Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [12]
The crescent was one of the great frontiers of modern history. For centuries it had drawn in millions of people in search of a livelihood, particularly from the ancient agrarian civilizations that bordered it. The advent of the imperial economy had created new opportunities. Waves of Chinese migrants, mostly from the hinterland of the southern seaboard, had come to the Nanyang, or the ‘South Seas’, as traders and artisans. They pioneered the plantations and mines of Malaya, and still provided the bulk of their labour force. South Asian communities were to be found in an infinite variety of specialist trades: Muslim shopkeepers, Malayalee clerks, Chettiyar money-lenders, Sikh policemen, Ceylonese lawyers. The train service of Malaya was known as the ‘Jaffna railway’ because of the monopoly by Tamils from Ceylon on the post of ticket-collector. The large-scale European rubber enterprises in Malaya pulled in another three-quarters of a million Tamils from the hinterland of Madras. Many more Indians made the shorter journey from eastern Bengal and Orissa into the rural economy of Burma. Migrations from Java and Sumatra kept alive a sense that the Malay peninsula was the heart of the Islamic civilization of the islands, that dated back to the fifteenth-century empire of Melaka. The traditional Malay rice, fishing and trading economy survived in the midst of some of the most advanced and regimented systems of wage labour on earth.
The main points of arrival for most of these pioneers were the great port cities such as Rangoon and Singapore: dynamic and diverse, they were built for play as much as trade or government, and their citizens were obsessed by their own modernity. They were glittering outposts of the West, where the colonial elite enjoyed a lifestyle they could never aspire to at home. Yet the lives of the Europeans, contained by their gross obsessions with race and hierarchy, barely touched the complex Asian worlds around them. The cosmopolitanism of a place like Singapore, for example, was built by Chinese, Indian, Arab, Armenian and Jewish merchants and professionals, many of whose own businesses were now regional in scope. Not least among them, and concentrated in new ‘modern’ sectors, were the Japanese: as dentists, photographers, and shopkeepers. Like the British before them, they saw Southeast Asia first as a frontier for private commerce, and then as a field for empire. In 1942 they renamed it ‘Syonan-to’, or ‘light of the South’. Singapore was the Paris, or even the New York, of the East, and more of a global city than either. Its fall seemed to herald the collapse of an entire civilization and all its certainties. But the colonial city was enveloped by another, invisible city; an Asian metropolis of artisans and labourers, prostitutes and players, itinerants and peddlers, teachers and preachers, artists and writers, spies and revolutionaries: people of all communities who began to interact and explore the commonality of their lives and ideas. In the years after 1942, the invisible city would come into its own.
There was a curious insubstantial quality to Britain’s Asian empire. Its political topography baffled the layman: as colonial power stretched to the south and east, the great traditions of the Raj gave way to complex arrangements of indirect rule. Even the 80 million people of Bengal, the oldest British possession in India, were governed at a distance. Assam to the northeast was an uncertain border region. Burma had been part of British