A Life Beyond Boundaries. Benedict Anderson

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.