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Continuity and Change in Asian Societies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Hugh Tinker
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Extract

There is a Malay saying, ‘From the endless past to the endless future,’ and most of us will have our own memories of a timeless Asia: a shepherd boy calling to his flock, grain winnowed in the wind, women drawing water at the well, fishing craft returning on the evening tide, the boom of the temple gong. This is the ‘Unchanging East’ which provides the principal Western stereotype of Asia.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , March 1969 , pp. 97 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969

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References

1 Hunter, W. W., The Annals of Rural Bengal, London, 1968, p. 286.Google Scholar

2 Marx, Karl, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, New York Tribune, 08 8, 1853.Google Scholar

3 Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, London, 1930. Vol. I, p. 406.Google Scholar

4 A prime example of this attitude is contained in the inaugural lecture of Professor Basham, A. L., The Indian Sub-Continent in Historical Perspective, London, 1958.Google Scholar

5 Harris, Richard, ‘A New Thirty Years' War’, The Times, 14 February 1968.Google Scholar

6 The Origin of Species was first published in 1859. The text was revised up to the 6th edition of 1872. There have been so many reprints subsequently that there is little advantage in giving a page reference to any particular edition. For the quotations which follow, only chapter references are therefore cited.

7 Darwin even suggests that ‘In some few cases there has been what we must call retrogression of organisation’.

8 Rivers, W.H.R., Psychology and Politics; and other essays, London, 1923, p. 118.Google Scholar

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21 According to Dawson, Raymond, who in The Chinese Chameleon; an analysis of European conceptions of Chinese civilization, London, 1967, has a chapter entitled ‘A people of eternal standstill: China and the historians’. Throughout the book there is a vigorous refutation of the theme of ‘the Unchanging East’.Google Scholar

22 Quoted in Sarvodaya (the Welfare of All), ed. Bharatan, Kumarappa, Ahmedabad, 1954, p. 161.Google Scholar

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27 Similarly, in Java, the mid-sixteenth century is remembered as the ‘time without order’, the ‘time between times’.Google Scholar

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30 Raymond Dawson observes (The Chinese Chameleon, p. 165) that ‘Views of Communist China afford a very good illustration of the thesis that attitudes towards foreign countries derive largely from the needs and personalities of the observers rather than from the objective facts’.Google Scholar

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