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The “Classical” in Southeast Asia: The Present in the Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2011

Michael Aung-Thwin
Michael Aung-Thwin
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North Illinois University
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When historians refer to the “classical” period in Southeast Asia, they usually mean the era roughly between the ninth and fourteenth centuries A.d. When they speak of the “classical” states, they are referring most often to the region's first great kingdoms — Pagan, Sukhothai, Angkor, Dai Viet, Srivijaya, and Majapahit — the civilizations that gave birth to many of the nations in Southeast Asia today. Yet, the very idea of a “classical” Southeast Asia has not been debated sufficiently in the literature.

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Articles
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Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 26 , 25th Anniversary Special Issue 1: Perspectives on Southeast Asian Studies , March 1995 , pp. 75 - 91
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Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1995

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References

1 In the recent festschrift for John Smail, several new issues regarding “autonomous history” are only now being raised, pushing the debate further. See Laurie, Sears (ed.), Autonomous Histories, Particular Truths Essays in Honor of John Smail (Madison: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Monograph No. 11, 1993).Google Scholar

2 See Legge's, John D. masterful essay, “The Writing of Southeast Asian History”, in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. I, ed. Nicholas, Tarling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1–50Google Scholar. It is the most recent, comprehensive account of the field of Southeast Asian Studies focused on the discipline of history dealing with the period before 1800. For a similarly broad, comprehensive, and relatively recent survey of the literature, but on the subject of the early states and from an anthropological perspective, see Bentley, G. Carter, “Indigenous States of Southeast Asia”, American Review of Anthropology 15 (1986): 275–305.Google Scholar

Earlier, D.G.E. Hall's edited volume Historians of South East Asia (London: Oxford University Press, 1961)Google Scholar, the result of seminars held between 1956 and 1958, provides a very good barometer of the trends in Southeast Asian history up to the early 1960s. This was followed by Soedjatmoko, , Ali, Mohammad, Resink, G.J., and Kahin, G. McT. (eds.), An Introduction to Indonesian Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965)Google Scholar, another major work of the same kind. The first edition of In Search of Southeast Asia (New York: Praeger, 1971)Google Scholar by Steinberg, David J. and others, was the next important contribution to the development and synthesis of the field. In the 1970s and 1980s Cowan, C.D. and Wolters, O.W. (eds.), Southeast Asian History and Historiography: Essays Presented to D.G.E. Hall (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976)Google Scholar and Reid, Anthony and Maar, David (eds.), Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979)Google Scholar continued analyzing the direction in which the field was headed. There are other studies of a comparable nature, which will be cited passim throughout this essay, which focuses primarily on the so-called “classical period”. My analysis of the field, I must admit, is largely American- and history-centric.

3 See Benedict, R.Anderson, O'G., Language and Power Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, and Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

4 Ian Mabbitt's works on the devaraja cited in Legge, “The Writing of Southeast Asian History”, Tambiah, S.J., World Conqueror and World Renouncer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, and Aung-Thwin, Michael, “Kingship in Southeast Asia”, in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea, Eliade, vol. 8 (New York: MacMillan, 1987), pp. 333–36, are some examples.Google Scholar

5 Since the above mentioned works appeared, I know of only three historians, strictly speaking, who have published entire monographs in English on the “classical” state based on original, indigenous sources: Taylor, Keith, Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Aung-Thwin, Michael, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Wolters, O.W., Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of Sri Vijaya (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967)Google Scholar and The Fall ofSrivijaya in Malay History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970)Google Scholar. There are, however, several other historians using primary sources who are knowledgeable about this early period and whose monographs we eagerly await. They include Pamela Gutman on Arakan, Jan Wisseman-Christie on Java, and Michael Vickery on Angkor. There are a few others writing in Southeast Asian languages about which I have only second-hand information, such as Vallibhotama, Srisakara, Siam: Thailand's Historical Background from Prehistoric Times to Ayutthaya, second edition (Bangkok: Piganes Printing, 1992).Google Scholar

6 See Laurie Sears’ own introductory article “The Contingency of Autonomous History”, in Autonomous Histories, ed. Sears, pp. 3–35. In terms of “updating” Benda's notion of time and periodization with more recent theories of change — particularly “punctuated equilibrium” – arising from geological and biological sciences, see Aung-Thwin, Michael, “The Spiral in Early Burmese and Southeast Asian History”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 21, 4 (Spring 1991): 572–602.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Even this small number depends on the inclusion of the epigraphists who lean more towards philology than history. The number of historians who have used only (or mainly) indigenous, primary, sources to reconstruct this period, is even fewer.

8 The seminars held in the late 1950s from which resulted Hall's Historians, not only did not raise the issue of a “classical” period, but when referring to the early eras, used the European categories of “ancient” and “medieval” instead. See p. 6 of the Hall volume.

9 Hall, Kenneth R. and Whitmore, John K. (eds.), Explorations in Early Southeast Asian History: The Origins of Southeast Asian Statecraft (Ann Arbor: Papers on South and Southeast Asia, no. 11, 1976)Google Scholar grew out of John Whitmore's graduate seminars at the University of Michigan which in turn drew on ideas developed in O.W. Wolters’ classes at Cornell where Whitmore was trained. That the concept of “classical” was already accepted as valid is attested in the Foreword along with Hall's introductory essay which explicitly mentions the “classical period” (p. 1). Hall subsequently produced Maritime Thade and State Development in Early Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985)Google Scholar but there preferred the term “indianized” rather than “classical” (p. 2). Osborne's, MiltonSoutheast Asia An Introductory History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1979)Google Scholar also raises some brief but interesting issues about the term “classical”

Actually, Benda, Harry had used the term “classical” earlier, in his famous article on the “Structure of Southeast Asian History: Some Preliminary Observations”, Journal of Southeast Asian History 3, 1 (1962)Google Scholar, reprinted in Continuity and Change in Southeast Asia: Collected Journal Articles of Harry J. Benda (New Haven, 1972), p. 125Google Scholar. However, he was referring to a much longer (and at the time more obscure) period, from the fourth century B.C. to the fourteenth century A.D. The term as it is taken today refers to a much shorter and better defined period, and to a time when the kingdoms mentioned above unified large sections of what later became the nations of today. In any case, the concept of “classical” could not have emerged much earlier since the field itself was created only after World War II.

10 See Lorraine, Gesick (ed.), Centers, Symbols, and Hierarchies: Essays on the Classical States of Southeast Asia (New Haven: Monograph Series no. 26, Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1983). Here is another example of not dealing with important issues thoroughly, in this case, “indigenous conceptual systems”, to which we are bound to return some day.Google Scholar

11 See Marr, David G. and Milner, A.C. (eds.), Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies and the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Even though Hermann Kulke's essay in this volume on “The Early and the Imperial Kingdom in Southeast Asian History”, pp. 1–22, dealt specifically with the “classical” states, he chose to characterize these polities both chronologically and structurally — as “early” and “imperial” kingdoms. Jan Wisseman-Christie's essay “Negara, Mandala, and Despotic State: Images of Early Java” in the same volume, pp. 65–93, does include the term “classical”. She was, however, one of the members present at the Princeton meeting. Carter Bentley in “Indigenous States” refers to “classical” and “postclassical” kingdoms.

12 Wolters, O.W., History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982).Google Scholar

13 Ladurie, Emanuel LeRoy, The Mind and Method of the Historian, trans. Sian, Reynolds and Ben, Reynolds (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 2Google Scholar, and his The Territory of the Historian, trans. Ben, and Reynolds, Sian [sic] (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar. See also Braudel, Fernand, On History, tr. Matthews, Sarah (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980).Google Scholar

14 Although Anthony Reid and Norman Owen, for example, have been influenced by the theoretical concerns of the Annales school, they do not deal with the period before the fourteenth century or with the “classical states” per se. Thus the contributions to Norman, Owen (ed.), Death and Disease in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Oxford University Press for the Asian Studies Association of Australia, 1987)Google Scholar focus on the nineteenth century, Reid's, while AnthonySoutheast Asia in the Age of Commerce — 1450–1680, Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988)Google Scholar and Volume Two: Expansion and Crisis (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1994) begin in the fifteenth. Similarly, even though I deal with this period and have embraced much of the theoretical and methodological concerns of the Annales school, I have not addressed the issue of “classicism” until now, except to suggest that the influences and guiding principles of Braudel's “longue durée” and Ladurie's “l'histoire immobile” be applied to “classicism” by extending it beyond an arbitrarily defined period; so that we should regard “classicism” more as a continuing phenomenon of type than a unique feature of time, whose components one finds even today. These thoughts are elaborated in Aung-Thwin, ‘The Spiral”.Google Scholar

15 See the foreword by Clifford Geertz in Gesick (ed.), Centers, Symbols, and Hierarchies, pp. viii-x.

16 Thus, for example, Jan Wisseman's “Raja and Rama: The Classical State in Early Java” in Centers, Symbols, and Hierarchies, Gesick (ed.), pp. 9–44, considers the kingdom of “Majapahit” to have begun by the early eighth century even though technically the city did not become the capital until the late thirteenth century. Keith Taylor in his article “The Early Kingdoms” (The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Vol. 1) also places Majapahit with the other “classical” states although he refrains from using that phrase (p. 176).

17 Even then, this analysis has not included the “classical ages” of the other parts of the Island world, which occurred somewhat later. See Reid, Anthony, “Introduction: A Time and a Place”, Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief, ed. Anthony, Reid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 9.Google Scholar

18 Emmerson, Donald K., “Southeast Asia: What's In a Name?”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15, 1 (1984): pp. 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 The perception of Southeast Asia as “lands below the winds” is largely an exogenous description by Indians, Persians, and Arabs (see Reid, The Age of Commerce, p, 6), although a travelogue on Borneo published in the 1940s, by Keith, Agnes Newton with the title Land Below the Wind (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1940)Google Scholar suggests that the concept was still prevalent among the “Malays”. Suvarnabhumi is an Indian appellation for what is now known as Southeast Asia, while Golden Khersonese was an ancient Indian term. See Wheatley, Paul, The Golden Khersonese (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1961).Google Scholar

20 Benda suggested that only transformations in institutions be considered valid criteria for periodization. See ‘The Structure of Southeast Asian History”.

21 Edward, Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 1–28, 201–328.Google Scholar

22 I must confess to being one of the most vehement instigators of the idea that “Indianized” should be abandoned in favour of “Classical” at that meeting. In retrospect, part of the reason for my objection to “indianization” was the modern prejudice against Indians in twentieth-century Burma, where because many Indians were of a lower socio-economic status, we concluded that they surely could not have influenced Burma in the past.

23 Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society, trans, by Manyon, L.A., Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 59.Google Scholar

24 See Barnes, Harry Elmer, A History of Historical Writing (New York, 1962).Google Scholar

25 I would also argue that such projections of the present onto the past for academic reasons, are quite different from a conscious and deliberate revisionism of the past to serve present political agenda, an issue of intent beyond the scope of this essay.

26 Aung-Thwin, Michael, “Jambudipa: Classical Burma's Camelot”, Contributions to Asian Studies 16 (1981): 38–61.Google Scholar

27 My choice of these kingdoms as “classical”, itself is a value judgement not necessarily shared by everyone, including the descendants of the people who created them. Keith Taylor among others, for example, may consider Ayutthaya, rather than Sukhothai, the “classical” state of Thailand while Betty Gosling might consider the former as more appropriate. See Taylor, , “The Early Kingdoms” and Betty Gosling, Sukhothai: Its History, Culture, and Art (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 1.Google Scholar

28 Benedict, Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar. See also Winichakul, Tongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).Google Scholar

29 We find some of these concepts in Reid and Marr (eds.), Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, Hall, Historians, Soedjatmoko et al. (eds.), Indonesian Historiography, and Hall, Southeast Asian History and Historiography.

30 Bernard Cohn's insightful essay on the close relationship between British colonial, administrative concerns and consequent scholarly constructs of certain subjects in India (such as castes and land ownership) is an extremely instructive case in point. See his An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

31 Said, Orientalism, pp. 12, 27 and passim. If pushed, I would go even farther, and suggest that our perceptions of Southeast Asia have a great deal to do with our individual personalities as well. Whether we “see” a centralized, bureaucratic state or a decentralized, loosely organized mandala; an “oriental despot” or the lead performer in a national ritual, may very well reflect our own personal preferences regarding “boring” orderliness and authority or “exciting” chaos and autonomy.

32 Becker's, Presidential address delivered at the American Historical Association in Minneapolis on December 29, 1931 and published in the American Historical Review, 37 (1932): 221–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar speaks to the issue of historical relativism, as “everyman was his own historian”. For Butterfield, see The Whig Interpretation of History (W.W. Norton, 1950). The thoughts of Gibbon and Humboldt can be found in Barnes, A History of Historical Writing and elsewhere.Google Scholar

33 Whereas there were very few Ph.D. dissertations in history written in English on the “classical” states during the twenty years (or more) prior to the 1970s in the United States, England, and Australia, there were at least five during the 1970s and 1980s. Not that English and these three countries are the supreme measurements for deciding what is important, but it can be argued that they might be used as barometers for trends in the field. Moreover, arguably some of the most important theoretical works on precolonial Southeast Asia also emerged during or after the 1970s, most notably those of Clifford Geertz, Paul Wheatley, Stanley Tambiah, and O.W. Wolters. Thus, the decade between the 1970s and 1980s was an important period in American and Australian scholarship in terms of increased knowledge of this early era.

34 O.W. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce and The Fall of Srivijaya; Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese, Lamb, Alastair, “Takuapa: The Probable Site of a Pre-Malaccan Entrepot in the Malay Peninsula”, in Malayan and Indonesian Studies: Essays Presented to Sir Richard Winstedt, eds. Bastin, J. and Roolvink, R. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Smith, R.B. and Watson, W. (eds.), Early South East Asia: Essays in Archaeology, History and Historical Geography (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, and Higham, C., The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Bellwood, Peter, Prehistory of the Indo-Mataysian Archipelago (New York: Academic Press, 1985) and his article “Southeast Asia Before History” (Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Vol. 1, pp. 55–136) bring some earlier queries up to date.Google Scholar

35 Gould, Stephen J., “Lucy in the Earth with Stasis”, Natural History 103, 9 (Sep. 1994): 12–20.Google Scholar

36 I have unabashedly stolen Geertz's use of the terms “Great Beast” and “Great Fraud”, although the “Great Drama” is my own depiction of his “theatre state”. See also Wisseman-Christie, “Negara, Mandala, and Despotic State”, in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, Marr and Milner (eds.), for another assessment of the “classical” states.

37 The authors and the issues they raised as summarized here can be found cited in Michael Aung- Thwin, “Spirals”.

38 This is not the same as saying that we have not moved from a structure of “this versus that” to one which is inclusive, i.e. “this and that”. We now concede, for instance, that the issue is no longer nature versus nurture, but nature and nurture; not change or continuity but change and continuity. Yet in early Southeast Asian history we still consider centralized states to be in opposition to multi-centred polities, mandala paradigms to pyramidal ones, continuity to change.

39 I use Geertz's spelling of negara rather than Paul Wheatley's nagara as a better representation of the contrast between the commandery and the “theatre state”. Wheatley clearly accepted the presence of both nagaras and commanderies in Southeast Asia as a whole, but my point here is that we are reluctant to accept them in the same society. See his Nagara and Commandery: Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Traditions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Papers 207–208, 1983).Google Scholar

40 Gould's choice of words taken from “Lucy”, p. 12.

41 There is a great deal of literature on time among anthropologists, but Southeast Asian historians have apparently not paid much attention to it.

42 Harry Benda grasped this important notion over thirty years ago, although he still thought of time as linear.

43 In a very interesting article, Michael Shermer argues for nonlinearity, but apparently of a different kind from what I have in mind. See his “The Chaos of History: On a Chaotic Model That Represents the Rote of Contingency and Necessity in Historical Sequences”, Nonlinear Science Today 2, 4 (1993): 1–13, where he writes of time as “…the entropic arrow…” (p. 5) moving only in one direction. That to me, is still linear.Google Scholar

44 Gould, Stephen Jay, “Cordelia's Dilemma”, Natural History (Feb. 1993): 10–18. Gould sees change in an irregular and unpredictable fashion called “punctuated equilibrium”, whereby long periods of relative equilibrium are punctuated by dramatic change.Google Scholar

45 Gould, “Lucy”.

46 The linear and progressive component added to this debate by Paul Wheatley in Nagara and Commandery is a case in point. He argued that the development of urban society precedes state formation, a linear paradigm. Although O'Connor, Richard, in A Theory of Indigenous Southeast Asian Urbanism (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Research Notes and Discussions Paper no. 38,1983)Google Scholar, questions whether urbanization was necessary for state formation, linearity was not the issue being raised. For this “cityless” view of “civilization”, see also Bronson, Bennett and Wisseman, Jan, “Palembang as Srivijaya: The Lateness of Early Cities in Southern Southeast Asia”, Asian Perspectives 19 (1976): 220–39.Google Scholar

47 Reid, Anthony, Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 1–11 discusses and explains the use of the term “early modern”. However, neither “early modern” nor “traditional” has seen much debate in print, and both are as problematic as “classical” and “post-classical”.Google Scholar

48 In a paper entitled “The Myth of the Three Shan Brothers’” delivered at the 13th annual IAHA Conference, September 5–9, 1994, Tokyo, Japan, I show how early colonial and Burmese historians trained under the same system periodized and organized Burmese history according to ethnic criteria.Google Scholar

49 Reid, Lands Below the Winds, and Lieberman, Victor, “Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies: Structuring Southeast Asian History, c. 1350-c. 1830”, Modern Asian Studies 27, 3 (1993): 486.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 See Fogel, Robert and Engerman, Stanley, Time on the Cross (Boston: Little-Brown, 1974).Google Scholar

51 See Coedes, George, The Making of Southeast Asia, tr. by Wright, H.M. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 126.Google Scholar

52 Aung-Thwin, Pagan.

53 Coedes was not totally unaware of internal problems either. See The Making of Southeast Asia, p. 123.

54 Ladurie argues that the “black death” in Europe made France's history “stand still” (introducing the concept of Thistoire immobile”), so that the “France” of 1320 was in many respects like the France of 1720. See his The Mind and Method.

55 C.C. Berg, “Javanese Historiography – A Synopsis of Its Evolution”, pp. 13–23, and “The Work of Professor Krom”, pp. 164–71, both in Hall (ed.), Historians of Southeast Asia.

56 For Southeast Asianists involved in this search, see Legge, “The Writing of Southeast Asian History”, pp. 43–50.

57 If taken to its logical conclusion, deconstructionism must extend into studies about the brain and its neurons and synapses. How do we know that the author of the text we have used was not suffering from some protein deficiency that caused “false consciousness” or paranoia – the “reality” behind the text? As a historian, I draw the line before entering the world of the bio-psychologist.

58 To quote Neil McMullin, in response to Masao Miyoshi's review of Jeffrey Mass, Antiquity and Anachronism in Japanese History:

“Historians are quite properly being called upon to be more self-conscious of, to reflect more upon, the nature of their endeavor. No doubt this is important, fruitful, and even necessary, but it need not be the only subject of historians’ discourse: occasionally historians should write history… One wonders whether we in the Humanities have not gotten a bit carried away solipsistically with our own presence and importance…

Everything, it is fashionable to claim, is a mental construct. There are no ‘mistakes’ in the record, just different ways of constructing things, different ‘discourse’; there is no truth, only local knowledges, and thus no lines – and, correlatively, no justice… Signs are taken to symbolize only other signs in an infinitely regressive tunnel of mirrors in which no-‘thing’ is reflected…

The fashionable approaches are more often than not characterized by relativism and obscurantism … it is most ironic that many relativists are absolute in their relativism. There is no truth, and that's the truth of it …“

See “Communication to the Editor”, Journal of Asian Studies 53, 2 (May 1994): 676–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar