Asia
Jane Drakard draws her analysis from three sources:
almost a score of royal letters from the nineteenth
century that had not been previously analyzed as a
genre; royal letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries written to the Dutch East Indies
Company (VOC); and European observations, also
from the Jatter period and gleaned from published
reports and archival sources. Drakard shows not only
how Minangkabau rulers exercised influence over their
subjects but also how the Dutch misunderstood this
influence, at times overestimating it and at other times
underestimating it, but in any case presuming that
kingly power and statecraft there could be understood
and measured in the same terms as those used to gauge
European states.
The Minangkabau heartland, situated in an upland
region, was a gold-producing center that Europeans
knew first through rumor. Minangkabau communities
also dotted both of Sumatra's coasts, and it was
through these that inland rulers exercised some control over trade. The Dutch first presumed they would
find a single, powerful ruler whom they could control
or influence for their own mercantile purposes. Instead, they gradually perceived a society riven into two
great moieties and numerous matrilineal clans, and
also a kingdom in which kingship was more often
contested than not. The Tines of authority between the
upland center and the coastal settlements, furthermore, were rather weak. (Meanwhile, Minangkabau
rulers had begun to speak of the Dutch as their subjects
or representatives.) The Dutch, increasingly embroiled
in and frustrated by the constant politicking, guessed
that they were witnessing a polity in decline, one that
was merely a pale glimmer of its past glory.
Drakard, however, is struck by the continuities
among the historical traces of this polity that begin in
the fourteenth century with the inscriptions of a ruler
named Adityavarman and continue in the so-called
seal letters (surat cap) that nineteenth-century rulers,
now fully caught in an expanding colonial net, sent to
their subjects on the coast. These formulaic letters
often correspond word for word with each other for
long passages. They typically begin with pious references to Allah and trace the sender's descent from
Alexander the Great. They assert a divine mandate to
rule, describing the ruler as a conduit for God's
blessings and justice. The letters go on to enumerate
the regalia and heirlooms of the royal line. Here, as
elsewhere in Indonesia, heirlooms and regalia are not
just the symbols or trappings of power; they are
themselves supernaturally charged, and possessing
them increases a ruler's power. Finally, the letters
often remind readers that the ruler's enemies risk
being ruined by his ability to curse them. Carefully
saved as heirlooms and no doubt repeatedly read
aloud, these letters were also constructed to be visually
compelling. Scribes produced blocks of careful script,
then framed the whole with annotated seals of the
royal line and those of its allies or relatives.
It was the hubristic hyperbole of these letters that
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
553
repulsed the Calvinistic Dutch, especially after they
saw that Minangkabau rulers could not command and
control subjects as the Dutch wished. Profuse, hollow
titles such as "Emperor of the World" and "King over
All Kings" sounded delusionary, or perhaps just laughable. What the Dutch missed, Drakard thinks, is the
extent to which Minangkabau power, such as it was,
rested on supernatural authority, including the idea
that words themselves—as oaths and curses, or in
stunningly beautiful letters—could influence and awe
people.
Although the Minangkabau and their rulers were
mostly Muslim after the sixteenth century, Drakard
thinks the kind of statecraft they practiced was similar
to the pattern laid down centuries before in Southeast
Asia when, following an Indic model, Hindu-Buddhist
cosmologies propped up the divine right of kings.
Other historians may well take issue with this continuity thesis. Drakard cracks a few old chestnuts (such as
the idea that the Minangkabau had three kings, and
that successesion in the seventeenth century was patrilineal instead of matrilineal) that probably will not
please some local historians, but she has written the
book from which all future discussions of Minangkabau kingship will surely begin. Concise and clear,
and built on careful scholarship, the book also extends
the arguments about Southeast Asian states—variously termed theater states, mandalas, or galactic
polities—by showing how words and rhetoric, not just
ceremony and artifacts, shored up royal authority, at
least in this Sumatran instance of the type.
RITA SMITH KIPP
Kenyon College
ALFRED W. MCCOY. Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at
the Philippine Military Academy. New Haven: Yale
University Press. 1999. Pp. xx, 425. $40.00.
Alfred W. McCoy has presented scholars of recent
Philippine history and those who study military elites
on a comparative basis with a well-researched, dynamic, and engrossing monograph that is difficult to
put down. However, as someone interested in the
Philippines, I believe there are certain areas that could
stand further examination. While some of these are
touched upon by McCoy, more elucidation would have
enhanced our understanding of the Philippine Military
Academy classes of 1940 and 1971.
McCoy's family background is U.S. military and
West Point. It was perhaps somewhat natural for him
to be curious as to why many postwar Philippine
Military Academy (PMA) graduates, especially from
the class of 1971, were willing tools of the Marcos-era
repression while the class of 1940 abstained—for the
most part—from partisan polities and threats of coup
d'état during the chaotic days of the 1950s.
PMA's graduates of 1940 were the first four-year
students at the newly established academy designed to
create an officer corps that would serve the state rather
than become agents for partisan polities in the soon-
APRIL 2001
554
Reviews of Books
to-be-independent Philippines. We learn that young democratie practices. The class of 1971 was closer than
men from all over the Philippines (some barely eigh- brothers in its acquiescence and support of divergence
teen years old) entered PMA, having passed an en- from the ideals that formed the class of 1940. It is a
trance test; that they took the traditions and curricu- painful story well told.
MICHAEL PAUL ONORATO
lum of West Point, which PMA used initially, and in
California State University,
quick time offered their own traditions; that as graduates they fought against the Japanese; and that they
Fullerton
strove in postindependence Philippines to hold fast to
the ideals absorbed at PMA in the face of increasingly PETER JACKSON. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and
partisan polities. They became closer than brothers Military History. (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilibecause of PMA and their wartime experiences. They zation.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999.
banded together in war and peacetime to protect and Pp. xx, 367. $64.95.
nurture each other where possible according to the
If it is possible to speak of a definitive history of the
dictates of conscience formed at PMA.
It seems that more could be learned about the class Delhi Sultanate for our time, this is it. Peter Jackson
of 1940 if we knew where they went to high school, who has written a book that is learned, literate, and judiwere their teachers, whether they met members (espe- cious, and it must be counted one of the most distincially officers) of the American-established Philippine guished contributions to Indian history in our time.
Constabulary or the Philippine Scouts (which was a Jackson is already well known as an authority in this
prewar Filipino fighting force in the American army). field, although his contributions to Islamic scholarship
Why? Those 120 young men were educated as young- range far from the banks of the Ganges and the Indus
sters in a milieu of the American ethos of fair play, rule to embrace Central Asia and Iran in the Mongol epoch
of law, and the supremacy of the civilian over the as well as Middle Eastern crusader studies. He was
military. Moreover, did they enter the academy solely responsible for the final editing of volume six of The
because it was the ladder of success for the sons of the Cambridge History of Iran (on the Timurid and Safavid
poor and middle-class families? They must have been periods) and for a new Hakluyt Society edition of the
aware that Japan was threatening the peace in Asia travels of William of Rubruck.
Throughout his scholarly career, Jackson has been
when they entered the academy in 1936. By 1940, war
was imminent, and yet they did not flinch at the preoccupied with the interplay between the thirteenthprospect of defending their country and supporting century Mongol Empire of the Chinghizids and the
history of the Delhi Sultanate. He has written a
constitutional authority at the cost of their lives.
The class of 1971 left PMA when the Filipino polity seminal account of early Muslim Delhi ("Delhi: The
was under assault by President Ferdinand Marcos, who Problems of a Vast Military Encampment," in R. E.
was seeking any means to extend his presidency. By the Frykenberg, cd., Delhi through the Ages [1986], unactime they were teenagers, most must have seen bitter countably omitted from the recent paperback edition)
provincial politics leading to the killing or maiming of along with "The Mamluk Institution in Early Muslim
politicians and innocent bystanders. They could not India" (Tournai of the Royal Asiatic Society [1990]) and
have been blind to the corruption and civil strife in the "Sultan Radiyya bint Iltutmish" (in Gavin R. G. HamPhilippines starting in the early 1950s. Did the trauma bly, ed., Women in the Medieval Islamic World [1998]).
of the war and Japanese army brutalizing Filipinos rub The geographical extent of his scholarship and his
off on their teachers and parents? The sad tale of the understanding of the complex interdependence of the
class of 1971 sinking to torturing countrymen and lands of the Delhi Sultanate with Iran and Central
murdering many at the behest of one political leader Asia, his linguistic skills, and his immense knowledge
leaves us wondering if we must look beyond their years of medieval Islamic geography have enabled him to
at PMA. McCoy details the class of 1971's subservi- compress into a single volume this splendidly nuanced
ence to Marcos's reign of terror and later their efforts assessment of the period, which is rooted in close
to seize power from him in order to substitute them- textual analysis and a mastery of the linguistic probselves and certain civilians as leaders of the nation. It lems presented by his sources—a mastery all too rare
seems to me, however, that the war and communist-led today and reminiscent of the research of Simon Digby.
The Delhi Sultanate is usually dated from 1206 to
Huk rebellion created a milieu that made Marcos and
his brutal repression, as well as the coopting of the 1555, but Jackson more or less ends his account with
PMA's graduates, especially the class of 1971, tolera- Timur's sack of Delhi in 1398, presumably regarding
ble to the officer corps.
the last century and a half as a distinct period in which
This reviewer's wishes for further elucidation aside, the once-mighty Delhi Sultanate was merely one
McCoy has written an important study explaining why among a dozen or more competing regional sultanates.
one PMA class—within the context of the Filipino In his first seven chapters, he meticulously investigates
political scene—remained loyal to the ideal of military the earliest pre-Sultanate Muslim contacts between
officers staying out of polities while another class Central Asia and northwestern India, examining the
attached itself to a dictator and then after his removal role of the Ghaznavids and Ghurids, the mamluk
tried through coup attempts to thwart nascent Filipino institution, the inherent religious and ethnic tensions,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
APRIL 2001