Autumn in SE Asia

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" never really did it for me. Romantic imagery of European seasons in a hot classroom is not particularly relevant to young Australian minds. Though I must admit to enjoying the rhythm of Keat's poetry and I fancied that the seasonal images somehow affected my psyche, born from European parents. But it didn’t.

It wasn't until I was in India, almost 30 years ago, that I first identified just how much fun harvest time is. Venturing into a Rajasthani night, a glass of greenish/brown bung mischievously given to me by the son of the farmer I had imposed myself upon, I found the kerosene lamps outside the huts rotating in tiny circles: just as represented by all the little statutes of Nataraj I had seen in Indian museums. With this instant and drug-inspired appreciation of Shiva's dance to destroy the cosmos, I joined the village folk release the tension of a year's hard work. The Indian version may be a little more energetic than an English idyll, but the inspiration of a periodic renewal is identical.

As is the Chinese, which seems to becoming increasing more visible in Sydney with several of my Kensington neighbours now stringing up coloured paper lanterns to announce the approaching September full moon. While living in China I was lucky enough to be taken one harvest season by a friend to his ancestral home in Shandong. Within an hour's travel of the most important symbols of Chinese self-awareness; Confucious' home, the Yellow river and Tai Shan - which emperors were required to climb to seek the mandate of heaven for their rule and which is now adorned by Mao’s poetry - I was given the lowdown on Chinese cosmology. Basically, everything is about stability and predictability. The thing that the Chinese state has always hated is a deviation from these twin pillars given by seasonal cycles and maintenance of a status quo. I guess all societies are similar but Chinese rulers were able to codify the concept very early in their's state evolution so that it is ingrained into Chinese consciousness a significantly deeper level than anywhere else.

My friend's grandfather had been a headmaster until some teenage Red Guards decided he would be more productive shovelling pig shit. Unembittered by that smelly decade - which resulted in his complete alienation from his son - the kindly old man used his gentle school master ways to explain the ancient significance of the Chinese full moon festivals to the cycles of modern Chinese life.

And now, as I find myself again in a country during its harvest time, I am again reminded just how removed I am in Australia from that close association between a shared community acknowledgment of the agricultural cycle and a sense of cultural togetherness. Even though, here in Malaysia, there is such a sharp division between ethnic communities, the sense of a party time when the year's major rice crop is gathered is palpable. The Malay actually call their harvest festival kenduri: literal translation is party. And it is party all around with the urbanised Hokkien community making the most noise with their hungry ghost festival.

This is when all the street workers: hawkers, garbage collectors, taxi drivers, morticians, prostitutes and the like, jointly fund a month of entertainment for homeless ghosts. Stages are set up immediately opposite taoist temples and every night young women mime the latest Hong Kong and Korean popsongs (the twin centres of youthful coolness across Eastern Asia) into the night. A newspaper article says that authorities are clamping down on the young women singers who do not wear underwear during Hungry Ghost. It really is a party.

Local householders simply tolerate the high decibel racket in much the same way all Malaysians appear to tolerate the habitual flouting of industrial and construction noise containment laws. After a huge feast, on the first night of the harvest moon, the hungry ghosts are presumably fed and entertained enough to leave the street workers to their duties for another year.

I think these rituals associated with year-ending festivals appeal to some prehistoric sense that has been expunged from the forefront of my Sydneysider consciousness. It seems to me that we in Australia are alone in our total alienation from the growing of food in the cycle of life. Even our fellow antipodeans in New Zealand have rituals acknowledging the end of the plentiful season. Perhaps because our English governors were more successful than any other at ethnically cleansing our land that my periodical reacquainting with this element of agricultural humanity is like plunging into refreshingly cold sea on a hot summer's day: there is a shock of recognition and a exhilaration at the remembered feelings.

I had another shock of recognition last week when up in Cambodia. Taking advantage of all these cheap air fares now in Asia, Swee Liew and I flew up to Siem Reap for a week. What do you know of Siem Reap? Are you aware of its significance in world history?

I thought I had a fair idea of Cambodia’s role in our contemporary consciousness. Cambodia is that small Southeast Asian country that the Vietcong used as a conduit to supply their comrades in the south. Nixon and Kissinger then agent-oranged the Cambodian jungle and landmined the country to an extent unprecedented in world history. This utterly destroyed the social fabric of the place making it ripe for a Maoist-inspired revolution led by Pol Pot who wanted to rid the country of all aspects of a corrupt modernity. In the process, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and murdered over a quarter of the country’s population for such crimes as having had an education or wearing glasses: truly insane times.

But why: these things seem to recur in history and that questions remains - what drives one person, or a small group of people, to visit so much misery on a population for some poorly thoughtout social agenda? I try to understand by reading the country's history.

And Cambodia does have a remarkable history through its peculiar geography. Cambodia lies at the end of the Mekong River and is dominated by a single feature: the Tonle Sap. This is Asia’s largest freshwater lake (not counting Baikal in Russia, which is really a sea) that expands and contracts like a giant bellow every year as the Himalayan snows melt and swell the flooding Mekong. Because the Mekong does not drain directly into Tonle Sap the lake has an extraordinary property. For three months a year it is filled by the Tonle Sap river, a small channel that drains off the Mekong at Pnong Penh, and creates an enormous water storage tank. For the remaining nine months of the year, the lake changes the direction of its tributary rivers and naturally irrigates the entire Mekong basin.

This unique feat of non-human hydroengineering led Cambodians, some five thousand years ago, to harvest a local grass that grew in the receding waterlogged soil around the lake – rice. From all available evidence this was where rice cultivation began before the knowledge migrated north to the valleys along the Yangtze river.

The huge Han Chinese states were based on this imported knowledge and several significant Mekong basin societies also developed. By the 6th century, these rice-producing societies were trading with both India and China and influenced by the revolution in political theory that was happening in both these, by now, hugely sophisticated economies.

Buddhism, and its emphasis on individualism, had been the rationale behind these revolutions. By 600AD, India had already had a 1000 year exposure to the concept that an individual is responsible for his/her own destiny. An Indian middle class had taken this idea to develop a multi-layered society that derived great wealth from trading and introducing these concepts of social contracts across the Asian continent.

Of course, there were widely differing responses to a social ethic based on individual responsibility. China's ruling families initially accepted the concept as a means of filling their coffers and cementing their own power base, with the mighty Tang and Soong dynasties. But eventually, the public service of the time, rooted in Confucian orthodoxy, managed to adapt Buddhism to their own agenda and marginalise it as a social force. Much the same happened in India itself, with southern Brahmins - best articulated by Sankara - finally devising a means of absorbing Buddhist individualism into their own peculiar social hierarchy based on social function.

It was this "new" Hinduism and its associated militarism that allowed a series of South India states to expand and exert influence on the rice producing southeast Asian states. By far the most impressive was the Cholas who are still the pride of the Tamil people and the creators of an architectural style that is familiar to all who has seen stereotypical tourist images of Southeast Asia. On this trip to Malaysia, my good friend Anand, a Tamil architect, convinced me that even the Twin Towers in KL, with their fat, slowly tapering towers, are Chola inspired.

Be that as it may, there is certainly no argument against the unheralded influence of the Cholas on Asian history. Throughout all my travels in Asia it always strikes me that attention is paid primarily to the societies associated with agriculture rather than trade. The Tamils, like the Dali in Yunnan, are the most obvious examples. Both the Tamil Cholas and the Yunnan Dali exerted immense economic power and were responsible for the expansion of Indian and Chinese power. But in both cases, the cultures of the river valleys to the north of these ancient societies dominate our current awareness of India and China.

I reckon there is a clear reason for this and it lies in the sense of seasonal rhythm that agriculture structures give our community conscientiousness.

And it was the agricultural produce of the Mekong that attracted the Cholas to share their logic of a god-appointed king, priests to interpret ancient texts, and specific soldier, trading and labouring classes to the Khmers and a series of other Sankara-inspired Hindu kingdoms in Sumatra, Java, Northern Borneo and, what is now, northern Malaysia.

The Khmers have left us with the grandest remnants of these medieval societies, largely because Cambodia is the only one of these Southeast states that managed to avoid the tsunamic rebuttal to individualism that Islam presented from the 7th century onwards.

Islam's impact on southeast Asia was not direct until European colonial times, by which time the influence of the Indian and Chinese economies had been all-but removed. The Khmer kings simply lost their affluence and thus their power and the temples of Angkor were swallowed by jungle and preserved for our contemporary wonderment.