medieval India has often tended to be conducted eventually along two lines, seemingly opposed to each other. On the one hand, there are communal historians who have reduced the history of medieval India into the conflict between Hindus and Muslims, which they have projected as having resulted from their divergent religious outlooks. The period was Islamic in their view, and the state a conversion machinery and an organ to bring Hindus under the hegemony of Islam. This was a mission in which the state could not succeed fully, largely because of ‘Hindu’ resistance. On the other hand, there are a large number of ‘liberal’ historians to whom the hallmark of medieval Indian society has been an amity between the two communities, the various tensions and encounters over economic and political matters notwithstanding. The medieval period, in the opinion of such historians, saw the evolution and efflorescence of a composite culture to which medieval rulers, nobles, sufis and Persian and Urdu poets contributed significantly. The later animosity between Hindus and Muslims and clashes over religious matters, they argued, were the handiwork of the British.

The words that serve as a motto for this paper are taken from the finest novel about Dutch fin de siècle society and indeed, in my opinion, the finest novel in Dutch literature, Louis Couperus' De Boeken der Kleine Zielen (The Books of the Small Souls). They form part of a dialogue between the widow of a former Governor-General of the Netherlands Indies and her, obviously, very dis-appointed grandson, a young colonial civil servant in the beginning of his career.

The changing cultural climate in Indonesia at the turn of the century can be demonstrated by the story of a young man, Achmad, who graduated from a Dutch senior high school (HBS) in 1899. He was the first native student to pass the final exams at the highest institution of learning (there was none at university level at the time) in Batavia, the capital of the Netherlands East Indies. Another young man had completed the same type of education in Semarang, Central Java, the year before. They belonged to the first generation of Indonesians schooled in Western ideas and thoughts. Indeed Western types of elementary education and teacher training school existed in other parts of the archipelago, but most of them taught in Malay or in the vernacular. Dutch-language schools at a ‘European’ level were reserved for the white section of the colonial society.

The Western educated Bengali intelligentsia was the first group of Indians to collaborate closely with the colonial regime in the governance of the country. As middle-ranking to minor functionaries they were to be found in all parts of the British territories from Burma to the North-western Frontier and as far south as the southernmost tip of the Madras Presidency. No other linguistic cultural group in the subcontinent was ever so extensively involved in the functioning of the Raj – Bengali professionals, doctors, teachers, journalists, lawyers and the like, also followed the flag to all parts of the Indian empire and later beyond its limits and were thus among the direct beneficiaries of Pax Britannica. The economic basis of their livelihood was a direct or indirect product of the colonial state. This was even more true of the new class of landed proprietors with their rights guaranteed by the Permanent Settlement. And then there were those who had collaborated with the Company and its servants in their commercial ventures and, in the process, founded some of the great fortunes of nineteenth-century Calcutta. As is well-known, these varied social groups were not mutually exclusive. Besides, their direct or indirect dependence on the colonial order created a basis for cohesion and a shared social ideology. For a long time that ideology was marked by an almost unqualified gratitude and admiration for the British empire and its creators

‘Given the circumstances facing Indonesian governments in the years 1950–57’, a standard history of Indonesia comments, ‘it is not surprising that the democratic experiment foundered, for there were few foundations upon which representative democracy could be built. Indonesia inherited from the Dutch and Japanese the traditions, assumptions and legal structure ofa police state. The Indonesian masses – mostly illiterate, poor, accustomed to authoritarian and paternalistic rule, and spread over an enormous archipelago – were hardly in a position to force politicians in Jakarta to account for their performance. The politically informed were only a tiny layer of urban society and the Jakarta politicians, while proclaiming their democratic ideals, were mostly elitists and selfconscious participants in a new urban superculture. They were paternalistic towards those less fortunate than themselves and sometimes simply snobbish towards those who, for instance, could not speak fluent Dutch. They had little commitment to the grass-roots structure of representative government and managed to postpone elections for five more years. A plant as rare as representative democracy can hardly grow in such soil.’

A marked feature of the business and industrial élites of post-colonial India and Indonesia is the dominance within them of minority communities. An Indian government commission in 1965 reported that, of the top 75 business houses which controlled almost half of the non-governmental, non-banking assets in the country, Marwari houses occupied the apex with control of Rs 7.5 billion in assets, followed by the Parsis with Rs 4.7 billion and Gujaratis with Rs 3.8 billion. By 1980 the Parsi Tata group represented the largest industrial house in India, followed by the Marwari Birlas. In Indonesia it is the Chinese who overwhelmingly comprise the business and industrial ĺite. Despite problems with quantifiable data, it has been assessed that the Chinese own, at the very least, 70–75% of Indonesia's private domestic capital and that Chinese business conglomerates such as the Liem and Astra groups dominate medium and large-scale corporate capital.

About ten years ago Deepak Nayyar, an Indian economist, lamented on the sluggishness of industrial growth in India, which at the time had persisted for more than ten years, since the rate of industrial growth dropped sharply from an average annual rate of 7.7% during the period 1951–1965 to an average rate of only 3.6% during the decade 1965–1975. Seven years later, at a conference on industrialisation in East and Southeast Asia held at the Australian National University, Canberra, Professor Deepak Lai, a distinguished Indian economist teaching at University College, London, and a consultant to the World Bank, expressed a similar disappointment, describing the absolute level of industrialisation in India as well its contribution to per capita growth as disappointing, even dismal compared with the rapid industrial growth of the four East Asian newly-industrialising countries (NICs), namely South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.