SOURCE : CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY SOUTHEAST ASIA SOCIETY
PROFESSOR BARBARA WATSON ANDAYA
I have been a student of that part of the world which we term “Southeast Asia” for well over fifty years, and it has been a stimulating and always exciting venture. Notwithstanding a complete lack of any career plan, a combination of circumstances has enabled me to engage with a field that has consistently provided me with both intellectual satisfaction and personal pleasure. Frankly, I am still amazed at how I arrived here.
I grew up in one of Sydney’s outer suburbs, then very rural, and my only experience of “Asia” was through the Indian students studying with my father, a professor of wheat genetics. Australia then was very white (immigration restrictions were in force), and my schooling included little about Asia, but as a student at the University of Sydney I was one of just two third-year undergraduates who chose to enrol in Asian history. My primary reason for this choice was because I thought it would be more interesting than the alternatives (American or Australian). Included in the fourth year honours class, we only covered Japan, China and India, and lectures were simply chalk and talk, with no visual aids whatsoever, but I was nonetheless entranced!
After graduation and completing a Diploma of Education in 1964, I began to teach at a high school west of the area where I grew up. My task, as a history graduate, was to introduce social studies to boisterous fourteen-year-olds, mostly of Greek or Italian migrant background. Unbeknownst to them, my pupils were the first generation to be exposed to evolving educational programmes aimed at producing “Asia literate” Australians, and despite my limited background, I was still seen as a kind of specialist on Asia. By this time Federal government had already distanced itself from earlier policies that positioned Australia as a white bastion at the bottom of the Pacific and was rethinking relationships with the countries of Asia, so close at hand. Accordingly, the high school curriculum was revised to reflect this perspective, including a completely new section for social studies entitled “Our neighbours to the near north” – meaning primarily Southeast Asia. At that time, however, there was very little in the way of resources, and virtually no one was trained in the history, culture and political situation of Southeast Asian countries. Faced with this frustrating situation, I successfully applied for a grant to the East West Center, an institution set up in Honolulu by President Kennedy in 1963 with the idea of bridging the gap between “Asia” and the United States by sponsoring students who would undertake degrees at the University of Hawai‛i. In my application I said that I planned to obtain a Master’s degree in Southeast Asian history, and would return to Australia to write a textbook for high school students. I left for Honolulu in September 1966, an airplane flight that not only launched me on an academic career, but truly changed my life.
At the University of Hawai‛i I studied with two historians, both pioneers in the field – Walter Vella, who worked on Thailand, and Robert Van Neil, on Indonesia. During this time I had the opportunity to spend two semesters at Cornell University, where I met Professor D.G.E. Hall, a doyen of Southeast Asian studies, who was filling in for Professor O.W. Wolters, then on leave. It was fortunate for me that Professor Hall believed in female education, and persuaded me to accept a scholarship to return to Cornell following the completion of my MA in Hawaii, and enrol for the PhD. degree.
The Southeast Asia programme at Cornell in the 1960s was a vibrant and dynamic, energized by activists protesting the Vietnam War and by former Peace Corps volunteers, returning to study the region where they had lived for two years. Caught up in these exhilarating times, my vaguely conceived thesis topic (perhaps education in British Malaya?) seemed of minor importance.
Again, circumstances helped decide my future when my classmate, Leonard Andaya (from Hawai‛i, whom I had met in a class on Southeast Asian Politics under Dr Ruth McVey) decided to marry because he was going to the Netherlands with a Fulbright scholarship and I could only accompany him as a spouse. Professor Wolters, I have to say, was not pleased – I think he assumed I would give up academics – but he told me that I should give myself a month and then go to the archives. Well, I did it! I studied Dutch and I learned to read the early modern hand-written script. More importantly, I found a new thesis topic when I realized that the Dutch East India Company (VOC) records from the Malay state of Perak covered the same period as several little-studied Malay texts. Now students have to consults these Dutch records on microfilm, but then we could see the originals. For me it was an amazing experience to turn the pages of the old VOC books and see the sand that had been used to dry the ink fall down into the margins --- this meant no one had ever looked at the Perak material sent to Amsterdam for over two hundred years!
Yet there were obstacles ahead, even as I returned to Cornell to take my comprehensive examinations. Because I was a married female, my future (at least in the eyes of academic men) seemed dubious at best. Reflected in a reduction in financial support, this lack of confidence was a searing experience, and today it is a reminder of how difficult it then was to advance in a largely male world. Fate stepped in again, for there were no jobs in the US now that the Vietnam War was winding down, but Leonard and I were able to join the history department in the University of Malaya. Arriving in Malaysia eighteen months after the riots of May 1969, we were eyewitnesses to the changes that were taking place as affirmative action program brought in large numbers of Malay students seeking courses offered in Malay. While these experiences helped generate the interest that led to our collaboration in A History of Malaysia (1982) I was also able to spend time in Perak, and to complete my thesis (published as Perak, The Abode of Grace: A Study of an Eighteenth century Malay State).
After two years in Malaysia we moved to the Australian National University on research fellowships, where I collaborated with Dr. Virginia Hooker on a translation and edited edition of the Tuhfat al-Nafis, the nineteenth-century Malay chronicle which had been the basis for her thesis. But when our time at ANU was completed, we found it impossible to find academic positions, even when we offered ourselves as “two for the price of one”. For that reason we shall always be grateful to Professor Nicholas Tarling and Professor Keith Sinclair, of the History Department at the University of Auckland, who supported our application to join the history faculty.
Our thirteen years in Auckland were happy ones, when we were both able to take advantage of academic opportunities (including overseas research and a year at the University of Kyoto) that gave us time to finish the History of Malaysia for me to finish a second book, To Live us Brothers, a study of Jambi and Palembang in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But although New Zealand saved our careers, it was not a centre for Southeast Asia, and when the University of Hawai‛i offered us two positions we accepted, although we left Auckland with regret.
I have been a member of the Asian Studies Program at UH since January of 1994, and in terms of gender equity even this campus is very different that which I found as a graduate student in 1966. Certainly, moving to the United States gave me a greater international profile, with positions such as President of the Association for Asian Studies, and opportunities to teach at the National University of Singapore and to work at other universities in Malaysia. At the same time, I could still see continuing evidence that regardless of culture, women have been disadvantaged in comparison with men. Combined with the rise of gender studies, this led me to embark on a new project, which resulted in The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (2006), which dealt with the ambivalence of womanhood in a region where the male-female relationship has been touted as relatively favourable to women. I have retained this interest in gender relations, but in recent years I have also become more involved with the history of religious change in Southeast Asia, especially in regard to the changing roles of women.
I never went back to Australia to write that high school textbook, but when I visit Sydney the demographics have changed so much that I sometimes feel as if I am in Asia. The mobility of people and ideas is reflected in academia, including Southeast Asia, where the globalization of university life, greater prosperity and the ease of international travel has increased the possibilities for research collaboration, faculty partnerships and student exchanges. The classroom environment has also changed with the advent of more visual aids, access to the internet, and more student involvement in the learning process. Often my students are my teachers, for their experiences are different from my own, and our discussions constantly remind me that I am still learning. Yet even as I see the development of new fields such as world history, I am struck by the small role accorded Southeast Asia in these supposedly global perspectives. As a teacher, I thus continue to feel akin to a missionary, beginning each class with the hope that I can somehow infuse my students with the same enthusiasm that has been one of the joys of my academic career.
C&P: 1/3/2021 @ 17 REJAB 1442H: 10.46 AM
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