When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker

assimilate French culture and become nationals of the great French metropolitan society, or should allow the local culture to survive alongside the French culture, which only the elite natives could assimilate anyway. The latter argument won out, for practical and political reasons.
    The cost of turning natives into French-speaking and French-acting citizens of the Metropole was prohibitive; moreover, it was far more provocative to those natives fighting France precisely because colonization spelled the death of their culture and the prospects for becoming modern nations. The French scholars hoping to improve French understanding of the Oriental world were the standard-bearers for politicians who claimed to be seeking to preserve local cultures. They provided a new argument for preserving Cambodia as a separate country, helping to stop the French administrators in Saigon who continued lobbying for its inclusion in Cochin China.

    The consequences of this scholarship reached far beyond the immediate political debate. During nearly one century of painstaking labor, French archaeologists, historians, and linguists “resurrected” Cambodia’s buried history and launched a Khmer sense of nationhood. Around Angkor the French rebuilt seventy-two stone temples, including Angkor Wat itself. This reconstruction was an essential part of the historical investigations. Also reconstructed were a set of views about Angkor’s source of power, its sense of itself and its basis for legitimacy Through the reconstruction efforts the French archaeologists uncovered the old irrigation network of tanks, dams, and dikes. Much of what is known today about Cambodia’s past was discovered by these French scholars, but this knowledge was passed along with the French prejudices, assumptions, and errors as unchallengable truths to the first generation of school-educated Cambodians.
    Their work was presented as a tonic for the Khmers, who were told that their pride was so regularly trampled by Siam, Vietnam, and French administrators. Cambodians in the twentieth century at least had a past they could be proud of. With their historical discoveries, the French gradually revived ailing Khmer institutions as well, renovating the traditional Buddhist schools, the Buddhist religion, even the monarchy.
    A few French men and women were responsible for the majority of scholarship that directly affected how modern Cambodians saw themselves. One was a remarkable woman named Suzanne Karpelès who encouraged a quiet renaissance of Buddhism that later fed Cambodia’s independence movement. She was attached to the Ecole Française d’Extrème Orient in Hanoi, then the world’s finest center of Orientalism. Karpelès came to Phnom Penh to build the royal library into a repository of irreplaceable Buddhist texts and relics she collected both for safekeeping and to instruct the Cambodian bonzes, or monks, in texts that had long been ignored.
    Her mandate was to reeducate the Buddhist monks in what the French considered their traditional faith and erase much of the “superstitious practice” that had “corrupted” Theravada Buddhism (Buddhism of the smaller vehicle) in Indochina. The library established the Buddhist Institute in 1930. The Institute was the only center based in Cambodia that brought in students from other Indochinese colonies, largely the Cambodian minority living in Cochin China. (Vietnamese Buddhists, a minority in their country, practiced Mahayana Buddhism—Buddhism of the larger vehicle.)
    These Cambodians from southern Vietnam, the Khmer Krom, became part of Karpelès’s larger project to revitalize Cambodian culture, pride, and aspirations. She surveyed the Cambodian minority community in southern
Vietnam and led a crusade encouraging Cambodians to remember that the entire Mekong Delta was once their homeland. (In fact, the lower delta was Cambodian for only a short while, perhaps a