Deconstructing Colonialism in Southeast Indonesia

CENTRO ESCOLAR UNIVERSITY
Mendiola, Manila

“Deconstructing Colonialism in Southeast Asia:
Danh tính, Lipunan and Budaya”
WENDELL GLENN P. CAGAPE
PhD in Southeast Asian Studies
Centro Escolar University
wendellglenncagape@gmail.com
wendscagape@gmail.com
Studies on Southeast Asian history are mostly filled with passages of the years of
colonialism, something that takes centerstage in the affairs of the states in the region for one and
only reason: affinity to the west.
Southeast Asia’s cauldron is characterized by its past and the legacy of the colonizers in its
national psyche and sadly, as we note, its history has never been crafted with so much purity
because all aspects of the ways of life of the people are altered by colonialists and its empires, even
if they are oceans apart from the locus of our present academic discourse.
It is important to anchor our understanding of colonialism through our study of how it
impacted peoples and cultures in Southeast Asia. Colonialism has come to the shores of Southeast
Asia bringing tidings of economy and religion, of culture and knowledge. If we keep an eye
foremost only on the benefits of it, we miss the point of critically introspecting ourselves in these

latter days. Our choices now, from the way we dress, listen to music, watch TV sitcoms, read the
newspaper, our ability to understand languages is in due part, a by-product of colonialism. This
study will not attempt to reverse the tide that has already been a part of the societies of Southeast
Asia, for doing it is impossible. What we intend to do is try to breakdown to pieces what has been
the impacts of colonialism on our danh tính (identity), lipunan (society) and budaya (cultures).
Theoretically, this study submits to the principles of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak whose
laudable work on the subaltern is an important footnote in our study of postcolonialism in
Southeast Asia. Also, we anchor our arguments in Edward Said’s Orientalism and cross-refer the
arguments of Michel Foucault.
This study attempts to piece together articles, views and write ups of scholars and
researchers in the aspect of deconstructing colonialism and setting it in our discourse of
postcolonialism.
Keywords: Colonialism, Orientalism, Subaltern, danh tính, lipunan, budaya

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If one asked historians what causes colonialism and the common answers will always be
economics. In the 19th century, most maritime advanced economies in Europe, namely Britain,
France, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain are in competition to the new world, finding new places
to pursue economic ties and discover. Voyages of discovery left their shores and armed with

scribes and writers, laborers, oil and a motivation to see the new world. These embarkation to the
new world found its way to Southeast Asia with much ardor.
Because they found their way towards Southeast Asia, they bring in trade. They bring in
new knowledge and a concept of civilization. Kenneth R. Hall noted that “in the premodern world,
the Southeast Asian region was initially portrayed in international sources as a land of immense
wealth; developments there were thought to be of crucial importance to the entirety of world
history in the pre-1600 period.” (Hall, 2011) Writers, travelers, sailors, merchants and officials
from every continent of the Eastern Hemisphere knew of Southeast Asia’s exotic products, and by
the second millennium of the Christian era, most were aware of its ports of trade and major political
centers (Ibid, pg.3). It has become an immensely rich sub-region for the West primarily for its
topographical and geographical backdrop and abundance.
Southeast Asians live in a sub-continent more clearly demarcated by nature than most. Its
boundaries are formed by the collision of continental plates, the northwardmoving Australian and
Indian plates, and the westward-moving Pacific plate, pushing upwards the chain of volcanic
mountains that almost surrounded the region. Within these mountains lies the relatively stable
Sunda shelf, which united Sumatra, Java and Borneo with the mainland during periods of low
water level such as occurred about 18,000 years ago. As the world’s largest area of monsoonal
humid tropics, it shared a patter of rainforest and water which provided a background for all
economic and social activity of humans (Reid, 1995).
Although important to the eyes of the European powers, Southeast Asia played a crucial

and important role of power balancing with East Asia, vis-à-vis India and China. In precolonial
times, it can not be argued that there were evidence of disputes between then smaller tributaries
and kingdoms. These is called the balance-of-power of Southeast Asia. Though the logic of
balance-of-power was not immediately obvious at the regional level, it had played a crucial part
in the sub-regional system of pre-colonial Southeast Asia. The centuries-old conflicts between Dai
Viet and Champa, between Burma and Ayutthaya/Siam, and among various Sumatra and Javanese
kingdoms all point to the importance of power balancing. Notably, the dynamics of sub-regional
balancing was not isolated from the power structure of East Asia. Upon close examination, the
article argues that the hierarchical regional order dominated by China and embedded in the tribute
system was in many ways instrumental in bringing about balancing behavior in pre-colonial
Southeast Asia (Shu, 2011). But this paper however, will not delve more on the tributary system
that characterized much of Southeast Asia but the topic remains to be an important footnote in the
precolonial times. It will not also discuss the Indic colonialism for India was the precursor to
Eurocentric interests to Burma and Malaysia.
The arrival of colonialism in Southeast Asia ushered the alteration of the identity of its
people. In Viet Nam, the French and other European groups had already arrived and started to
influence events in Vietnam as early as 1516. Portuguese ships bringing missionaries and traders
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were the first to arrive in Vietnam, and soon afterward French missionaries followed (Shackford

& Jones, 2000). These French missionaries was one of “mission civiliatrice” that was supported
by French intellectual. This was not merely missionaries to spread Christian religion but also to
spread French hegemony in Vietnam. In that time French tried to capture world attention by spread
their hegemony by colonialism. However, French seemingly drew an observation about
Vietnamese that they were once relatively progressive and intelligent due to Chinese cultural
influences, but of which had relapsed (Le, 2011).
The physical boundaries of Indonesia had been established by the Netherlands when they
took over the many islands and made them into a single colony: the Netherlands East Indies. The
present Indonesia was formerly named by the Dutch as “East Indies”. Why East Indies? As the
popular colony of British was India, Indonesia was named after India. East Indies is a term
referring to thirteen thousands islands located east of India. It is located in the South East Asian
Archipelago. Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Papua are among the five largest islands.
Within these islands, there are more than 300 ethnic groups and 200 local languages (Vickers,
2005). The term Indonesia or East Indies which means “the islands of India” was given to the
archipelago by a German ethnologist and has been used since 1884 (Vlekke, 1959).
In the Philippines, due in part to the flourishing trade of Acapulco and Manila, let us briefly
discuss it. The Manila-Acapulco galleon trade is the more popular name of the Philippine-Mexico
galleon trade. The ships were even called the Manila galleons. They were among the richest trade
ships of its time, competing with the silver fleet of Peru and the India fleet of Portugal. On their
way to New Spain, as Mexico was called then, the galleons' cargo holds were filled with silk,

spices, porcelain, cotton, musk, wax, and curiosities of the East which were sold at very high prices
in the fair in Acapulco. On the voyage back to Manila, it carried chestfuls of Mexican and Peruvian
silver pesos, the huge earnings from the sale and the royal subsidy to the Philippine government.
Even the subsidy was earned from the trade for greater a portion was the income from port duties
paid by the galleons and sales taxes imposed on their merchandise (Ango, 2010).

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The Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade justified the continued colonialism of Spain in the
Philippines through trade and commerce. This trade supports the claims of many historians that
the causes of colonialism is primarily driven by economics.
This painter’s rendition of the port of Manila during the flourishing Galleon trade with
Mexico evoked a sense of colonialist society, where Filipinos are seen wearing the Spanishinspired clothing and presents a semblance of a busy port of any buzzling city of Spain. This trade,
though driven in part by the hegemony of Spain in the pacific, benefitted colonial Filipino society
which are evident in its society’s biases towards the mestizos and the landed elites have, since the
Spanish colonization of the country, profited from this trade. Because the elites can study and be
educated and improved their statuses of living, their Lipunan was conceptualized.
More so, the concept of a Filipino national community was initially verbalized in the 1880's
by the ilustrados, the educated elite which emerged from the principalia class in native society
after the educational reforms of 1863. This concept was a function of native response to colonial

and ecclesiastical domination as well as the result of an interaction between the different social
classes in the colonial society (Majul, 1978).
These backdrops of colonialism will now be gleaned in our question: Do Southeast Asia
have a collective identity? If it does, what will it be in the light of our study of postcolonialism and
in our efforts at the deconstruction of colonialism? Will identity formation be sustained in the light
of a hegemonic culture of the colonizer?

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In this artist’s cartoon editorial, in de feestdagen was emblazoned above the bordered
piece. A quick Google translate entry yields an English translation of “in the holidays”. The
editorial cartoon depicted an obese old man representing the Dutch colonizer while Indonesia
was represented by this lowly, submissive, ashamed woman who wears a batik dress which
symbolizes her danh tính. Her identity remains to be uninfluenced, but her lands and resources
were spoils of the Dutch.
In the case of Viet Nam, the atrocities of the French is everywhere. As with most
colonizers, violence and abuses on the locals happened and recorded in the annals of history.

This cartoon depicted the War of Tonkin where the French legionnaires killed Vietnamese
and Chinese setters altogether. With very superior artillery and advantages of military training, the

colonialism of Indochina spanned from Viet Nam to Laos and Cambodia. These onslaught at the
locals whose affinity to the Chinese have effectively altered the budaya of the Vietnamese.
The subjugation of Viet Nam by the French resulted into the infiltration of the French
cuisine to the Viet’s budaya as well as in its buildings, effectively erasing the Chinese lineage in
most places in Viet Nam.
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Social identity formation follows the principle of Identity Control Theory of Peter J. Burke.
It is based on the premise that the idea was formulated, based on traditional symbolic interaction
views, that people choose behaviors, the meanings of which correspond to the meanings of their
identity (Stets & Burke, 2005). By this vein, people in Southeast Asia, due largely to the years of
colonialism have adapted to the new imposed identity by the colonizers. They have
correspondingly set meanings to their identity based on the new, sophisticated and foreign identity
which is totally different from their puritanical identities prior to the onslaught of the colonial rule.
In this particular context, it supported the postcolonial subaltern theory of Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote the Subaltern as she attacks the Eurocentric attitudes of
the West. She rejects the idea that there is a precolonial past that we can recover. A nostalgia of
lost origin, roots and native culture is flawed project because there is no ‘pure’ precolonial past to
recover: it has been changed by colonialism (Praveen, 2016). And these arguments provided an

impetus for scholars and academics to question world history and our place in it, along the parallel
fault lines of Said’s Orientalism.
So what is the place of Southeast Asia in the context of World History? Considering of
course, that most of the past collective history of the region is mired in colonialist recordings and
anecdotal descriptions except for the case of Thailand. What is the limits of World History then as
we deconstruct colonialism in Southeast Asia?
Ranajit Guha’s book History at the Limit of World History becomes an important
reference on this analysis. He argued that from the point of view of those left out of World-history
this advice amounts to condoning precisely such “world-historical deeds” – the rape of continents,
the destruction of cultures, the poisoning of the environment – as helped “the great men who were
the individuals of world history” to build empires and trap their subject population in what the
pseudo-historical language of imperialism could describe as prehistory (Guha, 2002). He further
stressed that “if limit, as defined by Aristotle, is “the first thing outside which there is nothing to
be found and the first thing inside which everything is to be found”, its function may be understood
as a signal of our attempt to explore the space beyond world-history (Ibid Pg. 7). And in this
attempt to probe the limit of historical thinking we follow Wittgenstein. To draw a limit to thought,
he says, “we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (ie we should have to be able to
think what cannot be thought). Accordingly, in our move towards a thinking of historicality as
what cannot be thought, we shall set out from that side of world-history “inside which everything
is to be found”, taking the concept of “people without history” for our point of departure (Ibid p.8).

Furthering our discourse on colonialism, one might be comforted answering the questions
raised by Walter Mignolo. The question is: who, when, why is constructing knowledges?
(Mignolo, 2009). So in Southeast Asia, who constructs our knowledges and history? When were
these constructed? And why were it constructed? Spivak provided a perspective to these possible
answers by attacking eurocentrism and holds that knowledge is never innocent, it is always
operated by western economical interests and power. To her, knowledge is like any other
commodity or product that is exported from the west to the Third World. The western scholars
have always presented themselves and their knowledge about the Eastern cultures as objective.
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The knowledge about the third world is always constructed with the political and economical
interests of the west (Praveen, 2016).
In providing for the impetus of why knowledge is constructed in world-history, I shall cite
in toto the passages of Spivak (1993) as she discussed the events leading to the preservation of the
history and culture of Hinduism and of India during the time of the British colonialism.
“I locate here the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, the Indian Institute at
Oxford in 1883, and the analytic and taxonomic work of scholars like Arthur Macdonnell and
Arthur Berriedale Keith, who were both colonial administrators and organizers of the matter of
Sanskrit. From their confident utilitarian-hegemonic plans for students and scholars of Sanskrit,
it is impossible to guess at either the aggressive repression of Sanskrit in the general educational

framework or the increasing 'feudalization' of the performative use of Sanskrit in the everyday life
of Brahmanic-hegemonic India. A version of history was gradually established in which the
Brahmans were shown to have the same intentions as (thus providing the legitimation for) the
codifying British: 'In order to preserve Hindu society intact [the] successors [of the original
Brahmans] had to reduce everything to writing and make them more and more rigid. And that is
what has preserved Hindu society in spite of a succession of political upheavals and foreign
invasions.,]} This is the 1925 verdict of Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Shastri, learned Indian
Sanskritist, a brilliant representative of the indigenous elite within colonial production, who was
asked to write several chapters of a 'History of Bengal' projected by the private secretary to the
governor general of Bengal in 1916. To signal the asymmetry in the relationship between authority
and explanation (depending on the race-class of the authority), compare this 1928 remark by
Edward Thompson, English intellectual: 'Hinduism was what it seemed to be ... It was a higher
civilization that won [against it], both with Akbar and the English.”
In this, what is the collective danh tính of Southeast Asia? Do we really have a pure danh
tính? According to Amitav Acharya of the American University in Washington DC, danh tính
(identity) is socially structured, combining instrumental logic with habit-forming socialization,
norms, and institutions. Moreover, such identity building is not entirely divorced from cultural and
historical ties but is reinforced by it. Simple proximity, historical ties, and shared culture are
sufficient for identity (Acharya, 2017).
Our context of social danh tính follows the social identity theory of Heri Tajfel and John

Turner. Its most fundamental assumption is that group behaviour is more than a collection of
individuals behaving en masse. Instead, group behaviour is linked to the group’s psychological
representation or social identity. Hence, social identity theory, or SIT, focuses less on how
individuals operate within social groups and more on how social groups operate within the minds
of individuals (Martini & Rubin, 2016).
In the salient aspects of lipunan in Southeast Asia, it was entirely based on the westernstyle democracy which even sipped through, albeit in lesser influence, to Thai lipunan though they
were not colonized by any imperial power from the western hemisphere. They were, however,
surrounded by kingdoms and states who were subject to a foreign colonial yoke namely, Burma

7

and Malaysia under the British rule, Laos, Viet Nam and Cambodia under the French, and further
south, of Indonesia under the Dutch.
Lipunan which is Filipino word for society is the largest form of human group. It consists
of people who share a common heritage and culture. Members of the society learn this culture and
transmit it from one generation to the next. They even preserve their distinctive culture through
literature, art, video recordings, and other means of expression (Schaefer, 2014).
Now, the question to be derived in our deconstruction of colonialism which impacted the
lipunan will have to be whether it gelled to Gemeinschaft or led to Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft
describes a lipunan in a social order centered around tightly knit communities while Gesellschaft
portends social order centered around self-seeking individuals with little or no community sense
(Inglis & Thorpe, 2012). Collectively, in Southeast Asia, lipunan is characteristically a
Gesellschaft which supported the arguments for the sustained ASEAN Identity. We have not yet
attained a certain Gesellschaft. The distinction between communal relations and interest-based
association goes back at least to Confucius, but it entered the emerging discipline of sociology in
classic form in Ferdinand Toennies’s theoretical essay Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Tonnies
explicitly treated the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft in evolutionary terms, arguing
that Gemeinschaft represented the childhood of humanity and Gesellschaft its maturity (Brint,
2001).
In supporting that the lipunan of Southeast Asia is of Gesellschaft, we look at contemporary
times. Southeast Asia is no longer at the periphery—demographically, economically, or politically.
Characterized by sprawling megacities and a densely settled countryside, it is hard to imagine that
tigers were once a major threat to those who lived on the outskirts of large Southeast Asian cities.
With wild animals banished to zoos, and even the once ubiquitous trishaws and bicycles almost
gone, the major features of Southeast Asia cities are shopping malls, congested roadways, and
pervasive smog arising from urban industries and motorized transport. The subsistence economies
of the Southeast Asian past have grown into dynamic economic engines producing electronic
goods, clothing and footwear, and household appliances for world markets. The economic,
political, and strategic centrality of contemporary Southeast Asia is evident in the annual meetings
of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the influential, quasi-political association of
the region), which draw representatives from all the major industrial blocs in the world (Hirschman
& Bonaparte, 2012).
Budaya is a Bahasa Indonesian word for culture.
So in our study of colonialism which impacted on culture in Southeast Asia, we will discuss
of what has been left. Is there truly a pure cultural identity even if a nation is subjugated by a
colonial power?
The imperial poet Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” is central in our
social criticism of colonialism in Asia and in Southeast Asia in particular. The poem justified the
colonial hold of both Britain and America at the start of the 20th century. The poem published in
1898, during a high tide of British and American rhetoric about bringing the blessings of
“civilization and progress” to barbaric non-Western, non-Christian, non-white peoples. In
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Kipling’s often-quoted phrase, this noble mission required willingness to engage in “savage wars
of peace” (Sebring, 2015).

Soon after the poem came out, there were pro-imperialist editorial cartoonists who took it
upon themselves to interpret the poem and presented them in these situations. In the cartoon above,
both Britain and America carry on their backs barbaric men and nations, those untouched by
civilization, uneducated, non-white and ignorant people.
Cross-referencing on the subaltern by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, we ask: do they speak?
Do they complain? Do they choose? Under the yoke of colonialism, these have not been given to
the subjugated peoples because the colonial masters ensured that a new society comes out, along
with a new identity – that is pro-western in all aspects.
However, in Malaysia the subaltern spoke. In and around the third decade of the 20th
century the upsurge of Malay national consciousness stirred the relative calm of British
administration in Malaysia. Malays educated in foreign academic and religious institutions became
the accepted leaders of their communities. These leaders were aware of the need to find a place for
themselves and for the Malay population in the British scheme of things. They were roused to
9

action by the few Chinese residents’ attempt to obtain political and social recognition within the
framework of the government. Their fierce zeal in preserving the Islamic faith and Malay cultural
patterns led the Malays to search for a modern identity which would enable them to hold their own
against the non-Malays, and the powerful governmental machinery in the hands of the British
(Khoo & Lo, 1977).
But in the case of Indonesia, it was a Dutch sponsored mechanism that ensure the thriving
of their culture and affinity to farming with the subtle impact through rice cultivation for economic
reasons and gains for Holland. The plan for the economic exploitation of Java was based on
exploiting religious as well as social usage by making use of the adat of the common people
towards their chiefs. What the government did was to utilize the traditional authority and prestige
of the hereditary chiefs, that is that princely regents, district wedana and the desa heads, to order
the people to work. In return these chiefs were allowed a proportionate share of the delivered crops
(Khoo, 1970). This was highlighted by Professor Fraces Gouda in her Tedx talk in Roterdam.
These all are the backdrop in Southeast Asia except for the Philippines. There the Spanish
Catholics, in their long reign, did indeed imprint a Western culture, it was altered in many ways
but also strongly reinforced by a fresh and vigorous injection of American values from 1900
(Hunter, 1966). And to provide you with how much altered the Filipino culture and identity, one
need not look beyond the gates of the University of Sto. Tomas in which one look up to a date
“1624” and it will give u an idea of how altered and erased the Filipino budaya is. These imprints
on the Filipino lipunan and budaya is manifested in the manner of clothing most Filipinos wore.
The following are artists’ rendition of the Filipino costume as taken from a reputable blog
(BibliOdyssey, 2008).

And these are the most common Filipino people dress during the Spanish colonial years.
The elite dressed more elaborately.
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Deconstructing colonialism in Southeast Asia will require an introspection as a Filipino.
For our ability to anchor our analyses on how our fellowmen view us in the colonial melee in
contemporary times, I refer to the Fiesta paint of National Artist Carlos “Botong” Francisco which
he did in 1946. This is one of his important body of works that adore museums in Manila.

Botong Francisco depicted what reality most Filipinos live during the fiesta in their
barangays and portrays the central role of Catholicism as the raison d’etre of the celebration.
Juxtaposing this to the locus of our history, it affirmed the submission to Spain and the colonial
influence of the country and its people. The danh tính of the Filipinos as we speak is
characteristically Eurocentric.
A survey of celebrations within the ASEAN of budaya and lipunan, the Philippines sets
itself apart from the rest. It has shown cultural influences from the Chinese, the Spanish, Americans
and the Japanese. It cuisine are replete with these colonial tastes which drives foreign gastronomic
commercialism in the country in the modern and post-modern Philippine lipunan. The influx of
foreign-sounding gastronomic delights stands proudly in comparison to the local delicacies which
will only be displayed on fiestas and special commemorations.
So how does colonialism viewed by anthropologists?
Anthropologists mostly think of colonialism in three ways: as the universal, evolutionary
progress of modernization; as a particular strategy or experiment in domination and exploitation;
and as the unfinished business of struggle and negotiation. All these views, in both positive and
negative versions, were common colonial currency. Anthropological views of colonialism
commonly stressed a combination of the three (Pels, 1997).

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Ergo, in the case of Southeast Asia, colonialism was universal save for Siam and was driven
primarily by the cogs of industrialization and civilization. It was religious, cultural and social
domination which erases the danh tính of some nations and peoples in Southeast Asia. Reverting
to the untouched Thailand in Southeast Asia, as we discuss its lipunan, it is essential to understand
where it social structure came from. Bangkok became the capital of Thailand after 1767, but
extensive urbanization and bureaucracy was only initiated by the reforms of King Mongkut (18511868) and to a greater extent, by King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910). After his death in 1910,
Thailand has a working ministerial bureaucracy, whose higher civil servants, although still
recruited largely from among the princes and members of the nobility, receive fixed salaries and
had regulated working hours (Evers, 1966). This is the hallmark of its danh tính as a nation and
people in Southeast Asia.
Purposely, this paper do not include the Indic colonialism by propagating civilization
because it serves as a factual backdrop in all the interests of the western hemisphere on Southeast
Asia and also, they were first colonized by Britain before it proceeded to coin the “orient” as a
reference to Southeast Asia. Although it is noteworthy to reference E. M. Forster’s A Passage to
India because it was critical to British rule in India. Its plot included the vicious rape of British
girl Daphne Manners by a group of Indians. Her Indian boyfriend, Hari Kumar – educated at an
English public school – is wrongly accused and cruelly interrogated by the policeman Ronald
Merrick, thus providing the novel with a realistic central political metaphor for British India
(Royle, 1989).
As we continue with our attempts at deeply reflecting on the colonial years that were our
history, how will we cross-reference our experience with how Michel Foucault looked at
colonialism. In afterthought though, Spivak and other postcolonial theorists attacked Foucault on
his position on the issue.
In a 1976 lecture Foucault admitted that the techniques and weapons Europe transported to
its colonies had a ‘boomerang’ effect on the institutions, apparatuses, and techniques of power in
the West (Legg, 2007).
So how were the colonizers experience their colonizing ways back home? This is an
important question which raises eyebrows of postcolonial scholars and theorists who opined that
Foucault has been absent in the present context of colonialism in the world. However, history of
the Dutch colonial past in Indonesia favored these arguments of Foucault for it was in the same
vein that the economy was the colonial currency, and that the Dutch wanted to buy agricultural
produce out of Java for Holland and the rest of the western hemisphere. They have validly
subjugated Indonesia for commerce’s sake. It has a ‘happy marriage’ relationship in Indonesia.
The same goes for the Philippines whose goods and agricultural produces are traded for Spain via
Acapulco in Mexico. These interests of the ‘orient’ by the western colonizers ignited also the
interests of locals and reciprocated visits for education and economic purposes. Indigenous elites
in Southeast Asia went across Europe to know the civilization and are caught up in its web through
education, lipunan, and budaya.

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In deconstructing colonialism in Southeast Asia, one should unearth the intention and
magnify it in the light of social danh tính, lipunan, and budaya. In the 19th to the early 20th century,
major superpowers and hegemons have engulfed Southeast Asia without us even knowing we were
a subregion in the greater Asian context. When India was colonized, it has extended to farther
inland to Burma but the race towards colonization and imperialism in Southeast Asia has started
with Indonesia, Malaysia, Viet Nam, the Philippines, Laos and Cambodia and in all these, the
colonizers are Europeans. Their worldview suddenly heightened by the discovery of the ‘orient’
and it feed into their consciousness that it is their obligation and duty to bring civilization to a
rather uncharted territory whose subjects were uncivilized and barbaric.
By colonizing Southeast Asia, they have humiliated dragon asleep. They have altered the
Chinese cultural influence in Viet Nam. They have, as depicted in this editorial cartoon by Puck,
a pro-imperialist cartoonist, curtailed its cultural dominance in Southeast Asia. China, like India,
is in Asia and therefore, the smaller states and
kingdoms pay tribute to their Imperial Courts in
Beijing. Though an old civilization, China was
infiltrated by all major superpowers from the western
hemisphere after the Boxer Rebellion which saw the
influx of the eight-nation alliance composed primarily
of the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Japan,
Germany, United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and
the Netherlands.
Embarrassing as it was, the Chinese Empress
Cixi had to sign the Boxer Protocol in 7 September
1901 which provided for the execution of government
troops who supported the Boxers, provisions of
foreign troops in Beijing and payment of 450 million
taels of silver – approximately $10 Billion at 2018
silver prices and more than the annual government tax
revenue, as indemnity to the 8 nations involved.
This is a painful chapter in the colonization of Asia which draws a parallel line in the history of
the colonialism which swept Southeast Asia. Both China and the smaller states and kingdom of
Southeast Asia have been subjected to too much humiliation by the colonial masters from western
hemisphere and that they were made as the reference point for an audacious orient and an image
of diverse culture and tradition.
In the many years of colonialism in Southeast Asia, some budaya remains pure and
traditional. As mostly depicted in dance, Java dance in Bali was retained and so much of its cultural
practices at harvest time and during the planting season. These cultural practices were still
celebrated in contemporary Indonesia. In the Philippines, the Singkil dance remains a cultural
hegemon among Philippine dances because of its intricately detailed dresses and garb in royal
gold, its storylines, it narratives and its steps. Magnifying its grandeur is the meaning of the dance
to all Muslim Filipinos whose lipunan were never under the yoke of colonialism. The same goes
13

to the pure Thai dance which resembles the parallel culture of both Laos and Cambodia. It has
retained its budaya with much of the steps, costumes, make up and accessories attributed to the
Thai lipunan.
A deconstruction of colonialism is not complete without understanding its impact to the
lipunan. A study was undertaken to ascertain he impact of colonialism in Africa and Asia and it
revealed that in many regards, European colonialism between 1860 and 1960 left much deeper
marks than traditional, usually tributary forms of domination. Where a long-term mise en valeur
was to be realized, infrastructure investment was huge, and labor migration from near and far
significant. Some of the countries in the sample truly are creations of colonialism. There is no
question that these “legacies” shape our world (Ziltener, Kunzler, & Walter, 2017).
In the end, colonialism have benefits far and beyond our shores, but the benefits also have
repercussion to contemporary danh tính-forming, the evolution of the lipunan and the conservation
of budaya across Southeast Asia.
Finally, I must ask: how colonial are you?
-o0o-

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