Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiapreserved examples of the kinds of pre-colonial indigenous sources
conventionally favoured by historians, largely those written texts that
were produced for royal courts and are easily accessible in both palm leaf
and printed form in major libraries both within the region and in Europe.
Royal scribes were not tasked in their own time with preserving an
unbiased historical record for future generations of everyday, common
folk. Court scribes worked within a literary as well as a moral economy
that established the boundaries for their work. Their role was to make a
record of whatever events and developments were considered important
for the ruling family and its elites to remember, to record (and embel-
lish) the accomplishments of their royal patrons, and to provide moral
guidance to future kings. This meant that royal scribes generally screened
out rural folk in their prose and focused attention on the prominence of
the king and the court. They also read all warfare by a royal register.^8 In
this view, wars were fought almost always over religious transgressions,
to acquire white elephants, or to restore universal harmony often after
evidence of disunity in the religion in Theravada Buddhist societies or
in the national “family” in Vietnam. Wars were also always waged by
organized armies that were mobilized and often led into the field by the
king himself, accompanied by his court. Similarly, anthropological work
on the Eastern Indonesian Archipelago has demonstrated that written
records there, even when written by local scholars, were subject to par-
ticular narrative and literary conventions that led them to transform war-
riors on the periphery in ways acceptable to “central power”, essentially
“Javaniz[ing]” them and this process influenced their historical depiction
by contemporary Indonesian historians.^9
Southeast Asian chronicles and murals produced for the royal court
were framed by religious and political paradigms that required a strong,
centralizing ruler, the size, and strength of whose armies reflected moral
superiority. These paradigms were derived originally from Indian classi-
cal religious thought such as those outlined by Sunait Chutintaranond.
Especially important as a model for the role of the king in a war was
the Sanskrit concept of the cakravartin or world conqueror (literally,
- The author has made a related argument on the strategic use of hyperbole in
royal sources from Burma in Michael W. Charney, “A Reassessment of Hyperbolic
Military Statistics in Some Early Modern Burmese Texts”, 193–214. - Janet Hoskins, “The Headhunter as Hero”, 614.