Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

More interesting for us than the motivation of the Indian sādhavaẖ is how they would have appeared to the receiving populations, known to the Indians as dvīpāntaraẖ , ‘islanders’. These people, Burmese in the east, Austro-Asiatic in the south (Mon, Khmer, or Cham), Malay in the islands, already used bronze, irrigated rice, domesticated cattle and buffalo, and had ships and boats of their own. They would not have been able to read or write. The Indians would have presented themselves to the local chiefs as visiting dignitaries, probably claiming royal connections back across the ocean, and offering gifts, and perhaps medicines and charms. Winning favour with local elites, some went on to take their daughters in marriage, and thus sow the seeds of new dynasties.

What the Indians brought with them was literacy, and an ancient culture with a vast array of rules (the sutras of the Hindu Dharmaśāstras , or the suttas of the Buddhist Tipiṯaka ) for every occasion. There was the whole mythology of Hinduism, making Agastya, Krishna, Rama and the Pandava brothers into household names, as they have been ever since in South-East Asia. There was the distinctive idea of the complementary roles of king and priest, admittedly at sixes and sevens over which was ultimately the higher, but clearly in a relationship of mutual support. This relationship could underwrite, and make permanent, the legitimacy of rulers. And so the rulers that the Indians met were happy to become their friends, business partners and fathers-in-law. The new generation that sprang from the mixed marriages would have been the first to receive a full Sanskrit education.

One characteristic of Indian civilisation that they brought with them was a tendency to modify and customise the alphabet. Just as there are now at least ten major scripts [766]derived in India from the Brahmi characters (diffused all over the subcontinent in Aśoka’s time), there are another nine that developed in South-East Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines, [767]all derived from Indian scripts, many through the Pallava script of the south. The origin of this diversity lies in the variety of writing materials available in different places, but the different styles evidently came to be national icons. In the Cambodian pillars that carry rules for monasteries, Sanskrit in Khmer script on one side is paralleled by Sanskrit in a North Indian script on the other: perhaps there were North Indian devotees as well as Khmers resident here. [396]

This is just one of many signs that there was heavy cultural traffic in both directions between India and Indo-China during this period. Another example is given by the life of Atīśa, a monk born in Bengal in 982, who went on to become one of the founders of Buddhism in Tibet in his sixties. He had spent his student days in Śri Vijaya, in Sumatra.

In a way, the culture as the Indians brought it will always be a mystery to us. The splendours of Shwe Dagon in Burma, Borobodur in Java, Angkor

Wat in Cambodia, as well as less well-known magnificences in Pagan, Champa, Laos, Bali and Sumatra, built over a millennium from about AD 500, all stemmed from the seminal ideas of the Indians, but at least in terms of architecture there is nothing now quite like them back in India. We can only speculate that styles executed in stone at Borobodur and Angkor Wat may echo the architecture of wooden buildings long vanished from southern India.

Nevertheless, this roll-call of states and civilisations that took their beginnings from India reminds us how vast, how varied and how long lasting this influence was, all the more remarkable because no military force seems to have been applied anywhere to bring in the new, more organised, Indian society. This contrasts sharply with the record of incursions from the other developed civilisation to the north. Ever since the first century AD, China had been putting constant pressure on the Annamite kingdom of northern Vietnam, periodically invading it, and insisting on recognition of China’s emperor as its overlord.

The earliest documented Indianised kingdom—the documentation is Chinese—was set on the lower Mekong, in modern Cambodia and southern Vietnam, probably in the first century AD. It is usually known as Funan, which is a Chinese version of its name. It was really called, in Khmer, Bnam , ‘the mountain’, [768]and its king as kurung bnam , a translation of Parvatabhū-pala or Śailarāja: bearing this title of ‘King of the Mountain’, he would have established a cult of the god Siva in a high place, so reconciling his legitimacy as an Indian king with the native spirits of the land. [397]

Funan’s foundation myth, read from a Sanskrit inscription in Champa, [398]confirms this. A Brahman named Kauṇḏinya (derived from Kuṇḏin , one of Siva’s titles) received a javelin from another Brahman, a hero from the Mahabharata named Aśvattāman , and threw it to find the right site for the city. He married a local princess named Soma, daughter of the king of the Nāgas , the many-headed water cobras worshipped as protectors of Khmer riches.

Thereafter, major Sanskrit-speaking states were set up all over South-East Asia, Sumatra and Java. [769]Their names are themselves in Sanskrit, and show either a sentimental link with other Indian holy places far away, or an attempt to Indianise local names. It is often difficult now to locate them exactly. In Malaya, Lankasuka , controlling one much-used overland route from the Bay of Bengal to the Gulf of Siam, beside Tāmbralinga (Ligor), Takkola (Takuapa) and Kāṯaha (Kedah); in Cham, the south of modern Vietnam, Amarāvatī (Dong-duong), Vijaya (Binh-dinh), Kauṯhara (Nha-trang), Pāṇḏuranga (Phanrang); in Java, Tārumā (round Jakarta) and Kaṯarāja in the east; in Sumatra, Malāyu (Jambi), Śrī Vijaya (Palembang); in Burma, Sudhammavatī (Thaton), Śrīkṣetra (Prome or Thayekhettaya), Haṃsavatī (Pegu), Śrī Deva (Si Thep); and in the region of modern Thailand Dvāravatī , north of Bangkok.

Names of rulers too are typically Sanskritic. Good examples are the more than thirty Cambodian kings whose names end in -varman , ‘bastion’, from Jayavarman , who died in AD 514, to Śrīndrajayavarman , 1307-27, and the Majapahit kings of Indonesia from Rājasa in 1222-7 to Suhitā , 1429—47. [770]

These led to many more Sanskrit place names, since it was customary to name a city after the king that founded it. To give one example among many dozens, Śreṣṯhapura (literally ‘best of cities’), capital of Cambodia, was named after its founder, King Śreṣṯhavarman (’best bastion’). It is likely also that Śri Vijaya , the dominant kingdom in southern Sumatra, was named after a king named Vijaya , ‘Victorious’.

This is just a sample of some of the better known; as could be expected, the history of the relations of all these cities and kings over a thousand years is a vast and labyrinthine subject, and not one to be broached here.

It is easy to overlook what a major change the introduction of Sanskrit must have been for the local peoples. Sanskrit, as a type of language, was fearsomely different from the local languages, now classified as Burman, Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Sanskrit is polysyllabic, and highly inflected, with a complicated consonant system that is not averse to long clusters. Word order is free. This language was being taken up by speakers of other languages where words were short, often distinguished by tone, and made up of simple syllables with single consonants at beginning and end. Inflections were simple or absent, but word order was rigid. It was at least as radical a change as it would be to bring Japanese in as an elite language where previously everyone had known only English or Dutch. What a wrench it was can be seen in the mangled remains of some of the Sanskrit names: Śrikṣetra came out as Thayekhettaya, Śrī Deva as Si Thep.