Charismatic Queens

De beroemde Zuidoost Azië specialist Anthony Reid komt naar Leiden, en wordt door ons geïnterviewd voor het journal Itinerario. Bij het doornemen van zijn - nogal omvangrijke - oeuvre, stuitte ik af en toe op onvermoede parels. Het volgende stuk moet absoluut even in het zonnetje worden gezet, alleen al omdat hij ook de culturele incentives voor vrouwelijk leiderschap bespreekt, en ze niet behandelt als historische uitzonderingen - wat meestal het geval is. Genoeg stof voor conversatie!

WITH THE ELECTION of Megawati Sukarnoputri to the Indonesian presidency in July 2001, Indonesia became the largest country to be governed by a woman, usurping the title previously held by Bangladesh, whose rival women leaders, 'the battling begums', have been alternating in power since 1991. The most populous country ever to have been governed by a woman is India, where Indira Gandhi was prime minister in two long stints, 1966-77 and 1980-84. In the ASEAN club of Southeast Asian leaders, Megawati joined her childhood acquaintance Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines. Arroyo had been in that country's highest office since 'people's power' toppled President Estrada the previous January. The path had been beaten by Cory Aquino, who filled the same office from 1986 to 1992. More than half of Southeast Asia's half billion people are now governed by women. Had the results of Burma's only recent open election, in 1988, been honoured, Burma (Myanmar) would also be governed by the charismatic Aung San Suu Kyi. Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India in South Asia, as well as Bangladesh, have all elected women heads of government since Sirimavo Bandaranaike blazed the trail in Sri Lanka in 1960.

There is no doubt, in other words, that the long battle to admit women to the highest pinnacles of power, which was fought predominately in Europe and its New World offshoots, has achieved its most spectacular results almost without a struggle, in southern Asia. Ever since Mrs Bandaranaike became the first woman head of government of the democratic era, the overwhelming majority of people being governed by women have been in these relatively poor countries. Yet in other respects women have not fared well there. The South Asian subcontinent has one of the world's worst records of injustice to women, including abysmal education and literacy rates, dowry killings and selective female abortion or infanticide. Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka have a better record of female education, economic autonomy, and participation in the workforce, but few politically prominent women except at the very top. What, then, explains the success of these ten women in the last thirty-five years -- two each in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, one in Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Burma?

Two features stand out. Firstly, they were all popularly elected, whereas their male counterparts frequently were not. Megawati in 1999 won the only free and fair election Indonesia has held since 1955, though she did not assume the presidency until the electoral college ousted Abdurrahman Wahid in her favour eighteen months later. Aung San Suu Kyi also won the only election held in Burma since the 1950s, while Benazir Bhutto has been long seen as the politician best able to win elections in Pakistan, and for that reason has been kept out of the country by successive dictators. One factor which has made female governance possible is the wider dispersion of electoral democracy since the late 1980s, after a long and often bitter experience of military coups. Nevertheless, below the charismatic leadership level, women have not been elected in great numbers to parliaments in these countries.

Secondly, all these women were related as widow or daughter to a widely admired male leader, always dead and usually assassinated. In chronological order, Sirimavo Bandaranaike took office under the mantle of her husband Solomon, assassinated in 1959. Her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga (prime minister for a few months before becoming long-term president in 1994) lost both father and husband to assassins. Indira Gandhi inherited leadership of India's Congress Party, and thence the nation, in 1966, only two years after the death in office of her father, independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru. Benazir Bhutto inherited the mantle of her executed father Z.A. Bhutto, first as populist leader of the Pakistan Peoples' Party, then as president. Suu Kyi, the daughter of Burma's assassinated first prime minister, General Aung San, returned from Oxford to lead the Democracy League in the crisis which led to the 1988 election.

When democracy was restored in Bangladesh after a series of military coups, the 1991 elections pitted thee widow of one independence hero and president, General Ziaur Rahman, assassinated in 1981, against the daughter of another, Syech Mujibur Rahman, assassinated with most of his family in 1975. Cory Aquino won the Philippine election of 1986 after one 'people's power' uprising against President Marcos, held to be responsible for the murder of her husband; Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was brought to power in a second, more middle-class 'people's power' movement against the elected movie star Estrada, evoking the memory of her father Diosdado Macapagal, a relatively successful president of the pre-Marcos era. Finally Megawati Sukarnoputri was able to exploit the memory of her father, Indonesia's populist but unelected first president, in contrast with the economically successful but corrupt second president, Suharto.

Another factor may be less frequently repeated in the future. All the countries in question were former colonies grappling with the colonial legacy of democratic aspirations without much democratic experience. Half of the dead males whose names were appealed to gained their charisma in the successful struggle for independence -- against Britain in India and Burma, against the Netherlands in Indonesia, and against Pakistan in Bangladesh. Others might be considered exemplars of the struggle for democracy more broadly (Aquino, Bhutto).
The sons or brothers of these dead rulers did not benefit in the same way. In fact those sons who were advanced to positions of power by their dictator fathers -- Marcos, Suharto, Thanom Kittikachorno in Thailand -- never fared well. With the exception of Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Nehru and son of Indira, only women apparently could tap the charisma of the deceased.
Is there some common element in the values of this region which has encouraged female rule, or at least facilitated it? If so, it seems not to be formal religion. Of the ten female rulers in question, four have been Muslim, three Theravada Buddhist, two Catholic and one Hindu. All of these scriptural traditions were historically hostile to women rulers.

A Southeast Asian pattern of bilateral kinship, in which women as well as men can inherit rank and property from their parents, does seem to have helped women to positions of influence there. In particular the Austronesian societies of today's Indonesia and the Philippines (and Polynesia and Madagascar, with their own redoubtable queens), have been historically [ inclined to favour appropriate descent over maleness as a criterion for kingship. In fact legitimacy often derived from marrying the right woman, such as the legendary queen known in Javanese tradition as the lady of the 'flaming womb'. These factors seem not to have applied in South Asia, despite a few notable examples of queens.

Can the pasts of these societies provide clues for explaining this phenomenon today? As it happens there is a quite exceptional pattern of female rulers in particular times and places in Southeast Asian history.

Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, the period most remarkably endowed with female rulers in Southeast Asian history was that between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Almost all were maritime states undergoing a commercial revolution. King Hayam Wuruk is renowned as the great conqueror of Javanese history, but the ruler before him (his mother), and the two who followed him, were all female. Women therefore ruled Java in the periods 1330-50 and 1389-1429. The Muslim Maldives, the last stop for Arab travelers such as Ibn Battuta before they reached Sumatra and the other 'lands below the winds', raised three women in succession to the throne in the period 1347-88, two sisters and a niece of the previous male ruler.
Pasai, the first Muslim port-state in Southeast Asia and predecessor of Aceh, established the north Sumatra tradition of prominent queens. The beautiful tombs remain of two who ruled at the height of Pasai's commercial pre-eminence in the early fifteenth century. Numerous other states were ruled by queens at times of relative commercial prosperity, including Pegu in modern Burma; Banten, Jambi, Solor and Sukadena in today's Indonesia; and Kelantan (adjacent to Patani and influenced by it) now in Malaysia.

The most important and well-documented cases, however, are Patani (Pattani in modern Thai) and Aceh, each of which raised four or more successive queens to the throne. Patani was a very mixed Malay/Chinese/Thai port-state on the east coast of the Peninsula, which had begun to flourish commercially by the 1560s when a couple of thousand Chinese 'pirates' (the language used in the Ming annals for unfilial or anti-Ming traders) made it their base. The politics of this period were disturbed, however, after the death during an attack on Ayutthaya (Siam) Of Sultan Mudhaffar Shah (c. 1540-64), an autocratic figure given to seizing the estates of the large merchants, according to the Portuguese chronicler Mendez Pinto. After twenty years' of unstable rule, the mercantile elite decided in 1584 to give the throne to the sister of the murdered king, who ruled as Raja Ijau -- the 'great queen'.

This lady ruled with apparent success for thirty-two years, and was on the throne when the first Dutch and English Company agents visited Patani. One of these, Jacob van Neck, writing in 1604, reported a relatively prosperous state under Raja Ijau, one well-disposed to merchants:
... so that all the subjects consider her government better than that of the dead king. For all necessities are very cheap here now, whereas in the king's time (so they say) they were dearer by half, because of the great exactions which then occurred...

The Queen was one of the major traders and financiers of the city. Her Malay monarchy absorbed a diversity of foreign traders into a polyglot elite united by the royal person, a Malay lingua franca, and a pattern of rules and sacred regalia passed down from courts such as Malacca and Pasai. Chinese were the major merchants, but the most important of them, like the leading commercial official Datu Sirinara, had adopted Islam and the Malay manners of the court.
The more revolutionary move was not Raja Ijau's appointment so much as her replacement on her death by another woman, apparently her sister and, like her, unmarried. The rise to the throne of Raja Biru ('the blue queen') in 1616, does suggest that the orangkaya class of merchant-aristocrats, in the words of the seventeenth-century French visitor to Siam Nicholas Gervaise, 'were weary of obeying kings who maltreated them, and shook off their yoke' in favour of queens. It became a political preference, and increasingly a recognised system. When she in turn died in 1624, a third sister, who would have had to be nearly sixty, came to the throne as Raja Ungu ('the purple queen'). She had previously married the neighbouring Sultan of Pahang, which caused some tension until it was established that each would continue to live in their own state. She had had a daughter by him (we do not know if there were also sons), who became Raja Kuning ('the yellow queen') in 1636.

This queen, the last of those whom the Patani chronicles acknowledge as legitimate, appears to have ruled into the 1650s. European traders found Patani less attractive than some of its neighbours in the second half of the century, and consequently sources are scarce. From the reports deposed in Nagasaki by Chinese junk captains, however, we know that the system of queens continued at least into the 1690s, through two debilitating invasions by Siam in 1674 and 1688. The Chinese reports describe a system where the hereditary principle had been sacrificed in favour of preserving the virginity of the queens. Any girl baby with favourable signs could be selected to replace a dying queen, they claimed. By this stage the evolution of monarchy appeared complete, into a charismatic but powerless symbol of the state.

The other contemporary state to adopt this pattern, presumably on the model of Patani, was Aceh (Sumatra), the most powerful maritime sultanate of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Southeast Asia. The power of this sultanate was brought to a peak by Sultan Iskandar Muda ('the young Alexander', 1604-37), an exceptionally astute and ruthless conqueror who extended Aceh's sway to most of the Malayan Peninsula and the coastal regions of the northern half of Sumatra. Internally he was a scourge to the mercantile elite, concentrating power, property and trade in his own hands by a series of tyrannical devices. The most careful foreign observer of his reign, Augustin de Beaulieu, noted that 'He has exterminated all the ancient nobility, and has created new ones.' This new elite were his military commanders, rewarded with land grants, but required to stay unarmed in the palace by rotation every third night, as hostages in the event of any stirrings of rebellion:

He draws great profit from those he daily puts to death... He has depopulated the whole territory of Aceh and drained everybody of their money, even all the foreigners who have been here.
On the positive side, he is remembered as a great law-giver, who enabled the poor to live in greater security than previously, and maintained Aceh's independence at a time when other kingdoms were falling.

Among Iskandar Muda's many victims was his own son, so that at his death he left only a daughter, whose husband, a prince of Pahang, had been adopted as a favoured successor by the Sultan. This man succeeded to the throne as Iskandar Thani, and was a much more predictable, pious figure, who sought to impose the shari'a law. If he reassured the merchant-aristocrats, he also alienated many of the populace by his support of the harshly orthodox Gujarati ulama, Sheikh Nurud-din arRaniri, who led a campaign of persecution of the works and supporters of the much-loved Sumatran poet and mystic, Hamzah Fansuri.

At Sultan Iskandar Thani's death in 1641, therefore, there was a reaction against the rule of both these men. After some days of dispute among the leading factions in the capital, the woman who was both Iskandar Muda's daughter and Iskandar Thani's widow was elevated to the throne as Sultana Safiyyat ad-Din Taj al-Alam Syah (1641-75). Aceh was a much bigger city and state than Patani, and saw itself as the leading example of Islamic learning and governance in Southeast Asia (much like Pakistan at Benazir Bhutto's election to office). Its cosmopolitan capital was home to the leading Islamic scholars of the day. One of them, Bokhari of Johor, had composed there the principal Malay-language manual of kingship, the Taj as-Salatin. This strongly counseled against female rule, though conceding that it was preferable to anarchy if there was no conceivable male heir available. There is little doubt that the literalist scholar Raniri, favourite of Iskandar Thani, would have been among those condemning female rule on religious grounds. It is indicative of the popular element in the rise of Safiyyat ad-Din that soon after her accession mobs in the street demanded that Raniri be executed, in revenge for the many followers of Hamzah Fansuri he had put to death. Raniri was obliged secretly to flee Aceh.
T
he Dutch factor Pieter Sourij provided an important clue to the advantages of the Queen's regime only a year after it had begun in Aceh, when he described an outing with the court and foreign merchants to the Queen's pleasure garden at a beautiful spring. Among the entertainments provided was a recitation of verse in honour of the Sultana's father, Sultan Iskandar Muda. This brought tears to the eyes of the Acehnese, Sourij tells us, since 'although dreaded in his life, he has however left for good among the Acehnese nation an immortal name.' The English trader Bowrey, who praised Aceh's 'good laws and government' in 1675, was only half right in claiming that 'The very name of kinge is long since become nautious to them, first caused through the Tyrannical Government of their last king'. In fact the Acehnese elite wanted the charisma of the mighty tyrant, but not a repetition of his actions.

Aceh under this queen was orderly and prosperous, with a climate favourable to foreign commerce. Four of the principal merchant-aristocrats formed a kind of executive council which took many decisions, and the Queen's authority was partly derived from a careful balancing of the two major factions at the court. Land grants to the Sultan's loyal war leaders, which had been at the king's pleasure under the two previous male rulers, became hereditary under Safiyyat ad-Din. She in fact resolved one major dispute by ruling that only grants of land made by her father would be recognised as valid in perpetuity, thus invoking his name to support a policy he would never have approved.

The experiment with female rule was deemed so successful by the ruling oligarchy in the capital that it was repeated three more times, at the death of queens in 1675, 1678; and 1688. Each time the election of the queen was more heavily contested by the now-hereditary descendants of those who had received land grants from Iskandar Muda. Chief among them were the family known by the title Panglima Polem ('older brother commander'), whose originator claimed to be an illegitimate son of Iskandar Muda, older than the daughter who took the throne. Islamic opposition increasingly made common cause with dynastic and anti-commercial factors, and in the 1690s a mission was even sent to Mecca to obtain a fatwa against female rule. The opposition to the established system became politically stronger as the trade wealth of the merchant-aristocrats diminished with Aceh's gradually less central role as entrepôt. The eventual beneficiaries from the upheavals of 1699, however, were not the Panglima Polem family but a Hadramaut Arab dynasty. Its advent inaugurated a time of grave instability for Aceh, which never recovered the orderly reputation the queens had given it.

Both in Patani and in Aceh, female rule began with a queen who enjoyed powerful charisma through a dead father, but ended with queens whose legitimacy on these grounds was no greater than that of many men. The continuance of the system of queens through several more generations, therefore, must be understood as an institutionalisation akin to the constitutional measures that developed in other societies. Although we have no documents to prove it, a conscious preference for women rulers as a curb on tyranny seems clear.

A final point is that all the states which can definitely be said to have exercised a preference for women by raising three or more to the throne in succession -- Maldives, Patani, Aceh -- were Islamic. So was the only analogous case in India, where the princely sultanate of Bhopal appointed four successive female rulers between 1819 and 1926. Given the hostility to female rule of much Islamic canonical writing, one wonders whether queens may have been seen as ineligible to direct religious affairs, and therefore more compatible with a necessary religious pluralism.

What do these experiments in the early modern era tell us about Southeast Asian attitudes to women and governance more generally? Firstly, they confirm a social fact. Women rulers were thinkable because status, property and legitimacy could be inherited through daughters as well as sons. This factor is especially marked in Southeast Asia, and continues to operate today despite the male bias of the world religions. Secondly, certain conditions appeared to favour female rule in commercially-orientated states of the Southeast Asian 'age of commerce' -- the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Because commercial interests were so important in these circumstances, they needed to find a means to protect property and create a stable, predictable environment. Similar interests in Europe developed courts, parliaments, financial institutions and urban autonomies, often in violent confrontation with monarchy.

Why did the feminisation of monarchy in Southeast Asia take the place of constitutionalism elsewhere? This takes us into the nature of the 'gunpowder empires', which rapidly created unprecedented concentrations of power in a region whose history and environment had been resistant to strong states. Sultan Iskandar Muda in Aceh, like a number of early seventeenth-century contemporaries, appealed to new and alien ideas of exalted kingship to justify the power that had come through trade and guns. This power was necessary to maintain order and independence at a dangerous time when Europeans were seeking monopoly rights over pepper and spices. But because it was alien to the local tradition, this kind of power came with few in-built theoretical limitations.

By appointing queens, the mercantile oligarchs were attempting to capture the legitimacy the tyrant's power had generated, but to limit the use of that power. They were experimenting with the new concept of a strong state that did not have to be an arbitrary state; a government that not only made laws but lived by them. It turned out that the first female ruler, in Aceh as in Patani, achieved this rather well. She represented the still fresh prestige of a mighty king and lawgiver, but did not waste the state's resources in warfare, nor fear the wealth of successful merchants. The rule of these women was not simply a weak version of male monarchy; it also partook of some of the attributes that women were expected to show in Southeast Asian societies. Women were everywhere entrusted with the handling of money, the buying and selling of goods, the promotion of the family as a business and the making of deals. Men, by contrast, had to be concerned with status, and therefore to show indifference to wealth or even profligacy with it. The queens did in fact demonstrate a much more business like attitude to matters of state than their male predecessors, as they would have been expected to.

Colonialism gave these societies an experience of the rule of law combined with the central monopoly of force that goes with modern states. But colonial regimes had an acute problem of legitimacy, and the ultimate checks on arbitrary government were in European parliaments, not in the colonies themselves. Postcolonial governments faced again the dilemma of how to combine these three elements -- legitimacy, strong and effective governance, and the kind of constitutionality that could prevent tyranny. The first generation of leaders, who enjoyed the charisma of obtaining independence, had legitimacy in abundance. They experienced more difficulty delivering the other two elements. Democratic regimes disappointed the hopes of independence by the appearance of division, corruption and stalemate; many were overtaken by military coups or more authoritarian regimes which suppressed opposition without delivering effective government in most cases. Because there was under colonial rule little practical experience of constitutionalism (with the exception of India) or debate about it, authoritarian ambition had little difficulty dressing itself in the mantle of nationalism.

In the late 1980s, beginning with 'people's power' in the Philippines, there was a movement of return to democratic electoral politics which affected also Burma, Bangladesh and finally Indonesia. The problem of how to combine the three elements mentioned above remained, however. The wives and daughters of the first generation of independence leaders enjoyed the great advantage of the legitimacy derived from the dead hero, without the same danger of repeating his autocratic tendencies. At least in the eyes of the males who largely made these decisions, women leaders were less likely to use the charisma of power arbitrarily to destroy critics and perpetuate their own power. They were less feared by the oligarchs and power-brokers of the new (male) elite. In this they were not unlike the merchant-aristocrats of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It would be easy to be cynical about the actual performance of the women once in power. So far, however, none of those elected as part of the return to constitutional democracy (Indira Gandhi may be in a different category) have used their charisma to destroy the constitutional process itself. History may therefore judge this second remarkable phase of female rule as a significant step towards more stable forms of democratic governance.