The French attitude was largely self-fulfilling. French rule did little to prepare Cambodia for the modern world. Life for most of the population remained much the same as it had been since Angkorian times, revolving around the cycles of subsistence agriculture. Instead of employing Khmers, the French brought in Vietnamese to staff the civil service and work the colonial rubber plantations.6 Electricity and running water were rare outside Phnom Penh. Until the 1930s, practically nothing was spent on schooling. The country’s first high school, the Lycée Sisowath, only opened its doors in 1936, and the number of Cambodian university graduates to that point was barely enough to fill a small seminar room.
Most education took place, as it had for centuries, in the country’s Buddhist wats, where monks instructed boys in part through the use of religious treatises known as chbap—a series of moral aphorisms and tenets that provided students with a rigid code of worldly conduct. The chbap counseled passivity and acceptance and enforced strict social relationships between men and women, parents and children, rulers and ruled. In contrast with Confucian conceptions of social hierarchy, these were seen to flow from the moral worldview of Theravada Buddhism, by which a person’s present fate depended on merit earned by good deeds in past lives. In the world of the chbap, deference and fatalism took precedence over the pursuit of social or economic justice.

Cambodian Literature
by Judy Ledgerwoord
Dept. of Anthropology
Northern Illinois University

Aksar roluat jeat roleay Aksar ponnareay jeat thlai thla .
If letters disappear, the nation will disappear
If letters are brilliant, the nation is excellent.

The Khmer word, aksarsastra, generally defined as "literature", comes from the base, aksar, meaning letter or script. In addition to what we would think of as literature, the study of texts, the word also has the connotation of the study of writing, of "letters". Thus studies of Khmer aksarsastra generally begin with the study of Khmer stone inscriptions. Rather than a complete review of all such works, what follows is only a brief glimpse of some of the different genres of Khmer literature and a sense of change over time. The earliest inscriptions in Khmer date from the 7th century AD The "classical" works of Khmer literature were written between the 16th and 19th centuries. Nepote and Khing write of these works:

For centuries, classical Cambodian literature followed a well-defined
pattern. Comprised mostly of verse, its language is characterized
by symmetry and circumlocution, with the rhythm of the sentence
prevailing over punctuation. Its vocabulary was carefully selected and
comprised archaism, borrowed terms and metaphors, the hallmark of
"appropriate" language. It was partly inspired by Indian literature and
was linked to two institutions: the palaces of princes and mandarins,
and the Buddhist monasteries (1981:56).

The stylized language, the use of complex rhyme schemes, and archaic language means that these works are extremely difficult to read. Jacob writes for example of the Ramakerti (the Cambodian version of the Ramayana) that, "with its early pages full of archaisms, obsolete vocabulary and unfamiliar words spelt in a variety of ways, the printed text looked formidable even to Cambodians and was not much read or studied until the 1960's" (1986: xii).

But we know that these texts were set to memory by professional storytellers who would then often travel doing performances. Such was the case with the man that Bizot interviewed in 1969, Ta Chak . Ta (grandfather) Chak had memorized the Ramakerti in 1920 at the age of 23 from palm leaf manuscripts. "He quickly became known," Bizot writes, "and was called to perform at village festivals and then on the stage in the monastery theaters during the big people's celebrations lasting several days" (1981: 263). The entire performance, given five hours each day, lasted about 10 days. It is through such performances that most Khmer
would have known classical literary works.

Much more in the article