Anticolonialism in Southeast Asia

With the exception of the Vietnamese and to a lesser extent the Indonesians (who had to endure the return of the colonial powers following World War II), the eventual exit of the European powers from the political scene created an important intellectual vacuum within which scholars of the former colonies could operate. Many of these "home" scholars sought to repair, renovate, or even remove the histories produced under colonial tutelage. Heeding the needs of nationhood, Southeast Asian scholars, many of whom were trained in European schools, began redressing the histories that were written for them by colonial historians by writing from the perspective of the nation. Where rebels, political activists, and influential religious figures were once marginalized and condemned by colonial historians, they were now transformed into "national" heroes who contributed to the fruition and emergence of the nation-state. Figures such as Java's Dipanagoro (c. 1785–1855), the Philippines' José Rizal (1861–1896), Burma's Saya San (d. 1931), and Vietnam's Tran Van Tra (1918–1996) became part of a common history of the nation and struggle that contributed to the imagining of the nation. Moreover, the rebellions and incidents first identified by colonial officials as being important were appropriated by home scholars for their narratives, intent on recasting the perspective in which they had originally been presented. So "anticolonial" movements became seen as independence movements, affecting the way in which protest and resistance was interpreted. For instance, the tone of the scholarship and the analysis of the movements were sympathetic rather than critical, shifting the movements' role and importance in history to demonstrate a national consciousness that was growing during colonial rule. Earlier elements of resistance that colonial writers had highlighted in order to establish the "backward" nature of political expression (such as tattooing, religious symbols, and language) were played down by nationalist historians in favor of more "objective" economic and political origins, although the interest and focus in causal factors as prescribed by colonial documents was nevertheless maintained. Local conceptions of protest and revolt were unintentionally deemed irrelevant, because nationalist scholars were keen on writing a modern narrative of the new nation. The shape and scope of anticolonialism had not changed, only its interpretation and coloring.

While these adjustments were being made by home scholars writing through the lens of the nation, scholars in the West began to reconsider anticolonialism within the context of nation as well, choosing to consider indigenous expressions of protest and revolt (which were ironically being played down by their counterparts in Southeast Asia) as evidence of protonationalism. As a result, the major rebellions and revolts (which continued to dominate the attention of scholars) that had taken on a religious or culturally specific character were deemed important to study under the rubric of "Asian" nationalism, which seemed to make these once dismissed ideological influences important and relevant to scholarly study. Consequently, disturbances and outbreaks of violence that demonstrated religious overtones drew attention on the grounds that they were early expressions of nationalism and therefore warranted closer scrutiny. The Saya San Rebellion (1930–1932) in Burma, which made use of Buddhist ideas in its program, was now being considered as a "Buddhist" protonationalist movement, suggesting that religion and other Southeast Asian ideological sources were important to understanding the growth and expression of Asian nationalism. Similarly, Dipanogoro's rebellion in Java represented an Islamic nationalism that would precede movements in the twentieth century, while the Filipino revolt launched in 1896 by Andres Bonifacio (1863–1897), which alluded to Christian ideas, seemed to forecast the origins of a national consciousness.