The first president of the South Asian Studies Association of Australia, Emeritus Professor Marjorie Jacobs AO, passed away in late 2013. Her life spanned most of the twentieth century, from 1915 to 2013, and was one of considerable and distinguished achievement. She had a brilliant undergraduate and graduate career, being awarded a University Medal for her BA in History, the Frank Albert Prize in Anthropology and another University Medal for a Master's in History—the highest research degree then offered in Australia's tertiary structures. Already showing her interest in colonial subjectivities, Marjorie's research thesis was on German colonialism in New Guinea and the Pacific. She joined the History Department of the University of Sydney in 1938, but left to take part in the war effort during World War II via a two-year stint with G2 Intelligence in the US Army, being stationed first in Sydney and later in Brisbane when General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, SWPA, moved Allied HQ northwards in 1942.
After the war, Marjorie returned to a tenured position in the History Department and, in 1946, travelled to London for eighteen months’ research. There, she participated in the lively debates and conversations that characterised the aftermath of the War, and attended seminars in London's plethora of scholarly institutions. What particularly attracted her attention were the discussions on the future of Britain's ex-colonies, highly relevant given the onset of independence for Burma (now Myanmar) and India and the breaking down of the British Empire.
Her growing interest in India was reinforced by a once in a generation massive exhibition of Indian art on show at the Royal Academy—it was an event Marjorie remembered vividly and which later influenced her lecturing and research on India. On the way back to Australia in 1948, a further experience heightened her interest in Indian history. Her ship sailed into Bombay (now Mumbai) very soon after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, so she was able to observe the mass outbreak of feeling over his death, see the enormous commemorative meetings on Chowpatty Beach and get a sense of what the independence struggle had meant in terms of mass involvement.
On her return to the University of Sydney, she expanded the study of India in the History Department and successfully, via an influential article in the Australian Quarterly, opposed a proposal to remove the primarily language-focused Oriental Studies Department from the University. She argued that Australia could not hope to remain ‘as delightfully self-centred as she was two generations ago’ and detected in the wider community outside the university a growing interest in Asia. She argued there was an urgent need to cultivate for the national good a broad background of understanding of these areas.Footnote Such sentiments would seem to be as relevant today as they were in the 1950s.
In pioneering courses in the 1950s, Marjorie moved away from the hitherto conventional focus on the study of imperial governance and decolonisation as a measured transition of colonies to self-government. She sought to provide a different emphasis by a re-focus on the autonomy of the colonised. Her position as described in the History Department's centennial volume was that she:
…did not deny a British/European place in the transformation of modern Asian nation states but primacy was assigned to indigenous agency: to the visions of a Gandhi, Nkrumah or Nehru. The Nehruvian third world order provided an alternative to the structures of European power and European ideology. Alternatives were possible and did exist in the new orders and new visions of non-European society, its struggles against foreign imperialism and its endeavours to create social and state orders distinct from the structures the European universe regarded as axiomatic.Footnote
In the process of developing this approach, she created popular undergraduate courses that suited the new awareness of Asia that emerged stridently and unmistakably in the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, she also built up a body of students who would later move into postgraduate research. They were attracted by her intellectual adventurousness and by how she made the alien familiar—and exciting. She elicited rigorous and positive responses in students and in terms of present-day academic-speak, she achieved splendid outcomes. She was a skilful teacher, a fine colleague and a good friend.
In 1967, Marjorie was appointed an Associate Professor and then Professor in 1969. She was the first female professor in the History Department and the University's second female professor—the first being Dame Leonie Kramer in English in 1968. Professor Jacobs was enabled to recommend appointments in Asian history and built up a significant nucleus of historians specialising in India, Thailand, Indonesia and China. For her work in education, she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1989, recognition of a lifetime of professional achievement that also acknowledged the range of her activities, apart from those around South Asia.
There remains another aspect of her career that requires mention on these pages of South Asia. By the beginning of the 1970s, many universities around Australia were building lively South Asian units of study. Notable was Professor D.A. Low at the ANU, but other eminent subcontinent-concerned scholars were attracted to Australian and New Zealand universities—among them to the universities of New South Wales, Queensland, Newcastle, New England, Tasmania, Melbourne, Adelaide, Western Australia, Christchurch, Flinders, Curtin, La Trobe and Monash. There was need, given the rapid growth of South Asian studies across the continent, for an organisation that would provide a structure of meetings, conferences, news interchange and even an academic journal. A journal, however, was not possible without funding—difficult to find in those tight times. It was evident that an organisation would need to be established so as to provide funding for a journal. Out of various conversations across the country guided by Hugh Owen, Low, Jacobs and myself, we decided to set up the South Asian Studies Association (SASA), which would be responsible for publishing a journal of international calibre, one that would have an Australian flavour while providing a platform for the best of international research. Jacobs was a key figure in all the discussions around the birth of both SASA (January 1971) and this journal, South Asia (August 1971). She became SASA's first president and from that position, along with an enthusiastic executive, played a critical role in steering the Association through the processes and requirements needed to establish a successful professional body. Her commitment and achievement were subsequently recognised by her election to Honorary Life Membership of the Association. South Asia further honoured her with a festschrift issue in December 1982.
Notes
1 Marjorie Jacobs, ‘Oriental Studies in The University of Sydney’, in Australian Quarterly (June 1953), pp. 82–90.
2 Jim Masselos and Roslyn Pesman Cooper, ‘Marjorie Jacobs’, in Barbara Caine et al. (eds), History at Sydney, 1891–1991: Centenary Reflections (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1992), p. 65.