The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in history, literature, education, political science, Asian studies, and related subjects.

Among them is Decolonization in Indonesia: The Problem of Continuity and Change, a 1965 book by Harry Jindrich Benda.

The TU Library collection includes other books by Dr. Benda.

Harry Jindrich Benda was a Czechoslovakian-born American professor at Yale University.

He specialized in Indonesian politics.

Born in Liberec, Czechoslovakia, he was sent to Java by his father to escape Nazism.

Dr. Benda was the first director of the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

The Association for Asian Studies’ prize for first book in Southeast Asian studies is named in his honor.

Benda emigrated to the United States, becoming a naturalised citizen in 1960.

He died in New Haven, Connecticut on October 26, 1971, at the age of 51.

According to the American historian Professor George McT. Kahin, Dr. Benda             

reappraised and analyzed with a fresh eye processes of history whose previous accounts had usually been strongly stamped by a heavily parochial, Western-centered point of view. He helped shake up some of the long settled but shallow and rigid perceptions of Indonesian and modern Southeast Asian history, and did much to raise the standards of historical research on the area.

In these fields he was one of the first of the revisionists, and his perceptions and trenchant criticisms of past work encouraged a new generation of scholars. These qualities marked his lectures as well as his writing, and in his speaking he brought to bear with particular effectiveness the wry and ironic sense of humor that was one of his special characteristics.

Among the memorial articles dedicated to Dr. Benda was one in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies by Sartono Kartodirdjo, an Indonesian historian.

A pioneer in Indonesia’s postcolonial historiography, Dr. Kartodirdjoi is considered one of the most influential historians in the country.

He wrote:

The world community of Southeast Asian historians suffered a most grievous loss with the sudden death of Professor Harry J. Benda. He was only in middle life, and was moreover in the full tide of his career. We have been robbed of a most distinguished scholar and treasured friend.

Of his early years we have no account except the fact that he was born in 1919 in Czechoslovakia and that at the age of nineteen he went to Indonesia where he found employment in a business firm. This was a life of unintellectual drudgery in, as he put it, “… the world of shipping documents, letters of credit, and foreign exchange regulations, the world of the Chinese tauke and Dutch hotel managers …”

On one occasion, attending a lecture at Batavia’s Alliance Fran?aise, he became acquainted with the late Louis Damais, the well-known scholar of Indonesian archaeology. They gradually developed a bond which was never interrupted. With Damais’s fostering care and rich and instructive conversation Benda could satisfy his irrepressible thirst for knowledge.

He familiarised himself with French literature, the Dutch language and Bahasa Indonesia. It was while sitting at the feet of this great scholar that Benda became interested in Indonesian society and culture. This association with Damais seems to have laid the founda tion for his future work. Even the internment-camps of the Japanese could not severe the close tie with Damais who every now and then sent him money and news concerning the course of the war.

In one of the internment-camps Benda gained the notice and friendship of Professor Wertheim who encouraged him to devote himself to scholarship. Dur ing the long days in the camp Benda benefited from many conversations with him. This period must be viewed as a turning point in his life.

As soon as the war was over Benda went to New Zealand where he entered Victoria University College and was conferred a B.A. degree in 1950. He then read for the degree of Master of Arts at the University of New Zealand and graduated in 1952. Thanks to an opportunity which occurred at this juncture, he went to the United States, and pursued Government and Far Eastern Studies at Cornell University, obtaining his PhD in 1954.

He was appointed Assistant Professor of History at the University of Rochester from 1955 until 1959. This was the year in which he assumed his professorship at Yale University and began to give the courses on Indonesian and Southeast Asian history by which he was to become so highly regarded. I can safely say, as a student of Indonesian and Southeast Asian history that Benda excelled his contemporaries in the field.

His intellectual equipment was remarkable and his writings are a wealth of fresh and original ideas bearing eloquent testimony to his scholarly insight. He made his debut with his disserta tion on the history of Indonesian Islam under the Japanese occupation, entitled The Crescent and the Rising Sun. This is the first systematic study of this important episode to appear. It was a notable achievement, lucidly organized and written, showing a confident grasp of the subject.

He displayed a remarkable power of analysis of the major issues of Japanese politics the Japanese were entangled with in confronting the Muslim population of Indonesia. His later studies, consisting of subsequent books, source publications, and numerous articles in various journals, e.g. the Journal of Asian Studies.

His article on the structure of Southeast Asian History in the Journal of Southeast Asian History (Vol. 3, no. 1, 1963) may be taken as a research design for the study of Southeast Asian history. He says in this article that the structural approach should commence with the endeavour to discover or reconstruct a set of social, economic, and political relationships. His contention is that this approach is most conducive to bringing out the infrastructure and internal processes of Southeast Asian societies in the past.

An important contribution which he made in this direction was the book entitled A History of Modern Southeast Asia, a joint effort with John Bastin. He put emphasis on internal developments within the in digenous societies. Unlike previous historians of Indonesian or Southeast Asian history Benda was not concerned with chronological history.

His effort to study the history of the area from within is also represented in his work of selected historical readings, The World of Southeast Asia. In compiling this book he focused on the activities of Southeast Asians as main agents in Southeast Asian history. Here is another effort to get away from the Europe-centric view.

The limits of this article will not permit a detailed discussion of all his writings. Suffice it to say that Benda has greatly enriched the literature on Indonesian and South east Asian history by bringing to it some new and exciting points of view and approaches. His works have increasingly shown that he was a pioneer in moulding the historian’s conception of Southeast Asia.  […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)