Rahul Goswami :
When was South-east Asia invented? The term did not exist before the 1940s and for at least a generation after that made not the slightest sense to those living in countries we currently say belong to South-east Asia.
It was a wartime invention, for during the World War II the term was used to designate the theatre of war commanded by Louis Mountbatten of Britain. During a second period of prolonged warfare, the Vietnam-USA wars of the 1960s and 1970s, it gained wide currency and began to be used to describe foreign policy in the region. It was therefore a term coined by one part of the Anglo-American alliance and impressed into routine use by another.
The current generation of political leadership in South-east Asia – whether they are aware of the term’s genesis is another matter – have been content to follow the foreign lead to describe their world.
Over the last forty-odd years, there have been arguments to include in the definition other territories for religious, ethnographic, geographic or linguistic reasons – Taiwan and Hainan have at times been proposed, but not generally accepted.
There is one salient demarcation in what we today call South-east Asia (the term persists from recent historical laziness) and that is the difference between mainland and island.
A little more than half the territory of the region we currently know as South-east Asia is part of the Asian mainland, the rest being the scattered fragments, large and small, of the archipelagos, the Indonesian and the Philippine.
More than half the population of the collective region lives on these islands, and the patterns of life they followed differ markedly from those found in the great empires of the rivers-and-rice mainland.
National boundaries – so beloved of the west that preferred straight maplines and curved them only to fit the course of rivers – did not exist in this region until enforced in the nineteenth century by colonial regimes each seeking to extend their dominion.
The inhabitants of Pagan and Ayutthya, of Champa and Angkor, paid no attention to these in centuries past and their descendants did not either, even as the colonial era began fading.
Village communities described themselves according to their local conditions, scarcely acknowledging more than a ‘ruler’ (with power to be feared or to be jeered) and administrators who had to be put in their place lest they become moneylending land-grabbers.
One example of the importance of the local in providing a definition of ‘nation’ was seen in the 17th century, during the wars for control of the population of the Mekong, and which were fought between the Lê rulers (Vietnam) and the Lao king.
Eventually, they agreed that every inhabitant of the upper Mekong valley who lived in a house built on stilts owed allegiance to Lao while those who lived in homes that had earth floors submitted to Vietnam.
The competition to include such populations in a kingdom was quite understandable.
They were innovative farmers, and it is possible that in floodplains of the great rivers these populations were amongst the first to domesticate rice and to develop wet rice cultivation.
Early archaeological data for rice culture goes back to around two millennia before the start of the common era and have notably come from northern Thailand amongst other sites.
Yet they were never a rice monoculture and harvested a number of other crops in addition including sugarcane, sago, yams, bananas and coconuts. They domesticated fowl and harnessed the recalcitrant and moody water buffalo to the plough, for that large beast provided the draft power that enriched with rice harvests the lives of the villages.
They had bamboo too, which was immeasurably important for the sophisticated metallurgical techniques they employed.
The trunk of the bamboo grows in hollow segments, and so the foundries of old were able to fashion a piston that could generate the heat required to reduce the ores into liquid metal.
Amongst the many extraordinary qualities of bamboo, this is one that is perhaps the least intuitive, and the leap of mechanical logic that was required to employ tough bamboo to smelt ore can only be marvelled at.
Aided by their bamboo-based foundries, it is reckoned that by around 200 BCE many peoples in the region possessed a sophisticated metal technology that included bronze, brass, tin and iron.
Ceremonial bronze drums and brass gongs were dispersed throughout the region, clear evidence that there existed an extensive exchange of valuable objects within the peoples and principalities that we now so drably call South-east Asia.
(The author is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with Unesco and studies agricultural transformation in South Asia)
