Farish A. Noor

Dr. Farish A. Noor is Professor at the Department of History, Faculty of the Arts and Social Sciences, University Malaya (UM). He is also Visiting Professor at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.

If one were to attempt a cursory overview of the nation-states of present-day Southeast Asia today, one will encounter a common feature: In the official history books of the countries of the region, we read histories that are national in character, with many of them being somewhat inward-looking, almost parochial is scope and interest. Why is this the case, and why is it that the official histories of the countries of the region have given scant regard to the much longer and older history of cultural contact, exchange and cross-fertilization?

A simple answer to the question above is this: That as the former colonies of the British, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese and American empires gained their independence in the wake of the Second World War, there emerged a new generation of postcolonial historians who set themselves the task of rewriting the respective national histories of their countries. That this was an urgent task then is wholly understandable, when we consider the fact that the communities of the region had lived under the yoke of Western colonial rule for hundreds of years, and that in the course of the anti-colonial struggle gaining control of the state apparatus was the primary objective of thousands of nationalists across the region.

Having liberated themselves from their former colonial masters, this first generation of nationalist historians - living and working as they did in the 1940s and 1950s - began reconstituting the broken body of the nation that had been rent asunder by horizontal and vertical social cleavages that were part and parcel of the colonial enterprise. The underlying belief, then, was that the nation they belonged to had experienced a rupture in its history, and had to be put back together again. To that end, a historical recovery of sorts had to be undertaken, where the precolonial past of the broken nation had to be excavated and restored, and reconnected to the postcolonial present. Remembering is precisely that: The process of re-membering the broken memory of the nation.

However, it also has to be pointed that all of the postcolonial states of Southeast Asia were immediately thrown into the maelstrom of a wider global political arena that was populated by modern nation-states; and that these nation-states bore the distinct imprint of the modern Western nation-state inherited from the time of Westphalia. The countries of Southeast Asia had no choice but to try to survive in this global system, for there was no other world to run to. And within this new geopolitical arena, the nation-state - seen and understood as an entity that was unique and distinct, with borders that were clearly drawn and with national identities that were likewise well-defined - was the norm. It is not surprising, therefore, to see that as the first generation of Southeast Asian historians began to work their craft and write their respective national histories, those histories bore the features of national histories that were likewise distinct, exclusive and singularly unique. From the colonial past to the postcolonial present, Southeast Asians - be they intellectuals or laypersons alike - were caught within the paradigm of the singular nation-state as the primary agent on the stage of global politics.

National Histories at the Cost of Regional History

Kirti Narayan Chaudhuri (b. 1934), in his outstanding work Asia Before Europe (1990) has shown how we can re-imagine the wider world of Asia before the arrival of Western imperialism and the division of Asia into the artificial regional blocs and categories that we are familiar with today.[1] In his work, he points to the fact that prior to the advent of the Westphalian state with its neatly demarcated and policed borders, the vast continent of Asia was in fact a poly-nuclear region where a host of active and interactive polities existed, engaged in commerce and exchange with one another.

This observation can be brought to bear upon the region of Southeast Asia in particular, that was, by virtue of its geographical centrality at the maritime crossroads between India (or more accurately, the many kingdoms and polities of the Indian subcontinent) and China (or more accurately the various dynasties and kingdoms of China). Chaudhuri challenges his readers to rethink the geography of precolonial Asia by noting that the Indian Ocean was not a barrier to movement, migration and trade, but rather the conduit that facilitated the exchange of commodities, cultures, languages, religions and ideas. Rather than see the Indian Ocean as a wall that separated the different parts of Asia at the time, the Indian Ocean was in fact the corridor that brought maritime Asia together.

Chaudhuri’s contribution to the debate over regional and collective identities is crucial, for he (and many other historians) has noted that the regional blocs that we know today - be in ‘Southeast Asia’, ‘South Asia’, ‘East Asia’ - happen to be nominal constructs that were discursively invented. Lest we forget, it would be wise to remind ourselves that the concept of ‘Southeast Asia’ is an alien idea that was imported and imposed upon the nations of the region during the colonial era by the colonial powers, as they carved up Asia and Africa into neat chunks that served the needs of colonial governance and colonial-capitalism. It would not be too farfetched to state bluntly that pre-colonial Southeast Asians never thought of themselves as being to the Southeast of anyone, and probably regarded their region as the centre of their political, economic and socio-cultural world.

It is also important to note that the economic, political and cultural development of Southeast Asia was the result of its interaction with other parts of the world, from the greater Asian continent and beyond. Southeast Asia was able to develop thanks to the constant movement of people, ideas and commodities across Asia for centuries, and along with that movement came the process of local adaptation and assimilation as the cultures, languages, philosophies and epistemologies of the wider Asian continent arrived in the region and were adapted through the workings of a local genius that was Southeast Asian in character.

One does not have to look far to see evidence of this long process of cultural overlap and cross-fertilization that remains with us until today. The languages of Southeast Asia bear similarities with one another in an uncanny way, and virtually all of the native tongues of Southeast Asia also happen to have borrowed much of the vocabulary from Sanskrit too - India being one of the region’s closest and oldest civilisational neighbors.

In the domains of popular culture and material history, we see instances of cross-cultural overlap and borrowing all around us, until today. The myths and legends of the Indian subcontinent - notably two of the greatest epics India has gifted to the world, namely the Mahabharata and the Ramayana - are also part of the national culture of many Southeast Asian nations, and have become part of the local culture in this part of the world, after having been sifted, adopted and adapted by locals to suit their local sensibilities and sensitivities. From Myanmar to Thailand to Cambodia and Laos, the Ramayana remains part and parcel of the local culture of these societies, notwithstanding their South Asian origins, without there ever being raised the question of whether such epic narratives were ‘foreign’ in the first place. The same can be said about the popularity of the Mahabharata in Indonesia too.

To a lesser extent we can also see how the beliefs, myths, vocabularies and philosophies of China have also permeated into the wider cultural domain of Southeast Asia, with traces of it evident until today.[2]

Here we need to ask ourselves how such large-scale, long-term cultural borrowing and exchange could have taken place, and how Southeast Asians were able to sustain such an open, inclusive and accommodating cultural outlook for so long.

Firstly, we need to take note of the simple fact that during this long period of cultural overlap, borrowing and exchange, there was nothing akin to the narrowly-confined, exclusive and singular nation-state as we know today. No historian has ever found evidence of there ever being anything akin to a ‘civilising mission’ on the part of the kingdoms and rulers of India, where efforts were made to ‘Indianise’ Southeast Asia as a matter of policy. Secondly, there is nothing to suggest that the polities of Southeast Asia in the precolonial period viewed themselves as exclusive, solitary political units, with a clear understanding of what constituted the ‘local’ and what constituted the ‘foreign’, couched in the language of oppositional dialectics.

If anything, Southeast Asian societies and polities seemed to behave in exactly the manner that Chaudhuri described them: As fluid polities that were able to both accept and lend/give both material commodities as well as cultural symbols and tokens as part of the process of engagement with the Other. We should not, however, assume that life in pre-colonial Southeast Asia was a hippy paradise where love and kinship reigned supreme all the time, for the absence of a sense of common regional identity also meant that the different kingdoms of the region were equally inclined to compete against one another, without there being any common ‘identity glue’ to bind them together as Southeast Asians. We do know that the region witnessed successive wars between various warring kingdoms, such as the long conflicts between successive Burman dynasties and the dynasties of Siam.[3] Yet despite the many instances of rivalry and contestation between the many kingdoms of Southeast Asia that took place well into the 17^th century, there remains ample evidence of how these kingdoms and nations also shared many common cultural, religious, linguistic and civilisational factors. The polities of Southeast Asia were able to live together, trade together, exchange with one another and occasionally went to war against each other - but they did so as part of a fluid continuum of nations that were in geographical proximity to one another.

Imperialism and the ‘Colonial Divorce’

How and when were the polities of Southeast Asia divorced from one another, and when did the rupture between ‘Southeast Asia’ and ‘South’ and ‘East’ Asia occur?

Here it is important to remind ourselves of the workings of racialised colonial capitalism during the era of Empire, and in particular to pay close attention to how the wider Asian continent was divided and subdivided into regional blocs that were seen as distinct and different. Much of this took place from the late 18^th to mid-20^th centuries, when the world of Southeast Asia was divided thanks to the arrival of the colonial companies that originated from the Western world.

The emergence of entities such as the Dutch East Indies Company, the British East India Company and other militarised corporate entities such as the French Compagnie des Indes marked a significant turning point in the development of the modern nation-state that was the culmination of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) in Europe and the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648) between the Dutch and the Spanish in Hapsburg Netherlands. In the course of these overlapping struggles for political sovereignty and territoriality, entities such as the Dutch East Indies Company signaled the arrival of a new form of Western economic nationalism, and also the demise of an understanding of European identity that was previously couched in the belief that a common religious identity could bind all of Christendom together.

Having witnessed the rapid growth of Spain and Portugal as a result of their conquest of the lands of South America, the other countries of Europe - notably England, Holland and France - likewise chose to pursue their respective dreams of Empire in order to counter the rise of their neighbours in Europe. The race for Empire had begun in earnest in Europe, and with Western expansionism it would be Asia and Africa that would end up being colonised and conquered, and later divided and parceled off into chunks of territory that would be integrated into different (and competing) European imperial domains.

From its victory at the Battle of Palasi (Plassey) in Bengal, India, in 1757, the forces of the British East India Company would spread its presence across much of India; and in the course of doing so would also war against its other European rivals such as the French and the Dutch who likewise eyed the subcontinent as a prize. Within the space of a century the very same European powers would extend their reach to Southeast Asia, and Britain - along with Holland, France, Spain and Portugal - would carve up the region and divide the communities and polities of Southeast Asia into colonial enclaves that would become part of their own empires. This process of colonial conquest would continue in earnest for much of the 19^th century, and in the case of Burma the conquest of the land would come in a successive of Anglo-Burmese Wars (1824-1826, 1852-1853, 1885) that were bloody and traumatic, culminating the fall of the last ruler of Burma King Thibaw Min (1859-1916) of the Konbaung dynasty. Holland’s conquest of the Indonesian archipelago was likewise a long and violent affair, with successive battles and wars fought not only across the whole of Java but also across Sumatra, Sulawesi, Kalimantan (Borneo), Ambon and the Moluccas, all the way to Timor and Papua. Though there was active resistance to Dutch expansionism across the region (such as the Java War of 1825-1830 led by the Javanese noble Prince Diponegoro (1785-1855)), by the end of the 19^th century the Dutch would find themselves in command of most of the archipelago. By that time the British had also succeeded in their intervention into the affairs of the Malay kingdoms of the Malay Peninsula, and had managed to defeat the Malay kingdom of Brunei (in July 1846), thereby gaining direct and indirect control of Sarawak as well as Northern Borneo for themselves.

Notwithstanding the fact that the colonial conquest of Southeast Asia was often a violent process, it should be remembered that in terms of the duration of these wars that were fought they represent a much smaller portion of time compared to the long duration of colonial administration of the different colonies in the region.[4] Additionally we need to remind ourselves that while lands can be conquered with the rifle and bayonet, weapons are not - and can never be - administrative tools.

Far more important to the colonial enterprise were the regimes of knowledge and power that were introduced to the colonies by the Western colonial powers. These regimes of knowledge and power came in the form of methodologies and disciplines in domains as diverse as public administration and logistics, to healthcare and education.[5] It was through the introduction of Western modes of colonial administration - bolstered by the creation of a new generation of Southeast Asian colonial subjects trained and educated to serve as colonial functionaries, bureaucrats, policemen and soldiers - that Southeast Asia and the colonies in it was re-imagined as separate entities, imbued with specific features and native characteristics that made them different from one another. In the case of Java, the Malay kingdoms, Burma, etc. the ‘myth of the lazy native’ was introduced to re-present the Javanese, Malays, Burmans as agrarian communities that were trapped in the past, disinclined towards scientific enquiry and unable to progress without Western intervention.[6] Such stereotypes were crucial to the politics of divide and rule that were put to work in many of these colonies, and the legacy of these stereotypes persist until today.

It was during this period that a host of Orientalist tropes and understandings - about native characteristics, capabilities and worldviews - was brought to bear upon a region that was being divided into colonies that were cast as distinct and different from one another.[7] Accompanying this process of re-imagining the natives of the region was a succession of treaties that were mostly signed between the Western colonial powers that divided Southeast Asia into parcels and chunks that belonged to different colonial regimes: The British Empire, the Dutch empire, the French empire, the Spanish empire and the Portuguese empire. What was once a fluid and interconnected region was slowly but surely being torn apart into different (and sometimes competing and warring) colonial-imperial domains, all of which were answerable to their colonial overlords back in London, Paris and The Hague.

Compounding the loss of territoriality for the Southeast Asians was the rapidly growing technological divide between East and West, and by the mid-19th century maritime Southeast Asia had become a contested space where the modern and sophisticated navies of Western Europe held sway. During the Napoleonic Wars that ended in 1815 the navies of Britain, France and Holland battled it out for maritime preeminence and hegemony, and by the last decades of the same century Western armoured steamships and gunboats outclassed and outgunned almost all the native navies of the region. Southeast Asians were no longer able to travel freely in their own waters, and though intra-Southeast Asian trade did continue - and was in fact encouraged - it was a form of trade that was controlled, policed and regulated by the dominant colonial powers. Southeast Asia was also drawn apart and away from the Indian subcontinent, that had for centuries been the region’s closest and oldest cultural-civilisational neighbour. As the Indian subcontinent became ‘British India’, the wider world of the Indian Ocean was divided into distinct domains bearing the (Western imposed) labels ‘South Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’.

Fluidity, complexity and cross-fertilisation eventually came to a halt, under the auspices of an imperial-colonial order of knowledge and power where the mapping of Asia also led to its division and rupture. And it is this divided world that we have inherited today, one where identities have been narrowed and compartmentalised thanks to the legacy of Empire. Even as the countries of Southeast Asia regained their independence one by one in the mid-20^th century, they have not been able to return to the precolonial past where a sense of common regional identity may have once existed.

The paths not taken: Southeast Asia’s Fluidity Frozen during the Cold War

From the late 19^th century to the middle of the 20^th century, there emerged across all of Southeast Asia a myriad of anti-colonial movements that were inspired by the nationalist movements in other parts of Asia: The rise of nationalism in India and China, along with the meteoric rise of Japan as an Asian military power (albeit with imperial ambitions of its own), provided a host of Southeast Asian nationalist intellectuals and activists with ideas about how they could eventually liberate their own countries from Western colonial rule. Winning control of their respective states became the goal of the day, and leaders like Jose Rizal, Sukarno, Ho Chi Minh and others began to articulate a new discourse of national liberation and self-determination in no uncertain terms.

One of the more interesting projects that was considered during this time was the notion that the countries of Maritime Southeast Asia could shake off the yoke of British, Dutch, Spanish and American imperialism and somehow reactivate the memory of a Maritime Southeast Asia that was closely connected thanks to shared cultural, linguistic and religious norms. It was during this period - from the 1900s to the 1940s - that there emerged the idea/s of somehow reuniting the landscape of Maritime Southeast Asia into an expansive and inclusive ‘Greater Indonesia’ or ‘Greater Malaya’, uniting the peoples of Malaya, the Straits Settlements, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines once again. Men like Jose Rizal spoke and wrote about a sense of belonging to the ‘Malay race’ in the widest cultural (as opposed to biologically essentialist) sense. The division of Southeast Asia into different Western colonies, each wed to its respective Western imperial domain, was seen as a great injustice to the collective memory of Southeast Asians generations earlier.

However it should be noted here that these early attempts at reuniting the broken body of Southeast Asia and reconnecting the peoples of Southeast Asia was also a complex and problematic endeavour, for such ideological projects were premised on the notion that there was such a thing as a relatively united, cohesive Southeast Asia in the first place, endowed with a sense of common identity. As we have argued earlier, this was not necessarily the case, for though the region was indeed a fluid and open space there is little to prove that the people of the region thought of themselves as ‘Southeast Asians’ prior to the colonial encounter. What was likely to have been in existence is a myriad of overlapping and criss-crossing cultural domains where similarities of language, religion and culture may have existed - as in the case of the widespread use of Malay as the lingua franca of Maritime Southeast Asia. But this does not mean that all Southeast Asians identified themselves as Southeast Asians before the coming of the Western colonial powers.

Notwithstanding the absence of an older and deeper understanding of Southeast Asian identity among the peoples of the region, the nationalists of Southeast Asia were spurred on by the rapid defeat and capitulation of the Western colonial powers when Japan invaded and occupied the region; and during this period under Japanese tutelage the nationalists of Malaya and Indonesia were allowed to dream of the imminent possibility of bringing their countries closer together. Close to the end of the Second World War some nationalist leaders of Malaya and Indonesia even proposed that both their countries could and should unilaterally declare independence on the same day. And yet the dream of re-uniting the broken body of Southeast Asia never took place. One of the main reasons for this was the advent of the Cold War, and how the newly minted states of Southeast Asia were thrown from the frying pan and into the fire as soon as the Second World War ended.

The states of Southeast Asia emerged in a state of emergency. For as soon as the countries of the region gained their independence (some via armed struggle, while others were negotiated affairs), they found themselves on a new geopolitical map that was already being carved up between the Western and Eastern blocs. While some countries like Vietnam would eventually come under the influence and control of the Communists, other countries - like Indonesia - would walk the tightrope of trying to balance the competing (and often mutually exclusive) demands of the communists and nationalists in their midst.

By the 1960s, the hot logic of the Cold War would render it virtually impossible for the countries and communities of Southeast Asia to come together. Ideology trumped culture, and the immediate needs of the political present overrode the older memory of movement, settlement, cultural exchange and assimilation. Following the virtual elimination of the communists in Indonesia in 1965, five Southeast Asian countries - Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, created the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967. Southeast Asia was divided yet again, but this time along an ideological divide that not only split the region in two, but also stretched across the rest of the world. Yet this ‘new’ Southeast Asia was built on the foundations of the Western colonies of the past, and the map of Southeast Asia that they inherited was the same map of Empire from the past as well.

Having inherited a political geography that was in so many ways shaped by the logic of Empire, the first generation of nationalist historians in the region set themselves to work by writing the national histories of their respective countries. By virtue of being national histories, many of these official historical narratives were inward-looking and self-referential. Forgotten, in this process, was the fact that all of the countries of Southeast Asia were born in the womb of Southeast Asia itself, and the cultural-mental disconnect that was initiated during the era of Western colonialism was reproduced and perpetuated by the nationalist historians of Southeast Asia themselves. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Southeast Asia’s Fluid and Complex History: Where has it Gone?

By way of concluding, allow me to raise a number of questions related to the theme of complexity and fluidity in history.

It was recently announced that the governments of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, est. 1967) will begin the process of admitting the state of East Timor into its ranks. This announcement was well received in many quarters, and for many it was also long overdue. And yet the question remains, as to whether East Timor will eventually be admitted into the ASEAN regional grouping as yet another nation-state - whose identity and origins can be traced back to the dominant paradigm of the nation-state known and recognised the world over, or whether East Timor is being invited into ASEAN as a fellow Southeast Asian nation and a member of the Southeast Asian family of nations.

This question is one that supersedes the technicalities of mere semantics, for to be seen and recognized as a fellow Southeast Asian nation means more than simply being in geographical proximity to the other countries of ASEAN. It means recognizing that there is something intrinsic to East Timor’s identity that makes it a family member; that it shares cultural, linguistic, historical similarities with the other states of ASEAN that makes it closer to us not only geographically but also culturally and historically.

If the latter were indeed the case, then we need to ask ourselves what makes Southeast Asia the thing that it is? The answer to that has to include the fact that the region has been permanently shaped and marked by its long history of fluidity, overlaps and cross-cultural fertilization. It means accepting the fact that the nations and peoples of Southeast Asia have more in common than physical proximity and geographical closeness. It also means having to recognize that our nations are bound together by ties of language, culture (both normative and material), historical experiences, religious beliefs and worldviews.

Such an understanding, however, cannot get off the ground as long as we see ourselves as individual nations wholly and solely defined according to the compartmentalising logic of the Westphalian nation-state. And it cannot happen unless we inculcate among ourselves (notably the younger generation of Southeast Asians today) a deeper, richer and more genuine understanding of our shared collective identity that is complex and overlapping. For this to happen, changes need to happen not only in the realm of state policy but also in the domain of education. For a start, the one thing that Southeast Asia needs today more than ever is a historical narrative that binds the region closer together, dating back to the more fluid and mobile precolonial era.

At the beginning of this paper I voiced my lament over the fact that the official historical narratives of the respective states of Southeast Asia have tended to be state-centric, inward-looking, insular and parochial in tone and tenor. Over the past few decades I have had the enormous privilege of teaching in some of the best universities in the region, in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia. And yet as I perused the history textbooks of all these countries, I noted with a tinge of disappointment the fact that the national histories of the countries of ASEAN have always tended to focus primarily - and in some cases exclusively - on the history of that particular nation-state, rather than beginning with the region as a whole.

What is lost in these state-centric historical narratives is the fact that all the states of Southeast Asia that we know today were born in the cradle of Southeast Asia, and it was the collective experience of Southeast Asians - as they lived through the premodern, colonial and postcolonial eras - that shaped our understanding of who and what we are now.[8] Without such an understanding of our complex shared and fluid past, how are we to ever appreciate the fact that we are indeed Southeast Asians, and that ours is a complex - sometimes messy, sometimes confounding - history that nonetheless has made us into what we are today. And so as Southeast Asia and Southeast Asians look to the future (which promises to be a future fraught with challenges, obstacles and all manner of complexity), we can and should also look to the past and remind ourselves of the myriad of counter-factual possibilities that were highlighted by Chaudhuri in his work that was mentioned earlier.

To live in a multi-centred world with competing and at time overlapping interests; to survive in a borderless world where external cultural, political, ideological and material influences will remain as permanent variables to be contended with; to be permanently exposed to successive waves of new ideas, philosophies, epistemologies and vocabularies, etc. - these were the conditions that were prevalent in our region in the precolonial era anyway. Newness, alterity, and difference are not and should not be seen as threats to Southeast Asians, for we have lived with such challenges for hundreds of years. But we can only address these external variables and adapt to them as our ancestors once did if we reconnect with that fluid and complex past that so many of us seem to have forgotten or ignored.

Bibliography

Alatas, Syed Hussein. The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism, London: Frank Cass, 1977.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Press. 1983.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Dying Races: Rationalising Genocide in the Nineteenth Century. In J.N Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, (eds). Decolonising the Imagination. London: Zed books. 1995.

Chaudhuri, Kirti Narayan. Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996.

Manderson, Lenore, ‘Race, Colonial Mentality and Public Health Policies in 20th century Malaya’. In ‘The Underside of Malaysian History’, edited by Peter J. Rimmer. Singapore: Singapore University Press. 1990.

 Noor, Farish A. and Peter Carey (Editors), Racial Difference and the Colonial Wars of 19^th Century Southeast Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.

Noor, Farish A., Data-Collecting in 19^th Century Colonial Southeast Asia: Framing the Other. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

Noor, Farish A.,  The Discursive Construction of Southeast Asia in the Discourse of 19^th Century Colonial-Capitalism. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016.

Steinberg, David Joel (ed.), In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History. With contributions by David P. Chandler, William R. Roff, John R. W. Smail, David Steinberg, Robert H. Taylor, Alexander Woodside and David K. Wyatt. Honalulu Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. 1985.

[1] Chaudhuri, Kirti Narayan. Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

[2]  Here it is vital to note that Southeast Asians were hardly ever passive recipients of external cultural or religious influences, and that there was local genius at work too. Though the epics of the Indian subcontinent were accepted and largely absorbed by many Southeast Asians in the precolonial period, this was also a time of great adaptation and innovation, where the tales of the Mahabharata and Ramayana were adapted to suit local understandings of politics and power. As such in the various local renderings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata for instance, we can see many new sub-themes and sub-stories added by Southeast Asians themselves, giving the texts a local understanding that has made them Southeast Asian narratives as well.

[3] The various dynasties of both Burma and Siam have been at war since the 16^th century, beginning with the numerous military campaigns waged by the Taungoo and Ayutthaya kingdoms. These included the Taungoo-Ayutthaya Wars of 1547-1549, 1563-1564, 1568-1569, 1584-1593, 1593-1600, 1609-1622, 1662-1664, 1675-1676 and 1700-1701. Following the demise of the Taungoo dynasty, Ayutthaya found itself at war with the Konbaung dynasty, and this led to the war of 1759-1760 and the fateful campaign of 1765-1767, which saw the total destruction and permanent demise of Ayutthaya. The Konbaung dynasty pursued its campaign against Siam during the Konbaung-Thonburi War of 1775-1776. Thonbori was later succeeded by Rattanakosin, and throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries the Konbaung and Rattanakosin dynasties waged numerous campaigns against each other, from the wars of 1785-1786, 1788, 1792-1794, 1797-1798, 1802-1805, 1809-1812 and 1849-1855. During the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-1826 Siam allied itself with the British, and threatened the southeastern frontier of Burma while the Burmese kingdom was defending itself against British forces that threatened its western borders.

[4]  Farish A. Noor and Peter Carey (Editors), Racial Difference and the Colonial Wars of 19^th Century Southeast Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.

[5] Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996; Manderson, Lenore, ‘Race, Colonial Mentality and Public Health Policies in 20th century Malaya’. In ‘The Underside of Malaysian History’, edited by Peter J. Rimmer. Singapore: Singapore University Press. 1990.

[6]  For a detailed account of the ‘myth of the lazy native’, see Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism, London: Frank Cass, 1977; and Patrick Brantlinger, Dying Races: Rationalising Genocide in the Nineteenth Century. In J.N Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, (eds). Decolonising the Imagination. London: Zed books. 1995.

[7] See, for instance:  Farish A. Noor, Data-Collecting in 19^th Century Colonial Southeast Asia: Framing the Other. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020; and Farish A. Noor, The Discursive Construction of Southeast Asia in the Discourse of 19^th Century Colonial-Capitalism. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016.

[8] For one of the few works that looks seriously at the region’s complex and interconnected past, see: Steinberg, David Joel (ed.), In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History. With contributions by David P. Chandler, William R. Roff, John R. W. Smail, David Steinberg, Robert H. Taylor, Alexander Woodside and David K. Wyatt. Honolulu Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. 1985; and Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Press. 1983.

 

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.