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‘State of the art’ surveys of Asian studies: historyS.T. Leong a , M.N. Pearson b & Jim Masselos ca University of Melbourneb University of New South Walesc University of SydneyPublished online: 27 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: S.T. Leong , M.N. Pearson & Jim Masselos (1984): ‘State of the art’ surveys of Asian studies: history, AsianStudies Association of Australia. Review, 8:1, 1-8

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'STATE OF THE ART' SURVEYS OF ASIAN STUDIES:

HISTORY

Historians make up a large proportion of the Asianists inAustralia. What do Australia's historians of Asia see today as themain tasks before them in the remaining few years of the 20th century?What methodologies are likely to rise or fall in favour - and whichfields of enquiry will be the most fruitful or important to investigate?Above all, in what ways are they likely, qua historians, to exert somepositive influences on the thinking or methodologies of otherhistorians, working on other parts of the world?

The Editors wrote to a number of historians, asking thefollowing questions.

Q.I What have any recent historians of Asia had to say (particularlyAustralian ones) that should be attracting the attention of otherhistorians - and why?

Q.2 Conversely, what new ideas have emerged on the horizons ofhistorical research and writing (of any part of the world) thatmight suggest fruitful new approaches to historians of Asia?

Q.3 What books or articles in your field are most readily to mind asthe major contributions, both by Australian, Asian or otherhistorians? Think of both specialist and popular writings here.

Q.4 In what fields is collaboration (direct or indirect) betweenAustralian and Asian historians currently occurring - or likely tooccur over the next 15 years?

Q.5 Broadly speaking, how do you think the balance does or should workout in the Asian history courses you know about in Australiantertiary institutions as between the following objectives orfunctions:

a- to educate Australians about Asia (or arouse an interest in thesubject), especially about the unfamiliar cultures and socialinstitutions therein?

b- to extend the frontiers of knowledge about the past of one ormore particular countries?

c- to show how a knowledge of the past can help to illuminate thepresent?

d- to contribute to the discipline of history

e- to serve a broad 'general knowledge' function rather thannarrowly 'academic' purposes?

f- any others?

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The following responses form the first installment of a two-issue series on Asian history in Australia.

China

Q.l-3

S.T. LeongUniversity of Melbourne

It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Australia's Asianhistorians have had an arduous uphill battle in establishing the legiti-macy of their interests among colleagues with entrenched academicorientations. The problem has only varied in degree from institutionto institution. The road ahead may not be any easier; the continuingcompetition for scarce resources in a situation of contraction willonly reinforce the considerable cultural and institutional barriersthat already exist. I see this as the main task ahead, the breakingdown of these barriers, and I suggest it is not enough to stress thegeopolitical position of Australia in relation to Asia. Nor does theeminently sensible notion that the study of history should encompassthe human experience in all its diversity cut much ice with otherwiseeminently sensible colleagues of other areas and cultures; it mayinstead be interpreted as feathering one's own nest.

Put simply, the general problem is this: Asian historians andthe historians of other areas and cultures have functioned in splendidisolation from one another, the one remaining peripheral, the otherparochial. The gap is, in part, a methodological one, and historians,unlike the political scientists and anthropologists, etc., have beenamong the slowest to incorporate comparativist methodologies. Theclosing of the gap will depend on the full return of history to thesocial science, only now underway.

In the China field, a promising beginning of the trend of movinghistory into social science has been spearheaded by G. William Skinner(see The City in Late Imperial China, Stanford University Press, 1977).Approaching a society as a complex temporal-cum-spatial system, theSkinnerian methodology affords a new and rigorous way of examininghuman behaviour in history within structured space and time, one thathas been taken up with enthusiasm by historians and social scientistsof other societies and cultures (see Carol Smith, ed., Regional Analysis,2 vols.. New York: Academic Press, 1976). His recent presidentialaddress 'Space and Time in the Analysis of Asian Civilizations' to the36th Annual Meeting of the AAS will be of interest to all Asianhistorians.

Q.4

On the question of collaboration between Australian and Chinesehistorians, one subject that comes readily to mind is surely the immi-gration of Chinese and their Australian experience (see J.W. Cushman,

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'A Colonial Casualty: the Chinese Community in Australian Historiography1,ASAA Review, Vol. 7, No. 3, April 1984, 100-113). This project mayinvolve Australian and Chinese historians in every state, and thoseinterested may wish to seek the sponsorship of the planned Museum ofChinese-Australian History, to be located in Melbourne's Chinatown.

The limited manpower and resources devoted to Asian history inmost Australian tertiary institutions determine the balance of variousobjectives, and will continue to do so. Courses offered to studentsof the first three years serve a liberal education purpose. The morenarrowly academic ones are normally taught to 4th year honours studentswho begin the process of professionalization. Serious originalresearch to extend the frontiers of knowledge of any Asian country isnormally left to postgraduate students. While every Asian historianwould and should welcome the opportunity to supervise postgraduateresearch, one cannot help but feel that the students' interests may bebetter served if they are directed, if willing, to institutions withthe requisite manpower and resources.

In conclusion, a .few words should be said about how Asianhistorians may contribute to the discipline of history. The problemis a serious one and it relates to what I said earlier about the peri-pheral status of Asian history in Australian tertiary institutions.The existing cumbersome structures of departments and centres, thefunding formula, and the contraction of funding have resulted in pro-tective tariff barriers being erected in one form or another. Asianhistory courses in some Asian studies departments, for instance, arenot accepted by history departments. Those Asian historians based inthe history department have at least got one foot in the door. Still,there remains the awesome task of pushing from the periphery to thecore, and Asian historians will have to seize the initiative of crossingboundaries, by orienting their teaching in a way as to incorporatecomparative and theoretical approaches ? they might attempt to findwilling non-Asianist partners with the discipline and mount jointcourses. The bridge won't be built unless we build it ourselves.

South Asia

M.N. PearsonUniversity of New South Wales

Teaching and research on South Asian history in Australia hasbeen undertaken for many years. There are a surprising number ofspecialists (i.e., historians with PhD's in South Asian history)scattered around the country. A large number of them are formerstudents (or students of students) of Anthony Low. Yet the field todayis in a parlous condition, as indeed is the case in the United Statesand Great Britain. Student interest varies from university touniversity, but has definitely declined over the last decade. Our twomajor publishing ventures, the journal, South Asia, and the ANU South

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Asia monograph series, have been faced with difficulties. There is noidentifiable Australian 'school' of South Asian history; integrationand contact are minimal, a result partly of distance and declininguniversity travel funds, and partly of parochialism. Instead we allcultivate our own gardens; whether this is desirable or not is open toquestion. Some of us in 'provincial' universities hoped that the ANU,with its comparatively lavish funding and facilities, would provide afocus. But this has not happened, and now our national universityseems to be moving away from the field altogether.

Nevertheless, there is important work being done, and, as Ishall suggest, several interesting new large projects are continuingor beginning. But, responding particularly to questions 1-3, we faceproblems in making our work known to other historians. Part of thisis a result of our own parochialisms how often do we make an effort toproduce work which is intelligible to other historians? Yet thelimitations of our non-Asian, even non-South Asian, colleagues is muchmore of a problem. When we give papers to general historical audienceswe, who work on an area with 5,000 years of recorded history and apopulation of 800 million, are required to adjust to the audience. Ourcolleagues who research the comparatively trivial history of westernEurope, let alone the United States or Australia, never feel they haveto do this. We are always playing away from home games.

Part of this is our own fault, for the theory underpinning ourwork (to the extent there is any) is often derivative. We draw fromGramsci, E.P. Thompson, or the Annalists, and say new things aboutSouth Asian history, but do not usually test and refine these theories:we simply see if they fit South Asia. Some years ago it seemed thatRon Inden at the University of Chicago was doing something different(Ronald B. Inden, Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, 1976 and Ronald B. Inden and McKim Marriott,'Caste Systems' in Encyclopedia Britannica, 1974). He was trying togenerate social science theory out of indigenous Indian materials. Istill think this can be a way forward. Nor need this be parochial;there is no reason why universal theory should not be generated fromour incredibly rich South Asian data at least as readily as from westernEurope.

One area in which this may be happening, and one whereAustralian South Asianists are to the fore, is the area of maritimehistory, especially focussed on the Indian Ocean. We all draw onBraudel's classic The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in theAge of Philip II (2 vols, London, 1972-73) and on Oskar Spate's greatwork in progress, The Pacific since Magellan (2 vols to date, ANU1979 - ) . But we seek to go beyond these; we want consciously to defineand justify the sub-discipline of maritime history, and consider thenature of littoral societies, of port cities, of interaction betweenthe very diverse coastal areas around the Indian Ocean. The work is beingrapidly advanced by the International Conferences on Indian Ocean Studies.The first was held in Perth in 19 79, the second will take place inDecember 1984. This may become an area where important new theory isgenerated. Several major publications are expected within the next

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few years, to which both Australian and South Asian scholars willcontribute. The energy of the Perth troika of Peter Reeves,Ken McPherson and Frank Broeze is invaluable here; the last named isalso editor of the important new journal Great Circle (1978 - ) , theorgan of the Australian Association for Maritime History, which pub-lishes much material on the Indian Ocean, on Indonesia, and on thestate of the sub-discipline . (One thing Broeze has shown is that itis possible for a new academic journal to flourish in Australia in the1980s.)

The major new advance during the last five years in South Asianhistory world wide is one where Australian can take some credit, for itis spearheaded by Ranajit Guha of the ANU, His notion of subalternstudies is already much debated, appreciated and criticized in all the •major centres of South Asian historical research. So far three volumeshave appeared, the last the result of a conference at the ANU inNovember 1982 (R. Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies, New Delhi, 1982 - ) .Guha in his own major work, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency inColonial India (Delhi, 1983), and in the edited volumes, drawsespecially on ideas of hegemony as developed by Gramsci. His influencecan also be seen in the recent and by far the best text on modern SouthAsian history, Sumit Sarkar's Modern India, 1885-1947 (Delhi, 1983).

The third area where important new work will soon appear is inthe New Cambridge History of India, edited by Gordon Johnson,Chris Bayly and John Richards. This series aims to get away from thestuffy, ex cathedra tone of past Cambridge histories (see the recentCambridge Economic History of India, 2 vols, 1982-83) and insteadproduce a series of interpretative essays on particular topics. A wordlimit of 60,000 will be enforced. Twenty-eight volumes have beencommissioned. The title of some of the ones projected to appear nextyear are 'Muslim Successor States', 'The Making of the British Empire,1780-1860', 'The Portuguese in India", 'Social and Religious ReformMovements in British India*, 'Government and Politics in India, 1860-19301.

Despite difficulties, our field is far from fallow. Importantnew work is being produced. The two major problems are our failure toappeal to wider academic audiences, let alone to the general readingpublic (though all three of the above new approaches may be moreaccessible to non-specialists than most recent monographs on SouthAsian history', and the decimation or worse of our best young scholars.One could compile a long and depressing list of actually or potentiallybrilliant recent Ph.D's who have not found academic jobs and are nowlost to us, probably for ever. On the positive side, contact andcooperation with Indian scholars continues and indeed increases. Wehave had a string of distinguished 'Indian visitors in recent years,many of us publish in India, and some of us are engaged in jointprojects with Indian colleagues. But our contacts with Pakistan,Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are minimal, a matter greatly to be regretted.

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South Asia

Q.l-3

Jim MasselosUniversity of Sydney

South Asian historians have been as much influenced by writingin associated disciplines as in history itself. I t is somewhat diffi-cult to pick out only the work of historians; in some cases, given theincreasing use of a diachronic approach, i t is at times even difficultto determine what is history and what is sociology or anthropology oreven psychology. Partly this is due to specific developments in thesocial sciences as they relate to South Asia? after Dumont's HomoHierarchicus, sociologists had to become Indologists, going back amillenium and more in order to understand the underlying bases ofcontemporary society. Thus virtually any issue of Contributions toIndian Sociology contains articles of importance to historians in termsboth of subject matter and treatment. Such material goes beyond merelythe attempt to support or refute the Dumont thesis; i t reflects inaddition the absorbing within South Asian studies of ideas derived fromthe French scholarly universe. There is a similar interpenetration inother writingst Ashis Nandy's At the edge of psychology attempts todelineate the underlying structures of Indian history over the past twocenturies via analyses of topics as diverse, but as interconnected, assat i , Gandhi's assassination, and Mrs Gandhi's emergency. Sudhir Khakarin a clutch of recent studies has used a modified psychologist's view-point to provide a different dimension in coping with dominant culturepatterns. As for symbols themselves and their role in popular conscious-ness , recent published and unpublished work of B.S. Cohn on thetrappings of the raj adds a depth to the understanding of how theBritish maintained their power over an alien population by meldingtogether culturally divergent symbols of authority. Less conceptuallywide ranging, and limited only to British perceptions, is Ballhatchet'sRace Sex and Class, a book that nevertheless in i ts study of themaintenance of social distance by rulers of a race alien to the ruled,adds a further dimension to explanations of imperial control.

I t was de rigeur for Indian historians in the 1960's to knowand refer to eli tes, power and value systems as concepts mediatedmainly through the writings of Max Weber. In the 1970's a re-interpretedMarx and Gramsci's notion of hegemony began to permeate historians'consciousness at a time when the relevance of such ideas to the contem-porary situation was concurrently being re-assessed. At the same timealso, E.P. Thompson's view of class formation, the work of popularculture historians (most recently centred around the University ofBirmingham) and the mentalites approach of annalistes writers in Franceprovided a sharper focus for grass roots level study of Indian history.The social and economic layering of Indian rural society was in anycase being thrashed out in the debates around Chayanov's model in theJournal of Peasant Studies and Economic and Political Weekly. Markinga welcome change from somewhat dreary 1960's considerations of landrevenue systems and administrations, the 1970's versions of peasant

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mobilization on the sub-continent applied the results of the debate toresearch on a nationalist movement that increasingly had less and lessto do with nationalism. Not until very recently however have some ofthese writers - and others - gone on to try and understand what washappening explicitly through the view from below. Here, in the late1 70s further ideas from France began to make an impact: via Barthes,Foucault, and possibly Lacan and Derrida, semiology, semiotics,deconstruction and whatever, are having an effect in their own rightwhile, as in anthropologists such as Turner, the various influenceswere fused and synthesised within other disciplinary moulds. The sumeffect of the three main lines of approach would seem, despite muchdebate, to be complementary. The work of Foucault and Barthes, forinstance, seems to be providing a method and a technique of investiga-tion; the writing of various kinds of popular history elsewhere isproviding for the Indian subcontinent examples of appropriate fieldsof investigation; while neo-Marxism is suggesting an over-archingconceptual and processual framework.

The situation for writing Indian history at the moment isextraordinarily fluid and exciting. It is almost as if a new disciplineis beginning to emerge with new sets of questions and new approaches.Old disciplinary lines are beginning to blend, with history remainingvery much the central discipline, one which is able to absorb, synthesiseand create new outlooks. The new synthesis displays both considerablenovelty of subject matter, and a diachronic approach combined with ahigh level of generalisation along with an equally high degree ofsubject specificity.

As to where it is all happening at the moment is still unclear:in Australia, Ranajit Guha at the ANU has staked out his claim throughediting articles by local and overseas scholars in the OUP series,Subaltsrn Studies„ They look like becoming a somewhat exclusive hard-bound serial with volume three on the way and volume four foreshadowed.Similar kinds of material can however also be found in current issuesof more orthodox journals like South Asia, the Indian Economic andSocial History Review and others. Equally if not more significant isMr Guha's recent monograph, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgencyin Colonial India, It has already become a landmark study, one whichwill provoke intense and worthwhile debate. There are however othersin Australia whose work is not yet as prominent as that of Mr Guha:for instance, Bob Stern's writing on Indian feudalism; Pauline Rule onthe popular history of Calcutta; Vijay Mishra and others on the Hindicinema; the Perth team of Broeze, MacPherson and Reeves who are tryingto do for the Indian Ocean and its port cities what Braudel did for theWestern Mediterranean. And others also.

Outside Australia, there are a myriad of directions in whichthe new approaches are being manifested. A debate on Islamic technologyand innovation has been initiated by Irfan Habib; the nature of Muslimconsciousness is being probed by S. Freitag, Anand Yang and G. Pandey;Muslim women by Gail Mainault and Hindu women by Susan Wadley andDoreen Jacobson; and so the list might be extended, according to thespecific area of interest. Much of the material is still in article or

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thesis form: it is yet to see expanded monograph treatment. Giventhe increasing difficulties of publication and the contraction ofpublishing about India both on the subcontinent and elsewhere, it may-take time before they achieve iconic stature. In the meantime, onelooks to journals and collected volumes and conferences to sustain theexplorations.

Collaboration at the moment in terms of scholarly interactionand dialogue at conferences and lecture tours. The creation of moreopportunities for dialogue is a pre-requisite for further collaboration.I would like to see properly international seminars and conferencesestablished, i .e . ones where Australian and foreign academics areequally represented; scholars located in each other's universities forextended periods of time; ultimately or even concurrently, jointprojects and research collaboration. At the least in the next decadeand a half there should be a significant increase in interaction betweenscholars from the two regions.

Q..5

I think that ideally all courses on Asia should serve all theobjectives outlined as well as a further objective, that of educatingAustralians about Australia through the experience of an alien-Asian-society. There seems to me to be no conflict between the variousobjectives although in some courses certain objectives will have greaterprominence according to the maturity, knowledge and disciplinary under-standing of the students involved.

'When we compare the Southeast Asian seas with the Mediterranean,we should observe how Braudel perceives the Mediterranean in hisclassic account of it in the age of Philip II. Braudel suggeststhat the sea's unity was created by the movement of men overthe sea routes. Movement certainly took place within theSoutheast Asian "Mediterranean", but we should also rememberthe type of movement Braudel has in mind. He is thinking ofthe urban-based trading activities that predominated over allother activities. "Cities and their communications, communica-tions and their cities have imposed a unified human constructionon geographical space". Or again, he says, "the history andcivilization of the sea have been shaped by its towns". Butthe Southeast Asian cities were not Venices or Genoas. Theywere royal centres, with trading ports under their shadow, wheremaritime treasure helped to sustain an elan vital that hadlittle to do with commercial enterprise in our sense of the term.Correspondence going out of such centres would not have been inthe form of enquiries about trading prospects but of missiveswith demands for tribute or even religious statues from over-lord to vassal.'

-from O.W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Regionin Southeast Asian Perspectives, pp.37-8.

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