Unlike most present day history students, I enrolled in the Department of History by conscious personal choice. While most of my high school classmates preferred to enter the faculties of economics, law, or social and political sciences, I opted for the commonly assumed economically less promising subject of study. In a time when the youthful idealism of the newly sovereign nation state was still very much part of the game — after all my classmates and I were the living witnesses of the bloody national revolution — I thought some of us should study the history of our newly independent country, so I consciously made the sacrifice “for the sake of our future”. Well, I must confess, liking the subject matter did not exactly make this a difficult sacrifice. I made the decision on the ship taking me and my friends to Java from Sumatra.

The Department of History of the Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta was then a part of the Faculty of Letters, Pedagogy, and Philosophy. In 1956, two years after I matriculated, the faculty was divided into two and the Department of History became a part of the Faculty of Letters and Culture. Looking back at the first two or three years of my study, I can now remember my bewilderment with the way the department was run. Not only because I had to follow the Continental system of free study, but there was also no clear-cut boundary between the subjects to be examined in the first year and those in the third year. Or, perhaps I was not properly aware of it. Since it was entirely dependent on my decision, I just attended the lectures on whatever subjects were offered. The lecturers and professors were apparently not too certain about the subjects of study to be offered to future historians. After all, the study of history was still something new in the tradition of higher learning in Indonesia. None of them had a formal degree in history. Now, several decades later, I can only express my gratification to the rather awkward programme of the department, as it exposed me to different kinds of disciplines and subjects of study.

Current critical thinking on regions outside the West appears to have shifted from a preoccupation with the limitations of Western discourse to endeavours in fostering inter-referencing in Asian contexts as a means to decentre and diversify knowledge production (Chen 2010; Hillenbrand 2010). This book presents an instance of dialogue and elaborations among Southeast Asian scholars on their dilemmas and ethical recourse as they respond to the critique of area studies and new political-economic and cultural reconfigurations around them. It proposes that the contemplation of the future of Southeast Asian Studies by intellectuals in the region involves both epistemological and ethical questions: How can Southeast Asian intellectuals respond to current critical norms yet construct representations which are faithful to lived realities and meanings in the region and which can also challenge oppressive discourses at the official and oppositional levels? By insisting that theoretical distinctions are shaped by moral imperatives, this book hopes that it can help bring to an end the quarrel between insider-outsider or regional versus Eurocentric perspectives on Southeast Asia. The different interpretations between insider/ regional or outsider/European perspectives may be more telling of distinct ethical-political imperatives in knowledge production than the ontology of Southeast Asia. Rather than being oppositional, these different perspectives may in fact complement each other.

This book is the product of the support of many individuals and institutions. It has its beginnings in a workshop in 2002, held with the aim of initiating an interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue amongst Southeast Asian scholars in order to plan for a research-cum-retooling project for junior researchers from the region. The workshop was organized in my role as consultant to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) of New York's Southeast Asia Programme. It was funded by both the SSRC and a Ford Foundation Seed Grant (No. 1005-0128). The venue for this workshop was provided by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS). From the SSRC, I want to thank particularly Mary McDonnell, Itty Abraham, Seteney Shami, and Craig Calhoun for their enthusiastic and steadfast support for this project. Without their wise counsel and the SSRC's provision of financial and logistical support, both the workshop and this book would not have been possible.

In recent years the conceptual underpinnings and continued validity of area studies in a globalizing world have been severely questioned. Emanating from a critique of Orientalism, but also reflecting changing institutional politics in the American academe following the end of the Cold War, the attack on area studies has spread across the globe. This has resulted in growing pronouncements on the failure of area studies in producing a synthesis of knowledge that transcends disciplinary divides and power hierarchies between the Western and non-Western world. The spread of this critique has led to a common view that area studies is in a state of “crisis”.

Ironically, however, this critique of area studies comes at a time when regional perspectives are gaining ground in defining regions based on local priorities. The critical agendas that propelled the attack on area studies in Euro-America appear to undermine such promising effort. As the crisis of area studies galvanized scholars to deliberate over its fate, some scholars in Asian Studies have sought to find “afterlives” for area studies by pointing to regionally located scholarships as alternative sites from which Euro- American-centric visions could be denaturalized. In the words of Miyoshi and Harootunian:

Yet the prospect of recentring knowledge production back to regions themselves raises its own set of questions. For one thing, regional scholarships have always existed alongside Euro-American social sciences. In fact, strident regional scholarships were contesting the dominance of colonial scholarships during the decolonization era in endeavours to map out national histories. These local voices were often dismissed as “nationalist” if not “nativist” and have remained under-examined and unnoticed, even by scholars located within the regions themselves. The unspoken politics of theory at the time, supposedly speaking on behalf of some universal and objective standard, determined which scholarship could be regarded as theory, and which relegated to more subjective and parochial forms of knowledge.

More than twenty years ago, discussing the culture of Indonesian research in North America, Benedict Anderson pointed out that scholars are not only experts in their fields, but they are also members of their particular societies. Anderson indicates the importance of the institutional contexts and sociohistorical conditions within which knowledge is produced. Today, Anderson's point applies as much to American scholars as to us, students of Indonesia who are situated (to a certain degree) in the West, and yet are still part of the cultural order of the place we come from.

Indonesia is a product of both my experience as its national subject and my understanding of it through engaging with knowledge and ideas obtained largely from the Western academy. Yet Indonesia is also a place where we encounter the limits both of our concept and our subjectivity. In this sense, the country is not merely an object of analysis for scientific or theoretical inquiry, but also a place to engage with the question of how we have become who we are. For such an orientation, premises and theories are tools to be used, modified, and transformed. They are important in so far as they help us to engage with the place.

In the end, regardless of where we are from and currently at, through our work, we are involved in the appropriation of theories and the construction of ourselves and the places within which we are (or were once) located. In this mutual framing of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, few experiences are as difficult and as rewarding to reflect on as those from our student years. For it is then that we encountered the material place, the interdisciplinary field, and the institutions that, in my own case, shaped both my subjectivity and Indonesia.

To Enter: Jakarta

I was born in Medan the same year Soeharto came into power. My family moved to Surabaya when I was sixteen. After completing high school I entered an architecture school and, soon after graduation in 1989, went to work in the capital city as a junior designer for a major Japanese construction firm in Jakarta.

The changing historical trajectories of Singapore have had enormous influence on the growth and development of the Indian business communities in the city-state, both from economic and sociological perspectives. In the course of their ascent in the development ladder, the economies of Southeast Asia witnessed shifts in growth paradigms with increased globalization of capital, rapid transnational mobilization of human resources as well as the new requirements of the contemporary knowledge-based economy. Though with different parameters and backed by increasing interest of the Indian Government in connecting with the successful overseas Indians, the new age has initiated the re-emergence of inter-firm and intra-firm linkages as in the colonial diasporic networks, thus setting the scene for powerful economic synergies between different Indian ethnic settlements in Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

In the light of the new age developments and the technological revolution, conventional concepts of communities and networks have been seriously challenged. The corporatization of business that has emerged at large among the Indian business community is much diffused from the nuances of caste, region, sect or religion that had earlier bonded business and trade so closely with financial ties and product markets. What has also emerged at present are the business networking activities that are based more on economic considerations irrespective of geographical locations and interpersonal relationships with a much wider scope of activity coordination. This has helped form real and virtual or imaginative communities based on professions, services, products, alumni bodies or shared neighbourhood spaces for business transactions. These have also emerged as overlaps between social organizations and business networks that are neither linguistically based nor with typical regional flavours. Yet, a certain sense of a community prevails, with an essence of ethnicity, in a mixture of different interest groups. Thus, the Indian, Malay and Chinese Chambers of Commerce in Singapore represent to a large extent, the business interests of different communities and participate actively in the shaping and restructuring policies in the city-state.

In the present context of study, one might also perceive the inter-ethnic business relationships between the Indian and Chinese communities in the Singaporean experience. The Chinese have been the largest racial component of the nation state and dominant actors in the political, cultural and economic systems in the administration. Their relationship with the Indian communities has largely been perceived as a relation between the demographic majority and a minority.

Organizations and associations of merchants’ bodies must have existed as long as the inception of the trading community, though the term “chamber of commerce” was only coined as late as the end of sixteenth century and became popular thereafter. The “merchant-guilds” and “craft-guilds”, the predecessors to the chambers of commerce, were quite common in medieval Europe as it was in early medieval India. Some names of the South Indian merchant guilds existed not only as prominent entities of trading interests, but represented complex syncretic relationships between state, guilds and religious institutions. Ancient India has also been replete with numerous examples of srenis or guilds with nexus between political authorities and the commercial interests in the parameters of the complex hierarchical occupational structures of the caste system. There are several other names denoting merchant bodies like the samuha, nigama, gana, pasanda, puga in the ancient Indian texts, but the differences between them is not very clear. Thus the essence and structure of merchant bodies was not a Western innovation, as is often believed, but readily existed in the parlance of the socio-economic structure of ancient India and continued into subsequent ages. The hereditary nature of profession in Indian guilds differed from the European guilds, where individual preferences were given priority; nevertheless, choice of family occupations was more common. The hereditary, linguistic and regional base of the Indian merchant bodies perhaps helped them to maintain the intra-ethnic bonding of the informal commercial networks even during the colonial period parallel to the Western chambers of commerce.

The basic mission of the merchant bodies has remained the same through the times, which is to promote a conducive climate of productive and profitable business operations in the commercial interests of the community. The Chambers of Commerce eventually evolved as a common protection group to govern conduct of trade for specific mercantile interests as well as influence legislation of respective governments or act as pressure groups to benefit their trade and commerce. This chapter focuses on the evolution of different business organizations and associations in Singapore, especially those emerging out of ethnic Indian bodies, through the colonial times into the present generation of several networking groups and analyses their contribution to the commercial community in different phases of history.

The challenges of modernization and industrialization that were successfully confronted by Singapore soon propelled her to one of the most prominent and economically stable nations of the East. However, at the end of the twentieth century in the post-Cold War scenario, she was further consumed by the resurgence of the two of the greatest ancient civilizations of the world — China and India. They were also two of the largest geographical entities of Asia with huge pools of thriving human resources. The new situation demanded re-establishing equations in dominance and power play amongst the nations and at the same time readjustments and rethinking of their respective foreign and domestic policies. Singapore was quick to respond to the changing circumstances and a globalizing India and its “Look East” policy followed by the new trends of migration offered propitious grounds to believe that the ethnic Indian communities would find new opportunities for competitive performances in professional and business ventures.

Indian economic liberalization preceded by the rapid modernization and opening up of China and the favourable global economic climate have been relevant to commercial groups and businessmen who would now spread their wings outside Singapore with greater confidence and bigger investments. Scepticism of the Indian bureaucratic system and a notion of Chinese impregnability had barred them from entering the respective markets (China opened up much earlier than India) which they could now venture into, given the changes in the approaches of the two giants. Opening up of investment opportunities in the face of improved political relations have also enabled many Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs to come into the region by opening representative offices, joint collaborations or independent corporate ventures. The influx has been quite remarkable in the case of the Indians, who have continued to be a minority population in Singapore. There have been new migrants who are Indian professionals in the field of telecommunications, computer engineering, education and banking, thus creating a new group of ethnic Indian settlers in the diaspora, and not only leading to their increasing importance as players in the economy but also creating sociological complexities.

The geostrategic importance of the Indian Ocean has continued from ancient times and still flourishes as one of the pertinent theatres for complex maritime trading systems. Singapore, with its unique geopolitical entity, has gradually assumed centre stage in the historical evolution as a centre for commerce, trade, entrepot and other maritime and political activities. The Indian subcontinent, on the other hand, has also been successful in exploiting the favourable geographical location in the heart of the Indian Ocean for a much longer period of time. The Indian Ocean gradually came to be dominated by Western naval suitors in the seventeenth and eighteenth century onwards. The Portuguese extended their maritime expansion with state patronage and soon had to face other contenders in the British, French and Dutch naval powers. The reigning phase of colonialism leading to imperialism made the Western powers very ambitious and the Asian states more and more vulnerable, ultimately resulting in the extensive prowess of the former, especially the British.

Centuries of maritime trade connectivities encouraged mobilization and migration of trading communities and others to different parts of Asia and beyond. As historian K.N. Chaudhuri writes, “There is every reason to believe that pre-historic movements and migrations of people took place both by sea and land.”2 Indian communities, being no exception to the rule, had travelled and migrated to different nooks and corners of Asia and beyond. The onset of British imperialism consolidated and facilitated greater movements of goods and people to cater to their administrative, military and commercial interests.

THE ADVENT OF COLONIALISM AND INDIAN MIGRATION

Stamford Raffles arrived in Singapore in January 1819 and opened the colonial chapter of a long established linkage, and globalization in Asia came to be redefined with a new rhetoric. Singapore became the key strategic location between Calcutta and Canton in the eastern trade routes of the British. It was an anchoring ground for a wide variety of sea vessels from the Chinese junks, Indian ships, Arab dhows and Portuguese battleships.