Cosmologies, Truth Regimes, And the State in Southeast Asia

Cosmologies, Truth Regimes, and the State in Southeast Asia Author(s): Tony Day and Craig J. Reynolds Source: Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 1-55 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/313111 . Accessed: 04/07/2011 06:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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TruthRegimes,and the State in Cosmologies, SoutheastAsial TONY DAY Universityof Sydney and CRAIG J. REYNOLDS AustralianNational University It has been said that post-capitalist society is a 'knowledge society.' Certainly the revolution in information technology has made the issue of knowledge production controversial and topical. Southeast Asian societies, while they may not be post-capitalist, have a thirst for knowledge as their capitalist classes become more complex and search for solutions to their problems. These problems of the middle classes are not only commercial, professional, and political, but also personal, psychological, and familial. Cable TV, satellite services, CD-ROM, the Internet, and so forth, sensitize us to the production, formatting, transmission, and reception of knowledge not only in our own age but also in the past. Since early times the state has been both shaped by and involved itself in the processes of knowledge formation and dissemination. What could be called histories of ideas or studies of the historical sociology of knowledge in the traditions of Weber or Marx are difficult to find in the historiography of Southeast Asia, but we do not choose to pursue our inquiry in either framework. Rather, for a methodological starting point we turn to the work of Foucault who argued that knowledge is unthinkable except in terms which connect ' This paper arises from a joint research project, funded by the Australian Research Council, in which we are investigating the 'state' as an historical phenomenon and as a conceptual category in Southeast Asian historical writing. Earlier versions of this paper were presented in Honolulu, Bangkok, Canberra, and Boston in 1996. We would like to thank Charlie Hallisey, Ranajit Guha, Aihwa Ong, Mary Steedly and other participants at these sessions as well as the anonymous MAS reader for insightful and critical comments. oo06--749X/oo/$7.5o+$o 10 1

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it to the struggle for power. Since we are interested in the 'state' as a complex process of agencies and struggles for domination, it follows that our approach to knowledge involves understanding how knowledge acts as an agent or informs agency in 'the clash of dominations,' to borrow a phrase from Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983:114)-

The editors of a recent reader of contemporary social theory influenced by the writings of Foucault suggest some useful concepts when they write that 'much of the problematic of power today is a problematic of knowledge-making, universe construction, and the social production of feeling and "reality"' (Dirks et al. 1994:5)-

Questions about knowledge and power have been raised before in studies of colonial societies, particularly in relation to India (Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993; Cohn 1996). In Southeast

Asian studies such questions have typically not been asked by more than a handful of scholars (for example, Manas and Turton 1991; Anderson 1992). The historical literature, where it deals with questions of power, has been overwhelmingly concerned with narratives of political conflict within or between states; or with indigenous concepts of power, such as those of the Javanese (Anderson 1990); or with the 'theater state' (Geertz 1980 and 1993). Foucault's thinking

has been taken up with the greatest enthusiasm and skill in recent anthropological studies of Southeast Asia which examine gender in the context of power relations or which attempt to construct 'genealogies' which lead back from present discourses into the Southeast Asian past (e.g., Ong and Peletz 1995; Pemberton 1994; Wiener 1995; Stoler 1995). In the case of studies which examine the colonial

past, the central preoccupation is with the onset of colonialism as an 'origin' for a particular discourse of power and with indigenous Southeast Asian responses to that discourse. Especially in the strongly argued writing of Pemberton and Stoler there is a tendency to depart from Foucault's interest in history and the 'infinitesimal mechanisms' of power in pursuit of an expose of a unitary, monolithic, and static form of colonial and postcolonial state domination which had its beginnings in the late eighteenth century. The challenge we have set for ourselves in this paper is to address Foucault-type questions about knowledge in relation to power in both early and modern Southeast Asian state formations and to end with some critical annotations on the use of Foucault's thought for the writing of Southeast Asian history. We will be trying to suggest ways of viewing Southeast Asian 'states' and histories in a decentered, disaggregated way. We will also argue that similar features of the

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relationships between knowledge and power seem to recur at different times and places within the region. This may suggest that 'Southeast Asia' and its history in the fullest sense are still a useful framework for comparative analysis in an age when area studies and the nation-state are being called into question. At the same time, we are not reviving old arguments for thinking of Southeast Asia as a unified cultural whole. The 'repetition' of certain features of Southeast Asian state formation across time and space does not imply the existence of static cultural 'identities' or 'essences.' Rather the argument that certain features persist or recur unsettles linear teleologies implicit in some of the least challenged but most basic concepts in the historian's or anthropologist's craft, such as 'tradition,' 'modernity,' or most recently, 'postmodernity.' In the first part of the essay on constructing universes we examine the universalizing knowledges that seemingly controlled human actors in the precolonial period. We also look at some nineteenthand twentieth-century examples of the clash of epistemologies. We conclude this section by asking whether the visionary projects and world-viewsin postcolonial Southeast Asia can be looked at as cosmologies, as a struggle between old and new epistemologies, between mysticism and technology. The second part of the essay concerns the truth regimes that appeared in the colonial period, beginning with the practical business of occupation and gaining control and followed by the establishment of Far Eastern institutes that served the colonial 'will to know.' One of the important sources for colonial knowledge was the corpus of shastric manuals found throughout Southeast Asia on all levels of society. We will examine one of these manuals and read it against the grain of the colonial regime of truth which sought to master and interpret it.

Constructing Universes Indian-stylekingdomswere formedby assemblingmany local groups .. underthe authorityof a single Indianor Indianized-nativechief. Often this organizationwas accompaniedby the establishment,on a naturalor artificial mountain,of the cult of an Indiandivinityintimatelyassociatedwith the royalperson and symbolizingthe unity of the kingdom.This custom, associatedwith the originalfoundationof a kingdomor royaldynasty,is witnessedin all the Indiankingdomsof the IndochinesePeninsula.It reconciled the native cult of spirits on the heights with the Indian concept of royalty, and gave the population, assembled under one sovereign, a sort of

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national god, intimately associatedwith the monarchy.We have here a typicalexample of how India, in spreadingher civilizationto the Indochinese Peninsula,knew how to make foreign beliefs and cults her own.... (Coedes 1968:26-7)

It is appropriate to begin our discussion with a quotation from one of the founding fathers of the academic discipline of 'Southeast Asian history,' Georges Coedes, who was himself a product of and tireless contributor to French colonial knowledge of Southeast Asia. Coede's defines 'Indianization' in a way that leaves the agency of the process unclear. Yet this passage unambiguously links 'Indianization' to both the missioncivilisatriceof French colonialism (here identified implicitly with the high 'civilization' of India) and the spread of the nationstate as the universal form of modern social organization. In the historiography that Coedes did so much to shape, 'Indianization' marks the onset of history in Southeast Asia. Whatever else may be disputable about the nature of 'Indianization,' it entailed unquestionably one of the most significant interactions between knowledge and power in the history of the region. It was first and foremost a process which formed a certain discourse of power, a discourse entailing concepts about relations between leaders and followers and about ways of representing and organizing the state. In a major reinterpretation of 'Indianization' O. W. Wolters reformulated this process of acculturation so that it ceased to have the implication of missioncivilisatriceconferred on it by French colonial scholarship (Wolters 1982:9-15). Wolters cast his understanding of the process in terms of the 'Hindu devotionalism' of the Southeast Asian 'man of prowess,' involving the male leader's education by 'elitist teacher-inspired sects.' This education led to the leader's self-identification with the god Siva, 'the sovereign deity who created the universe.' Thus, the overlord'sclose relationshipwith Sivameant that he participated in Siva's divine authority ....

He participated in sovereign attributes of

cosmologicalproportions.... The chief's prowesswas now coterminous with the divine authoritypervadingthe universe... (Wolters1982:11) Enough has been written about the content of the Indic knowledge which was acquired and applied to the building of states in early Southeast Asia for us to move on here to examine a feature noted by Wolters in passing. This feature is characteristic of all subsequent state formations in the region, namely, the tendency for knowledge to be viewed as inherently 'cosmological' and 'universalistic,' a tendency which shaped the relationship between knowledge and power in

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a particular way. This relationship involved a synthesis of the 'latest' technology and of religious belief in the service of state domination. We argue that this synthesis can be observed throughout Southeast Asian history in a way which confounds linear conceptions of historical development. In the discussion that follows we distill the innumerable instances of the synthesis of 'latest' technology and religious belief to three examples: twelfth-century Cambodia; nineteenthcentury Siam; and late twentieth-century Indonesia. Eleanor Moron's analysis of the 'journey into the philosophical concepts and numerical sets of Angkor Wat' provides the most striking example of what we might call the 'technology' of Indic power in early Southeast Asia (Moron 1977:218; Mannikka 1996). The vis-

itor to the twelfth-century Khmer temple, Angkor Wat, crosses distances in entering and leaving the central temple along the westeast axis which are 1,728 cubits long, lengths which are equivalent to the duration of the Golden Age or krtayuga in Indic cosmology. Along this journey through the Golden Age s/he can look at wall carvings which allegorically represent, through scenes taken from the epic Mahabharata,the career and glory of the king who commissioned the building of the temple, Suryavarman II (r. 1131-50).

First, the king is represented as Yama, the Indic god who sits in judgment over men and women in the afterlife. Scenes of the thirtytwo hells give way to representations of the Churning of the Sea of Milk over which the king presides in the form of Visnu. The churning, which produces the elixir, of immortality, amrta,requires the cooperation of opposing factions, thus signalling the need for unity of all who live under Suryavarman'srule. Moreover, the temple is constructed in such a way that the bas relief depicting the churning is illuminated by the rising sun every morning, and the sun alternately favors the gods or the king, depending on the time of year. In winter the king is illuminated while the gods are in darkness; in summer Suryavarman is in deep shadow (Moron 1977:225).

The

builder of Angkor Wat apparently lived by a cosmological clock whose mechanisms regulated the structure of the temple. Time was a dominating concept. As striking as the physical orientation of the temple to the movements of the sun and the seasons may be, it is the integration of knowledge about observable astronomical phenomena with concepts of cosmic time and universal space that is the most awe-inspiring. The central tower represents the central peak of Mt Meru, the home of Visnu (Mabbett 1983). To climb to the chamber where the image

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of the god was housed, the devotee had to traverse a space consisting of thirty-three units, a length which 'represents the universe as a whole, embodied in Visnu,' and at 'the same time ... a universe in which divinity is not defined or confined by three dimensions' (Moron 1977:243). 'During the long walk to the upper elevation,' moreover, 'visitors ... cross through a sequence of fouryuga periods,' thus traversing the entirety of cosmic time according to the Indic schema. Theyuga symbolism is reiterated by the positioning of the four subsidiary Meru peaks around the central tower, a positioning which is also coordinated with the cycles of the solar calendar: In complementary terms, the total vertical length of all four corner towers ... symbolizes a complete mahayugaperiod of 4,320,000 years. As a consequence, the four towers arranged around the central tower can symbolize both the real cycles of stars and planets around the north pole as well as the four yuga cycles. ... As the north celestial pole, Mt Meru remains immobile while time forever flows around it in an eternal movement. (Moron 1977:249) 'From the moment the visitor crosses the bridge to Angkor Wat,' Moron concludes, 'numerology leads to the central sanctuary.' As we consider the implications of Moron's discoveries for our understanding of the state in Southeast Asia, we may well agree with O. W. Wolters that 'the signifiers visible at Angkor Wat are drawn from Indian literature, but they signify a Khmer formulation associated with the Khmers' expectations of being Suryavarman's contemporaries,' thus assigning primary significance to the temple as 'a local statement' of Southeast Asian cultural identity before the era of nationalism (Wolters 1982:62, passim). We can also reflect on the amount and complexity of the knowledge which was acquired and then fastidiously applied to the construction of a temple which acted as a cosmological 'machine,' activated through pilgrimage and ritual, for generating power, enabling Suryavarman and his followers to claim Visnu-like domination over infinite time and space. Suryavarman II's reign began, indeed, in a period of disorder, which it continued to foment by means of military expansion into what is now present-day southern Vietnam and Thailand (Coedes The building of Angkor 1968:159-62 and Chandler 1996:49-52). Wat commenced at the beginning of his reign and was only completed after Suryavarman's death. The 'knowledge' which structured and was enscribed in the temple was thus physically situated in a struggle for power extending over many years. This devotee of Visnu observed the requirements of rajadharma, the Indic norms of mon-

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archical behavior, which he fulfilled by becoming a copybook universal monarch or cakravartin(Tambiah 1976:9-31). But neither 'localization' theory nor Suryavarman's knowledge of the rajadharma explains the obsessive bookishness and precision of the Angkor Wat 'power machine.' And the early Cambodian social formation is not the only place in Southeast Asia where we find this kind of statesponsored construct of knowledge and power. A thirteenth-century royal temple in EastJava, CandiJago, has Tantric Buddhist carvings of equally elaborate and arcane structure which reflect a Javanese king's concern to achieve universal domination in the age of Kublai Khan (O'Brien 1988 and 1990; Day 1996). What seems to have been involved in building these temples was a mastery of recondite knowledge in order to accomplish extraordinary feats of power and domination. Is it possible to look beyond individual men and women as actors and wonder whether the recondite knowledge, represented in terms of the esoteric measurements, representations of countless texts as well as examples of everyday, local knowledge, and the form of the temple itself had agency? It is as if the cosmology that manifested this knowledge were speaking through the Khmer and Javanese rulers, artisans and engineers who created the temples. Our second instance of cosmological knowledge, in which technology and religious belief were synthesized in the service of state domination, comes from nineteenth-century Siam. In his discussion of the Theravada Buddhist polity Thongchai Winichakul explains the self-fulfilling logic of the acquisition of tributaries by the Universal Monarch: 'The acquisition of tributaries in itself became a sign of supremacy. Success in preventing tributaries' disobedience ... therefore, reflected the status of this supremacy. In other words, it was a self-presumed protector who sought the protected to fulfill his own desire to become a cakravartin'(Thongchai 1994:84). In a sense the logic of Universal Monarchy itself, Thongchai suggests, is an agent in the history of territorial conquest and domination in Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asia. Coedes' implicit attribution of (penetrative, conquering, yet civilizing male) agency to 'Indian civilization' in Southeast Asia would, following this line of reasoning, gain a new but more explicit cogency. The powerful agency of universalizing knowledge which seemingly controls, rather than is controlled by, human actors is also found in Thailand during the nineteenth century. Although the history of the modernization of Siam after the accession of Rama I in 1782 is conventionally told in terms of the modernizing agency of the Jakkri

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monarchs and their extended family of scholar-officials, it is possible now to tell a different kind of history of modernity and nationalism in Thailand in terms of the interaction and collaboration between knowledges and power. In this history the Jakkri kings and epistemologies, although clashing with one another for domination, in the end joined forces to forge the modern Thai nation-state. One of these epistemologies was expounded in the Traiphumor 'Three Worlds' cosmography (Reynolds 1976:209; Lithai 1982). Ver-

sions of this cosmography date from the fourteenth century, and the text was repeatedly redrafted and cross-checked against Pali sources between 1783 and 1802 by the order of Rama I 'in order to promote both faith and knowledge' of the hyper-orthodox Buddhist variety insisted upon by the first Jakkri monarch (Wyatt 1982:20-7). Paintings of the Three Worlds cosmography covered the walls of monasteries in many parts of nineteenth-century Thailand, instructing 'the illiterate, through the medium of their senses', as one European visitor to Bangkok put it. These paintings made graphic a powerful concept of universal social order and cosmic space. Wyatt points out that one of the 'innovations' of the Rama I recension of the text was to reorganize the order in which the different levels of existence were presented (from lowest to highest in older versions), beginning this time with the 'middle' level of mankind (Wyatt 1982:24-5). Southeast Asian cosmologies typically contain origin myths that set out human hierarchies in favor of aristocracies and elites.2 The fol2 This is true not only of Indic Southeast Asia. A Visayan cosmology of the late sixteenth century as recorded by the Spanish, for example, conceives of the origins of social hierarchy in spatial and architectural terms which recall the form of Indic temples. The children of the primordial couple flee their father's anger: 'They scattered where best they could, many going into their father's house; and others stayed in the main sala, and others hid in the walls of the house itself, and others went into the kitchen and hid among the pots and stove. So, these Visayans say, from these who went into the inner rooms of the house come the lords and chiefs they have among them now, who give them orders and whom they respect and obey and who among them are like our titled lords in Spain; they call them datos in their language. From those who remained in the main sala of the house come the knights and hidalgosamong them, inasmuch as these are free and do not pay anything at all; these they call timaguasin their language. From those who got behind the walls of the house, they say, come those considered slaves, whom they call oripesin their language. Those who went into the kitchen and hid in the stove and among the pots they say are negroes, claiming that all the negroes are in the hills of the Philippine Islands of the West come from them. And from the others who went out of the house, they say, come all the other tribes there are in their world, saying that these were many and that they went to many and diverse places.' (quoted in Scott 1982: 112) One also notes here the translation of Southeast Asian social realities into categories intelligible to colonial observers.

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lowing passage from the Traiphummakes clear that this seemingly 'enlightened' and 'humanistic' Siamese revision of the early nineteenth century in fact gives emphasis to the central role of the king and the state in maintaining the Buddhist moral order: 'Whenmankindarose in the world,and began to gather in groups,those groupsraisedup a personof truth,justice, ability,force,and powerto preside over them in orderthat they might be governedso as to live in peace and prosperity,safe from all dangers. When mankindhad further progressedand states (banmuang)had been formed,a Bodhisatvaappearedin the worldof men, a man of merit, bravery,and abilitysurpassingall other people,so the assembledpeopleinvitedhim to becometheir leader,and he

was named the King ....'

(quoted in Wyatt 1982:25)

The Traiphumof Rama I expressed familiar aspirations of universal monarchy since it cast its net over other Buddhist subjects such as the Mon and Lao whose versions of the text, obtained during military campaigns, were used in compiling the dominant Jakkri recension (Reynolds 1976:21 o). Beginning in the 183os, Western knowledge about astronomy and geography began to compete with the Three Worlds cosmography. The result was not a victory of one kind of knowledge over the other, but their mutual accommodation so as to strengthen the modernizing elite and give impetus to the formation of a powerful nationstate. An early stage of this epistemological collaboration can be observed in the way in which Chaophraya Thiphakorawong'sKitjanukit (A book explaining various things) of 1867 rationalizes Buddhism even as it attacks traditional Buddhist cosmography. The book gives instruction on modern geography and astronomy. Yet it also confirms that while 'the Buddha knew the truth of the earth, ... the Buddha

was also aware that what he knew was in conflict with people's belief,' which, if challenged, would only lead to their neglecting 'the path to salvation.' Thus Thiphakorawong promoted 'geography of the new kind with the approval of true Buddhism' (Thongchai 1994:40-1).

Both 'geography' and 'true Buddhism' as knowledge formations acted in concert to reinforce the accommodating policies that the elite had chosen as they confronted Western pressures in the middle of the nineteenth century. A similar partnership was forged between Thai astrology and Western astronomy through the scientific activities of the reigning monarch himself, King Mongkut. In 1868, at the age of sixty-four, Mongkut travelled into malarial rainforests near Wako on the Kra isthmus with a party of European officials to observe the solar eclipse

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which he had predicted would take place on August 18, since 'he was obsessed by the calculation in every precise detail to prove his knowledge and the king's credibility' (Thongchai

1994:45).

When

he returned to Bangkok (dying not long after from malaria he had contracted in Wako), Mongkut punished the court astrologers for their ignorance. Yet he himself had made offerings while visiting the peninsula to the traditional deities who had cleared away the clouds so that he could make his scientific observations of the eclipse on 18 August. The moral of the Wako story is surely that the 'Father of Thai Science,' who was also called the 'Father of Thai Astrology,' became the embodiment of a powerful epistemological convergence of rival knowledges and hence a 'modern' Universal Monarch. For in the words of one of his biographers quoted by Thongchai: '[Mongkut] understoodastrology well, both in Siamese and European scripts.He couldcalculatethe movementsof the sun and all the planetsin great detail, predictingsolar and lunar eclipses so preciselythat no one could match him. He also knewyiokrapfi[geography]verywell, measuring the sun and starsaccurately.... He was unremittinglyfaithfulto the Three Gems of Buddhism.' (Thongchai 1994:57)

Such a nineteenth-century cakravartinwould not be altogether out of place as a human devotee or deified as an inanimate statue of the god-king in the central chamber of Angkor Wat. Indeed by the 188os Western 'geography' and the concept of the 'map' had become powerful agents in the transformation of the old Siamese phraratcha-anachak (royal kingdom) into a modern prathet(lit. 'common space,' nation) in a way that allowed the older concept and its epistemological basis to live on within the boundaries of a new dominant nation-state order and world view. Administrative reform and expansion into the north were carried out under the double aegis of 'tributary overlordship' (old) and 'national sovereignty' (new), in the name of a kind of nationalistic universalism, that of 'Us' Thai versus 'Them' others (Thongchai 1994:95-107).

What the universal

monarchy lost in domination over infinite time and space the emergent nation-state gained in sovereignty and administrative control over a bounded national territory, although, as Thongchai describes the process, the Bangkok court never conceived of itself as similar to the European imperialists. On the contrary, the court saw itself as protecting the new bounded territory from European imperialism. The actionstaken togetherconstituteda code which signifiedtwo kinds of relationshipsimultaneously.On the one hand, it signifiedthe premodern overlord/tributary relationship. On the other, it represented the new polity and political geography.... (Thongchai 1994:1o6-7)

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The map of the new bounded polity could even become an agent in its own right. It could, and did, serve as a metasign and symbol for a royal foundation supporting the police and paramilitary forces. Or it could serve as the blueprint for a retrospective Thai national history that was already mapped upon territory in the distant past deemed 'national' only by hindsight (Thongchai 1994:137,

140-63).

The agency of such universalizing Western knowledge as 'geography' and 'nationalism' in nineteenth-century Thailand is, therefore, not all that different from the cosmologies of early Cambodia or Java. The effect of the representation of the battle of Kuruksetra taken from the Indic Mahabharata and etched into the walls of Angkor Wat was to reinforce a cosmology, a universalizing knowledge, that made an imperial kingship desirable and even necessary (cf. Wolters 1982:62-3). Each kind of knowledge claimed to provide those who received instruction in it access to a Golden Age under the benevolent domination of a universal monarch or his modern avatar, the sovereign ruler of the respective political system that reigns supreme in any particular historical moment. In more recent Thai history we can again witness the clash between Buddhist cosmology and a competing epistemology in the writings of Samak Burawat, a London-trained geologist and mining engineer who taught philosophy at the Mahamakut Buddhist Academy in Bangkok from 1948 to 1952. Along with a number of Thai thinkers and writers in the immediate post-war period, Samak Burawat moved in leftist political and literary circles and flirted with the Communist Party of Thailand (Reynolds and Hong 1983:85-6). Samak and the others saw in Marxism a path to modernization through the scientific perfection of human society. Samak wrote thick treatises with such titles as Intellectand The New Scienceand the MetteyaBuddhain which he integrated Marxism, Buddhism, and Social Darwinism. His ambition was to transform Buddhism into a 'universal knowledge' (wichasakon)and, as intellectual heir to Mongkut and Thiphakorawong, to 'use science to explain religion, government and economics.' These works of intellectual synthesis were a conscious effort on his part to connect all that he had learned and integrate it into a single system of knowledge (pen an nung an diawkan) (Samak 1954:Preface). The subtitle of Intellect is 'Scientific Philosophy.' This 'scientific philosophy' was very much Samak's own construction, which he took pains to distinguish from the realism, positivism, pragmatism, and materialism that informed it. Intellect was, indeed, a cosmology. While this cosmology did not issue from the ruling elite in the manner of Mongkut's and Thi-

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phakorawong's revisionist thought, it was mobilized in a war of position against the military oligarchy and proved to be a force which the ruling elite had to confront. This war of position for a popular, pluralistic, and participatory nationalism was lost as the military gradually tightened its authoritarian rule through the 1950s. Yet Samak's synthesizing cosmologies were willy-nilly absorbed into the educational curricula of the Thai developmental state. The way Samak's 'scientific philosophy' was related to the socialist politics of his time raises a more general question about the nationstate, its similarities to and differences from earlier state formations, and the role of knowledge within its operations. This question can be considered in the light of our third example. In the scholarly literature on the Indonesian nation-state, to take one example, we find contradictory views on the relationship between knowledge and state formation that allow us to gain a comparative perspective on the problem. In the earlier writings of Anderson (1990:17-77) there is a tendency to stress the persistence of traditional attitudes towards knowledge and power, especially amongst the Javanese, which shaped and inhibited the transition of Indonesian societies to modernity. In later work, however, most notably in ImaginedCommunities, Anderson has stressed the rupture not only between the traditional past and the modern present, but also between the utopian promise of authentic popular nationalism and the official nationalism of the contemporary nation-states of Southeast Asia. In the following passage, Anderson reifies the nation-state and the knowledge formation it embodies in a way that poses problems for the kind of analysis which we are pursuing here. Successfulrevolutionariesalso inheritedthe wiringof the old state: sometimes functionariesand informers,but alwaysfiles, dossiers,archives,laws, financial records,censuses, maps, treaties, correspondence,memoranda, and so on. Like the complexelectricalsystem in any large mansionwhen the ownerhas fled, the state awaits the new owner'shand at the switchto be very muchits old brilliantself again. (1991:160) Although Anderson is antipathetical to the state generally, the implicit contrast here is between the decayed institution of the nationstate that houses tyrannical 'lords of the manor' and a state formation that is the living expression of the people and their culture. For example, Anderson makes an invidious comparison betweenJayavarman VII's Bayon temple in early Khmer society and Soeharto's Taman Mini in contemporary Indonesia (Anderson 1990:181-2). Anderson characterizes the discourses of 'official nationalism,' again

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by way of explicit contrast with those of an earlier and more authentic social formation, as 'inventions' and 'lies' (1991:16in). Anderson's argument makes it difficult, in other words, for us to raise serious questions about knowledge and the state in Soeharto's New Order Indonesia (1966-98). This line of argument suggests that state-produced knowledge can only be regarded as unauthentic, masking the truth of a cunning struggle for total domination. Statesponsored efforts at building ethnic identity or national unity are typically seen as manipulative, because they demand that older symbols of power and royalty be included as signs of 'tradition' (Bowen 1995:1061). Yet the phenomenal development of new technology in New Order Indonesia since the mid-197os under the leadership of Soeharto and his Minister for Research and Technology, Baharuddin Jusuf Habibie, demands some recognition of authenticity in its inspiration and historical formation if it is to be understood. Will we be able to apply the same kind of analysis of state knowledge to this case as we have to the other examples of universalizing knowledges that we have called cosmologies? Recent arguments by Anderson and Pemberton assume a rupture between authentic and concrete 'old cosmologies' and inauthentic, 'monumentalized' yet 'intangible' ideologies (see Pemberton 1994, especially

148-96

and 269-310).

In doing so, these arguments

ignore the very old history of cosmologies and monuments in Southeast Asia. The following characterization of Taman Mini, which was completed in 1975, for example, notes the time-transcending and conflict-resolving function of the pleasure park without identifying and then reflecting on the similarity of these functions to those of Angkor Wat and other early Southeast Asian temples: With the founding of 'Beautiful Indonesia,' Bapak (Father) and Ibu (Mother) assumed the roles of model parents of an extended national family, privileged benefactors of an extensive inheritance. Displacing economic concerns with a patently 'cultural' gift, this novel inheritance offered

Indonesiansa bequestthey apparentlycouldnot affordto refuse.Built into the logic of such a bequest was a transferenceof culture that erased the differencebetweenpast, present,and future,and thus flattenedtime--and, with it, histories,includingthe extraordinaryviolence of the New Order's own origins-into a continuouslypresentedpresent.For 'BeautifulIndonesia' was foundedupon a peculiarsense of temporality.The obsessionwith connectingthe past and futurein the formof a presentfindsprolificexpression at Mini through numerous so-called monuments (monumen):miniature replicas of ancient monuments (candhi),memorial monuments (tugu), and commemorative inscriptions (prasasti).(Pemberton 1994:155)

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The meaning of Taman Mini's time-effacing and universalizing message, one of many repetitions of similar statements found throughout the course of Southeast Asian history, cannot be said to be exactly the same as that of Angkor Wat, even though both structures exhibit an interest in symbolic numerology (see Pemberton 1994:156) and are modelled on contemporary 'monuments' to universal domination over time and space: the Indic cosmic mountainas-temple on the one hand, Disneyland on the other! Suryavarman II and Soeharto are hardly identical kinds of Southeast Asian leader and yet both were powerfully motivated to build tombs for themselves during their own lifetimes in order to become 'future anterior royal ancestors,' to use Pemberton's felicitous phrase for describing President and Mrs Soeharto as destined for ancestral status on Mt Awakening (166).3 Nor are the conditions of their foundation totally dissimilar. Political consolidation, economic growth, territorial expansion, the incorporation of different religions into one centralized but multifaceted state ideology are part of the background to the origins and form of both monuments (see Chandler 1996:4954; Bouchier 1984; Hefner 1993; Shiraishi 1996). Perhaps 'beautiful Indonesia' as an expression of New Order concepts of 'culture' and Habibie as the exemplar of New Order notions of 'development' can be usefully seen as complementary contributors to the same cosmology. Takashi Shiraishi provides an excellent introduction to the rise of Habibie and to the economic background to the timing of technological development in Indonesia since the 1970s (1996). Shiraishi's

analysis, however, is indebted to Anderson's rewiring metaphor of the New Order nation-state, so that Habibie's career and contributions to technological development are read merely as further articulations of the growing authoritarianism of Soeharto's rule rather than as embedded in a struggle for power which has religious as well as political and economic dimensions (see Bouchier 1984; Hefner 1993). Soeharto's drive to rapid industrialization and technological Cf. O. W. Wolters' characterization of the linga cult founded on Mt Mahendra

II in 802: '... His cult,I believe,was also somethingelse. He realized byJayavarman that his achievementshad guaranteedhis status as an Ancestoramong all those Khmerswho were connectedwith his kinshipgroup, which was bound to be an extendedone becauseit was organizedin accordancewith the principleof cognatic kinship.He thereforemade arrangements,as the Sdok Kak Thornm inscriptionof 1052 describes,for the perpetuationof the cult to enable future kings to invoke additionalsupernaturalprotectionfrom their deifiedAncestor.'(1982: 7)

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autonomy, however, seems less unauthentically sui generis when examined in the context of the twelfth-century Angkorean and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Siamese cases discussed above. The state in each case seizes and technologizes knowledge to achieve, not just control over social relations, but a kind of universal domination over time and space. In the Soeharto-Habibie case we can observe how such an objective involves the struggle between old and new epistemologies, between mysticism and technology, within a statist discourse that we may usefully call cosmological.4 A good place to begin examining this conflict is Soeharto's own thought as expressed in his Otobiografi (Autobiography)published in 1989. We will look at three chapters, set in the mid-198os, in which the epistemological struggle is strikingly apparent. One of the discourses developed in the Autobiographyis that of the traditional ruler as example to his people. In chapter 84, entitled 'There are those who have the wrong idea,' Soeharto begins by paying exemplary respect to three state officials who have recently become 'ancestors,' Ali Murtopo, Adam Malik, and Sudjono Humardani. But the chapter is mainly concerned with refuting the view that these three welleducated and highly intelligent officials, now deceased, were superior to the President. Before Ali Murtopo died, there were people who liked to assert that Ali Murtopo was the one who decided things. Why? Maybe because he was a clever speaker, dared to say what he thought.... About Sudjono Humardani one could hear people say that he knew more than I did about mysticism. Even though Djono himself always paid obeisance (Jav. sungkem,literally kiss the knees) to me. He considered me to be older and more knowledgable about ilmu kebatinan. It's true, for me kebatinanis not the mysticism people currently think it is. As I said earlier, kebatinanis a science for bringing oneself close to God.... ... Djono liked to come to me bringing a book full of writings. He had a belief. And he liked to make proposals. I accepted these proposals in order to make him happy. I didn't just swallow these ideas. We think that 'cosmological' is preferable to terminology with a shorter histor4 ical reach. Compare the following passage from Hefner 1993 which seems to be describing the same phenomenon using a vocabularywhich fails to suggest the similarity to other places and periods of Southeast Asian history: 'ICMI's inclusivist organization also replicates a pattern of corporatist inclusion and control which, as Benedict Anderson and David Reeves have emphasized, is a long-standing feature of Indonesian politics, elaborated in its most effective degree under the New Order'

(22).

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I analyzed them. I weighed them up-were they rational or not? If they were rational, if they entered the rational mind (Ind. masukakal), then I accepted them. (Soeharto 1989:440-2) The next chapter is entitled 'The meaning of the Indonesian Air Show,' which was held in 1986. Soeharto discusses the importance of Indonesia's airplane industry, initiated by Dr Habibie, which he argues is key to Indonesia's economic independence. But the cosmological significance of the industry as an expression of 'development' outweighs its practical usefulness. We might recall that the representation of the Churning of the Sea of Milk on the walls of Angkor Wat expresses collective social labor as well as an effacement of time as we read the following passage: The development of an aeronautics industry, of a naval industry and of other modern industries which use sophisticated technology is not just for show and is not undertaken without an awareness of the sacrifices which we are shouldering (pengorabananyang kitapikul). We carry out this development precisely because we are aware (sadar)of the great difficulty and pain which we have to expect in the future, if the Indonesian nation is to continue to compete with other nations in knowledge and technology (ilmupengetahuan dan teknologi).(1989:453) Pengorabananyang kita pikul implicitly refers to Javanese maxims about sacrifice and leadership, and sadar is an Indonesian-Javanese concept that carries overtones of the Islamic, exemplary ruler. But the sciences of knowledge and technology are not the only ones found within the mind of the President and encompassed by the Indonesian nation-state. The next chapter is called 'My request: one must always remember.' To 'remember,' Jav. eling, is an important concept in the neo-traditional Javanese epistemology which Soeharto seeks to dominate in the face of competition from members of his own entourage like Sudjono Humardani or from critical mystics with powerful elite backers like Sawito (Bouchier 1984). One remembers God, the ancestors and their teachings, one's place in the hierarchical order of things; to 'forget' these things is to invite disease, death, and social disorder.5 In chapter 86, the person who is asked to eling is Dr B. J. Habibie, the son of a Bugis father and Javanese mother, whose fiftieth birthday coincided with the holding The injunction aja eling, 'Do not forget!' is typical of oral cultures such as those 5 of Java and Bali where it was important to remind listeners to heed the rules of correct behavior. Compare this understanding of eling with Pemberton's discussion of 'forgetting' in 1994: 143 as a psychological feature of the minds of palace intellectuals in late nineteenth-century Surakarta.

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of the Indonesian Air Show. Soeharto recalls in his Autobiography how he personally recruited Habibie, luring him back to Indonesia from a high-paying aeronautics job in Germany. Would Dr Habibie accept the President's offer? 'I'm ready, Sir,' he answered. Habibie's Eastern spirit was still youthful [the 'youthfulness' of the East as opposed to the decrepitude of the West is a trope from pre-war Indonesian nationalist discourse]. He always asked my advice about how to approach life. He also asked for my photo and I gave him one which he picked himself, a photo of me when I was relaxing in traditional Javanese clothes. I gave it to him with the following teaching in Javanese: Wongsing tansah dumadi,iku dadioboringuripkangbecik, eling,percayamituhumarangkangmurbeng becik. sajatining (That is, we must always 'remember,' believe in God, have faith. Never should scientific knowledge (berilmu)lead to an abandonment of faith.) He put the portrait in his office. Then he made a copy of it and it was later printed in his book [i.e., the one published in his honor on his birthday]. He considers me as his own parent. It is completely clear that he doesn't want to do wrong. He always asks for my guidance. The philosophy which I give to him is noted down by him. I know that this philosophy of struggle will be a source of no insignificance for him during his career and later during his retirement. (1989:456-57) These

passages from Soeharto's Autobiography document the for dominance between competing epistemologies in construggle temporary Indonesia, a struggle which leads to a synthesis of 'scientific knowledge' and 'faith' to form a hegemonic state cosmology. The genealogy of this synthesis goes back at least to the opening of the

first Western school for the sons of 'native chiefs' in 1879. At that time it was argued that the Western 'religion of knowledge' (agama kawruh) combined with the Javanese 'religion of judgment' (agama

budi), rather than Islam, offered the true basis for 'being Javanese' (Drewes 1966:326

and passim).6

6 In his study of the firstJavanese nationalistorganization,the Budi Utomo, Nagazumiquotesa 19o04newspaperarticlein whichseveralJavanesejudges discuss the meaningsof threeJavanese/Indonesian wordsfor 'knowledge': ilmu, pengetahuan, and budi.The followingpassageindicatesthe politicsimplicitin the choice of budi as the master term: 'Budican be likened to a king enforcingorderin his country: He discussesand seeks to understand,contemplatesand workstowardcreatinga prosperousand refinedlife for his subjects;the soul in the humanbodyis therefore like a lampinsidea house,servingto illuminatethe structure'.(quotedin Nagazumi

1972: 36)

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One of the reasons modern knowledge, whether in the form 'scientific' Marxism or the advanced technology promoted by Habibie, gained credibility in Indonesia was because the Indonesian word for science, ilmu, is also the word for mystical knowledge. 'llmu is thus science in the sense of mastery of recondite knowledge, of being able to penetrate beneath appearances; applying ilmu one can accomplish extraordinary

things' (McVey 1996:1oon;

Anderson

1990:54-8).

Ilmu endowed its possessor with the kind of power/knowledge useful to those who govern. Seen in this light, cosmological knowledge as formulated in the contemporary Indonesian state is no less religious than technological. The notion that the beliefs of the New Order leadership are secular and 'concerned with this world and not that beyond' (McVey 1995:26) obscures the striking similarities between the three examples which we have just considered.

The Construction of Colonial Knowledge and the Far Eastern Institutes of Learning Each society has its r6gimeof truth, its 'generalpolitics'of truth: that is, the types of discoursewhich it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanismsand instanceswhich enable one to distinguishtrue and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned;the techniques and proceduresaccordedvalue in the acquisitionof truth; the status of those

who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault 198o:131)

In the preceding section we examined the universalizing knowledges of several Southeast Asian state formations. In each case Brahmans, kings, or Western-educated experts and advisors were the authorized possessors of Truth that was synonomous with the political order of things as well as with the 'natural' order of the world. The sun and the seasonal changes it brought determined the design of Angkor Wat and in turn illuminated its meaning. The Jakkri monarchs mastered astronomy and geography and used them to naturalize the workings of the heavens above and the boundaries around the Thai nation-state. Samak's materialist-Buddhist cosmologies, while forged as part of an anti-hegemonic discourse, laid the groundwork for scientific Buddhism. Soeharto's Javanism has been fashioned to be the natural basis and goal of technological development in New Order Indonesia. In each case, potentially opposing truths, combatants in knowledge wars between the foreign and the indigenous, have been

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made to seem harmonious corollaries of an even greater Truth, to which the state lays claim. But we have hardly touched on the struggles and tensions of the processes by which Truth was constructed under the colonial state's guidance.7 To this topic we now turn our attention. To understand how the formulations of a Coedes or of many other historians of Southeast Asia came into existence it is necessary to trace the history of what an historian of India, David Ludden, has called the formation of 'Orientalist empiricism' (1993). Ludden argues, against Said but very much in the spirit of Foucault, that it is necessary analytically to imagine a shifting, historically contextualized relationship between knowledge and power in order to understand the stages through which the search for Western empirical knowledge about India developed. In the late eighteenth century officials whose thinking was influenced by the Enlightenment sought a universal kind of knowledge about India which was not strictly utilitarian and bound to the needs of colonial rule (Ludden 1993:252). During the transition to Company rule over India from 1722 to 182o, however, the requirements of centralized rule altered the nature and uses of the knowledge which was collected. Not just indigenous rulers, but the 'Indian intelligentsia' had to be subordinated: To subordinate these men, Europeans had to appropriate knowledge that was locked away in the minds of Indian commercial, judicial, military, and revenue specialists. By appropriating knowledge toward this end, Europeans discovered India for themselves, in their own terms, by converting knowledge from native sources into English language forms that were systematic, scientific, and accessible to means of truth-testing that were becoming the pride of European culture. ... In addition, military operations and political centralization required that data which had never been produced by Indian rulers be generated and controlled by government; such data constituted new facts for the creation of orientalism as a body of knowledge. (253) The kinds of knowledge gathered not only became more specialized, utilitarian, and 'British': they were also labelled as 'empirical,' '... which made colonial knowledge into a set of factualized state7 AnotherpassagefromFoucault(1980: 114) comes to mind here: 'The history whichbearsand determinesus has the formof a warratherthan that of a language: relationsof power,not relationsof meaning.Historyhas no 'meaning',thoughthis is not to say that it is absurdor incoherent.On the contrary,it is intelligibleand shouldbe susceptibleof analysis,downto the smallest detail--but this in accordance with the intelligibilityof struggles,of strategiesand tactics.'

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ments about reality' (258). This was once again a kind of 'universalization' of knowledge by the colonial state: Indology, revenue surveys, and commission reports came to share the same epistemological terrain and positivist knowledge about all societies, culture, and political economies. Separate streams of knowledge about India could thus intersect and enrich one another, and facts from investigations in India could be integrated with facts from around the world in political economy and world history. (258) Empirical knowledge about India became first authoritative, then indistinguishable from definitions of 'actual law-abiding behavior and thus of religious norms that guided traditional life.' What was already 'known' became not only normative but what was actually 'discovered' and 'seen.' 'Factualized representations of India became official wisdom' and so Orientalism was born (259). In this way, British empiricism became woven not only into the fabric of Orientalism: it became intrinsic to definitions of Indian nationalism. Although Ludden does not explain if or how empiricism was contested in its march from Enlightened science to nationalistic myth, his analysis suggests how we might trace the genealogy of empirical knowledge in colonial Southeast Asia. The early phases of colonial imposition-reconnaissance, occupainvolved a 'will to know,' a desire to tion, and consolidation-all grasp the object in the colonial gaze. Western knowledge of local society acquired in the course of exploration and reconnaissance comprises a genre of its own. Typically compiled by Westerners, this genre also came to be written by Southeast Asians who had acquired Western knowledge and were critical of their own societies.8 An interesting example of this genre is Voyage to Tonking in the Year At-Hoi (1876) by the linguist and Francophile Truong-Vinh-Ky (Honey 1982). The French had already established themselves in Cochinchina, and they would be in possession of the north within a decade after Truong-Vinh-Ky completed his report. It was unusual for Vietnamese at that time to travel for the sake of travel or the acquisition of knowledge (Honey 1982:1). It has long been suspected that Truong-Vinh-Ky made the trip to Tonking to assess French prospects of a takeover of Tonking and to report to the Admiral General on the feasibility of conquest. 8 See, for example, the discussion of Abdullah Abdul Kadir's travel account of 1837 in Milner 1995: 1o-58; Chulalongkorn's diary of his fact-finding trip to Java in 1896, in Chanatip 1993; and the travels of Candranegara, grandfather of Kartini, translated and discussed extensively in Bonneff 1986.

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The report he wrote covers the climate, geography, population, history, economy, customs, and administration of the northern provinces, including the natural resources and products-the wealth that might be France's if the provinces were to be annexed. In a sense, this report could have been written by a European, for its format is similar to Western descriptive surveys of other parts of Southeast Asia. Perhaps the French briefed TruongVinh-Ky before he began his travels. In any case, the kind of information he provided would be useful to leaders of a military expedition as well as to explorers and first administrators. Perhaps more significant than the strictly utilitarian value of its 'facts,' however, was the attention Truong's account bestowed on 'antiquities' and 'local customs.' These apparently non-utilitarian features of Western-style colonial travelogues in fact gave expression to the civilized values which colonial regimes sought to 'protect' and 'preserve' through military intervention and colonial occupation. Truong-Vinh-Kyalso wrote another, secret document that detailed the conflicts and cleavages in Vietnam in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, particularly the divisions between French missionaries and the native clergy and the mutual hatred of Catholics and non-Catholics (122-5). In this secret report Truong-Vinh-Ky also reported on the endemic poverty and insecurity of the north, conditions made worse by the destabilizing presence of the French in the south, but in his published report he says little about the adverse conditions. In the 'open' account 'the impression of Tonking conveyed is one of a peaceful and prosperous region inhabited by friendly and hospitable people and filled with interesting relics of Vietnam's glorious past' (2). The two accounts do not so much contradict one another as suggest the typically colonial relationship between an apparently innocent desire for antiquarian and cultural knowledge and the machinations of power. Following conquest, occupation and settlement, colonizers required an equally important kind of knowledge that would facilitate their administration-knowledge of legal codes, the education systems, public works, methods for raising revenue, and of languages. At first, this knowledge was not collected, collated, and systematized. On the contrary, it was acquired haphazardly in an 'unstudied' form. In John S. Furnivall's long essay on The Fashioningof Leviathan,his study of the imposition of British rule in lower Burma, he breaks down the categories of this knowledge in an order that implicitly

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legitimizes colonial domination and economic exploitation: justice, the police, roads and buildings, education, revenue, foreign policy (Furnivall 1991). These same categories also take the form of the names of government departments or ministries. The similarity between Furnivall's list in The Fashioning of Leviathan and the reformed ministry structure in Siam is remarkable. Such classifications of knowledge came into existence with a view to how they would fit with bureaucracies. It would require several book-length studies to examine all the moments in Southeast Asian history when the truth of competing discourses was disputed. Not only 'Hinduization,' but also all the major pre-modern 'izations,' far from representing the natural and inevitable historical transformations as so often stated in both indigenous and Western historiographies, were just as contested as the example from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we will be examining.9 It is important now to consider the history of Western empirical knowledge of Southeast Asia because of its centrality to the formation of concepts that have dominated the historiography of the region since the colonial era. The task of knowing in colonial states was formally consigned to Far Eastern institutes of learning, learned societies and the like, and the knowledges that these institutes of learning produced have been the bedrock of Western area studies. In some cases, the knowledge produced by colonial rule is unsurpassed, even today with the supposedly advanced techniques of academic fact-finding and ethnographic methodology. Far Eastern institutes of learning grew out of both 'the will to know' and the requirements of colonial regimes, although at times the knowledge they sought was separable from the practical needs of government and administration. The scholars who established these institutes were a mixed group of colonial officials and scholar-officials from the indigenous elites. The establishment of these institutes and learned societies on the mainland flowed from east to west, as a result of the French having taken the initiative. The French Governor-General of Indochina, On Islamization, for example, contrast the myths of seamless transition from 9 the Indonesian and Malay worlds as recounted in the state myths of conversion collected by Russell Jones (1979) or as presented in some but not all eighteenthand nineteenth-century Central Javanese court histories (Ricklefs 1972), with accounts which bring out the clash of discourses occasioned by Islamization, from the sixteenth century (Drewes 1978), to the nineteenth (Ricklefs 1972, Soebardi 1975, Drewes 1966, Day 1988), to the twentieth (Hefner 1987 and 1993).

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Paul Doumer, set up the tcole Frangaise de I'Extreme-Orient in 1901 as 'a scholarly organization with a special interest in Indochina' The Siam Society, whose first Council (DeFrancis 1977:178-9). was held on March to meeting 1904, followed soon after (Davis

1989). It is worth underscoring this mainland context of the Siam Society's founding, for there was much cross-fertilization in the membership. French scholars, including Georges Coedes, played key roles in its early development. Sir George Scott, a scholar admnistrator from Burma, was an early Honorary Member. So, too, Pavie, the French surveyor. Prince Damrong was a key figure, while he was still Minister of Interior. His tours of duty took him to out of the way places where he was always bumping into lost cities (muang) and neglected ruins. In uncolonized Siam the line between colonial regime and indigenous sovereignty seems at first sight to be clear-cut. In fact, the indigenous elite was undertaking the same kinds of 'investigations' and compilations of 'encyclopedic' knowledge as the colonial powers. In a parallel but integrally related development in 1907 the Society for samakhom)was founded at Archaeological Investigation (borankhadi the instigation of Damrong and King Chulalongkorn. The intention of this society was the study of the longuedurie, history measured in a thousand years rather than a few hundred. Damrong, a central figure in both organizations, was 'filling up' the boundaries of the map with authentic ruins that testified to Thai possession of the new, imperial Siam. The aims and activities of both the Siam Society (European-Thai) and the Society for Archaeological Investigation (Thai) were very similar. In Burma the Burma Research Society came into being just after the Siam Society and largely because of the latter's instigation. J. S. Furnivall was in this case the moving force, having had the Siam Society brought to his intention by a government interpreter. Furnivall sought 'a knowledge and understanding of facts.' He said: 'We should devise some machinery for organizing knowledge and thought in relation to life in Burma' (Furnivall 1935: 40-1). In the cases of Burma and Indochina there was a decidedly 'left' orientation of these institutes and learned societies; in Siam, with the Society under the patronage of the Crown Prince, Vajiravudh, the opposite was the case. Furnivall was warned that 'You can't touch economics ... or the Society will be declared a political association, and all government servants will be called on to resign' (41). In Vietnam, 'the colonial authorities even came to fear the liberalism

TONY DAY and CRAIGJ. REYNOLDS 24 of French members of the officially supported tcole Frangaise de l'Extreme Orient who were encouraging native personnel of the

tcole to engage in scientific academic work' (DeFrancis 1977:170).

The Enlightenment and Javanese Knowledge In Java the human sciences inspired by the Enlightenment and the colonial needs for local knowledge converged at the end of the eighteenth century. A decision by the Dutch Society of the Sciences to establish a branch in the colonies led in 1778 to the founding of the Batavian Academy of the Arts and Sciences (BataviaaschGenootschap vanKunstenen Wetenschappen). According to its charter, the Academy, which was the first of its kind in Asia, ... will attempt to stimulate all arts and sciencesand will eagerlyreceive anythingwhich deals with the natural history, antiquities, customs and mores of the peoples.However,its principalgoal is to make such matters the subjectof its investigationswhich can be beneficialto the agriculture, trade, and particularwelfare of these settlements. (The and van der Veur 1973:3)

Contributions to the first eighteen volumes of the Transactions of the Academy, which cover the period up to 1843, reflect the scientific goals of the institution and the rather loose relationship between the gathering of knowledge and the goals of colonialism during these years. Thus we find 'short descriptions' of islands in the Indonesian archipelago as well as ofJapan, China, and India, but also pieces on children's diseases in Batavia and on a variety of topics concerning natural history and agriculture, as well as an essay on the bird of paradise. But there are also articles onJavanese language, 'antiquities,' and indigenous histories, on sea charts (proposing improvements to Dutch maps using English and French ones as models), and racial themes. All of these subjects would feature more prominently later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries once empirical knowledge had become 'Orientalized' and more closely aligned with the objectives of the colonial state (The and Van der Veur 1973:98-o109).

But it was the British who provided the Dutch with the greatest single impetus to the scientific collection of empirical data about Java through the energetic investigations of Thomas Stamford Raffles,John Crawfurd and Colin Mackenzie during the British occupation of the island between 1811 and 1816. The shock-waves of the example set by these British gentlemen and antiquarian-

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orientalists, who gathered manuscripts, laid siege to and overran native palaces, and reorganized the chaotic state of European colonial administration in Java, were felt until the end of the colonial period by Dutch 'Indologists' and administrators. To Southeast Asianists, Colin Mackenzie, later Surveyor-Generalfor India, is the least well known of the three, but it was he who designed the siege of the Yogyakarta kraton, which fell to the British inJune 18 2. Mackenzie also travelled around East and Central Java collecting Javanese manuscripts earlier in that same year, compiling materials which were used by both Raffles and Crawfurd in their publications and which now comprise a major collection of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Javanese manuscripts housed in the India Office Library in London.'o A closer look at Mackenzie's 'Enlightened' objectives and a sketch of the modus operandi of European seekers after Enlightenment, a process which was underway in Central Java from the time of the founding of the Bataviaasch Genootschap and which apparently produced a response from Javanese intellectuals, provide one of the earliest opportunities to examine the struggle over knowledge as the colonial regime came into existence in Southeast Asia. Mackenzie's 'A General View of the Results of Investigations into Geography, History, Antiquities, and Literature in the Island of Java,' written after he had returned to India in 1813, is based on 'encyclopedic' assumptions like the published studies of Raffles and Crawfurd. The essay is divided topically into five sections which taken together constitute a totalizing concept of knowledge: charts, geographical and hydrographical; military; territorial; history and antiquities; and manuscripts (Blagden 1916:xxiii-xxxii). Most of the information in all of the categories except for 'history and antiquities' was already available to Mackenzie in the archives of the VOC. With regard to the latter topic, Mackenzie begins by noting how little had been done by the Dutch, despite the founding of 'a Society of Sciences' in 1780 [sic], which had been revived by the British in the hope that it could still 'contribute essentially to the general culture of science, and of commercial economy, and of useful knowledge in these' (Blagden 1916:xxvi). Mackenzie remarks that his prior experiences in India have helped him to 'remove difficulties arising "o See Weatherbee 1978 on Mackenzie's travels and collecting in Java as well as for the use Raffles made of some of the historical information Mackenzie gathered. For discussions of Mackenzie's career in India, see Dirks 1993 and 1994; Cohn 1996: 76-10o5.

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from prejudices of education and religion' during his investigations, but he was hampered by a major difficulty. Because he was without 'the powerful aid of the penetrating acute genius of the Brahmans,' he had trouble making translations into English, especially fromJavanese. The Dutch colonists themselves were either ignorant or 'from a repugnance to travelling and fatigue, arising from indolence, and from habits widely dissimilar to ours' unavailable to assist him (Blagden 1916:xxvii).

Mackenzie thus places the local Dutch and Indo-Europeans he encountered in Java in the same Orientalist category as 'indolent natives'! However, as Weatherbee shows, this was merely an expression of British arrogance, for the new scholar-overlords from Great Britain in fact made extensive use of resident 'encyclopedists' ofJavanese culture, past and present, Dutch, American, Indo-European, as well as Javanese and Chinese. We know from his correspondence during 1812-13,

for example, that Mackenzie drew on the know-

ledge and linguistic skills of the American naturalist Thomas Horsfield, who had been living in Surakarta since 18o0 and had travelled down the Solo River and through East Java in 1805-o07 investigating '"climate, soil, mountains, rivers and productions of Java"' as well as medicinal plants (see Horsfield 1814 and de Haan 1935:582-4).

He also made use of the services of the Indo-European translators J. G. Vincent and J. W. Winter (father of the famous C. F. Winter), who had close contacts with a large number of Javanese aristocrats in Semarang, Surakarta, and East Java, all of whom provided Mackenzie with manuscripts and assisted him with translations (Blagden 1916:218-24)."

Mackenzie also states in a note to 'A General View'

that 'an ingenious native ofJava has since this accompanied Colonel MACKENZIEto India, and has already made some progress in translat-

ing from the Javanese,' but we know nothing more about this person (xxvii). We can form an impression of how Mackenzie et al. went about collecting information on Java by leafing through Mackenzie's 'Narrative of a Journey to Examine the Remains of an Ancient City and Temples at Brambana in Java,' a trip which he made in January " Other Indo-European informants, translators, and owners of manuscripts include F. von Winckelman, who lived and worked in Semarang, and J. D. J. d'Arnaud van Boeckholtz, who later assisted Raffles with his translation of the 'Brata Yudha' and whose father, F. van Boeckholtz, made drawings of Hindu-Buddhist antiquities while he was stationed in Salatiga in the early 178os. On both men see de Haan 1935: 503-4 and 665-6.

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1812, described in his travel journal (see Blagden 1916:98), and later published in 1814. On January 19, Mackenzie arrived at the ruins at 'about 9 A.M.by very deep bad roads'; After some refreshment, about half past eleven A.M.Mr Knops and myself, with the Draftsman, and some villagers provided by the Chinaman (by the Sooracarta Gentlemen's orders) proceeded in more form to perambulate the ruins; chairs were provided, covered with canopies of leaves and each carried by 4 men on poles of bamboo, but my impatience did not always permit me to avail myself of this convenient coverture from the sun's scorching rays, amidst the tantalizing ruins that surrounded us. (Mackenzie 1814:7) Later in the day Mackenzie noted: We enquired and sought in vain for inscriptions and characters; an aged Mantree who was our Ciceroni, intimated there were some in the ruins of the upper part, and I clambered in quest of them upon the ruinous roof; but what was pointed out consisted merely of single characters or figures which seemed cut on the stones ... (14) At day's end the explorer wrote: Returned at six A.M.[sic] much fatigued, though highly gratified with our inspection of these antiquities-the evening was fair and pleasant.-We were lodged in the Chinaman's house where we were accommodated with the open hall on pillars in front, with chairs and tables, where we sat, wrote and eat ... The evening was passed after dinner in writing our notes, and in Mr Knops' takingdown [sic] the traditionary [sic] account of Buka Embok Lora-Jongran, as translated verbally by one of the younger Chinese, from a villageMantree who promised to bring a MSS containing its history in the morning. (16-17)

Mackenzie, along with Raffles and Crawfurd, were thus the most visible but by no means the only participants in the founding moments of 'Javanology,' the systematic, encyclopedic, empirical study of Javanese language, literature, history, and culture in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies. The aim of this study was to uncover the 'truth' about Java (Tsuchiya 1990). In the extracts from Mackenzie's journal quoted above one is struck by a paradoxical mixture of innocent, boyish curiosity and colonial arrogance, of willingness to interrogate natives about 'their' traditions with something approaching respect, but respect quick to turn to disdain when the information was patently 'false.' Nicholas Dirks captures in pertinent fashion the same mixture of intense Enlightenment inquisitiveness about 'universal and objective truths' and the 'brutality of conquest'

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in his characterization of Mackenzie's encounter with antiquities in India, where he was Surveyor General from 1815 until his death in 1821: Let us recall the picture where Mackenzie is marching in with his native assistants to draw the ruined Hindu temple. The temple has been rent by the riotous energy of the natural world; it is about to be lost forever to the undergrowth. Mackenzie is clearly enamoured by the Hindu past, seeking to recover it through his collections ...

Thus the paradox of Mackenzie's

presence. On the one hand, the massive documentation of Mackenzie's empirical project is carried out with as little mediation as possible; Mackenzie eschews writing catalogues and annotations in favor of continuing to collect. But on the other hand, Mackenzie's very absence is what constantly legitimizes his presence; it is the fact that India's histories and traditions would soon disappear if allowed to follow their natural course that reminds us that without Mackenzie's active efforts the process of recovery and transcription-representation itself--could not take place. (Dirks 1994:229) But if we return to early nineteenth-century Java and proceed with an historicizing account of the context in which the 1814 Serat Centhini was composed, it would be a mistake to follow Dirks or the Indian historian David Ludden (1993) too closely in assigning primary agency to European scholar-imperialists and the regimes of knowledge and truth which they constructed and imposed on a helpless native population. As C. A. Bayly argues, the 'colonial information order' in India was erected on the foundations of its Indian precursors. For instance, indigenous police descriptions and sociological understanding of the classes of beings were incorporated into the British canon by means of the testimony of native informants. Of course, this information was reclassified and built into hierarchies which reflected the world view of the Britons of the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Indian sociologies, forms of religious thought and beliefs about criminality were active, not passive elements within these constructs, and Indians almost immediately began to critique them from the inside. (Bayly 1996:179, and passim) As we have noted in our comments about Mackenzie's 'informants,' and as his account of the visit to Prambanan also testifies, British research on 'the actual state of knowledge' about Java was already intertwined with and based upon 'facts' and ideas which were being generated and written down by the Javanese themselves in response to the colonial requests for 'information' that were being made upon them. Next to the many texts which were being produced, copied, and created to order for colonial investigators at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one work stands out, not only because of its

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'encyclopedic' scope and size but also because of the way in which it eluded detection by colonial investigators until a part of it was copied and given as a present to the Dutch king in 1846 (Behrend n.d.:39). In 1814, the Serat Centhini,a massive poetic compilation of knowledges of all sorts about Java, was written in the residence of the Crown Prince of Surakarta. As Tim Behrend's research demonstrates, this text had older antecedents (Behrend 1987 and n.d.). But it seems probable that, given everything else which we know about the visibility of and Javanese participation in the Enlightenment investigations of all aspects ofJavanese life and culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and given the features which distinguish the 1814 text from its predecessors, the much-expanded 1814 version of the Serat Centhini was in some as-yet-to-bedetermined sense a response to the Enlightenment. According to Behrend (n.d.), the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury recensions of what became the Major Centhiniof 1814 are concerned with the travels during an unspecified time by various characters through villages in a geographically vague if identifiably Javanese countryside. During these wanderings 'lists of animals and foods' as well as 'theological points' are enumerated or discussed. In his study of one of the 1814 Centhini'sancestors, the SeratJatiswara, Behrend makes clear that the 'encyclopedism' of the later text is already present in the former's wide-ranging interest in examining questions of religious practice and knowledge. But in the 1814 text not only is the number of characters and information vastly expanded to cover every imaginable facet ofJavanese experience and knowledge, both secular and religious. The text also acquires an historical setting, after the sacking of the Islamic port state of Giri in 1625 by the forces of Mataram, and a place, the minutely detailed geography of the length and breadth of the island of Java. 'History' is hardly a novel concept in Central Java at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But it is noteworthy that the 1814 Centhiniis apparently the first encyclopedic and religious travel poem to be historicized in this way, thereby mirroring some of the features of European writing and modes of thinking about the Orient from the same period. Among other things, it is a 'travelogue' which historicizes the landscape it traverses and represents. The kinds of knowledge now inquired about and recounted include, in Behrend's listing, 'primbon(numerology and divination), pakem (wayang stories), suluk (Islamic mysticism), piwulang (etiquette and morals), kawuruh kalang (building lore), jampi-jampian (herbology

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and medicine), musawaratan para wali [stories about the Islamic saints and their deliberations], babad (history), jangka (predictions), sastra wadi (mystical meanings of the alphabet), dasa nama [lists of synonyms for use in literary compositions], pikih (Islamic law), anbia (tales of the [Islamic] prophets), katuranggan(equestrian lore) and many others,' including kawruh about birds, krisses, sex, women, ascetics, legendary pre-Islamic and Islamic heroes, dates, calendars, non-Islamic 'Buda' religion, Islamic prayers and rituals, childbirth, marriage, weddings, butchering, exorcism, wealth, thievery, music, dancing, magic, mountains, springs, grave sites, and death (Behrend n.d.:35; Pigeaud 1933). All of the topics listed by Behrend are also treated in separate texts, of which manuscript copies date from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. Thus the 1814 Centhiniincludes within itself a multitude of what might be called 'manuals' of knowledge, presented during incidental conversations in the course of a long and meandering narrative. This presentation of knowledge in manual-like segments, as well as the seemingly unstructured way in which these manuals are strung together, marks one of the obvious differences between the text and European Enlightenment encyclopedia.'2 Such manuals are still common in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia, where we find treatises on war strategy, statecraft, and healing therapies.'3 We also find law codes, religious texts, grammars, and handbooks on sorcery, astrology, pharmacology, and invulnerability (on the latter see Quinn 1975 and Turton 1991). This assemblage of knowledges, which was available to ordinary people as well as to the elite, is not dissimilar to the shastric knowledge of classical India. In his study of shastric knowledge in early India, Sheldon Pollock argues that the shastras represent 'an attempt at an exhaustive classification of human cultural practices' (1985:502).

What is distinct-

ive about this knowledge is its sheer comprehensiveness, which embraces everything from cooking to sexual intercourse, elephantrearing, thievery, mathematics, logic, legends, ascetic renunciation, 12 Cf. Anderson's snide characterization of the manual-passages in the Centhini as 'unalphabetized, poetic Yellow Pages' (1990: 274). Anderson's Enlightened amusement at such disorder can be linked genealogically to such 'scientific,' totalizing, and obsessively tidy constructions of human knowledge as Jean Le Rond D'Alembert's 1751 diagram of the 'Detailed System of Human Knowledge' (D'Alembert 1751 [1995]: 144-5). D'Alembert was a contributor to Diderot's famous Encyclopedia. For an example of an ancient Chinese manual on warfare now much in vogue 3 in contemporary Thailand as a handbook of business strategy, see Reynolds 1996.

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and spiritual liberation. We find this characteristic in the Serat Centhini and in the manual literature of Southeast Asia generally. Another shastric characteristic found in Southeast Asian manuals is the expression of the 'centrality of rule-governance in human behaviour' (500). Learning in early India, Pollock says, moved away from contact with direct experience toward a mastery of shastric codifications. But the question of the relationship between theory and practice was not a matter of trivial concern in the Indian intellectual tradition (504). According to Pollock, 'the relation of theoretical knowledge to actual practice' was given its 'fullest and most pointed expression' in the Kamasutra (506). (The subject of sexual knowledge and practice is also a major concern in the Centhini and its textual antecedents.)'" According to one ancient commentator on the Kamasutra: '... Kama cannot be achieved without the application of a specific procedure ... Kama is a function of the union of man and woman, and this requires some procedure, the knowledge of which comes only from the Kamasutra... The procedure must therefore be enunciated, and the purpose of the Kamasutrais to do just this and so make it known. For how does one come to know anything except by means of a given sastra?' (quoted by Pollock, 506) In another ancient passage on the efficacy of the shastras which foreshadows the attitude toward knowledge and rules displayed in the Centhini, it is stated that '"When human activity is fundamentally governed by sastra, it leads to the full measure of success of whatever is intended; otherwise it leads to misfortune"' (509). One final and extremely pertinent comment from the Indian 'shastric paradigm' which resonates with the Centhini is that 'The improvement in any given practice lies, not in the future and the discovery of what has never been known before, but in the past,' which can be recovered whether through 'uncontaminated, unexpurgated descent from the original, whether through faithful intermediaries or by sudden revelation' (5 2). Informed with Pollock's ideas on the difference between Indian shastric and Western Enlightenment concepts of knowledge we can 4 For an earlyJavanese reference to the use of an Indic love-manual as a theoretical guide to practice, see the passage from the twelfth-century Bharatayuddhain which King Salya and his wife Satyawati ' "achieved the most sensuous enjoyment of sexual union in accordance with the kamatantra".'(Supomo 1993: 233). The oldest

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read the first verse of the 1814 Serat Centhini and take note of the

way in which it alludes to the poem's character as an historical, narrative, and shastric compendium of Javanese knowledges all at the same time: The excellent CrownPrince of SurakartaAdiningrat on the island ofJava has orderedhis servant,the scribe, Sutrasna,his close companion, to fashiona storytaken from the past in such a way that all ofJavaneseknowledge(kawruhJawa) is gatheredtogether (ingimpun), arranged(tinrap)in metricalform so that all who hear it will be pleased,not bored. (Translation,with minorchanges,from Behrendn.d.:34) Several questions arise from this opening stanza. Why was the text compiled in 1814? Why was the compilation of kawruhgiven in the form of a historical 'story' (caritengdangu)?What is the significance of the seemingly shastric, all-inclusiveness of its intent? What, indeed, is kawruhJawa, Javanese knowledge, all about? Carey's work on the political and cultural history of Central Java during the first two decades of the nineteenth century is illuminating on the question of why the text was composed in 1814. The production of the text seems to have been caught up in and have given expression to the politics of the court of the Surakarta Sunan, Pakubuwana IV (r. 1788-1820)

(Carey 1977:298-302).

In 1811-12,

prior to the destruction of the Yogyakarta kraton by the British, Pakubuwana had been secretly plotting with the ruler of Yogyakarta to expel the British, in the hope that Hamengkubuwana II's disloyalty would be discovered, thus paving the way to Pakubuwana's possession of both thrones. The Sunan was also at odds with the ruler of the Mangkunegaran house in Surakarta, who sent forces to help the British assault on Yogyakarta. The Sunan's hatred of Pangeran Prangwedana expressed itself when the Sunan refused to allow his daughter to marry the Mangkunagaran prince, and it was further inflamed by the whisperings of a powerful prince at the Sunan's court, Mangkubumi. The latter also fomented intrigues against the Crown Prince, hoping to see him replaced as the Sunan's successor by his son-in-law, Pangeran Purbaya. And it was Mangkubumi who made contact with a group of rebellious Sepoys, introducing them from Javaneseencyclopedicshastrain literaryform is the OldJavaneseRamayana the tenth century(see Hooykaas1958).

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to the Sunan, who became infatuated with Hindu ritual. In Carey's words, This fascination on the part of the Sunan for Hindu ceremonial was later stressed by Raffles as having been one of the main reasons why such close initial contacts were formed between the Surakarta court and the Sepoys .... Indeed, the Sepoy conspirators in Surakartawere at pains to emphasize to the Sunan that Java had a special Hindu heritage which in their opinion should be once again revitalised.... The fact that many of the Hindu temples and archaeological remains were in the process of being cleaned and surveyed by the British government at the time, may have also served to awaken an interest among the Central Javanese nobility in their Hindu past .... ." In Surakarta ... the Sunan immediately responded to the Sepoys' overtures by lending them Hindu images from the Surakarta court collection and ... also attended various Hindu ceremonies inside the fort .... (Carey 1977:301-2) These contacts between the Sunan and the Sepoys continued during the later months of 1814 and early 1815, the conspiracy finally being discovered and the leaders of the Sepoy plot arrested in November 1815. The Surakarta court copy of the Serat Centhini is dated 29 December 1814 (Florida 1993:252). The political and religious tensions of the Sepoy conspiracy help to explain the specific provenance and dating of the 1814 Centhini. The frame story of the poem, with its tale of the sacking of Giri, the flight and subsequent wanderings of the royal son and heir, and its representation of 'religion' as depoliticized, dispersed, and localized lists and conversations about various knowledges and practices, comments on the situation in Surakarta in 1811-14 from a point of view which the embattled Crown Prince must have endorsed. The text imagines how the political crisis might be averted, as well as what the consequences of the crisis might be if it came to a head. In this respect, the Centhini is similar to the Serat Cabolek, which seems to comment on the conspiracy of 1787-90o by means of an historical story about a theological debate which took place at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Day 1988:144-8; Soebardi 1975). The compendious exposition of Islamic knowledge in the text can certainly be read as a shastric exposition of all possible religious practices and theological positions, but there is also a polemical edge to the treatment of heterodoxy which reflects a critical rather than '5 Rafflesalso used the Sepoysas informantsduringhis visits to Hindutemples in CentralJava and notes their admirationfor these monuments,as well as their contempt for the Javanese of the day, '... degenerate sons, with scarce a remnant of arts, science, or of any religion at all' (Raffles 1965, 2:27).

TONY DAY and CRAIGJ. REYNOLDS 34 a tolerant assessment of the Sunan's neo-Hinduism (cf. Soebardi

1971:349).

A political reading of the text is also supported by the

realization that the 1814 Centhiniis similar to other instructional texts from the same period which enunciated the injunction 'Do not forget!' the rules of ancient and proper conduct and dress in times of political disorder (see Kumar 1997:367-429, and passim). The SeratCenthini,therefore, represents an interesting moment in the development of 'Javanese knowledge.' Its hybrid form and content reflect its origins as both shastric manual, political polemic, and Enlightenment-style, knowledge-gathering travelogue. Ben Anderson has read the text as a 'phantasmagoric utopia' in which protoEnlightenment intellectuals attack the ideology ofJavanese kingship, but this interpretation does not take account of the pervasive 'ruleboundedness' (Pollock 1985:511) of the text, which extends to characterizations of social and gender relationships which are anything but revolutionary, notwithstanding occasional, carnivalesque but instructive upendings of the social order (see Anderson 1990:271-

98 and cf. the Indian shastric injunction about the cause of misfortune quoted above, in Pollock 1985:509).

However, in line with Anderson's Enlightenment reading of the text, it is worth thinking about the fact that the Centhinipays abundant attention to practice as well as theory, to experience as well as rules. Is there an expression of Enlightenment influence here? Pollock notes a similar tension in Indian shastras, one which was resolved there in favor of theory and rules. One of the features which distinguishes the Centhinifrom contemporaneous European encyclopedic travel or historical accounts of Java is the vivid way in which it dwells on natural settings, social interaction, eating, music, performance, and sex before and after the 'rules' of a particular kind of knowledge are expounded. Compare, for example, Mackenzie's account of his scientific expedition to Prambanan with the poetic narrative of the visit by Mas Cabolang and his companions to the same ruins (Serat Centhini 1986, III:85ff.). The travellers approach through a dawn landscape filled with bird-song, sights of towering mountains, and the sound of people working in the rice fields. They arrive at the ruins and a spring whose refreshing qualities are sensuously evoked. A village woman fetching water tells them the name of the place and takes them to meet the village head Harsana, who is delighted to show them around the temples over which it is his duty to watch. After a tour, during which the ruins and their features are minutely described (at one point [v. 26-7:94] the text makes

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use of verses from the Serat Rama to describe a Ramayana relief on one of the temples and evoke their emotional significance), the travellers retire to Harsana's home where he offers them food and drink. The meal and its enjoyment are described at length. After eating, Mas Cabolang politely asks for the 'story' about the temples, since he does not 'know' (weruh,v. 11:97) which of the two versions he has heard is correct. Harsana obliges with a tale which lasts several hundred verses and a night of pleasurable listening. There are certainly parallels between the details and stages of Mackenzie's visit to Prambanan and the one described in the Centhini which suggest either a Javanese awareness of European archaeological method or the agency of Javanese modes of making inquiries which willy nilly have been incorporated into European practice. But the differences between the two accounts are equally striking. Compared to the intensely serious and imperious Mackenzie and Raffles being borne aloft on the shoulders of coolies during their rigorous daily study routines, on the job by nine, home by six, the Centhini's scholars enjoy a relaxed, egalitarian, joyous, and sensuous learning experience in which 'time' is noticed, if at all, at various moments of day because people want to worship God who has created all knowledge and existence. This mode of living and learning seems enlightened, but not in a European sense! For reasons which may have to do with the experiential rather than exclusively shastric orientation of the poem, the word used to designate most of the knowledges in the text is kawruh,from the root wruh meaning to see or come to know by observing the exoteric, external appearance of things (Gericke and Roorda 19go, 2:14-15). The term ngelmuis reserved for the esoteric, mystical secrets of religion, such as those revealed by Amongraga to his bride-to-be Tambang Raras on their wedding night (see the passage from the Centhinitranslated and discussed in Zoetmulder 1995:132-6).I6 The important point is that without exception all knowledges are revealed in the Centhini, as Anderson himself observes (1990:288). But the main protagonists Cabolang and Amongraga who elicit or make these revelations are hardly middle- or lower-class professionals in the modern, secular meaning of that term, as Anderson would like to imagine them in 16 We do not know whether the difference between kawruhand ngelmuis examined in the 1814 Centhinior whether, if it is, the difference is considered to be significant. Behrend notes that in a nineteenth-century version of the Seratjatiswarainfluenced by the 1814 Centhinithere is a discussion about the difference between these two kinds of knowledge (1987: 117).

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quasi-parallel with Enlightenment intellectuals in Europe, but men of spiritually superior ancestry (trah utama) who ultimately submit to the authority of fathers and kings however nakal (naughty) they have been. At the end of the poem, the theologian Amongraga becomes a black gendhon(a kind of edible worm) so that he can be consumed by and so merge with the king. The perspective of the text on knowledges and on social behavior is thoroughly aristocratic and male (cf. Florida 1996:217). There is more to say about the shastric range of knowledges presented in the text. When they began appropriating bits and pieces of these knowledges, Western and modern Indonesian scholars took what interested them-theology, music, dance and sex-preferences which have a lot to do with the selection of the portion of the total text that was first transliterated and published in 1912-15. But what about the other knowledges that have not been so privileged as items in the colonial and postcolonial versions of the Centhiniunderstood as cultural 'encyclopedia', as subjects worthy of Orientalist scholarship or anti-New Order polemic? The basis for all-inclusiveness given in the first stanza of the poem quoted above is that the knowledges presented are all Javanese, kawruhJawa.The earliest textual use of 'Javanese' as a classifier for knowledge is possibly the sixteenth-century tract on ethics translated by Drewes. In this text the question is asked: 'Which is the better religion, Islam or the religion of the Javanese?' (Anangucapaendibecik agamaselamlawangamajawa?) (Drewes 1978:36-7). Within the 1814 poetic Javanese landscape of dispersed and depoliticized knowledges, however, this question is no longer being asked, at least not explicitly. So why must the 'Javaneseness' of knowledges in the text be designated as such? The historical context of early nineteenth-century Central Java, where decades of European regulation of the affairs of the courts and probings of their knowledges were followed by the pillage of manuscripts and heirlooms from the kraton of Yogyakarta, suggests a powerful reason for self-reflexivity about the Javaneseness of knowledges and anxiety about their efficacy (see Kumar 1997).John Pemberton has recently given us an analysis of one aspect of this Javanese cultural self-reflexivity and response to European colonialism in his study of Central Javanese court ritual from the late eighteenth century onwards, by means of which there developed a 'Javanese' concept of 'order' (tata) and a 'Javanese style' (caraJawa) of behaving (Pemberton 1994). A shastric reading of the 1814 Centhini expands

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this reading of nineteenth-century Javanese culture. The emphasis in the poem is on exposing, for all to know, the sarat or effective means for utilizing knowledge. The word caraas used in the text also possesses a plural rather than a monolithic meaning in the way in which it is used to describe a variety of different ways of doing things, e.g., carapraja, the way we do things in a kraton environment; cara priyayi,the way the highborn do things; carabasaBudha, the way one would put it in pre-Islamic terms. The Centhini thus expands the boundaries of Pemberton's 'Java' and pluralizes what it contains, at least for the early nineteenth century. The significance of the frequent occurrence of the phrase caraJawa, 'Javanese style,' however, still needs more explaining. Following Pemberton, we are also inclined to place the compilation of the 1814 Centhiniand the impulse behind its display of kawruh Jawa in a ritual framework, but we want to use the ideas of the anthropologist of performance Victor Turner in order to understand the wider cultural, historical, and ritual significance of the writing of the text. In Turner's terms, the 'utopian' (Anderson) or 'subjunctive' (to use a term from Victor Turner) mode of representation in the SeratCenthiniderives not from an anti-feudal ideology of a professional class of artists who produced the text, as Anderson argues in his essay in order to suggest a quasi-historical parallel between late eighteenth-century France and early nineteenth-century Java, but from the fact that the Centhiniis a 'metacommunication' (Turner 1988:102) about Javanese culture in the early nineteenth century, a self-reflexive 'framing' of cultural practices and values in a period of rapid and violent change. Thus in a textual form (and we will see in a moment how well the text's narrative content supports this view) it is analogous to the kind of explicit framing of cultural values that occurs during the middle, 'liminal' phase of ritual as analyzed by Turner's predecessor, the anthropologist Van Gennep, and by Turner himself (see Turner 1982:24). 'Liminality,' writes Turner, in one of his eloquent definitions of this concept, ... is often the scene and time for the emergence of a society'sdeepest values in the form of sacred dramas and objects-sometimes the reenactmentperiodicallyof cosmogonicnarrativesor deeds of saintly,godly, or heroicestablishersof morality,basicinstitutions,or waysof approaching transcendentbeings or powers.But it may also be the venue and occasion for the most radical scepticism-always relative, of course, to the given culture's repertoire of sceptical concepts and images-about cherished values and rules. Ambiguity reigns; people and public policies may be judged sceptically in relation to deep values; the vices, follies, stupidities

TONY DAY and CRAIGJ. REYNOLDS 38 and abusesof contemporaryholdersof high political,economic,or religious status may be satirized, ridiculed,or contemned in terms of axiomatic values, or these personages may be rebuked for gross failures in com-

monsense. (1988:10o2)

The Serat Centhinidisplays all the hallmarks of a metacommunication in Turner's 'liminal' sense. The frame story, involving the search by the oldest son of the defeated ruler of Giri, one of the most sacred sites of Islamic pilgrimage and once a powerful, theocratic maritime state on Java's northeast coast, for his brother and sister who have become separated from him during the pillage of the city by the forces of the Central Javanese inland state of Mataram, has the basic ritual structure of separation, transition and incorporation (Turner 1982:24), a structure which is recapitulated over and over again in narrative sub-plots and in the topics of Islamic debate and discussion throughout the text. The final 'incorporation' sought by Amongraga, but also endlessly parodied in the scenes of exuberantly raunchy sexual union (as well as dis-union!), is not the physical recovery of his two siblings, since the separation of the sons and daughter from each other is symbolic of man's separation from God. Amongraga ('He who devotes himself to love') eventually achieves his own spiritual goal, but not before, by means of travels, discussions, performances, sexual unions, and displays of every kind of cultural knowledge imaginable, the cultural values and paraphernalia of Central Java are put on display in the midst of a 'liminal' realm of villages and places of pilgrimage situated outside Giri, outside Mataram, outside the normal, everyday social courtly world of Surakarta where the poem was written and by whose inhabitants it was meant to be read and listened to. What Anderson calls a 'phantasmagoric utopia' might be better termed a concrete ritual space, located in a real Javanese geography beyond the pale of 'normal' courtly, colonized Javanese society, where the characters of the poem, like participants in some vast initiation, are instructed in the kawruhof their culture. The dispersed and non-courtly location of knowledges in the text also reflects, in a directly referential way, the actual dispersal of specific sites of experience and knowledge throughout the landscape of Java before the nineteenth century,'7 a situation which changed in the course of that century as the countryside was colon17 Cf. Bayly's comments on traditional Indian concepts of geography, especially

the remarkthat 'since spiritualitywas as much a "substance"as a "code",geographyin this schemeembracedsociology,religionand naturalhistory'(1996: 303, passim).

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ized and a Europe- and kraton-centric idea about the location of knowledge and culture developed. We are suggesting, therefore, that not just theology but every form ofJavanese knowledge presented in the text is imbued with an aura nf sacredness and the power to induce self-reflexivity about being 'Javanese' at a time of cultural and political crisis. The 'shastric' nature of the text, which has its origins in very old approaches to learning and literary production in Java,18conforms to and expresses this 'liminal' function of the poem. The 1814 Centhini,like the published and unpublished encyclopedic compendia produced by the Enlightenment in early nineteenth-century Java, needs to be read, therefore, in a dialogic way across the widening cultural divide that separated 'Java' from 'Europe'. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for reasons which have partly to do with the appearance of the Enlightenment in Java, this divide was narrower than it had been or would become. A lot more spade work has to be done to uncover the nature and extent of contacts between. European and Javanese seekers after knowledge at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But on the basis of what we already know about such contacts, and on the basis of the many similarities between the encyclopedic interests pursued and facts gathered in both intellectual traditions, there are grounds for theorizing that the early nineteenth century was a pivotal moment in Javanese history when, all other things being equal, a different historical turning point might have been achieved. As it turned out, of course, 'Enlightened' Europeans andJavanese pursued divergent trajectories toward modernity. One can already detect, along with expressions of potential receptivity to Western ideas, the nodes and modes of this historicJavanese resistance to Enlightenment colonialism in the 1814 Centhini.The poem resists the order which the colonial categories used to arrange Javanese knowledge imposed on the 'facts' of Javanese kawruh.Presented in an order which appears random from a Western point of 1a Noorduyn, in his study of the fifteenth-century Sundanese poem about the travels of Bujangga Manik, argues that 'Java' (as opposed to Sunda) and its many mountain sites of learning attracted wandering pilgrims in search of 'higher education in the field of religion' (1982: 418). When he returned from one such pilgrimage in search of knowledge, Bujangga Manik informed his mother that he was '"thoroughly instructed in learning/thoroughly well-read in precepts/firmly versed in the rules/ loyal to what has been prescribed/ having received thorough instruction"' (418). These shastric sentiments could be found in many places in the 1814 Centhini.

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view (Anderson 1990:274),

information in the Centhini is displayed,

not according to the logic of a colonial fact-finding expedition or taxonomy, but along the meandering route of seekers after kawruh. Its acquisition is subordinated to the willingness of village sages to divulge their knowledge and governed by the etiquette of polite inquiry. The scientific collection and decipherment of written sources is replaced by the oral/aural pleasures of learning by listening and telling, followed by eating, music making, or sex. The purposeful travel of colonial officials is resisted in the form of wandering motivated by a religious quest which, once completed, leaves the living sources of knowledge alone and at peace. The subsequent history of the Serat Centhinihas yet to be written. We know, however, that a partial manuscript of the text found its way into the Dutch Academy in Batavia. There it was eventually edited by the future Mangkunegara VII, an aristocratic Javanese nationalist who identified himself with the chief seeker after mystical Truth in the poem, Amongraga, and was published in abbreviated form in 1912-15 during the height of the Javanese nationalist awakening." Thereafter, the text was plundered for bits and pieces of kawruhJawa considered important for Western knowledge about such topics as Islamic mysticism (Zoetmulder 1995), popular performance (Pigeaud 1938), and Central Javanese gamelan music (Kunst 1973). We can note here, however, that the historical specificity of its relation to the situation in Central Java in 1812-14 was quickly forgotten. By 1862, when the Javanologist C. F. Winter's were published as 'Javanese conversations' (JavaanscheZamenspraken) a textbook for Dutch Javanese-language learners, the Serat Centhini was referred to, only briefly, as a 'secret guide to mystical knowledge' (perlambang ngelmi). The Orientalizing and mystification of what is presented in the text as empirical knowledges of all sorts, both mundane and esoteric, about Java had thus already occurred (Winter 1862:193). The transformation of the text by Dutch Orientalists into an apolitical 'encyclopedia' of Javanese cultural knowledges, VII whichlinks him rather 19 See Sears 1996 for an appraisalof Mangkunegara too one-dimensionally with Dutch colonialand Theosophicalthinkingand Muhlenfeld 1916/17, whowritesthe following,biographically, of the youngSoerioSoeparto beforehis elevationto kingship:'He travelledover the whole of Java,on foot or by third-classtrain,accompaniedbyonlya few servants,spendingthe nightwithvillage chiefs, and from time to time findingrelease in the beautyof nature,searchingfor life's path-Amongrogo from the Tjentini (his favoritework,of which a published version,introducedby himself,appeareda few yearsago) flutteredbeforehis mind's eye.' (85)

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along with its own message of political, sexual, and religious submissiveness, are the reasons why the poem never became 'seditious' like the nineteenth-century Siamese Nirat No'ngkhai (Reynolds 1991). This work belongs to another genre and a different history, but like the Centhiniit is a shastric representation of knowledges recorded during a journey which leads to discoveries about the nature of colonial relations of power. The Orientalizing of Javanese Knowledge As was the case in India, the years from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century witnessed the transformation ofJavanese 'intellectuals' into 'informants,' or worse. Although far less was recorded about them, the writers of the Serat Centhini,as well as the various Javanese princes who shared their learning and texts with Mackenzie and Raffles, were treated more nearly as intellectual equals by Europeans than the famous Ranggawarsita (1802-73) of Surakarta, the descendant of a long line of court writers, who labored during his lifetime anonymously and impecuniously as an assistant to Dutch lexicographers, only to be ridiculed for his ignorance of Old Javanese by one of the most prominent early Dutch philologists, A. B. Cohen Stuart (1825-76), in a 'scientifically' prepared text edition of 186o (Day 1982:164, passim;Tsuchiya 1990; Fasseur 1994 passim). Ranggawarsita was crushed beneath a juggernaut of Dutch research on the Hindu-Buddhist origins of CentralJavanese culture, bible translation, Javanese lexicography and literature, relegated to the bottom of a scientific and political pecking order that stretched from Surakarta to Leiden (Tsuchiya 199o).20 Ranggawarsita's obscurity, but also the transformation of his reputation and posthumous fame, was partly a result of a shift in focus of Western empirical research onJava." The shift can be seen in the 20 Ranggawarsita recorded his loss of status and economic security in several of his works. See Day 1982, Florida 1987, and Errington 1989. The degree of displacement of court intellectuals in Surakarta between 18oo and 1875 can be sensed by comparing the ebullient prolixity of the Centhiniwith the terseness and despair of such poems as Ranggawarsita's SeratJayengbayaand SeratKalatidha. 21 See Tsuchiya 19goo: 96-1o6 for an account of Ranggawarsita's life which is based on a biography compiled in the early twentieth century at the request of the Theosophist and close friend of prominent members of the Budi Utomo, Dr van Hinloopen Labberton. In this account, Ranggawarsita's education and mystical knowledge are the antithesis to Western rationalism and the educational methods

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pages of the Transactions of the Batavian Academy after 1843. Interest turned from the natural sciences to language, literature, archaeology, and the collection of antiquities, and the Academy 'approached several Dutch specialists in "the heart ofJava" (the principalities of Jogjakarta and Surakarta) with a request for assistance in selecting and translating important works from old Javanese' (The and van der Veur 1973:8 and passim). It also promoted 'the preservation of antiquities' and fought to protect its piece of the scientific action when the State Ethnographical Museum of Leiden tried to arrange the transfer of its collection of ethnographic objects to the Netherlands.22 Another example of the Academy's activities ... is the case of Rudolph H. Th. Friederich, a German student of Sanskrit who had enlisted as a regular soldier in the Colonial Army in order to obtain access to Hindu monuments and manuscripts.... Friederich's talents were soon put to more productive use. The Directors, alerted that the government intended to send a military expedition to Bali, petitioned the Governor-General to have 'the interests of scholarship' represented by attaching Friederich to the expedition with the task of collecting manuscripts, statues, inscriptions, and information on the connection between Balinese and old Javanese. In the last decade of the century, similar efforts led to the 'rescue' from the temple of the radjaof Lombok of the Nagarakretagama [sic], the panegyric of the court poet Praon Wuruk. (11) pantja King Hajam The pages of the Transactions after 1843 record not only a deepening and totalizing appropriation of the Javanese past, involving a definition of that past as essentially 'Hindu' and hence 'classically' Indic and non-Islamic (see Day 1988 and Sears 1996); they also begin to prefigure, then parallel the expansion of the Dutch imperium into the heartland of the Javanese countryside by means of the Cultivation System and out into the rest of the Archipelago in the vanguard of military conquest (The and van der Veur 1973:10925). From 1853 onward, the Academy also printed a journal which, next to linguistic and philological matters, began publishing studies directly relevant to political, military, and economic concerns such as Islamic and Chinese education, Muslim and Chinese sects and which fostered it. As Tsuchiyashows,Ranggawarsitawas thus 'recuperated'by a 'Javanese'traditionof modernitywhich also gave rise to the Taman Siswa movement (on the latter, see Tsuchiya1987). 22 This is an earlyexampleof whatbecamean important,if little-studied,aspect of the historyof the productionof knowledgeaboutIndonesia:competitionbetween and Netherlands/Western-based Indies/Indonesiaexpertsand institutionsfor dominanceoverOrientalknowledgeand its transmission.See Fasseur1994.

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secret societies, and in the 189os Javanese village legends and beliefs. 'Knowing' the Indies began to mean literally possessing it,23 and both the knowing and the possessing were masculine in gender: Many colonial administrators, who were always male, imagined Asia as unfathomable ... whereas they envisioned the physical terrain of colonial administration as a Pandora's box, the ultimate symbol of feminine inscrutability ... it was only the scientific scrutiny of Western men that could decipher the conundrum of colonial governance. Knowledgeable civil servants should strip away the layers of secrecy and ignorance that surround the desa [village], said the Dutch adat ['village customary law'] specialist Cornelis van Vollenhoven in 1909; only through a scholarly ethnographic analysis of the customs and cosmology of family life in the desacan the great divide between the formal colonial state and the informal village world be bridged. (Gouda 1993:6)

Dutch philology re-enacted military conquest and administrative centralization on the dry pages of the Transactions: European scholars subjugated indigenous texts and destroyed their universal truth-value as well as their multiple meanings, by arranging variant versions into stemma leading to a single lost 'original.' Textual edit-

ing implied that only the Western philologist could guess at what the text once 'really' and originally meant. Philological editions also implicitly restated the view that contemporary Indonesian societies were, to use Raffles' words, mere vestiges 'of humbled majesty and decay' (Raffles 1965, 2:15).24 In 1862 the Dutch government declared that ' "The islands of the Indies Archipelago offer a wide field for scientific study"' and concluded that the Netherlands should become the international center for studies of the region (quoted in Fasseur 1994: 196-7). Elsbeth Locher-Scholten (1981: 176-208), nicely links the colonial 'Ethical Movement' at the very end of the nineteenth century, which encouraged the development of Indonesian nationalism, to an upsurge of Dutch national selfconfidence (tempered by a recognition of Holland's non-importance on the international scene), military expansionism to the Outer Islands of the Indonesian archipelago, and an anxious concern for the 'development' of the 'natives.' One of the decisive events in the reawakening of Dutch national self-confidence was the conthe famous OldJavanese poem quest of Lombok in 1894, where the Nagarakrtagama, about the Javanese kingdom of Majapahit, was seized (197). For the latter, see 23

Prapanca 1995.

24 See Wiener 1995 for an excellent study of the Dutch conquest of Bali which examines the clash between Dutch and Balinese ways of knowing. Balinese make use of historical texts, she says, 'for aid in ritually "remembering" their ancestors, persons transformed through death rituals into nonvisible agents. Such remembering is crucial to well-being, for "forgetting" . . is often diagnosed through healers as the cause of illness, dissension, and other misfortunes' (78). For Europeans, on the other hand, 'vision was the primary trope for knowledge' (76). Once the conquest had been completed in 1go8, the Dutch were routinely interested in only 'statistics and regularities' (9go).The texts which were looted from Klungkung and

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In stressing the growing utilitarian value of the collection of and then intellectual triumph over indigenous knowledges and languages in the Indies to the expanding Dutch imperium during the course of the nineteenth century, we do not want to lose sight of the particular issues which served to motivate the struggle to possess knowledge of certain kinds. Henk Maier has recently argued in an essay about the 'creation of Malay and Dutch in the Indies' (1993) that the general trend over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was for what he calls 'Authority' to transform the 'heteroglossia' of hybrid languages and knowledges, both native, white, and Eurasian, into a 'polyglossia' of invented, purified, and segmented linguistic and cultural constructs called 'Javanese,' 'Malay,' 'Dutch,' etc. As a consequence, a day-to-day struggle occurred over the meanings of what it meant to be Javanese or Dutch in the colonial situation and about what one needed to know in order to be one or the other. Fasseur's long study 'The Indologists: Bureaucrats for the East, 1825-1950' (1994), for example, details the tortuous and often ridiculous path by which policies and institutions were invented for the training of colonial bureaucrats destined for service in the Indies. Little did Ranggawarsita or other 'natives' who were made to feel minder,inferior, to arrogant Dutch taskmasters realize that from the time of Raffles until the end of the colonial period (if not beyond), Dutch officials and policymakers were themselves chronic sufferers of a cultural inferiority complex in relation to the English. As was the case for Dutch interest in Javanese and Balinese 'antiquities,' the inspiration and model for the setting up of institutes to provide future colonial bureaucrats with linguistic and other skills came from the British, who had established such training institutions as the College at Fort William (18oo) and Haileybury College (1809), both of which trained bureaucrats for service in India, as well as the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca (1818) and the Malay College of Singapore (1823) [25-8, 6o-1]. In 1825-26 the pros and cons of the English model were debated in the chambers of power in Batavia and The Hague. King William I, the Minister for Colonies, and the Governor-General of the Indies were all agreed that what was appealing about the selection and training of the British civil servant elsewhere, on the other hand, reflected a world in which power was 'inherently divided and dispersed' (149) and in which competing individuals 'acquired their power from differing sources;' for the Balinese, the important question remains: 'There are many texts: which one is superior?' (207). Compare Wiener's understanding of dispersed knowledges and the significance of remembering/forgetting, with the treatment of knowledge in Java by Anderson and Pemberton.

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was that he was chosen from '"the gentlemanly (fatsoenlijken)rank",' his gentlemanliness further cultivated and enhanced through training in language and local knowledge. The result, according to Minister Baud, was that the impression made on Asians by English bureaucrats was 'none other than one of respect [eerbied]and which explains the ease with which a people as admiration [bewondering], populous as that of Hindustan is able to be kept in thrall by means which are small in comparison with their object'. (47) On October 29 1832 'Java received its Fort William' in the form of the Institute for the Javanese Language, Surakarta (62). The decision to focus on Javanese and to found the first training school for colonial bureaucrats in the defunct capital of the old Central Javanese kingdom of Mataram was based on a mixture of practical needs, cultural prejudices, and Dutch national identity problems. The Javanese language was chosen partly because it had been selected by the Netherlands Bible Society, founded in 1814, again on a British model, that of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), as the first Indonesian language to become a medium for the transmission of Holy Scriptures to the heathen; the German Bible translator Johann Friederich Carl Gericke (1799-1857) had been sent to the Indies in 1827 and had settled in Surakarta, where the 'best' Javanese was supposedly spoken; from there, with a view to using his pivotal role as a Javanese-language expert to advance the evangelical cause, Gericke was able to bring pressure to bear on the government in Batavia to found a training school in Surakarta (5762). Partly, Javanese was thought to be the language which officials who would run the new Cultivation System needed to learn in order to make the System work (and the fewer the colonial administrators, the cheaper it would be to run). But the deeper underlying reason was the one which echoed Baud's admiration for the fatsoenljkheid, gentlemanliness, of the English and which contributed to the conceptualization of the ideal colonial bureaucrat as a man of 'civilized habits and manners' (73). On April 14, 1841 the linguist Taco Roorda enunciated this reason when he delivered a speech before King William II in Amsterdam which helped pave the way for the establishment of the training course for colonial bureaucrats in Delft in 1842, where he would be named Holland's first professor of Jav-

anese. Roorda

delivered a fiery address, in which, with argument after argument, he ridiculed the corrosive use of Malay in official dealings between the Dutch government and the [native] chiefs. Moreover, Malay for a Jay-

TONY DAY and CRAIGJ. REYNOLDS 46 anese was the language of the stranger, a language he despised. Not only did the use of Malay frequently lead to unfortunate misunderstandings, to speak to a Javanese in that language was, according to Roorda, 'unstatesmanly', because it constantly reminded him of the foreign domination to which he was subjected. Most particularly, Malay was objectionable because it placed the person spoken to on the same footing as the speaker. It was 'a language in which differences in rank and class were not expressed or considered', a feature so characteristic of Javanese. The Dutch bureaucrat who mastered Javanese would, in speaking to his Javanese interlocutor in Low Javanese, choose his words so as to make his superiority felt, while the Javanese, according to sanctified usage, should make use of High Javanese. (go)

Despite the Java-centricity of Dutch colonial economic and bureaucratic policy during the nineteenth century, the attempt by a few academics and senior administrators to translate their linguistic and philological conquest ofJavanese language and literature into practical policy failed. The reasons for the failure are revealing for our understanding of what was really at stake in the quarrels and quibbles over what to teach future bureaucrats and why. Almost from the beginning the Institute ofJavanese Language in Surakarta was criticized because it catered mainly to sons of Eurasians, who in large numbers were seeking positions in the lower ranks of the colonial bureaucracy during the expansive early years of the Cultivation System (65, 70-1, 118). These 'Indo' pupils were accused by 'pure blood' officials, typically, of being congenitally unruly, 'unscientifically' educated (by their largely Eurasian teachers), and despised by their (pure-blood) classmates 'born into a gentlemanly (fatsoenlijk)class' (65-7). In 1838, the famous C. F. Winter (who was Eurasian) was accused by a review committee of being unable to control his students, who lacked 'moral guidance' (67). Fears also began to be voiced that a failure to learn perfect Javanese '"with that tone, with that accent, that the gentlemanly Javanese wants to hear"' would open the Dutch bureaucrat to ridicule and hence disrespect, an argument which resurfaced in 1872 when mandatory Javanese was dropped from the curriculum in 'Indologie' at Leiden University (66, 267). Not far beneath the surface of the debate about the Institute, which was closed in 1843, one year after the opening of the Academy at Delft, was nineteenth-century Dutch cultural cringe and class insecurity. Present too was a much older male racist anxiety, which went back to the early days of the colony in the seventeenth century and became increasingly intense from the end

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of the nineteenth century onward when pure-blood wives began to accompany their husbands to the Indies and establish 'proper' European households, of loss of control to mixed-bloods, natives and women (see Taylor 1983; Maier 1993; Stoler 1995, especially pp. 93-136).25 This anxiety was translated into the view that only the Europe-educated, proper Dutch-speaking, pure white (male) official could exercise authority and control, and only he could ever be a 'gentleman.' Minister of Colonies J. C. Baud (1840-48) was particularly fearful of mixing the European and the 'IndiesPolynesian' races, a miscegenation which would have '"neither physically or morally happy results"' (76). In 1851 Baud founded the Royal Institute for Linguistics, Geography, and Ethnography, dedicated, as he put in his opening speech of June 4, 1851, not only to 'pure research,' but to guiding a 'just, enlightened, and well disposed Government' (Baud 1853:3)Stoler highlights the connection between the barring of IndoEuropeans with 'native' language skills from anything but the lowest levels of the colonial civil service and government concern to provide those very same linguistic skills to the 'right' kind of candidate administrator: 'At issue was obviously not whether civil servants knew local languages, but how those languages were learned and used and whether that knowledge was appropriately classified and controlled' (1995:108). Racial fear gave rise to a 'shastra'-like literature of 'colonial guides to European survival in the tropics' (1995:109).

The anxiety about fatsoenlijkheid reminds us that the

relationship between cara welandi (Dutch style) and cara jawi (Javanese style) was mutually mimetic and transformative. The powerful attraction which the subordinate Other exercised on the 'Dutch' can be documented from the history of colonial ceremonialism and from accounts of relations between Dutch linguists and their 'native informants' (see Taylor 1983; van der Putten 1995; Pemberton 1994, esp. 65-147). Apart from questions of everyday domination and 'fragmented knowledge' (Stoler 1992) revolving

around language use, access to texts written in ancient languages, the selection of one language over another as the chief medium of either oral or written communication, and the adoption or not of 25 In the first half of the nineteenth century there was also a problem of finding enough Dutch nationals to staff the bureaucracy. The colonial army in particular was full of Germans, such as one A. Herz, who claimed to be of Prussian nobility but who was in fact an ex-musician who had fled the service of the King of Prussia after a quarrel with the choirmaster of the royal chapel (72).

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romanized scripts became major issues in power struggles during the colonial period throughout Southeast Asia.26 It was the scholarly journal of the Royal Institute which first published, between 1905 and 1914, a translation of the famous Nagarakrtagama, the Old Javanese poem about the glorious fourteenthcentury reign of King Hayam Wuruk of Majapahit which had been seized during the Dutch conquest of the island of Lombok in 1894As the Indonesian scholar Supomo observes, It is, perhaps, more than a coincidence that it was during the period of the rebirth of Prapanca's Majapahit that Budi Utomo, the first embodiment of the Javanese national awakening, was founded in 19o8-a decade after the publication of the Pararaton [i.e., another Old Javanese 'historical' text about early Java], three years after the first instalment of Kern's articles on the Nagarakrtagama. Initially this organization sought the stimulation and advancement of the Javanese people only, but this regionalism soon gave way to the idea of one Indonesia covering the whole of the Netherlands East Indies, the idea which was shared by other regional-based associations. And what better model for this one Indonesia which was free and united than the great Majapahit, the real Majapahit which had just been brought back to life by the labour of great scholars like Brandes, Kern and Krom, and the expanse of which coincided with, or was even larger than, the Netherlands Indies? (Supomo 1979:181)

The 'discovery' of Majapahit, and of the old Sumatran kingdom of Srivijaya by Georges Coedes in 1918, allowed the 'truth' about the pre-colonial past to become available, in an Orientalized form, to nationalist intellectuals (Reid 1979).

Critical Reflections and Conclusions The connection that Supomo makes in the quotation above between historical knowledge and state formation (i.e., the nation-state) brings us back to the fundamental issues with which we began. This project is an inquiry into the nature and representation of the state in Southeast Asian historiography. We are concerned to disaggregate the elements that constitute the state in selected historical epochs and to show how they are brought together and made to cohere. This essay ventures a methodology for understanding the way in which 26 For example, on the politics of quocngu in relation to Chinese and nomscripts, see DeFrancis 1977: 69-219; for the imposition of Central Thai as the 'national' language, see Diller 1991; on the creation of 'Malay' and 'Dutch' in the Indies, see Maier 1993.

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knowledge is produced, appropriated, represented and contested in particular historical moments. This knowledge was not used solely by aristocratic elites or colonial regimes to dominate the subject populations over which they ruled. It was also expressive of power relations at work in the respective social formations that produced it. In the first part of the paper we looked at three examples of universalizing knowledges: the Hindu temple of twelfth-century Cambodia; the clash between Buddhist cosmology and Western science in nineteenth-century Siam; and the high-tech development championed by Dr Habibie that is imbued with mystical powers in the minds of the Indonesian leadership today. In each of these examples universalizing knowledge is brought to bear on contemporary problems with a view to dominating time and space. We have suggested not a continuity so much as a Foucault-like genealogical link across these three historical moments. In the second part of the paper we investigated the way shastric manual knowledge in colonial Java was forced to confront the Western knowledge of the Enlightenment through the agency of missionaries, envoys, and colonial administrators and scholars. In the particular case we examined in detail, the Serat Centhini of early nineteenth-century Java, we sought to write an exemplary history of the process by which empirical knowledge aboutJava developed. This process entailed decades of interactions between Javanese and European seekers after truth located in the repositories of local knowledge. Such a process transformed the Serat Centhini as a 'megashastra' into an encyclopedia that was then plundered by colonial officials and Western academics for its recondite insights into Javanese society and culture. This transformation, we suggested, was an Orientalizing process in which the power relations that produced the Centhiniwere masked by the uses to which the text was put. The kind of history we have written calls attention to the mechanisms by which knowledge and power have replicated themselves in Southeast Asia. But the account of this process cannot be fit into a Western developmental teleology which leads from 'tradition' to 'postmodernity' (Bayly 1996). Cosmologies, shastras, and Orientalized versions of the Enlightenment, to name only three Southeast Asian knowledge formations discussed in this essay, appear and reappear throughout Southeast Asian history. We find ourselves thinking as much about residues and repetition in history, therefore, as we do about the ruptures and 'surprises' which are the staple concerns of Foucauldian analysis. The history that connects Angkor

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Wat, the Traiphum,the Centhini,and Taman Mini does not construct an immobile form, since the power effects and relations of each of these knowledges are different. Instead, we are left with the question of what kind of 'state' and what kind of 'history' are implied by the characteristics which these discourses have in common.

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