History, Southside | When India, SE Asia belonged to a globalised medieval world
Instead of seeing India as solely having influenced the east, it is more accurate to see India and its neighbours as sharing and developing a uniquely global Sanskritic culture together
Among the most pervasive ideas about India’s history — repeated by diplomat, scholar, and social media user alike — is that the subcontinent “influenced” Southeast Asia in various ways.
For example, a scholar at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses writes, “With Southeast Asia, India has been enjoying the historical legacy of the strong influence of the Indic civilization.” In a recent article for The Diplomat, scholar Krzysztof Iwanek argued, with more nuance, that “India used to be an empire without colonies, an empire of culture divided into various kingdoms.”
Implicit in these claims is the idea that “India” — corresponding to the present-day boundaries of our nation-state — was in some way the “centre” of the Southeast Asian imagination - a distant, prestigious place from which culture and “influence” flowed in one direction, to be adopted with enthusiasm in Southeast Asia.
There are two assumptions here; that India as a cultural unity always extended through the subcontinent, and that Southeast Asia was peripheral to it. But as we explore ritual, language, and the movement of people, we will dismantle both these assumptions, revealing one of the most unique cultural complexes of the medieval world.
A Networked Sanskritic Universe
To the modern Indian mind, Sanskrit is fundamentally a language of Hinduism, a language of people of Indian ethnicity, a language of the subcontinent. This isn’t surprising given how much of a role language plays in our present-day politics, despite its complex history, which I have explored earlier.
In reality, Sanskrit’s emergence as the predominant language of culture and politics was by no means inevitable. It was Pali and various Prakrits that dominated the linguistic sphere of the earliest Indian states, as seen in the inscriptions of Ashoka and the Satavahana kings.
As established by historians Andrew Ollett and Sheldon Pollock, it was only in the early centuries CE that a decisive shift towards Sanskrit began, in the areas corresponding to modern-day northwest Pakistan and southern Gujarat. Here it was patronised by the Kushans and Shakas — Central Asians who had invaded and settled in the subcontinent. So from its very outset, the history of cultural and political Sanskrit was one in which many peoples and many polities took part.
_1659181766577.jpg "The 4th–5th centuries CE saw the emergence of influential ways of thinking about kingship, especially using architecture and sculpture to establish a privileged relationship between the king and the gods, as seen in this Gupta period sculpture of the god Varaha. (Shutterstock)")
The use of Sanskrit by royal courts soon spread through the Gangetic Plains. By the mid-fourth century CE, we begin to see it used in marvellous eulogies such as the Allahabad Pillar Inscription of Samudragupta. This eulogy reveals that kings increasingly wanted to be seen as learned in poetry (“He has put to shame Bṛihaspati by [his] sharp and polished intellect… [his] title of "King of Poets" has been established”); as victorious in war, (“great through… the forcible extermination of many kings”); and as generous patrons of religion: (“he is the giver of many lakhs of cows”).
This signals the advent of a new form of state in South Asia — one led by men of war who were educated in Sanskritic court culture, who derived legitimacy from patronising Brahmins and/or religious institutions such as temples and monasteries.
Mere decades after Samudragupta’s inscription, we see evidence that this sort of Sanskritic state was being adapted in Southeast Asia. Around 400 CE, on the eastern side of the island of Borneo, over five thousand kilometres from the Gangetic Plains, a king called Mulavarman, whose inscriptions call him “civilised, strong and powerful”, performed various Vedic sacrifices and announced that he had given alms of 20,000 cows to Brahmins.
Mulavarman had done this even before many chiefs in the Indian subcontinent itself had adopted the Sanskritic royal culture seen above. Indeed, it was over a century after, in the early 500s CE, that dynasties such as the Vatapi Chalukyas would perform Vedic sacrifices, invite Brahmins to settle in their territories, and shower them with gifts.
For Mulavarman in Borneo, just as with the Chalukyas in the Deccan, the motivations for using these elements of royal culture were complex. They were not merely imitating ideas because they came from somewhere more “prestigious”. Rather, argue Stephen A Murphy and H Leedom Lefferts in Globalising Indian Religions and Southeast Asian Localisms, archaeological evidence suggests that such rulers presided over societies that were gradually tending towards urbanisation and political stratification. In order to establish their right to found and rule a state, they adapted ideas of rulership that were already in circulation, whether through trade or other means. And so the emerging concept of the Sanskrit-speaking, Brahmin-patronising warlike king spread at the same time through both South and Southeast Asia. As Daud Ali puts it in The Early Inscriptions of Indonesia, there was a “convergence on both sides of the Bay of Bengal”.
Such adaptions were not meant to signal subservience to a distant cultural or sacred centre. Nowhere in the inscriptions of Mulavarman (or other Southeast Asian kings) is an Indian king or dynasty mentioned. Rather, it appears that Mulavarman (like other rulers) sought to use the ritual ideas he was adapting to elevate his own territory — he refers to it as “the holy land of Waprakeswara”. These new kingdoms could thus interact with other, similarly globalised kingdoms on their own terms, granting them access to networks of knowledge production, particularly related to royal rituals, state formation, poetry, and drama.
Southeast Asia as its own world
There was considerable diversity in interactions between South and Southeast Asia over time and place. The networked nature of the eastern Indian Ocean meant that a polity in Bengal might have much more in common with Java — which had similar royal cults of the Buddhist goddess Tara — than it might with the Shaivite and Jain polities of the Deccan.
As Sanskritic culture spread through these vast regions, they began to exchange ideas, people and goods at unprecedented scales. In the medieval period, writes Dr Andrea Acri in The Place of Nusantara in the Sanskritic Buddhist Cosmopolis, we can think of a few major phases.
The first, 600–800 CE, involved the spread of Sanskritic or “globalised” political cultures through much of South and Southeast Asia, exchanging merchants and monks, creating their own unique ritual and political frameworks. As many of these states were the first to emerge in their respective regions, they had much to share with each other. As Daud Ali puts it, the scribes who wrote Mulavarman’s inscription “were not the civilising ‘emissaries’ or agents of powerful South Indian kingdoms, but arrived with experience at nascently-formed princely courts which had shared similar backgrounds and faced similar problems in establishing authority.”
_1659182035355.jpg "The temples at Prambanan, an impressive complex built by the Shaivite Sanjaya kings of Java in the 9th century and comparable in scale to major temples being built in South Asia at the same time. (Shutterstock)")
From 800–1100 CE, each subregion of this world was marked by increasing political complexity and intra-regional imperial expansion. The “templates” of kingship and statehood specialised and diversified away from each other. However, there were still a few spectacular inter-regional interactions such as the Chola raids into Southeast Asia in 1025. Despite the tremendous variations at the local level, we can see this globalised Sanskritic cultural world in full bloom.
As Sheldon Pollock writes in The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300–1300, “A traveler around the year 1000… would have seen, from the plain of Kedu in central Java to the basin of Tonlé Sap in Cambodia, from Gangaikondacolapuram in Tamil Nadu to Patan in Gujarat and beyond, imperial formations that had many features in common… the existence of cultural and political élites assiduously mastering the intricate codes and protocols of Sanskrit poetry… stately public poems in Sanskrit engraved on the ubiquitous copper-plates recording gifts and donations, or on stone pillars looming up from gigantic architectural wonders… This was a form of shared life very different from that produced by common subjecthood or fealty to a central power, even by shared religious liturgy or credo. It was instead a symbolic network created… by the presence of a similar kind of discourse about the nature and aesthetics of polity — about kingly virtue and learning; the dharma of rule; the universality of dominion.”
Central to creating this “symbolic network”, with all its infinite local variations, was the movement of intelligentsia — specifically Sanskrit-speaking intelligentsia. Through various sources, we know of around 103 Buddhist monks who moved between South and Southeast Asia, to work at royal courts as well as to study. This represents a tiny fraction of the true number, which was probably in the tens of thousands. As ritual experts, Sanskrit-speaking Brahmins were another important component of exchanges; however, the distinguished scholar Johannes Bronkhorst has shown in The Spread of Sanskrit in Southeast Asia that Southeast Asian Brahmins rarely mention their gotra, unlike South Asian Brahmins. They were thus most likely local elites who trained in the knowledge of the emerging Sanskrit-speaking world, and used this knowledge in close alliance with kings.
_1659181928607.jpg "The Angkor Wat complex, one of the largest Vaishnava temples in the world, built in the 12th century and continuing the Devaraja traditions established by earlier Khmer kings. (Shutterstock)")
We can see both a broad adherence to the attitudes of this Sanskritic world coupled with the primacy of local needs in an 802 CE inscription of the Khmer king Jayavarman II. The king worked with a Brahmin of unknown gotra — most likely from Java —known as Hiranyadama, who was “skilled in magic and science”.
Hiranyadama developed the rituals involved in the new Devaraja cult of Angkor, a form of royal worship unique to Southeast Asia, portraying the ruler as a god-king analogous to the king of gods, Shiva. This Hiranyadama, we are told, also “performed a ceremony that would make it impossible for this country.. to pay any tribute to Java”, suggesting that to Jayavarman, Java was a much more crucial centre than India ever was. And yet Sanskrit was the language in which his entire ritual and political world was formulated. Clearly, over 1000 years ago, this language had left its South Asian origins far behind and become something else entirely — a language of power and elite culture spreading across half the world, comparable to Latin and English in their heyday.
By the 9th century, various areas had emerged as centres across this vast world, and not all of them were in India. A city in Java was named Lankapura, creating a “local ‘replica’ of Buddhist Sri Lanka” as Andrea Acri puts it. Conversely, Javanese iconographic forms, such as those of the Buddhist deity Amoghapasa Lokeshvara, were adopted by Indian and Nepali craftsmen. It was in Java that the largest Buddhist monument ever was built: Borobudur, and once again iconographic forms from this site seem to have spread far and wide. A 9th century inscription shows that a Buddhist temple at Prambanan was even frequented by merchants from Gujarat. Similarly, the island of Sumatra was a major centre for the production and acquisition of Buddhist texts; in the 11th century, the famous preacher Atisa Dipankara — who would later convert many Tibetan courts to Buddhism — is known to have completed his studies there after graduating from the monastery of Vikramashila in Bihar.
India as a centre, not the centre
Given how used we are to thinking of Southeast Asia as merely a region that India “influenced”, it can be difficult to accept the idea that not only did Indians go there to study but even to worship, and that many parts of South Asia took cues from Southeast Asia.
But, as we think about it further, the true wonder and significance of this fact becomes clear. Yes, perhaps India was not the “centre” of the medieval world but one among many centres. But this only means that it participated in an unimaginably vast and exciting cultural universe spreading through present-day Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and even as far as the Phillippines.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of minds that circulated through this world, the cultures we can scarcely imagine, the hundreds of mother-tongues, the millions of myths, all competing, intermingling, innovating, growing together. Recognise that they were all able to interact through the world of Sanskrit, creating a vast globalised cultural complex that preceded our own by a thousand years. And realise that world of our ancestors was shaped by Southeast Asians that they must have found exciting, challenging, exotic, and respected as equals.
To see ourselves as the heirs of all this is a sobering and humbling thought, reminding us that behind the modern mirages of nationalist pride lies the enormous, dazzling reality of a medieval world without borders.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian and author of Lords of the Deccan
The views expressed are personal
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