A Life Beyond Boundaries (5 page)

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.

The Sharp-Kahin strategy therefore involved two stages. The first was to find youngsters capable of securing tenure by showing strong disciplinary credentials. (Usually departments were not much interested in Southeast Asia as such.) Having located such youngsters they would then use Rockefeller and Ford money to pay the salaries of these young scholars for a few years, on the understanding that if they did well from a disciplinary viewpoint, they would be moved over to their department's regular salary budget. The second step was to make sure the youngsters did a lot
of undergraduate teaching on subjects having nothing to do with Southeast Asia. In my case, I taught subjects like ‘Traditions of Socialism', ‘Politics in the British Commonwealth', ‘The Political Role of the Military', or ‘Politics and Literature'. This involved a lot of work, but it protected the program from lapsing into isolation and Orientalism. The crucial thing was that every professor in the program should have a firm base in a discipline, and be able to teach many more subjects than just Southeast Asia.

It was still quite hard to realize these goals in the 1950s, but the situation changed greatly in the 1960s. First, the Russians' achievement in putting an astronaut into space ahead of the Americans alarmed many politically powerful people and institutions in the US. Part of the humiliation was attributed to the backwardness of American universities. But there were wider anxieties as well: the war in Korea, the rising power of Mao's China, the growing crisis in Indochina, wars in South Asia, instability in the Middle East, and so on. Starting around 1960, a huge amount of money was poured into the universities in the form of scholarships, language courses and the like. Area programs like Cornell's Southeast Asia Program for the first time began to receive a lot of money from the state.

This change created a clear semi-generational break among the students. The whole time I was a graduate student, my classmates and I never received any scholarships; we paid for our education by working as teaching assistants to professors with large classes. We took this for granted, assumed it was good practice for the future, and even quite enjoyed it. By 1961, the number of graduate
students had visibly increased, most had scholarships, and some were rather annoyed if they were forced (for their own good) to teach.

By the second half of the 1960s the looming catastrophe in Vietnam, and, for undergraduates still liable for military conscription, the prospect of fighting in Indochina, created the powerful, campus-based anti-war movement and generated an enormous interest in Southeast Asia. All of a sudden, right across the country and including almost all the more important universities, there was a great demand for Southeast Asia–related courses, to which university administrators had to respond. Faculty positions opened up all over the place and almost any student who got a PhD connected to Southeast Asian studies had little trouble finding a good job.

I was very fortunate to finish my dissertation on the eve of the Tet Offensive. Against normal recruitment rules – which require competitive candidacies, extensive interviews, and hostility to ‘nepotism' – I walked into an assistant professorship without any interviews and without any outside candidate being considered.

Although the Cornell Southeast Asia Program was usually under strong pressure to reach out to undergraduates, in its heart it thought of itself as mainly oriented to graduate students. The formal requirements were not very demanding. Every semester all students had to study one of Southeast Asia's vernaculars, and were encouraged to learn French or Dutch if they were interested in Indochina or Indonesia. All students had to take at least two so-called Country Seminars, which over a three-year period
rotated between the major countries of the region. These seminars, often taught by two faculty members, and often using guest teachers for particular topics, were supposed to involve intensive multidisciplinary work on, say, Burma's history, politics, sociology, economy, anthropology, religion, international relations, and maybe arts and literature. Burma-bound students were to have a thorough immersion in ‘Burma studies', and like students specializing on other countries would learn how to think comparatively.

Aside from language courses and the Country Seminars, students would take a range of other courses which were almost always defined as comparative and pan-Southeast Asian: for example, ‘Comparative Decolonization', ‘Hill Tribes in Southeast Asia', ‘Rural Development in Southeast Asia', ‘Communism in Southeast Asia', and so on. This comparative framework, necessitated by the Southeast Asian studies format, was in complete contrast to the European tradition of one-country specialization. I was lucky to have experienced it, and it had a great influence on my later thinking about the region and about the world.

A final, less structured part of the teaching program was inviting foreign scholars. Sometimes they would be invited to teach for a whole semester or even a year. Usually they would come as visiting fellows, or as one-day speakers at the weekly lunchtime ‘brown-bag' meetings of the faculty and students. I remember being fascinated by the visit of Nishijima Shigetada, who was a legend for his activities in the last days of the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia. He is said to have been bitten by leftist ideology in his youth and was sympathetic to the Indonesian nationalists, but
Kahin knew him now as the agent of a giant oil corporation, and felt he was an opportunist. Nishijima spoke in rapid-fire Indonesian in the ‘brown-bag' meeting and lived up to his reputation as a man of mystery. Visits by former Burmese prime minister U Nu and Cambodian monarch Norodom Sihanouk were hardly less intriguing.

Having experienced the often authoritarian university traditions of their own countries, many foreign students in the program were surprised and pleased by the close and democratic relations between professors and students. In seminars students were encouraged to express their own opinions, often received detailed comments on their papers, and never had the impression that they were being exploited as informal research assistants for the professors' projects in the countries of their origin.

In my time, and indeed until long afterwards, the students were a diverse cluster. Initially, in the 1950s, all the countries of Southeast Asia were accessible to various degrees. After that period Burma closed its doors, as for a long time did the countries of Indochina. There were dictatorships in Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore, and an authoritarian regime in Malaysia, which in 1963 secretly provoked the Malays into anti-Chinese violence in Kuala Lumpur. Kahin especially wanted to have close contact with bright young Southeast Asians, and found the means to bring a good number to Cornell.

Hence in the late 1950s I had Burmese, Filipino, Vietnamese and, especially, Indonesian classmates. For us this was a marvellous chance to learn first-hand about our countries of interest, to build friendships, and to have our
prejudices challenged. Furthermore, Cornell's location in a very small town meant that students were together all the time, not just in the classroom and library, but in shops, bars, restaurants and the local parks. Many of us shared apartments with Southeast Asians, sometimes even learning to cook in the process.