ABSTRACT
In his lectures in the classroom and in the seminar rooms Professor Damodar SarDesai made reference to the ideas of Jacob Cornelius van Leur (1908-42).1 This was not van Leur’s idea of the ‘thin, easily flaking glaze on the massive body of indigenous civilization’, although it has been an invaluable and indispensable tool in researching and teaching Southeast Asian history, but, instead, his statement that in the writing of its history, ‘the Indies were observed from the deck of the ship, the rampart of the fortress, the high gallery of the trading house. There lingers something highly unsatisfactory here’.2
