Fifteen years ago, or halfway to this year's thirtieth anniversary, in his presidential address to this association, Earl Pritchard began by saying: “In accordance with tradition, it now becomes my duty to perform a time-honored rite—to inflict on you the Presidential Address. I will try to do this as painlessly and as quickly as my own inadequacies will permit.… It is … customary, according to the unwritten rules governing the rituals of the present occasion, for the president to review in some way or other the state of the profession or of the discipline to which he belongs, or to present some general theory which interests him, or to discuss the direction that studies in the profession are taking or should take.…” Like Pritchard I have no inclination to depart sharply from this pattern, and I hope here merely to review briefly the past and present state of Malay and Indonesian lexicography. I have chosen this topic because it has been of great and abiding interest to me and because I have, in a modest way, tried to contribute to its furtherance.

On the Party. By Liu Shao-ch'i. Second Edition. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1950. 206 p.

It is no wonder that the world is baffled by Communist China's “cultural Revolution.” Not only do the specialists who are skilled in reading between the lines of Chinese Communist utterances disagree about many aspects of the present upheaval, those whose task it is merely to read the. plain lines themselves also seem unable to agree even on the basic meaning of what they are reading. We are informed, for instance, that “eight Red Guards and a member of the Pioneers … had been killed by ‘class enemies,’ according to a Red Guard announcement.” Later we are told of “doubts about a report that nine youths were killed last week. Chinese-language experts said the characters on a poster reporting the incident could mean also that the nine young Chinese had been injured.” There were more doubts about whether Lo Jui-ch'ing was “taken away” or was “arrested” and still more about whether T'ao Chu was “led” or “dragged” through the streets.

In 1943, towards the middle of Japan's occupation of the Philippines, as the tide of war was turning, Jose P. Laurel accepted the Presidency of the Republic. Two years later, when he was under indictment for treason, he claimed that he had been forced to take that office. He maintained in his War Memoirs, supposedly written while interned in 1945 by the Americans in Japan, that his collaboration was ex necessitate re and that “forced collaboration is not collaboration. Voluntary collaboration as a means of national survival and to tide over our people to better times is not punishable.“

Lost texts are common in the history of ancient Indian literature. Many must have perished altogether—even from memory—victim to neglect and hostile insects; a great number survive only as fragments or brief quotations embedded in other works, and sometimes only as titles. One of these lost works is Bṛhatkathā (“The Great Romance”). Legend tells us that the poet Guṇāḍhya composed it in Paiśācī, an obscure dialect of Prakrit. Now it exists only as a title; but once, to some commentators, it was a famous and important work. Witness Govardhānācāry's high esteem, for example—”We pay homage to the poets of the Śrī Rāmāyaṇa, the Bhārata, and the Bṛhatkathā,” or his remark, “Who would not say Guṇāḍhya is this very same man [Vyāsa] reborn?” Yet, to most scholiasts Guṇāḍhya and his illustrious work are but a memory and a faint one at that. How fortunate it is then that the work has survived, testament to its once great popularity, in several ver¬sions: three in Sanskrit, one in Prakrit, and one in Old Tamil.

Notwithstanding the considerable body of scholarship on South Asian history that has appeared over the past several decades, we still live with the image of a monolithic and alien Islam colliding with an equally monolithic Hinduism, construed as indigenous, and from the eleventh century on, politically suppressed. Such a cardboard-cutout caricature survives in much of India's tabloid media, as well as in textbooks informed by a revivalist, aggressively political strand of Hinduism, or “Hindutva.” Though useful for stoking primordial identities or mobilizing support for political agendas, this caricature thrives on a pervasive ignorance of South Asia's past. Removing such ignorance is precisely the endeavor to which academic institutions, and scholarship more generally, are properly committed.

Recently, a group of scholars, all either students of Anil Seal or persons very much affected by his thinking, have produced a volume entitled Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870–1940,1 which is reprinted from Volume VII (1973) of Modern Asian Studies. Included in it are an introductory essay by eal himself entitled “Imperialism and Nationalism in India,” two essays on U.P. by C. A. Bayly and F. C. Robinson entitled “Patrons and politics in northern India” and “Municipal Government and Muslim separatism in the United Provinces, 1883 to 1916.” There is one essay by R. A. Gordon called “Non-cooperation and council entry 1919 to 1920” and one by David Washbook entitled “Country politics: Madras 1880 to 1930.” The volume ends with two essays on Bengal by Gordon Johnson and John Gallagher entitled respectively “Partition, agitation and Congress: Bengal 1904 to 1908” and “Congress in decline: Bengal 1930 to 1939.” This volume raises issues of great substance for the study and interpretation of recent Indian history. Seal, in his essay, argues that previous historians of India (in which he includes himself) have been too much concerned with policy and with the educated elite bound together by a common ideology. Instead of looking at partnerships of fellows, we should be looking at vertical alliances. After all, according to him, these alliances were mostly cross-caste and cross-religion. “Hindus worked with Muslims, Brahmins were hand in glove with non-Brahmins; and notables organized their dependents as supporters …” (p. 3).

There is a bewildering contrast between the superficial calm of the 1930s in Indonesia and the turbulence of the immediate post-war period. In addition to the enormous upsurge of anti-colonial militance, the years following the Japanese surrender were marked by an unprecedented degree of conflict amongst Indonesians, as society adjusted to the radically changed conditions of independence. In other countries occupied by Japan, notably Burma and Malaya, ethnic animosities were also unusually overt after the war. It seemed natural to ask, as Elsbree did in his pioneering essay of 1953:

did the [Japanese] occupation, with its dissolution of existing ties, aggravate the fissures of the old order? … Did the Japanese deliberately pursue a “divide and rule” tactic, and is their policy to be held responsible for the violent outbursts and the general increase in racial tension since the end of the war?

It is no easy matter for a government seeking to foster rapid economic and social changes to win acceptance of its programs. Too much control by the center assures local resistance; too much dispersal of authority empowers it. The dilemma is a familiar one today, but it is not, of course, a new one. The leaders of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan found it to be the knottiest problem in their efforts to construct a modern state. They needed to exert sufficient central control of local government to assure that their initiatives could be enacted in Japan's villages and that taxes would flow to the center in a predictable and orderly manner. But these goals required the central government to permit a measure of autonomy—to rely on pre-Meiji inter- and intravillage organizations originally devised to guard and insulate the village from the demands of higher authority. Their efforts to resolve the dilemma quickly took on a note of desperation: in the first twenty years of the Meiji era, the government radically altered the system of local administration four times.

One hundred years of Brooke rule in Sarawak seem to present a stark contrast to the political and social foment in Burma, Indonesia and Vietnam. Cognizant of the ill effects of European domination in the archipelago, the Brookes established a paternalistic rule whose policies were designed to curtail European economic investment in the area and to protect the indigenous inhabitants from internal and external exploitation. However, despite the fact that Brooke rule was structured for maintaining traditional order, not development, the European interlude in north Bornean history may have been more of a deviation than is apparent. The suppression of “piracy” in the area and the political domination of the Brookes over most of the northeastern part of the island had several important results. First, the area trade patterns—if piracy can be seen as a form of luxury trade—were altered to the ultimate economic advantage of the Chinese who came to dominate retail trade. Second, the natural northeastern expansion of the Iban people was halted to the chief benefit of the indigenous Malays who gained significant political advantage under die Brookes. Finally, an inevitable depersonalization of rule occurred as the administration of the state became increasingly complex. If, in a “modern” world, a rule of law, not economic development per se, is the essential ingredient for political stability, Brooke rule made a significant contribution to the political viability of northern Borneo by fostering a White, civilized way of settling disputes.

One often has the impression that young Japanese writers today are more eager to follow Western fads than to explore the Japanese tradition. Far from being devotees of Zen Buddhism, they are more likely to come to it through translations of Kerouac and other beatniks. In this paper, I propose to examine the cultural and psychological bases for this curious situation, which I suggest stem largely from the Japanese obsession with being up-to-date or Westernized. Young Japanese writers are never free from the pressure of the reading public that they should be au courant with the latest trend in Western literature, and this imposes such a heavy burden that it is no wonder that they have no time to go to a monastery and practice Zen.

Perhaps no area of China-related scholarship has taken longer to recover from the access limitations of the mid-twentieth century than the study of Xinjiang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of Xinjiang was so fashionable that it had a wide following in the Western popular press, where the region was better known as Chinese Central Asia, Chinese Turkistan, or Eastern Turkistan. When the turmoil of the Republican and Mao eras made the region almost entirely inaccessible to outsiders, the study of Xinjiang began a long sojourn in the Western academic wilderness. After all, the earlier interest had always been tinged with Orientalist travel fantasy and imperial desires that required scholarly boots on the ground.