Industrializations and Revolutions

"The Mahabharata and the Ramayana never knew of a revolution. Something new. And these [Javanese] farmers never knew that this Earth has witnessed so many revolutions. And their own ancestors has witnessed one, although their poets has never mentioned it: the Revolution of Arok, the opening of a new era, from the Javanese Hindu to the Hinduist Java..."

-A Mute's Soliloquy, Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Toer was arguably Indonesia's most prominent author who was nominated for a Nobel Prize shortly before died. His works, many of them written during his fourteen-year internment, are incredibly reflective of the Javanese identity and the invention of Indonesia as a nation-state. I stumbled upon PDFs of his work here in Pune while working on a Sanskrit epic - the Mahabharata - thousands of miles away and enabled by American universites, yet this Indian experience is only inches away from my feelings as an Indonesian, and as a (half) Javanese. And so, for the next couple of paragraphs, allow to generalize South and most of Southeast Asia as post-colonial nations.

If the Industrial Revolution and the two World Wars are what propelled the Western world and Japan into their current states of relative political and economic well-being, then I'd say that most if not all post-colonial nations have never experienced revolutions that propelled them into modernity. We were, for the lack of a better term, dragged into the vulnerability of post-colonial independence by the well-intended albeit idealistic evolutions of our Westernized indigenous elites in the middle of the 20th-century. Since then, my older Indonesian cousins, like so many upper-class Indians, are corporate professionals and IT executives capable of working easily with their counterparts in virtually every wired city in the world.

Yet we are still, for good and bad reasons, nations of servants.

The peasantry may have moved to the cities to work blue-collar jobs, or even abroad to find low-key employment as migrant workers. And in the process we have hailed them as heroes of development through their stream of remittances that keeps the engines of construction chugging in palces like Kerala and Central Java. Yet we never propelled them into the state of ideological and economic autonomy that is the middle class, because of, among others, we have never experienced a state of industrial revolution as much as a state of industrialization.

I'm not arguing for a forced overnight transformation through double-digit growth that, for instance, China is experiencing, but post-colonial nations would never achieve the state of well-being that they associate with the devloped world until we reach a tipping point during which the descendants of the colonial peasantry cease to be servants - a point at which politically-motivated religious and moral dogmas cease to numb the jarring disparity their developmental policies have maintained. Maybe that will inevitably be a painful moment of upheaval, but perhaps that is the only alternative to a permanent state of complacency.