and linguistics who was familiar with more than a dozen languages, had originally been interested in Scandinavia, and was posted to neutral Sweden during the war to gather intelligence. After the war he became very interested in Indonesia, and compiled the first English language dictionary of bahasa Indonesia. It was he who mainly developed the teaching of Southeast Asian languages at Cornell, and in time the university was capable of teaching all the major vernaculars of the region. Echols was an extraordinary man in quite another way. Almost single-handedly, he built in the Cornell Library the largest collection of texts on Southeast Asia in the world, devoting the later part of his life to this monumental task without any personal financial inducements. This collection was a major reason why faculty recruited into the program very rarely moved to other universities, and why first-class students flocked to the Cornell campus.
The second central figure, George Kahin, was another remarkable man. In the last years before the Pacific War he had been an undergraduate at Harvard and there became very interested in international affairs, including those of the Far East. If Sharp and Echols were not very political, Kahin was the opposite. It is a good indication of his progressive thinking and personal courage that he became politically active immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The attack provoked a violent reaction against Japanese-Americans settled along the West Coast, most of whom were rounded up and put in horrible internment camps for the duration of the war. Unscrupulous and racist businessmen on the West Coast took the opportunity to refuse to pay their debts to the internees, making their fate even worse. Kahin joined a brave Quaker initiative to use legal and other means to force these people to pay their debts, in a political climate that made such action seem almost unpatriotic.
When the young Kahin joined the US Army he was trained to be parachuted behind Japanese lines in Indonesia and Malaya. Needless to say – if one knows the Pentagon – in the end he was sent to Italy instead. But his training led him to an abiding interest in Indonesia, and, on demobilization, he went back to school as a graduate student, setting off for political fieldwork in Indonesia in 1948, right in the middle of the long, armed struggle for independence. He became a close friend of many prominent Indonesian nationalists, found his way through Dutch lines to visit many parts of the archipelago, sent back pro-Indonesian articles to American newspapers, and later lobbied the US Congress to support the Indonesians against the Dutch.
Kahin arrived at Cornell in 1951, just before his classic Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia was published, the first great American scholarly work on contemporary Southeast Asian politics. He was a crucial recruit to Cornell because he was a political scientist at a time when the American focus on Southeast Asia was primarily political, and so there were many youngsters interested in studying under him. The move unfortunately came at the height of the McCarthy era, and Kahin’s right-wing enemies in the State Department took away his passport for a number of years on the false grounds that he was friendly to Indonesian communism.
With the support of Sharp, Kahin helped bring two other important, and utterly different, people into the Southeast Asia program. One was the economist and economic historian Frank Golay, who had been recruited into naval intelligence during the war, and had developed an interest in the Philippines. He was an orthodox economist, and quite conservative in many ways, but his discipline was important, his concern for the Philippines solid, and he was a good teacher. Second was Claire Holt, a truly romantic and extraordinary woman. Born to a rich Jewish family in Riga, she grew up in the last years of Russian Tsardom, so that her mother language was Russian. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the family moved to Sweden, and she ended up as a reporter and newspaper critic on dance, especially ballet, first in Paris and later in New York.
After her husband was killed in a freak accident, she set off with a friend on a trip to the Orient. But while in Dutch colonial Indonesia she fell in love with the place and the peoples, and promptly studied Javanese dancing to a high level of proficiency. She also became the lover of the brilliant German archaeologist Wilhelm Stutterheim, and through him became thoroughly knowledgeable about Indonesia’s pre-colonial civilizations. Then tragedy reoccurred in her life. After the Nazi invasion of Holland in the spring of 1940, Stutterheim, along with all other Germans in the colony, was interned. When the Pacific War broke out, the Dutch colonial regime decided to move the internees to British India. But Stutterheim’s ship was sunk by Japanese planes off the coast of Sumatra, and everyone on board died.
After returning to America, Claire was recruited to teach Malay and Indonesian languages to young diplomats and intelligence officials. She stayed till the McCarthy era, which so enraged and depressed her that she quit. Kahin, who already knew her, seized the chance to bring her to Cornell, where she remained till her death in 1970. She had no academic credentials, so could not become a professor, but she was a fine teacher of bahasa Indonesia, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of colonial society, Indonesia’s cultures and its performing arts. She was the only member of the program who had actually lived for many years in any part of Southeast Asia. She was also the only woman, and the only person who was really interested in the arts.
The Yale Southeast Asia Program was smaller but had some advantages over Cornell. Its founding father was Karl Pelzer, an emigré Austrian agricultural economist who had worked in colonial Indonesia, specializing in the study of the colony’s vast plantations. But the key figure, till his too-early death, was Harry Benda, a Czech Jew who as a young man had pursued a career in business in prewar Java. During the Japanese Occupation he was put in an internment camp and barely survived. On his release in 1946, he made his way to the US, and ended up writing a brilliant doctoral dissertation at Cornell on the relationship between Japanese and Muslims in prewar and wartime Indonesia. He was one of Kahin’s first students, though he was the slightly older man. It says something for the fluidity of academic life in those days that his dissertation in political science was no barrier to him becoming a professor of history at Yale.
Pelzer and Benda gave the Yale program a ‘European’ culture and outlook in contrast to a more ‘American’ Cornell. But the two programs were in driving distance of one another, the faculties were friendly to each other, and by the time I arrived at Cornell, the universities took turns hosting tough language classes during the summer.
The four teachers who influenced me most as a graduate student formed a wonderfully diverse constellation of characters, talents and interests. Claire Holt and Harry Benda were my fellow Europeans, and very interested in history and culture. Benda had a gifted mind, a thoroughly sceptical outlook on life, and a restless temperament. He worked at being ‘unconventional’ in his thinking. He was loyal to the US but never really felt himself part of it. Claire Holt was very special to me, and I spent many hours at her house, asking her about art, dance, archaeology and Javanese life. Sometimes we would read Russian poetry aloud together. She was not at all academic, and helped me not to become too embedded in academic culture.
Kahin and Echols were two perfect American gentlemen, kind, gentle, morally upright, and devoted to their students. Echols introduced me to modern Indonesian literature and gave me an abiding love of dictionaries. Still today, the favourite shelf in my personal library is filled only with dictionaries of many kinds. And every time I go to the fabulous library collection that bears his name, I think of his selfless dedication. Kahin formed me politically, with his progressive politics, his activist commitment to justice at home and in the rest of the world, and his tolerance of honest difference.
Sharp and Kahin were both intelligent academic politicians who recognized the power of disciplinary departments in American universities. They also understood, better than Pelzer and Benda at Yale, that the long-term growth and stability of Southeast Asia programs depended on new faculty being integrated, intellectually and financially, into these departments. New, young professors in America are on trial for their first six years, during which they can be dismissed very easily. In the sixth year, at the latest, they come up for an intensive review of their teaching and publication records. If they pass, they move up in rank from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, and get lifetime tenure, meaning that they cannot be dismissed except for criminal activity or serious sexual scandals.
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