feudal era. I share the sentiment of the former critics and thus use ‘Siam’ as the country’s name, with some exceptions for well-established names of organizations.
I grew up in a time when an older world was coming to an end. I took my fine, old-fashioned education for granted, having no idea that I was a member of almost the last cohort to benefit from it. This education was designed, quite conservatively, to reproduce, if you like, a bearer of an upper-middle-class tradition. With this kind of general education, a boy could still expect eventually to become a senior civil servant, a member of the political oligarchy, or a respected teacher in the old style.
But the peaceful social revolution inaugurated by the postwar Labour governments was to create a mass of new high schools and universities much better adapted to the Cold War, American domination, commercial globalization and the decline of Empire. Youngsters needed to learn economics, business management, mass communications, sociology, modern architecture and science (from astrophysics to professional palaeontology). There was little use anymore for amateurism. Even the language was changing. The kind of old-fashioned BBC English I had learned to speak was under attack as class-ridden, and was gradually being replaced by more demotic versions. No one any longer saw much point in memorizing poetry at all, let alone poetry in languages other than English.
Schools were changing too. The era of regular beatings, by teachers and older boys, was coming to an end. All-boy schools were under increasing democratic pressure to become coeducational, with the obvious consequences both positive and negative. I think that I was in the next to last cohort educated (and self-educated) through books, radio and black-and-white films. No television, almost no Hollywood, no video games, no internet. Not even typing, which I only started to learn in America after reaching adulthood.
In a dim way, I could even sense this change in my own family. My brother was educated the same way as I had been. But my sister, seven years younger, and eventually a graduate from Oxford, was part of a new world just coming into being. Even between me and my more politically advanced and intelligent brother there was a marked difference. One measure of this was America. Until I actually went to the US, I had absolutely no interest in the place at all. I knew no American history, read almost none of the great American novelists, was increasingly bored or annoyed by American movies, and, as an ardent classical piano player, had only scorn for American pop music, about which I knew nothing. My brother, however, who had to endure my banging away at Bach and Schubert, retaliated with fortissimo playing of records of Latin American rumbas, and later Elvis Presley. I have to admit that even today, in spite of long residence in the US, many wonderful American friends, and an attachment to Black music of all sorts, I still feel, if not alienated, at least detached from American society and culture. But … my father had left behind a 1920s edition of Moby Dick, fantastically illustrated by the brave communist Rockwell Kent. Herman Melville is still my no. 1 great novelist.
There is one other, more professional, sense in which I was part of a ‘last cohort’. I arrived in the US in 1958, just before American university life underwent a fundamental change, analogous to what occurred in the UK. In the early and middle 1960s, the great machine that we call ‘theory’ was beginning to become visible. It began with the now antique ‘behaviourist’ revolution. Although I do not think that ‘theory’ came very naturally to a pragmatic, down-to-earth people, it had crucial effects. It made each discipline more eager to distinguish itself from its sisters and to set about inventing its own jargon.
When I studied in the US, this change was barely under way, so none of my teachers complained if I took courses in history or anthropology. But by the late 1960s this was already becoming difficult. The irony is that, thirty years later, American scholars started to talk eagerly about multidisciplinary approaches without realizing that these might have already existed more than a generation earlier.
This is not to say that the changes that occurred after I reached adulthood were not positive in many respects. All I want to emphasize is that I finished my studies just as those changes were setting in. Coming out of the last generation before they became normalized, I was in a position to observe them from a distance, rather than being formed by them.
As it turned out, fate worked out differently than I originally expected. It did not take long for me to be enticed by the beautiful natural setting of Cornell, and by George Kahin’s lecture classes on Indonesia, Southeast Asia and US policies in Asia. By the end of my first year at Cornell, I realized that I had finally decided what I wanted to do in life: become a professor, do research, write and teach, and to follow in Kahin’s footsteps in my academic and political orientations. I will say more later about Kahin, who was not only an excellent scholar but also a man of conviction and energy.
So I stayed on. My mother was happy that I had finally settled down, though she complained about my being so far away from her and my brother and sister. So I wrote to her nearly every week, and every year returned home for Christmas and during the summer holidays. She wrote back to me regularly too, and my aunt Celia sent me clippings of crossword puzzles which were generally more difficult to solve than their American counterparts.
Though I was attracted by Kahin’s lectures on Southeast Asia early on in my stay at Cornell, it took me a few months to adjust to American graduate student life, and still longer to understand how unique a place Cornell University was in those days, with its Southeast Asia program. To explain the nature of this uniqueness, it is necessary to leave Cornell for a while and consider the sudden rise, after the Second World War, of what the Americans came to call area studies.
Before Pearl Harbor the United States had been isolationist, despite its aggressive policy of worldwide economic expansion. It will be remembered that despite Woodrow Wilson’s strenuous efforts, the US had rejected membership of the League of Nations. It had only one significant colony, the Philippines, and was often embarrassed, as a former colony itself, to be in the game of ‘European’ and Japanese colonialist imperialism. By the mid-1930s, a schedule had already been set for Filipino independence in 1946. America had a huge, modern navy, but an insignificant army and air force. Its direct political interventions were mainly confined to what it regarded, under the Monroe Doctrine, as its ‘own backyard’: Central and South America, a part of the Caribbean, and a big chunk of the Pacific. The American scholarly world mirrored this larger picture. Since so many Americans originated from Europe, and since the prestige of European scholarship was high, there were plenty of US scholars who studied the main countries of Western Europe – the UK, France, Germany and Italy. The Soviet Union was also studied because it was regarded as a powerful ideological enemy. In Asia, the only countries of general concern were China and Japan. The latter was studied mainly because of its military power, which threatened to rival America’s in the Pacific region. In the case of China, a strong early interest was stimulated by the large number of American missionaries who worked there from the end of the nineteenth century. In the late 1940s, as the Chiang Kai-shek regime fell apart, many Chinese scholars, reactionary and liberal, first class and mediocre, fled to the US and there substantially increased the influence of anti-communist sinology. Unlike scholars from Japan or other Asian countries, many of them entertained particular political agendas. Allying with American scholars of China with similar ideological perspectives, they were to form a major and influential faction in American academic associations with Asia.
There was some work done on India, but it was mainly confined to books read by students of Sanskrit, influenced by European Orientalism, rather than works on contemporary colonial India. Almost no one, except an anthropologist or two, studied Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia or Southeast Asia. For Southeast Asia (except for the Philippines) the number of serious specialists could be numbered on one hand: Margaret Mead
