 Le literallyPor enough everybody my name is Paul Wellie the director of S. It's a really great pleasure to welcoming to celebrate the inaugural event of the South East Asian Art each of it program now just to make sure this is an enjoyable event. I do need to do a little bit a simple house keeping at the beginning. So do please turn off your mobile phones. It's very embarrassing when a mobile phoned goes often in the middle of the lecture and doę note where the star success all ac mae'r parwysgledd yn unrhyw. Y ddweud ddweud ar gyfer arddig Cymru yn ysgrifetig ar gyfer yraedd, gan y ddweud ar gyfer ddweud ar gyfer Alhrwyr Ffondasiwn. Felly dywed yn ystod o'r ddweud ar gyfer y ddweud ar gyfer yr Argynys Gwyl Seng, ddweud o'r ddweud ar gyfer y Ddweud Argynys Gwyl Seng, ac yn ymgyrchol iawn o'r ddweud ar gyfer yr argynys yma yn ysgrifetig. One of the words we often use when we talk about service is passion or passionate, something I say a lot. We're passionate about our expertise, we're passionate about our specialisms. We try and inspire our students to be passionate and it's the passion of one of the alumni of our postgraduate diploma in nation art in the department of history of art and archaeology, Fred Eichner, that's inspired this visionary enterprise. We're immensely fortunate to have Fred as a friend of Sias, someone who's not only had a vision to make the world a more just and humane place, but through his Alford Foundation who can, by working with partner organisations and institutions around the world, make this change a reality. We're truly privileged I think that he's chosen to work with Sias on the South East Asian Art Academic Programme that's been funded by his donation and the donation has also allowed Sias a state of the art expansion through the redevelopment of the Senate House North Block, the building that's next door to this one. And I'm delighted that both Fred Eichner and Jim McDonough of Malford have travelled to Chicago to be with us tonight. I'd like to extend my personal thanks to Fred and Jim for their friendship and for their inspiration. Thank you so much. After Professor Singh, we'll hear from Professor Anna Contadini, who's the incoming head of our School of Arts here at Sias. Anna will introduce our esteemed speaker, Professor Haram W. Woodward. After the lecture, our speaker has kindly agreed to a brief question and answer session. That will be directed by Dr Ashley Thompson. Dr Thompson joined Sias in September as the chair that's honoured by the name of our speaker, the Haram W. Woodward chair in South East Asian Art. Those of you who are academics will know how unusual this is. One of the things I love about this donation, this programme, is that it honours academics, academic work, academic development. So the fact that we have a Haram W. Woodward chair I think is itself truly marvellous. Professor Contadini has curated a wonderful Arts of South East Asian South Sias Collection exhibition in the Foyle Gallery. The exhibition constitutes a further stage in the treasures of Sias project that's designed to highlight and showcase the many treasures that Sias has been given or acquired over nearly 100 years, and to encourage research of those collections. The gallery will be open after the lecture, and I do urge you to see some of those objects in the exhibition, many of which are being displayed for the first time. You'll have your own personal favourites. One I rather liked was there's a wonderful map of South East Asia, which is actually from the Middle East. It's a superb piece, but there's also some wonderful objects here. It's a great exhibition. I also hope you'll join us after the lecture for a reception upstairs in the Brunai Suite. There'll be more music from our superb Indonesian Gamelam players. So without further ado from me, I'm going to hand over to Professor Garble Singh, and he'll tell you more about the South East Asian Academic Art Program. Thank you so much. Thank you, Paul. Thank you all for joining us to celebrate the inaugural event of the South East Asian Art Academic Program, or as we like to say, SAP. This will be the first of many events in this transformational project that aims to create a real step change in the study, research and understanding of South East Asian, Buddhist and Hindu art. So as is world renowned for its study and research of Asia Africa Middle East and has a long-standing link which this project will further strengthen. SAP brings new members of staff to the School of Arts who will join the wealth of talent that we already have in Asian arts. In September we will welcome three fully endowed post holders to the Department of History of Art and Archaeology. In addition to Dr Thompson, Paul's who's already mentioned, we're welcome Dr Christian Llewknights, who will take up the David Snellgrove Senior Lectureship in Tibetan and Buddhist Art. Dr Llewknights unfortunately cannot be with us tonight, he's currently trekking in the Himalayas. We are delighted to welcome back also to so as one of our most esteemed former professors, David Snellgrove, who's kindly honoured this post with his name. Lastly, I'm delighted to announce that Dr Prith Powell, Prithee Powell recognized authority on the arts and cultures of the subcontinent as honoured us with his name of the Prith Powell Senior Lectureship in Creating and Museology. Dr Powell cannot be with us tonight and sends his regards, Louise Thithgott who will take up the post is here with us. One of the main objectives of SARP is to bring students on fully funded scholarships from all over Southeast Asia to study it at so as. Beginning this September over the next five years we are welcome over 80 scholarship students. This year we'll see the entry of the first cohort of students from eight to different countries. They will study on the postgraduate Diplomery in Asian Art, master's degree in the Department of Art History and Archaeology and Languages and Cultures. This year we'll also see one PhD scholarship student, Heidi Tan, who is currently Deputy Director and Chief Curatorial Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore. Heidi's research will focus on the museological behavior and Buddhist art with a focus on the monastery collection of Myanmar. At the end of their studies these Alphawood scholarships will return to the region with enhanced skills and expertise in heritage organizations to further develop the study and preservation of Buddhist and Hindu art and to make a long lasting impact in building capacity in the region. SARP will also increasingly involve itself in outreach activity, building a network of organizations in the UK and Southeast Asia region to create an impact that is long after the life of the project itself. Before I finish I want to thank those who have made this event possible. First I echo Paul's appreciation of Alphawood for their truly inspirational and visionary initiative. I also want to thank all my colleagues in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Languages and Cultures and External Relations and Development. To Professor Tim Screech as Head of School of Arts and Professor Anna Contadini as incoming Head of School of Arts and to all members of SARP, a warm thanks for their contribution in making this possible. Thanks are also due to Professor Anna Contadini and Farouk Yahya for all their hard work in producing the exhibition at such short notice. Thanks to our guests Professor Hiram Woodward for agreeing to give the talk today and to Professor David Snellgrove who has travelled from Turin to be with us tonight. I mustn't forget to mention that Professor Snellgrove is giving a lecture tomorrow on the Hindu and Buddhist sites of southern Sumatra that will be held in the Brunai Gallery at 5.15 tomorrow evening. Lastly we gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Paula Ferrer and Nick Gray for the music, for the gremlin music that we heard earlier. I will now hand over to my colleague Professor Anna Contadini who will introduce tonight's speaker. Anna. Thank you for Harpal. Good evening everybody. I'm delighted to see many colleagues and guests and to see also so many students past and present. There is much work and preparation behind events such as this and I'd first like to thank Simone Green, the South East Asian project administrator for all her hard work. Now it is my honour and privilege to introduce Hiram Woodward who he tells me likes to be called Woody. He's a meritus curator of Asian art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore where if for more than 20 years he cared for one of the world's greatest collections of South East Asian art outside South East Asia. He's one of the world's leading art historians of that region and he is the author of numerous publications of which I shall just mention two major items. His catalogue of the Alexander Griswald collection published in 1997, a groundbreaking study on the sacred sculpture of Thailand and the art and architecture of Thailand published by Brill in 2003 which is a fundamental reference work on the subject. Woodward's work is characterised by its probing examination of objects combined with comprehensive study of their contexts and this approach has yielded a long series of discoveries and breakthrough interpretations demonstrating both intellectual flair and imaginative insight. After the lecture a brief question and answer sessions with you the audience will be directed by Dr Ashley Thompson. Dr Thompson is herself a major scholar of South East Asian art in particular of the arts of Cambodia and I'm delighted to welcome her into the history of art and archaeology department as the first Hiram Woodward Professor in South East Asian Art beginning in September and now please join me in welcoming Hiram Woodward. I think I don't know what to do there uh there we go. Thank you Anna for those very generous words and good evening distinguished colleagues and guests. Prior to being tied to the School of Oriental and African Studies in this unexpected and undeserved manner I suppose my closest connection with so has was through one of its American graduates Henry Ginsberg the late Henry Ginsberg my friend and my wife's close friend for many years. Henry who is keeper of the Thai language collection in the British Library and did so much to build up its holdings of Thai manuscripts spoke with admiration of his teacher EHS Simmons and prior to that I can remember my senior friend and teacher in Bangkok Tantan Prince John Chiri Urochini telling me that Peter B of Zoaz has spoken the most elegant Thai of any foreigner. I have chosen to talk about HG Quarish Wales this evening because he gives us a lot to chew on. If you came here expecting that I was going to rehabilitate him you will be disappointed. Most of us have encountered disparaging remarks of one sort or another. Craig Reynolds in 1995 his work is not taken very seriously today or Michel Jacques Ergouach telling us that Alastair Lamb in the years 1958 to 61 carried on archaeological excavations in Malaya that interpreted in a more objective and scientific manner material that Quarish Wales had examined somewhat rapidly and according to a number of apriori assumptions in 1936 to 7 in 1940 and I think it would be fair to say that these days we encounter the name Quarish Wales less and less. Maybe we should think of the dilemma of the Hollywood publicist aren't negative news stories better than no news stories at all. Of course not all my judgments will be negative and what I hope you will take away is all of Quarish Wales's prodigious output and admiration for his fearlessness in addressing issues of great importance. Issues that academic timidity encourages us to sidestep. I will first give you a brief overview of his career then I shall focus on two of his books Siamese State Ceremonies of 1931 and The Making of Greater India the first edition of which appeared in 1951. Horace Jeffrey Quarish Wales was born in 1900 and attended Charter House in Queens College Cambridge. He was the grandson of Bernard Quarish founder in 1847 of the firm of that name and Quarish Wales maintained a connection to the booksellers until it was sold in 1971. In 1924 he went to Bangkok and became an English teacher at the Royal Page School a school modeled on English public schools which had been founded by King Watsherawut in 1910. At least that is what I was once told in Bangkok. Quarish Wales's own description of his position was one of having quote an official connection with the Lord Chamberlain's department. The Royal Page School was renamed Watsherawut College by King Prachati Polk in 1926 in memory of his late brother. Whatever Quarish Wales's exact position it was his good fortune to observe at close hand many of the Bromannical Court ceremonies that punctuated the Royal Calendar. It is these experiences that led him to compose Siamese State ceremonies which was accepted by the School of Oriental and African Studies as a doctoral dissertation. Shortly after publication of Siamese State ceremonies Quarish Wales appears to have turned to ethnography and he published articles in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and in Man. Presumably if he had moved into an academic position at this time such work would have continued. Around the same time he also pursued library research producing a book on government administration in old Siam. A much later work along similar lines is Ancient Scythe East Asian Warfare published in 1952. Then there was another shift in interest towards exploration and archaeology. Quarish Wales was appointed field director of the Greater India Research Committee which was funded in the first year by the Maharaja of Baroda in the second by Mrs. Rentmore who was Quarish Wales's aunt. This made it possible to carry out field research in Siam in 1934, 1935 and 1936 and led to a number of publications first in articles published in Indian art and letters and then in a book intended for general readership towards Angkor. Exactly how much of value is to be found in Quarish Wales's unpublished field notes has not been definitively established. After Quarish Wales's death in 1981 a large gift of his papers was presented to the Royal Asiatic Society. Recently these were consulted by an American scholar interested in Pungduk, a Dvaravadi period site in western Thailand. Towards Angkor is a wonderful book still serviceable today as an introduction to Southeast Asia's past because Quarish Wales was not only provides an account of his travel adventures but catches the reader up in his quest for understanding. If it were not for his errors of fact and judgment it would be more frequently recommended. I suspect that George Sides' Angkor, the English translation of lectures Sides given in Dave in Hanoi in the early 1940s owes much of his success to the fact that after reading towards Angkor Sides realized that the discoveries of historians of ancient history could be presented in an intriguing and engaging way. The trans Peninsula route taken by Quarish Wales ran from Takua Ba on the west coast to Chaya on the east. It was on this trip that Quarish Wales discovered the small Gupta style Indian stone Buddha now in John Guy's exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York on loan from the Bangkok National Museum. Of primary interest for Quarish Wales was a small stone ball relief which I found in the roots of a tree when I was engaged in excavating the brick base of what had once been the central shrine of the city of Wuyangsa. In fact the only building of which we had found any remains at the site. His opinion that it was in the purely Gupta style and might be dated to the fifth century has held up but his assumption that it was probably brought by Indian colonists would be questioned as we cannot say whether it was brought by Indian colonists rather than traders or had been carried from India to the peninsula by local residents or even by Chinese traders or monks. Equally problematic if this small sculpture is considered as a demonstration of a Gupta wave of influence is whether there were in the fifth and sixth centuries sculptures in Southeast Asia that were influenced by it as some scholars maintain or whether in a contrary view later 17th century sculptures later seven century sculptures with Gupta-like qualities had in fact rather different sources. Many of Quarish Wales speculations about Sea Tep on the border between central and northeastern Thailand have not been laid to rest and sometimes Sea Tep is considered an enigma as if archaeology and art history of competently conducted are not capable of sorting out his position in cultural history. In 1936 later wrote Quarish Wales shortly after returning from our expedition to Sea Tep I suggested that the greater India research committee the desirability of our turning our attention to the archaeological exploration of Malaya. The asiatic they published report which appeared in the journal of the Malayan branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1940 with the title archaeological researches in ancient Indian colonization in Malaya making use of the problematical term colonization is a lengthy but concise account of the excavations of 30 distinct structures in Kedda in northwestern Malaya along the Thai border and a smaller number of sites in the contiguous state of Pay Rock and in Johor the southernmost province in Malaya. In 1941 Quarish Wales joined the British army and was assigned to Malaya. Excavations commenced again in Kedda and in province Wellesley under the direction of Quarish Wales's wife Dorothy and the report appeared in 1947. The wartime experiences led to the publication of a book of reportage and commentary years of blindness published in 1943. I did not even know of the existence of this book until after I had informed Peter Sharik that I would like to speak about Quarish Wales and I doubt that many people have read it recently. Just as in towards Angkor, Quarish Wales demonstrates his fluency in telling anecdotes and expressing robust opinions. The theme of the book is the shifting relationship between east and west. The British officers and planters in Malaya and to a large extent in India as well have attitudes different from their 19th century predecessors. They have brought their wives and so therefore have less direct contact with the native population. They can listen to the BBC and even telephone home. Asians with new ideas have been educated abroad but only partially and are not in a position to establish democracy. Quarish Wales foresees the defeat of Japan but not the hold that communism would have over many over many in the post war years. Many of the stories Quarish Wales tells are delightful especially his recollections of traveling on coastal steamers in one case as long ago as 1924 journeying between Bangkok and Saigon and stopping off in Cambodia. At one point he devotes several pages to the physical and mental attributes of the Dutch archaeologist P. V. van Stijn Cullenfels. The reader senses that van Stijn Cullenfels was a kind of role model unlike the bookish and family oriented Dutch officials Quarish Wales meets at a club in Bondung. In vigor and curiosity van Stijn Cullenfels was a throwback to the great Dutch adventures of the 17th century. In Java wrote Quarish Wales when Stijn Cullenfels was identified with Ravana, the demon king of Lanka in the Ramayana. In fact Quarish Wales appears to have gotten this slightly wrong. Van Stijn Cullenfels was actually identified with Ravana's brother Kumbakarna who you see here on the left on the screen. I shall return to years of blindness a little later pointing to passages that hint at the directions taken by Quarish Wales in the years after the war. The post war publications can be divided into four major groups. The first could be called meta historical and begin with the making of greater India in 1951. This was preceded by articles in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1946 and 1948 in which he presented his hypotheses in somewhat tentative form. I will be discussing the making of greater India later but not the mountain of God, prehistory and religion or the universe around them. In the second group I have placed three titles Encore and Rome, The Indianization of China and Southeast Asia and Early Burma Old Siam. Early Burma Old Siam is the only book by Quarish Wales that I myself ever reviewed. This review in the Journal of Asian Studies seems to me now unduly harsh. I took Quarish Wales to task for not exhibiting more aesthetic sympathy, saying that most art in any one period tends to be mediocre and you should not condemn an entire culture as degenerate before first attempting to distinguish the good art from the ordinary. There was I thought a damned if you do and damned if you don't quality as Siam and Burma were portrayed as engaged in a race to the bottom. I fear I wrote nothing that would have made the author feel good. In the third group are two historical surveys, one about Dvaravadi, the other about the peninsula. Both are useful but neither when it was published could be said to have broken new ground. In addition to this prolific output, Quarish Wales also directed his attention to specific archaeological issues resulting in short articles in the Journal of the Siam Society, some reporting on fresh excavations. Quarish Wales understood the importance of aerial photography in locating sites and analyzing settlement patterns and his interest in procedures overlapped to a degree with those of Elizabeth Moore. Besides all of this, Quarish Wales turned again to bromannical court ceremonies and he wrote supplementary notes on Siamese state ceremonies. Much later in 1992, Siamese state ceremonies was reissued by Curzon Press incorporating the supplementary notes. Finally, one book was published two years following Quarish Wales's death in 1981. It is an engaging and useful account of prognostication and astrology as found in Thai manuscripts such as a couple that are now on view in the exhibition in the Royal Gallery. I cannot resist referring to a section from the introduction as it endows the present occasion with an element of symmetry. Quarish Wales writes that in approximately 1931 in Bangkok he had bought a copy of Proma Chot, destiny in his translation, a do-it-yourself book of astrology containing transcriptions from various manuscripts. He says that it was 310 pages long. In 1980, 49 years later, he saw a book of the same title for sale in Bangkok, 800 pages long. Here is a jacket of my own copy of Proma Chot bought also 49 years ago in 1965 and it has 648 pages. I never met Quarish Wales. There were just two occasions when I might have. The first would have been in 1964 when I visited the site of Muangbong in the Khan Suwan province where some Dvaravadi period stupas were being uncovered. This was in fact a site that Quarish Wales had first identified in the Williams Hunt aerial photographs and he initially requested permission from the Fine Arts Department of Thailand to excavate there himself. He did some exploring apparently and after his departure the Fine Arts Department carried out a full-scale excavation. The young Fine Arts Department officials I stayed with had previously accompanied Quarish Wales. This was not a marriage made in heaven and they had found him imperious. In the course of my visit I removed bits of dried mud from the fragment of ornament you see in the illustration on the screen. The second occasion was during my second long stay in Bangkok probably in 1970 or 1971. My mentor Abie Griswold, whose Bangkok home was on the river on the Tonebury side where a fancy hotel now stands told me that Quarish Wales had come to lunch and that they had gotten along like a house on fire. Somehow in the previous 25 years they had never managed to meet. He was coming back again in a few days what I like to join them. My recollection is that I had recently read something by Quarish Wales that I found particularly outrageous and I doubted my ability to behave with the proper decorum. Foolishly I declined the invitation a much regretted decision. About half of Siamese state ceremonies consists of introductory material and of descriptions of special occasions such as the coronation, the tansur ceremony and royal cremations. The second half is devoted to ceremonies performed annually according to a fixed calendar. Quarish Wales tells us that there are Thai accounts of these ceremonies, the ceremonies of the 12 months and he refers to the two most important, the tale of Lady Nopamot and royal ceremonies of the 12 months by King Chulalongkon. He uses these texts as source materials but does not describe their literary qualities or attempt to define their function. Nong Nopamot was composed in about the second quarter of the 19th century by a palace lady but it purports to be a document dating from the Sukkotai period many centuries previously and it is not clear how much of it may have been based upon an older text. It was the subject of a probing analysis by the contemporary historian Nithi Eoc Wong readable in Chris Baker's 2005 English translation. Dr Nithi's view is that Nong Nopamot was written as a guide to palace etiquette. King Chulalongkon's much longer and more comprehensive book was written in the years before he died in 1910. In articles of my own I have quoted a passage from the introduction which goes as follows. Those who truly believed in Buddhism had no proper reason to hold the following of magical practices in respect. Later however, those who followed Buddhism but had not attained the fruits of the path still experienced fear and terror on account of various dangers and concern for their own well-being and fortitude as the result of having previously worshipped and lived in fear of gods and divinities who had the power to punish both oneself and others for reasons that are not truly just by bringing about sickness or pain of various sorts because of anger or hatred at not being paid homage or worshipped or as the result of merely feeling evil, harmfully causing people trouble in the form of sickness or food shortages among other things. Therefore people decided to pay homage and to make offerings in order to prevent misunderstanding. King Chulalongkon made a distinction akin to the proposal by a number of 20th century anthropologists including the late SJ Tambaya, a distinction between reciprocal and non-reciprocal relations. Gods and spirits reward and punish us. Our relations with the Buddha are entirely one-sided. Everyone knows for instance that monks cannot acknowledge the food placed in their arms bowls. I wonder if the passage I have quoted provides some hint as to King Chulalongkon's motivation in composing his long treatise. True, he was in a privileged position, knew more about these ceremonies than anyone else, and understood that many would fall into disuse as modern circumstances made them outdated. Therefore he believed that they should be recorded for posterity. He also wanted to leave a record presumably that his successor could use as a guide. More than that, however, I wonder if there was not an element of superstition in the King's thinking. That is, when the jealous gods are no longer appeased, perhaps the very existence of such a text serves as a bulwark against their mischief. If this is the case, I would argue that the same holds for Nag Nopamot, the earlier treatise. Having readers in teaching palace etiquette is less important than the composition and preservation of a text that sets things right in our relationship with gods and spirits. I want to make an excursion into King Chulalongkon's book, another part of his book, as it is something that has occupied me in the past few years as a result of trying to understand an opening in a manuscript on the characteristics of elephants in the Walters Art Museum, dating from the 1810s or the 1820s. This manuscript opening is a summary illustration of a legend. The god Vishnu atop centre responds to the pleas of two emissaries left and right and gives them a snake with which they are able to pacify a marauding elephant. This snake is also a lasso. In addition, it is the emblem of a powerful mantra. The figures at the bottom stand for humans to whom knowledge of the mantra has been passed down and who possess magical lassos, the snakes that encircle them. This legend was secretly reenacted in a ceremony of the fifth month, around April, the casting off and pulling in the rope ceremony. It is described in the ceremonies of the 12 months by King Chulalongkon, but not in Siamese state ceremonies, where, however, a related fifth century ceremonies is briefly discussed, the sprinkling of elephants and horses. Following ceremonies performed by specialist Brahmins and by an elephant impersonator, the director or the deputy director of the elephant department, whoever is the more skillful dancer, takes the role of Vishnu at the time that Vishnu writes King Chulalongkon changed his face into the face of an elephant descended and taught the knowledge of kachakarma or elephant ritual to the men at the time of the pacification of the marauding elephant. An elaborate dance begins accompanied by appropriate music and characterized by the assumption of various poses, including a rhythmic prostration and the repetition of certain sequences. The performer takes the rope of the lasso and dances with it, rhythmically extending it three times. Elements in this legend and in this ritual can be traced back to Angkor and the implications for our understanding of the role of magical powers in kingship are considerable. There is little doubt that the path of study initiated by Quarish Wales will continue to yield significant discoveries. Occasionally, Quarish Wales inserts his own presence into the pages of Siamese state ceremonies and sometimes this might cause us to raise our eyebrows. In his chapter on the kingship he lists various customs under ten headings which he calls taboos. He notes that ordinarily no one may touch the king, especially his head, yet while observation of this custom was mandatory in public, things were less stringent in private. At the conclusion of the coronation audience, he wrote, after the curtains have been drawn and the king is surrounded only by his pages and chamberlans, he permits his attendance to relieve him of his crown and in undoing the fastnings they can scarcely avoid touching his head. This I particularly noticed on the occasion of the coronation audience of the present king, that is King Prachati Poc, when being in my official uniform of the chamberlans department I was the only European present behind the curtain. At this some people might be inclined to think please be grateful for this experience but shut up about it. Siamese state ceremonies was never reviewed in the pages of the journal of the Siam Society but attention was conspicuously drawn to it in a talk by Prince Tani Niwat at the Siam Society in 1946 published in somewhat altered form in the journal of in 1947 with the title the old Siamese concept of the monarchy. Prince Tani born in 1885 was the leading spokesman of his generation for the values and culture of old Siam and his talk given in the presence of the young king Ananda and his younger brother Prince Pumipon is sometimes understood as providing a rationale for the modern monarchy. Prince Tani referred to Quarish Wales at both the beginning and the end of his published article. At the beginning he quoted in full a passage from Bronislav Malinowski that Quarish Wales had also used concerning the essential role of tradition in traditional societies especially when tradition is considered sacred. There's an element of confusion in this passage because Quarish Wales has in fact misquoted reversing the order of sentences and thus blurring the distinction between two different subjects. At any rate Quarish Wales's point was that some young Siamese didn't fully recognize the importance of tradition. He hoped his book would help serve as a guide to understanding which parts of these ceremonies should be maintained for the purposes of social integrity. Prince Tani had no intention of being taught anything by Quarish Wales and wrote that he was inspired to speak about the monarchy on one hand because of Malinowski's views and on the other because of what he called a nationalistic impulse by which he meant I think not the nationalism of the government of the period but the native as opposed to the foreign point of view. Prince Tani addressed the role of stressed, Prince Tani stressed the role of the king in protecting buddhism and in the section headed divine kingship there is a single curt paragraph ending with the sentence the average Siamese then is now has never taken seriously the idea of his king being connected with Hindu divinities who after all had no place in his buddhist faith. In quote by attributing this opinion to the average Siamese rather than presenting it as his own view Prince Tani left questions a cunning historical sleuth would have to pursue. At any rate he appears to be saying either that royal ceremonies should be demythologized or abandoned. He avoided engaging in any way with the treatise by King Trula Longcon who was a half brother of his father. At the end of his article Prince Tani more or less lost control of his reactions to Quarish Wales's fourth chapter the one with the list of taboos. In part this is simple indignation over the use of the word taboo which Quarish Wales probably used in order to sound anthropological but which Prince Tani found condescending. Had the learned doctor been equally conversant with court etiquette in his own country would he have written that it was also taboo in England to use the word of the common language or common modes of address when speaking to or about the king and princes when he noticed that one often said your majesty instead of you that one preferred to talk of the king's natal day rather than birthday and to say that the sovereign had been pleased to command his attendance upon the king at dinner and so on and then a little later on with all due respect to his wide reading and high erudition which I can never claim to equal there are I feel certain points the significance of which requires no native no effort for a native to understand. Well let this be a warning to those who write about the cherished customs and beliefs of the living rather than of the dead in general I prefer to stick to the dead. I will now take up the making of greater India in his first edition of 1951. This book is a study of the character of art and architecture in classical southeast Asia and the reasons for his variety region by region. Quarish Wales first distinguished a western zone consisting of Malaya Thailand and Burma from an eastern zone Cambodia Champa Java. In the western zone Indianization completely eradicated indigenous capabilities in the eastern zone a quality called local genius shaped creative developments in various ways according to the character of the relevant prehistoric culture. A sentence from towards Angkor of 1937 shows that he was working his way towards the concept of local genius at that time. When the guiding hand of India it says in this book was removed her inspiration was not forgotten but the Khmer genius was released to mold from it vast new conceptions of amazing vitality different from and hence not properly to be compared with anything matured in a purely Indian environment. There are suggestions in years of blindness published in 1943 that Quarish Wales was interested in developing a grand explanatory scheme and was searching for the required methodological tools. For instance he describes a visit in 1937 to the home in Malaya of H.D. Noon a Cambridge anthropologist who studied the aboriginal populations the Arang Astley. It is thought that Noon was murdered during the Japanese occupation by the lover of his wife Temir. A friend of Noon soon got used to the idea Quarish Wales wrote of seeing a wild man from Borneo harmlessly coiled up on the veranda and raised no question as to the advisability of allowing a new Guinea headhunter to assist the Chinese cook in sharpening the carving knife. It was at H.D. Noon's compound that Quarish Wales first saw the great eight armed Avalokiteshvar of the early eight century subsequently presented to the Pirach Museum now one of the treasures of the National Museum of Malaysia and currently on view in exhibition in New York in the exhibition Lost Kingdoms. According to Quarish Wales another point at one time it was the latest methods of filming natives that was engrossing to Noon's attention. At another he was full of some new psychological means of studying the natives most secret thoughts. This he had learned from an American anthropologist who when passing through Malaya had availed himself of Noon's ever ready hospitality. Later Quarish Wales did indeed look to American anthropology for insights into culture and personality. A stimulus of a different sort came from Japanese imperialist propaganda. In years of blindness Quarish Wales quotes from a translation of a pamphlet issued in Japan in February 1942. In the prehistoric age mankind formed a single worldwide family system with the emperor at its head and Japan was highly respected as the land of the parents while all other lands were called lands of the children or branch lands. The Japanese propaganda, Quarish Wales wrote, knew the mystic oriental mind and he sensed that Japan's pseudoscientific theorists have actually crossed the paths of his own work as he wrote. There was a possible response. An official greater Indian campaign of counter propaganda could have been useful in two ways in the critical months that preceded Japan's bid for the empire. In the first place it might have served to shake the growing fascination of the peoples of Southeast Asia with Japan's meteoric rise by exposing the inconsistencies in Japanese claims and reminding the natives of their cultural connections with India. End quote. Greater India therefore was not a concept only applicable to the distant past. It had validity in the present, especially in the context of the Second World War. Quarish Wales first presented his theories in a series of articles in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. In 1946 he described the successive waves of influence, Gupta, Palauva and so on, a classification not considered particularly significant today because there were such constant contact between various parts of India and Southeast Asia. Waves that are today recognized such as the spread of Mahayana images from Bengal in the last decades of the eighth century were not successfully isolated by Quarish Wales. He then went on to propose a western and an eastern zone. In the western zone which includes Thailand there was initially the imitation and then elapsed into decadence. The article cultural change in greater India, which appeared in 1948, introduced the term local genius and identified this genius with prehistoric cultures. At this point Quarish Wales was following in the wake of the Austrian prehistorian and ethnologist Robert Heinegelden who was born in 1885. Heinegelden was a brilliant diffusionist, a scholar capable of linking up cultures across continents by the meticulous observation of unique details to be seen in artifacts of various sorts. Heinegelden had worked out a proposed prehistory of Southeast Asia built upon the clues provided by historical linguistics and a meager amount of archaeological evidence. His work was published beginning in the 1920s but his views concerning Southeast Asia are most easily accessible in an article published in 1966, two years before his death. His focus was on the non-Indianized cultures in Southeast Asia and he believed that two distinct art styles or traditions could be identified, one the monumental, the other the ornamental. Just as a linguist reconstructs a parent language, Heinegelden traced the monumental style back to what he called the older megalithic dating from Neolithic times and characterized by such culture traits as bull sacrifice, the erection of men hears and feasts of merit. In fact archaeology has not to my knowledge ever confirmed the existence of Heinegelden's older megalithic. The ornamental style on the other hand had his origins in Dong Son culture of northern Vietnam best known from his bronze drums. Dong Son culture did spread into Insular Southeast Asia around the end of the first millennium BC. For Heinegelden the ornament on a toba batak house in Sumatra such as on the right of the screen could be in essence traced back to a Dong Son source even though the physical evidence has entirely disappeared. Quarish Wales accepted Heinegelden's reconstruction and took it one or perhaps two steps further. His question was to which family did the art styles of the Indianized societies belong, the monumental associated with the older megalithic or the ornamental associated with Dong Son. Cambodia he decided was to be linked to the older megalithic Champa to Dong Son. How did this work in practice? At the time of culture contact the process would appear to be fairly straightforward. The receptive society would take from India those elements that seemed compatible with the indigenous culture but Quarish Wales was not satisfied with just that. Here is where the concept of local genius comes in. The local genius shaped by the earlier prehistoric culture becomes subsequently a kind of guiding force. In his own words it is the active agency which molds the borrowed material giving it an original twist and at the same time preserving and emphasizing the distinctive character of the evolution. The historical origins of the concept as Quarish Wales himself acknowledges are to be found in the writings of Dutch archaeologists working in Java and maintaining that the differences between the art of central Java in the eighth and ninth centuries and East Java and Bali in the 10th to 15th centuries is to be explained by a process of javonization meaning that the art of East Java reveals more similarities to prehistoric culture than does that of central Java. I have always resisted this concept of javonization but for reasons a little different from what is at stake at the present moment. The use of the term for me has suggested that the art of central Java is not truly javanese. That I cannot agree with. The two regions are equally javanese but in different ways. At any rate Quarish Wales writes in East Java once Indian control had been thrown off the local genius was even freer than in Champa and he quotes from a 1929 article from Willem Studerheim a Dutch archaeologist working in the Dutch East Indies. In any event the conception of the subconscious being are bound to conquer in the end. That which is indigenous is stronger than that which is alien." But Quarish Wales pulls away from Studerheim's use of the term subconscious. He says it's better to substitute not being in full consciousness. Nevertheless he does not convince us there that this is a meaningful distinction. In the course of the making of greater India he just varies the terminology somewhat. Cambodia he believes had a type of religion and a form of cosmic symbol identified by Quarish Wales as the god king or devaragia concept. They were expressive of deep-rooted pre-Indian convictions working through the medium of local genius and he also finds evidence of this devaragia cult in east Java which reappears in early form after had it long been repressed. Furthermore no actual evidence for the pre-Indianized belief need be present. It may be inferred in the pyramidal structures of Cambodia for instance if they are not the result of some foreign loan we should I think be justified in drawing the inference that the older megalithic genius was at work. Let's see how local genius is operating in Champa. Dong Saun art well known both from ancient bronzes and modern survival shows a love of complicated spirals circles linked by tangents meanders etc according to Quarish Wales. For Quarish Wales this general characterization is sufficient. It is different from Heine Gelderen's approach which depended on the isolation of quite specific details and here on the screen is an arch from the Cham site of Dong Xiuong from around 900 AD. Quarish Wales wrote the Cham tendency to put a carving a curving or wave defect into the Indian decorative motifs can be seen as arches, pilasters and freezes develop from the virtually Indian forms of the 8th century through the Walai and Dong Xiuong styles of the 9th and early part of the 10th century. The latter being the style in which the local genius attains its greatest activity. The local genius therefore is a kind of force pushing the direction of the evolution in a certain direction. I suppose genetically speaking it will be considered a kind of reversion to a mean. Surely this process does posit the existence of some sort of culture specific collective unconsciousness or unconscious. Most art historians on the other hand would want to analyze any particular development on the basis of specific visual experiences whether of the most recent art of the past or art of another country. In the case of the foliate leaves that hang from the stems in the Dong Xiuong ornament we might see them as variation on the pendant leaves hanging from a necklace is on the Ganesha from Misan. Similar pendant leaves can be found in Javanese sculpture of the 8th century. The design of each leaf is varied a little as in the sort of mirror reversals we might expect in textile designs. It is interesting that in this case where some observers might see a process of degeneration Quarish Wales finds the highest evidence of local genius at work. Surely however there is such a thing as cultural continuity. At this point Quarish Wales's citation of contemporary works by anthropologists and psychologists is only partially helpful. He refers to the psychological frontiers of society 1945 by Abram Cardiner. Cardiner was a psychiatrist at Columbia University who had actually been psychoanalyzed by Freud when he was young and who collaborated with members of the Columbia University Department of Anthropology in endeavoring how to understand collective culture traits and to think of cultures as having personalities. In general the sort of analysis he proposes brings to mind the somewhat earlier attempts to characterize societies. Ruth Benedict's patterns of culture with his Apollonian and Dionysian tribes peoples or Margaret Mead's studies of child rearing practices in Bali. Among the culture traits Cardiner believed should be analyzed are induction of affectivity solicitation of response handling play fondling but preferences for ornamental or preferences for monumental or ornamental art styles don't make it on to his list. So we are left with the problem of whether if we maintain that cultures are organic entities it is possible that known cultural traits suppose 95% of the totality of cultural traits can generate a missing 5% this 5% being the art styles or more optimistically if the induction of affectivity is constant generation to generation the character of the art shouldn't change much either. This brings to mind EH Gompricks lecture in search of cultural history and the ridicule he directed to Adolf Los's contention that given a single door knob he could reconstruct an entire civilization. In the western zone which includes Thailand extreme acculturation took place there was an initial indianisation that was so severe that local the local genius was entirely wiped out only degeneration was possible. In this context Quarish Wales later discussed that in regard to the ornamental in Dvaravadi wheels of the law which appears to have become increasingly schematic in the course of the 7th and 8th centuries the point could equally well be made on the basis of sculpture in terracotta and stucco where similarly robust complicated three dimensional coiffures and necklaces are turned into something simpler flatter and more based on incision as we move from the 7th into the 8th century though not all scholars are in agreement concerning these datings. Here we have another set of challenges is it possible that the initial adoption was so overwhelming that an entire population was turned into zombies if not what other kinds of explanation should be provided should we put the blame on a narrow group of hidebound patrons who discouraged creativity and absolved the population as a whole or should we avoid any attempt at explanation. George Sides wrote a rather positive review of the making of Greater India which was published in English in the journal Diogenes. This is his characterization of Quarish Wales's position. Without saying so in so many words he seems to look on the pre-Indian civilizations of south east Asians as venerable trees in which the Indian graft had provoked the flowering of the Javanese Khmer and other civilizations. To this Sides contrasted his own view. My impression but it is only an impression is that the ancient pre-Indian civilizations of Indochina and Indonesia whatever the label one cares to put on them have provided the more or less rich more or less complex soil in which some plant of foreign stock has grown and then that whatever country one looks at the plant is the same and displays only such differences as are due to the differences of soil. Was the Indian tree planted roots and all Sides's view or was it only grafted onto a native tree the view attributed to Quarish Wales. Today if we have students who want to know the answer to this question we are likely to send them first to the work of another scholar with deep ties to the School of Oriental and African Studies Oliver Walters and in history culture and region in south east Asian perspectives after making our way through hundreds of footnotes and 148 pages of additional nuances in appendix after appendix and post script after post script will we will be prepared to discuss the issues knowledgeably but will surely feel somewhat nostalgic for the days of Quarish Wales's bold propositions.