Before embarking on our exploration a word of caution is in order. The following is not meant to be a full-fledged scholarly paper pulling out all the available evidence. All it intends to do is to throw out a couple of suggestions which hopefully may give rise to discussion. It is, therefore, an unabashed exercise in speculation. Also it will endeavour to compress within the compass of a brief paper complicated and diverging developments taking place during a period of more than a thousand years over a diverse and widely stretched area. At best it may serve as an essay in the sense of a speculative ‘attempt’; in short, a discussion piece. It arose from previous discussions with students and colleagues, especially with Andre Wink, who may recognise a blurred reflection of their own ideas.

One may not always agree with the term used as the title of the book, but in his already classic study on ancient Southeast Asia, Coedès has shown that despite local differences and regional variations, this region shares similar sense of unity. Hinduisation or, rather, Indianisation in statecraft and religion was the basis of this sense of unity. Not only were Sanskrit and Pali the official languages of the original texts of the religion, Hinduisation also provided commonly shared high cultural symbols. In other words, despite political instability in inter-state relations and trading competition that continued to disturb whatever type of stability had been attained, the world of Southeast Asia, and particularly the historic Indonesian archipelago, shared a number of cultural traits, that were clearly manifested in the conduct of political affairs and religion.

The study of Islam and Muslims in relation to local non-Muslim population and their religious beliefs and social practices in medieval India has often tended to be conducted eventually along two lines, seemingly opposed to each other. On the one hand, there are communal historians who have reduced the history of medieval India into the conflict between Hindus and Muslims, which they have projected as having resulted from their divergent religious outlooks. The period was Islamic in their view, and the state a conversion machinery and an organ to bring Hindus under the hegemony of Islam. This was a mission in which the state could not succeed fully, largely because of ‘Hindu’ resistance. On the other hand, there are a large number of ‘liberal’ historians to whom the hallmark of medieval Indian society has been an amity between the two communities, the various tensions and encounters over economic and political matters notwithstanding. The medieval period, in the opinion of such historians, saw the evolution and efflorescence of a composite culture to which medieval rulers, nobles, sufis and Persian and Urdu poets contributed significantly. The later animosity between Hindus and Muslims and clashes over religious matters, they argued, were the handiwork of the British.

The words that serve as a motto for this paper are taken from the finest novel about Dutch fin de siècle society and indeed, in my opinion, the finest novel in Dutch literature, Louis Couperus' De Boeken der Kleine Zielen (The Books of the Small Souls). They form part of a dialogue between the widow of a former Governor-General of the Netherlands Indies and her, obviously, very dis-appointed grandson, a young colonial civil servant in the beginning of his career.

The changing cultural climate in Indonesia at the turn of the century can be demonstrated by the story of a young man, Achmad, who graduated from a Dutch senior high school (HBS) in 1899. He was the first native student to pass the final exams at the highest institution of learning (there was none at university level at the time) in Batavia, the capital of the Netherlands East Indies. Another young man had completed the same type of education in Semarang, Central Java, the year before. They belonged to the first generation of Indonesians schooled in Western ideas and thoughts. Indeed Western types of elementary education and teacher training school existed in other parts of the archipelago, but most of them taught in Malay or in the vernacular. Dutch-language schools at a ‘European’ level were reserved for the white section of the colonial society.

European expansion in Asia and the subsequent clashes between European trading companies and the trading systems of Asia have given rise to vivid discussions in the last decades. The discussions, ranging from Van Leur's theories of the tenacity of the indigenous ‘pedlar’-trade, to Steensgaard's theories of the structural superiority of the trading companies over their Asian competitors, have as yet been rather one-sided. Mostly, when comparing the two trading systems, the historians have concentrated on the trade which took place directly between Europe and Asia. Consequently, the competition between the ‘native’ Asian trade and the trade carried out by the companies have been discussed solely as an aspect of this bi-lateral trade. European participation in the intra-Asian distribution and re-distribution of goods has as yet not been fully discussed. Although authors like Holden Furber and K.N. Chaudhuri have acknowledged the need for further analysis of this subject, neither case-studies nor more theoretical works have appeared.

The five hundredth anniversary of the Columbian discovery of America is upon us, and with it the obligation to assess existing interpretations of the significance of that voyage and the establishment of permanent links between the Old and the New Worlds. The most influential of the several schools of interpretation are, on the one hand, the newest and analytic, and the other, the classic and bardic. The former is for many recondite and discomforting. The latter, the one most often taught, dramatized, and believed in North America, is for most as comfortable as an old pair of slippers. We learned it at primary school.