Tangent Special Issue, 6 (2), 2007, edited by Loh Kah Seng

Synopsis

In this special issue of Tangent, the twelve contributors will examine an oft untold side of history. What follow are our reflections on ongoing or recently-completed research into Singapore’s history after World War Two. We write of our engagements with the “makers” and “keepers” of this history, of how, because the period is close to the present, both the archival and oral records are frequently difficult to obtain.

By “makers”, we refer to participants who had a hand in shaping the past, including the elites and ordinary people. By “keepers”, we mean public officials who manage access to government archives, and also the “makers” who, when interviewed, decide what and how much of their experiences are to be shared.

It is, we maintain, important to talk about our attempts to engage the makers and gatekeepers of history, because while history is about the past, an account of the research is invariably about the present. This issue, in other words, considers the uneasy, ambivalent relationship between present-day Singapore society and its past, and the mediating role of historians in between.

Huang Jianli opens the discussion of parleys at the gates of history with an examination of archival and oral history holdings in Singapore for the study of a complex and oft-misrepresented facet of Singapore’s history, student politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Huang’s observations set the context for the next four papers detailing journeys to the British, American, Dutch, Australian, Chinese, and Taiwanese archives by current or recent doctoral candidates.

Akin to a flanking manoeuvre, the authors arrive, so to speak, at the “back gates” or “side gates” of our political and social pasts: Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied in his pursuit of the iconic 1950 Maria Hertogh controversy, Joey Long and P. J. Thum on the little-studied American role in Singapore’s decolonisation and labour history in the 1950s and 1960s, and Jason Lim on the social and economic history of Chinese tea merchants in 1920–1960.

The second half of the issue concentrates on social history and oral history. Stephen Dobbs outlines his efforts to engage the elite and ordinary makers and keepers of the past in his study of the place of the Singapore River in our national history and the lives of lightermen toiling along the riverfront.

The next six chapters focus on the challenges and rewards of engaging the voices of the past. Through a linguistic analysis of his interviews, Ernest Koh uncovers the agency of Chinese workers in the period 1945–2000. Kelvin Low and Lai Ah Eng reflect on their conversations, respectively, with the samsui women and elderly women in general, noting ways to access the “semi-official” and “unofficial” gates to these crucial but underwritten parts of our history. Personal endeavour, luck and recent events are, as Lim Cheng Tju notes, important in engaging the artists and cartoonists of the postwar years.

The issue concludes with two papers on the history of the vanished: kampongs in Singapore city. C. C. Chin considers research into the anti-colonial rural associations in postwar Singapore, and finally, the editor for this special issues, Loh Kah Seng recalls his encounters with the makers and keepers of the documents and memories of the great Kampong Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961.

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From fiery exchanges on internet forums to commentaries in international dailies on the outburst of pro-Tibet protests around the world, most often than not, the word “history” is thrown around putatively from both side.[i] A notable example came from a recent Jakarta Post editorial stating that “any student of history cannot but condemn the occupation (of Tibet).”[ii]

Despite some insightful points made on the cultural ties between Indonesia and Tibet by Anand Krishna, a well respected spiritual activist, I cannot agree that he speaks for all “students of history”. Placards waved by Pro-China demonstrators from San Francisco to Canberra with the words, “Tibet was, is and will always be a part of China” (emphasis mine) continues to betray the partisanships of the issue.

The point that I am trying to illustrate is how polarised the history of can be when faced with the “Tibet question”. The complexity of the issue is illustrated by a well-informed but alas inadequate Straits Time editorial’s attempt on presenting some “bedrock truths” about Tibet. It states that “romanticised nonsense spewed about Tibet does not change the fact that it has been a part of Chinese empire for three centuries.”[iii]

This opinion fails to consider the historical political structure of the Manchu empire and the Spiritual master-student relationship between the Dalai Lama and Manchu emperors. In an effort to shed more light on the subject, a survey of existing western works addressing the 1951-1959 “invasion” of Tibet is carried out to highlight how Tibet’s history have been used and abused.

Available literature on the “invasion” of Tibet can be roughly grouped into those with partisan positions and those which hold the middle-ground. Partisan discourses include a Tibetan Lobby, informed by the Tibetan Diaspora and sympathisers, and discourses informed by a cold war mentality. Pro-China scholarships are carried out by Chinese scholars based in America and China sympathisers.

Discourses shrouded in cold-war mentality usually serve as the fulcrum of American anti-communist effort in South Asia. The authors’ chief concerns are generally with Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) operations in Tibet during the 1950s, placing the Tibet issue within the context of the Cold War. The Cold War mentality also laid the foundation for future accusations against the atrocities of the Chinese invading forces through the reports of the International Commission of Jurist (ICJ), an organization tasked to carry out a full-scale investigation of what happened in Lhasa.

The ICJ was hardly impartial. It had “evolute” from the Investigating Committee of Free Jurists (ICFJ), an organization funded by the CIA (to the tune of least U.S. $650,000) to “publish anticommunist propaganda”. ICJ’s primary purpose has been explicitly stated in American Bar Association Journal as “gather(ing) and publish(ing) documented reports throughout the world of systematic Communist injustice behind the Iron Curtain.”[iv]

The work of ICJ has also informed many partisan scholars’ work such as Hugh E. Richardson’s Tibet and its people and a self-proclaimed handbook for American higher education in Tibetan studies, Tibet: A handbook by Helmut Hoffman. [v]

Post Cold War scholarship persists in the same vein regardless of attempts to repackage them. Jane Ardley’s The Tibetan Independence Movement: Political, religious and Gandhian perspectives (2002) and ex-CIA operative in Tibet, John Kenneth Knaus’s Orphans of the cold war (1999) are examples of some of these works.[vi] These works continue to be a wellspring of inspiration for hawkish US legislators addressing the perceived “Chinese threat” through its rise as an economic power.

Donald S. Lopez Jr, a scholar on Tibetan Buddhism has examined the introduction of Tibetan iconography into mainstream American popular culture in the 1970s-90s and interpreted it somewhat exaggeratingly as “spiritual colonialism”. The cultivation of Tibetan Buddhist sensitivity has laid the ground for garnering greater political sympathies towards the Tibetan cause.[vii] This juxtaposition of reverence for Tibetan culture with explicit calls for Tibetan independence is not only based on ICJ’s accusation of cultural genocide but can also be seen as part of the Dalai Lama’s political strategy in his struggle with the Chinese government.

Publications put out by lobbies such as International Campaigners for Tibet (ICT) and Tibet Information Network (TIN) usually carry such partisan scholarship. Publishing houses, such as Snow Lion and Shambala Publishing, were also set up to propagate literature for the Tibetan cause,. Patt David’s misleadingly named work, A strange liberation: Tibetan lives in Chinese hands published by Snow Lion, does not detail the existing livelihood of Tibetans as it suggests, but consists of two accounts of the Chinese “invasion” by two Tibetan nobles, including Tibet’s poster female resistance fighter, Ama Adhe.[viii]

University Presses are also keen to publish works by Tibetans, such as Tsepon W.D. Shakabpa’s Tibet, a political history and Tsering Shakya’s The dragon in the land of snows: a history of modern Tibet since 1947.[ix] Both authors were key Tibetan government officials prior to the “invasion”, which implies that they could be personally invested when telling their sides of the story.

Literature which presents China’s case also began to appear within the western academic sphere soon after the “invasion”. Such works are written by Chinese and foreigners, Marxists and non-Marxist scholars and largely empathises with the pre-‘liberated’ general Tibetan populace.

In Li Tieh Tseng’s revised edition of The Historical Status of Tibet (retitled Tibet: Today and Yesterday), he suggested that “Tibet’s independence should be the Tibetan people’s choice” but – in adopting President Wilson’s self-determination principle – “do not think that those landed aristocrats and feudal lords of Tibet who took refuge in India can speak for the Tibetan people.”

The Gelder brothers, journalists who travelled to Tibet in 1962, while being sceptical of the claims by the “Chinese Communists”, saw for themselves the legacy of the exploitative Tibetan nobles and religious bureaucrats.[xi]

Han Suyin also recorded the testimonies of atrocities committed against novice and child-monks from poor families within the Sera monastery, the world’s largest active religious site.[xii]

(The Sera Monastery is in the foreground)

(Monks in Sera Monastery)

Anna Louise Strong, a Marxist scholar who defected to Beijing, also helped promoted Beijing’s line in the West.[xiii] These works started to abate as the Tibetan lobby’s influence increased during the 1970s and 1980s, but some of their arguments were followed up by middle-ground scholars.

Amidst such polarized discourses, scholars such Dawa Norbu, A. Tom Grunfeld and Melvyn C. Goldstein took a more middle-ground approach in trying to present more balanced perspectives of the issue.[xiv] I am not suggesting that these scholars do not have ideological positions on the issue of political legitimacy, but they have been able to synthesise arguments from both sides and generally refrained from being overtly partisan. These works have been able to evolve out of the Kuhnian limitations of organised institutions or discourses because they recognise inherent problems within existing scholarship and attempt to resolve them.[xv]

The case of Dawa Norbu is especially informative of the prevailing climate amongst the Tibetan Diaspora. Because he had dared to veer away from official discourses, Norbu has been criticised and accused of being a traitor by the Dalai Lama camp. What Norbu had aimed to highlight was the ambiguity of a united Tibet and that “fractionism” has to be factored into any discourse on the Chinese “invasion”. He also suggested that Tibetan’s claim of legitimate sovereignty phrased in modern terminologies only appeared after contact with the Communist Chinese’s own claim of sovereignty in Tibet.[xvi]

Hence, the Tibet issue is not as clear-cut as various commentators have made it out to be. In highlighting the plurality of discourses above, I hope to demonstrate that to understand what is happening in Tibet today, one has to not only know its “history” but understand how various “histories” have been created.

The author graduated with honours in History from NUS in 2005. He is currently Publication Executive at Chinese Heritage Centre and is interested in History of Modern China-Tibet relations and Chinese Overseas. The article is partly based on researches carried out in the author’s undergraduate years and the opinions expressed are within his personal capacity.

[i] My personal favourite is a comment made by a local radio DJ on the morning aftermath of the London Olympic torch relay hubbub: “These people (the protestors attempting to extinguish the Olympic torch) does not know the history!” Having made the comment after reference to the political status of Tibet, “History” here presumably refers to the history of Tibet, not that of the Olympics nor the torch relay. The perceived separation of the Olympics and politics makes for more discussion, for a recent survey of historical works on the issue, see Allen Guttmann, “Sports, Politics and the Engaged Historian”, Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 38, No. 3, Sports and Politics (July 2003), pgs. 363-375. It is sufficient to note here that the Olympic torch relay was invented as part of the Third Reich’s propagandistic spectacle at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

[ii] Anand Krishna, “Indonesia, Tibet and the secret of ‘terima kasih’”, The Jakarta Post (24 March 2008). Thanks to Gille Massot for posting the article to Taoism-singapore yahoogroup.

[iii] “What Tibet is to China”, The Straits Times (18 March 2008).

[iv]Tom Killefer, “Free lawyers and Cold War. The International Commission of Jurists” American Bar Association Journal, 41 (May 1995) p. 417, cited in Tom A. Grunfeld,The making of modern Tibet (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, Rev. ed. 1996), pgs. 146-147.

[v] Hugh E. Richardson, Tibet and its history, (Boulder: Shambhala 2nd ed., rev. and enl., 1984), pgs. 241-243; and Helmut Hoffman in collaboration with Stanley Frye, Thubten J. Norbu, Ho-chin Yang, Tibet: A Handbook (Bloomington: Published for the Asian Studies Research Institute by the Research Center for the Language Sciences, Indiana University, 1975) pgs. 80-81.

[vi] See Jane Ardley, The Tibetan Independence Movement: Political, religious and Gandhian perspectives, (New York: Routledge, 2002) and John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan struggle for survival (New York: PublicAffairs, c1999).

[vii] Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pg. 207.

[viii] Patts David, A strange liberation: Tibetan lives in Chinese hands (Ithaca, New York: Snow Lion Publications, 1992).

[ix] Tsepon W.D. Shakabpa, Tibet, a political history (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967) and Tsering Shakya, The dragon in the land of snows: a history of modern Tibet since 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

[x] Li Tieh-Tseng, Tibet: Today and Yesterday (New York: Bookman Associates, revised ed., 1960) pg. xiii.

[xi] Stuart & Roma Gelder, The timely rain; travels in new Tibet (London, Hutchinson, c1964).

[xii] Han Siyun, The Open City - A journey to Tibet (New York: G. P. Punam’s Son, 1977). Sera Monastry is a key site during recent protests.

[xiii] Anna Louise Strong, When Serfs Stood up in Tibet (Beijing: New World Press, 1965).

[xiv] Tom A. Grunfeld, The making of modern Tibet(Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, Rev. ed. 1996).

[xv] For a discussion of institutional influences on academic scholarship refer to Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions (IL: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed, 1996).

[xvi] See Dawa Norbu, China’s Tibet policy (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001).

The concept of time constantly astounds me as a student. In addition, my training as a historian, the so-called guardian of the past, also deals directly with the notion of time. In this short paper, I will present some preliminary sketches in regards to the epistemology of time and its connection to the way we view, order and experience the past.

The problem raised in this paper is stimulated by a truism held by many contributors to historiography ever since Thomas Hobbes, that one’s vision of historical events is conditioned, even shaped by one’s personal experience of time. A number of philosophers have shown how one’s vision of a succession of events is generated by the way he or she judges the continuities, discontinuities, changes and duration of facts and events.

It is at this point when the historian understands and interprets the past, based on the available evidence. And yet, that interpretation bears a direct relationship to the historian’s personal temporal experience. In studying several nineteenth-century thinkers, Hayden White brought forward a manner of historical processes which represented and typified their respective ages. White sees these men as products and progenitors of the mood of the age and its narrative structures that furthered his mood. The mood of these men and the age, however, was occasioned by the events that preceded their explanatory narratives but also sustained by the narrative themselves.[i] In other words, what White is confirming is the role of cognitive style in generating the distinct and different ways of constituting and explaining a state-of-affairs.

The problem then is how do our conception of time and the way we experience time produce our cognitive style, which in turns generate different ways of explaining any state-of-affairs, including the past?

The late Paul Ricoeur did ask the question: “How can one’s personal experience of time in its singularity, that is phenomenological time, be distinguished evidently as distinct from one’s location in and awareness of cosmological time, that is the common time by which one measures personal and public events?”[ii]

Mark Blum attempted to answer this question by using the tools of recurrent logic and grammar of the sentential judgment: a style of expression which allows one to have different personal construction of historical time from the normative public understanding of historical time.[iii] Blum suggests that a “historical logic” is rooted in each perception of life as an experience, or history in which movements and causal relationships happen. It is “a manner of ordering temporal-spatial events, an ordering in each man that gave birth to the concepts of time and history that reflect that order.”

Drawing from Kant and Husserl’s phenomenology, Blum states that logic begins with the division of perception into parts and wholes which establish a quantitative order as well as dependency-independency relations among these parts and wholes, creating a condition of temporality. Temporality is experienced as the moving attention of the conscious mind directed by sequential order of parts and wholes.[iv] This relation and sequence between the parts and the whole (gestalt) is what Edmund Husserl called temporal concretums, or a judgment about state of affairs.[v] Each judgment is “history” in the most immediate sense of the temporal experience. These temporal-spatial relations are the foundation of logic. This order will enable us to establish higher relation such as causality. In the words of Karl Mannheim:

Just as modern psychology shows that the whole is prior to the parts and that our first understanding of the parts comes through the whole, so it is with historical understanding. Here, too, we have the sense of historical time as a meaningful totality which orders events “prior” to the parts, and through this totality we first truly understand the total course of events and our place in it.[vi]

Blum describes what he called as the four foundational historical logic of Western historical thinking as: continuity, continuum, quantum and dialectic.[vii]

Continuity: A historical logic of continuity conceives each moment as an integer in an open-ended, incremental series of events (such as: 1+1+1+1). A judgment of a continuity thinker is to see every entity in a state-of-affairs as an independent whole. Attention travels from one entity to another as a coherent picture is formed and goes on into infinity. This line of thinking is what has been usually termed as a conception of linear time.

Continuum: Assumes that every time which succeeds another may or may not share common properties. In continuum logic, there are no overarching temporalities, only temporal contiguities (closeness or contact). It assumes the greatest freedom to act individually in time because of the absence of either the telos of continuity or dialectical thinking or the pull of quantum collective for each individual gesture. Historical works of “great men”, I think, are expressions of continuum logic.

Quantum: Quantum historical logic focuses upon patterns of history that begin and end and replaced by another pattern. According to Blum, the historical concept of Zeitgeist (ideas or spirit of the time) is a quantum appreciation. Quantum logic focuses on an individual which is the agent in time closely dependent upon the greater whole that is instantiated. Quantum logic does not speak of developmental teleologies, only of immediate time. It gives the society a radical freedom to change based upon visionary voices. Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler for instance, can be seen as a historical work based on quantum logic.

Dialectic: This reflects the same continuity emerging from the past into the future as seen by the continuity thinker, but also incorporates the notion of quantum phases which conflict or interrupt the incremental line of change. Ibn Khaldun’s theory of dynastic cycle is among the historical works that utilizes the dialectic logic.

Apart from the four historical logics in Western historical thinking elucidated by Blum, my own interest in Islamic historiography shows another tendency in historical thinking facilitated by the Islamic concept of time.

In incorporating Democritus atomism, Islamic theology has a distinctive concept of time. It describes reality as a composition of simple and unchangeable minute particles called atoms. Each atom and their accidents exist for only an instant. In every instant, God is creating the world anew which renders intermediate causes impotent. Differing from Greek materialistic atomism, Muslim theologians made atomism an instrument of divine providence, which held each moment within time as the direct creation of God. In other words, creation is discontinuous and only appears continuous to us only because of God’s compassionate consistency.[viii]

In the view of atomic theology, the link of causality that appears to rule the world becomes subordinate to God. Natural causes give way to divine will. This historical logic reflects in the Arabic grammar, which lacks genuine verbs of “to be” and “to become”. Arabic grammar also does not employ tenses of past, present and future. Instead it uses verbal aspects of complete and incomplete, which marks the degree to which an action has been realized or is yet to be realized without precise difference between present and future.

The result of this historical logic to historiography is that Islamic historiography stresses very much on Divine wills in the development of history. According to Chase Robinson, what is distinctive about Islamic historiographical tradition is the meaning attached to the way that God was made to work on earth.[ix] Generally, in Islamic historiography, God’s will is the ultimate cause of all events. The tools He preferred, however, were the action of elite individuals and the standard He held his creatures has been made clear in His law.

That is why Historical works in the Islamic tradition had pedagogical aspects. They present history as a record of human choices, from which the readers can draw appropriate lessons. This discussion on Islamic historiography, however, only focuses on the orthodox Sunni school. The Ismaili sect for instance, had different set of cosmology which resulted in different form of historiography related to their cyclical conception of time and its distinctive logic.[x]

To conclude, Sir Geoffrey Elton once remarked that written history is primarily the narrative of events. With narrative, he means, a tracking of change in the sense of recording “the movement from A to B.”[xi] The discussion on different conceptions of time which resulted in the different historical logic has shown that there is no singular way of typifying our judgments of any state-of-affair, be it past or present.

Rather, there exists a number of historical logic, which in turns generates different levels of objectivity in making sense of the past. The five historical logics listed above are by no means the only spatial-temporal logic affecting how human beings perceive events and causality. Other forms of logic not discussed here should also be explored. Chinese and Indian cosmology, their conceptions of time and the ensuing forms of historiography should be subjected to further study. This will results in the polyphony of ways in which human beings try to make sense of time and consequently, how they see the past.

Ismail Fajrie Alatas (Aji) was born in Semarang, Indonesia in 1983. He has a BA (Hons) in History from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is currently a research scholar, finishing his MA thesis at the Department of History, National University of Singapore. This essay was written in response to a discussion during a seminar on historiography. Aji has published and his latest publication is Sungai tak Bermuara: Risalah Konsep Ilmu Dalam Islam (Jakarta: Diwan, 2006).

[i] Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1973), pp. 38-42.

[ii] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, translated by Katleen Blamer and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983-85), vol. 3, p. 249.

[iii] Mark E. Blum, Continuity, Quantum, Continuum and Dialectic: The Foundational Logics of Western Historical Thinking (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), p. xiii

[iv] Ibid, p, 2.

[v] Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, translated by J.N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), vol. 2, p. 488.

[vi] Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 189.

[vii] The following discussion on the four foundational historical logics of Western historical thinking is based on Blum, chapter 1.

[viii] Gerhard Bowering, “The Concept of Time in Islam’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 14, 1 (1997), p. 60.

[ix] Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 131.

[x] For further information of the Ismaili concept of cyclical time, see: Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis (London: Keagan Paul International, 1983). See especially the first lecture entitled “Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism”, pp. 1-58.

[xi] G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967), pp. 10-11.