In Burma, the appearance of Setkya-mins and other Buddhist Messiahs became intensified after the annexation of lower Burma in 1852. The very use of the name Setkya-min by a certain Maung Tsetkya enabled him to collect followers for a revolt in Pegu, thus the authority a leader was simply due to a name.
In Vietnam, rural rebellion was in the form of the Saya Sun uprising, the most significant manifestation of anti-colonial activity between 1885 and the Pacific War. He was a former monk and a practitioner of ‘native’ medicine, and the traditional aspects of the revolt have attracted much attention, his goal of restoring the monarchy. However so, he also had extensive experience in more modernist anti-colonial movements, in particular in faction of the GCBA concerned with peasant grievances. In the mid 1930s a major strike at the University of Rangoon, and also young activists taking over the Dobama Asiayone, a nationalist organization originally founded in 1930 by older leaders. The student leaders appropriated themselves to the title thakin, and included the charismatic Aung San who had the confidence of the non Burman minorities and U Nu.
The religious factor also played an outstandingly important role in fostering early anti-Western sentiment, especially where it involved the encounter between Islam and Roman Catholicism, carried by Portuguese and Spaniard in to the Indian Ocean. Very often too, dynastic ambitions almost always stood in the way of a united religious front that could have obstructed the growth of western power in Southeast Asia.
In Burma and Vietnam which experienced a direct foreign invasion, the British and French represented alien cosmologies which threatened the Buddhist and Confucian orders, wide spread resistance could be generated through appeals for a “holy war” to preserve the integrity of a civilization or to restore its greatness.
In Burma, the series of wars, military defeats and foreign occupations could not have been viewed in terms of the Buddhist conception of history as signs of the age of world decline, which would be followed by a new age. Thus, the retreat and fall of the Konbaung dynasty, while causing dislocation and a sense of loss, also pointed towards a future in which the kingdom and a perfect Buddhist society would arise and the Future Buddha would finally descend. This ideological context helps explain the forms and intensity of popular resistance to British occupation. Just before the final wars with the British, King Thibaw had announced that he will march forth with his army to expel the British from Burma, to uphold the honour of Buddhism and the country, to “gain for us the notable result of placing us on the path to the celestial regions and Nirvana, the eternal rest. His fight failed, but the framing of the struggle in Buddhist terms ensured a continuance of popular resistance despite the loss of the monarchy.
In Vietnam under the banner of the Popular Self-Defence movement, the scholars drew upon Confucian ideals to mobilize the peasants behind the throne, a good many of the armed partisan unit, even under that banner, were actually religio-political or sectarian in nature. Confucian scholars and emergent Buddha-Masters had found common ground in the anti-colonial struggle.
In Java, holy men, all hajjis, circulated through the branches of the Kadiriah tarekat in the Bantern region, propagating the message of jihad and the coming of the Iman Mahdi to packed audiences in the mosques. When hostilities broke out in Cilegon in July 1888, the ragtag army was composed largely of peasants convinced they were invulnerable in waging the holy war. Despite the indiscriminate persecution of hajjis, Islamic teachers and mystics continued to circulate surreptitiously throughout the tarekat and pesantren networks, bands of gurus and pupils re-emerged from time to time threatening new insurrections.
In the Philippines, Christianity could also lead to dissatisfaction with colonial rule and offer an idiom of resistance to it. In 1817, protestant converts led by an Ambonese Christian solder, Thomas Matulesia, rose against the Dutch, invoking biblical themes to legitimize their action. In the Batak region, the Christian God was seen as a source of power to counter missionary hegemony. An example was the Sadrach movement in central java. Sadrach addressed his followers with Christian formulae and soon large groups of followers came under his leadership, and by 1887, his circle involved seventy local and seven regional groups. This congregation was independent of the Christian Church the members being personally loyal to Sadrach.
Thus as seen, religion had played a very important role in various nationalist movements in Southeast Asia, it being the main “glue” that brought the people together and binded them as one to bring about such movements. However although religion seemed to have played important role, most of the time it was closely related to political reasons, and was a method used by leaders to get the people together, for example the Sarekat Islam, where unlike its name implies, was not fully a religious movement, was more to counter Dutch and Chinese economic dominance, though it was expressed in terms of religion.
In the cities and towns of Southeast Asia, more and more of the elites were coming to the fore, being educated in modern schools. These young Southeast Asians where thus increasingly attuned to foreign intellectual and political influences, while at the same time confronting Western material and spiritual, Christian or secular, inroads at home. Both impacts led them to seek new certainties to counter the challenge of Western dominance. The confrontation with the West forced many thoughtful Southeast Asians – with the exception of the dwindling proponents of a continued, stubborn retreat from modernity – to search for a new identity. The partly Western-schooled leaders were not so much interested in religious matters or reform as in the search for a Burmese identity.
There were also tensions arising from economic issues, in many colonies, there was more than just one community, and very often the Chinese and the Indians were targeted as they played an important economic role and thus the dislike coming from the indigenous people.
As mentioned earlier the Sarekat Islam of Indonesia was not just based fully on the premise of religion, it was initially set up to counter the Dutch and Chinese economic dominance, formed in 1912 when both groups had considerable economic influence in the Indies. They organized boycotts against Chinese merchants, which ended up in violence in the beginning of 1912.
In conclusion, as seen above, there are various factors in play concerning the nationalist movements in Southeast Asia, namely leadership, religion, economic interest. As seen above, religion seems to play a very important role in most of the movements, it being the binding force of the people. However in my opinion, I would think that still effective leadership is more important than religion as it is that brings the different segregated groups of people together into an organization with a stronger political voice. Thus the effective leadership is of great importance in the nationalist movements of Southeast Asia.
