Monsoon Asia: A reader on South and Southeast Asia 9789400604360

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. Introduction: Seasons and Civilizations
Chapter 2. Revisiting the Monsoon Asia Idea: Old Problems and New Directions
Chapter 3. Space and Time in the Making of Monsoon Asia
Chapter 4. New Paradigms for the Early Relationship between South and Southeast Asia : The Contribution of Southeast Asian Archaeology
Chapter 5. Contacts, Cosmopoleis, Colonial Legacies: Interconnected Language Histories
Chapter 6. Indianization Reconsidered: India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia
Chapter 7. Local Projects and Transregional Modalities: The Pali Arena
Chapter 8. Muslim Circulations and Islamic Conversion in Monsoon Asia
Chapter 9. Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia
Chapter 10. Languages of Law : Islamic Legal Cosmopolis and its Arabic and Malay Microcosmoi
Chapter 11. Human Traffic: Asian Migration in the Age of Steam
Chapter 12. The Problem of Transregional Framing in Asian History : Charmed Knowledge Networks and Moral Geographies of “Greater India”
Chapter 13. Pragmatic Asianism: International Socialists in South and Southeast Asia
Chapter 14. The Informality Trap : Politics, Governance and Informal Institutions in South and Southeast Asia
Chapter 15. Epics in Worlds of Performance : A South/Southeast Asian Narrativity
Chapter 16. Postscript: The Many Worlds of Monsoon Asia
Bibliography
About the authors
Index

Citation preview

Monsoon Asia

Critical, Connected Histories Critical, Connected Histories is a series of works that explore unfamiliar social, cultural, and political issues that connect people of Asia, the Middle-East, Africa, America and Europe in the modern age. Building on trends in historiography that look at transnational flows and networks and foreground themes of circulation and connection, the series aims to break down artificial boundaries between regions that have long dominated traditional area studies and the discipline of history. It aims to build new ways of mapping these networks and journeys of people, ideas, and goods without omitting dynamics of power and the resilience of the state. The works in this series seek to sharpen the edges of such inquiries and challenge legal and imagined boundaries while examining the durability of their structures of power. In addition, the series cautions against the potential universalization of histories, and situates queries within different vantage points. Multi-disciplinary in their approach, the books in this series draw from sources in multiple languages and media. They seek to expand our understanding and historical knowledge of events, processes, and movements. In denaturalizing the practices of historical writing, this series offers a forum for scholarship that is both theorised and empirically rich, and one that in particular addresses the violence and inequality of the modern ages as well as its promises. Series Editors Nira Wickramasinghe, Leiden University Tsolin Nalbantian, Leiden University Editorial Board Fred Cooper, New York University Engseng Ho, Duke University Ilham Khuri-Makdissi, Northeastern University Susan Pennybacker, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Bhavani Raman, Toronto University Willem van Schendel, Amsterdam University Other titles in this series: Myra Ann Houser, Bureaucrats of Liberation. Southern African and American Lawyers and Clients During the Apartheid Era, 2020 Nadine Willems, Ishikawa Sanshirō’s Geographical Imagination. Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan, 2020 Alicia Schrikker and Nira Wickramasinghe (eds), Being a Slave. Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean, 2020

MONSOON ASIA A Reader on South and Southeast Asia

Edited by David Henley and Nira Wickramasinghe

Leiden University Press

Critical, Connected Histories, volume 4 Cover design: Andre Klijsen Cover illustration: ‘Fisher boats, Colombo’, photograph, c. 1890-1910. From the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (gift of the heirs of C.J.J.G. Vosmaer, Leiden, 1989) Layout: Crius Group Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. ISBN 978 90 8728 390 2 e-ISBN 978 94 0060 436 0 (e-PDF) https://doi.org/10.24415/9789087283902 NUR 692 © David Henley and Nira Wickramasinghe / Leiden University Press, 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the publisher and the editors of the book.

Table of Contents

Preface

7

Chapter 1. Introduction: Seasons and Civilizations

9

David Henley Chapter 2. Revisiting the Monsoon Asia Idea: Old Problems and New Directions 63 Andrea Acri Chapter 3. Space and Time in the Making of Monsoon Asia

97

Jos Gommans Chapter 4. New Paradigms for the Early Relationship between South and Southeast Asia: The Contribution of Southeast Asian Archaeology

119

Pierre-Yves Manguin Chapter 5. Contacts, Cosmopoleis, Colonial Legacies: Interconnected Language Histories

137

Tom Hoogervorst Chapter 6. Indianization Reconsidered: India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia

155

Hermann Kulke Chapter 7. Local Projects and Transregional Modalities: The Pali Arena

183

Anne M. Blackburn Chapter 8. Muslim Circulations and Islamic Conversion in Monsoon Asia 

197

R. Michael Feener Chapter 9. Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia

217

Ronit Ricci Chapter 10. Languages of Law: Islamic Legal Cosmopolis and its Arabic and Malay Microcosmoi Mahmood Kooria

233

6 table of contents

Chapter 11. Human Traffic: Asian Migration in the Age of Steam

257

Sunil Amrith Chapter 12. The Problem of Transregional Framing in Asian History: Charmed Knowledge Networks and Moral Geographies of “Greater India”

283

Marieke Bloembergen Chapter 13. Pragmatic Asianism: International Socialists in South and Southeast Asia 

311

Carolien Stolte Chapter 14. The Informality Trap: Politics, Governance and Informal Institutions in South and Southeast Asia

329

Ward Berenschot Chapter 15. Epics in Worlds of Performance: A South/Southeast Asian Narrativity

351

Bernard Arps Chapter 16. Postscript: The Many Worlds of Monsoon Asia

377

Nira Wickramasinghe Bibliography 

383

About the authors

431

Index

435

Preface

The idea for this reader grew out of the undergraduate programme on South and Southeast Asian studies at Leiden University, which the editors Nira Wickramasinghe and David Henley have chaired in succession since 2016. This unique BA programme was in fact born out of the restructuring of two existing programmes, one on India and Tibet and another on Indonesia, that were in today’s parlance seen as ‘non-performing’. The enforced merger that ensued 12 years ago had unintended consequences: it invited scholars from these two geographical areas across various disciplines to collaborate, teach together and look beyond their own region for connections with the other. For a number of years we struggled with the name of the programme, but eventually, giving up on ‘Southern Asian Studies’ and ‘Monsoon Asia Studies’, we settled for the less elegant ‘South and Southeast Asian Studies’. We can be more adventurous with the title of the book! Monsoon Asia is ambitious, as it seeks to answer a real need for a comprehensive volume that addresses the richness and tensions inherent in studying South and Southeast Asia as a connected space. But it is also modest. We cannot lay any claim to true comprehensiveness since our choices of topics and authors were limited by circumstances, including the corona virus pandemic and the availability and willingness on the part of colleagues to participate in this project. We are very grateful to all the contributors to this volume who kept their trust in us in spite of delays and communication problems. We are also extremely thankful to the Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University, that provided us with a generous grant to commission the chapters and gave us some time off from teaching to conceive the project, which was initially designed as a volume that would draw on Leiden-based scholars of South and Southeast Asia. As we went along, we decided also to approach colleagues in other universities in order to give the book more cohesion. The Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) supported some of the editorial work and we heartfully thank them for this help. In addition, we thank: our anonymous peer reviewers; Leiden University Press managing publisher Saskia Gieling and publishing assistant Romy Uijen; Tsolin Nalbantian, co-editor of the LUP series Critical, Connected Histories; Pouwel van Schooten, for editing and indexing; and Koen Berghuis for the maps. Finally, we would like to take the opportunity to dedicate this book to all our students of South and Southeast Asian Studies, past, present, and future. Nira Wickramasinghe David Henley

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Seasons and Civilizations David Henley

Abstract This chapter lays out the purpose of the Monsoon Asia anthology: to explore the usefulness of studying South Asia and Southeast Asia as a single unit, and to investigate historical and contemporary connections and contrasts between them. It traces the history of the idea of the southern rim of Asia as a single region, and outlines some of the similarities that can arguably be identified across the countries of that region in the domains of ecology, culture, ethnicity, social and political institutions, and postcolonial identity. It discusses the concept of cultural “Indianization” and argues that whatever oversimplifications that concept has fostered, in many respects Southeast Asia does belong to a cultural “Indosphere” which is clearly distinguishable from the “Sinosphere” of Northeast Asia. This asymmetry has its origins in a period of more than a millennium, starting in the last centuries before the beginning of the Common Era, in which Southeast Asia’s relations with India and Southwest Asia, navigational and commercial as well as cultural, were decisively closer than its relations with China. Reasons are tentatively suggested for the Indian head start, and for the fact that cultural transfers across the Indian Ocean mostly took place from west to east rather than vice versa. The chapter continues with a preview of the structure and contents of the rest of the volume, and concludes with a reflection on the significance of the Monsoon Asia concept in the twenty-first century.

Keywords: South Asia; Southeast Asia; history; geography; region; Indianization

Atiśa Dipaṃkaraśrījñāna […] (982-1054). […] Buddhist monk and scholar revered by Tibetan Buddhists as a leading teacher […] of Buddhism in Tibet. […] Born into a royal family in what is today Bangladesh, Atiśa […] journeyed to the island of Sumatra, where he studied under the Cittamātra teacher Dharmakīrtiśrī (also known as guru Sauvarṇadvīpa) for twelve years […]. Atiśa was invited to Tibet by the king of western Tibet Ye shes ‘Od and his grand-nephew […] who were seeking to remove perceived corruption in the practice of Buddhism […]. Atiśa reached Tibet in 1042 […]. He spent the remaining twelve years of his life […] there and his relics were interred in the Sgrol Ma Lha Khang.1 Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (2013)

10 david henley

Munshi Abdullah Bin Abdul Kadir, born 1796, Malacca, Malaya – died 1854, Jiddah, Turkish Arabia […]. Malayan-born writer who, through his autobiographical and other works, played an important role as a progenitor of modern Malay literature. Of mixed Arab (Yemeni) and Tamil [Indian] descent, and Malayo-Muslim culture, Abdullah […] spent most of his life interpreting Malay society to Westerners and vice versa. […] He was copyist and Malay scribe for Sir Stamford Raffles […]. Hikayat Abdullah (“Abdullah’s Story”) […] was first published in 1849; it has been reprinted many times and translated into English and other languages.2 Encyclopaedia Britannica (2021)

The maritime southern rim of Asia, from the Arabian Sea in the west to the South China Sea in the east, has been the most important axis of long-distance travel, trade, and cultural exchange in human history. As a result, the countries of the regions conventionally referred to today as South and Southeast Asia, from India to Indonesia and from Pakistan to the Philippines, all have deeply intertwined histories. The two eminent lives sketched above, separated in time by eight hundred years, provide testimony to the enduring interconnectedness of events across and beyond the South and Southeast Asian countries: the monk Atisha, Bengal-born, Sumatran-educated apostle of Buddhism in eleventh-century Tibet; and the writer Munshi Abdullah, part-Tamil, part-Yemeni pioneer of modern Malay literature in nineteenth-century British Singapore. Yet despite this extraordinary history of connectedness, twentieth-century geopolitics have led South Asia and Southeast Asia to be treated in scholarship and education as two distinct fields of study. The purpose of our volume is to contest this now conventional divide by bringing together scholars of South and Southeast Asia from diverse disciplines to reflect, through their own work, on the possibility and utility of conceiving the two areas as a single overarching region. The combined region might have been labelled southern Asia, or tropical Asia, or, following a recent trend in archaeology and historiography, the “Indian Ocean World”. For reasons to be discussed presently, we prefer to refer to it here as Monsoon Asia – a term that was popular among a wide range of academic writers in the mid-twentieth century, never disappeared in the earth sciences, and has recently begun to see a revival in the cultural and historical disciplines.3 In many cases our contributors bridge the South/Southeast Asian divide by focusing explicitly on links between the two subregions, in the form of tangible histories of exchange, translocality, and mobility. In other cases they do it by comparing developments in (parts of) South and Southeast Asia, thereby exploring the utility of the wider frame of Monsoon Asia as a heuristic device. Either

Figure 1.1: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the places and areas mentioned in this chapter

Obsolete names, and no longer existing places and polities, are shown in italics.

12 david henley

way, the intent is not to insist on the superiority of one geographic frame over another, nor even to prioritize, a priori, transnational over localized processes. One of our contributors, Marieke Bloembergen, is in fact explicitly critical of our terms of reference, entitling her chapter “The problem of transregional framing in Asian history”. What we do hope to accomplish is threefold. First, to explore the usefulness, from diverse perspectives, of treating Monsoon Asia as a unit of study and analysis. Second, to highlight areas of contrast and contention, as well as comparability and consensus, which can serve to generate engagement between scholars of South Asia and Southeast Asia. And third: to provide an introduction, for general readers seeking to know more about both regions or subregions, to the many historical, cultural, and other links between them.

Monsoon Asia: geographies and genealogies The idea that South and Southeast Asia can be seen as a single historical and cultural region is not, of course, a new one. Two centuries ago it was commonplace, reflected in the use of terms like “Farther India”, “Trans-Gangetic India” and “the East Indies” to refer to Southeast Asia. Today it is still unintentionally commemorated in the name of Southeast Asia’s largest nation, “Indonesia”, originally a Greek-based neologism translating the expression “Indian archipelago”,4 and in the continuing if sporadic use of the term ‘Indochina’ to refer to (parts of) mainland Southeast Asia. The historical tendency to treat Southeast Asia as an extension of India is partly a matter of Eurocentrism, reflecting the hereditary limitations of European geographical terminology. But the notion that India and Southeast Asia can sometimes be talked of in the same breath also has an empirical basis in observations of the natural and human environment. With their tropical or subtropical maritime climates and their natural Himalayan boundary to the north, South and Southeast Asia form to a large extent a single ecological zone, sometimes labelled the “Indomalayan biogeographic realm”, across which many plant and animal species and associations are widely distributed.5 Human populations, too, show characteristic adaptations to the conditions of that zone in terms of agriculture,6 diet, and architecture.7 The weather pattern is distinctive: in most areas a system of seasonal monsoon winds brings rain in the northern hemisphere summer, and drier conditions in the winter, setting the rhythms of farming and the ritual calendar. For centuries the same seasonally reversing winds (Fig. 1.2) were also the engines of long-distance commerce, making possible regular voyages between all harbours from the Arabian Sea to the South China Sea and beyond.8 Since the region has long coastlines and most of it is relatively accessible from the sea, the monsoon system affected its economic and

introduction: seasons and civilizations 13

Figure 1.2: Monsoon Asia: prevailing winds, July (left) and January (right).

social life almost as deeply via the trade winds as it did via the agricultural cycle. “The lives of ordinary people”, observes Richard Hall in his popular history of the Indian Ocean, “were always ruled more by nature than by great events, by the perpetual monsoons rather than by ephemeral monarchies”.9 It is the multivalent historical importance of the monsoon for our region, together with the evocative quality of the term itself, in South and Southeast Asian as well as European languages (for instance: Hindi mausam, Malay/Indonesian musim, both with the meaning “season”, from Arabic mausim, also the ultimate origin of the English word), that inspires us to choose the label ‘Monsoon Asia’ for South and Southeast Asia as a combined unit. “Southern Asia”, by comparison, is prosaic and perhaps too easily confused with South Asia alone; “Tropical Asia” has a very climatological flavour and belies the fact that much of South Asia lies north of the Tropic of Cancer; while the “Indian Ocean World” has perhaps too strictly marine a connotation, includes Hormuz, Yemen, and the Swahili coast of East Africa, and threatens to exclude Vietnam, the Philippines, and much of Indonesia. An important disclaimer immediately needs stating here. Our own terminology is itself inconsistent in that Monsoon Asia, in our sense, excludes a large part of Asia which climatologically and ecologically speaking is almost as much affected by the monsoon system as is the southern rim of the continent. Japan, Korea, and much of China share with South and Southeast Asia the alternating monsoon seasons (albeit with important differences in weather and timing), and to some extent the historical patterns of maritime trade shaped by these.10 They also feature the same predominant system of agriculture and subsistence, wet (pond-field) rice cultivation, that is most characteristic of the regions to their south. For these reasons, mid-twentieth century textbooks with the term Monsoon Asia in their titles tended to encompass Northeast as well as Southeast and South Asia.11

14 david henley

That we do not follow their example is due in the first place – though not, as we shall see, the last – to the fact that our own frame of reference is set not only by ecology and climatology, but also by considerations of cultural history and geography. It is here that the observations underpinning the old “Farther India” concept remain relevant. The European travellers who embraced that concept were aware that almost all of Southeast Asia had at some point been strongly affected by many of the same influences that had shaped the societies of South Asia, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Indian kingship, and Indian law. In the course of the colonial period this awareness was heightened by the academic study of Sanskrit, inscriptions in which language are numerous in Southeast as well as South Asia, and by the archaeological study and restoration of ancient religious monuments, in which colonial governments came to take great pride. As a result, the early history of Southeast Asia was increasingly seen as a story of cultural, religious, and indeed political “Indianization”. The first comprehensive textbook on the subject, published in 1944 by George Coedès, was entitled Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d’Extrême-Orient, ‘Ancient history of the Hinduized states of the Far East’.12 Three-quarters of a century on, many academic writers are wary of using the term “Indianization” as such. One reason for this is that it seems to suggest passivity on the part of the recipients of Indian culture – clearly a dubious implication given that many pilgrims from Southeast Asia are known to have travelled to centres of religious learning in India, while South Asian monks and scholars, as we saw in the case of Atisha, also studied in Southeast Asia.13 Another reason is that the idea of Indianization has come to be seen as unacceptably condescending toward Southeast Asians. Actually there seems to be little evidence of serious resistance to it among Southeast Asians themselves, who in the colonial period were generally impressed by the challenge to European cultural dominance posed by self-confident Indian thinkers,14 and whose postcolonial relations with South Asia (of which more below) were seldom intensive or competitive enough to make them sensitive to any implication of cultural inferiority. Nevertheless, Southeast Asian intellectuals can hardly have been enthusiastic when, in the mid-twentieth century, attempts were made in some Indian nationalist quarters to extrapolate ‘Farther India’ into bluntly asymmetric historical narratives featuring an expansive “Greater India”, an Indian “civilizing mission”, and even “Indian colonies in the Far East”.15 In more recent decades, the intellectual environment of postcolonial scholarship has played an important role here by discouraging, across the board, the characterization of particular regions and societies as sources of “civilization”, and others as its recipients. More substantively, the reduced prominence of Indianization as an explicit paradigm also has to do with a growing awareness that the social and cultural changes associated with Indian influence in Southeast Asia followed a long period of bilateral prehistoric contact across the Indian Ocean, and were by and large

introduction: seasons and civilizations 15

paralleled, rather than preceded, by similar changes taking place at the same period on the Indian subcontinent itself.16 There was, for instance, little or no time lag between the sequences of stone Hindu temple construction in South and Southeast Asia: both essentially began in the seventh century CE, with Southeast Asian temples almost immediately surpassing their Indian counterparts both in scale and, by most accounts, in architectural brilliance.17 Neither is there much to suggest that in doing so, they moved progressively away from initially more similar and more “Indian” forms; the temples of Java have been described as “vernacular from the start”.18 If India itself was “Indianized” no earlier than Southeast Asia, and in some ways even to a lesser degree, then the term automatically seems to lose some of its validity, and it becomes reasonable to think that developments on either side of the Bay of Bengal need to be understood in terms of bilateral convergence rather than unidirectional diffusion. It is partly in this spirit, as well as in the spirit of twenty-first-century globalization, that scholarly interest in the history of cultural relations between South and Southeast Asia has in recent years been revived. The most important moment in the revival was perhaps the publication in 2006 of philologist Sheldon Pollock’s monumental account of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” which spanned both regions in the first millennium of the common era. Equivalent to what used to be called the “Indianized world”, in Pollock’s vision this constituted a single civilization, stretching from Afghanistan to Java, united by a common familiarity – particularly, but not exclusively, on the part of elites – with the Sanskrit language, its literary corpus, and the body of social, political, and religious ideals embedded in that corpus. As far as the era of the Sanskrit cosmopolis is concerned, Pollock argues, “it makes hardly more sense to distinguish between South and Southeast Asia than between north India and south India, despite what present-day area studies may tell us”.19 In the wake of Pollock’s work, others were soon inspired to extend his model, or at least his terminology, to two other aspects of the cultural interaction between South and Southeast Asia: the “Pali cosmopolis” which united and buttressed the resiliently Buddhist societies of Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos as Buddhism gradually died out on the Indian mainland in the second millennium CE;20 and the “Arabic cosmopolis”,21 created by a seaborne “Monsoon Islam”,22 which linked together the newly Islamized lands of island Southeast Asia and the coastal Muslim enclaves of the Indian subcontinent in the early modern period. Better documented than their Sanskrit predecessor, these more recent transnational communities of faith, language and literature have proven amenable to study not just in terms of their cultural consequences, but also at the level of the specific social networks and religious orders that created them.23 In the last decade, the new wave of interest in cultural relations between South and Southeast Asia has coincided and intersected with two other, related scholarly

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developments: a maturing body of research – Nigel Worden provides a partial review – on the history of trade and shipping in the Indian Ocean,24 including a Braudelian magnum opus on the history of that ocean and the lands around it by Philippe Beaujard;25 and an upsurge of writing, inspired by contemporary globalization, on the modern history of transnational migrations, connections, and interactions in Asia,26 particularly across the Bay of Bengal.27 These trends have combined with the “cosmopolis” literature to rekindle interest among prehistorians and archaeologists, as well as historians, in interactions between South and Southeast Asia. Panoramic publications reflecting the resulting synergy include the anthologies edited by Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani and Geoff Wade (Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia, 2011),28 Andrea Acri, Roger Blench and Alexandra Landmann (Spirits and ships: cultural transfers in early Monsoon Asia, 2017),29 and Angela Schottenhammer (Early global interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean world, 2019).30 These works vary in the tightness of their geographical focus, and necessarily include excursions beyond South and Southeast Asia, as do many of our own chapters. However their main focus, at least in the first two collections, is on Monsoon Asia in the same sense as in the present volume, and the most important reasons for this lie once again in those facts of cultural geography that long caused Europeans to label Southeast Asia as a part of India. Although Northeast Asia is itself partly “Indianized” in the sense that Buddhism forms an enduring subsidiary part of its cultural matrices, Southeast Asia has clearly been much more deeply influenced by its contacts with the lands to its west. Its Hindu as well as Buddhist monuments and artistic forms, its Indic scripts, and its orthodox, societally inclusive Theravada Buddhist religious institutions are all transparent testimony to this. So too is the Islam of its islands, the story of which cannot be disentangled from that of Islamization in maritime South Asia. Later in this introductory chapter it will be argued that these patterns are not coincidental, but reflect a history in which commercial exchanges and population movements, as well as cultural interactions, were for many centuries decisively more frequent and intensive across the Indian Ocean than across the South China Sea.

Monsoon Asia: persistent parallels We have taken quite some space to discuss and justify our frame of spatial reference in terms of cultural and civilizational geographies. Ultimately it is not the framework that counts, but the insights it yields, and in any case our contributors have not been rigidly bound by it. The discussion, moreover, has not yet revealed much about the underlying reasons for the observed affinities between South and

introduction: seasons and civilizations 17

Southeast Asia. More will be said further on about the specific mechanisms of cultural convergence. First, however, it is worth mentioning three other ways, besides their deep historical interconnections and their shared legacies of Sanskrit, Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic culture, in which the countries of South and Southeast Asia can be described as comparable with one another. These have to do with their political as well as their cultural histories, and they continue to be important up to the present day. Despite their commonalities at the level of high culture, firstly, both South and Southeast Asia, and almost all the individual nation-states within them, large and small, have always been places of enormous human diversity, ethnic and cultural, at the grassroots. Ethnicity, of course, is a subjective phenomenon and a social construct rather than a straightforwardly quantifiable matter. It is also defined, and shaped, in very different ways by different states. In China, for example, huge numbers of people whose mother tongues are mutually unintelligible have long been classified under a single ethnic label (Han). In South and Southeast Asia, by contrast, ethnic diversity and fragmentation were accentuated during the period of colonial rule by the characteristic enthusiasm of colonial states for ethnic classification and discrimination, as well as by the large-scale migrations which they encouraged. Cultural pluralism is a product of history, not an intrinsic property of nations or civilizations. That said, it is still instructive to illustrate the extent of that pluralism in Monsoon Asia by citing some quantitative data on ethnic fractionalization, indices of which measure the probability that two randomly chosen individuals in a population will belong to different ethnic groups. The potential range is from 0 (everybody belongs to a single group) to 1 (no two individuals are ethnically similar). Historical data for 1960 put the level of fractionalization in (for instance) Sri Lanka at 0.45, in Pakistan 0.59, in Malaysia 0.60, and in Indonesia 0.71 – all figures which contrast dramatically with (for instance) a vanishing 0.01 in the case of Japan, and a straight zero for the Republic of Korea. Ethnic fractionalization index (1960) Selected others

South and Southeast Asia31 Pakistan (with Bangladesh)

0.585

Nepal

0.808

Japan

0.012

Bhutan

0.502

Korea (South)

0.000

Sri Lanka

0.451

China

0.101

Taiwan

0.195

Myanmar/Burma

0.433

Thailand

0.387

Cambodia

0.231

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Ethnic fractionalization index (1960) Selected others

South and Southeast Asia31 Laos Vietnam

32

0.562

Netherlands

0.013

0.250

Italy

0.041

Malaysia

0.601

Poland

0.027

Singapore

0.385

USA

0.259

Indonesia

0.709

Philippines

0.819

Source: Historical Index of Ethnic Fractionalization, Harvard Dataverse.33

Historically, the societies of Monsoon Asia have responded to – and perhaps perpetuated – their endemic diversity by developing relatively permissive, pluralistic social norms and institutions. These old traditions of pluralism are still perceptible today, even if in the era of nationalism, democracy, and the politicization of religion they have sometimes been strained to breaking point – most dramatically with the partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines in 1947, but also by the recent upsurge in many countries of chauvinistic populism. A second area of comparability is to be found in the social and political institutions of Monsoon Asia, which are characterized by a paradoxical combination of hierarchical, inegalitarian social norms with relatively weak and decentralized states. The South Asian “caste system”, with its hereditary, endogamous, ranked social and/or ethnic divisions, is conventionally the very archetype of human inequality.34 And although caste as such is all but absent from Southeast Asia, slavery was until recent historical times a common and characteristic institution there, and “vertical bonding” between individuals has been described as “very ancient and central to almost all Southeast Asian societies”.35 Yet all this hierarchy did not typically translate into strong, enduring institutions of government. Instead it was often religious institutions, enjoying considerable autonomy from the state, which provided the most stable basis for social organization and solidarity. It would be wrong to think of traditional South and Southeast Asian political systems as simple or undeveloped: particularly at a local level, they often featured complex corporate institutions.36 Neither should their distinctiveness be exaggerated; in their pluriform and decentralized character, their intertwining of kinship and descent with status and power, and their tendency toward secular/religious diarchy, they were comparable with many other premodern polities, including those of Europe. Nevertheless, these characteristics were not universal. They were clearly in contrast, for instance, with those of imperial China, where what has been described as an “all-embracing officialdom” was already established before the beginning of

introduction: seasons and civilizations 19

the Common Era, and where both aristocratic privileges and the autonomy of the (Buddhist) church were eliminated in the first millennium.37 It is in relation to Southeast Asia that the characteristic institutional features of Monsoon Asia have been most systematically described. Ideologies of universal kingship notwithstanding, most precolonial Southeast Asian states were in reality complex, decentralized oligarchies.38 Alliances based on kinship and marriage played an important role in holding them together.39 So too did chains of those unequal partnerships, involving exchanges of personal service and political support for physical, social, and economic security, which are known in modern literature as “patron-client relationships”.40 Lacking territorial control and vulnerable to shifts of allegiance, rulers also used cultural prestige to help retain the loyalty of their subjects, sometimes investing in pomp and ceremony on such a scale as to create what Clifford Geertz called “theatre states”.41 More important still was their sponsorship of religious elites, institutions, and monumental building projects, with which they developed close and mutually supportive relationships.42 In some cases, the rulers themselves claimed divine status.43 In the Southeast Asian literature the terms “galactic polity”44 and “mandala”45, associated respectively with Stanley Tambiah and Oliver Wolters, have been widely adopted as shorthands for this species of diffuse, borderless state based on supernatural authority, cultural prestige, personal loyalty, and unequal exchange. Views of the traditional political organization of South Asia have evolved in parallel directions, with South Asianists often referencing in this context the work of scholars of Southeast Asia, particularly Geertz and Tambiah. In addition, Burton Stein influentially used the model of the “segmentary state”, derived ultimately from the study of African chiefdoms, to characterize the political systems of pre-colonial South India, up to and including the great Chola Empire (tenth to thirteenth century CE).46 Like a mandala or galactic polity, a segmentary state in this analysis consists of numerous power centres of which one has primacy as a source of “ritual sovereignty”, but all exercise actual political control over a part, or segment, of the whole. Throughout the polity, according to Stein, “the functions of government are embedded in kinship”; the “little kingdom” that forms each segment is inseparable from the kin group of its ruler.47 Subsequent scholarship, notably by Nicholas Dirks, underlined the role of “gifts” and exchanges of various kinds, alongside kinship, in holding together such personalistic political systems: “the shared sovereignty of overlord, king, chief, and headman was enacted and displayed through gifts and offerings”.48 Perhaps the most important gifts were those made by rulers to religious authorities, as in Southeast Asia a crucial source of political legitimacy.49 Local chiefs, according to Dirks, “became little kings when, emulating the actions of kingly overlords, they gave gifts to temples and to Brahmans”.50 Also fundamental, however, were more

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mundane forms of patronage offered, along with physical protection and honorific titles, to favoured subordinates in return for their allegiance: profitable positions and privileges, land grants, royal feasts, and financial help in times of need, when the normal extractive flow of wealth from subalterns to elites was temporarily reversed. Whereas in Southeast Asia this kind of clientelistic relationship was usually conceptualized in terms of credit and debt,51 in India, according to Anastasia Piliavsky, the key terms were more often “gift” and “service”.52 But there were many similarities, including the use in both areas of kinship metaphors whereby clients referred to their patrons as “parents”.53 Piliavsky goes so far as to argue that the Indian caste system can itself be understood as a collective form of clientelism, with each caste or subcaste forming a hereditary “service community” defined by its dependent relationship to another such group.54 The clientelistic structure of the Monsoon Asian states, together with their economic resources and their accessibility by sea, had the effect of making them vulnerable (and more so than their Northeast Asian counterparts) to Western intervention and conquest, so that colonial rule ultimately joined Indianization and Islamization as part of their shared historical experience. By the early twentieth century all parts of South and Southeast Asia, with the exception of Thailand (Siam), were under some form of Western rule. Together with the disruption caused by colonialism itself, and the conflict and instability that accompanied decolonization, the historical legacy of clientelism probably also contributed to the prevalence in postcolonial South and Southeast Asia of what Gunnar Myrdal labelled “soft states”, characterized by limited administrative efficiency and weak law enforcement.55 With few exceptions, and despite great diversity in other respects among national political systems, the region’s states have remained “soft”, in this sense, up to the present day. Since poor scores on scales of “good governance” are typical of developing countries worldwide, the element of historical continuity here should perhaps not be exaggerated. Nevertheless, throughout Monsoon Asia, many of the everyday practices of political clientelism in the twenty-first century would certainly have been familiar to past generations.56 A third point of similarity, and indeed source of active solidarity and common identity – at least for an important part of the twentieth century – across Monsoon Asia emerged from the shared experience of colonialism, and more particularly from the struggle against it. Dutch and then British domination of the Indian Ocean, followed by the British occupation of Singapore and Malaya and the conquest and incorporation of Burma/Myanmar directly into the Indian Raj, led to an intensified movement of people and ideas across the Bay of Bengal.57 Although the rest of the region was divided up among many colonial powers, by the 1930s its various anticolonial nationalist movements were in active contact with each other.58 The Second World War, the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, and the sudden end

introduction: seasons and civilizations 21

of the war in 1945 enabled Indonesia to become the first Asian colony to declare its independence (17 August 1945), closely followed by Vietnam (also in 1945), the Philippines (1946), India and Pakistan (1947), Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar (both 1948). As the vanguard of the emerging postcolonial world it was five South and Southeast Asian states, Indonesia, India, Burma/Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, which took the initiative to stage the famous 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955, one of the events leading to the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. Although Third World solidarity was in practice short-lived, the “Bandung spirit”, a spirit born in Monsoon Asia, survives in global memory and its consequences are perhaps not exhausted yet.

Great asymmetries: Indosphere and Sinosphere The history of Monsoon Asia, and especially its cultural history, is characterized by great geographical asymmetries, the discussion of which is not always regarded as bon ton in contemporary academic contexts. But because these asymmetries are in reality intrinsic to how we – and others – understand and define the region, and because by and large they are not directly addressed in other chapters, it is worth considering them explicitly here in our introduction in order to avoid their becoming the elephants in the room of our anthology. Such a discussion has additional value in that the same asymmetries are to some extent also elephants in the larger room of Southeast Asian Studies, practitioners of which are sometimes too quick and too keen to portray Southeast Asia as an open, cosmopolitan “crossroads” of cultures. The first great asymmetry lies in the fact that in sharp contrast to its undoubted permeability to cultural influences from India and points west, Southeast Asia has historically been very little affected by Sinicizing influences from the Confucian world to its north – or indeed from the tens of millions of people of Chinese ancestry who now live within its borders.59 To be sure, this is not true of every area of life. Chinese influence on Southeast Asian food and cuisines, an important cultural domain, is substantial.60 Chinese novels, as translated and published in local languages by the ethnic Chinese populations of nineteenth-century Southeast Asian cities, played a role in the early development of the modern national literature of the region.61 But such countervailing currents across the South China Sea are hardly comparable with the weight of religious, literary, aesthetic, and other influences that have operated on Southeast Asia through the centuries along the Indian Ocean axis. Southeast Asia is an intensely plural region and a historical crossroads of trade and migration, but it is not an indiscriminate melting pot of cultures. Loanword frequencies in Southeast Asian languages provide a crude but useful quantitative indication of this. Most of Indonesia is geographically closer to China than to India,

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but only 0.7 per cent of the vocabulary of modern Indonesian comes from Chinese languages, against 8.4 per cent from Sanskrit and Tamil, and another 5.7 per cent from Arabic or Persian.62 Thailand has a border less than 200 kilometres from China, and ten per cent of its population is of Chinese descent. Yet only 2.5 per cent of the vocabulary of modern Thai is borrowed from Chinese languages, compared with 14.5 per cent from Pali and Sanskrit, and 4.6 per cent from Khmer and other languages of nearby Southeast Asian countries.63 While there are structural and phonological (as opposed to lexical) convergences between Chinese and some non-Sinitic languages of mainland Southeast Asia, including Thai,64 these originate in distant periods of contact and migration in what is now China itself, and/or reflect subsequent areal interactions among the affected languages within Southeast Asia.65 Although people in Thailand may not routinely be aware of it, many other aspects of their lives besides the borrowed words in their language link them with distant South Asia. The script in which that language is written, for instance, derives, via Cambodia, from an ancient writing system of southern India.66 The Buddhist religion to which more than 90 per cent of Thais adhere originates of course in northern India, and the specific doctrines of the Theravada school of Buddhism which they follow, including the rules of monastic discipline to which every male, regardless of class or status, is expected to subject himself at some period in his life, were codified in Sri Lanka. When Thais die they are not buried, as their own distant ancestors were and as has always been customary in China, but cremated, in the Indian tradition. The king of their country boasts Sanskrit titles and, although a Buddhist like most of his subjects, is attended by a hereditary corps of Brahman (Hindu) priests of Indian descent, who perform vital rituals at his inauguration and at other life-cycle and seasonal ceremonies.67 All these observations on Thailand are also true of Cambodia, and most of them are true of Myanmar/Burma and Laos too. In maritime Southeast Asia today the cultural footprint of South Asia is less immediately self-evident, but still decisively clearer than that of China and the Sinicized countries. The only serious exceptions to the rule of non-Sinicization among the Southeast Asian countries are those two that can reasonably be said to prove it: Vietnam, a Chinese province for more than a thousand years (conventionally, 111 BCE to 938 CE) before throwing off northern rule, whereafter it preserved and developed its Sinicized political and educational institutions in continued contact with China; and Singapore, where three-quarters of the population is descended from people who migrated from southern China to the “South Seas” (Nanhai, Nanyang), as they called Southeast Asia, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or consists of recent Chinese migrants of the last three decades. While the Chinese orientation of Vietnam and Singapore is exceptional in the modern history of Southeast Asia, almost the whole population of that region

introduction: seasons and civilizations 23

nevertheless has its ultimate origins in ancient migrations from what is now China.68 It has been suggested that these migrations were triggered by an agricultural revolution: the domestication, probably in central and northern China respectively, of rice and millet.69 In late prehistoric times Southeast Asia’s cultural affinities and trade relations continued to lie mainly with the lands to its north,70 and a single cultural sphere, for which Andrew Abalahin has coined the term “Greater Southeast Asia”, extended northward far beyond China’s modern borders.71 The great change came with two momentous developments of the last centuries before the beginning of the Common Era: the southward expansion and consolidation of the Chinese empire, within which a new form of centralized, self-contained, patriarchal society developed under bureaucratic administration; and the intensification of maritime commerce across the Bay of Bengal, which brought Indian influences to Southeast Asia proper. The mainland of Southeast Asia consists of upland terrain separated by a number of very long river valleys […] following generally north-south directions […]. These […] must have served as major conduits of human population movement in the past. Thus, it is not surprising that the Neolithic archaeology of this region shows much stronger connections with China than it does with India, an axis of relationship to be dramatically overturned at about the time of Christ with the spread of the Indic cultural influences which came to dominate […] Southeast Asia.72

In the wake of this “Indic” reorientation, the populations south of the Red River were progressively integrated into networks and communities from which the northern peoples, some brave Buddhist pilgrims and itinerant monks excepted, were excluded. Through these two successive phases of external influence from different directions, Southeast Asia, as Reid succinctly puts it, “derived most of its modern gene pool and language stocks from the north […] and its religions and written cultures (except the Viet) from the west”.73 The last part of Reid’s observation refers to a second great asymmetry in Monsoon Asia’s transnational history: the fact that along the Indian Ocean axis itself, the predominant direction of cultural transfer and influence has indeed been from west to east, not vice versa. Southeast Asians may have been quick to adopt them and inventive in developing them, but ultimately there is no denying that Buddhism, the Hindu pantheon, the Indian epics, the Sanskrit and Pali languages, and the Indic scripts and syllabaries all have their origins in the Indian subcontinent. Islam, too, reached Southeast Asia from west to east, and partly from South Asia. Below it will be shown that even in prehistoric times, important innovations were already being made in India before diffusing eastward. To acknowledge this asymmetry is not to insist that Southeast Asians owed their early historical achievements entirely to Indian inspiration; Southeast Asian societies may have adopted

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Indian symbols and products because their development was running parallel to that of the subcontinent, for instance in terms of political centralization.74 But like “non-Sinicization”, the cultural Indianization of Southeast Asia remains a subject which no anthology on Monsoon Asia can reasonably fail to address. Again, a caveat is immediately in order here. The interaction between South and Southeast Asia was always to some extent a two-way street. It was Indonesians, more than Indians, who – together with Persians – pioneered long-distance seafaring in the Indian Ocean, settling Madagascar,75 and leaving a technological legacy of locally adapted outrigger boat designs along the East African, Indian, and Sri Lankan coasts.76 Southeast Asian, not Indian, ships and ship-masters probably dominated early trade across the Bay of Bengal.77 A whole series of domesticated plants believed to originate from Southeast Asia, including bananas, betel nut and leaf, ginger, sandalwood, and some types of citrus fruit, found their way westward to India and beyond in prehistoric or early historic times. In the classical era, when Southeast Asian pilgrims travelled to the holy sites of India, Burmese kings supported the temple commemorating the Buddha’s enlightenment at Bodh Gaya in what is now Bihar, while rulers of Srivijaya in the Malacca Strait sponsored the foundation of at least two new Buddhist religious institutions elsewhere on the subcontinent.78 There were even Southeast Asian military expeditions to South Asia: in the thirteenth century, armies from Tambralinga on the Malay Peninsula twice invaded Sri Lanka, albeit without lasting consequences.79 Perhaps the most striking examples of cultural transfer from east to west across the Indian Ocean took place within the transnational Theravada Buddhist world, or “Pali cosmopolis”, as it emerged in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia during the second millennium CE. Within this ecumene it was often Southeast Asia that provided authoritative sources of religious knowledge. Beginning as early as the eleventh century, monks from Southeast Asia were repeatedly called upon to help renew the Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition after periods of turmoil or decline.80 In accordance with this pattern, the major monastic orders of modern Sri Lanka all trace their origins to countries further east:81 the majority Siyam Nikāya, introduced from Thailand (Siam) in 1753, and the smaller Amarapura Nikāya and Rāmañña Nikāya, founded by Sri Lankan monks ordained in Burma/Myanmar in 1803 and 1861 respectively.82 Countervailing flows from east to west, then, have been significant. Neither should the depth and impact of the dominant currents from west to east be exaggerated: Indianization was a very selective process and even at its height, many key South Asian institutions – patriarchal gender relations, the caste system, vegetarianism – were rarely adopted across the Bay of Bengal. That Southeast Asia has its own regional identity, nowadays strongly felt by its inhabitants and institutionalized in the form of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, is clear.83

introduction: seasons and civilizations 25

The big picture, nevertheless, remains one of profound asymmetry in cultural relations within Monsoon Asia. Painstaking searches through the lexicons of Indian languages have discovered no great trove of borrowings from Southeast Asia to compare with the mass of Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, and Persian loanwords in Southeast Asian languages.84 Whereas the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, touring Java and Bali in 1927, is famously said to have exclaimed: “I see India everywhere”,85 it is telling that a recent review of historical and linguistic evidence refers to Southeast Asians as “invisible agents of eastern trade” in the Indian Ocean.86 Various explanations have been suggested for the asymmetry of Southeast Asia’s external cultural relations. Some involve idealistic arguments about the intrinsic qualities of the Indian cultural models: that the Sanskrit language, with its intellectually challenging and satisfying grammatical complexity, was – as a Sanskrit poet put it – “charming like a creeper”;87 or that Southeast Asians, like twentieth-century Indologists, were simply “fascinated by the universal quality of Indian civilization”.88 A converse approach points to allegedly intrinsic limitations of Chinese civilization: the “low exportability” of China’s complex ideographic writing system, and its close association with “imperially appointed officials versed in the classical literature”.89 Tied to power and bureaucracy, in this view, Chinese culture remained confined behind the borders of the empire, which for various reasons – tropical disease, lack of maritime ambition, and, after the tenth century, the military resistance of the Vietnamese – never extended further south than the Red River delta. In one of the few publications to tackle the question in an explicit way, Monica Smith goes a step further by suggesting that it was “apprehension about Chinese expansion” which, together with the usefulness of Indian political models – and political theatre – for local rulers, caused Southeast Asia to become Indianized rather than Sinicized.90 The relative importance of these two factors, she proposes, varied from state to state according to its distance from the Chinese colossus. In […] Myanmar and northeastern India, as well as in island Southeast Asia, the adoption of subcontinental traditions may have been undertaken by local leaders desiring to impress and govern their populations by reference to powerful but distant authorities. And in many parts of mainland Southeast Asia, the adoption such traditions may have included the additional motivation to maintain autonomy as a reaction to the spectre of Chinese expansion.91

In the absence of direct evidence regarding the motivations of the leaders in question, the idea of Indianization as insurance against Chinese expansion remains speculative, and it is hard to say more about it than this – except perhaps to note that along China’s southern land borders, outward diffusion of Chinese culture (as well as ethnic Chinese emigration) does on occasion seem to have prepared the ground, at least

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on a small scale, for imperial expansion, so that fear of the political consequences of cultural Sinicization might not have been unjustified.92 Smith’s complementary argument regarding the internal function of Indianization within Southeast Asian societies suffers from the same problem of evidence. On this point, however, it is possible to say more, because it brings us to a long-running scholarly debate about how exactly Sanskrit civilization was propagated through the Indosphere. The most popular way of categorizing the competing positions in this debate, classically laid out by Indologist F.D.K. Bosch in Leiden in 1946, takes its terminology from the primary caste (varna) divisions of Indian society.93 The “brahmin theory”, favoured by Bosch himself, sees religious specialists – “clerics” of the priestly brahmin caste – as the main agents of cultural transmission, typically acting in the role of advisers to local warrior-chiefs who are keen to enhance their authority by association with exotic knowledge and prestige. It is this idea to which Smith, too, refers when she writes of “local leaders desiring to impress and govern their populations by reference to powerful but distant authorities”.94 In the “ksatria theory”, by contrast, the warriors themselves are the motors of change, “knights” seeking fame and fortune by violent means on the frontiers of their civilization, which they expand in the process. The “vaisya theory” has that civilization propagated by traders who, possessed of wealth and mobility, settle among, intermarry with, and gradually influence the cultures of, recipient populations. To this classic triad, finally, Reid has recently added what might be called the “sudra theory” of Indianization, according to which religious conversion – especially to Buddhism – is a grassroots phenomenon originating among ordinary people inspired by wandering monks and ascetics.95 The varna scheme is neat and comprehensive, but its usefulness is limited by the fact that good evidence can be found to support all four of the alternatives which it lays out. The literary, philosophical, and “scholastic” character of much of the cultural borrowing, as Bosch pointed out, speaks in favour of transmission by an intellectual (brahmin) elite.96 That brahmins sometimes served to consecrate and elevate emerging royal dynasties in Southeast Asia is proven by a well-known early inscription from Borneo/Kalimantan.97 That traders also played an important role (the vaisya theory) is not only a logical inference from the fact that communication is a precondition for intercultural contact, but also an empirical inference from specific evidence for an early association between Buddhism, trade, and seafaring.98 The Bodhisattva (Buddha-like being) Avalokiteshvara became popular in the first centuries CE as a supernatural protector of travellers, in particular as “the saviour of mariners from shipwreck”.99 A fifth-century Sanskrit inscription from Kedah in Malaya records a gift by “a pious Buddhist sea-trader”,100 the ship-master (mahānāvika) Buddhagupta, to a religious institution. In the case of the “sudra theory”, the idea of Indianization as a movement of popular piety at the agrarian

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grassroots is supported by the anonymous and decentralized character of some of the religious building projects of the period, particularly in Central Java.101 Even the ksatriya or military theory of Indianization, although often treated in recent literature as entirely discredited, probably contains elements of truth. One episode of violent Indian intervention in Southeast Asia is certainly well documented: in 1025 the South Indian Chola Empire launched a powerful naval expedition against the Malay trading state of Srivijaya and its allies in the Strait of Malacca, attacking many port towns including at least six on the Malay Peninsula and four in Sumatra.102 This event seems to have marked the beginning of Srivijaya’s decline as a commercial centre and maritime power,103 and although it did not lead to a sustained occupation of the Straits area as a whole, there is evidence that for many decades Kedah in Malaya remained the seat of Chola “viceroys” who promoted the construction there of Hindu monuments in South Indian styles.104 The Chola invasion is generally regarded as an anomaly in the generally peaceful history of interactions between South and Southeast Asia, but given the incompleteness of historical sources for the classical period, it may not have been unique. Although the issue is contested, there is much circumstantial evidence that the eighth and ninth-century Sailendra “dynasty” of Central Java, associated with the construction of Buddhist monuments, was of foreign, quite possibly Indian, origin.105 Within Southeast Asia, Indianized kingdoms certainly often expanded their power, and with it their cultural influence, by violent means.106 It is never very satisfying when an academic discussion concludes simply that reality is complex, and that all of the available theories have some merit. In the case of Indianization, however, there is no avoiding the fact that we are dealing with a diffuse and multi-stranded process, one in which many groups, pathways, and motives were likely involved. Instead of trying to tease these apart historically, the next two sections take a holistic approach to the two great geographical asymmetries that mark cultural and civilizational exchange across Monsoon Asia down the ages: the predominance of interactions across the Indian Ocean over interactions across the South China Sea, and the predominance within the Indian Ocean world of transfers from west to east – that is, from South to Southeast Asia – rather than vice versa. Both asymmetries, it will be argued, were already established at very early dates, before the beginning of the historical record, for reasons which, while they can be guessed at, are not fully clear. Once established, however, directionally selective patterns of migration and interaction were extremely durable. This was partly because existing networks and orientations acquired lives of their own, reproducing themselves across generations and structuring subsequent developments over centuries of cultural and economic change. Another very important factor was the near-constant hostility of the Chinese state, until very recent historical times, to trading and travel by its subjects in the lands to its south.

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Precedence of the Indian Ocean axis: India’s thousand-year head start in Southeast Asia By the beginning of the Common Era, Southeast Asia already had strong maritime connections with India. Among the most important archaeological indicators of very early globalization is a class of glass ornaments, produced from about the third century BCE, known as “Indo-Pacific beads”.107 By the seventh century CE these were found across the whole of maritime Eurasia from England to Japan, as well as in many parts of Africa.108 But their densest distribution, and all of their known places of manufacture, were in South India, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, and the Mekong Delta, indicating that it was along this equatorial axis that trade and cultural interaction were concentrated. The Indo-Pacific bead industry appears to have originated on the Coromandel (eastern) coast of southern India near modern Puducherry/Pondicherry, then spread quite rapidly to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, but never further.109 In this it anticipated to a remarkable degree the pattern of later cultural Indianization, in the age of Sanskrit and monument-building. Finds of another characteristic manufactured trade good of the same era, a type of fine ceramic known as “rouletted ware”, are similarly distributed across South and Southeast Asia.110 China, significantly, was peripheral to both geographies: it had a separate tradition of glass bead-making, the products of which did not enter maritime trade,111 while Chinese ceramics were rarely exported to Southeast Asia before the seventh century CE.112 To date, the most important archaeological site for the study of Southeast Asia’s early maritime trade is Khao Sam Kaeo, at the eastern terminus of an ancient overland portage route across the narrow Isthmus of Kra in what is now southern Thailand. Excavated in 2005-09, this was a regional centre of commerce and manufacturing from the fifth to the second century BCE. Some of the artefacts recovered there, including Dong Son drums from northern Vietnam and jade ornaments belonging to an ancient South China Sea culture complex, reflect the old northsouth axis of prehistoric exchange. Taken as a whole, however, the corpus of finds at Khao Sam Kaeo clearly reveals the ascendancy of what Sunil Gupta has labelled the “Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere”.113 Ninety percent of the glass beads, for instance, are classically Indo-Pacific in type.114 The great majority of the semi-precious stone beads and ornaments are Indian in either production technique, or style, or both.115 Among the pottery sherds, more than 600 consist of “Indian fine wares” including rouletted ware,116 and another 1,100 are either Indian or show clear Indian influence.117 By contrast only 84 sherds are identifiably Chinese, all of them from storage vessels rather than trade wares, and perhaps associated with Han Dynasty diplomatic missions.118 Further evidence of incipient Indianization in late prehistoric Khao Sam Kaeo is provided by a burial jar containing cremated

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ashes. “For thousands of years”, comments Charles Higham, “the dead in Thailand had been inhumed”; the new practice of creation “took hold at the same time as Indian influence increased”.119 The predominance of Indian over Chinese archaeological finds at Khao Sam Kaeo is replicated at the slightly later sites associated with Southeast Asia’s first historically documented Indianized state. Known to contemporary Chinese writers as Funan (Fu Nan), this flourished in the Mekong Delta from the first to the sixth century CE. Reviewing the archaeology of Funan, Pierre-Yves Manguin remarks on “the almost total absence of artifacts of Chinese origin”.120 “Although China lay much closer to Fu Nan than India”, concludes John Miksic, “and although we know that communication with China occasionally took place, it seems that Fu Nan’s contact with South Asia was more intense”.121 Chinese sources from the third century CE throw light on this situation by recording that whereas trading vessels in the South China Sea still cautiously hugged the coasts of Indochina and the Malay Peninsula, “great merchant ships” were already making transoceanic voyages in the Indian Ocean.122 The liveliness of early commerce between India and Southeast Asia may seem rather counterintuitive given what has been said about the relative ecological homogeneity of the Monsoon Asia region. Potential for trade, after all, is generally greater between high and low latitudes, with contrasting climates generating complementarities of agricultural and natural production, than along east-west axes. In the case of the relation between South and Southeast Asia, however, important economic complementarities did exist. The forests of Indonesia produced spices, woods and resins not found further west, while deposits of gold and tin, scarce in India, were relatively plentiful in Southeast Asia.123 In return India sent manufactures, almost certainly including cotton cloth, its staple export throughout later history.124 It has been suggested that foodstuffs were also involved.125 To the north, meanwhile, trade between Southeast Asia and China was constrained by a number of factors. One was environmental: whereas Indonesia and the equatorial part of the Indian Ocean are typhoon-free, voyagers to China (or the northern Philippines, and to some extent also Bengal) had to run the gauntlet of tropical rotating storms (Fig. 1.3). Another constraint had to do with the timing of technological development in China: in the first centuries CE the most important Chinese export industry of later times, pottery/ceramics, “was still in its early stages and did not lend itself to commerce with the Nanhai”.126 In this period China’s exports to Southeast Asia were limited mainly to luxury silks, most of them transit goods destined for places further west.127 A third factor was the political turmoil which afflicted China intermittently from the third century CE to the sixth.128 Probably the greatest impediment to intensive interaction along the South China Sea axis, however, and certainly the most persistent at later periods, was the

Constructed 15-6-2022 and reproduced by permission of NOAA Digital Coast, with thanks to Matt Pendleton.

Hurricane Tracks database of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (https://coast.noaa.gov/hurricanes).131

Figure 1.3: Tracks of major hurricanes (category 3 and above) recorded in the boxed (darkened) area according to the Historical

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introduction: seasons and civilizations 31

restrictive attitude of Chinese governments toward overseas private commerce.129 As late as the tenth century, on the eve of premodern China’s most important interlude of commercial openness, the Chinese state still repeatedly issued harsh laws prohibiting its subjects from voyaging overseas, and continued to monopolize not only all imports, but also the domestic distribution of all imported goods.130 First-millennium commerce between China and its southern neighbours took place almost entirely in the framework of formalistic, ritualized political relationships between Southeast Asian polities and the Middle Kingdom, involving official trade monopolies and infrequent “tribute” missions from the Nanhai to the Chinese emperor and his representatives.132 All such trade was carried on foreign vessels; China itself did not build oceangoing ships, and would not begin to do so until the second millennium, when it copied their designs partly from Southeast Asian models.133 The fact that a good chronology of the official tribute missions survives in the Chinese records has tended to obscure the fact that compared with early Indian Ocean commerce, their significance for Southeast Asia was in most ways limited. Although their economic impact did grow during the Tang (618-907) with the emergence of Chinese ceramics as a valuable return cargo, the highly regulated character of these missions, each carrying a large volume of goods under monopoly control, continued to ensure that they did not involve intensive social and cultural contacts between China and Southeast Asia. It has been calculated that the 600,000 pieces of Chinese stone- and earthenware carried by a single Malay-Austronesian ship that sank off Cirebon around 970 CE, the wreck of which was salvaged in 2004-06, could have supplied Java’s entire demand for such products for a year.134 Between South and Southeast Asia, by contrast, flows and exchanges were far less constrained, and trade brought people as well as goods from India to Southeast Asia from an early date. DNA analysis of a tooth found with imported pottery in Bali suggests that it belonged to a trader of Indian extraction who was there in the late first millennium BCE.135 Bellina and Glover infer from the archaeological evidence that “Indian craft persons” skilled in the manufacture of beads and other ornaments were already settled at Khao Sam Kaeo in the same period.136 A goldsmith’s touchstone found elsewhere on the Kra isthmus carries a Tamil inscription in a script of the third or fourth century CE, likewise indicating immigration since Tamil, unlike Sanskrit, was not a language used by Southeast Asians for official or devotional purposes.137 A whole series of later Tamil inscriptions, ranging in date from the ninth century to the thirteenth, confirm the presence in Malaya, Sumatra, and Burma/Myanmar of settled Tamil-speaking populations, often linked with merchant trading guilds operating on both sides of the Bay of Bengal.138 By this period, Indian traders of many other ethnicities were also resident in Southeast Asia. Javanese inscriptions from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries CE list multiple

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South Asian merchant communities, including groups from what are now Odisha, Karnataka, and Sri Lanka as well as Tamil Nadu.139 Southeast Asia’s early interactions with South Asia also had a political dimension. Around 250 CE, a Chinese diplomatic mission to Funan met at its court an envoy of the Indian Murunda dynasty, with which Funan had previously initiated relations by sending its own envoy to northern India via the Bay of Bengal and the Ganges river.140 More important for future developments, however, was the arrival of Indian religious experts in Southeast Asia. Evidence for the presence of these, perhaps surprisingly, is scarcer than evidence for Indian artisans and traders, and often more contested. But while some references to Brahmins in historical sources may refer to mythical figures or indigenous Southeast Asians, specific mention of the presence of Indian Brahmins is made in a number of Cambodian and Javanese inscriptions dating from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries.141 In some cases the careers of these men are summarized and their Indian birthplaces named.142 The celebrated fourteenth-century Javanese court poem Negarakertagama (Desawarnana) names two Indian scholars who have composed eulogies to the king of Majapahit (East Java), adding that the home of one of them is in what is now Conjeeveram/Kanchipuram, near Madras/Chennai.143 Some details are also known about the life of a pioneer South Asian preacher of Buddhism in Southeast Asia, the royal-born Kashmiri monk Gunavarman, who travelled to Java via Sri Lanka at the beginning of the fifth century CE.144 Many were to follow in his path: a ninth-century Javanese inscription mentions a stream of visitors to a Buddhist temple in Central Java, pilgrims “bowed by the burden of devotion”, who “continuously arrived from the Gurjara country” – a region of India, most probably modern Gujarat.145 Because of their prehistoric origins in what is now China, modern Southeast Asian populations are predominantly Northeast Asian in genetic heritage. But their long history of interaction with Indian Ocean peoples has also left its mark in their DNA, at least in the areas where cultural Indianization was strongest. Genetic research in Bali shows that “haplogroups […] making up approximately 12% of the Balinese paternal gene pool appear to have migrated to Bali from India”, indicating “substantial levels of gene flow”.146 In Central Java almost 15 per cent of a sample population showed ‘Western Eurasian’ (South Asian, Middle Eastern, or European) paternal ancestry, with South Asia as “the most frequent point of origin”; eight per cent, perhaps more surprisingly, had similar maternal ancestry, again “primarily […] from South Asia”.147 A South Asian genetic signature is also “consistently visible” in populations of Burmese and Malay ethnicity,148 as well as among the Batak of North Sumatra, an area of medieval Tamil influence.149 Southeast Asia’s early westward connections did not stop at the Indian subcontinent, but also extended to Southwest Asia, the Middle East, and indirectly to Europe. Roman beads have been found in several parts of the region, including

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a late prehistoric site in Bali.150 Persian or Southwest Asian cultural influence in Southeast Asia appears to date back to the time of Funan,151 where funerary monuments have been found that have no equivalent outside the “Indo-Scythian” world of western Central Asia and northwest India.152 Ships of Persian or Arab design traded directly with Southeast Asia and China in the first millennium.153 Linguistic and literary evidence indicates that Java developed cultural as well as commercial links with Persia well before the island’s Islamization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.154 The long early history of navigation and migration to Southeast Asia from India and the Middle East contrasts sharply with the scarcity of Chinese visitors until almost the end of Southeast Asia’s classical era of Hindu-Buddhist civilization. The Chinese empire, as noted, was concerned to keep foreign trade under tight administrative control, and in principle did not permit its subjects to trade privately overseas.155 During the “Golden Age” of the Tang Dynasty China’s overseas commerce expanded rapidly, yet that commerce was still brought to and from Chinese shores exclusively by foreigners, including Southeast Asians, Indians, and Muslims from western Asia (Persians and Arabs). There are no records of private Chinese traders going overseas during the Tang.156 As for the overseas visitors to China, with the exception of some Buddhist monks,157 their interactions with the Chinese were limited. Foreign traders lived in separate ethnic quarters within the Chinese port cities, and contemporary sources suggest that their relations with the host population were “uneasy and contentious”.158 During the first millennium CE almost the only Chinese visitors to Monsoon Asia beyond Vietnam were occasional diplomatic envoys, together with a trickle of Buddhist pilgrims to India. The southward diplomatic missions, at least to places relatively distant from China’s borders, were few and far between. Only one, to Srivijaja in 683 CE, appears to have been sent to any part of maritime Southeast Asia (the islands and the Malay Peninsula) over a period of half a millennium between the fifth century and the tenth.159 As for the pilgrims, it is worth noting in relation to the issue of limited Chinese cultural impact that they came not as bearers of what they regarded as a superior civilization, but as seekers of sacred knowledge in South Asia, and indeed in Southeast Asia too. Srivijaya in Sumatra and/or Malaya was not only where the Bengali monk Atisha studied for twelve years before teaching Buddhism in Tibet; it was also where Chinese pilgrims like Yi Jing (635-713), travelling by sea to India, sojourned for long periods to study Sanskrit, scripture, and ritual before proceeding to their destination. In Sumatra, Yi Jing reported, Buddhist scholars could study “all the subjects that exist just as in the Middle Kingdom [Madhya-desa: India, not China]; the rules and ceremonies are not at all different”.160 It was not until 989 CE that the Chinese government for the first time allowed Chinese private shipping, albeit initially still subject to tight restrictions, to sail

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abroad for the purpose of trade. 161 Deregulation continued in the eleventh century and became a matter of political survival in the twelfth, when Mongol invaders conquered the north of China and the Song dynasty established a new southward-looking capital at Hangzhou. The Southern Song (1127-1279) was too financially dependent on overseas trade to contemplate leaving such trade to foreigners.162 After the Mongols completed their conquest of China in 1279, their new Yuan dynasty continued the relatively active, outward-looking commercial orientation of its predecessor, although free trade conditions now alternated with periods of monopoly in which the state itself sponsored official Chinese trading expeditions to the exclusion of private Chinese competition.163 Despite the more favourable policy environment from the eleventh century onward, the Chinese commercial movement into the Nanhai remained slow. The earliest epigraphic mention of a Chinese trading community on Java does not occur until 1305 CE,164 and prolonged Chinese sojourning in the Malacca Straits area appears to date from the same period.165 It is, then, only a mild exaggeration to say that by the time the first Chinese people settled in Southeast Asia, and indeed by the time any Chinese beyond a handful of pilgrims and diplomats even set foot in Southeast Asia, South Asians of diverse classes and occupations had been travelling, sojourning, and settling there in significant numbers, as well as Southeast Asians visiting India, for well over a thousand years. China’s medieval interlude of outward orientation, moreover, was not to last. Despite the famous episode of extroversion represented by the great “Zheng He voyages” of official trade and exploration in the years 1405-1433, private sea commerce was once more heavily restricted under the Ming Dynasty during almost the whole period from 1371 to 1567, and then again, albeit less effectively, in the early Qing from 1654 to 1684.166 Not until the middle of the eighteenth century did Chinese traders, miners and farmers began to arrive in Southeast Asia in large numbers,167 prefiguring the mass migrations of the period 1850-1930.168 Chinese activity beyond Southeast Asia in the Indian Ocean, meanwhile, was limited to the Zheng He episode, together with an earlier period during the Yuan when Chinese shipping briefly frequented India’s Malabar Coast.169 Given the long prior history of sustained east-west interaction and the lack of a comparable tradition of north-south contacts, it is hardly surprising that when the classical era of Indic civilization in Southeast Asia came to an end in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the rise of the new international cosmopolis which replaced it in Indonesia and Malaysia, that of Islam, took place mainly from the same direction and through the same channels as Indianization. Portuguese chronicler Tomé Pires’ contemporary account of the Islamization of Java, written around 1515, gives a good sense of how this process was shaped by the island’s intensive commerce with many different countries and peoples to its west.

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At the time when there were heathens along the sea coast of Java, many merchants used to come, Parsees, Arabs, Gujaratees, Bengalees, Malays and other nationalities, there being many Moors among them. They began to trade in the country and to grow rich. They succeeded in way of making mosques, and mollahs came from outside, so that they came in such growing numbers that the sons of these said Moors were already Javanese and rich, for they had been in these parts for about seventy years. In some places the heathen Javanese lords themselves turned Mohammedan, and these mollahs and the merchant Moors took possession of these places. Others had a way of fortifying the places where they lived, and they took people of their own who sailed in their junks, and they killed the Javanese lords and made themselves lords; and in this way they made themselves masters of the sea coast and took over trade and power in Java.170

Although much was no doubt different, it is not hard to discern in this passage an analogue of the multi-pronged Indianization process of the previous millennium, in which traders, brahmins (“mollahs”) and warriors all played their roles. While Pires’ antagonism toward Islam may have led him to exaggerate the violent aspect of Islamic conversion, it was certainly present, as it no doubt had been in the growth of the Indianized kingdoms. Two aspects of Islamization not mentioned by Pires likewise echoed earlier paths of cultural change: alliance and intermarriage of Muslims with existing elites, including members of the court of the last Javanese Hindu-Buddhist kingdom, Majapahit;171 and popular enthusiasm for the universal appeal, charismatic proponents, and supernatural benefits of the new faith.172 As Pires’ account suggests, the rise of Islam in Indonesia was closely connected with similar developments around the shores of the Indian Ocean.173 While migrants from the Chinese port of Quanzhou also seem to have played a part in Java’s conversion,174 they did so as participants in long-distance networks based in Persia and the Indian Ocean, and indeed as refugees from one of the periodic episodes of violence between foreign traders and their hosts in China.175 Indologist J.G. de Casparis, noting the involvement of South Asian Muslims in the spread of Islam in the Malay world and the role of the Mughal Sultanate as a model for the early Islamic kingdom of Aceh (Sumatra), once argued that “Indianization” never really ended in Indonesia, and that the whole concept could better be replaced by one of ‘a lasting relationship between the Indian subcontinent and maritime Southeast Asia’, embedded in “a complicated network of relations”.176 What is clear is that the historical precedence of that network, and its persistence over many centuries during which it had no real equivalent connecting Southeast with Northeast Asia, goes a long way toward explaining the primacy of the Indian Ocean over the South China Sea as a highway of cultural and other change within Monsoon Asia.

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The puzzle of directionality: South Asia as innovation hub and exemplary centre There remains the question of directionality: why did the major currents of cultural change always flow from west to east? As noted this cannot be explained in terms of the means of transport and communication across the Indian Ocean, which in the first millennium were probably mostly in Indonesian or other Southeast Asian hands. In relation to the proselytizing, global religion of Islam, spreading in all directions, closely associated with trading networks, and benefiting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from a sustained expansion of commerce and cities,177 the idea of a directional bias may not be a particularly relevant or sensible one. But in relation to Indianization, some elements of which were perhaps less intrinsically dynamic, and which outside India itself did not extend beyond Southeast Asia, the directionality question still begs for some kind of answer, however tentative. Possibly the directional bias, like the primacy of the Indian Ocean axis itself, was partly an accidental legacy of the earliest period of contact, when Southeast Asians, in return for products of the land, acquired desirable artefacts and technologies – ornaments, textiles – from India. A higher degree of early economic complexity on the Indian subcontinent, supported by larger, denser populations and associated with professional craft specialization along caste or guild lines, could have played a role here.178 Such early exchanges might then have set up a lasting pattern of cultural expectation with respect to things foreign, or even things Indian. Perhaps they also created or enhanced “stranger-king” traditions in which foreigners themselves, as well as foreign goods and skills, were perceived as bearers and sources of prestige – even if those foreign people and products were deliberately fetched to Southeast Asian shores by Southeast Asians themselves, rather than appearing mysteriously there as in a Pacific “cargo cult”.179 Indeed, it is conceivable that the very mastery of Southeast Asian peoples when it came to ships and sailing caused them to develop a habit or custom of looking overseas for valuable innovations in other domains, rather than relying on their own powers of invention. While claims for the intrinsic superiority of Indian cultural products must always be treated with caution, some introduced ideas or technologies may well have been so genuinely new and useful as to have promoted themselves regardless of any tradition. The obvious example is writing. Southeast Asian societies were illiterate until they encountered Indian-derived scripts and syllabaries, which they adopted with an enthusiasm possibly unmatched in the history of writing.180 In India itself, ironically, premodern literacy was largely restricted to elites, and even among the literate few there was a “bias toward the oral” whereby the use of the written word was disapproved in some contexts.181 In many parts of Southeast Asia, by contrast, the art of writing seems to have embraced by almost all groups

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in society, and was soon used for domestic and economic purposes as well as in the spheres of religion and statecraft.182 Whatever the solution to the puzzle of directionality, the Indianizing pattern of extensive and unidirectional acculturation without political unification is less unique than some commentators suggest. During and after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Christianity and Latin-Greek civilization spread well beyond the boundaries of the empire that had been their incubator, from Ireland to Scandinavia to Russia. A closer analogy with Southeast Asia’s Indianization, first explored in a Japaneselanguage article by Aoyama Toru, can be found in Japan’s longue durée cultural relationship with China and the Sinicized world.183 The export of Chinese culture was not everywhere prevented by the difficulty of the writing system and the tightness of its association with imperial political institutions. Whereas the roots of Vietnam’s Sinicization lie in its millennium as a Chinese province, Japan, in the course of that same millennium, borrowed and adapted many elements of Chinese civilization – writing,184 law and political ideology,185 and the Buddhism which had reached China through Central Asia during the Han 186 – without falling under Chinese rule. As in the Indosphere, this borrowing was a complex process involving many groups. Like their Southeast Asian counterparts, emerging Japanese political elites used exotic knowledge, religion, and connections to reinforce their local status and power. “Book, writing brush and the icons of the Buddhist cult”, as Joan Piggot puts it, “replaced armor and sword […] as insignia of royal rule”.187 This was possible, however, because Buddhism and the new legal order seem to have proved widely popular innovations. Meanwhile, the migration of craftsmen, scholars, and monks to Japan from the mainland also played a role in the cultural shift. The political, technological, and commercial predominance of China for Japan was no doubt greater than that of India for Southeast Asia, making the persistent directionality of the cultural transfer perhaps less mysterious. But it is worth noting that many of the foreign artisans and literati who influenced Japan in the first millennium did not themselves come from China, but from small kingdoms on the Korean peninsula, which like Japan was part of the Sinosphere without being part of the Chinese empire.188 This suggests that civilizational, not political, prestige was central to the process of acculturation. A final, striking point of similarity with the Indianization of Southeast Asia is that the close cultural relationship which developed between Japan, Korea and China in the era of the Nara and the Tang was not a new one. It was prefigured by a long period of prehistoric cultural convergence, illuminated by recent archaeological research, between the countries around the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan.189 Piggot coined the term “China Sea Interaction Sphere” to refer to this maritime domain.190 Like the Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere, it represents a very old arena of habitual movement and interaction which has shaped history in multiple ways over successive periods. Its cultural significance lasted far into the second

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millennium, when Japan continued to borrow primarily from China – for instance, in the area of Confucian values and ideology – until Western pressure forced it to widen its horizons.191 Like Southeast Asia, Japan offers no easy lessons on the specific mechanisms of cultural change, but rather a more general lesson on the power of geography and the momentum of history in the cultural sphere.

Two millennia of Monsoon Asia Of the remaining fifteen chapters in our collection, the first, “Revisiting the Monsoon Asia idea: old problems and new directions”, by Andrea Acri (Chapter 2), deals explicitly with Monsoon Asia as a concept. Acri calls for a revival of that concept in a form which has ecology and prehistory at its centre, and which takes its cue in the first place from French thinkers of the early twentieth century. While he pays due respect to Indologists like George Coedès and Sylvain Lévi, his main inspiration comes from the geographer Jules Sion and especially the sociologist Paul Mus, who argued that Indic civilization was underlain in South and Southeast Asia by a common cultural and religious substrate that both shaped its development and facilitated its diffusion. Elements of the prehistoric “religion of the monsoon zone”,192 in this view, included the cult of local ancestors and the idea of an autochthonous god of the soil, both of which were fused with new beliefs of “Aryan” origin as Indian and Indianized cultures developed. With its characteristic attachment to territory, water, and fertility, the common primordial culture was rooted in ecology and the intensive, sedentary agricultural systems of the monsoon countries. Consistent with his ecological premise, Mus located the ancestral culture of Monsoon Asia in southern China as well as India and Southeast Asia. This means that his theory cannot in itself account for the specific geography of Indianization and Sinicization that has been the subject of much of our introductory discussion. Nevertheless, in proposing that the Indianization of the classical era had prehistoric roots, and by suggesting that sea travel as well as environmental similarities already promoted cultural coherence across Monsoon Asia in prehistory, Mus clearly anticipated much later scholarship on the region. The remainder of Acri’s chapter consists of a succinct intellectual history of the Monsoon Asia concept, with useful illustrative maps, together with a review of twentieth and twenty-first century works in anthropology and other disciplines which offer support for the idea of a cultural unity across the region in prehistoric times. Finally he proposes linking the old idea of Monsoon Asia with two innovations of recent scholarship: Johannes Bronkhorst’s “Greater Magadha hypothesis”,193 which Acri suggests can be interpreted in terms of the presence in the prehistoric Gangetic plain of an Austroasiatic language-speaking population with Southeast Asian affinities; and

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the concept of “Zomia”, a zone encompassing the stateless margins of both South and Southeast Asia, as popularized by James Scott.194 Chapter 3, “Space and time in the making of Monsoon Asia” by Jos Gommans, is a similarly wide-ranging enquiry into the history and value of this concept as a way of understanding the Asian past, but now with a focus on historically documented periods and on relations with other world regions. Gommans’ intellectual genealogy of Monsoon Asia begins less with Indologists and colonial scholars than with Fernand Braudel, whose opus magnum on the sixteenth-century Mediterranean (1949) popularized the idea that a zone of maritime connectivity could be an object of historical scholarship,195 and Braudel’s disciple K.N. Chaudhuri, whose standard works on trade and civilization in the Indian Ocean applied the Braudelian method to Asia’s most historically important maritime space.196 Gommans compares the sea highway of Monsoon Asia with its overland Silk Road counterpart in the arid zone of Central Asia, and argues that the most important nodal points of the premodern world were those which had access to both marine and terrestrial systems of long-distance transport. This helps to explain the persistent importance of one such node, Gujarat in northwestern India, in the history of Southeast Asia as well as the Indian Ocean.197 With respect to chronology, Gommans argues that the histories of South and Southeast Asia are of a piece in the sense that both can be divided into the same three broad periods. The first is that of large but loosely organized “Charter Empires”, beginning with the Indian Maurya Empire in the third century BCE. In cultural terms, this period corresponds to the development of Pollock’s Sanskrit Cosmopolis. From 750 to 1250 CE, secondly, both South and Southeast Asia saw a trend toward smaller, more centralized “Temple States”, accompanied by a cultural vernacularization whereby local languages increasingly replaced Sanskrit in written use. From 1250 to 1750, finally, disruptions caused in northern India by Muslim invasions, and in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean by new commercial impulses, led to the development of what Gommans calls “Frontier States”, both terrestrial and maritime, and to Islamization. This bold, broad-brushstroked chronology of Monsoon Asian history, not corresponding exactly to conventional cutoffs and categories for either India or Southeast Asia, should serve as a valuable point of reference for future discussion and debate. With Pierre-Yves Manguin’s “New paradigms for the early relationship between South and Southeast Asia: the contribution of Southeast Asian archaeology” (Chapter 4) we move from the domain of intellectual history and re-interpretation into that of recent empirical findings. Manguin draws on the results of the flowering of Southeast Asian archaeology since the 1980s to show how much more is now known about the ancient history and late prehistory of the region than was known in the time when inferences were based almost entirely on epigraphy. The most striking findings are those that illustrate the levels of organization and

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sophistication which Southeast Asian societies had already achieved prior to the appearance of inscriptions, statues, or temples. In the Mekong Delta, for example, a rectangular moat of 15 by 3 kilometres surrounding the city of Oc Eo has now been dated to no later than the second century CE, and a 70-kilometre canal linking it with Angkor Borei, the other main centre of Funan, Southeast Asia’s earliest Indianized kingdom, to the fourth century at the latest.198 Significantly, Manguin and other archaeologists do not hesitate to ascribe the moat, and other aspects of the design of ancient Oc Eo, to inspiration by ‘Indian urban concepts”. That borrowing from India was not limited to exotic words and religious abstractions is already clear, after all, from other archaeological evidence of prehistoric technology transfer. The examples of Indo-Pacific bead and Indianized pottery manufacture, of which the Mekong Delta was one centre, have already been mentioned. Manguin adds that the roof tiles covering early wooden structures at Oc Eo were also identical to tiles found at Indian sites. Other themes of his chapter include new evidence for the role of “sectarian, devotional forms of Vaishavism [Hinduism]”, alongside Buddhism, as agents of Indianization among commercial and urban groups in Southeast Asia. Of all our contributors, Manguin is the frankest in his acknowledgement that India and Southeast Asia were not equal parties in the cultural exchanges of the period. “No historian”, he writes, “has seriously contested the asymmetry of the mid-first millennium CE process that we still need to designate as ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia, for lack of a better word”. A philological perspective on connections between South and Southeast Asia is provided by Tom Hoogervorst in Chapter 5, “Contacts, cosmopoleis, colonial legacies: interconnected language histories”. This begins by sketching Sheldon Pollock’s idea of an early rise of Sanskrit as a cosmopolitan language of aesthetics, learning, and power.199 Hoogervorst then compares the subsequent vernacularization process, whereby Sanskrit was replaced in written use by “literarized” and partly Sanskritized vernaculars like Javanese, Khmer, and Tamil, with the emergence in Europe of what would become national written languages, still using Latin script and often with much Latin vocabulary, at the expense of Latin itself. In the modern era the influence of Sanskrit has nevertheless continued in Southeast Asia as national language planners have looked to the old prestige language as a source of official neologisms. By no means all of the Indian words borrowed into Southeast Asian languages come from Sanskrit: Pali, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, is an important source of vocabulary in Burmese and Thai, as is Tamil for Malay/Indonesian. Hoogervorst also gives examples of loans from colloquial languages of northern India. Islamization, in Indonesia and Malaysia, brought influences from Persian as well as Arabic. In the colonial era, Portuguese, Dutch and English also left their mark, while the Tamil connection was sustained by continuing migration across the Bay of Bengal.

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With Chapter 6, “Indianization reconsidered: India’s early influence in Southeast Asia”, we return to the classical era for a survey by Hermann Kulke of the debate over the nature and causes of Indianization. This is a revised and updated version of Kulke’s own most influential contribution to that debate, a 1990 article in which he laid out the idea of a long-term “cultural convergence” between South and Southeast Asia as a corrective to the “Indocentric” frames of reference inherited from the colonial period.200 In the early centuries CE, Kulke argues, commercial development and state formation proceeded at a similar pace, and in a context of continuous mutual contact and influence, on both sides of the Bay of Bengal. Cultural innovations such as stone temples were similarly synchronized: although Buddhist stupas have a longer history on the subcontinent, the early Hindu temples of the Dieng Plateau in Java are almost exactly contemporary with similar structures built by emerging kingdoms on India’s eastern seaboard in the late seventh century CE. In terms of the character of the causal links between sociopolitical and cultural change, Kulke leans toward a brahmin theory of symbolic innovation as an instrument of political legitimation for emerging elites, but without the traditional assumption that Southeast Asians were in awe of Indian cultural superiority. Whereas early theorists assumed that it was the perceived distance between India’s great culture and Southeast Asia’s parochial cultures that drove the process, he explains, “the convergence hypothesis postulates socio-political nearness as a major factor promoting Indianization”. The chapter concludes with a review of some subsequent additions to the literature, including Pollock’s The language of the gods,201 which he criticizes for its lack of clarity regarding the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the Sanskrit cosmopolis; Aoyama’s pioneering discussion of the parallel with Japanese Sinicization; and a recent article by Andrea Acri (author of Chapter 2 in the present volume) on local and cosmopolitan paradigms in the study of premodern Southeast Asia. 202 In Chapter 7, “Local projects and transregional modalities: the Pali Arena”, Anne Blackburn introduces our second historical cosmopolis (although she herself prefers to avoid that term due to its specific association with the work of Pollock). This is the world of the Buddhist network or networks, oriented toward the Pali language, that were to evolve into what much later became known as Theravada Buddhism. Buddhists in the Pali tradition accorded authority to a corpus of Palilanguage scriptures and commentaries, standardized in Sri Lanka, which they regarded as true to the original teachings of the Buddha. Beginning in the middle of the first millennium, and more robustly from the turn of the second, they formed a community which spanned both sides of the Bay of Bengal, including Sri Lanka, the Coromandel Coast, and “the maritime spaces along Burmese, Mon, and Tai territories”, and which “acted – in composing texts, undertaking pilgrimages,

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and conducting diplomacy […] – as if these regions were not distinct”. Blackburn describes how the import of monastic teachers and ordination lineages from distant parts of the Pali-oriented ecumene, as sketched earlier in relation to Sri Lanka, was in fact a common tool of statecraft for Buddhist rulers in mainland Southeast Asia too, serving to strengthen their control over the religious establishment. She traces the history of the Pali world up to the colonial period, when it began to develop connections beyond Monsoon Asia. Chapter 8, by R. Michael Feener, is the first of three dealing with Islam and transnational Islamic communities. Under the title “Muslim circulations and Islamic conversion in Monsoon Asia”, it discusses the advent and spread of Islam in the region. Feener begins by cautioning against the tendency to assume that Southeast Asia’s Islam must be eccentric or derivative with respect to that of the Middle East, and that the question of its routes of transmission must be vital to understanding it. Distance from Mecca is not necessarily the operative variable here. The Islamization of Anatolia/Turkey (roughly, 1100-1500 CE) was nearly contemporary with that of Malaya/Sumatra, and seems to have involved the mediation of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) and Sufi organizations,203 just as the conversion of Indonesia is often said to have done.204 But Turkish Islam is not normally thought of as a foreign transplant to the same extent as is Islam in Southeast Asia. By framing the conversion process in terms of “circulation” rather than transmission, Feener aims to promote a more balanced understanding of Muslim Southeast Asia both in its own right, and as part of the broader Islamic world. Feener’s concern is with the seaborne Islam of coastal Asia, not the horseborne Muslim incursions and conquests that led to the partial Islamization of northern India from about 1100 onward. For maritime Asia, the rise of Islam effectively came in two discrete stages: the initial establishment of a Muslim sea trade network between the Middle East and China, which took place with breathtaking speed over the earliest phase of Islam’s history in the seventh and eighth centuries CE; and the great demographic surge of Islamic conversion and conquest, spreading outward from the Muslim port cities, which began in the fourteenth century and reached its peak, dramatically described by Tomé Pires, with the Islamization of Java in the sixteenth. Feener agrees broadly with Reid that the main driving force behind this second phase was an increase in the scale and importance of international trade,205 as a result of which “expansion of Muslim local communities beyond court circles and the mixed families of merchant intermarriages appears to have reached tipping points […] that […] triggered wider identifications with the increasingly prestigious faith of Islam among broader populations”. After the Portuguese capture of Goa in 1510 and Malacca in 1511, competition with the self-consciously anti-Muslim Christian interlopers, and more militant modes of expansion, also played a role.

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Whereas Chapter 8 told a panoramic story of the rise and expansion of Islam over time, Chapter 9, “Islamic literary networks in South and Southeast Asia”, by Ronit Ricci, focuses on one specific transnational Islamic community in mid-second millennium Monsoon Asia: that linking Java, Sumatra, and Tamil-speaking southern India. Ricci gives some detail on the trade flows that underpinned this community – steel, diamonds, and fabrics, for instance, from Golconda (Hyderabad) to Aceh (Sumatra) in return for pepper, benzoin (gum resin) and camphor (also a tropical tree product) – and mentions the special role played within the community by the Chulia, a commercially specialized Muslim Tamil subgroup.206 But she stresses that religious, as well as commercial, journeys bound the community together: the grave of one Sufi saint in Kayalpattinam, on the southern tip of India opposite Sri Lanka, still attracts Indonesian and Malaysian pilgrims today. Ricci’s central focus is on the function of the Tamil-Indonesian ecumene as a “literary network”. A well-known Islamic literary work, the Book of one thousand questions, is used to illustrate this. Originally composed in Arabic, the Thousand questions was also widely distributed and read in loose Tamil, Malay and Javanese translations, written in modified forms of the Arabic script, often adjusted to local cultural settings and differing significantly from each other in content. Ricci suggests that a precedent and model for such translations was provided by the post-Sanskrit vernacular literature of Indianized Southeast Asia, such as that written in Kawi or Old Javanese. Although the explicitly sacred status of Arabic was not exactly prefigured by the role of Sanskrit in the earlier cosmopolis, Ricci sees strong continuities between the classical and post-classical periods in terms of a fertile interplay between cosmopolitan and local languages and narrative styles, underpinned by “fundamental beliefs in the power of words”. Chapter 10, by Mahmood Kooria, deals with another aspect of the transnational Islamic world of South and Southeast Asia: “Islamic legal cosmopolis and its Arabic and Malay microcosms”. Indianization had already involved a legal component, with the ancient Indian Dharmasastra, and especially its subcomponent the Code of Manu, becoming revered sources of law in mainland Southeast Asia and Java/ Bali.207 But law and justice were more important still in the spread of Islam and the creation of Islamic societies. Kooria tells the story of how one of the four major schools (madhhab) of Islamic law, the Shafi’i, came to be linked with the “cosmopolitan vernacular” language of island Southeast Asia, Malay, and thereby to dominate that part of the Islamic world while other schools prevailed elsewhere – the Hanafi, for instance, in Mughal South Asia, and the Maliki in North Africa. Like Swahili across the Indian Ocean on the East African coast, where the Shafi’i school also became dominant, Malay was a regional lingua franca that became a language of transmission, alongside Arabic, for Islamic knowledge. Ultimately it gave rise to a

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whole set of transnational ethnic identities that defined themselves as Muslim as well as Malay-speaking.208

Monsoon Asia in the modern era Long-distance commerce, we have seen, has been a defining feature of Monsoon Asia since the earliest times. Nevertheless, for technological and institutional reasons – steamships, British naval hegemony, and economic liberalism – the nineteenth century brought a huge increase in the volume of trade across the region.209 It also saw migration on a scale that was unprecedented, and indeed never later equalled, at least not in proportional terms. The greatest movement was from China, with some 6.5 million Chinese migrants settling permanently in Southeast Asia between 1850 and 1940.210 But several million Indians also migrated to Sri Lanka, Burma and Malaya in the same period, and a many times larger number worked there temporarily before returning home to the subcontinent. Chapter 11, “Human traffic: Asian migration in the age of steam”, by Sunil Amrith, describes this movement. The majority of the migrants came from the Tamil southeast, where there was poverty and a tradition of bonded labour. Taking advantage of both, labour recruiters working with European planters used a combination of inducement, coercion, and debt to deliver Tamil workers en masse to Sri Lanka’s tea plantations and Malaya’s rubber estates. Indian migrants to Burma/Myanmar were more diverse, including Chettiar moneylenders and Telugu urban labourers. Most left Burma during and after the Second World War, but in Malaysia and Singapore, ethnic Indians still make up about seven percent of the population today. Chapter 12, “The problem of transregional framing in Asian history: charmed knowledge networks and moral geographies of ‘Greater India’”, by Marieke Bloembergen, examines how intellectual elites of the late colonial period conceptualized the region we refer to as Monsoon Asia. Bloembergen’s focus is on how new knowledge about cultures and histories was filtered and structured by civilizational and colonial ways of thinking in which inequality was fundamental. The characteristic result was a double value judgement: Indonesia, as the derivative civilization, was essentially inferior to India, justifying chauvinistic forms of Indian nationalism; and the present achievements of both countries were inferior to the greater glories of their past, justifying European colonial endeavours to raise them up again on the civilizational ladder – for instance, by explaining to them the achievements of their ancestors. To make matters worse, the “moral geography” that associated India with spirituality and non-violence served to shield these prejudices from criticism and prolong their lifespan in the postcolonial world. Bloembergen suggests that there are cautionary messages here for present-day proponents of the Monsoon Asia

introduction: seasons and civilizations 45

paradigm. In empirical terms, her chapter provides a wealth of historical detail on the extraordinary multinational cast of adventurers, archaeologists, artists, poets, theosophists and gurus who contributed to the “Greater India” idea. With Carolien Stolte’s “Pragmatic Asianism: international socialists in South and Southeast Asia” (Chapter 13) we remain in the sphere of ideas and ideology, but now from the very different perspective of “Labour Asianism”, or international solidarity among Asian socialist and labour movements. In the mid-twentieth century, roughly from 1930 to 1960, several organizations based on this hybrid principle were active. Stolte focuses on the Asian Socialist Conference (ASC), founded in 1953. The ASC was essentially an association of non-communist and anti-communist socialist parties disillusioned by the lack of priority which their European counterparts, organized since 1951 in the Socialist International, were prepared to give to the issue of decolonization. The ASC did not exist for long – technically until 1965, in practice not beyond 1960 – and was never particularly influential, partly because some of its member parties were only minor forces in their own countries. Its interest in our context lies in the fact that de facto, if not de jure, it was very much a South and Southeast Asian institution. Its driving forces were socialist groups from Indonesia, India, and Burma, joined at its first conference in 1953 in Rangoon, where it had its headquarters, by similar parties from Pakistan and Malaya, and at the second, in Bombay in 1956, by Sri Lankan and Nepali allies too. Stolte notes that the ASC was “not […] held together by any particular map of Asia (real or imagined), or the attribution of key cultural characteristics of Asia”. Rather, its geographical scope was dictated by the fact that, rejecting both Western and “neo-Soviet” imperialism, in that time of Sino-Soviet solidarity it automatically found itself wedged between “the Soviet Central Asian republics and revolutionary China to the north, and resolutely aligned Australia to the south”. But if there was no continuity here with the “Greater India” ideologies of the colonial past, it is nevertheless tempting to see in this political geography an echo of the old cultural geography of precolonial Monsoon Asia, of which “non-Sinicization”, as we have seen, was de facto a defining characteristic. The same could almost be said of the far more important Non-Aligned Movement, given that one of the main concerns of the South and Southeast Asian states which organized the 1955 Bandung Conference, in which that movement partly originated, was their collective relationship with revolutionary China.211 Our most thoroughly contemporary chapter, by political scientist Ward Berenschot, is entitled “The informality trap: politics, governance and informal institutions in South and Southeast Asia” (Chapter 14). Earlier in the present introduction it was suggested that in postcolonial times one of the most striking similarities among the South and Southeast Asian countries has been the weakness of their legal and administrative institutions. Berenschot presents concrete

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evidence of this from international indices of quality of governance. Except for the city-state of Singapore, where corruption has been kept rigorously at bay by a legalistic form of semi-authoritarianism designed to preserve the city’s prosperity as an outpost of international capitalism, all countries of Monsoon Asia score poorly on regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. Some, such as Pakistan and Vietnam, score very poorly, worse than most Latin American and Caribbean countries. The success of many of these countries, including Vietnam, in generating rapid growth and poverty reduction shows that institutional quality – at least as conventionally measured – is less vital to economic development than has often been assumed. Nevertheless, in terms of the prospects for impersonal legal justice, it is a bleak picture that Berenschot paints from his fieldwork experience in both Indonesia and India. While entrenched social values favouring personal reciprocity and clientelism are part of this story, Berenschot stresses that the situation also needs to be understood as a massive collective action problem. Even when individuals would prefer not to give or receive bribes, to stop doing so, in the absence of a coordinated change of behaviour by very large numbers of people, would be to disadvantage not only themselves, but also their family and dependants, without improving the wider system. Today, most countries of Monsoon Asia remain deeply mired in this “informality trap”. In Chapter 15, “Epics in worlds of performance: a South/Southeast Asian narrativity”, Bernard Arps picks up the theme of the “literary network” introduced by Ricci in relation to Islamic texts and genres in India and Indonesia. Arps, however, paints on a broader canvas, and brings his story up to the present day. His thesis is that common elements can be detected in all the great epic stories of Monsoon Asia, from the Indian Ramayana and Mahabharata, still the stuff of popular as well as high culture almost everywhere in South and Southeast Asia, to the tales of Amir Hamza, champion of Islam, which until recently were popular throughout the Muslim countries of the region. South and Southeast Asian epics, by definition, have some characteristics in common with similar tales elsewhere in the world: they are “grand and elaborate stories told about heroes and heroines on adventures”. But other features stand out, at least in combination, as distinctive in global terms, yet shared across Monsoon Asia. They are: a concern with noble kinship relations and the struggles these engender over love, leadership, and land; named protagonists belonging to distinct types, appearing vis-à-vis nameless masses, and facing challenges willed upon them by (supernatural or human) others; “atmospheric storyworlds” highlighting the emotions, moods and temperaments of the protagonists; and “splendid, modularly structured narration”. Although set in alternate worlds, the stories are in some ways realistic and intersect with real sociopolitical issues. Often they play a role in the assertion of political authority and are employed as charters for power.

introduction: seasons and civilizations 47

Arps proceeds to illustrate these characteristics from Hindu and Islamic epics, Buddhist Jataka stories, Javanese Panji tales, the Bugis La Galigo cycle, the Tibetan epic of King Gesar, and Filipino pasyon texts recounting the Passion of Christ. In the process he highlights some specific differences between the tradition he is describing and defining, and other epic genres around the world. For instance, whereas European and some African epics tend to be “chronotopic”, recounting the lives and journeys of their heroes in chronological sequence, South/Southeast Asian epics often branch out anachronistically along lines of kinship into subsidiary tales about relatives of the main characters (Malay/Indonesian: cerita ranting, “twig stories”). Arps does not speculate on when or how the great convergence of epic styles within Monsoon Asia took place, or what it might have to do with – for instance – kinship patterns, social stratification, state formation, or indeed Indianization. And his model of a single shared tradition of South and Southeast Asian “epicality”’, straddling historical eras and religious traditions, will no doubt have its critics. But as an attempt to explore and chart deep, hitherto nameless commonalities of human experience and sensibility across Monsoon Asia, his contribution stands out in our volume for its originality. The volume ends with a postscript by my co-editor Nira Wickramasinghe, entitled “The many worlds of Monsoon Asia”. Its central theme is that Area Studies is at its most useful, and most true to life, when it takes as its objects of analysis areas that are defined not by fixed boundaries, but by dynamic connections: “rather than being a solid thing, embedded in the bedrock of geography, an area is rather like a fountain, which is given shape only by constant activity and movement”. Maritime, as opposed to terrestrial, arenas of human interaction epitomize this kind of dynamically defined area, and the Indian Ocean, and by extension Monsoon Asia, is an example par excellence. The postscript draws upon several of our earlier chapters to illustrate this point and advocate its significance for future studies, before concluding with a different kind of hope: that the political legacy of Monsoon Asia, as the birthplace of Asian anticolonialism, Third World solidarity, and the Non-Aligned Movement, will also prove inspirational for the future.

Monsoon Asia in the twenty-first century To what extent are the movements and interactions that gave Monsoon Asia its historical coherence still ongoing in the twenty-first century? In some respects, undoubtedly less than in the past. Trade and migration between South and Southeast Asia, for instance, have long ago lost the importance they once had. In 2015 only 2.6 per cent of the foreign trade of the ASEAN countries was conducted with India, against 15.2 per cent with China, 10.5 per cent with Japan, 10.0 per cent with the

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EU countries, and 9.4 per cent with the USA.212 Neither do religious, cultural, and intellectual relations across the Bay of Bengal seem to have been particularly close or intensive in recent years – although there are exceptions, and this remains an area for research.213 In political terms, too, South and Southeast Asia drifted apart for many decades after the heady moment of the Bandung Conference, the more so following the failures in 1967 and 1981 of two somewhat ambivalent attempts by Sri Lanka to join ASEAN.214 But if active exchanges and solidarities among the countries of Monsoon Asia have on the whole declined in strength and importance in recent decades, the old geographical and environmental similarities among those countries remain strong, and continue to be of great significance for the inhabitants of the whole region. So too do persistent parallels in the social, economic, and political spheres, as well as the shared cultural legacies of past interactions. The following paragraphs briefly explore some of these continuing similarities and parallels, beginning with ecology and its influence on patterns of economic development in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Monsoon Asia’s intensive agriculture, particularly the pond-field farming of its rice-bowl areas, has proven a good springboard for broad-based economic development thanks to its amenability to improvement through technical irrigation, market access, and Green Revolution inputs.215 Despite pessimism about their prospects in the 1960s and 70s, and despite many setbacks due to political instability, Cold War conflicts, and policy errors, most states in the region, including India, Bangladesh and Myanmar/Burma as well as the better known Southeast Asian success stories, have ultimately been able to take advantage of this potential and create the conditions for large-scale poverty reduction. Their maritime aspect, facilitating trade as it always did, has been another favourable factor, at least once experiments with autarchic economic policies were abandoned. Economic growth has led to urbanization across the region, in the 1960s still one of the least urbanized in the world. Together with a huge expansion of public education, especially for girls, it has also brought about changes in social and family life that have caused birth rates to fall and the spectre of overpopulation, which loomed large in the twentieth century, to fade.216 If the nation-states of Monsoon Asia have increasingly succeeded in combating poverty and educating their citizens, none has become a full-scale “developmental state” along the lines of late twentieth-century Taiwan or South Korea, capable of managing industrial as well as agricultural development in such a way as to sprint into the ranks of the developed countries. Of the South and Southeast Asian countries, only the hyperglobalized city-state of Singapore and the tiny oil sultanate of Brunei have so far risen above middle-income status. Although some, notably Malaysia and Thailand, have substantial outward-oriented manufacturing sectors, these have mostly remained labour-intensive and either technologically

introduction: seasons and civilizations 49

unsophisticated, or operated as offshore dependencies of Western or Northeast Asian corporations. While there are many reasons for this intermediate or incomplete developmental status, some of them probably have to do with the clientelistic character of South and Southeast Asian states, which tends to propel business-state relations in the direction of cronyism rather than developmental partnership. The ethnic diversity of Monsoon Asian countries may also have played a role here, in so far as one common aspect of that diversity is the presence of commercially specialized ethnic minorities. Particularly in Southeast Asia, where business life is dominated by ethnic Chinese groups toward which antipathy tends to exist among the population at large, this pattern has made it difficult to generate the kind of dynamic cooperation between state, capital, and society, based on the pursuit of economic development as a common national project, which is the hallmark of the Northeast Asian developmental states.217 In terms of formal political institutions, most countries have alternated between democratic and authoritarian systems, only India boasting an (almost) unbroken democratic record. Between about 1985 and 2010 the general trend was one of democratization, but in the last decade Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar/ Burma have reverted to (de facto) dictatorship, while almost everywhere else, India included, civil liberties, minority rights, and the rule of law have been under pressure from populist, sectarian, and sometimes openly authoritarian forces. Here again a constant factor has been the intertwining of political and economic interests, leading to the development of powerful oligarchies capable of manipulating democratic systems. Another has been the personal character of political life, in which charisma, kinship, and private gain play important roles. In the sagas of twenty-first-century leaders like Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Mahinda Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka it is easy to see echoes of the epic “storyworlds” which Arps, in this volume, identifies as recurrent elements of both South and Southeast Asian literature: worlds in which “focal personalities” struggle for power and wealth amidst a web of families and factions, and against a backdrop of “masses of nameless others”. Active connections between South and Southeast Asia, it was noted above, have been less developed in recent decades than at most times in history. Very recently, however, international relations have begun to change in ways that may bring the old Indian Ocean axis back to the foreground of history. The cause is the return of tension between the People’s Republic of China and many of its neighbours, as well as with the USA and its Western allies. Today the term “Indo-Pacific” no longer refers only to an obscure class of prehistoric glass beads, but to a strategic concept associated with the containment of Chinese ambitions by the West and its Asian partners, including India. With ASEAN in disarray as a result of expansive Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, to which it has been unable to

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develop a common response, Southeast Asia’s potential great power, Indonesia, has shown signs of greater engagement with India and the Indian Ocean countries. The geography of the emerging Cold War, like that of the previous one, corresponds approximately to that of the ancient civilizational divide between Indosphere and Sinosphere, and once again this may not be wholly coincidental. The contrast between Monsoon Asia’s traditions of cultural and political pluralism on the one hand, and the centralizing, standardizing ethos of Confucian China on the other, is partly analogous to the contest between democracy and totalitarianism that forms the ideological aspect of the new superpower confrontation. Geopolitics aside, we hope that this book demonstrates the continuing utility and fertility of the Monsoon Asia perspective as an aid to understanding what South/Southeast Asia has been in the past, and is today. Intellectually that perspective has two very different roots: an old root in Indology, philology, and colonial scholarship, and a newer one in the postcolonial study of transnationalism and globalization. The combination is not always an easy one, and ethical issues remain. Marieke Bloembergen, in her contribution to this volume, warns that the endeavour to reconnect South and Southeast Asia in the academic imagination may revive “essentializing views” of the two regions as a cultural unity and, in doing so, resuscitate “ideas of Greater India”. That the danger of “essentializing” transnational cultural units does indeed exist is sufficiently illustrated by my own equation above – however tentative – of Confucianism with totalitarianism, and democracy with the Indosphere. That a Confucian cultural heritage does not somehow condemn a people to authoritarian rule is obvious from the flourishing democracies of modern Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. Monsoon Asia, conversely, has seen its share of dictatorships, including one of the most extreme in history, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime of 19751979. In a time of rising ethnic and religious nationalism, as well as ideological confrontation, essentialized thinking is not something that academic writers should engage in frivolously. A few defensive observations are nevertheless in order here. First, while no reasonable person would claim that the future of a nation or region is predetermined by its cultural (or even institutional) heritage, it is equally indisputable that such heritages do shape ongoing political developments, if only because they provide powerful resources that leaders can draw on to legitimate political projects. The Chinese Communist Party’s revival and embrace of Confucianism is a transparent example of this. So too are the ways in which successive architects of Indonesia’s resolutely pluralistic (if often far from democratic) “Pancasila democracy” have drawn upon old traditions of religious tolerance and syncretism to strengthen their project of multicultural nationalism. In a less explicit way, what has been called the “argumentative democracy” of India draws inspiration and resilience from habits

introduction: seasons and civilizations 51

of public debate, disagreement and heterodoxy that far predate the democratic institutions introduced during the periods of British rule and decolonization.218 Secondly, in so far as the danger is one of inheriting stereotypes and prejudices from colonial literature, it may be pointed out that colonial scholarship on the relationship between India and its cultural sphere of influence was quite diverse. Before the Second World War, Southeast Asian art and architecture already found champions in scholars like A.J. Bernet Kempers, who wrote that the temples and classical sculpture of Java were “absolutely different from similar artistic products in India” and “may be regarded as the most splendid and elaborate specimens of their type”.219 As Bloembergen points out, this was in fact an established trope in colonial literature on Indianized Southeast Asia, codified at the end of the period by Horace Quaritch Wales in the expression “local genius” – a respectful and surely accurate way of characterizing what Southeast Asians have brought over the centuries to the various cultural traditions from overseas that they have interpreted and made their own.220 As always, the scholarship of the past needs to be treated selectively and with discrimination, but not dismissed a priori on the basis of presumed biases and distortions. A final point worth making here is that history has moved on since the colonial era, and that events, especially in Asia, have a way of overtaking fixed ideas, prejudices, and hierarchies. The economic history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has certainly done something to redress the historical imbalance in prestige between India and its neighbours, in the sense that most of Southeast Asia has been far more successful than most of South Asia in fighting poverty, educating citizens, raising living standards, and bringing people en masse into the modern world. In Jakarta in the early 2000s I more than once saw visitors from India, taken aback by the unexpected modernity and prosperity of the Indonesian capital, being forced to revise their thinking in this respect – just as two decades earlier I myself, arriving from a dilapidated London via an even more dilapidated Moscow, had been taken aback by the gleaming wealth and efficiency of Singapore, with similar consequences for my world view. Antecedence is not destiny, and neither should a chain or direction of causality ever be understood as necessitating a hierarchy of importance or value – least of all between people, cultures, or nations. As long as we bear this clearly in mind, we can surely live with the exercises in association and classification that areal approaches to the study of human society inevitably, and productively, involve. Knowledge of connections through time and space may be prone to abuse in support of claims to precedence, superiority, and entitlement, but it can also serve to refute such claims. Tom Hoogervorst, in his contribution to this volume, suggests for instance that a thorough, linguistically informed study of the history of the Rohingya people of Rakhine/Arakan might well help to undermine the narrative of “ethno-linguistic

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otherness” currently being used to justify violence against that group in Myanmar/ Burma. It would be nice to think that this is true. But wherever knowledge turns out to lead, the correct response to the knowledge that knowledge can be abused surely cannot be: to refrain from seeking it.

Acknowledgments In writing this introduction I have greatly benefited from the knowledge and advice of Andrea Acri, Ward Berenschot, Ian Caldwell, Tom Hoogervorst, Marijke Klokke, Pierre-Yves Manguin, Nathan Porath, and Ivo Smits, as well as my co-editor Nira Wickramasinghe. I thank them all for their help. They are in no way responsible for any errors in the piece, nor for any of the personal views and judgements expressed. My thanks also go to Koen Berghuijs, for his technical assistance with the maps in figures 1.1 and 1.2.

Notes 1

Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Princeton dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 77-78.

2

Encyclopaedia Britannica (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abdullah-bin-Abdul-Kadir).

3

Andrea Acri, “‘Local’ vs. ‘cosmopolitan’ in the study of premodern Southeast Asia,” Suvannabhumi: Multi-Disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9, no. 1 (2017): 27-33; Andrea Acri, Roger Blench and Alexandra Landmann, eds., Spirits and ships: cultural transfers in early Monsoon Asia (Singapore: ISEAS, 2017).

4

Jan Avé, “Indonesia, Insulinde and Nusantara: dotting the i’s and crossing the t,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 145, no. 2/3 (1989): 220-234.

5

Peter S. Ashton and Reinmar Seidler, On the forests of tropical Asia: lest the memory fade (Kew: Royal Botanic Gardens, 2014).

6

K. Kyuma, “Soil recources and land use in tropical Asia,” Pedosphere 13, No. 1 (2003): 49-57.

7

Tetsu Kubota, Hom Bahadur Rijal and Hiroto Takaguchi, eds., Sustainable houses and living in the hot-humid climates of Asia (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2018).

8

P. J. Rivers, “Monsoon rhythms and trade patterns: ancient times east of Suez,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 77, no. 2 (2004): 59-93.

9

Richard Hall, Empires of the monsoon: a history of the Indian Ocean and its invaders (London: William Collins, 1996), xxi.

10

Taiji Yazawa, “Monsoons and Japanese life”, GeoJournal 3, no. 2 (1979), 153-159; Masatoshi M. Yoshino, “Winter and summer monsoons and navigation in East Asia in historical age,” GeoJournal 3, no. 2 (1979), 161-170.

11

For example: V.D. Wickizer and M.K. Bennett, The rice economy of monsoon Asia (Stanford, California: Food Research Institute, Stanford University, 1941); E. H. G. Dobby, Monsoon Asia

introduction: seasons and civilizations 53

(London: University of London Press, 1961); A. L. Basham, ed., The civilizations of Monsoon Asia (Sydney: Angus Robertson, 1974). 12

George Coedès, Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d’Extrême-Orient (Hanoi: Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient, 1944).

13

Anthony Reid, A history of Southeast Asia: critical crossroads (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 40.

14

See, for instance, Arun Das Gupta, “Rabindranath Tagore in Indonesia: an experiment in bridge-building,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 158, no. 3 (2002), 451-477.

15

Susan Bayly, “Imagining ‘Greater India’: French and Indian visions of colonialism in the Indic Mode,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 703-744.

16

Ian Glover, Early trade between India and South-East Asia: a link in the development of a world trading system (Hull: University of Hull, Centre for South-East Asian Studies, 1981); I. W. Mabbett, “The ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia: reflections on the historical sources,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 8, no. 2 (1977): 161-162.

17

Hermann Kulke, “Indian colonies, Indianization or cultural convergence? Reflections on the changing image of India’s role in South-East Asia,” in Onderzoek in Zuidoost-Azië: agenda voor de jaren negentig, ed. H. Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost-Azië en Oceanië, Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden), 29-30.

18

Julie Romain, “Indian architecture in the ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’: the temples of the Dieng Plauteau,” in Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: reflections on cross-cultural exchange, ed. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani and Geoff Wade (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), 314.

19

Sheldon Pollock, The language of the gods in the world of men: Sanskrit, culture, and power in premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 16.

20

Peter Frasch, “A Pāli cosmopolis? Sri Lanka and the Theravāda Buddhist ecumene, c.500-1500,” in Sri Lanka at the crossroad of history, eds. Alan Strathern and Zoltán Biedermann (London: University College London Press, 2017), 66-76.

21

Ronit Ricci, Islam translated: literature, conversion, and the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).

22

Sebastian R. Prange, Monsoon Islam: trade and faith on the medieval Malabar coast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

23

R. Michael Feener and Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist and Islamic orders in southern Asia: comparative perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2018).

24

Nigel Worden, “Review article: writing the global Indian Ocean”, Journal of Global History 12 (2017): 145-154. See also: Edward Alpers, ed., The Indian Ocean in world history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Sugata Bose, A hundred horizons: the Indian Ocean in the age of global empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009); M.N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003).

25

Philippe Beaujard, Les mondes de l’océan Indien (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012, 2 vols).

26

Sunil Amrith, Migration and diaspora in modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Asia inside out (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015-19, 3 vols).

27

Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the furies of nature and the fortunes of migrants (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013); Michael Laffan, ed., Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: religious rites, colonial migrations, national rights (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

28

Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani and Geoff Wade, eds., Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: reflections on cross-cultural exchange (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011).

29

Acri, Blench and Landmann, eds., Ships and spirits: cultural transfers in early Monsoon Asia.

54 david henley

30

Angela Schottenhammer, ed., Early global interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 2 vols).

31

Not available: India.

32

Estimate on the basis of separate figures given in the database for North and South Vietnam, adjusting for their relative populations (roughly 16 and 14 million respectively in 1960).

33

Lenka Drazanova, “Historical Index of Ethnic Fractionalization Dataset,” Harvard Dataverse, accessed 20-6-2022, https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/ DVN/4JQRCL/GZLWGZ& version=2.0.

34

Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchicus: essai sur le système des castes (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).

35

Anthony Reid, “Introduction,” in Slavery, bondage and dependency in Southeast Asia, ed. Anthony Reid (Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 6.

36

J. Stephen Lansing, Perfect order: recognizing complexity in Bali (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006).

37

W. J. F. Jenner, “China and freedom,” in Asian freedoms: the idea of freedom in East and Southeast Asia, eds. David Kelly and Anthony Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 65-92, 77-79.

38

Anthony Reid, “Political ‘tradition’ in Indonesia: the one and the many,” Asian Studies Review 22, no. 1 (1998): 23-38.

39

Tony Day, Fluid iron: state formation in Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 39-62.

40

James C. Scott, “Patron-client politics and political change in Southeast Asia,” The American Political Science Review 8, no. 2 (1972), 91-113: Henk Schulte Nordholt, “From contest state to patronage democracy: the longue durée of clientelism in Indonesia,” in Environment, trade and society in Southeast Asia: a longue durée perspective, eds. David Henley and Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 166-180.

41

Clifford Geertz, Negara: the theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980).

42

S. J. Tambiah, World conqueror and world renouncer: a study of Buddhism in Thailand against a historical background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

43

Robert Heine-Geldern, “Conceptions of state and kingship in Southeast Asia,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 2, no. 1 (1942): 15-30.

44

Stanley J. Tambiah, “The galactic polity: the structure of traditional kingdoms in Southeast Asia,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 293, no. 1 (1977): 69-97.

45

O.W. Wolters, History, culture and region in Southeast Asian perspective (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), 16-33.

46

Burton Stein, “The segmentary state in South Indian history,” in Realm and region in traditional India, ed. Richard G. Fox (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia, 1977), 3-51; Burton Stein, Peasant, state and society in medieval South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980).

47

Stein, “The segmentary state in South Indian history,” 5.

48

Nicholas B. Dirks, The hollow crown: ethnohistory of an Indian kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 404.

49

Hermann Kulke, Kings and cults: state formation and legitimation in India and Southeast Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993); Norbert Peabody, Hindu kingship and polity in precolonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

50

Dirks, The hollow crown, 52.

introduction: seasons and civilizations 55

51

David Henley, “Credit and debt in Indonesian history: an introduction,” in Credit and debt in Indonesia, 860-1930: from peonage to pawnshop, from kongsi to cooperative, eds. David Henley and Peter Boomgaard (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009), 3-5.

52

Anastasia Piliavsky, “Introduction,” in Patronage as politics in South Asia, ed. Anastasia Piliavsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 12, 24.

53

Piliavsky, “Introduction,” 22-23; Reid, “Introduction,” 6, 9.

54

Anastasia Piliavsky, Nobody’s people: hierarchy as hope in a society of thieves (Stanford, California:

55

Gunnar Myrdal, “The soft state in underdeveloped countries,” UCLA Law Review 15, no. 4 (1968):

Stanford University Press, 2020), 30-31. 1118-1134. 56

Piliavsky, “Introduction”; Schulte Nordholt, “From contest state to patronage democracy”.

57

Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the furies of nature and the fortunes of migrants (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013); Alicia Schrikker and Nira Wickramasinghe, eds., Being a slave: histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020).

58

Tim Harper, Underground Asia: global revolutionaries and the assault on empire (London: Penguin, 2020); Carolina Margaretha Stolte, “Orienting India: interwar internationalism in an Asian inflection, 1917-1937” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2013).

59

C. P. Fitzgerald, The southern expansion of the Chinese people: “southern fields and southern ocean” (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1972), 117-41.

60

Penny van Esterik, Food culture in Southeast Asia (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2008), 5, 12, 47, 53, 66, 75-76, 86-88.

61

Claudine Salmon, ed. Literary migrations: traditional Chinese fiction in Asia (17-20th centuries) (Beijing: International Culture Publishing Corporation, 1987); C. W. Watson, “Some preliminary remarks on the antecedents of modern Indonesian literature,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 127, no. 4 (1971): 417-433.

62

Uri Tadmor, “Loanwords in Indonesian,” in Loanwords in the world’s languages: a comparative handbook, eds. Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2009), 698.

63

Titima Suthiwan and Uri Tadmor, “Loanwords in Thai,” in Loanwords in the world’s languages: a comparative handbook, ed. Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2009), 607.

64

Mark J. Alves, “Linguistic influence of Chinese in Southeast Asia,” in The Languages and linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia: a comprehensive guide, eds. Paul Sidwell and Mathias Jenny (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 659-666.

65

N. J. Enfield, “Areal linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 181-206.

66

Nantana Danvivathana, The Thai writing system (Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1987), 23-24.

67

Nathan McGovern, “Balancing the foreign and the familiar in the articulation of kingship: the royal court Brahmins of Thailand,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 48, no.2 (2017): 283-303.

68

Hugh McColl et al., “The prehistoric peopling of Southeast Asia,” Science 361 (2018): 88-92.

69

Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, eds., The peopling of East Asia: putting together archaeology, linguistics and genetics (London: Routledge, 2005).

70

Charles Higham, The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

71

Andrew J. Abalahin, “‘Sino-Pacifica’: conceptualizating Greater Southeast Asia as a sub-arena of world history,” Journal of World History 22, no. 4 (2011): 659-691.

72

Peter Bellwood, First farmers: the origins of agricultural societies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 131.

73

Reid, A history of Southeast Asia, 26.

74

Kulke, “Indian colonies,” 21-28.

56 david henley

75

Alexander Adelaar, “Towards an integrated theory about the Indonesian migrations to Madagascar,” in Ancient human migrations: an interdisciplinary approach, eds. Peter N. Peregrine, Ilia Peiros and Marcus Feldman (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2009), 149-172.

76

James Hornell, Water transport: origins and early evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946), 253-263.

77

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Protohistoric and early historic exchange in the eastern Indian Ocean: a re-evaluation of current paradigms,” in Early global interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World, Volume I: Commercial structures and exchanges, ed. Angela Schttenhammer (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 112-15, 117-19.

78

Upinder Singh, “Gifts from other lands: Southeast Asian religious endowments in India,” in Asian encounters: exploring connected histories, eds. Upinder Singh and Parul Pandya Dhar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 45-61.

79

W.M. Sirisena, Sri Lanka and South-East Asia: political, religious and cultural relations from A.D. c. 1000 to c.1500 (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 36-47.

80

John N. Miksic and Geok Yian Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2017), 367.

81

Kitsiri Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese society, 1750-1900: a study of religious revival and change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

82

Buswell and Lopez, The Princeton dictionary of Buddhism, 33-34, 696, 828.

83

David Henley, “Southeast Asian studies and the reality of Southeast Asia,” Suvannabhumi: MultiDisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12, no. 2 (2020): 19-52.

84

Tom Hoogervorst, Southeast Asia in the ancient Indian Ocean world (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013).

85

Arun Das Gupta, “Rabindranath Tagore in Indonesia”, 474.

86

Tom Hoogervorst and Nicole Boivin, “Invisible agents of eastern trade: foregrounding island Southeast Asia agency in pre-modern globalisation,” in Globalisation and the people without history, eds. Nicole Boivin and Michael Frachetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 205-231. Emphasis is added.

87

Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the word: a language history of the world. (London: Harper Collins, 2005), 174.

88

J.G. de Casparis, India and maritime Southeast Asia: a lasting relationship. Third Sri Lanka Endowment Fund lecture delivered at the University of Malaya on Wednesday, August 10, 1983 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya, 1983), 19.

89

Reid, A history of Southeast Asia, 27.

90

Monica L. Smith, “‘Indianization’ from the Indian point of view: trade and cultural contacts with Southeast Asia in the early first millennium C.E.,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 1 (1999): 1.

91

Smith, “‘Indianization’ from the Indian point of view,” 19.

92

Fitzgerald, The southern expansion of the Chinese people, xx-xxi.

93

F.D.K. Bosch, Het vraagstuk van de Hindoe-kolonisatie van den archipel [professorial inaugural address, Leiden University, 15-3-1946] (Leiden: H.E. Stenfert Kroese, 1946); F.D.K. Bosch, “The problem of the Hindu colonisation of Indonesia. Inaugural address delivered at the University of Leiden on March 15th, 1946,” in F.D.K. Bosch, Selected studies in Indonesian archaeology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 1-22.

94

Smith, “‘Indianization’ from the Indian point of view,” 19.

95

Reid, A history of Southeast Asia, 37-39.

96

Bosch, “The problem of the Hindu colonisation,” 9-11.

97

Hermann Kulke, “Epigraphical references to the ‘city’ and the ‘state’ in early Indonesia,” Indonesia 52 (1991): 4-5.

introduction: seasons and civilizations 57

98

Andrea Acri, “Maritime Buddhism,” in Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Religion (2018), https:// oxfordre.com/religion/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore­-9780199340378-e638?rskey=GyEFIY&result=2, pp. 5-6.; Himanshu P. Ray, The winds of change: Buddhism and the maritime links of early South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 136, 142, 153-4.

99

Osmund Bopearachchi, “Sri Lanka and maritime trade: Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara as the protector of mariners,” in Asian encounters: exploring connected histories, eds. Upinder Singh and Parul Pandya Dhar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 164.

100

H. Kern, “Concerning some old Sanskrit inscriptions in the Malay Peninsula,” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 49 (1907): 98.

101

Reid, A history of Southeast Asia, 38.

102

Hermann Kulke, K. Kesavapany and Vijay Sakhuja, eds., Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: reflections on the Chola naval expeditions to Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009).

103

M.C. Ricklefs et al., A new history of Southeast Asia (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 62.

104

Miksic and Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia, 398-401.

105

Roy E. Jordaan, “The Śailendras, the status of the kṣatriya theory, and the development of HinduJavanese temple architecture,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 155, no. 2 (1999): 210-243; Roy E. Jordaan, “Why the Śailendras were not a Javanese dynasty,” Indonesia and the Malay World 34, no. 98 (2006): 3-22.

106

H. G. Quaritch Wales, Ancient South-East Asian warfare (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1952).

107

Peter Francis, Asia’s maritime bead trade, 300 B.C. to the present. Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2002), 17-50.

108

Caitlin Green, “Indo-Pacific beads from Europe to Japan? Another fifth- to seventh-century AD global distribution” (personal website/blog posting, 22-7-2018), https://www.caitlingreen. org/2018/07/indo-pacific-beads-europe.html.

109

Francis, Asia’s maritime bead trade, 32.

110

Shahnaj Husne Jahan, “Rouletted ware links South and Southeast Asia through maritime trade,” SPAFA Journal (Journal of the SEAMEO Regional Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts) 20, no. 3 (2010): 5-17.

111

Francis, Asia’s maritime bead trade, 53-62.

112

Wang Gungwu, “A study of the early history of Chinese trade in the South China Sea,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 31, no. 2 (1958): 53, 112.

113

Sunil Gupta, “The Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere (1000 BC-AD 500),” Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 25 (2005): 21-30.

114

Laure Dussubieux and Bérénice Bellina, “Glass from an early Southeast Asian producing and trading centre,” in Khao Sam Kaeo: an early port-city between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, ed. Bérénice Bellina (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2019), 556.

115

Bérénice Bellina, “Maritime silk roads stone ornament industries,” in Khao Sam Kaeo: an early portcity between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, ed. Bérénice Bellina (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2017), 429.

116

Phaedra Bouvet, “Indian fine wares,” in Khao Sam Kaeo: an early port-city between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, ed. Bérénice Bellina (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2017), 307.

117

Phaedra Bouvet, “Lustrous black and red wares,” in Khao Sam Kaeo: an early port-city between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, ed. Bérénice Bellina (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2017), 342; Phaedra Bouvet, “Rotative kenetic energy-produced pottery,” in Khao Sam Kaeo: an early port-city between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, ed. Bérénice Bellina (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2017), 372.

58 david henley

118

Sophie Peronnet and Sachipan Srikanlaya, “The Han ceramics,” in Khao Sam Kaeo: an early portcity between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, ed. Bérénice Bellina (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2017), 416.

119

Charles Higham, Early mainland Southeast Asia: from first humans to Angkor (Bangkok: River Books, 2014), 232.

120

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The archaeology of Fu Nan in the Mekong River Delta: the Oc Eo culture of Viet Nam”, in Arts of ancient Viet Nam: from river plain to open sea, ed. Nancy Tingley (New York: Asia Society/Houston: Museum of Fine Arts/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 111.

121

John N. Miksic, “The beginning of trade in ancient Southeast Asia: the role of Oc Eo and the lower Mekong river”, in Art and archaeology of Fu Nan: pre-Khmer kingdom of the lower Mekong valley, ed. James C.M. Khoo (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2003), 13.

122

R.A.L.H. Gunawardana, “Cosmopolitan Buddhism on the move: South India and Sri Lanka in the early expansion of Theravāda in Southeast Asia,” in Fruits of inspiration: studies in honour of Prof. J.G. de Casparis, eds. Marijke J. Klokke and Karel R. van Kooij (Groningen: Egbert Forsten. 2001), 135-136.

123

Sing C. Chew, The Southeast Asia connection: trade and polities in the Eurasian world economy 500 BC-AD 500 (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 92-94.

124

John Guy, Woven cargoes: Indian textiles in the East (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998).

125

Ray, The winds of change, 117.

126

Monique Crick, Chinese trade ceramics for South-East Asia from the 1st to the 17th century (Geneva: Fondation Baur, Musée des arts d’Extrême-Orient, 2010), 18.

127

Kenneth R. Hall, A history of early Southeast Asia: maritime trade and societal development, 100-1500 (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 54.

128

Derek Heng, Sino-Malay trade and diplomacy from the tenth through the fourteenth century (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009), 22.

129

Angela Schottenhammer, “China’s rise and retreat as a maritime power,” in Beyond the silk roads: new discourses on China’s East Asian maritime history, eds. Robert J. Antony and Angela Schottenhammer (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2017), 189-90.

130

Heng, Sino-Malay trade and diplomacy, 40.

131

This map shows the full track of all storms of that intensity recorded within the boxed area, including those track segments along which each storm was of lower intensity, down to the level of “tropical depression.”. If only those track segments along which each storm was actually at “major hurricane” level were to be included, then the map would show an even greater concentration of tracks in the South China Sea and western Pacific to the north of Mindanao and the Mekong Delta.

132

O. W. Wolters, The fall of Śrīvijaya in Malay history (London: Lund Humphries, 1970), 19-38.

133

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Trading ships of the South China Sea’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 36, no.3 (1993): 253-280.

134

Horst Hubertus Liebner, The siren of Cirebon: a tenth-century trading vessel lost in the Java Sea (PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2014), 307.

135

J.S. Lansing et al. “An Indian trader in ancient Bali?,” Antiquity 78, no. 300 (2004), 287-293.

136

Ian Glover and Bérénice Bellina, “Ban Don Ta Phet and Khao Sam Kaeo: the earliest Indian contacts re-assessed,” in Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: reflections on cross-cultural exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani and Geoff Wade (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 41.

137

John Guy, “Tamil merchants and the Hindu-Buddhist diaspora in early Southeast Asia,” in Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: reflections on cross-cultural exchange, eds. PierreYves Manguin, A. Mani and Geoff Wade (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 248.

introduction: seasons and civilizations 59

138

Jan Wisseman Christie, “The medieval Tamil-language inscriptions in Southeast Asia and China,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29, no.2 (1998), 239-268.

139

Jan Wisseman Christie, “Javanese markets and the Asian sea trade boom of the tenth to thirteenth centuries A.D.,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (1998), 366-369.

140

Coedès, Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés, 49-50.

141

Miksic and Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia, 237.

142

Paul Wheatley, Nāgara and commandery: origins of the Southeast Asian urban traditions. (Chicago: Department of Geography, University of Chicago, 1983), 300.

143

S.O. Robson, Deśawarṇana (Nāgarakṛtagāma) by Mpu Prapañca (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995), 148-9.

144

Valentina Stache-Rosen, “Gunavarman (367-431): a comparative analysis of the biographies found in the Chinese Tripitaka,” Bulletin of Tibetology 10, no. 1 (1973): 5-54.

145

J.G. de Casparis, Selected inscriptions from the 7th to the 9th century AD / Prasasti Indonesia diterbitkan oleh Dinas Purbakala Republik Indonesia (Bandung: Masa Baru, 1956), II: 188-189, 202-203.

146

Tatiana M. Karafet et al., “Balinese Y-chromosome perspective on the peopling of Indonesia: genetic contributions from pre-neolithic hunter-gatherers, Austronesian farmers, and Indian traders,” Human Biology 77, no. 1 (2005): 94.

147

Pradiptajati Kusuma et al., “Western Eurasian genetic influences in the Indonesian archipelago,” Quaternary International 416 (2016): 245.

148

Alexander Mörseburg et al. “Multi-layered population structure in Island Southeast Asians,” European Journal of Human Genetics 24 (2016): 1607.

149

Daniel Perret and Heddy Surachman, “South Asia and the Tapanuli Area (North-West Sumatra): ninth-fourteenth centuries CE,” in Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: reflections on cross-cultural exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani and Geoff Wade (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 161-175.

150

Ambra Calo et al., “Trans-Asiatic exchange of glass, gold and bronze: analysis of finds from the late prehistoric Pangkung Paruk site,” Antiquity 94/373 (2020): 114-115.

151

Coedès, Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés, 55-57.

152

Manguin, “The archaeology of Fu Nan”, 113-114.

153

John Guy, “Shipwrecks in late first millennium Southeast Asia: southern China’s maritime trade and the emerging role of Arab merchants in Indian Ocean exchange,” in Early global interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean world, Volume I: Commercial structures and exchanges, ed. Angela Schottenhammer (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 121-163.

154

Jiří Jákl and Tom Hoogervorst, “Custom, combat, and ceremony: Java and the Indo-Persian textile trade,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 103 (2017): 207-235.

155

Miksic and Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia, 208.

156

John N. Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road of the Sea 1300-1800 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013), 67.

157

Andrea Acri, “Maritime Buddhism”, 9-10.

158

John W. Chaffee, “Han Chinese representations of South Sea merchants in Song China,” in Early global interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World, Volume I: Commercial structures and exchanges, ed. Angela Schottenhammer (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 297.

159

Heng, Sino-Malay trade and diplomacy, 27.

160

Junjiro Takakusu, An introduction to I-tsing’s record of the Buddhist religion as practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (A.D. 671-695) (Oxford: Horace Hart, 1896), 34.

161

Heng, Sino-Malay trade and diplomacy, 42.

162

Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road, 99.

163

Heng, Sino-Malay trade and diplomacy, 63-70.

164

Christie, “Javanese markets and the Asian sea trade boom,” 369.

60 david henley

165

Heng, Sino-Malay trade and diplomacy, 128-130, 133.

166

Yew Seng Tai et al. “The impact of Ming and Qing dynasty maritime bans on trade ceramics recovered from coastal settlements in northern Sumatra, Indonesia,” Archaeological Research in Asia 21 (2020): 100174.

167

Reid, A history of Southeast Asia, 188-195.

168

Amrith, Migration and diaspora in modern Asia, 38-46.

169

Guanmian Xu, Peppers to sea cucumbers: Chinese gustatory revolution in global history, 900-1840 (PhD dissertation, Leiden University, 2021), 101-113.

170

Tomé Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires: an account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, written in Malacca and India in 1512-1515, trans. Armando Cortesão (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944 [1515]), I: 182.

171

Anthony Reid, “The Islamization of Southeast Asia,” in Anthony Reid, Charting the shape of early Modern Southeast Asia (Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 1999), 32.

172

Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 19881993), II: 150-161.

173

André Wink, Al-Hind: the making of the Indo-Islamic world (Leiden: Brill, 1990-2004), III, 170-243.

174

Alexander Wain, “China and the rise of Islam on Java,” in Islamisation: comparative perspectives from history, ed. A.C.S. Peacock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 419-443.

175

Reid, A history of Southeast Asia, 102.

176

J.G. de Casparis, India and maritime Southeast Asia, 18-19.

177

Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, II: 1-61.

178

A.L. Basham, The wonder that was India: a survey of the culture of the Indian sub-continent before the coming of the Muslims (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1954), 142-3, 148-150, 216-218; Jim Rooney and Vijaya Murthy, “Institutions, social order and wealth in ancient India,” Journal of Institutional Economics 17 (2021), 91–104; Y. Subbarayalu, “Trade guilds of south India up to the tenth century,” Studies in People’s History 2, no. 1 (2015): 21–26; Romila Thapar, Early India from the origins to AD 1300 (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 245-256.

179

Ian Caldwell and David Henley, “Introduction: the stranger who would be king: magic, logic, polemic,” Indonesia and the Malay World 36, no. 105 (2008): 163-175.

180

Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, I: 217.

181

Pollock, The language of the gods in the world of men, 82.

182

Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, I: 215-225.

183

Aoyama Tōru, “Indoka saikō: tōnan ajia to indo bunmei to no taiwa [Indianization revisited: interactions between Southeast Asia and Indian civilization],” Sōgō bunka kenkyū [Trans-Cultural Studies] 10 (2007), 122-143.

184

Christopher Seeley, A History of writing in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 1991).

185

Joan R. Piggott, The emergence of Japanese kingship (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997).

186

William E Deal and Brian Ruppert, A cultural history of Japanese Buddhism. (Chichester: John Wiley, 2015).

187

Piggott, The emergence of Japanese kingship, 200.

188

Piggott, The emergence, 70-71, 93.

189

Melvin C. Aikens, Irina S. Zhushchikhovskaya and Song Nai Rhee, “Environment, ecology, and interaction in Japan, Korea, and the Russian Far East: the millennial history of a Japan Sea oikumene,” Asian Perspectives 48, no. 2 (2009): 207-248; Gina L. Barnes, “The Yellow Sea Interaction Sphere (400 BC-300 AD),” in The archaeology of East Asia: the rise of civilization in China, Korea and Japan, ed. Gina L. Barnes (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2015), 309-330.

introduction: seasons and civilizations 61

190

Piggott, The emergence of Japanese kingship, 2.

191

Kiri Paramore, Japanese Confucianism: a cultural history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

192

Paul Mus, “Cultes indiens et indigènes au Champa,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 33 (1933): 373.

193

Johannes Bronkhorst, Greater Magadha: studies in the culture of early India (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

194

James C. Scott, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009).

195

Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949, 3 vols).

196

K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and civilization in the Indian Ocean: an economic history from the rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); N.K. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: economy and civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

197

Edward A. Alpers and Chhaya Goswami, eds., Transregional trade and traders: situating Gujarat in the Indian Ocean from early times to 1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).

198

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Dialogues between Southeast Asia and India: a necessary reappraisal,” in India and Southeast Asia: cultural discourses, eds. A.L. Dallapiccola and A. Verghese (Mumbai: K.C. Kama Oriental Institute, 2017), 26.

199

Pollock, The language of the gods in the world of men.

200

Kulke, “Indian colonies.”

201

Pollock, The language of the gods in the world of men.

202

Aoyama, “Indoka saikō”; Andrea Acri, “’Local’ vs. ‘cosmopolitan’”.

203

A.C.S. Peacock, “Islamisation in medieval Anatolia,” in Islamisation: comparative perspectives from history, ed. A.C.S. Peacock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 134-155.

204

A.H. Johns, “Sufism as a category in Indonesian literature and history,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, no. 2 (1961), 10-23; A.H. Johns, “Sufism in Southeast Asia: reflections and reconsiderations,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (1995): 169-183.

205

Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, II: 132-192.

206

Barbara Andaya, “‘A People that Range into all the Countries of Asia’: the Chulia trading network in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” in The trading world of the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800, ed. Om Prakash (New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilisations, 2012), 305-336.

207

M.B. Hooker, “The Indian-derived law texts of Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 37, no. 2 (1978): 201-219.

208

Anthony Reid, “Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a source of diverse modern identities,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32, no. 3 (2001): 295-313.

209

David Henley, “Ages of Commerce in Southeast Asian history,” in Environment, trade and society in Southeast Asia: a longue durée perspective, eds. David Henley and Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 125-128.

210

Amrith, Migration and diaspora in modern Asia, 38.

211

George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1956), 4-5.

212

ASEAN, “Top ten ASEAN trade partner countries/regions, 2015, as of November 2016 (External Trade Statistics).” https://asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Table20_as-of-6-dec-2016.pdf (accessed 25-7-2021).

213

Adrian Athique, “Soft power, culture and modernity: responses to Bollywood films in Thailand and the Philippines,” International Communication Gazette 81, no. 5 (2018): 470-489; Martin Ramstedt,

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“Hindu bonds at work: spiritual and commercial ties between India and Bali,” Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 4 (2008): 1227-1250. 214

Henley, “Southeast Asian studies and the reality of Southeast Asia,” 32-33.

215

Harry T. Oshima, Economic growth in Monsoon Asia: a comparative survey (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1987).

216

Wei-Jun Jean Yeung, Sonalde Desai, and Gavin W. Jones, “Families in Southeast and South Asia,” Annual Review of Sociology 44 (2018): 469-495.

217

David Henley, “Foreign investment and the Middle Income Trap in Southeast Asia,” Lembaran Sejarah 14, no. 1 (2018): 38-44.

218

Amartya Sen, The argumentative Indian: writings on Indian history (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

219

A.J. Bernet Kempers, Cultural relations between India and Java. Calcutta: University of Calcutta (Calcutta University Readership Lectures, 1935), 20.

220

H.G. Quaritch Wales, “Culture change in Greater India,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 80, no. 1/2 (1948): 13; H.G. Quaritch Wales, The making of Greater India: a study in South-East Asian culture change (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1951), 17.

CHAPTER 2

Revisiting the Monsoon Asia Idea: Old Problems and New Directions Andrea Acri

Abstract This chapter traces the intellectual genealogy of the idea of “Monsoon Asia” and its application to the field of Asian Humanities, and offers some historiographical and theoretical reflections on old and novel research trajectories. It foregrounds a borderless history and geography of Asia in the longue durée, emphasizing the ancient connections and interactions among the societies found throughout the region stretching from the Indian Ocean littorals to the Western Pacific. Suggesting to revive, and revisit, the Monsoon Asia idea elaborated in early twentieth century French intellectual circles, it proposes to reconceptualize the geopolitical configurations of Asia as framed by the current Area Studies paradigm by widening the geo-historical framework through which a complex mosaic of cultural phenomena, linked by a shared history going back to a remote past, is to be investigated.

Keywords: Monsoon Asia; Areas Studies; Indo-Malaya ecozone; Greater Magadha; Zomia

This chapter offers some historiographical and theoretical reflections on old and novel research trajectories by tracing the intellectual genealogy of the idea of “Monsoon Asia” and its application to the field of (Asian) Humanities. Inscribing itself in the same intellectual trajectory of an edited volume from 2017 by Andrea Acri, Roger Blench and Alexandra Landmann on cultural transfers in early Monsoon Asia,1 it foregrounds a borderless history and geography of Asia, and explores the ancient connections and dynamics of interaction that favoured the encounters among the societies found throughout the region stretching from the Indian Ocean littorals to the Western Pacific in the longue durée.2 Suggesting to revive, and revisit, the Monsoon Asia idea elaborated in early twentieth century French intellectual circles, it reconceptualizes (i.e., reimagines) the geopolitical configurations of Asia as framed by the current Area Studies paradigm by widening the geo-historical framework through which the complex mosaic of cultural phenomena, linked by a shared history going back to a remote past, is to be investigated, as well as a disciplinary de-parochialization. In so doing, it proposes (1) to transcend the artificial

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spatial demarcation and imagined boundaries of macro-regions and nation-states, stressing that those concepts are not actual distinctive entities, and do not reflect intrinsic, clear-cut and enduring geoenvironmental and ethnolinguistic boundaries; and (2) to bridge the arbitrary divide between (inherently cosmopolitan) premodern “high cultures” or “civilizations” (e.g. Sanskritic, Sinitic, and Islamicate) on the one hand, and (inherently embedded) “local” or “indigenous” cultures of predominantly oral Austroasiatic and Austronesian language-speaking societies on the other. Tapping on pioneering early twentieth-century studies as well as recent transregional scholarship, I make a case for a reframing of the field of Area Studies through the “geoenvironmental metaphor” of Monsoon Asia,3 conceived as a dynamic macro-region of intersecting discursive fields across which networks of cultural brokers travelled since time immemorial. Influenced by similar environmental and climatic factors, such as the seasonal monsoons, this macro-region formed an ideal theatre for the circulation of crops, people, goods, languages, and ideas. Spreading across the superimposed geopolitical boundaries of modern nation-states, and transcending such equally arbitrary and historically constructed geographical entities as South/Southeast/East Asia, Monsoon Asia can be conceptualized as forming a vast “contact zone” and a single interconnected network, and arguably even an integral cultural ecumene with a shared background of human, intellectual, and environmental history. Rather than a static and reified geographical expression, this macro-region is a metaphor spatializing dynamic social networks that may help us to make sense of complex historical processes. The main hypothesis underlying the Monsoon Asia idea is that, from the preand proto-historical period through the premodern to the early modern period,4 the region constituted an integrated system of littorals and hinterlands connected by land and maritime corridors (the latter governed by the seasonal monsoon winds), characterized by similar socio-economic factors (for instance, predominantly agrarian and water-based civilizations), and linked by the long-distance spread of religious ideologies – mainly Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, but also predominantly oral knowledge-systems, which are sometimes fuzzily categorized as “ancestor cults” or “indigenous religions”. Thus, by imagining Monsoon Asia as a geographical arena with a shared history of human migration, long-distance trade, linguistic contact and dispersal, and cultural transfer, we may capture the highly fluid translocal dynamics that transcend artificial geographical as well as political boundaries, which create constructed divides fragmenting what were in origin shared and multi-focal cultural processes. This chapter does not intend to “prove” the Monsoon Asia hypothesis, but rather to provide the intellectual coordinates – following on the work of previous scholars as well as ongoing work by the present author – within which sets of questions

revisiting the monsoon asia idea: old problems and new directions 65

may be formulated to cast a fresh perspective on old problems and, in the words of Andrew Abalahin, to frame “a series of world-historical developments that bring together histories that have customarily been viewed apart”.5 As bold – and even controversial – as it may sound, this endeavour is not radically different from the elaboration and application of similarly translocal, wider-ranging historical and geographical approaches that have led to the – now virtually mainstream – adoption of such concepts as “Eurasia”, “Indian Ocean” (in the framework of “Indian Ocean Studies”), the “Silk Routes”, or “Maritime Asia”, which have become (or are increasingly becoming) part of the imaginary of global contemporary academe, as well as global modernity tout court.6

The idea of Monsoon Asia: its genesis and reception The definition of Monsoon Asia as a distinct and coherent geographical area can be traced to early 1900s French intellectual circles. Tapping on the advancements in meteorology that had occurred since the last decades of the nineteenth century, and also making use of botanical, ecological, and agronomic knowledge coupled with information obtained in situ,7 geographer Jules Sion devoted the two volumes of tome IX (1928–29) of the Géographie Universelle by Paul Vidal de la Blache and Lucien Gallois to Monsoon Asia (Asie des Moussons). In that publication, Monsoon Asia is treated as an integrated region including India, Indochina (mainland Southeast Asia), Insulindia (insular Southeast Asia), China, and Japan.8 Sion envisioned an opposition between the “centre” of the Asiatic continental landmass and the southeastern “periphery” – an area characterized by the climate shaped by alternating seasonal winds, which with their deep effects give to this region its very name, and which influence its climate well beyond the tropical belts. According to Sion, indeed, it was primarily climate, together with the presence of alluvial plains, that allowed the development of high population densities, created the unity of the region, and enabled it to develop civilizations that influenced much of Asia.9 It was the climatic configuration (and the presence of volcanoes along the IndoPacific rim) that favoured rice cultures and the procurement – by either sedentary cultivators or nomads-foragers – of an abundance of aliments from a restricted surface, nourishing more than half of the world population, but at the same time capriciously exposing it to the threats of volcanic eruptions, seismic events, storms, inundations, and tsunamis.10 In the decade following Sion’s publication, the same geographical configuration of Monsoon Asia became popularized in textbooks of Geography in the Englishspeaking world: we find it, for instance, in The World in Outline: A Text-Book of Geography by E.D. Laborde (1935), according to whom “[t]he peculiar conditions of

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Figure 2.1: Map of Monsoon Asia (black colour, distribution of rainfall in Asia, July), after Laborde, The World in Outline, 124.

the monsoons and their reaction on human life mark off the area which they influence from the rest of Asia,”11 an area which he explicitly defined as covering “those parts of south and eastern Asia which are shown in black in the July rainfall map” (reproduced here as Fig. 2.1).12 The Monsoon Asian region is further subdivided into a (1) Monsoon Equatorial Region, (2) a Tropical Monsoon Region, (3) a Subtropical Monsoon Region, and (4) a Temperate Monsoon Region, and separated from the Australasian region by the Wallace line in the Southeast. In the USA, economists V.D. Wickizer and M.K. Bennett adopted the expression Monsoon Asia in their The Rice Economy of Monsoon Asia (1941) as “a convenient designation for a specific group of countries in which monsoonal climatic conditions profoundly influence both agriculture and economic life,” bound together by climate and trade in rice. The idea of an interconnected and unified Monsoon Asia from the perspective of geography and climate as well as history and culture may be traced back to French Orientalists Sylvain Lévi, Jean Przyluski, Jules Bloch,13 Paul Mus, and George Cœdès. In their writings, published mainly in the first half of the twentieth century, these authors contributed in various measures to develop the wider geographical and cultural idea of Asie des moussons on the one hand, and of Inde transgangétique on the other, in contrast to the narrower focus on “Classical” India embodied in

revisiting the monsoon asia idea: old problems and new directions 67

the Vedic texts of “Aryan” pedigree characterizing German and British Indology.14 These scholars, mainly working from the disciplinary perspectives of philology, linguistics, ethnography, comparative mythology, art history and archaeology, and history applied to both South and Southeast Asia, hypothesized the existence of an ancient cultural substrate (socle asien primitif), labelled “Austroasiatic” or “Austric”, common to South, Southeast, and parts of East Asia – collectively forming Monsoon Asia. This ancestral culture or civilization would have been characterized by the cult of ancestors, the worship of gods on high places, the figure of the “Lord of the Land/Soil”, similar funerary practices related to megalithic burials, matrilineal dualism, as well as structural analogies of myths and as cults (for instance, relating to Nāgas and/or [female] aquatic creatures often in association with the bestowing of sovereignty and/or wealth); its technology would have included advanced skills in navigation, wet rice cultivation, and metal casting (as suggested by, for instance, Dongson drums).15 An exponent of this circle whose significant work contributed to further develop the idea of Monsoon Asia in the second half of the twentieth century was Paul Mus. In his hallmark article Cultes indiens et indigènes au Champa (1933), Mus posited the “existence in ancient times of a certain unity of culture throughout an extensive zone in which India, Indo-China, Indonesia, a Pacific islands fringe and doubtless southern China are to be united”.16 In a paragraph of striking modernity, Mus rightly emphasized the “borderless” character of long-distance cultural transfer in Monsoon Asia, favoured by its unique maritime geography: The wide distribution over the surface of the globe of the regions I have just mentioned is not as absolute a barrier as you might be tempted to believe at first. For too long, ethnography has proceeded by purely continental groupings. […] A hundred, two hundred or a thousand kilometres of sea, especially where there are prevailing winds, are a distance much less considerable than a hundred, two hundred or a thousand kilometres of land, divided by mountains, forests and hostile tribes […] whenever sea lanes establish communication, it is reasonable to expect a cultural unity, and it makes more sense to speak of a religion of the monsoon zone of Asia than to speak of Indian religion, or Chinese religion, prior to the civilizations which were later to give meaning to these words.17

Following Mus’ idea of Monsoon Asia as an integrated cultural zone, Cœdès, in his pioneering publication Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d’Extrême-Orient (1944), espoused an analogous perspective, employing this expression in the very first paragraph, and reiterating the idea in the later instantiation The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968). There he stated that Southeast Asian people were “endowed with a civilization that had traits in common with the civilization of pre-Aryan India”, and that there existed, “under an Indian veneer, a base common

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Figure 2.2: 1720 Weigel Map of India (India Intra Gangem) and Southeast Asia (India Extra Gangem). Image courtesy of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc.

to all of monsoon Asia”.18 This base might have been precisely what made the spread of Indic cultural elements throughout Southeast Asia so quick and productive. The concept of Monsoon Asia can perhaps be regarded as a natural evolution, or fine-tuning, of pre-twentieth-century cultural and geographical imagination, as well as current geopolitical configurations. For instance, no clear geographical, historical, and cultural separation between South and Southeast Asia existed in the minds of the early European travellers – and, later, colonizers – beyond that of India Intra Gangem (South Asia proper, within the Ganges river) and India Extra Gangem (trans-Gangetic Eastern India, mainland Southeast Asia, and Southern China: see Fig. 2.2) elaborated by second century CE author Claudius Ptolemy in his Geographike Hyphegesis. The Nouvelle géographie universelle by Elisée Reclus, published in 1876, treats India and Indochina in a single volume (and, in a fashion that is remindful of a modern Maritime History perspective, it devotes volume 14 to the “Océan et terres océaniques”, including the islands of the Indian Ocean, Insulindia, the Philippines, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Australia, and Polynesia). The term Indochina, forged in 1811 by John Leyden (one

revisiting the monsoon asia idea: old problems and new directions 69

Figure 2.3: Map of “India Orientalis” by Jodocus Hondius (circa 1610). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:India_Orientalis_by_Jodocus_ Hondius.jpg).

of Sir Stamford Raffles’ associates), soon thereafter became the eponym indicating the French possessions in mainland Southeast Asia,19 while maritime Southeast Asia or “Golden Khersonese” or Insulinde became the “Eastern Indies” (Indiae Orientalis) under Portuguese and Dutch colonialism (see Fig. 2.3). In the East India Companies’ parlance, the last designation covered much of Monsoon Asia – the Indian subcontinent, Myanmar, the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago. I venture to argue that this arrangement, at least at an early stage, might have been inspired not only by a colonial imperialist project, but also by the empirical observation of actual affinities between the two regions, namely their ecologies (i.e., flora and fauna), their monsoon-influenced climates, their landscapes (shaped by the wet climate), and, last but not least, the material and immaterial cultures, religions, and lifeways of the peoples that inhabited them. An analogous lack of neat geographical separation between South and Southeast Asia, probably directly inspired by the French scholarship discussed above, was the intellectual hallmark of the “Greater India Society” that flourished in Bengal in the 1930s, through which a group of Indian historians extended “their

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vision of Indian history eastwards across the Indian ocean, and […] constructed the idea of an ancient Indian colonisation of early southeast Asia”.20 Unfortunately, the idea and geographical construct of “Greater India” was driven more by a political and nationalist than an intellectual agenda, as the cultures of the Austroasiatic and Austronesian language-speaking populations of Southeast Asia were regarded as either figments of Indian (Vedic) culture, or as expressions of barbarous and uncivilized peoples.21 By the 1960s, with the rise of post-WWII, post-colonial nation-states, and regional partitions stemming from US imperialism and the Cold War geopolitical order, dividing Asia into macro-regions, the notion of Monsoon Asia seems to have disappeared from most textbooks of Geography. The abandonment of “diffusionist” paradigms (à la Robert Heine-Geldern) in the humanities in favour of structuralist and psychological models, as well as the rise of the Area Studies paradigm in global academe, which favoured micro-geographical approaches more tightly compartmentalized along disciplinary and regional boundaries, relegated the wide-ranging and eclectic approaches to the histories and geographies of Monsoon Asia elaborated by scholars in the first half of the twentieth century to an intellectual dustbin. While Monsoon Asia remains a popular expression among geographers and scholars of ecology and environmental studies,22 it is seldom used in the humanities. Admittedly, the Monsoon Asia perspective clashes with the post-1950s localization and parochialization of academe along disciplinary and regional specializations, and sometimes even national interests – a predicament that has been lamented by James Fox23 with respect to Austronesian studies, and by Grégoire Schlemmer24 with respect to the study of the highland populations of Southeast Asia.25 The same attitude privileging context-specific approaches is apparent in the study of premodern Southeast Asia, which has witnessed the rise of the Area Studies paradigm insisting on Southeast Asian agency in regional localizations of Indic phenomena, as per the influential model proposed by Oliver Wolters.26 This model arose as a reaction to both the “Indianization” and “Greater India” paradigms that over-emphasized the civilizing role of India and West–East dynamics of transfer, but also as the result of geopolitical trends and (supra)national interests that favoured the creation of macro-regions, such as Southeast Asia, defined by Wolters as a “broadly based community of outlook”, or a distinctive “mosaic of literary cultures characterized by foreign and local features fitting into various text-like wholes”.27 Attempts to revive the Monsoon Asia perspective, mainly inspired by the seminal work by Mus, have remained sporadic and isolated at best. In the 1970s and 1980s, one may refer to a PhD thesis by Pamela Gutman, who, in a fashion that is strongly remindful of Mus indeed, argued that Arakanese society was particularly receptive to Indian religion because it “was familiar in its substratum of beliefs developed in the same monsoon-dominated environment”.28 A significant engagement with

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the idea of Monsoon Asia from the point of view of architecture and archaeology is that articulated in an article originally published in 1978 (a revised version of which appeared in 1980) by Senake Bandaranayake,29 which is worth discussing in detail here. Bandaranayake applied the Monsoon Asia model to Sri Lanka in the typologization of architecture as wholly masonry on the one hand and timber-skeletoned or mixed timber-and-masonry on the other across the area coinciding with the wettest regions of Monsoon Asia, which are inhabited by rice-growing, bamboo-using cultures.30 Having lamented an over-reliance by previous scholarship on an “influence” paradigm stemming from cultural diffusionism in the study of acculturation and cultural contact, Bandaranayake counters it by applying a Monsoon Asia perspective, and describes a meaningful pattern of distribution of “indigenous” vs. “imported” architectural forms sharing similarities, like the tower temples, circular and polygonal structures, and rectangular houses.31 Accepting a wide definition of Monsoon Asia as the region going from Pakistan and Kashmir in the West to Japan and Korea in the East, he conceptualizes the area as follows: There is no suggestion here that Monsoon Asia is a purely self-contained region or that it contains no transitional zones which, in some respects, are as (or more) closely related to similar transitional zones in neighbouring global regions – as, for instance, the relationship between China and Central Asia or the Indus valley and the cultures of the Iranian plateau and beyond. At the same time, the concept of Monsoon Asia as a geo-cultural or a geo-historical category is more than just a convenient frame of reference. When we speak of its unity we refer to the ‘relative homogeneity’ of a single, though immense, global category with a specific geographical and historical character.32

Bandaranayake sees three main implications for this view: Monsoon Asia should be considered as (1) an “immense matrix out of which arise a number of different and parallel cultures,” which underlies the aspect of unity; (2) a geographical arena for a process of subtle differentiation proceeding from internal dynamics of each culture involving the encounter of humans with the environment and with each other in a given territory; and (3) an area where interconnected paths of development involved the organic development by any given culture of its own existing forms and concepts, the invention or innovation of new forms, and the acquisition and adaptation of forms and concepts developed in neighbouring cultures.33 The specificity of Monsoon Asia lies in the combination of numerous factors, viz. monsoon-influenced climate, agrarian economy, high population density, interrelations and interactions between highly advanced civilizations, and the coincidence of its borders with those within which Buddhism spread, as well as the prevalence of a number of significant architectural forms common to various regional cultures. The sum total of local traditions, shaped by the particularities of the distinctive

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conditions as they have been formed in time in the contact between the various peoples and cultures and their local environments, constitutes “the Monsoon Asian complex of cultures and its rich patterns of unity and differentiation”.34 Moving to the 1990s, Daigoro Chihara posited a “substratum of pre-Aryan culture” shared between India and Southeast Asia, and surmised that “there were few fundamental differences between Indian civilisation and Southeast Asian civilisation, [so] the wave of Indianization would seem to have penetrated Southeast Asian societies as if by osmosis.”35 John Emigh, in his comparative study on Southeastern Indian (especially Orissan) and Javano-Balinese performance traditions and iconographic motifs, attempted to go beyond the “(Indian/tantric) influence” paradigm by positing a common ground for both areas, and highlighting that those traditions were made possible “by thousands of years of a partially shared prehistory”: What I am suggesting is that performative traditions, as well as linguistic and agricultural ones, may well have flowed south and west before returning towards the east; and that the Tantric traditions that took root in Bali may already have been nurtured in common ground.… We probably will not be able to fill in the blanks more precisely until further archaeological work is done to refine the nature of the trade contacts between South and Southeast Asia, a reassessment is made of the contributions of the Austro-Asiatic and Dravidian populations to ‘classical’ Indian culture in general, and more is known about the early cultural and historical links connecting the Indonesian archipelago to India, southern China, mainland Southeast Asia and Melanesia.36

Along similar lines, and explicitly situating themselves within the intellectual trajectory started by Mus, Jordaan and Wessing took into account both ethnographic and textual data from various geographical areas of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China to point at the striking correspondences between construction sacrifice37 – which, in its tantric form, might have involved human sacrifice – across Monsoon Asia and ritual prescriptions recommended by the Sanskrit Śilpaśāstras: Indian usages can be seen as being but a local variant of practices once prevailing throughout “Monsoon Asia”, the difference between the Indian ones and the others lying in the fact that the former were infused with Vedic notions and later became doctrinized as ‘Hinduism’ (which itself is, of course, a cover term for a wide variety of beliefs and practices) while the others more or less remained folk practices.38

As Jordaan and Wessing put it, paraphrasing Mus, “a study of the customs of present-day groups in Southeast Asia, like the Cham in Vietnam, could teach us more about the hidden, still continuing pre-Aryan cultural influences which have contributed to the form that Hinduism has taken”.39

revisiting the monsoon asia idea: old problems and new directions 73

The desideratum put forward by Jordaan and Wessing with respect to Hinduism and contemporary ethnic groups in Southeast Asia clearly resonates with that invoked by ethnographer Robert K. Dentan, who in a series of articles published between 2002 and 2017 has posited the existence of a common religious base in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Southern China.40 On the basis of his extensive fieldwork among the Austroasiatic-speaking Semai in highland peninsular Malaysia, Dentan hypothesizes a common ancestry between Nkuu’, the thundersquall-God of the Semai and the fierce Vedic Rudra, on account of their similar nature and common features, as well as a constellation of associated mythological elements and religious tropes. Dentan suggests a process involving the slow internal differentiation of an unformalized and unnamed aboriginal religion which spread throughout south and southeast Asia; its resultant differentiation into diverse forms in India and […] the mountainous interior of Peninsular Malaysia; and a subsequent convergence in the first millennium AD as Indian traders, princes and missionaries introduced their Hindu and Buddhist modifications of the original religions into the area.41

Anthropologist Holly High, explicitly inscribing her research on the “territory cults” (dedicated to the Lords/spirits/energies of the soil/place) of the populations of mainland Southeast Asia within the Monsoon Asian paradigm traced by Mus, notes that “[o]ne unifying theme of the cults in and around Laos is that they are preoccupied with violence,”42 intended as both protection and punishment. She links the monstrous “father” or “presence” associated with the place to the “Dark Lord” described by Dentan: “prudish, capricious, difficult to read, and dangerous.”43 Emphasizing the connections between ecology, culture, and cosmologies, Yoshinori Yasuda44 discusses what he calls the “water civilizations” in the geoenvironmental setting of Monsoon Asia.45 An analogous attention to dynamics of interaction between ecology and food culture informs the edited volume Nature, Culture, and Food in Monsoon Asia,46 where Hitoshi Araki describe Monsoon Asia as a specific region of the world where the summer rainy season is predominant – a vast area stretching from the deep tropics right up to the mid-latitudes, including Japan. […] In short, Monsoon Asia is the region under the influence of the Asian monsoon. […] Monsoon Asia’s vast boundaries mean that when it is used as a single term Monsoon Asia encompasses extreme diversity.47

Although not explicitly mentioning Monsoon Asia, Iain Sinclair combines ecology and Sanskritic Buddhism by noting that the diffusion of Sanskrit language proficiency “largely follows the spread of the Brahmin settlements up to the arc of the Himalayas and the Wallace Line”, and that “There is a still closer correlation with

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Figure 2.4: Approximate premodern distribution of Sanskritic (area within dashed line) and semi-Sanskritic (within dotted line) Buddhist epigraphs in Asia, overlaid on the Oriental Bioregion of Indomalaya (dark shaded). Reproduced from Sinclair, “Sanskritic Buddhism as an Asian universalism,” 292 (Fig. 10.1), with the author’s permission. Legend: (1) Chandina, Chittagong, Bangladesh; (2) Anurādhapura, North Central Province, Sri Lanka; (3) Malé, Maldives; (4) Valabhi, Gujarat, India; (5) Chilas, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan; (6) Kathmandu, Nepal; (7) Shai-thaung pagoda, Mrauk U, Myanmar; (8) Esperanza, Mindanao, Philippines; (9) Makam Dagang, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei; (10) Pejeng, Bali, Indonesia; (11) Pagaruyung, Sumatra, Indonesia; (12) Dali, Yunnan, China; (13) Mnga’ ris, Tibet Autonomous Region, China; (14) Arjai Caves, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China; (15) Yeonbok Bell, Kaesong Namdaemun, North Korea; (16) Feilai Feng, Hangzhou, China.

the Indomalayan bioregion, the range of which – in one demarcation – is similar to that of Sanskritic civilization as a whole”.48 He illustrates in a map the approximate premodern distribution of Sanskritic and Semi-Sanskritic Buddhist epigraphs in Asia, overlaid on the Indomalayan bioregion (see Fig. 2.4). A case for the incorporation of the texts by the two leading civilizations of Monsoon Asia (which he apparently regards as a mere geographical container), i.e. India and China, into a “Great Books” or world civilization program in global history academic curricula has been made by Phillip F. Williams,49 on the ground

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that Monsoon Asia hosts half of the global population (and thus also half of all human knowledge), as well as the oldest world’s civilizations still existing today, in an increasingly multipolar and interconnected world. While setting itself apart, either implicitly or explicitly, from the Monsoon Asian idea, especially with respect to the shared “cultural substratum” theory, a recent trend in modern scholarship has emphasized cosmopolitan, trans-local phenomena. This trend bodes well for a return to wider-ranging approaches that seek to transcend the currently dominant particularism in Area Studies scholarship. In fact, it appears to me that even scholars who did not explicitly adhere to the Monsoon Asia model have elaborated ideas that go in the direction of transcending artificial geopolitical and disciplinary boundaries towards a regional integration, although not on a Monsoon Asian scale. For instance, a case for extending the “Southeast Asian space” to Guangdong, Fujian, and Yunnan in China has been made by Denys Lombard,50 who noted the difficulty of transcending “the heaviness of regional, colonial, and then nationalistic histories which have strongly partitioned off the historical space” when describing transregional connections.51 More geographically extensive paradigms include that by Andrew Abalahin,52 discussing the non-Sinitic (non-Han), i.e. (proto-) Austronesian identity in the pre- and proto-historic periods of what we now call “China”, which connects – and at the same time dissolves – early Southeast Asia and Inner/North/East Asia into the macro-region called Sino-Pacifica (or “Greater Southeast Asia”); van Schendel’s Zomia53 (see below); Guillot, Lombard and Ptak’s Maritime Asia;54 and Gupta’s Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere,55 to name just a few.56 As far as the premodern cultural relations between South and Southeast Asia are concerned, Sheldon Pollock57 has critically engaged with what he calls the “civilizationalist indigenism” of Oliver Wolters and any “defensive indigenist” approaches that see an undeterminable cultural matrix in Southeast Asia, i.e. an echt “Southeast Asianness” (which reminds one of Mus’ socle primitif, on a more restricted scale). He has imagined a Sanskrit-dominated Cosmopolis or Ecumene as a complex transregional cultural formation extending over an immense swathe of territory from Afghanistan to Java, and suggested that we should speak of the “Indianization” or “Sanskritization” of Java in the same way as the “Indianization” of Kerala: “there seems to be no awareness that the Indianization of South East Asia was not dissimilar from the Indianization of India”.58 As useful and sophisticated as it may be, Pollock’s model is limited to Sanskrit and “Cosmopolitan vernacular” languages and literatures, and therefore inherently biased towards “high cultural”, top-down phenomena – with the notable exclusion of religion; furthermore, the supralocal dynamics shaping bottom-up phenomena that do not fit the model, such as e.g. “magic”, “folk” religion, ritual, and performances, remain largely to be investigated. As noted by Daud Ali, “the full implications of Pollock’s

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theory have yet to be explored and may still help us reconceptualize the nature of linkages between South and Southeast Asia in ways perhaps consonant with Hermann Kulke’s suggestive remarks”59 – namely, Kulke’s enticing model, which tries to explain shared socio-cultural processes across South and Southeast Asia. Kulke calls India and Southeast Asia “partners of mutual ‘processes of civilisation’ which comprised both sides of the Bay of Bengal”,60 and posits a socio-economic and political (parallel) convergence in both regions during the early centuries CE that enabled similar solutions to similar problems of social change.61 While this theory focuses on convergence rather than postulating a substratum, it may be regarded as implying a shared cultural matrix, which would have led to parallel developments starting from similar premises and ending in similar results, through a process of independent origination in the theatre of a geoenvironmental area characterized by similar features. Indeed, in a recent article on state formation and social integration in premodern South and Southeast Asia, Kulke appears to reorient his research towards a Monsoon Asia integrated model: South and Southeast Asia and particularly the countries on both sides of the Bay of Bengal comprised a coherent region of the Asian continent. Despite strong individual distinctions and differences, like languages and ethnic groups, they are interrelated by several important factors that shaped their history until present day. Suffice it at the moment to mention three of them. South and Southeast Asia belong to ‘Monsoon Asia’ with its heavy reliance on wet rice, they form central sections of the Indian Ocean trade system linking the great urban markets of the Mediterranean−Near Eastern world and China. And finally, since mid−first millennium CE, India’s strong influence in Southeast Asia emerged as a basis of an enduring cultural relation and convergence of both regions.62

Kulke, renewing his plea for “a kind of ‘conceptual convergence’ of research on South Asia and Southeast Asia, particularly with regard to pre-modern processes of state formation”, stresses that both subcontinents have a great deal in common in essential matters that influence and determine processes of state formation. Both belong to Monsoon Asia with its intensive rice agriculture and are active participants in the international Indian Ocean trade system and, last but not the least, they communicated on the basis of a common cultural heritage of localized Indian influences. These criteria created certain commonalities of state formation that distinguish both regions from their Near Eastern and East Asian neighbours.63

Theories that implicitly revisit, and fine tune, Mus’ idea of a “substratum” include Robert Blust’s acceptance of the “Austric hypothesis” positing a genetic relationship between Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages, and locating the ancestral

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habitat of the Austric family “in the general region where the Salween, Mekong and Yangzi rivers run parallel on the Burma-Yunnan frontier”;64 Blench’s individuation of an “arc of vegeculture” as early as 10,000 BP, characterized by tubers, Musaceae, sago exploitation and sugar-cane stretching between Melanesia and Eastern Nepal, correlated with linguistic evidence as well as a suite of material culture items and, perhaps, ideas;65 Thomas Reuter’s description of an “Ancestor Religion” widespread in the Austronesian world and East Asia;66 or Francesco Brighenti’s discussion of remarkably similar buffalo sacrifices, head-hunting practices and mortuary rituals characterizing the religion of Nāga tribes of Eastern India, as well as the past religions of some Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic-speaking ethnic groups settled in Myanmar, which might have been once widespread in maritime Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and the whole of Oceania.67

(Re-)conceptualizing Monsoon Asia: future directions Thanks to recent advancements in various scientific domains, from textual studies to archaeology, from genetics and palaeobotany to historical linguistics, we are now at a point at which it is possible to link together a considerable body of data gathered over the vast region of Monsoon Asia to test the set of similarities proposed by Mus and others to posit the existence of a shared substratum or cultural matrix, and throw further light on complex problems concerning human migration, linguistic transfer, and cultural contact in the longue durée. It also seems to be high time to revisit the deep past of Monsoon Asia from the perspective of geoenvironmental history and maritime connectivity, and explore the correlations between the physical environment and the multi-centric dispersal of people, goods, and ideas. Adhering to the intellectual agenda of recent historical scholarship drawing on Global and Maritime History, Indian Ocean Studies, and Global Medieval Studies, one may highlight the strongly interconnected nature of premodern Asia, its networks of exchange via the maritime routes, and the cosmopolitan dynamics that have contributed to shaping its mosaic of cultures. Following this trend, seeing comparative coherence to periods applied to a global perspective (for instance, the “Global Middle Ages” or “Global Early Modernity”), one may also counterbalance the negative perception towards the elaboration of grand narratives that has characterized many academic fields in the past three decades. As summarized by Alan Strathern, if at any given period “the diverse societies of the world are becoming more interconnected it makes sense that they will come to exhibit other comparable developments to the extent that there is some kind of loose holistic logic to their emergence”.68 This dictum echoes Victor Lieberman’s conceptualization of premodern Eurasia as part of a coherent, integrated Ecumene connected to Southeast

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and East Asian “appendices” that, through comparative study, reveals parallel yet independent social adaptations, climatic shifts, and commercial links – what he calls “strange parallels,” i.e., synchronous developments between geographically distant regions in Southeast Asia and the wider Eurasian region.69 Paraphrasing and coalescing Lieberman’s set of questions on premodern Eurasia, one may ask: in what ways and to what extent can we regard premodern Monsoon Asia as a (semi-) coherent ecumene? Like previous scholars, I imagine Monsoon Asia as a vast geographical, historical, and environmental space characterized by a great variation and, at the same time, an underlying unity. Cutting across the natural boundaries and barriers of continental topography as well as the political borders of modern nation-states, and transcending such constructed geographical divisions as South/Southeast/East Asia, this mainland and maritime expanse – which encompasses the “Indomalaya ecozone” as its “core” – was influenced by environmental and climatic factors, such as the seasonal monsoon winds, which not only impacted the environment, but also facilitated the creation of cultural networks. Asking whether the history of the civilizations around and beyond the Indian Ocean exhibit any intrinsic and perceptible unity, expressed in terms of space, time, or structures, Kirti Narayan Chaudhuri has found “a basic underlying structure, the ground floor of material life, which remained invariant while displaying variations within certain limits”.70 According to him, the unifying factor that “brought the whole [Indian Ocean rim] area within the operation of a single local variable” was the cyclical monsoon wind.71 By following the rhythms of the monsoons, sailors were forced to wait for months in foreign ports for the contrary winds that would take them back home, thus becoming agents and recipients of cultural transactions. The physical and human unit that Chaudhury calls the “Indian Ocean system” was not limited to the sea, but included the hinterlands – even when they are far away from the shores – as its integral part.72 Similarly, Michael Pearson has stressed the “deep structure” underlying the Indian Ocean, including climatic and physical factors.73 Andre G. Frank has considered the Indian Ocean area as extending all the way to the South China Sea, and as having been central in global history for at least five millennia up to about 1800.74 Against this background, Monsoon Asia can be theorized as an environmentally unified space and also as an interconnected and integrated network that – just like Eurasia75 – presents the characteristics of a cultural ecumene or “world system”. The geoenvironmental metaphor of Monsoon Asia could be translated into a human-environmental metaphor indeed, which here is offered as a heuristic device for the purpose of suggesting a commonality of cultural traits and epistemes shaped by millennia of human interaction. Monsoon Asia, through its maritime corridors and riverine arteries connecting the coast to the hinterland, formed a natural space that favoured the long-distance movement of people, commodities,

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languages, and ideas across the Indian and the Western Pacific Oceans. Recent archaeological research into the pre- and proto-history of the Indo-Pacific arc has prompted the formulation of new paradigms in the study of exchanges across this vast space.76 Sunil Gupta has conceptualized the Bay of Bengal as an “Interaction Sphere” in the period from 1000 BCE to 500 CE, where one could distinguish interactive, long-distance “processes of human dispersals and techno-cultural diffusions (including the Neolithic expansion from southern China into Southeast Asia) and short term movements of men and material inspired by trade opportunities” (usually effected through conduits opened by earlier expansions).77 Cameron has unearthed new archaeological evidence on the existence of a “Prehistoric Maritime Silk Road” constituting “one of a series of interaction spheres that dovetailed into other interaction spheres in the Indian Ocean extending all the way to the Indian subcontinent” from ca. 3000 BCE onwards.78 In a series of recent studies, Bérénice Bellina79 and Aude Favereau and Bérénice Bellina80 discuss Maritime Southeast Asian populations’ socio-political and economic developments when the region became part of the Maritime Silk Roads system, highlighting long distance interactions and processes of globalization across the South China Sea–Indian Ocean networks in the late prehistoric and early historical period. Similarities and exchanges in the realm of material culture and technology, languages, religious tropes, etc., have been uncovered, which suggest the existence of long-standing historical connections among Monsoon Asian societies. For instance, elements suggesting the possibility of long-distance interaction and the sharing of religious ideas and practices from (South) East to South Asia include the presence of jar burials along the Indo-Pacific arc, while studies on the distribution of ceramics, cultigens, and nautical terms and devices, have highlighted the regular maritime links between early farming communities in South and Southeast Asia since at least the first millennium BCE.81 These connections are suggestive of a complex process of exchange in the cadre of a region with a partially shared prehistory or, as hypothesized by Kulke (from a socio-political rather than religious point of view) for South and Southeast Asia, of a cultural convergence indeed. Using these models as sources of inspiration, I emphasize processes of cultural exchange and integration, and raise the questions as to whether these dynamics may have shaped the societies of Monsoon Asia from the crucial transitional proto-historic period (1500 BCE–500 CE) all the way to the early modern period, and whether through the study of existing socio-religious realities we may be able to access and reconstruct an older layer of resilient cultural frameworks. For instance, tapping into, and combining, the large amount of data from archaeology, genetics, linguistics, textual studies, ethnography, and history that scholars working in diverse and often highly specialized fields have gathered over the past two to three decades, we may study the flows and interactions across the Indo-Pacific area, such

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as the migration and socio-linguistic “layering” of Austroasiatic, Austronesian, and Indo-Aryan language-speaking people – and their “cultural packages” – across Monsoon Asia (see Fig. 2.5). My perspective posits the occurrence of circulatory dynamics of globalization and diverse cross-cultural human relations that have configured the trajectories of many salient cultural patterns existing in the area. These were formed and accommodated in prehistoric and early historical times, and constitute processual continuities that are still being negotiated in the modern period. For instance, by applying a polythetic approach, alongside the aspects of unity and interconnectedness we may also individuate patterns of acceptance, selection, avoidance, and differentiation that render Monsoon Asia a mosaic of highly diverse, yet somewhat “familiar” cultures.82 By focusing on agency, interaction, and multi-directional transfer, this perspective aims at avoiding both essentialism and extreme fragmentation, thereby achieving a greater depth in historical and socio-cultural analysis. One promising area of enquiry is the relation between the environment, ecology, and culture. Scholarship could try to explore the question as to whether shared environmental and climatic conditions, including natural disasters, would have resulted in shared imaginaries, ethics, and cosmologies. Sugata Bose has suggested that disasters unite the peoples of the Indian Ocean world and link them to the world beyond.83 Similarly, a recent volume edited by Greg Bankoff and Joseph Christensen places natural hazards at the centre of Indian Ocean history.84 Anthony Reid’s chapter in the aforementioned volume mentions the links between the habit of the people of Nias (Sumatra) to build houses on high ground (arguably for fear of tsunamis) and their mythology and cosmology, postulating the existence of an earthquake god residing in the underworld to be propitiated with the erection of each new house.85 Could the capricious nature of the environment in Monsoon Asia – with the omnipresent water in all its forms, which sustain life but can bring death through waves, storms, or floods – explain the fascination for a high storm god, more feared than worshiped, representing a prehistoric “terrorist god” that converged into the (extra-?)Vedic Rudra in South and Southeast Asia in the early historical and mediaeval period? Or, could the Monsoon Asia idea help us answer such questions, along the lines framed by Sinclair when discussing the overlap between Sanskritic Buddhist epigraphy and the Indo-Malaya ecozone (see above), as to why such Indic religions as “Hinduism” and Buddhism spread mainly eastwards, or in any event rather neatly coincide with the borders of Monsoon Asia? It is hoped that future scholarship will elaborate a solid comparative framework for the systematic study of the material and socio-cultural history of Monsoon Asian societies in the longue durée.

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Figure 2.5: Map showing the spread of Sino-Pacific language families, from Abalahin, “‘Sino-Pacifica’,” 669 (Abalahin’s notes: extra-Sino-Pacific in italics; *Manchurian Agricultural Transition). Imagine one more AA (Austro-Asiatic) arrow going from the Thai/Burman coast to Odisha via the Andaman Islands: see Rau and Sidwell, “The Munda Maritime Hypothesis.”

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Monsoon Asia and the prehistory of Greater Magadha In the following sections I will discuss the Monsoon Asia idea vis-à-vis two hypotheses concerning supra-local cultural formations in, respectively, South and Southeast Asia. The first is the Greater Magadha hypothesis elaborated by Johannes Bronkhorst, which has advanced a revolutionary model to interpret the historical development of the culture of the premodern Indian subcontinent. Bronkhorst has identified the traces of a culture of the Gangetic plains of Northeastern India that predated Brahmanism, and was assimilated by it only centuries after the penetration of Indo-Aryan language-speakers into the subcontinent. He has argued that philosophical concepts, religious systems, and cultural practices that we now commonly perceive as quintessentially “Hindu” or “Brahmanical,” as well as non-Brahmanical phenomena such as the Śramaṇa movement, Ājīvikism, Buddhism, and Jainism, had their origin in the culture of the geographical area of Greater Magadha, which early Brahmanical literature refers to as being inhabited by asura-worshipping, barbarous, and demonic people from the east (āsuryaḥ prācyāḥ [prajāḥ]).86 Having noted an asymmetry in the current study of cultural flows across the wide geographical region encompassing South and Southeast Asia, which tends to focus on the transfer of Sanskrit language along with Brahmanical ideology and religions such as Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism, and Buddhism, from the Indian “cradles” to Southeast Asian “peripheries” (which are often associated with axiomatically “local”, “indigenous”, and non-literate contexts), one may apply the Monsoon Asian perspective to rebalance this framework and gain a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics of human, ecological, and cultural transfers in the longue durée over a wider area than that we now call “India”. In so doing, one may cast a fresh perspective on the prehistory of the Indian subcontinent and its linguistic, ethnic, and cultural substrata. In particular, one may salvage the idea of an Austroasiatic linguistic and cultural substratum shared across Monsoon Asia elaborated by Lévi, Przyluski, Mus, and others, and apply it to religious history, in particular the emergence of what we call “Classical Hinduism” and “Tantrism” in the course of the Gupta and post-Gupta medieval period. Following a heterogenetic model, I argue that tantric traditions cannot be uniquely the result of comparatively late, elite- and text-driven dynamics, and that Brahmanism and even (late) Vedic religiosity may actually be a mélange of substratal and adstratal cultural elements with a long history and, even more importantly, a geography that transcends the borders of the Indian subcontinent. The theory of Greater Magadha has been mainly discussed by Classical Indologists. However, since it (at least in part) deals with, and bears implications for, phenomena that date back to a period for which textual evidence is scant, it would lend itself to being tested against different datasets and studied from disciplinary perspectives that go beyond Indology and Sanskrit philology. Besides archaeology,

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which was, to some extent, already taken into account by Bronkhorst, it seems that linguistics, genetics, and ethnography could cast further light on some of the issues raised by his model. A case in point is the recent research by John Peterson, who has applied a well-tested methodology that allows us to go farther back in time than the earliest available written sources. Peterson suggests that the Austroasiatic languages that today are restricted to four residual zones in the subcontinent were once spoken over a much wider area (including the eastern half of the Indo-Gangetic plain), and that an overlap seems to have existed between the cultural and linguistic (i.e., Austroasiatic vs. Indo-Aryan) boundary of Greater Magadha.87 These findings suggest that the advanced culture of Greater Magadha may have owed much to a predominantly Austroasiatic-speaking substratum, and may have been the expression of an historical evolution of Austroasiatic-speaking linguistic groups who, starting from the early centuries of the Common Era, started to be assimilated into the culture of the Indo-Aryan-speaking immigrants, and who did not recognize the Brahmans as the highest class of society. The conclusions elaborated by the two scholars fit remarkably well with each other, all the more so because both models were based on different datasets and were elaborated independently of one another.88 The above findings open up new vistas on the prehistory of Greater Magadha and indeed of the entire Indian subcontinent, but also carry implications for the wider region of Monsoon Asia. The fact that early Brahmanical literature refers to Greater Magadha as an area inhabited by people that apparently belonged to a different ethnic stock than that of the Indo-Aryan settlers, coupled with Waruno Mahdi’s hypothesis proposing a Southeast Asian pedigree for the pre-Aryan populations called Nāgas in Sanskrit sources on account of their maritime orientation, their associations with piracy, and their adherence to a cult of serpents and sacred fig trees,89 matches the current scholarly consensus that the Austroasiatic-speaking populations entered the subcontinent from overseas, through the Indo-Himalayan overland corridor, as well as the Indian Ocean maritime corridor, via the Andaman Islands, from a proto-Austroasiatic homeland located in the region between the Bay of Bengal, the Assam-Burma border, mainland Southeast Asia, and Southern China at some undetermined time in antiquity, but probably around 2000–1500 BCE.90 Traces of this culture can be found in the borrowings from Austroasiatic languages that we find in Sanskrit (mainly related to agriculture, plants, etc.), as well as in parallels in the Chalcolithic and Neolithic material culture of Eastern India and mainland Southeast Asia. According to recent genetic research, the descendants of these immigrant populations are the Austroasiatic language-speaking ethnic groups of the Indian subcontinent, which most closely resemble the oldest ethnic group of South Asia, namely that of the “Ancestral South Indians”.91 This group has been hypothesized to be related to the Andaman Islanders, and to reflect a very old genetic stock that has been in South Asia for several millennia.

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The hypothesis that the culture of Greater Magadha was characterized by an Austroasiatic substratum language and an Ancestral South Indian genetic stock, both of which entered the subcontinent from Southeast Asia via both the land and maritime route, implies that the cultures of the Austroasiatic-speaking “Munda” populations of the Indian Subcontinent were not quite “autochthonous”, but were rather the result of evolution from the culture carried by earlier Austroasiaticspeaking immigrants. This culture included a fully realized agricultural package, a developed metallurgy, and primitive navigational technology, among other features. Thus, keeping in mind the danger of unduly conflating languages, ethnic groups, and cultures, it seems legitimate to ask – just like scholars are used to do with IndoAryan speakers, as well as later Indian carriers of Sanskritic culture to Southeast Asia – whether the set of cultural packages transmitted by Austroasiatic-speaking immigrants included religious ideas and practices as well. This question is relevant for at least three reasons: first, it corrects the asymmetry mentioned above by acknowledging the contribution of Southeast Asian culture to South Asian culture; second, it frames the issue of the prehistory of Greater Magadha as the result of complex circulatory dynamics across Monsoon Asia; and third, it suggests that what are nowadays the illiterate small-scale societies dispersed across the “Munda Belt” in the Indian subcontinent as well as mountainous isolated areas of predominantly Austronesian-speaking peninsular Malaysia may be the descendants of premodern societies that participated in dynamics that most scholars would not hesitate to regard as “cosmopolitan,” had they been associated with literate milieus. The above-discussed speculative reconstruction of an ancestral cultural matrix across Monsoon Asia revived by Dentan, who has individuated uncannily similar elements between the boogeyman thunder deity or “dark Lord” Nkuu’ of the Semai and the Vedic (and early tantric) “outsider god” Rudra,92 has been reviewed and fine-tuned from an Indological perspective by the present author in an article published in 2017.93 There I have presented some preliminary findings of substratal elements in early Śaiva (pre-tantric and tantric) traditions, including: the non-Indo-Aryan (possibly Austroasiatic) origin of words associated with early tantric and Śaiva milieus (such as piśāca, liṅga, laṅgāla/laguḍa/lākula, uḍumbara/Tumburu94); the significance of blood-offering in Austroasiatic-speaking tribal communities of India and tantric traditions; the importance of dragons (Sanskrit: nāga) in Semai cosmology, their connection to the monsoon and Nkuu’, and the importance of nāgas in early Indic lore; the existence of a religiosity of “sacred trees”, and the naming of early manifestations of Rudra after such trees, revealing Austroasiatic etymologies; a conceptualization of power as female, and its articulation through an erotic relationship between Semai adepts and demonic wives, which mirrors that between yoginīs and practitioners in tantric lore; and the parallel between seven power-bestowing female deities among the Semai and the Indic Kṛttikās/Mātṛs

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(= Pleiades), four of which bear non-Indo-European, possibly Austroasiatic names, and three of which bear names associated with water, rain, and cloud, thereby revealing a cultural complex stemming from a “Monsoonal culture”.95 I have then related this perspective, combining religious and textual history and ecology, to that applied by Gautama Vajracharya to the study of Vedic culture through time, according to whom the emphasis on water, rain, and seasonal atmospheric phenomena that is detectable in the late strata of the Vedic corpus may be indicative of an influence of a “monsoonal culture” of non-Aryan (Austroasiatic-speaking?) agriculturalist populations of the Indian subcontinent on Vedic nomadic culture.96 He argues that, while the Avesta shows little interest in rain-making, the Ṛgveda is replete with prayers for rain, and contains various speculations about rain and lightning. This would reflect the growing importance of the monsoon as the IndoAryans moved toward the basin of the Ganges in the subcontinent. According to Vajracharya, deities such as Indra and Varuṇa, who originally had nothing to do with the phenomena of rain, due to the association of agriculture with the monsoon became regarded as rain makers; for instance, Varuṇa was originally the god of the night sky representing the primeval water and later became the god of the Indian monsoon, while Indra’s slaying of Vṛtra should be interpreted, besides as a creation myth, also as a story of “drought and rain”. The available data, and recent insights into the linguistic and ethnic transfers from Southeast Asia to South Asia in the pre- and proto-historical period, should prompt scholars from various disciplines to consider the potential of detailed comparative research involving the religious lore of Austroasiatic-speaking populations from both sides of the Bay of Bengal, along the lines of that carried out by Fox, Bellwood, and others in the framework of the “comparative Austronesian project,” or by Joseph Watts et al. in the “Database of Austronesian Supernatural Beliefs and Practices”97 scattered over the geographically vast Austronesian-speaking world. For instance, besides shared so-called “shamanic” practices, such populations as the Gonds (speaking a Dravidian language), Bhils and Santals share a veneration of plants and trees as gods, as well as a “storm-god” complex revolving around a supreme deity that, just like Nkuu’, resembles the Vedic Rudra, or has been assimilated to the Rudra-Śiva of later tantric Hinduism. It is therefore not impossible that Austroasiatic-speaking ethnic groups scattered over the eastern regions of the modern Indian subcontinent carried, in a modified form, cultural and religious features that were (and still are) shared by their Southeast Asian “cousins”. These features played a role as ingredients, so to speak, in the constitution of the religio-cultural complexes that later became crystallized along regional lines as tantric traditions, following their appropriation and re-packaging by Brahmanical or Sanskrit-speaking elites as a strategy to assimilate them, just as it happened to other Greater Magadhan soteriological systems, such as Yoga and Sāṅkhya – as well

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as, I would add, the early Śaiva movement of the Pāśupatas, for instance with the domestication of the wild god Rudra and the Brahmanical adoption of antinomian practices that we know from such marginal groups as the Vrātyas. Mainstream scholarship has long since admitted the existence of important differences between Vedic and post-Vedic religiosity, attributing them to either purely orthogenetic dynamics, or heterogenetic “influences” from non-Brahmanical cults; and yet, it has hardly tried to identify and tease out the cultural strands that determined the “turning point” between the Vedic and “Classical Hindu” religions. While the Greater Magadha hypothesis has fulfilled this desideratum, some important pieces in this complex puzzle are still missing – namely, what constituted the linguistic, ethnic, and cultural substratum of Greater Magadha. Further research on the cultural and religious history of the subcontinent could substantiate the claims, supported by recent linguistic and genetic research, about the contribution of Austroasiatic-speaking people to the formation of “Classical Indian” culture (of which tantric traditions were integral constituents), and thereby do justice to the pioneering work by the French Orientalists who adhered to the Monsoon Asia idea.

Reflections on Zomia, or the “Sino-Indian margins”, vis-à-vis Monsoon Asia I shall now discuss a geographic expression that goes beyond the regional, imperial, and national borders, and its implication for the Monsoon Asia paradigm, namely the concept of Zomia (or, the “Sino-Indian margins”). In a programmatic introduction to a special issue of the journal Moussons, Grégoire Schlemmer notes how past scholarship has tended to structure continental East Asia into four major zones, namely the Chinese and Indian civilizations, and their neighbouring agro-pastoral societies of the Tibetan and Mongolian highlands and the agrarian societies in the tropical plains of Southeast Asia, thereby leaving out a large part of the so-called “minorities” living in forested and/or mountainous areas on the limits of the four zones.98 He refers to this large geo-cultural area as the “Sino-Indian margins”, “with the belief that, in spite of great differences, it is pertinent to consider them as a single large unit”.99 This is remindful of van Schendel’s proposition of the term “Zomia”,100 which indeed the author takes to be roughly equivalent, as well as the “Southeast Asian Massif”.101 This region (or, rather, socio-cultural construct) spreads across the mainland Southeast Asian highlands and extends to southwest China and, perhaps, also western Sichuan and the highlands of Fujian, Hunan, Jiangxi, and Taiwan.102 Schlemmer notes that research has produced highly localized monographs focusing on the micro-features a relevant population, with the result that these populations have been perceived as autonomous realities isolated from the greater regional and supra-local context. The solution to this predicament

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would be an approach extending to this comparative zone that goes beyond the standard map of cultural spheres, “in order to give it visibility and coherence”. In this zone, the “relative unity” of these populations would stem from their status as ‘living on the margins’. To be more precise, this unity comes from the fact that these populations participate in geopolitical contexts which share similar characteristics: a habitat in regions which are difficult to access, be they mountains or forests, but where different coexisting groups which are related in one way or another to different political or religious spheres, apart from the kingdoms or states on whose margins they live. Because of this, there is a continual interaction process, limited though it may be, between these groups as well as between these groups and the centres of power which encompass them. As isolated and peripheral as these populations may be, they all have been at least partly shaped by interaction with, and in reaction to, their neighbours. These populations have, because of this, elaborated responses which, although they may vary according to their context, contain similar modalities.103

Just like the Monsoon Asia idea, this working hypothesis (as per the author’s own definition) rests on the geoenvironmental features of the region, and a complex pattern of centre-periphery interaction that goes beyond linguistic and ethnic aspects. Even though the author explicitly and firmly distances himself from Mus’ hypothesis of an ahistorical and static “native base” or “substrate” in Monsoon Asia, he seemingly takes inspiration from it, for instance when positing a series of features shared by the inhabitants of the Sino-Indian margins: a network of “territorial rituals”, the “gods of the soil” extending from East and Southeast Asia to the Himalayas and beyond; the oppositions involving water (feminine), stone (a sterile element), and soil, often connected in ritual to a hill-like mound or miniature mountain; the combination of alters or Earth/Sky entities; certain categories of half-aquatic, half-earthly beings connected to chthonic powers; tree-centred cults; foundation rituals; ancestors’ cults; and links between ancestors and mountains.104 To this list one may add the characteristic contrast between uplands and lowlands, a sort of “vertical geography that spans several national and imperial boundaries of China, India, and Southeast Asia”;105 the resistance to homogeneization and the acceptance of multiple religions and cultures; the practice of “escape agriculture”; the more important political and social role of women; the smaller, decentralized, and ephemeral political structures (in contrast to those of the lowlanders); their isolation and resistance to the lowland state by taking advantage of the mountainous terrain; and their local autonomy, even in the context of a vassalage relationship.106 The idea of Zomia would seem to be specular to the Monsoon Asia model, which rests on altogether similar methodological grounds, and independently validates it: the marriage of synchronic and diachronic approaches, a comparative method,

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the nuanced and flexible distinction (rather than axiomatic separation) of ethnic and linguistic boundaries, and the geographically extended transregional and supra-national vocation. Since several items in the list of shared features are also found among other populations of Monsoon Asia outside the borders of Zomia (as already pointed out by Mus), how does Zomia fit in Monsoon Asia? Perhaps we may imagine Zomia as a “sub-system” within Monsoon Asia, as are some other translocal entities – think, for instance, of the (not unproblematic) “Malay world” dominated by Austronesian language-speaking populations. Zomia could be seen as one side of a geographical and cultural dichotomy within Monsoon Asia between mainly “vertical” (mountain-dominated) systems on the one hand, mainly “horizontal” (maritime, riverine, and lowland-dominated) systems on the other. While the “highland” vs. “lowland” dichotomy also applies to Maritime Southeast Asia (indeed, one may also encounter it in many other regions of the world), it seems to have acquired a particular significance in Monsoon Asia. In this region, the opposition between the conservative and relatively isolated societies of the highlands and the cosmopolitan and open societies of the coasts and plains may reflect (at least in part) phenomena of linguistic, genetic, and socio-cultural layering. This is particularly true from the point of view of religious history: in mainland Southeast Asia, highland societies have preserved “ancestor cults” and have been only marginally influenced by the “World Religions” practiced in the lowlands. A case in point is that of the Austroasiatic-speaking preliterate small-scale societies living in mountainous enclaves of the predominantly Austronesian-speaking Malay Peninsula, which according to Dentan document the survival of a proto-historical Monsoon Asian religion. In the Sumatran, Javanese, and Balinese spheres, comparably, Islam (in lowland Sumatra and Java) or cosmopolitan, East Javanese waves of Hinduism (in lowland Bali) have not (or not fully) been embraced by the highland populations – witness the communities of “Hindu-Buddhist” practitioners surviving in the forests of the Sumatran highlands in the premodern period,107 the inhabitants of the isolated Tengger highlands of East Java (as well as the network of “Hindu-Buddhist” scriptoria/hermitages, or kabuyutans, still characterizing the upland Javanese landscape well into the Islamic era), and the communities of Ṛṣi Bhujaṅga priests108 and Bali Agas in the Balinese highlands.109 These textual and social realities speak about a shared tendency of the highlands towards religious cosmopolitanism, compared with a more open and cosmopolitan attitude on the plains.

revisiting the monsoon asia idea: old problems and new directions 89

Conclusion In this chapter I have sketched the intellectual genealogy of the idea of Monsoon Asia, its rise and demise, and the continuing, albeit sporadic, allure that it has exerted on scholars of disparate domains of Asian Humanities up to the present. Adhering to the intellectual approach of the early twentieth-century French academic circles that elaborated this concept, I have revisited it in the wake of a recent wave of scholarship revealing the arbitrariness of the Area Studies division of Asia into geographical quadrants. In so doing, I have advocated a widening of the geo-historical framework for the study of the longue durée translocal dynamics which govern historical processes transcending the boundaries of both nationstates and macro-regions as they are commonly framed in the current academe, and conceptualized Monsoon Asia a fluid space characterized by socio-cultural dynamics and environmental factors spanning discrete histories and geographies. In advocating the need for a unified historiography of the supralocal system of Monsoon Asia, I should like to stress that I do not regard this concept only as a “container” (i.e. a mere geographical expression), but also as a dynamic network of human interaction. Thus, rather than merely reviving the idea of a static substrate or socle asiatique primitif proposed by Mus, I conceptualize Monsoon Asia as a dynamic pattern, network, or matrix, of cultural, linguistic, and material interactions as well as processes of adoption and rejection (or what Schlemmer calls “homogenization” and “heterogenization” with respect to the “Sino-Indian margins”) intervened over a large, yet interconnected, area influenced by similar environmental factors. In so doing, I have attempted to do justice to Mus’ insights and comfortably enlarge the scope of the field so as to transcend a too narrowly-focused disciplinary approach and Area Studies compartmentalization. At the same time I have tried to fine-tune Mus’ ideas in the light of half a century of theoretical and methodological advancements, as well as newly discovered empirical data. By relating the idea of Monsoon Asia to the hypothesis of Greater Magadha, I have sketched possible avenues for future research on the contributions of Austroasiatic-speaking societies, which immigrated into the Indian subcontinent from a homeland in Southeast Asia or Southern China, to the constitution of “Classical Indian” “elite” cultures and religions, including tantric traditions. What has been described by Pierre-Yves Manguin as a “millennium-long phase of exchange” that predates the beginnings of “Indianization” of Southeast Asia in the third–fifth centuries CE could,110 indeed, represent a shared “cultural matrix” (to say it with Kulke) that would explain the fundamental affinity between cultural traits/trajectories over the immense region spanning South and Southeast Asia – and beyond. This affinity would be due to historical processes of multi-directional interaction, transfer, and filiation. The idea of Monsoon Asia represents a useful

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heuristic tool to reframe the parameters of the current scholarly debate towards a truly connected and borderless history of Asia. Rather than remaining the preserve of academics, the Monsoon Asia idea may have an impact on global imaginaries and, more importantly, on issues of identity and heritage construction across the world’s most densely populated region.

Notes 1

Andrea Acri, Roger Blench, and Alexandra Landmann eds., Spirits and Ships: Cultural Transfers in Early Monsoon Asia (Singapore: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, 2017).

2

In this Chapter (differently from the volume editors’ definition in the Introduction, which considers Monsoon Asia to be limited to South and Southeast Asia), I accept the geographically wider definition of Monsoon Asia provided by earlier scholars: cf. the map reproduced in Figure 2.1.

3

I borrow this expression from Craig Reynolds, Seditious Histories: Contesting Thai and Southeast Asian Pasts (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2006), x.

4

The advent of steamship and, later, air travel, did have a major impact on the hitherto rhythmic/ seasonal monsoonal dynamics that shaped connectivity in the region up to the early modern period – a fact that somewhat undermines, yet by no means obliterates, the coherence of this model to study modern and even contemporary phenomena.

5

Andrew Abalahin, “‘Sino-Pacifica’: Conceptualizing Greater Southeast Asia as a Sub-Arena of World History,” Journal of World History 22, no. 4 (December 2011): 664.

6

See Andrea Acri, “Imagining Maritime Asia,” in Imagining Asia(s): Networks, Agents, Sites, eds. Andrea Acri, Murari K. Jha, Sraman Mukherjee, and Kashshaf Ghani (Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2019), 36–59.

7

Michel Bruneau, “Les géographes français et la tropicalité, à propos de l’Asie des moussons,” Dans L’Espace géographique 35, no 3 (2006): 195.

8

The expression “Monsoon Asia” had been already used to denote narrower geographical areas (for instance, the Indian subcontinent, especially in British circles); as a reviewer of Sion’s volume noted, the novel contribution of that scholar was precisely to include insular Southeast Asia: “Monsoon Asia is too often popularly considered as if it were synonymous with India, China, and Japan” (L.D.S., review of Jules Sion, Asie des Moussons, The Geographical Journal 74, no. 4, October 1929: 403).

9

Jules Sion, Asie des Moussons, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1928–29), 511.

10

Sion, Asie, 1–2.

11

Edward D. Laborde, The World in Outline: A Text-Book of Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 132.

12

Laborde, World, 133.

13

Lévi, Przyluski, and Bloch, among other Orientalists, are indeed mentioned and acknowledged for their inputs in the Introduction by Sion, Asie, 2.

14

Chong Guan Kwa, ed., Visions of Early Southeast Asia as Greater India: An Anthology of Articles from the Journal of the Greater India Society (Singapore and New Delhi: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute/ Manohar, 2013), xxi–xxii.

15

Here I am simply sketching those scholars’ views, without necessarily endorsing them, yet at the same time acknowledging that some of these posited similarities seem pertinent, and would deserve to be further investigated in the light of our current knowledge (a discussion that should be postponed to another occasion).

revisiting the monsoon asia idea: old problems and new directions 91

16

Paul Mus, “India seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa” (Melbourne: Monash University, 1975): 22. Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, 3; English translation of “Cultes indiens et indigènes au Champa,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 33 (1933): 367–410.

17

Mus, “India,” 22–23.

18

George Cœdès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, trans. Susan Brown Cowing and ed. Walter F. Vella (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1968), 15. Elsewhere, Cœdès adopted a biological metaphor to describe the peculiar “hybrid” nature of Southeast Asian civilizations: “The early civilizations of Indochina and Indonesia [may be regarded] as branches springing directly from the main trunk of Indian civilization [...] India supplied much more than a graft, […] it was the whole plant that was exported, and [...] according to the nature of the ground where it flourished, the same plant bore fruits of varying flavor.” Cœdès regarded this process as one of “osmosis” between Indian and local elements. See George Cœdès, The Making of South-East Asia (London: Routledge, 1966), 55. The “nature of the ground” metaphorically refers to the autochthonous substratum hypothesized by his predecessors Przyluski, Lévi, and Mus. See George Cœdès, Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d’Extrême-Orient (Hanoi: Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient, 1944), 8–9. For an elaboration of these ideas, see George Cœdès, “Le substrat autochtone et la superstructure indienne au Cambodge et à Java,” Cahiers d’Histoire Mondial 1, no. 2 (1953): 368–77; and George Cœdès, “L’osmose indienne en Indochine et en Indonésie,” Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale 1, no. 4 (1954) : 827–38.

19

Bernard Formoso, “L’Indochine vue de l’Ouest/Indochina as seen from the West,” Gradhiva 5 (2006): 1.

20

Kwa, Visions, xii.

21

See S.K. Chatterjee, “Race-Movements and Prehistoric Culture,” in The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. I: The Vedic Age, ed. R.C. Majumdar (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), 149–167; R. C. Majumdar, “The Malay,” Journal of the Greater India Society 3, no. 1 (1936): 86–96.

22

See, for instance, Hanqin Tian et al., “Regional Carbon Dynamics in Monsoon Asia and its Implications to the Global Carbon Cycle,” Global and Planetary Change 37 (2003): 201–17; and several entries in the Monsoon Asia Integrated Regional Study (https://lcluc.umd.edu/regional-ini� tiative-name/monsoon-asia-integrated-regional-study). A search of the database https://lcluc.umd. edu/content/documents-and-publications yields more than two dozen published scientific papers containing the expression “Monsoon Asia(n)” in their titles. For the application of the concept of Monsoon Asia to the field of economy, besides V. D. Wickizer and M. K. Bennett, The Rice Economy of Monsoon Asia (Stanford University, California: Food Research Institute in cooperation with the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1941), see Katherine Gibson et al., “Community Economies in Monsoon Asia: Keywords and Key Reflections,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 59, no. 1 (April 2018): 3–16.

23

James J. Fox, “Introduction,” in Origins, Ancestry and Alliance: Explorations in Austronesian Ethnography, eds. James J. Fox and Clifford Sather (Canberra: Department of Anthropology in association with the Comparative Austronesian Project, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1996), 1.

24

Grégoire Schlemmer, “Rituals, Territories and Powers in the Sino-Indian Margins,” Moussons 19, no. 1 (2012): 20.

25

See, with respect to the field of Southeast Asian Studies, Andrea Acri, “‘Local’ vs. ‘Cosmopolitan’ in the Study of Premodern Southeast Asia,” Suvannabhumi 9, no. 1 (2017): 7–52.

26

Oliver W. Wolters, History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999 [1982]).

27

Wolters, History, 65.

28

Pamela Gutman, Ancient Arakan, with Special Reference to its Cultural History between the 5th and 11th Centuries (PhD diss., Australian National University, 1976), 320.

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29

Senake Bandaranayake, “Sri Lanka and Monsoon Asia: Hypotheses on the Unity and Differentiation of Cultures,” in Continuities and Transformations: Studies in Sri Lankan Archaeology and History, ed. Senake Bandaranayake (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 2012), 23-55. Originally published in Diogenes 111 (1980): 65–82. For an earlier version, see: Senake Bandaranayake, “Sri Lanka and Monsoon Asia: Patterns of Local and Regional Architectural Development and the Problem of the Traditional Sri Lankan Roof,” in Studies in South Asian Culture VII, Senarat Paranavitana Commemoration Volume, ed. J.E. van Lohuizen-de Leeuw (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978), 22–44.

30

Bandaranayake, “Sri Lanka and Monsoon Asia,” 30.

31

Ibid., 45–46.

32

Ibid., 24.

33

Ibid., 28.

34

Ibid., 26

35

Daigoro Chihara, Hindu-Buddhist Architecture in Southeast Asia (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 7.

36

John Emigh, Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 96.

37

Roy Jordaan and Robert Wessing, “Human Sacrifice at Prambanan,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 152 (1996): 45–74; and Roy Jordaan and Robert Wessing, “Construction Sacrifice in India, seen from the East,” in Violence Denied, eds. Jan E.M. Houben and Karel R. van Kooij (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 211–48.

38

Jordaan and Wessing, “Construction Sacrifice,” 239.

39

Ibid., 218.

40

Robert K. Dentan, “‘Disreputable Magicians’, the Dark Destroyer, and the Trickster Lord,” Asian Anthropology 1 (2002): 153–94; Robert K. Dentan, “Against the Kingdom of the Beast: An Introduction to Semai Theology, Pre-Aryan Religion and the Dynamics of Abjection,” in Tribal Communities in the Malay World: Historical, Cultural and Social Perspectives, eds. Geoffrey Benjamin and Cynthia Chou (Leiden: International Institute for Asian Studies/Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), 206–236; Robert K. Dentan, “Fearsome Bleeding, Boogeyman Gods and Chaos Victorious: A Conjectural History of Insular South Asian Religious Tropes,” in Acri, Blench, and Landmann, eds., Spirits and Ships, 38–70.

41

Dentan, “Disreputable Magicians,” 157. It should be stressed that Dentan has distinguished a set of core Semai beliefs, which are unlikely to be the outcome of Hinduization, from other beliefs that clearly betray the characteristics of borrowings; further, he has rightly admitted the possibility of multiple waves and directions of influence.

42

Holly High, “Terror and the Territory Cults: Pregnancy and Power in Monsoon Asia,” in Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds through Monsters, eds. Yasmine Musharbash and Geir H. Presterudstuen (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 175.

43

High, “Terror,” 175.

44

Yoshinori Yasuda, ed., Water Civilization: From Yangtze to Khmer Civilizations. (Tokyo: Springer, 2013).

45

Yasuda individuates a dichotomy between the rice-cultivating piscatory people with the forest/ water-system and the barley/wheat/millet-cultivating pastoral people, not only in terms of material ulture but also of ethics and cosmology. See Yasuda, Water Civilization, xi. Scarborough compared the water civilizations of Monsoon Asia to the Mesoamerican Mayan civilization, highlighting resemblances in the realm of ethics that are attributable to parallel reactions to similar environmental conditions. See Vernon L. Scarborough, The Flow of Power: Ancient Water Systems and Landscapes (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2003).

46

Satoshi Yokoyama, Jun Matsumoto and Hitoshi Araki, eds., Nature, Culture, and Food in Monsoon Asia (Singapore: Springer, 2020).

revisiting the monsoon asia idea: old problems and new directions 93

47

Hitoshi Araki, “Prologue,” in Nature, Culture, and Food in Monsoon Asia, eds. Satoshi Yokoyama, Jun Matsumoto, and Hitoshi Araki (Singapore: Springer, 2020), viii.

48

Iain Sinclair, “Sanskritic Buddhism as an Asian Universalism,” in Imagining Asia(s): Networks, Actors, Sites, eds. Andrea Acri, Murari K. Jha, Sraman Mukherjee, and Kashshaf Ghani (Singapore: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, 2019), 291.

49

Philip F. Williams, “Monsoon Asia,” Academic Questions 25 (2012): 114–24.

50

Dénis Lombard, “Networks and Synchronisms in Southeast Asian History,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (1995): 10–16.

51

Lombard, “Networks,” 10.

52

Abalahin, “Sino-Pacifica”.

53

Willem Van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002): 647–68.

54

Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard, and Roderich Ptak, eds., From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998). See the historiographical discussion in Acri, “Imagining”.

55

Sunil Gupta, “The Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere (1000 BC–AD 500),” Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Bulletin 25 (2005): 21–30.

56

See the historiographical surveys in Acri, “‘Local’ vs. ‘Cosmopolitan’”; Andrea Acri, “Tantrism ‘Seen from the East’,” in Acri, Blench, and Landmann, eds., Spirits and Ships, 71–144; Andrea Acri, Roger Blench and Alexandra Landmann, “Introduction: Re-connecting Histories across the Indo-Pacific,” in Spirits and Ships, 1–37.

57

Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

58

Sheldon Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300–1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization and the Question of Ideology,” in Ideology and the Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, ed. Jan E.M. Houben (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 234. This statement mirrors Mabbett’s argument that “Indianization of Southeast Asia” is a “confusion of categories.” See Ian W. Mabbett, “The ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia: Reflections on the Prehistoric Sources,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 8 (1977): 1–14; and Ian W. Mabbett, “The ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia: Reflections on the Historical Sources,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 8 (1977): 143–61.

59

Daud Ali, “Connected Histories? Regional Historiography and Theories of Cultural Contact between Early South and Southeast Asia,” in Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, eds. R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (Singapore: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, 2009), 16.

60

Hermann Kulke, “Indian Colonies, Indianization or Cultural Convergence? Reflections on the Changing Image of India’s Role in South East Asia,” in Onderzoek in Zuidoost-Azie: Agenda’s voor de jaren negentig, ed. Henk Schulte-Nordholt (Leiden: Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, 1990), 8–32.

61

Kulke, “Indian Colonies”, and Hermann Kulke, “The Concept of Cultural Convergence Revisited: Reflections on India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia,” in Asian Encounters: Exploring Connected Histories, eds. Parul Pandya Dhar and Upinder Singh (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 10.

62

Hermann Kulke, “State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-Islamic South and Southeast Asia: A Reconsideration of Historiographic Concepts and Archaeological Discoveries,” in State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-modern South and Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study of Asian Society, eds. Noboru Karashima and Masashi Hirosue (Tokyo: Toyo Bunko, 2016), 302.

63

Kulke, “State Formation,” 325.

64

Robert Blust, “Beyond the Austronesian Homeland: The Austric Hypothesis and Its Implications for Archaeology,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (new series) 86, no. 5 (1996): 136. Although this substratum would be linguistic, Blust has highlighted the existence of ancestral

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shared cultural features, for instance the “thunder complex” in Australasia, which would be one of the most distinctive and widespread ethnological markers known in Southeast Asia, and which could be traced back to “a prehistoric society which was ancestral not only to the modern Austronesian-speaking societies of western and eastern Indonesia, but also to those of Oceania”. See Robert Blust, “On the Limits of the ‘Thunder Complex’ in Australasia: A Reply to Gregory Forth,” Anthropos 86, nos. 4–6 (1991): 517. A wider discussion of linguistic and cultural features supporting a common Negrito ancestry across Southeast Asia may be found in Robert Blust, “Terror from the Sky: Unconventional Linguistic Clues to the Negrito Past,” Human Biology 85, no. 1 (2013): 401–16. 65

Robert Blench, “Was There Once an Arc of Vegeculture Linking Melanesia with Northeast India?” in Pacific Archaeology: Documenting the Past 50,000 Years: Papers from the 2011 Lapita Pacific Archaeology Conference, eds. Glenn R. Summerhayes and Hallie Buckley (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2013), 1–16.

66

Thomas Reuter, “Is Ancestor Veneration the Most Universal of All World Religions? A Critique of Modernist Cosmological Bias,” Wacana 15, no. 2 (2014): 223–53.

67

Francesco Brighenti, “Buffalo Sacrifice and Mortuary Rituals in the Tribal Cultures of Monsoon Asia,” Bubalus Bubalis 1 (2005): 7–13; Francesco Brighenti, “Traditions of Human Sacrifice in Ancient and Tribal India and their Relation to Śāktism,” in Breaking Boundaries with the Goddess: New Directions in the Study of Śāktism: Essays in Honor of Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya, eds. Cynthia Ann Humes and Rachel Fell McDermott (New Delhi: Manohar, 2009), 63-101.

68

Alan Strathern, “Global Early Modernity and the Problem of What Came Before,” Past & Present 238, Supplement no. 13 (2018): 325.

69

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. Volume 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 10.

70

K.N. Chaudhuri, “The Unity and Disunity of Indian Ocean History from the Rise of Islam to 1750: The Outline of a Theory and Historical Discourse,” Journal of World History 4, no. 1 (1993): 7.

71

K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 23.

72

Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation.

73

Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003).

74

Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

75

Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (London and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 143.

76

Bérénice Bellina, “Le port protohistorique de Khao Sam Kaeo en Thaïlande péninsulaire: lieu privilégié pour l’étude des premières interactions indiennes et sud-est asiatiques,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 89 (2002): 329–43; Bérénice Bellina, “Beads, Social Change and Interaction between India and Southeast Asia,” Antiquity 77, no. 296 (2003): 285–97; Robert Theunissen, Peter Grave, and Grahame Bailey, “Doubts on Diffusion: Challenging the Assumed Indian Origin of Iron Age Agate and Carnelian Beads in Southeast Asia,” World Archaeology 32, no. 1 (2000): 84–105.

77

Gupta, “Bay of Bengal”, 21.

78

Judith Cameron, “A Prehistoric Maritime Silk Road: Merchants, Boats, Cloths and Jade,” in Beyond the Silk Roads: New Discourses on China’s Role in East Asian Maritime History, eds. Angela Schottenhammer and Robert J. Antony (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017), 25–6.

79

Bérénice Bellina, “Maritime Silk Roads’ Ornament Industries: Sociopolitical Practices and Cultural Transfers in the South China Sea,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24, no. 3 (2014): 345–77; Bérénice Bellina, “Development of Maritime Trade Polities and Diffusion of the ‘South China Sea

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Sphere of Interaction Pan-Regional Culture’: The Khao Sek Excavations and Industries’ Studies Contribution,” Archaeological Research in Asia 13 (March 2018): 1–12. 80

Aude Favereau and Bérénice Bellina, “Thai-Malay Peninsula and South China Sea Networks (500 BCE–AD 200), Based on a Reappraisal of ‘Sa Huynh-Kalanay’-Related Ceramics,” Quaternary International 416 (2016): 219–27.

81

Gupta, “Bay of Bengal”, 22; Tom Hoogervorst, Southeast Asia in the Ancient Indian Ocean World (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013), 102.

82

See Acri, Blench, and Landmann, eds., Spirits and Ships, “Introduction,” 3.

83

Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1–2.

84

Greg Bankoff and Joseph Christensen, eds., Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World: Bordering on Danger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

85

Anthony Reid, “Revisiting Southeast Asian History with Geology: Some Demographic Consequences of a Dangerous Environment,” in Bankoff and Christensen, eds., Natural Hazards, 34.

86

Johannes Bronkhorst, Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 4.

87

John Peterson, “Fitting the Pieces Together: Towards a Linguistic Prehistory of Eastern-Central South Asia (and Beyond),” Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 4, no. 2 (2017): 211–57.

88

Peterson, “Fitting the Pieces,” 226.

89

Waruno Mahdi, “Linguistic and Philological Data Towards a Chronology of Austronesian Activity in India and Sri Lanka,” in Archaeology and Language IV: Language Change and Cultural Transformation, ed. Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (London: Routledge, 1999), 160–240.

90

Felix Rau and Paul Sidwell, “The Munda Maritime Hypothesis,” Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 12, no. 2 (2019): 35–57; cf. Waruno Mahdi’s hypothesis that the Austroasiaticspeaking “Negritos” were the first humans to navigate in a remote past: Waruno Mahdi, “Pre-Austronesian Origins of Seafaring in Insular Southeast Asia,” in Andrea Acri, Roger Blench and Alexandra Landmann, eds., Spirits and Ships (Singapore: ISEAS, 2017), 325–74.

91

Gyaneshwer Chaubey et al., “Population Genetic Structure in Indian Austroasiatic Speakers: The Role of Landscape Barriers and Sex-Specific Admixture,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 28, no. 2 (2011): 1013–24; David Reich et al., “Reconstructing Indian Population History,” Nature 461, no. 7263 (2009): 489–94; David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

92

Dentan, “Disreputable Magicians,” 219–220.

93

Acri, “Tantrism”.

94

See the discussion as to whether the udumbara, and fig or banyan trees in general, were assimilated by Vedic Hinduism from an Austroasiatic-speaking Negrito or Austronesian-speaking milieu in Allan Dahlquist, Megasthenes and Indian Religion (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977 [1962]), 230–31; Waruno Mahdi, “Linguistic, Linguistic and Philological Data,” 189–209).

95

I may add here the wider-ranging system of pentads (intended as 4+1) and enneads (intended as 4+4+1) widespread in Śaiva doctrinal and ritual texts and practices, architecture, art and material culture in Java and Bali, as well as in the Indian subcontinent, at the core of which there lies an epistemic system of categorization of the micro- and macro-cosmos (for instance, as the points of the compass plus the centre as the Supreme Being) through related series of visible and invisible interfaces that stand in meaningful relation to the individual, and provide the links to bridge different levels of reality. According to Velduisen-Djajasoebrata, this concept is rooted in the preHindu culture of Austroasiatic language-speakers. See Ali Velduisen-Djajasoebrata, “On the Origin and Nature of Larangan: Forbidden Batik Patterns from the Central Javanese Principalities,” in Indonesian Textiles: Irene Emery Roundtable on Museum Textiles 1979 Proceedings, ed. Mattiebelle Gittinger (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 1979), 205.

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96

Gautama Vajracharya, “The Adaptation of Monsoonal Culture by Ṛgvedic Aryans: A Further Study of the Frog Hymn,” Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 3, no. 2 (1997); Gautama Vajracharya, Frog Hymns and Rain Babies: Monsoon Culture and the Art of Ancient South Asia (Mumbai: The Marg Foundation, 2013).

97

Joseph Watts et al., “Pulotu: Database of Austronesian Supernatural Beliefs and Practices,” PLOS ONE 10, no. 9 (2015).

98

Schlemmer, “Rituals, Territories and Powers”.

99

Ibid., 19.

100

Van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing”.

101

Jean Michaud, Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2006); see also James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

102

Peter C. Perdue, “Nature and Power: China and the Wider World,” Social Science History 37, no. 3 (2013): 384.

103

Schlemmer, “Rituals, Territories and Powers,” 20–21.

104

The similarities between this list of features shared by the inhabitants of the Sino-Indian margins and Mus’ list of features shared by the inhabitants of Monsoon Asia would not be primarily due to similar environmental factors (in fact, their geographical contexts have rather different geoenvironmental features, although they share some climatological factors), but rather to their filiation from, or influence by, an Austroasiatic (or proto-Austroasiatic) cultural matrix, which underwent subsequent dynamics of interaction, adoption/rejection, and internal differentiation.

105

Perdue, “Nature and Power,” 379.

106

Ibid., 384.

107

L.F. Brakel, “Islam and Local Traditions: Syncretic Ideas and Practices,” Indonesia and the Malay World 32, no. 92 (2004): 10–11. As Brakel notes, the division between the highlands in the interior and the plains on the coasts “corresponds almost exactly with the geographic expansion of Islam in Indonesia”.

108

It is significant that among the palm-leaf manuscripts used by the ritual specialists of the prevalently Hindu Tengger community we find the Pūrvaka Bhūmi, an arguably early Śaiva cosmogonic Old Javanese text that has also survived on Bali as the exclusive preserve of the Ṛṣi Bhujaṅgas.

109

The Bali Aga societies of the northeastern Balinese highlands perceive themselves as the “original” inhabitants of the island and as following a pre-Hindu religion. Another claim of (ab)originality (and Balinese “authenticity”) is that of the Balinese village of Tenganan, where the locals regard themselves as following a more egalitarian form of social structure and reject the religious authority of the Pedandas. This state of affairs echoes some of the features attributed to the societies of Zomia.

110

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Introduction,” in Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoffrey Wade (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), xvi.

CHAPTER 3

Space and Time in the Making of Monsoon Asia1 Jos Gommans

Abstract This highly explorative essay offers a connective and comparative study of the history of premodern South and Southeast Asia by reflecting on some long-term spatial and temporal ingredients that have made this region, despite all its diversity, a relatively cohesive whole, while always being in fluid transition with the overlapping border regions of West, East and Central Asia. The first part is about space and focuses on some often-ignored longue-durée geographical features of the region. The second part is about time and explores how these features have impacted the historical development of the region and led to the emergence of three different kinds of polities: Charter Empires, Temple States and Frontier States/Empires.

Keywords: climate; geography; state-formation; trading networks; cosmopolis

The Beloved of the Gods even reasons with the forest tribes and seeks to reform them. But the Beloved of the Gods is not only compassionate. He is also powerful, and he tells them to repent, lest they be slain. Ashoka (r. circa 268-232 BCE) in Rock Edict XIII2

Like many spatial categories, the idea of “Monsoon Asia”, as announced in the title, is somewhat problematic since it lacks precision. Nevertheless, for at least two reasons it suits the present purpose very well. First, it highlights the importance of climate in determining space. Secondly, it helps join those regions of the world that were, and continue to be, affected most intensely by the monsoon climate and which also happen to be the topic of this particular volume: South and Southeast Asia. As such, this explorative chapter will briefly reflect on some long-term spatial and temporal ingredients that have made this region, despite all its diversity, a relatively cohesive whole, while always being in fluid transition with the overlapping border regions of West, East and Central Asia. The first part is about space, and focuses on some oft-ignored longue-durée geographical features of the region.

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The second part is about time, and explores how these features have impacted the historical development of our region and led to the emergence of three different kinds of polities: Charter Empires, Temple States, and Frontier States/Empires.3

Space Asia before Europe Another spatial category that immediately comes to mind when speaking of South and Southeast Asia as a whole is that of one Indic or Hindu-Buddhist civilization that supposedly flourished before the “onslaught” of an “external” power: Islam. From this “Indological” perspective, from the early first millennium CE this civilization expanded from the northern region of the subcontinent ever further towards the south and southeast, and in so doing produced thriving “Indianized” states like those of Angkor Wat and Srivijaya. The main agents of this civilizing process were Brahmin ritualists using Sanskrit, and, as the latter is considered the prime indicator of the degree of “Indianisation”, it is also called “Sanskritisation”. Although this process is certainly relevant for understanding transcultural connections within our region, it has too often been misinterpreted as a one-directional process in which a pre-existing, “pure” Indian form was almost lock, stock, and barrel exported from a north Indian heartland to the rest of Monsoon Asia. Building on the findings of mainly Western Indologists, some nationalist Indian historians attempted to merge the idea of a single Indian civilization with that of the “nation” in order to construct the idea of a “Greater India” that included, in addition to the subcontinent, both the Southeast Asian mainland and its archipelagos. It did not take too long before historians of these latter regions announced an “autonomous history”, as a reaction to what was considered a rather unhealthy alliance between (Indian) civilisation and (European) empire.4 Yet the spatial boundaries of these autonomous regions quite neatly mirrored the newly independent nationstates. As a consequence, these autonomous histories were of particular relevance for the anachronistic nationalist approach on the rise in postcolonial Asia but hardly helped gain a better understanding of the process of transcultural interaction before the modern era of colonial empires and nation-states. According to the current scholarly consensus, Indianization as we understand it in the Southeast Asian context actually paralleled a process which occurred in the Indian subcontinent itself and, as such, should be considered a process of ongoing interaction and syncretism between local beliefs and concepts and those that had been imported.5 Very much like civilizations and nations, broad geographic categories like “Europe” or “Asia” hardly qualify as a canvas on which to draw an adequate picture

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of the historical developments of the pre-colonial period. Although Asia existed as a broad European concept in which it was seen as “the other” – non-Europe – it was only during colonial times that the term became more “scientifically” defined and in due course started to affect the hearts and minds of its peoples.6 Besides leading into the trap of anachronism, the terms “Europe” and “Asia” are too general and fail to do justice to either the diversity within or the continuity between both areas. Vasco da Gama’s arrival in South India in 1498 was not so much a dramatic “first contact” between two completely separate civilizations as it was a return to a world long familiar to traders, in which it did not take long to make oneself understood, even in Italian or Castilian. Vasco da Gama’s revolution was not like that of Christopher Columbus, with his discovery of a whole “new world”, but rather the discovery of a new route leading back to an Old World that had been united for ages. What image should we have of the latter? It was certainly a world of which Europe was a part, albeit on its outermost western edge. In many ways it was an “unbroken landscape”, a huge Afro-Eurasian continuum that owed its unity to two unifying geographical elements: the seas to the south and the relatively arid zone of deserts, savannahs and steppes to the north.7 Chiefly due to the work of the French scholar Fernand Braudel, historians have become very aware of the linking characteristic of seas and oceans, and because of this we can perceive not only a highly connected Mediterranean world, but also an Atlantic, a Baltic, and, in our case, an Indian Ocean one. Logistical advantages made these seas extremely important connecting arteries for transport and trade. Since at least the first century CE, extensive commercial and cultural contacts existed between the Mediterranean Sea and the western Indian Ocean, through both the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. This is illustrated in the well-known Roman complaint about the permanent stream of precious metals flowing in the direction of India. Equally telling, during the early centuries CE, the Roman court experienced recurrent waves of orientalism, partly directed towards India, that impacted European thought from Pyrrhonism to Neoplatonism.8 In order to avoid the Asia–Europe dichotomy, let us first determine some alternative spatial categories by sketching the relatively unaltered climatological and geographical characteristics of the regions affected by the monsoon. Connections: seas, savannahs and rivers The idea of a single economy connecting all the regions surrounding the Indian Ocean basin derives from one of Braudel’s most inspiring disciples, the Indian historian K.N. Chaudhuri.9 Taking the prevailing monsoon pattern as a starting point, he distinguished three large maritime trading circuits: (1) the Arabian Sea; (2) the Bay of Bengal; and (3) the Chinese Seas. These overlapping commercial zones were the natural result of the annual rhythm of the monsoons: south-westerly winds from

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Figure 3.1: Eastern hemisphere trading zones. From Jos Gommans, “Continuity and Change in the Indian Ocean Basin, 1400-1800”, 185. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press.

April to August, and north-easterly winds from December to March. These winds dictated the rhythm of maritime and, to a large extent, also that of continental traffic. The optimal annual radius of operation of shipping in these circumstances resulted in the coastal areas situated around these three sea areas being in closer contact with each other than any of them were with the world outside. Not surprisingly, the main and most important ports were located in areas where the circuits overlapped. These ports, such as Khambayat or Cambay (and later Surat, both in Gujarat), Calicut, Goa and Melaka, were the natural trans-shipment harbours that connected two of these maritime zones. Hence, in the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese traveller Tomé Pires could speak of the “two arms” of Cambay: one extending west to Aden, the other east to Melaka. What makes the case of Cambay exceptional, though, was that there was not only the sea and its immediate hinterlands; in addition, there was actually a third and a fourth arm, both landbased, the first stretching eastward towards South and Central India, the second northward into Hindustan and beyond to Iran and Central Asia. The combination

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of its relatively fertile agrarian conditions and the numerous trade routes explains the extraordinary position of the Gujarat ports as perhaps the most important trade emporia in the Indian Ocean. The idea of a connecting Indian Ocean quite naturally also brings to mind the importance of its continental counterpart: the great desert, savannah, and steppe area that stretches from Morocco in the far west to the Great Wall of China in the far east. As with the ocean, this area, known as the Arid Zone, was an important trading artery between the continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia, and its logistic possibilities made it eminently suitable for long-distance trade. Since ancient times, these relatively dry areas were the home of stock-breeding and trading nomads who owned vast herds of dromedaries, Bactrian camels, and, most importantly, the world’s best war-horses. In addition, the warlike traditions of many of these peoples, whose skill as mounted archers aroused both admiration and fear, meant that the Arid Zone harboured enormous potential both commercially and militarily. Just as did the coastal areas of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, it was principally the transitional areas between the dry (semi-)nomadic zones and the wetter agricultural areas that rose to become centres of economic and political vitality and dynamism. It is no coincidence that the capitals of the most successful large realms in Eurasia were situated either on the sea coasts or on the fringes of the Arid Zone. Moreover, the most powerful anciens régimes were those that were able to link the agrarian exploitation of their realm with the dynamism of both the maritime and arid frontiers. Unquestionably, their initial foundation and continued existence were dependent on their ability to link these two huge commercial arteries and spheres of mobile resources with each other. The rulers of the Delhi-Agra region, for instance, managed their connections with the sea trade via Cambay (later Surat) and their links with the arid grazing areas and caravan trade via Kabul. This logistical split between the Indian Ocean and Central Asia demonstrates the crucial importance of having permanent control of a network of highways. Hence, none of these empires should be regarded as huge, closed geographical blocks, but instead as far-flung, open networks of military and commercial routes. As one can already sense from Ashoka’s rockedict quoted at the start of this essay, beyond these routes or pathas imperial control had to be negotiated with the tribes who dominated the uncultivated, mostly arid jungles. Nevertheless, by dint of the services provided by the military-fiscal elites, who were backed up by agents and bankers, it was possible to both exploit the surrounding area and keep it under control. The administrative corps of these empires was anything but an “Oriental Despotism” characterized by a rigid, closed hierarchical structure, as earlier generations of Western scholars asserted. Its overriding character resembled far more

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an infinitely expandable, diffuse structure composed of overlapping political and fiscal rights, one which was controlled to the best of its ability by an often-itinerant court that employed whatever fairly makeshift means came to hand. In the Indian case, this open configuration offered outside powers every opportunity to enter and exploit it as active co-sharers of the realm. Rivers played a key role in connecting the political capitals near the Arid Zone with the commercial hubs along the coast. Empires could not dispense with rivers as economic lifelines, as they provided both transport and irrigation. The best example of this is the importance of the Ganges River, which connected the ever-expanding Bengal economy to the political centres to the west, including Pataliputra under the Mauryas and the Guptas, Kanauj under the Rashtrakutas and Palas, and Delhi under the various sultanates. While, in South India, rivers were much less important as connecting arteries and highways of empires, from at least the seventh century, massive agricultural expansion into the relatively dry interiors of the Deccan and the Carnatic essentially followed their various courses. Beyond the Arid Zone, in Southeast Asia, rivers were as relevant to the process of state-formation as they were in South Asia. In mainland Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent in Java as well, the principal political and agrarian centres at the end of the first millennium CE were not established in the deltas – which were forever subject to floods, changes in the course of the waterways, and epidemics – but further upstream, in the interior, in often semi-arid areas where deforestation and water management were relatively easy. These upstream areas included the ancient capitals of Pagan in Burma, Sukhothai in Siam, and Angkor in Cambodia. Under ideal circumstances, the rulers stimulated agricultural expansion in the interior and maintained control of the deltas and the coastal areas downstream via the rivers. The centre of the economy was intensive rice cultivation, while trade was of only secondary importance. One consequence of this pattern was that very large areas, usually far from the navigable rivers, did not actually fall under the authority of the ruler. The result was a settlement pattern of relatively small, widely scattered, and densely populated cultivated nuclear areas in the midst of enormous jungles, some of which were extensively exploited, others not at all. In those regions where the interior was less conducive to intensive rice cultivation, such as in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, the situation was entirely different.10 Here, coastal port-cities without a large hinterland but with crucial transregional functions could emerge, especially at the trans-shipment zone between the Bay of Bengal and the Chinese Sea, where there was a long-term continuity of important entrepôts such as Srivijaya in the first centuries after 1000 CE, Melaka-Johor from c. 1400 onward, and Singapore from c. 1850.

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Inner frontiers Reflecting on the spatial category of Monsoon Asia as a whole, it emerges as a vast, open crossroad between the Arid Zone and the Indian Ocean connected to each other by rivers. But apart from connecting this macro-region, the same climate also produced various internal frontiers between areas of settled agriculture and unsettled wilderness or jungle: more arid zones with pastoral nomads in most of South Asia, and more humid zones with hunter-gatherers in Southeast Asia and the eastern parts of South Asia (in particular Bengal and Orissa). The overall impression of both regions, of both its nomads and its peasants, is that of societies on the move. As a result, static urban centres of civilization were quite rare, albeit more so in humid Southeast Asia.11 In South Asia, the settled order was continuously undermined by people from the fringes. Although long-distance connections between political, economic, and cultural centres were facilitated by a myriad of routes, along these were vast areas of wilderness with roaming internal “forest tribes” and “barbarians” (atavi or mlecchas in Sanskrit) beyond the control of the settled state. In Southeast Asia, the tropical forests could not support the kind of warbands that repeatedly undermined the settled order on the Indian subcontinent. Nevertheless, in the Archipelago, maritime raiding seems to have been part of the seasonable rhythm of amphibious groups that combined such activities with trade and agriculture. Despite such distinctions, what goes for South and Southeast Asia is the fact that the most sustainable states were those that managed to control the long-distance routes and were also able to straddle the inner frontiers through a combination of sword and plough. In other words, their main challenge was to invest the mobile resources of the Arid Zone (money and cattle) and the Indian Ocean (primarily money) into agricultural development. Having set out some of the most important geographical conditions of our region, it is now possible to take a closer look at how these impacted its long-term historical developments.

Time Charter Empires (250 BCE–750 CE) One of the drawbacks of a civilizational approach to history is that it tends to focus on certain core ideas that can be traced back to a canon of “classical” texts. As a result, such an approach often underestimates the inner dynamics that help create civilizations. In the case of the Indian civilization, such a canon is generally perceived as being thoroughly religious and traditional. It gave rise to the construction

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of at least two essential social ingredients of that civilization which have withstood the ravages of time: caste and village. Although both imperial and Marxist historians were attracted by the idea of fixed castes living in self-contained villages governed by despotic rulers, some of them tried to challenge this static picture by imposing the European tripartite periodization on the region: a Hindu-Buddhist classical period (until circa 750 CE), an Islamic medieval period (until circa 1750), and a British colonial period. For Southeast Asia, historians were more hesitant to suggest such clear-cut temporal divisions, but equally they still focused their attention on the “outside” influences of Islam and European imperialism. Such models, though, fail to reflect the historical dynamic of our region, which instead is the result of the specific geographical conditions as discussed in the first part of this chapter. At the same time, considering the openness of Monsoon Asia, we should surely not dismiss the – at times crucial – impact of immigrants, in particular traders, warriors, and intellectuals. In focusing on what makes our region so unlike any other, we should first stress the distinctly different presence of empire in the centuries both before and after the beginning of the Common Era. As mentioned previously, the many inner frontiers of Monsoon Asia made it hard for rulers to impose peace and order in every corner of their realms. Beyond the empire’s limited physical reach that was discussed earlier, the Indian canon of classical texts underscores the ideological insignificance of empire. Recently, the most imaginative of present-day Indologists, Sheldon Pollock, expressed it most succinctly when comparing the Roman with the most classical of Indian empires, the Gupta Empire: “To the observer looking from the vantage point of Gupta South Asia, the Roman Empire does appear to have striven for and achieved a degree of centralisation without the remotest parallel in South Asia.” For Pollock, the early Indian empires never “established garrisons of their troops to rule over conquered territories. No populations were ever enumerated. No uniform code of law was in force anywhere across caste groupings, let alone everywhere in an imperial polity.”12 In other words, in sharp distinction from other regions like Europe, the Middle East, and China, in pre-Islamic South Asia – and I would add Southeast Asia – the “state” seems almost absent in the “classical” sources. For Pollock, the main reason behind this is that Indian rulers must have been less concerned with socio-economic and political power, instead celebrating “aesthetic power.” This dearth of political articulation in Indian empires resonates quite well with Clifford Geertz’s famous “Theatre State,” in which the pre-colonial “Indianised” state of Bali was not about political and economic control but was instead primarily directed towards the performance of drama and ritual.13 Pollock’s idea can be accommodated alongside the concept of “Charter Empires” as proposed by the American historian Victor Lieberman.14 The idea of a charter refers to an initial large-scale polity that provides a political and cultural

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model or package consisting of shared norms of rule and righteousness for later generations. Such polities ushered in a period of time characterized by population growth, massive investment in “epicentre enhancements” such as buildings near the capital, and the expansion of agriculture through the development of agricultural water-management tied to higher levels of maritime trade. At the same time, however, Charter Empires remained loosely integrated and highly decentralized, with semi-autonomous tributaries and religious institutions. Lieberman suggests different Charter Empires for different regions and different times. In the case of South and Southeast Asia, perhaps the most obvious examples of such empires are those of the Mauryas (c. third – second century BCE), the Kushanas (c. first to third century CE) and the Guptas (c. fourth to sixth century CE).15 What is most relevant for our region is the fact that despite being among the most extensive of all time, anywhere in the world, these empires possessed neither large-scale palace complexes nor sophisticated administrative systems. It was during their existence, though, that the long-distance routes discussed in the previous section reached the zenith of their importance and brought traders and pilgrims – including Buddhist monks and Brahmin ritualists – from South to Southeast Asia and vice-versa. These empires’ power, however, was not derived from a specifically delineated territory but came instead, basically, from a form of ethic and aesthetic branding in which universal guidelines (dharma) were formulated in Sanskrit for all humanity. From temple states to frontier states (750-1750) From the seventh century CE onward, the more extensively oriented Charter Empires were gradually replaced by more intensively organized regional polities that succeeded in reclaiming more and more land for settled agriculture, especially in those areas that were conducive to rice cultivation. Much more intensively than under the Charter Empires, massive water projects, such as irrigation channels and water tanks, often surrounded by huge temple complexes, started to characterize the landscape of these new regional states. More than being simply a place of religious devotion, Indian temples developed into economic and financial powerhouses – in other words, ideal targets for investment by merchants, taxation by rulers, and looting by conquerors from different religious affiliations. In South Asia, the political and economic centres of these new Temple States began to gravitate more towards the coast. As in the cases of the Pallavas and the Palas, it was from the littoral in Southeast and East India respectively that more and more of the jungle interior was reclaimed through the foundation of temples. In Monsoon Southeast Asia, though, the main river deltas and their hinterlands remained too swampy and hence prone to infectious diseases. Thus, as mentioned

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previously, here temple building and paddy cultivation were concentrated in the slightly more arid upstream areas of the interior. Interestingly, this phase of large agricultural development, which was to continue into the early centuries of the next millennium, coincided with similar processes of agricultural expansion in West Asia, China, and Europe, and may be associated with the so-called Medieval Warm Period that lasted until around 1250. At the same time as agricultural expansion, long-distance interregional trade continued to develop. As in the well-documented case of the eleventh-century Chola dynasty in Southeast India, the profits from overseas trade and conquest were invested, through temples and cattle, in agricultural expansion into the relatively dry interiors. The following Tamil proverb summarises the process most elegantly: “[a] rich kadu (wilderness) makes strong cattle, strong cattle make rich people, rich people make rich temples, rich temples make rich kings.” In this way, the wild kadu of Cholamandalam was gradually turned into the settled, Tamil Nadu. From the beginning of the second millennium until colonial times, Monsoon South Asia experienced a new era, one in which various powerful conquerors repeatedly emerged from the Arid Zone to create a new kind of polity – later called sultanates – that highlighted the martial qualities of their rulers. Their trump card was the improved exploitation of the war-horse thanks to improved equipment (stirrups, deeper saddles, new tack) and, in particular, the more effective mounted archery of ever-larger cavalry armies. Together with new, mainly ox- and dromedary-based supply systems, these significantly increased the effectiveness of the war-horse, which was now used in a devastating new tactical combination of heavy cavalry at the centre and wheeling mounted archers on the flanks. As a result of these mounted warriors’ conquests, from about 1000 CE especially, the dry interior of the subcontinent began to operate as a kind of central axis connecting the rich sedentary cores of the Indian temple states more closely than ever before with the Arid Zone of the Middle East and Central Asia. Hence, at the very fringes of settled society, new Frontier States emerged which fully exploited India’s extensive drylands both for agrarian expansion and the breeding and keeping of war-horses and other animals. To name just the most powerful among them, these states included: the Ghaznavids and the Ghurids between Kabul and Delhi, the Yadavas and Kakatiyas in the Deccan, and the Hoysalas in the Carnatic. In their wake, there arose new, cavalry-based warrior castes based in ever stronger forts, such as the Rajputs in the north, the Marathas in the mid-west, and the Telugu Nayakas in the south of India. Financed by temporary revenue grants (iqtas), they provided the military backbone of these new states that, under Islamic dispensation, came to be known as sultanates, with Delhi becoming the finest example. In due course, mostly Turkic peoples of the sword and mostly Iranian people of the pen created a new standard of an extremely cosmopolitan empire that achieved its high point under

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the Mughals. The new political paradigm was so impressive that even the Hindu kings of Vijayanagara styled themselves as “sultans among Hindu kings” (hindurajasuratrana).16 Here, it was not religion or ritual that counted, but sheer masculine power. On the coast, new emporia emerged that linked up with these new “sultanic” capitals in the interior: Cambay/Surat connected to Delhi, Chaul to Ahmadnagar, Dabhol to Bijapur, Masulipatam to Golkonda, and Goa to Vijayanagara. From the sixteenth century onward, it was the major achievement of the Central Asian Mughals that they not only managed to bring all these sultanates under one imperial umbrella but also managed to tie them more closely than ever before to the traditional sedentary cores along the river valleys and the coast. Although their inclusive imperial ideology contributed significantly to their success, the Mughals were only able to achieve a durable Frontier Empire thanks to a booming economy and the availability of hard cash from the Americas and Japan that supported their extensive military apparatus. As so often in the history of empires, the high point of imperial centralization under Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) also marked the start of the imperial downfall. Hence, the eighteenth-century decline of the empire also saw, once again, the regional centralization of its former fringes, for example, triggering off the invasions of the Afghans from the northwest and the British from the northeast.17 Meanwhile, the military balance had significantly altered. From the middle of the eighteenth century onward, larger and better-drilled and -equipped European sepoy armies proved perfectly able to withstand and even beat the cavalry-based armies of the Mughals and their successors. All this paved the way for a new phase of imperial integration, this time coming from South Asia’s littoral. In Southeast Asia, there were no mounted archers to carve out Frontier States of their own. Nonetheless, there are intriguing similarities between two such Frontier States: the already mentioned Vijayanagara in South Asia (1336-1565) and Majapahit in Southeast Asia (1293-1527). Their rise was triggered by outside intervention: Turks in Vijayanagara, Mongols in Majapahit.18 As a result, the new rulers moved their capitals away from the agricultural heartlands to their frontiers, thus improving access to the increasing mobile resources of the Arid Zone and the Indian Ocean respectively. Also, at the interface of previous Temple States, the new capitals integrated the old agricultural centres into the widening networks of the new Frontier States, quickly developing into extensive Frontier Empires. To add another parallel, both these empires are often considered as the last Hindu bulwarks against Islam, but in fact, both incorporated important Muslim elements, mostly horse warriors in the case of Vijayanagara, probably overseas merchants in the case of Majapahit.19 These strange parallels between a continental and a maritime empire, once again allude to the analogous impact that the Arid Zone and the Indian Ocean could have on premodern processes of state-formation in Monsoon Asia.

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Figure 3.2: Panataran Temple, Blitar, East Java, Relief 55. Photograph by Marijke Klokke. Although way beyond the Arid Zone, the emergence of the Javanese empire of Majapahit was triggered by a Mongol invasion. At the Panataran temple in East Java, this event of 1292 under Khubilai Khan was reinscribed into the Ramayana, showcasing Ravana’s son Indrajit as a Mongol horse-archer. The relief provides a unique Javanese lieu de mémoire of this Mongol invasion.

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Even without the help of the Mongols (Fig. 3.2), in most other parts of Southeast Asia, the agricultural centres began to be shifted in the direction of the coasts, and new capitals emerged somewhere between the coast and the old capitals in the interior. At the same time, the relative importance of interregional trade as an income source for the rulers markedly increased. As a consequence of drier climatic conditions and the introduction of new crops and agricultural techniques, it became easier to reclaim the swampy river deltas and settle people on the land.20 These developments probably played an important role in the growing orientation of the states of mainland Southeast Asia towards their southern coastal areas: in Burma, Pegu grew in importance (until 1634), in Siam it was Ayutthaya, in Cambodia it was Phnom Penh, and in Vietnam (albeit somewhat later) Champa. Interestingly, this success story of the increased importance of the coast repeated itself in Ceylon, but, there, integration with the interior was nipped in the bud by the early seventeenth-century aggression of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which left Kandy as a relatively isolated state in the interior. Something similar happened in Java, where Mataram had emerged as a successor to Majapahit but was denied access to the booming Pasisir by the Dutch. Elsewhere, by the eighteenth century, exponentially growing European and Chinese participation in the economies of the South China Sea stimulated the rise of the Southeast Asian littorals – read the maritime frontiers – even further. The Age of Commerce The previous survey suggests that the expansion of European maritime power from the sixteenth century onward must be seen as part of a much earlier, Eurasia-wide development. This was a long “Age of Commerce”, starting from about the fifteenth century, in which Eurasia as a whole turned increasingly towards the coast and maritime trade became steadily more important as a source of income for “early modern” states.21 These tried to exploit the increasing possibilities of trade by selling the protection of the main routes and/or monopolizing the main commodities. For the Europeans, the most successful instrument to organize long-distance trade was the new institution of the joint-stock company. Behind the institutional façade of the company, though, we can easily detect a small but influential circle of families conveniently combining politics and business. Merchants in Monsoon Asia were not organized in joint-stock companies like the English and Dutch East India Companies. Instead, the family firm ruled. Some of these firms participated in transregional trade networks that were based on the mutual trust of partners with a common ethnic, religious, or caste background, and which made them stand out from the majority of the population of the regions in which they traded. Like the European companies, some of these Asian “trade

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diasporas” could count on the support of their political patrons. For example, the Armenian trade network started as a local enterprise along the Ottoman–Safavid border that profited from increasing European demand for Iranian silk. After 1605, when the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I relocated the Armenians to New Julfa, on the outskirts of his new capital of Isfahan, they started to develop a huge trading network spanning the Mediterranean, the entire Indian Ocean, and even beyond to Russia, the Baltic Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. It seems that, through various formal and informal means, all the nodes in the network were connected and subordinated to the centre in New Julfa. At the very base of this network was the commenda partnership, in which a settled “capitalist” provided the capital or commodities to his agent, who would supply his labour by travelling on his master”s behalf to distant markets and putting the entrusted capital or goods to use by investing it on behalf of the partnership. The profit resulting from the joint venture was divided between the master and his agent. Although the commenda was, in principle, open-ended, in the Armenian case the inner circle of partners were all members of an extended family of sons, brothers, and cousins under the direction of a senior family member residing in New Julfa. Beyond this inner circle, there was a “coalition” of other Armenian agents whose conduct was monitored and enforced, since they were also linked to other Armenian families in New Julfa. Although most of the other Asian trading networks in the Indian Ocean were not based on a single nodal centre, all of them functioned on the basis of the family firm. They used commenda or some other flexible form of partnership such as the commission agency, which tended to be a short-term, less personal contract that included partners beyond the inner circle of kin or even sometimes the ethnic or religious group.22 Many of these Asian trade networks had links with the political authorities that patronized them or were supported by them just as much as did the European companies. The courts of Southeast Asia, including that of the VOC High Government in Batavia, were highly mercantilist and deeply involved in trading activity; many of their rulers were the country’s prime merchants themselves, often imposing monopolies on the foremost commodities in their realms. For the various coastal city-states of the Malay world, which lacked substantial hinterlands, interregional trade was the sine qua non of state-formation. Although some Southeast Asian states supported indigenous mercantile groups (orang kaya), the bulk of the external trade was in the hands of minorities who lived in separate quarters with their own chiefs, who were appointed by the state. Some of them were given major political responsibilities such as the position of harbour master (shahbandar) or financial minister (phraklang in Siam). Their minority status was supposed to prevent these groups from taking power, but this did not always work. Apart from the well-known Dutch case, the eighteenth-century expansion of the Buginese serves as another example of what could happen if trade networks were

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allowed too much leeway. Although the Dutch had imposed their spice monopoly on the Buginese and threatened their home base in Celebes, the latter managed to expand their influence over the Malay waters and establish themselves as the ruling power in Kelang, Lingga, Selangor, and Johor. In the smaller principalities of South India, the situation was not much different, as long-distance maritime trade was dominated by ethnic or religious minorities such as Jews, Armenians, Mappila or Maraikkayar Muslims, or specific caste-groups such as Chetties and Chulias. The latter two groups in particular were perfectly situated to connect the ports of the Indian Ocean to the temples and markets of the interior. All of these groups operated beyond the grip of the main empires, behaving very much like “portfolio-capitalists” for whom the boundaries between trade and politics were extremely porous.23 However, with only a few exceptions – such as the Ali Rajas of Cannanore and the Buginese – maritime traders hardly ever became fully-fledged territorial rulers. Although they may have taken a rather aloof attitude towards trade in public, the rulers of the most sizeable Asian empires were very aware that, through the cash nexus, trade affected the ability to collect land revenue and to pay salaries. While the Ottomans exploited Christian and Jewish trading minorities through their millet system, the Safavids forcefully settled the Armenian trading community in New Julfa. In the late sixteenth century, Iranian merchants played a vital role in connecting Iran to the Bay of Bengal through Masulipatam, the newly-emerging maritime outlet of the Golconda sultanate.24 From the mid-seventeenth century, however, connections beyond the Arabian Sea became increasingly dominated by Arab and South Indian merchants. The Mughal Empire was well served by various trading communities consisting of both foreign – mainly Europeans, Armenians, and Turks – as well as indigenous groups – mainly Indian Muslims, Banias, Parsis, and Jains. The emperors often preferred a laissez-faire approach towards Indian Ocean trade, not because they were less interested but because they could afford such a policy. Thanks to the structural trade surplus of India, they simply had to tax in- and outgoing trade flows at the main imperial gateways in Gujarat and Bengal. By far the most important commercial hub that connected Mughal India to the outside world during the sixteenth century was the port city of Cambay, followed by Surat during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Gujarati traders had dominated the Indian trade to Southeast Asia, due to Dutch aggression in the archipelago their role substantially diminished after the mid-seventeenth century. However, in the eighteenth century, Gujarati traders became increasingly prominent in the western Indian Ocean, and in particular in the Red Sea and along the African coast. Meanwhile, the trade links of the Arabian Sea with the archipelago were taken over by mercantile groups from the Hadhramaut and South India. Through the Siamese ports of Mergui-Tenasserim and Junk Ceylon (Ujang

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Selang/Phuket), they could bypass the Dutch ports to trade directly with Aceh and the newly assertive sultanates of eastern Sumatra, including Palembang, Siak, and Indragiri. Moreover, many mercantile communities from the Minangkabau proliferated along the east coast of Sumatra, as well as in Naning, Rembau, and Sungai Ujong on the Malay Peninsula. From these strongholds, they became increasingly involved in the politics of neighbouring states such as Perak, Kedah, and Johor. As previously indicated, here they found themselves in the midst of swiftly expanding Buginese and Chinese trading networks.25 In contrast to the Indian empires, the Chinese ones upheld a long tradition in which merchants were distrusted and trade was closely supervised. In the sixteenth century, the Chinese themselves referred to the Nanyang, a Chinese “Southern Ocean”, which at that time was encircled by an eastern and a western trading route. The western route (Hsi Yang) ran to Java via Champa, Cambodia, Siam, the Malay Peninsula, and Sumatra; its eastern counterpart (Tung Yang) went through the Philippines, the Sulu Archipelago, and Celebes to the Moluccas. In this period, the Spanish – who had managed to cement their position in the Philippines and the Moluccas – were the dominant European power along the eastern route, whereas the Portuguese succeeded in making themselves masters of a number of key positions along the western route, such as Melaka and Macau. In the course of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese share in the lucrative China trade was gradually taken over by the Dutch and the English. Nevertheless, in contrast to the situation in those areas where the VOC could actually exercise political control, in most of the western Nanyang Dutch undertakings were completely overshadowed by the Chinese economy, particularly when it experienced yet another exceptional growth spurt at the end of the seventeenth century. Purely and simply on account of its size, the Chinese economy tended to dominate Southeast Asia. In the era of the VOC, Southeast Asia, including the Indonesian Archipelago, was home to an estimated 20 to 30 million inhabitants, about the same as Japan, while China had roughly ten times that number! Thus, the orientation towards China throughout the region as a whole reflected contemporary demographic realities. In the eighteenth century especially, the effect of this Chinese world economy increased exponentially. Because the Malay Peninsula and the islands of the East Indies were both being drawn increasingly into the orbit of the VOC, mainland Southeast Asia in particular felt the effects of this growth. However attractive participation in the burgeoning China trade might have been for the surrounding kingdoms, it was always accompanied by the ever-present threat of being overwhelmed by an influx of Chinese immigrants, which would eventually lead to the loss of domestic political control. In Japan, matters were complicated by the Shogunate, which was constantly assailed by fears that the growing trade with China could lead to an unstoppable outflow of the domestic supplies

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of precious metals. In colonial trade centres such as Batavia and Manila, on the other hand, the growing economic power of China was viewed by the authorities as less of a threat, and throughout the eighteenth-century Chinese traders continued to be largely welcome to offer their goods and services there locally. As with the other political regimes of Southeast Asia, colonial centres could hardly dispense with Chinese expertise and manpower to work the expanding new plantations and mines of the region. However, as the pogroms in various cities in which many Chinese were killed bear witness (six in Manila, one in Batavia), Sinophobia could also suddenly rear its ugly head, though this was also a sign that in those areas the economy had gradually become dependent on the expanding number of Chinese immigrants. Although the Chinese were increasingly running the economies of Southeast Asia, they were neither directed by the Qing authorities nor did they organize themselves effectively beyond the region of their settlement. To end this section on political and commercial networks, let us briefly recap the impact of European activity in the Indian Ocean as a whole. Although the Asian trading networks in Monsoon Asia were negatively affected by the European presence in the Indonesian Archipelago in particular, they were able to adjust themselves quite well, even to the extent that they were able to exploit the new conditions. For example, Gujarati and Sindi traders left the eastern Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century to make room for Dutch, British, Arab, and South Indian competitors, only to become increasingly prominent in the western Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century. In a way, this reconfirmed the old triple segmentation of the Indian Ocean in which Arab merchants, from both the Hadhramaut and the southern Persian Gulf, increasingly dominated the western, South Indians the middle, and the Chinese the eastern section of the Indian Ocean. At the same time, European companies and private traders penetrated all three zones, but focused in particular on the easily colonized southern, tropical fringes, which included the plantations of the French Mascarene Islands, Ceylon, and the Indonesian Archipelago. In the end, the British proved to be the most successful because they were best positioned to use the Indian subcontinent as a bridgehead to open direct trade with China. More important than the phenomenon of European expansion was that of the great Islamic empires which, through networks of rivers and roads, connected the flourishing coastal regions to ever deeper and better-cultivated hinterlands. All this was achieved through the efforts of various transregional trading communities – from Banjara nomads to Bania bankers – which, as well as their core business of trade and transport, operated the imperial cash nexus through a sophisticated system of mints, banks, and other credit facilities. Hence, the financial support of these same communities, many of them ethnic or religious minorities, often became the key to shifting power relationships, as famously demonstrated by the support

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provided by the Jagath Seth banking family to the British takeover of Bengal. The aftermath of this in the nineteenth century shows how the Indian Ocean littoral became so wealthy and populous that it could no longer be controlled from the interior. With the help of new and more sophisticated techniques of military and economic exploitation, the British were able to turn the tables, dominating the interior from their rapidly expanding coastal urban enclaves. Thanks to the Age of Commerce, the balance of power had definitively shifted from camp to port, from the interior to the coast, paving the way for an entirely new kind of empire in which Europeans would, quite literally, call the shots.

Conclusion Let us now return to our starting question: what are the long-term spatial and temporal elements that have made the region of Monsoon Asia, i.e. South and Southeast Asia, a cohesive whole? The basic answer is geographical. What makes this macro-region different from other macro-regions like China, Africa or Europe is its open and dual nature conditioned by the Arid Zone and the Indian Ocean. On the one hand, we find areas of impressive sedentary wealth and agriculture; on the other hand, there were corridors of high mobility, mobile resources and trade. Although there was structural tension between the two, they also came symbiotically together at inner frontiers which also served as highways and capitals of empire. The main distinction between the two areas lies in the different characteristics of the Arid Zone and the Indian Ocean; the first having much more military potential than the latter. Nonetheless, both generated societies on the move, albeit least so in those regions, like Mainland Southeast Asia, that were more distant from either the Arid Zone or the Indian Ocean. From this geographical point of view, it is West and Central Asia that linked up quite smoothly with South Asia and the Archipelago. In the South Asian case, though, the inner frontier appears to be sharper than elsewhere, demarcating areas of higher agricultural wealth supporting higher population levels. Obviously, in the end, the open inner frontiers of Monsoon Asia defy rigid demarcation and usually facilitated substantial interaction with other regions. Coming to the temporal dimension of things, we have observed that the region as a whole shows a progression from fairly extensive but loose (1) Charter Empires (250 BCE-750 CE) to (2) more centralized regional Temple States (750-1250 CE), to (3) Frontier States (1250-1750). The latter states were the result of (a) new nomadic inroads through the corridors of the Arid Zone into the Indian subcontinent starting from the thirteenth century, and (b), through the corridors of the Indian Ocean, a new Age of Commerce in South Asia and Southeast Asia starting from about the

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fifteenth century. Switching from a comparative to a connective perspective, it is interesting to observe that the three stages of state-formation broadly reflect the subsequent processes of Sanskritisation, vernacularization and Islamisation in the region. But it was only at the fourth stage of colonization that the modern states of Monsoon Asia started to get a firm hold on their inner frontiers and could, at last, execute Ashoka’s long overdue aspiration to “even reform the forest tribes”.26

Notes 1

This chapter is a significantly revised version of my earlier publication: “Continuity and Change in the Indian Ocean Basin, 1400-1800,” in The Cambridge History of the World, vol. 6, part 1, eds. Jerry H. Bentley, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 182-210. It is the result of long conversations with my former teachers Jan Heesterman and André Wink, and more than two decades of teaching an introductory course in “Premodern History of South and Southeast Asia” in which my understanding of the region as a whole was tremendously enriched by the interaction with students.

2

A.L. Basham, The Wonder that was India: A Survey of the Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent Before the Coming of the Muslims (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954), 53-54.

3

The use of the word “empire” suggests a wider, more extensive reach of either claimed or real power, while “state” refers to a more regional, more intensive concentration of power. From this perspective, Frontier States could easily develop into Frontier Empires, as did Vijayanagara, Majapahit, the Delhi sultanate, and the Mughal Empire.

4

J.R.W. Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 2 (1961): 72-102.

5

M.C. Ricklefs, ed., A New History of Southeast Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 20-23.

6

See e.g. Carolien Stolte, “Orienting India: Interwar Internationalism in an Asian inflection, 1917–1937” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 2013).

7

Cf. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol 2: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 68-91. For an interesting institutional analysis of this unbroken landscape in the early-modern period, see Frank Perlin, Unbroken Landscape: Commodity, Category, Sign and Identity: Their Production as Myth and Knowledge from 1500 (Ashgate: Variorum, 1994) and The Invisible City: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe 1500-1900 (Ashgate: Variorum, 1993).

8

For the Neoplatonic continuum connecting Europe to India, see Jos Gommans and Said Reza Huseini, “Neoplatonic Kingship in the Islamic World: Akbar’s Millennial History,” in Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence, eds. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 252-286.

9

K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also André Wink’s three-volume Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1990-2004).

10

The information on Sumatra is ambivalent and stands in need of further research. It seems, though, that compared to Java there was much less of a surplus for export. For a good survey of

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rice production in the area, see Peter Boomgaard, Southeast Asia: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006). For Sumatra, see Anthony Reid, “Inside Out: The Colonial Displacement of Sumatra’s Population,” in Paper Landscapes: Essays in the Environmental History of Indonesia, eds. Peter Boomgaard, Freek Colombijn and David Henley (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998), 61-89. 11

In my view, this inner frontier also geographically conditions Heesterman’s “inner conflict of tradition” which, in his view, characterizes the Indic world. See J.C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985) and idem, “Warrior, Peasant and Brahmin,” Modern Asian Studies, 29 (1995): 637-654.

12

For the comparison with the Roman Empire, see Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 274-281.

13

Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

14

See his two-volume Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

15

This choice is mine, not Lieberman’s, also because I feel that these South Asian empires indeed provided the earliest model for state-formation in both South and Southeast Asia. The so-called Indus Civilization has been left out of this overview since its empirical base makes it difficult to observe (dis)continuities with the later periods, although it also seems to lack a clearly recognizable political infrastructure.

16

Phillip B. Wagoner, “‘Sultan among Hindu Kings:’ Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara,” The Journal of Asian Studies 55 (1996): 851-880.

17

This “once again” refers to the earlier phase when the Charter Empires of the interior developed into the Temple Empires of Pallavas, Rashtrakutas, Palas and other dynasties more oriented towards the coast.

18

For Majapahit, see Jos Gommans, “Java’s Mongol Demon: Inscribing the Horse Archer into the Epic History of Majapahit,” in HerStory: Historical Scholarship between South Asia and Europe, Festschrift in Honour of Gita Dharampal-Frick, eds. R. Klöber and Ludwig Manju (Heidelberg: CrossAsia, 2018), 249-259.

19

Kenneth R. Hall, “Local and International Trade and Traders in the Straits of Melaka Region: 6001500,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47 (2004): 213-260.

20

For the latest on climate change, see Brendan Buckley and Victor Lieberman, “The Impact of Climate on Southeast Asia, circa 950-1820: New Findings,” Modern Asian Studies 46 (2012): 1049-1096.

21

The term is Anthony Reid’s (see his two-volume Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450-1680 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988-1993), its Eurasian extension is mine.

22

Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 215-234.

23

Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C.A. Bayly, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 25 (1988): 401-424. For an illustration of how these mercantile networks conditioned a visual worldview that encompassed seventeenth-century South Asian and Southeast Asian courts in one piece of textile, see Jos Gommans, “Cosmopolitanisn and Imagination in Nayaka South India: Decoding the Brooklyn Kalamkari,” Archives of Asian Art 70 (2020): 1-21.

24

For the Iranian connections across the Indian Ocean World, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese: The Travails of Masulipatam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean 15901665,” Modern Asian Studies 22 (1988) 503-530, and “Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and the Early Modern State Formation,” Journal of Asian Studies 51 (1992): 340-362.

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25

See in particular the wonderful works by the Andayas: Leonard Y. Andaya, The Kingdom of Johor 1641-1728 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University, 1975), and Barbara Watson-Andaya: “The Indian Saudagar Raja (The King’s Merchant) in Traditional Malay Courts,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 51 (1978): 13-35; Perak, The Abode of Grace: A Study of an Eighteenth Century Malay State (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979); “The Cloth Trade in Jambi and Palambang Society during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Indonesia 48 (1989): 27-46; To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993).

26

There are many studies to demonstrate this point. A recent study that discusses this protracted process in great detail for the frontier region of Delhi is Girija Joshi, “Resilient Communities: Household, State, and Ecology in South-Eastern Panjab, c. 1750-1880” (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 2021).

CHAPTER 4

New Paradigms for the Early Relationship between South and Southeast Asia: The Contribution of Southeast Asian Archaeology Pierre-Yves Manguin

Abstract The study of the Indianization process in Southeast Asia was long kept in the hands of philologists and historians of art and architecture who rarely ventured into settlement excavations and paid little attention to mundane aspects of Southeast Asian societies. Far-reaching progress in archaeological research on proto-historic and early historic Southeast Asia has proved that contact, exchange, and trade between Southeast Asia and India were persistently conducted during the millennium that preceded the Indianization of the region. This chapter presents research carried out in a variety of coastal sites, which resulted in a reappraisal of the mastery of nautical technologies, of the state formation and urbanization of the region, and of the role of Buddhism and Vaishnavism in the Indianization process, thus questioning the nature of the long-lasting relationship across the Bay of Bengal and returning agency to Southeast Asian people and polities.

Keywords: Southeast Asia; archaeology; maritime trade; agency; state formation

Archaeology was not a forte of the colonial period scholars who put together the first coherent narratives of Southeast Asian pre-modern history. Until the 1960s, with few exceptions, archaeology of Southeast Asia was restricted to prehistory and, for the historical periods, to the study of art history and architecture.1 Most excavations were carried out during the protracted process of cleaning up and restoring religious monuments; many were meant to bring to light as many statues and inscriptions as possible, too often with little consideration for the context and environment of such finds.2 The long-standing debates regarding the nature of “Indianization” (or “Hinduization”) of the region –– that is, the understanding of the process which resulted in the transfer of a set of South Asian cultural traits to Southeast Asian societies –– remained moreover very much within the realm of scholars trained as Indologists, most of them philologists (mainly epigraphists) or historians of art and architecture. They rarely ventured into excavations of settlement sites, and altogether paid little attention to mundane aspects of Southeast

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Asian societies. During the first half of the 20th century, they also remained men of their times and reproduced stereotypes developed in Europe for the study of Greek and Roman cultural expansions. They transposed Enlightenment-tinted worldviews, considering Indian and Chinese “great civilizations” to be the only traditions at the origin of all major cultural developments of Asian history. Contemporary geographical designations for the region – Indochina, Further India or Greater India –– are revealing of such a bias in the appreciation of a regional identity. History in Southeast Asia, to sum up, was said to have started around the fourth or fifth century CE, after the region received from overseas a cultural package comprising writing, the usage of Sanskrit as a language of power and learning, text-based religions –– both Brahmanism and Buddhism ––, associated literature, iconography and architecture, and more mature political structures. Such approaches resulted in imagined tales of a sudden imposition of foreign cultures upon Southeast Asian societies entangled in quiescent, passive social organizations. Within the limits of this paradigm, local agency was barely considered in the process, and only an often-claimed “local genius” in the local adaptation of borrowings was recognized. Major social, economic and political developments such as the emergence of states and cities could only be linked to the sudden adoption, starting around the third century CE, of exogenous cultural packages, Chinese in the case of Vietnam, Indian elsewhere in Southeast Asia, along the western façade of the region. For decades, starting in the 1920s, Indian scholars of the Greater India Society explained these transformations, against all evidence, by way of an imagined “colonization” of Southeast Asia, a paradigm that was largely a transposition into an imagined past of a contemporary colonial state of affairs.3 Most European scholars shunned the conquest paradigm and ended up providing until the 1960s a more affable version of the events: prominent among them was George Cœdès, who acknowledged that Southeast Asian societies, thought to have remained in a “late Neolithic phase” when they came into contact with India, did manage to preserve “the essentials of their individual cultures and developed them, each according to their own genius”.4 Inscriptions in East Kalimantan and West Java, being among the oldest in Southeast Asia (together with those found in the Funan area of the Mekong Delta), attracted the attention of philologists, and prompted the first attempts to document the transition from local forms of political systems to more complex, state-like organizations. On palaeographic grounds alone these inscriptions were then dated to the early fifth (East Borneo) and middle fifth century (West Java).5 Progress in Indian epigraphy however brought about a revision of these dates, and the same inscriptions in Southern Brahmi scripts now tend to be dated between the mid-fifth and the mid-sixth centuries CE.6 This is more in accordance with architectural and iconographic data as, despite earlier interpretations, no Buddhist or Vaishnava

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statue in Southeast Asia is presently dated earlier than the fifth century;7 and, so far, no stone or brick temple appears to have been built before the fifth or sixth century (the Pyu area of Myanmar is the only exception to this rule, most probably as a result of its proximity with India, via both land and sea routes).8 Such locally produced texts were complemented by contemporary exogenous sources: routine but elusive Indian references to Suvarnadvipa (the Islands of Gold), a land where fortunes could be made; and a set of more detailed Chinese sources, which, however, provide information that is far from always being reconcilable with field data. George Cœdès’ opera magna The Indianized states of Southeast Asia, first published in 1944, remains the most thorough achievement of this Orientalist phase of Southeast Asian historiography.9 It was based upon a considerable body of erudite research by two generations of scholars who built up a reliable chronological backbone for Southeast Asian history. In times of decolonization and building of national identities, perceptions of Southeast Asian history evolved and historians revised earlier radical views, shying from univocal explanations of political developments.10 They progressively assigned local political developments to a manifold process, with a variety of incentives and outcomes, showing that local rulers and their people, far from being passive recipients, played an active part in such socio-political transformations. To describe immaterial cultural exchanges between the two shores of the Bay of Bengal, useful concepts were called upon over the years to tone down the earlier paradigms, such as a “lasting relationship”,11 “localization” of Indic inputs,12 or cultural “convergence”.13 Southeast Asian societies regained in the process an entrepreneurial role in the adoption and the adaptation of Indian concepts and constructions to pre-existing social and economic patterns, from scripts and learned languages to literary genres and motifs, from religious texts and discourses to associated art and architectural forms, and to state and urbanization models. Cambodian history, for example, had remained for long the quasi-exclusive domain of Orientalists and was kept largely insulated from developments in social sciences until Michael Vickery published his major work on Society, economics and politics in Pre-Angkorian Cambodia.14 Like earlier works, it was still largely based on epigraphic sources, but they were interpreted within a radical reassessment of earlier paradigms on Indian inputs, and returned a far larger measure of agency to local populations, in a context of growing social complexity and increased participation in the world economy. All these studies, however, remained largely based on evidence gathered from locally produced sources –– textual, architectural and iconographic –– that did not appear in Southeast Asia earlier than the late fifth to seventh centuries (with the single and isolated exception of the possibly fourth century Vo Canh inscription in South Central Vietnam, still largely unexplained). It would be unfair to state

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that these studies never ventured into social and economic history, but, due to the nature of the sources they had at hand, and to a general distaste in Orientalist circles for anthropological (“sociological”) approaches, their analyses remained largely based on the history of events, dynastic and art historical sequences.15 Only archaeology –– notwithstanding its own limitations –– would help build up a more systematic understanding of the whole cultural system, an account of social and political structures, of religious practices, and of economic trends, exchange networks and agricultural practices. It is fair to recall that pioneering endeavours in early urban archaeology had been carried out in various areas, with mixed success. In Myanmar, as elsewhere in Indianized Southeast Asia, protohistoric and historic archaeology had only received sporadic attention, and little was done until recently to corroborate in the field G.H. Luce’s major work on pre-Pagan times.16 The Pyu sites of the central plain and their walled urban settlements, such as that of Sriksetra and Beikhtano, were clearly identified and dated to the early first millennium CE, but could not yet be interpreted in relation to earlier Iron Age local developments.17 In French Indochina, the architect Jean-Yves Claeys excavated at Tra Kieu the site of a Cham capital but ended up misinterpreting and wrongly dating his finds, due largely to hasty excavation methods.18 Louis Malleret, after years of field surveys, carried out in 1944 a remarkably thorough archaeological campaign in the Oc Eo site complex, thus revealing one large urban site of Funan, the first large state of Southeast Asia, known until then only through textual sources.19 Malleret’s work firmly inscribed Funan in the pre-seventh century history of the Indochinese Peninsula and of Southeast Asia.20 He may not have been a trained archaeologist to start with, but his pioneering work did take into consideration recent progress in the field, using stratigraphic techniques when needed, carrying out physical and chemical analysis of artefacts, pioneering radiocarbon dating in the region, and thoroughly comparing his finds with all that was then known in Southeast Asia and all over the rest of Asia. However, despite his systematic approach, Malleret remained tied up in current understandings of Southeast Asian history. The vast array of early first millennium Mediterranean and Indian artefacts brought to light at Oc Eo and in the whole Mekong Delta were indicative of activities led exclusively by foreign merchants and entrepreneurs, not a by-product of local initiatives. The urban pattern he brought to light at Oc Eo –– which he could not precisely date –– could only in his mind be contemporary with Indianization, i.e. after the fifth century CE. The Japanese takeover of French Indochina in March 1945 and successive Indochinese wars precluded any further work in the Mekong Delta. Decades would pass before archaeological research was resumed in the region. The methodological change of the 1980s and 1990s is nowhere better illustrated than in the writings of Oliver Wolters, author, years before, of a ground-breaking

new paradigms for the early relationship between south and southeast asia 123

study on the origins of Srivijaya, based mainly on Chinese sources. He had then returned a considerable measure of agency to the polities that appeared to have developed along the coast of Southeast Sumatra before and after the foundation of the state of Srivijaya in the late seventh century.21 After visiting the area in the early 1980s, and re-reading a variety of written sources, he produced a number of articles in which he concluded that it was impossible for him, as a specialist in written sources, to further progress without taking into consideration a new “text”, which could only be provided by archaeological fieldwork: “The terrain is now the superior text in Sriwijayan studies”.22 Dealing with the early Khmer history, Michael Vickery deconstructed the “ancients” in his usual iconoclastic way, and also defended a new approach that took into consideration the first results of archaeological research in both Cambodia and Vietnam.23

A new harvest of data None of the often-remarkable studies produced so far could yet have taken into consideration in their conclusions the results of intense archaeological work carried out in the following decades. The scarcity of additional iconographic or written source material and the all too frequent uncoupling between this material and the original archaeological sites made it difficult for scholars to build up a radically new paradigm. Only archaeology could shed light upon the persistent historiographical no man’s land that led from relatively simple prehistoric societies to increasingly complex protohistoric and historic polities or, in Karl Hutterer’s own insightful words, “to break the logjam that has been obstructing access to the early social history of the Southeast Asian region”.24 Prehistorians now carried out excavation programmes on sites leading into the last few centuries BCE, mainly in Thailand, where archaeological progress was little affected by the wars in Vietnam and the political turmoil of Indonesia.25 Burial sites of the lower central plain of Thailand, such as that of Chansen,26 yielded a few artefacts of clear Indian origin, which pointed out early interactions with South Asia, as Malleret had done in the Mekong Delta. Scholars working on historical periods now also engaged in excavations on sites from the first half of the first millennium CE, thus helping to close the gap between prehistory and history and producing the first comprehensive local archaeological sequences for the protohistoric period.27 It is however Ian Glover, based on the results of his excavations at Ban Don Ta Phet, who set a new interpretative trend in motion in his crucial essay emphasizing what he described as “a link in the development of a World Trading System”.28 In the second half of the first millennium BCE, Southeast Asian societies no longer appeared to be cut off from transformations and developments in world economy

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Figure 4.1: Southeast Asia, showing places mentioned in this chapter.

taking place elsewhere in Asia.29 As a consequence of economically vibrant exchange patterns, coastal societies were seen to progressively adopt sets of common cultural values, and their capture and consolidation of such exchange networks across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea facilitated the emergence of power relations within the region. The systematic dating of stratigraphic levels using improved radiocarbon or luminescence techniques confirmed the earliness of exchange patterns between South and Southeast Asian societies, centuries before the “Indianization” of the region took place. Transfers of technologies have now been clearly identified. Bead making, both in glass and semi-precious stones, counts among the first quasi-industrial technologies to have been transferred and adapted for local markets in

new paradigms for the early relationship between south and southeast asia 125

Southeast Asian sites, starting around the fourth century BCE.30 Other technological transfers can be documented in Southeast Asian sites at the turn of the first millennium CE. Large wooden monuments built in the earlier occupation phase at Oc Eo, in the first two centuries CE, were covered with flat, grooved tiles similar to those found at Indian sites, such as Bhita or Arikamedu.31 Some firing techniques, pastes and pot shapes common in Southeast Asian sites (particularly the so-called “fine-paste ware” or “fine buffware” kendis) are by then clearly of South Asian inspiration.32 In the reverse direction, the paddle impressed mode of decorating pottery, a common Southeast Asian feature, appears to have been adopted in South Asia only after exchange across the Bay of Bengal became regular.33 Absolute dating after controlled excavations of anthropogenic landscape transformations also brought about crucial breakthroughs, revealing pre-fifth century sites in areas known to have later harboured such Indianised polities as Champa, pre-Angkorian Cambodia or Srivijaya. Research combining field archaeology and history could now reconsider various aspects of early state formation and explore social, economic and ideological forces that shaped first-millennium landscapes.34 Along the coasts of present-day central Vietnam, systematic archaeological work on sites associated with the regional Iron Age culture of Sa Huynh brought to light the succeeding transitional phases that led into the formation of the early states of Linyi and Champa with clear relations with Indian Ocean networks, but also, in this specific case with strong inputs from the neighbouring Chinese sphere of influence.35 Further south in the Mekong Delta, exogenous urban concepts and state management modes that can only be associated with a politically mature polity now appear to have made their way into Funan area in the first few centuries CE, after a centuries-long process of growing social complexity.36 Whichever the political model at play in the polity known as Funan – a centralized state or a strongly knit federation of city-states – political developments taking place after foundations times in the first century CE soon allowed for an impressive mobilization of the workforce, and the implementation of public works that must have brought into operation a significant economic surplus. It is now possible to date at the latest to the fourth century CE the usage, for communication purposes, of the 70 km long canal linking Angkor Borei with Oc Eo (and from there with the Mekong and the Gulf of Siam), and possibly also to the same period the construction of an impressive web of drainage canals. The digging in the flood plain of the rectangular moats surrounding the large urban site of Oc Eo was clearly an Indian-inspired innovation in Southeast Asian landscapes, a striking difference from the other major centre of Funan, Angkor Borei, where the urban landscape does not follow a geometric plan, but rather conforms to the natural topography. This first deployment of Indian urban concepts is now known to have taken place at the latest in the second century CE, long before inscriptions, statues and temples appeared.37

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In southeast Sumatra, the major maritime state of Srivijaya was for long described as emerging all of a sudden in the late seventh century, as a by-product of Indianization. Only Oliver Wolters, then on the sole basis of textual sources, hypothesized the earlier existence, along what he termed the “favoured coast” of southeast Sumatra, of trading polities that prepared the ground for the birth of Srivijaya in the late seventh century.38 Hermann Kulke’s own re-reading of the central Old Malay inscription at Palembang showed that the newly born state remained largely based on pre-existing, vernacular political structures, incorporating neighbouring small political entities into a polity whose sovereign now centralized power, and acted as a primus inter pares.39 These early assumptions have now been overwhelmingly confirmed by archaeologists who revealed the existence of such pre-Srivijaya polities. Intense surveys starting in the 1990s and recent excavations in back mangrove environments downstream from Palembang (at Karang Agung and Air Sugihan sites) and on the island of Bangka (at the Kota Kapur sites), brought to light a vast array of densely populated wetland settlement sites dating from at least the third and fourth centuries CE (and probably earlier), and lasting, in some sites, into Srivijaya times. These proto-historic coastal sites, some of them possibly proto-urban settlements, produced a variety of small artefacts indicating a participation in Indian Ocean and South China Sea networks. They appear to correspond to those referred to in Chinese sources of the fifth and sixth centuries as having by then adopted Indic religions and language. Based on such new data, it is possible now to offer a renewed interpretation of the birth of Srivijaya, as a complex, long-term, multi-factor process of state formation, during which trade (both inland and overseas), urbanization, religion and early interactions with South Asia played critical roles.40 Along the northern coasts of Java and Bali, both proto-historic and early historic sites have now been brought to light that constitute as many waypoints along the route to the eastern spice islands, and served as an interface with hinterlands where the better-known polities of Classical times will soon develop.41 Even in domains usually reserved for art historians, systematic excavations of temple sites and subsequent dating of their use brought about a profound chronological readjustment of a set of Brahmanical statues, most of them considered by many French and Thai scholars to be a late, local evolution. For the latter, who posed as an axiom that only “beautiful” Southeast Asian statues could be close to Indian prototypes, one group of “mitred” Vishnu statues of awkward execution could only be a late, degenerate local evolution. Such a biased approach rejected a considerable corpus of Vaishnava statues into late Indianization times, and implicitly denied Hinduism a significant role in the early phase of this process, leaving only Buddhism in the centre scene.42 Other scholars rightly compared these early Brahmanical statues to contemporary and stylistically “awkward”

new paradigms for the early relationship between south and southeast asia 127

Indian prototypes,43 but the general trend prevailed and the role of Vaishnavism in the Indianization process remained obscured in standard manuals. It took the discovery of mitred statues of Vishnu in securely dated early archaeological contexts in Sumatra and Vietnam and renewed approaches by art historians to reverse this subjective chronology, the only remaining debate being that of their earliest appearance in Southeast Asia, the balance now shifting towards the fifth or early sixth century.44 Newly translated epigraphic records of the early sixth century also help better document this spread of Vaishnava cults to Southeast Asia, and the circumstances of their adoption across the Bay of Bengal. Commerce and the accumulation of wealth were intricately associated with Vaishnavism in India: a favourable circumstance, considering the historical context of much of coastal Southeast Asia, where overseas trade was one essential ingredient of state formation. In the wake of the brilliant Gupta state, no doubt perceived as a source of modernity, sectarian, devotional forms of Vaishnavism that spread over the western part of Southeast Asia attracted newly urbanized citizens of developing states, giving such people a sense of belonging to a larger community of thought and shared economic interests. Sectarian Vaishnavism thus appears to have locally provided a powerful instrument for assimilating and adjusting Southeast Asian rulers and their people into the new Brahmanical social order. Sea merchants and long-distance shippers were one emergent social class that benefitted from such a newly accessible religious climate and must have played an essential role in the transmission of new doctrines, Buddhism as well as Brahmanism.45

The role of maritime archaeology Peninsular and Insular Southeast Asia count among the regions of the world with the longest coastlines. Located, furthermore, at the crossroads of East Asian main maritime routes and at the interface with inland regions producing commodities in high demand in the whole Ancient World, it is not surprising to see the social and political developments of early first-millennium coastal polities fostered by their early participation in regional maritime networks and soon in the world economy. The radical reassessment of their economic dynamism, as described above, prompts further questions regarding their role in Asian trade networks. Did these early polities also provide the shipbuilders, shipmasters and entrepreneurs who sustained this vibrant long distance maritime trade? One well-adhered to axiom of maritime history is that a comprehensive investigation of shipbuilding traditions and of their evolution provides a faithful representation of the overall history of societies, as they mastered the technology to build and sail the sophisticated systems of ships and the economic skills to invest in and profit from high seas trading ventures.

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On the basis of rare textual sources, only a few early scholars defended the notion that powerful rulers of coastal societies had run fleets of large merchant vessels.46 Most historians of Southeast Asia dealing with pre-14th century times, however, only referred to Persian, Arabic, Indian or Chinese shippers, that is from areas which they perceived as “great civilizations”. They only acknowledged that Malay World societies, having peopled the Pacific and Madagascar, would have been skilled sailors. But the image conveyed was that of intrepid mariners crossing half the planet on outrigger dugouts, or serving aboard ships under foreign command.47 Paradoxically, Jacob van Leur, the very author who was so influential in returning agency to societies of Insular Southeast Asia, concurrently reduced the scope of their maritime ventures to a regional, “primitive” peddling trade, qualified as ‘proa shipping’ in vessels with very limited cargo capacities.48 Based first on ancient and early-modern textual sources, but now confirmed by nautical archaeology, recent research on ships built in Southeast Asia recently restored a significant role to their shipbuilders and shipmasters, on a par with Indian Ocean bottoms (the Chinese only developed a high seas merchant fleet in the early second millennium). Due to their early marine adaptations, the share of Austronesian-speaking populations of Southeast Asia in the development of seagoing traditions and the creation of distinctive, regional shipbuilding technologies appears to have been overwhelming (other coastal populations – Melanesians in the east of the archipelago, Mons of Burma and Thailand, and pre-Han populations of Southern China – may also have contributed to the process, but their participation remains so far largely undocumented). Building up upon such a long technical tradition, polities of western Southeast Asia were instrumental in sending to sea vessels of considerable sophistication and size at least as early as the first few centuries CE. These large vessels were first described by the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims who had to board them on their way to Southeast Asia and then India, in search of canonical texts that they would translate into Chinese. They were said to belong to the Kunlun (i.e. Southeast Asian) people. These witnesses were erudite, keen observers, and their descriptions of such foreign ships are technically flawless.49 These early ships were the forebears of the fleets of imposing jong of the 15th and 16th centuries in Insular Southeast Asia, as described by the Portuguese newcomers, surprised to find ships larger than their own. Vessels up to some 40 m in length and reaching up to some 500 tons were described until the late 16th century, when their overall tonnage started decreasing.50 These, in turn, evolved into the Bugis and Javanese traditionally built trading fleets of smaller vessels that survived well into the 20th century. Ships built in the first millennium CE in Southeast Asia were first assembled following a unique “sewn” technical tradition, fundamentally different from that of ships of the western Indian Ocean, their planks and frames being fastened with

new paradigms for the early relationship between south and southeast asia 129

disconnected lashings and stitches, with ropes made of sugar palm fibre.51 This “sewing” assemblage was progressively replaced, around the turn of the second millennium, by dowels of hardwood. During the past decades, such textual sources were progressively confirmed by a growing number of shipwreck sites brought to light in Southeast Asian waters, dating mainly from the first millennium CE. Many of these ships were built according to this clearly Southeast Asian tradition. Some, such as the so-called 10th century Cirebon wreck, carried, as expected, a huge cargo (some 300 000 Chinese bowls in this case).52 We also have confirmation by now that Southeast Asian shipmasters played a crucial role in long-distance exchange networks of both the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, which firmly places their operations into the mainstream of Asian global maritime history, on a par with shipmasters of other Asian origins. Between the fifth century and modern times, their position is documented in local epigraphy, as well as in Malay, Chinese, Arabic and Indian textual sources (under designations of various origins: mahānavika (Sanskrit), puhawang (Austronesian), nakhoda (of Arabo-Persian origin, but passed into Malay with the coming of Islam). The first appearance of the Austronesian term puhawang is among the list of important actors appearing in the Old Malay inscription of Sabokingking which provides in the 680s a local representation of the newly born state of Srivijaya. It appears together with vaniaga (a term borrowed from Sanskrit), here clearly designating a seagoing merchant.53 These complementary terms would often appear in associated pairs in later Javanese epigraphy and literature, as well as in Malay classical texts. The puhawang or nachoda (both terms literally meaning “master of the ship”) were true entrepreneurs, who owned and skippered the trading ships and often also invested in part of the cargo. In a region where the economy of a variety of polities was essentially based on long-distance maritime trade, their role was therefore intimately associated with the state formation process. In the Malay World, they belonged to a high-status, non-noble class. They formed a social group that connected local political power to networks of overseas relationships and exchange, the very foundation of the merchant economy of coastal polities.54

Indianization revisited: asymmetric exchange in the longue durée No historian has seriously contested the asymmetry of the mid-first millennium CE process that we still need to designate as “Indianization” of Southeast Asia, for lack of a better word, a development which profoundly contributed to shaping Southeast Asian societies. It is useful however to consider that such cultural asymmetries are more than common in world history and have more than once resulted in controversial narratives. Asymmetrical exchange of ideas and of goods between

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Mediterranean Europe and Western Asia accompanied profound socio-cultural transformations, linked to patterns of interaction between societies during the Greek, the Roman and the Byzantine periods. Historians of Southeast Asia should at least keep in mind the fact that increasingly complex societies in the Atlantic façade and the north of Europe – contemporary to those of Southeast Asia’s proto-history – were then also undergoing transformations comparable to those brought about before and during “Indianization”. In a process named “Romanization” (again a much debated term), the Gauls and other European people were adopting and adapting to a modernity introduced from distant Mediterranean shores, in a process that recent archaeological research has proved to have little in common with the vision conveyed by Julius Caesar and his Gallic wars, and by so many historians after him. By the time Caesar conquered Gaul, much of its territory was already strongly Romanized as a result of economic and cultural exchanges.55 To better understand the early adoption by Southeast Asians of Indic religions one needs first to consider transformations at work in South Asian societies themselves. It is now well known that many were then undergoing a parallel process (long designated as “Sanskritization,” also a much-debated term), thus adopting cultural traits developed in Northwest India. New traditions then came into prominence in South and Western India, as Buddhism and Vaishnavism became agencies of acculturation for those social groups for whom Brahmanism of the Great Tradition had been inaccessible.56 As they did within South Asia, these new religious practices facilitated the dialogue between India and Southeast Asia. It is no surprise then to be witness to the adoption in Southeast Asia sometime after the fourth or fifth century CE of a broad new set of cultural traits inspired by South Asian parallel developments. Despite a relatively late start, recent archaeological research on the transition period that leads from late prehistory to early history is inducing a significant heuristic revolution in the assessment of the history of early Southeast Asia. With a resolutely interdisciplinary approach, it has shown that scholars need to write history using a wider range of source materials, as the archives of the soil are not opposed to the written or art historical records, but are associated with them. Archaeological research has brought to light a renewed knowledge basis on this fertile proto-historic period upon which we can reassess the trans-cultural, mutual processes that took place within complex sets of networks, in terms of chronology, of directionality, of quality or of intensity, within what Sunil Gupta rightly names the “Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere”.57 It is now possible to conclude that by the time Indian inspired epigraphy, temples, statues and all that they conveyed in religious and administrative practices appeared in Southeast Asia, the relationship between Southeast Asian and Indian societies had matured during a whole millennium. We are now far removed from an imagined vision of the sudden imposition of Indian

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culture, as a deus ex machina. In other words, as I put it earlier on in deliberately provocative terms,58 one has now to admit that Southeast Asia was Indianized long before “Indianization”, and that local societies played a considerable role in all phases of this complex process.

Notes 1

The term “archaeology” can be understood in a variety of ways. In this essay, we use it to designate a discipline belonging to the social sciences that uses systematic excavations to gain a better knowledge of past societies as a whole and of their cultural landscapes. The “early” protohistoric phase considered here is a transitional period between late prehistory and history, during which the accelerating complexity of local societies led them into early forms of statehood and links to world economy.

2

See, among others, examples of such practices in French Indochina given in Catherine ClémentinOjha and Pierre-Yves Manguin, A Century in Asia: The History of the École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1898-2006 (Singapore: Éditions Didier Millet/École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2007), 111-120; Bernard Formoso, “L’Indochine vue de l’Ouest,” Gradhiva 4 (2006): 35-51; see also Pierre-Yves Manguin, “De la ‘Grande Inde’ à l’Asie du Sud-Est: la contribution de l’archéologie,” Comptes rendus des Séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 144, no. 4 (2000): 1485-1492.

3

See, among many others, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Greater India (Bombay: Dayanand College Book Depot, 1941; Sain Das Foundation Lecture, 1940).

4

George Cœdès, The Making of South East Asia (London: Routledge, 1966), 35.

5

Jean Philippe Vogel, “The Yupa Inscriptions of King Mulavarman, from Koetei (East Borneo),” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië 74, nos. 1-2 (1918): 167-232; Jean Philippe Vogel, “The Earliest Sanskrit Inscriptions of Java,” in Publicaties van de Oudheidkundige Dienst in Nederlandsch-Indië, vol. 1 (Batavia: Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 1925), 15-35; Bahadur Chand Chhabra, “Yūpa Inscriptions,” in India Antiqua: A Volume of Oriental Studies presented by his friends and pupils to Jean Philippe Philippe Vogel (Leiden: Brill, 1947), 77-82; Bahadur Chand Chhabra, “Three More Yûpa Inscriptions of King Mûlavarman from Kutei (East Borneo),” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 83 (1949): 370-374; J. G. de Casparis, “Some Notes on the Oldest Inscriptions of Indonesia”, in A Man of Indonesian Letters: Essays in Honour of Professor A. Teeuw, eds. C.M.S. Hellwig and S.J. Robson (Dordrecht: Foris, 1985), 242-256.

6

Ahmad Hasan Dani, Indian Palaeography (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1986), 237-239; Arlo Griffiths, “Early Indic Inscriptions of Southeast Asia,” in Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, ed. J Guy (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 2014).

7

Robert L Brown, “Indian Art transformed: The earliest sculptural styles of Southeast Asia,” in Indian Art and Archaeology, eds. Ellen M. Raven and Karel R. van Kooij (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1992), 41-53; Robert L Brown, “The Importance of Gupta-Period Sculpture in Southeast Asian Art History,” in Early Interactions Between South And Southeast Asia: Reflections On Cross-Cultural Exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 317-332; Paul A. Lavy, “Conch-on-hip Images in Peninsular Thailand and Early Vaiṣṇava Sculpture in Southeast Asia,” in Before Siam: Essays in Art and Archaeology, ed. N. Revire and S.A. Murphy (Bangkok: River Books, 2013), 153-173.

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8

Pamela Gutman and Bob Hudson, “The archaeology of Burma (Myanmar) from the Neolithic to Pagan,” in Southeast Asia: from Prehistory to History, eds. P. Bellwood and I.C. Glover (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 149-176; Pamela Gutman and Bob Hudson, “A First-Century Stele from Sriksetra,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 99 (2012-13): 17-47.

9

George Cœdès, Les États hindouisés d’Indochine et d’Indonésie (Paris: de Boccard, 1964); George Cœdès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, trans. Susan Brown Cowing, ed. Walter F. Wella (Kuala Lumpur/Honolulu: University of Malaya Press/University of Hawaii Press, 1968).

10

Frederik D.K. Bosch, Selected Studies in Indonesian Archaeology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 1-22; Ian W. Mabbett, “The ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia: Reflections on the Prehistoric Sources/Reflections on Historical Sources,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 8, nos. 1-2, (1977): 1-14, 143-161.

11

J. G. de Casparis, India and Maritime South East Asia: A Lasting Relationship; Third Sri Lanka Endowment Fund lecture, delivered at the University of Malaya on Wednesday, August 10, 1983 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya, 1983).

12

Oliver W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1999).

13

Hermann Kulke, “The Early and the Imperial Kingdom in Southeast Asian History,” in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, eds. D.G. Marr and A.C. Milner (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), 1-22; Hermann Kulke, “Indian colonies, Indianization or cultural convergence? Reflections on the changing image of India’s role in South-East Asia”, in Onderzoek in Zuidoost-Azie: Agenda’s voor de jaren negentig, ed. H. Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, 1990), 8-32; Hermann Kulke, “Epigraphical references to the ‘City’ and the ‘State’ in Early Indonesia,” Indonesia 52 (1991): 3-22; Hermann Kulke, “The concept of Cultural Convergence Revisited: Reflections on India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia,” in Asian Encounters: Exploring Connected Histories, eds. Upinder Singh and Parul Pandya Dhar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1-19.

14

Michael Vickery, Society, Economics and Politics in Pre-Angkorian Cambodia: the 7th-8th Centuries (Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko for UNESCO, 1998).

15

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Un ‘sociologue’ parmi les orientalistes: Paul Mus à l’École française d’Extrême-Orient (1927-1937),” in L’espace d’un regard: Paul Mus et l’Asie (1902-1969), eds. C. Goscha and D. Chandler (Lyon and Paris: Institut d’Asie Orientale, 2006), 109-116.

16

Gordon H. Luce, Phases of Pre-Pagan Burma: Languages and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

17

Gutman and Hudson, “The archaeology of Burma (Myanmar) from the Neolithic to Pagan.”

18

Jean-Yves Claeys, “Simhapura: La grande capitale chame (VIe-VIIIe s. A.D.) (Site de Tra-Kiêu, QuangNam, Annam),” Revue des Arts asiatiques 7, no. 2 (1931): 93-103; Ian C. Glover, “The excavations of J. Y. Claeys at Tra Kieu, Central Vietnam (1927-28): from the unpublished archives of the EFEO, Paris and records in the possession of the Claeys family,” Journal of the Siam Society 85, nos. 1-2 (1997): 173-186.

19

Paul Pelliot, “Le Fou-nan,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 3 (1903): 248-303.

20

Louis Malleret, L’archéologie du Delta du Mékong (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 4 parts

21

Oliver W. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of Sri Vijaya (Ithaca: Cornell

in 7 volumes, 1959-63). University, 1967). 22

Oliver W. Wolters, “Restudying Some Chinese Writings on Sriwijaya,” Indonesia 42 (1986): 41; PierreYves Manguin, “De la ‘Grande Inde’ à l’Asie du Sud-Est: la contribution de l’archéologie,” Comptes Rendus des Séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 144, no. 4 (2000): 1485-1492.

new paradigms for the early relationship between south and southeast asia 133

23

Vickery, Society, economics and politics in pre-Angkorian Cambodia; Michael Vickery, “Funan reviewed: Deconstructing the ancients,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 90-91 (2003): 101-143.

24

Karl L. Hutterer, “Early Southeast Asia: Old wine in new skins – A review article”, The Journal of Asian Studies 41, no. 3 (1982): 563.

25

Best summarised in Charles Higham, “The Iron Age of Thailand: Trends to Complexity,” in 50 Years of Archaeology in Southeast Asia: Essays in Honour of Ian Glover, eds. B. Bellina, E.A. Bacus, T.O. Pryce and J.W. Christie (Bangkok: River Books, 2010), 129-140; Charles F. W. Higham and Rachanie Thosarat, Early Thailand: From Prehistory to Sukhothai (Bangkok; River Books, 2012).

26

Bennet Bronson and George F. Dales, “Excavations at Chansen, Thailand (1968 and 1969): A preliminary report,” Asian Perspectives 15, no. 1 (1972): 15-46; Bennet Bronson, Excavations at Chansen and the cultural chronology of Proto-Historic Central Thailand (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania., 1976).

27

See Ian C. Glover and Peter Bellwood, “Southeast Asia: foundations for an archaeological history,” in Southeast Asia: from Prehistory to History, eds. P. Bellwood and I.C. Glover (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 4-20; and various essays in. P. Bellwood and I.C. Glover, eds., Southeast Asia: from Prehistory to History (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); Ian C. Glover, “Connecting prehistoric and historic cultures in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 47, no. 3 (2016): 506–510; Miriam T. Stark, “Globalizing early Southeast Asia,” in The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization, ed. by T. Hodos (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 707-710; Miriam T. Stark, “The transition to history in the Mekong Delta: A View from Cambodia,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 2, no. 3 (1998): 175-203; Ambra Calò et al, “Sembiran and Pacung: a strategic crossroads for early trans-Asiatic exchange,” Antiquity 89, no. 344 (2015): 378–396; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Archaeology of the Early Maritime polities of Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asia: from Prehistory to History, ed. P. Bellwood and I.C. Glover (London: Routledgecurzon, 2004), 282313; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Dialogues between Southeast Asia and India: a necessary reappraisal,” in India and Southeast Asia: Cultural Discourses, eds. A.L. Dallapiccola and A. Verghese (Mumbai: K.C. Kama Oriental Institute, 2017), 23-36; Pierre-Yves Manguin and Agustijanto Indradjaya, “The Batujaya Site: New Evidence of Early Indian Influence in West Java,” in Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani and Geoff Wade (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 113-136.

28

Ian C. Glover, Early Trade between India and Southeast Asia: A link in the development of a World Trading System (Hull: University of Hull, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1990).

29

Miriam T. Stark, “Globalizing early Southeast Asia,” in The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization, ed. T. Hodos (London: Routledge, 2017), 707-710.

30

James W. Lankton and Laure Dussubieux, “Early glass in Southeast Asia,” in Modern Methods for Analysing Archaeological and Historical Glass, ed. K.K.A. Janssens (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), 413-441; Bérénice Bellina, Cultural Exchange between India and Southeast Asia: Production and distribution of hard stone ornaments (VI c BC-VI c AD) (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme/ Epistèmes, 2006); Bérénice Bellina, ed., Khao Sam Kaeo: An Early Port-City between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2017); Laure Dussubieux and Bérénice Bellina, “Glass from an Early Southeast Asian producing and trading centre,” in Khao Sam Kaeo: An Early Port-City between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, ed. Bérénice Bellina (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2017), 549-585.

31

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Les tuiles de l’ancienne Asie du Sud-Est: Essai de typologie,” in Anamorphoses: Hommage à Jacques Dumarçay, eds. H. Chambert-Loir and B. Dagens (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2006), 275-310.

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32

Miriam T. Stark, “The chronology, technology and contexts of earthenware ceramics in Cambodia,” in Earthenware in Southeast Asia, ed. J.N. Miksic (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), 208-230.

33

Veerasamy Selvakumar, “Contacts between India and Southeast Asia in Ceramic and Boat Building Traditions,” in Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, eds. P.-Y. Manguin, A. Mani and G. Wade (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 200-207.

34

Miriam T. Stark, “Early Mainland Southeast Asian Landscapes in the First Millennium A.D.,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 407-432.

35

Ian C. Glover and Yamagata Mariko, “The origins of Cham civilization: Indigenous, Chinese and Indian influences in Central Vietnam as revealed by excavations at Tra Kieu, Vietnam 1990 and 1993,” in Southeast Asian Archaeology, eds. C.T. Yeung and B. Li (Hongkong: Hongkong University Museum, 1995), 145-169.; Ian C. Glover and Yamagata Mariko, “Excavations at Tra Kiêu, Viêtnam 1993: Sa Huynh, Cham and Chinese influences,” in Southeast Asian Archaeology 1994, ed. P.-Y. Manguin, vol. 1 (Hull: University of Hull, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1998), 75-93.

36

Stark, “The Transition to history in the Mekong Delta”; Miriam T. Stark, “Pre-Angkorian and Angkorian Cambodia,” in Southeast Asia: from Prehistory to History, eds. P. Bellwood and I.C. Glover (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 89-119; Stark, “Early Mainland Southeast Asian Landscapes in the First Millennium A.D.”; Manguin, “The Archaeology of the Early Maritime Polities in Southeast Asia”; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Archaeology of Funan in the Mekong River Delta: the Oc Eo Culture of Vietnam”, in Arts of Ancient Vietnam: From River Plain to Open Sea, ed. N. Tingley (New York/Houston: Asia Society, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Yale University Press, 2009), 100-118.

37

David W. Sanderson, Paul Bishop and Miriam Stark, “Luminescence dating of anthropogenically reset canal sediments from Angkor Borei, Mekong Delta, Cambodia,” Quaternary Science Review 22 (2003): 1111-1121; Eric Bourdonneau, “Réhabiliter le Funan: Óc Eo ou la première Angkor,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 94 (2007): 111-157; Manguin, “The Archaeology of Funan in the Mekong River Delta: the Oc Eo Culture of Vietnam”, 100-118.

38

Oliver Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of Sri Vijaya (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967), 197-228.

39

Hermann Kulke, “’Kadātuan Śrīvijaya’: Empire or Kraton of Śrīvijaya? A Reassessment of the Epigraphical Evidence,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 80, no. 1 (1993): 159-180.

40

Lucas Partanda Koestoro, Pierre-Yves Manguin, and Soeroso, “Kota Kapur (Bangka, Indonesia): A Pre-Sriwijayan site reascertained,” in Southeast Asian Archaeology 1994, ed. P.-Y. Manguin (Hull: University of Hull, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1998), 61-81; Agustijanto Indradjaja, “The Pre-Srivijaya Period on the Eastern Coast of Sumatra: Preliminary Research at the Air Sugihan Site,” in Connecting Empires and States, eds. M.L. Tjoa-Bonatz, A. Reinecke, and D. Bonatz (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2012), 32-42; Fadhlan S. Intan, Air Sugihan: Jejak Sungai Lama di Lahan Basah (Yogyakarta: Penerbit Ombak, 2017); Pierre-Yves Manguin, “At the origins of Sriwijaya: The emergence of state and city in southeast Sumatra,” in State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-modern South and Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study of Asian Society, eds. Noboru Karashima and Masashi Hirosue (Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, 2017), 89-114; Nurhadi Rangkuti and Mohammad Ruly Fauzi, “Archaeological evidence from Purwo Agung site (Karang Agung Tengah): A new perspective on Pre-Srivijayan settlement in the coastal area of South Sumatra,” Archaeological Research in Asia 17 (2019): 193-203.

41

Calò et al, “Sembiran and Pacung: a strategic crossroads for early trans-Asiatic exchange.”; Ambra Calò et al, “Reconstruction of the late first millennium AD harbor site of Sembiran and analysis of its tradeware,” The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 17, no. 1 (2020): 1-18; Agustijanto

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Indradjaya et al, “Note on two pre-Mataram sites recently discovered near Weleri, north Central Java, Indonesia,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 105 (2019): 1-76. 42

Pierre Dupont, La statuaire pré-angkorienne (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1955); Jean Boisselier, “Le Visnu de Tjibuaja (Java occidental) et la statuaire du Sud-Est asiatique,” Artibus Asiae 22, no. 3 (1959): 210-226.

43

Stanley J. O’Connor, Hindu Gods of Peninsular Thailand (Ascona: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 1972).

44

Nadine Dalsheimer and Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Viṣṇu mitrés et réseaux marchands en Asie du SudEst: nouvelles données archéologiques sur le Ier millénaire apr. J.-C,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 85 (1998): 87-123; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The transmission of Vaiṣṇavism across the Bay of Bengal: Trade networks and state formation in early historic Southeast Asia,” in Transfer, Exchange and Human Movement across the Indian Ocean World, ed. A. Schottenhammer (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2019), 51-68; Paul A. Lavy, “As in Heaven, So on Earth: The Politics of Viṣṇu, Śiva and Harihara Images in Preangkorian Khmer Civilisation,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2003): 21-39; Lavy, “Conch-on-hip Images in Peninsular Thailand and Early Vaiṣṇava Sculpture in Southeast Asia”; Paul A. Lavy, “Early Vaiṣṇava Sculpture in Southeast Asia and the Question of Pallava Influence,” in Across the South of Asia: A Volume in Honour of Professor Robert L. Brown, eds. Robert DeCaroli and Paul A. Lavy (Delhi: DK PrintWorld, 2019), 213-249.

45

Himanshu Prabha Ray, The winds of change: Buddhism and the maritime links of Early South Asia. (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994); Manguin, “The transmission of Vaiṣṇavism across the Bay of Bengal.”

46

B. Schrieke, “Javanen als zee- en handelsvolk,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 58 (1919): 424-428; and Nicolaas J. Krom, Hindoe-Javaansche Geschiedenis (s’Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 2nd edition, 1931), both writing about ancient Java.

47

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Austronesian Shipping in the Indian Ocean: From Outrigger Boats to Trading Ships,” in Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World, ed. G. Campbell (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 51-76.

48

Jacob C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1955), 98-99, n. 40.

49

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Southeast Asian Ship: An Historical Approach,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11, no. 2 (1980): 266-276; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Southeast Asian shipping in the Indian Ocean during the 1st millennium AD,” in Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean, eds. H.P. Ray and J.-F. Salles (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996), 181-198; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Ships and Shipping in Southeast Asia,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

50

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The vanishing jong: Insular Southeast Asian fleets in war and trade (15th-17th centuries),” in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief, ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 197-213.

51

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Sewn Boats of Southeast Asia: the stitched-plank and lashed-lug tradition,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 48, no. 2, (2019): 400-415.

52

Horst Hubertus Liebner, The Siren of Cirebon: A Tenth-Century Trading Vessel Lost in the Java Sea (PhD. diss., University of Leeds, 2014).

53

Kulke, “‘Kadātuan Śrīvijaya.”

54

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Shipmasters of Insular Southeast Asia: Seafarers and Entrepreneurs.” Paper presented at the AAS Annual Conference, Seattle, 2016.

55

Emmanuel Arbabe, La politique des Gaulois: Vie politique et institutions en Gaule chevelue (IIe siècle avant notre ère-70) (Paris: Éditions de La Sorbonne, 2018).

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56

Romila Thapar, Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

57

Sunil Gupta, “The Bay of Bengal interaction sphere (1000 BC – AD 500),” Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 25 (2005): 21-30.

58

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Introduction,” in Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, eds. P.-Y. Manguin, A. Mani and G. Wade (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), xiii-xxxi.

CHAPTER 5

Contacts, Cosmopoleis, Colonial Legacies: Interconnected Language Histories Tom Hoogervorst

Abstract The linguistic landscapes of Monsoon Asia have been connected for millennia. One notable example of language contact is the elite adoption of Sanskrit in the first centuries CE, accompanied by processes of cultural, epigraphic, and religious convergence. Other languages, such as Pali, Tamil, Malay, Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, played important roles too. Speech communities continued to influence each other under European colonialism and these contact legacies still inform post-colonial language policies across the region. Analytically, premodern networks have often been examined through the idea of a cosmopolis. Historical linguistics and transregional philology can add further substance to our understanding of Monsoon Asia and its prolonged interconnections, providing a much-needed counterweight to hypernationalism and disingenuous ethnoreligious identity claims.

Keywords: language history; Indian Ocean; inter-ethnic contact; cosmopolis

Language, Area Studies, Monsoon Asia The history of the region defined in this volume as “Monsoon Asia” and by others as “Southern Asia” took shape over two millennia of interethnic contact. This chapter aims to survey the linguistic consequences of these interactions and illustrate how language can help us reconstruct and understand the nature of historical encounters between different communities. As both South and Southeast Asia have been approached as separate analytical units in most twentieth-century Area Studies departments, examining their interconnected linguistic landscapes comes with benefits as well as challenges. This chapter explores the relevance of Monsoon Asia from the perspective of language history. It begins by tracing the adoption across much of South and Southeast Asia of Sanskrit as a vehicle of cosmopolitan thought, discussing some of the models proposed for this remarkable socio-political development. Other link-languages, such as Arabic, Persian, and Malay, are discussed as well. Attention is then given to the more mundane dimensions of contact across

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the Bay of Bengal, including trade, technological transfer, and maritime networks. Historical linguistics, a field that examines the development of and contacts between languages through time, can add texture and detail to these interactions between South and Southeast Asia. Under European colonialism, sizeable and often forced migrations across Monsoon Asia (and beyond) gave rise to new instances of language contact. These historically significant events continue to inform how communities in the region position themselves and their languages in relation to others. From the perspective of linguistics, some of the world’s regions – as they are defined in newspapers, atlases, and universities – make more sense than others. The regionality of the Middle East is almost intuitive, since it is largely shaped, signified and sounded by Arabic. In Latin America, Spanish and Portuguese fulfil a similar role. It would be a stretch, however, to assign such ubiquity to Sanskrit in the case of Monsoon Asia. This hypothetical cultural area also provides little conceptual value for the study of Austroasiatic or Tibeto-Burman languages, which are indeed spoken across Monsoon Asia, but also in China. In fact, one of the few linguists who uses the term Monsoon Asia incorporates coastal China in it.1 That being said, the more conventional regions comprising Monsoon Asia – South Asia and Southeast Asia – make equally little sense for scholars of language, unless they focus on areal linguistic features.2 Needless to add, research on language still benefits greatly from the institutional support and monetary resources obtained from Area Studies departments, however they choose to compartmentalize the world at a given juncture in time. As a concept, Monsoon Asia holds most promise in the realm of epigraphy. While perhaps not obvious to the uninitiated reader, the Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Javanese, and other pre-Islamic scripts of Southeast Asia share a common Indic ancestor and function in highly similar ways.3 They can be traced back to southern Brahmi scripts, currently still in use for Sinhala and South Indian languages. Southeast Asia’s epigraphic traditions additionally feature northern Brahmi and Nāgarī scripts,4 which are closely related to the North Indian, Tibetan and East Asian (Siddhaṁ) writing systems. For this reason, one might conclude that Monsoon Asia offers the philologist little analytical improvement over the fast-aged idea of “Greater India,” given that the former excludes East Asia, the Himalayas, and the Silk Roads. More insightful observations, at least from the perspective of historical linguistics, come to the surface in the realm of interethnic contact. The history of Monsoon Asia took shape along the axis of linguistic cross-fertilization. While the Indian Ocean in its entirety has never been united by a single language, its eastern portions were connected by a variety of tongues that expanded beyond their homeland. In tandem with processes of language contact, communities on both sides of the Bay of Bengal experienced profound transformations caused by long-distance trade, technological transfer, and the adoption by local elites of various Hindu doctrines,

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Figure 5.1: Languages mentioned in this chapter.

Buddhism, and/or Islam. The first religion relied on Sanskrit as its chief liturgical language, the second on Sanskrit and Pali, and the third on Arabic. These new worldviews came with copious terms for legal, political, scholarly, literary, and aesthetic concepts. The reconfigurations they introduced have often been analyzed through the framework of the “cosmopolis,” on which we will read more below. Prior to tracing these legacies of contact, a few words are due on the specific questions this chapter aims to explore. What are the implications of two millennia of linguistic cross-pollination across the Bay of Bengal? What methods can cast a new light on these issues? Which parts of Monsoon Asia were pivotal in these histories? As regards the last question, it is a truism that cultural areas are not static. The Champā civilization, for instance, was once home to a deeply Indianized culture but its contacts with and conquest by Vietnam have drawn this locality away from Monsoon Asia and placed it firmly into the orbit of East Asia. Conversely, centuries of Hinduization contributed to the erasure of much of India’s tribal cultures, including those with East Asian affinities. In general, the linguistic connections across Monsoon Asia reflect overlapping processes of trade, migration, and expansion. This chapter first discusses the role of Sanskrit in classical times, including its adoption in parts of Southeast Asia. It then examines lesser studied processes of

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language contact, centering on literary as well as vernacular languages. Finally, it zooms in on the continuities and new formations of languages contact in colonial and post-colonial times.

Hierarchies of early language contact The first solid archaeological evidence for contacts across the Bay of Bengal comes from the second half of the first millennium BCE.5 One well-excavated burial site in present-day Thailand dated to the fourth century BCE contains numerous semi-precious beads and other prestige goods reflecting complex Indian technologies.6 By that time, the majority of Southeast Asian societies sustained themselves by small-scale hunting, foraging, and horticulture. Advances in agriculture, metallurgy, urbanization, seafaring, and commerce further characterized the region’s premodern history. It is relevant to point out that maritime and terrestrial networks between South, Southeast, and East Asia had been established long before the diffusion of artefacts associated with Hinduism and Buddhism. This is evidenced, for example, by similarities in burial practices, megaliths, beads, and pottery.7 Mounting archaeo­botanical evidence furthermore points to the exchange of banana cultivars, rice varieties, and other subsistence crops between these three regions.8 The early orientalists who wrote about Asia’s past had limited access to archaeological data. In Southeast Asia, they encountered traces of monumental architecture, religious art, and sophisticated epigraphy, different from yet reminiscent of what was found in India. Partly driven by the same notions of civilizational hierarchy that underpinned European imperialism more broadly, colonial-era scholars paid little attention to reciprocality in these ancient encounters between South and Southeast Asia. The lucrative exports of the latter region – such as tin, precious metals, forest luxuries, and maritime products – are notoriously difficult to detect and interpret archaeologically. As a result, early scholarship on South–Southeast Asia connections exhibits a bias towards “high culture”. It is also indicative that the Muslim period – which is a misnomer, as Hindu and Buddhist networks continued to be relevant – receives considerably less attention.9 Later scholars aimed to redress these externalist paradigms by prioritizing, as they called it, the “local genius” of Southeast Asia’s early civilizations. The resultant debates between autonomists, externalists, and advocates of a middle ground are ongoing. The pre-Islamic civilizations of South Asia, by contrast, are less commonly attributed to outside forces. The concept of transculturation provides a fruitful way to understand the adoption of Hindu and/or Buddhist “high culture” in South and Southeast Asia alike.10 It can also be applied in the realm of language. The adoption of Sanskrit across Monsoon Asia, for example, has been interpreted as part of a “Sanskrit cosmopolis”.

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Figure 5.2: Twelfth-century Khmer inscription in Angkor Wat. Photograph by Tom Hoogervorst.

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According to this idea, Sanskrit served from roughly the beginning of the first millennium as a cosmopolitan – and, therefore, supralocal – tool of proclamatory politics and cultural prestige across Southern Asia.11 To phrase the complex argument in concise terms, Sanskrit was the language of power as well as aesthetics – two qualities that hardly always travel together – from Afghanistan to Java. It was never the language of commerce or other practical activities, which relied on bilingual individuals, trade languages such as Malay, and presumably ephemeral pidgins. A secondary development, believed to have started near the end of the first millennium, was the process of “vernacularization,” the gradual and partial replacement of Sanskrit by local languages (as had happened with Latin in Europe). This process appears to reflect the emergence of regional identities. New literary languages, such as Tamil, Kannada, Khmer, and Javanese, were typically patronized by the same courts that had earlier adopted Sanskrit. These “cosmopolitan vernaculars,” as they are defined by Sheldon Pollock,12 drew extensively from the rich vocabulary and stylistic repertoire of Sanskrit. In effect, they had become polished-up “little Sanskrits”.13 For this reason, one may view the process of vernacularization as “literarization of the vernacular”.14 Well-known examples of literarized, hybrid languages include Sanskritized Javanese (Kawi) and Sanskritized Tamil (Maṇippiravāḷam), as well as Old Khmer (see Fig. 5.2). Arguably, such registers would not have been truly vernacular, as their use remained restricted to society’s learned elites. The “real” vernaculars spoken by the ancient sailors, traders, and pilgrims who crossed the Bay of Bengal, in both directions, have a more shadowy presence in broader discussions on Asia’s language history. The Malay language, which had become Sanskritized in courtly milieus, continued to function as a lingua franca and a vector of new words and concepts across Southeast Asia. Historical linguistics again offers relevant insights. Sound changes and semantic shifts reveal that Sanskrit vocabulary was promulgated as far westward as Madagascar and eastwards as the Philippines through the mediation of Malay speakers, even though the amount of words that made it this far was limited.15 The study of loanwords can also cast a light on Southeast Asian influence on South Asia, rather than the reverse. The lucrative export of spices and aromatic forest products, for instance, is amply reflected in the linguistic record. To give but two examples, the Malay word kemenyan – denoting benzoin, a tree resin found in Sumatra – spread westwards as Tamil kumañcāṉ and Dhivehi kumanzaani, whereas the Sanskrit term lavaṁga ‘clove’ reflects Malay (bunga) lawang.16 Such linguistic findings, which can often be quantified and verified, provide a useful framework beyond the cosmopolis to conceptualize the language history of Monsoon Asia.

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Cosmopolitanisms and beyond By virtue of its cosmopolitan nature, Sanskrit cannot help us to identify the specific parts of South Asia from which Indic culture entered Southeast Asia. Geographic proximity, monsoonal cycles, and the attestation of ancient ports make Bengal and the Coromandel Coast the most credible candidates. Their importance was indeed frequently insisted upon by advocates for and from these localities, such as H.C. Majumdar for Bengal and K.A. Nilakanta Sastri for the Coromandel Coast. The French Indologist George Cœdès eventually concluded that almost every part of India had contributed something to Southeast Asia.17 In terms of religious connections, Sri Lanka18 and Nepal19 are to be included as well. This multiplicity of regional influences substantiates the common argument that Southeast Asians were selective in accepting and rejecting elements from abroad. Indeed, they “regained in the process an entrepreneurial role in the adoption and adaptation of Indian concepts and constructions to pre-existing social and economic patterns, from scripts and learned languages to literary genres and motifs, from religious texts and discourses to associated art and architectural forms, and to state and urbanization models”.20 To trace the actual communities that created and sustained the Sanskrit cosmopolis, we must once again turn to historical linguistics and epigraphy. Inscriptions dating from the ninth to the eleventh century suggest that the Javanese distinguished several regions and their associated ethnicities: Klings, Sinhalese, Canarese, Malayalis, Chams, Mons, Khmers, and others.21 An analysis of lexical borrowing reveals the nature of these contacts and the domains of knowledge transfer. In the shadow of Sanskrit, an important and often overlooked role in the eastwards transmission of Indic concepts was played by the colloquial languages of North India, typically classified under the umbrella term “Prakrit” or, more correctly, Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA). Whereas Sanskrit was predominantly reserved for “high culture,” vernacular influence shows up in the more practical domains of manufactured items and trade goods, but also in a number of political, religious, and cultural terms.22 Consider, for example, Malay telaga “water basin,” peterana “a seat near the throne,” and upeti “tribute” from MIA talāga, pattharaṇa, and uppatti rather than their Sanskrit equivalents. The relevance of these transmissions to the region’s interconnected language history is self-explanatory. Lexical influence from Tamil was equally ancient and widespread. This South Indian language contributed numerous loanwords to Malay, Javanese, and various other Southeast Asian languages.23 The antiquity of South Indian influence is confirmed by archaeological findings in Thailand, which exhibit potsherds dated to the second century CE inscribed with Tamil-Brahmi writing.24 In later centuries, Tamil inscriptions show up in several parts of Southeast Asia, confirming the prolonged and substantial historical presence of South Indian merchants across the region.25

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The Batak-speaking areas of northern Sumatra in particular exhibit archaeological and epigraphic evidence pointing to the presence of Tamil merchant guilds in that area from the ninth to the fourteenth century. These networks consisted of South Indian, Sri Lankan, Hindu, and Buddhist members.26 The Batak languages indeed exhibit several loanwords from Sanskrit and Tamil,27 although more scholarship is desirable. This linguistic influence was apparently not one-directional, as loanwords from North Sumatra persisted in the late nineteenth-century merchant slang of South India and Jaffna.28 As one of the few places in South Asia where Buddhism remained dominant, Sri Lanka has long been central to the Theravāda networks across the Bay of Bengal (see Blackburn, this volume). From the mid-first century CE, the island maintained spiritual and commercial relations with the Mon-speaking kingdoms of present-day Myanmar (Rāmañña) and Thailand (Dvāravatī), with Maritime Southeast Asia, and later with Bagan. Pali, an Indo-Aryan language related to Sanskrit, served as their language of scholarly communication. In addition to the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” and the “Arabic cosmopolis” (see below), we can therefore speak of a “Pali cosmopolis” among the Theravāda Buddhists of Monsoon Asia.29 As was the case with Sanskrit, scholars from different linguistic backgrounds were able to correspond in Pali. In some schools, it was also used as a medium of instruction.30 It is less certain that this literary language served as a common vehicle for oral communication, given that the phonological systems of Thai, Burmese, Sinhala, and Khmer are so dissimilar that each group had a distinctive Pali intonation.31 It would be fair to assume that Southeast Asia’s Indic languages were often as unrecognizable to the uninitiated ear as the Latin of an Oxford don. Some pre-colonial language contact between Malay and Sinhala is believed to have taken place as well, yet the evidence for this remains scanty.32 The spread of Islam partly took place on the coattails of pre-existing networks forged by Hindus and Buddhists. Like Sanskrit and Pali, the Arabic language has universal pretensions. This erudite language spurred Arabized literary registers, and the associated scripts, across Monsoon Asia. Examples include Arwī among the Tamilspeaking Muslims and Jāwī in the Malay World (see Fig. 5.3). Much like the Sanskrit cosmopolis, the “Arabic cosmopolis” constituted a trans-regional ecumene in which texts and ideas circulated across Islamized communities.33 The adoption of Islam differed from earlier cosmopolitanizing processes in its geographical scope. Islamic civilization, and the Arabic language in which much of it was articulated, neither originated from Monsoon Asia nor was restricted to it. The external origins of Islam were beyond anyone’s doubt and claims of Arabic ancestry in fact became a common part of genealogical hierarchies. One could argue that Islamization and the resultant contacts between Muslim communities laid the foundations of distinct South Asian (Hindī) and Southeast Asian (Jāwī) regional identities. While these geographical

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Figure 5.3: Page of a manuscript kept at Leiden University Library (Or. 7368), partly in Arwī and partly in Jāwī.

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ascriptions (nisab) were defined by outsiders, they were quickly adopted by people from the respective regions upon entering more globalized Islamic networks.34 In several parts of Asia, the introduction and spread of Islam took place through Persian agency, so that one may also speak of a “Persian cosmopolis”. The Classical Persian language, which developed in the tenth century, was adopted in the administration of the Ṣafawīds and later the Mughals. It was also a language of education across the Ottoman Empire. The new cosmopolis so forged, too, extended beyond the geographical boundaries of Monsoon Asia, into Central Asia to the north and the Balkans to the west. In large parts of the Indian Ocean World as well as the Silk Roads, Persian notions of statecraft, prestige goods, and orders of Sufism (ṭarīqah) became important parts of life for those in power.35 These parts of Asia also converged in terms of cuisine and sartorial preferences.36 While the influence of Persian on Hindustani – the prestigious literary language of North Indian Muslims – is well known, the former also contributed substantially to Classical Malay.37 Persian loanwords such as bandar “port,” chādar “veil,” dīwān “council of state,” nākhudā “captain,” and saudāgar “merchant” have been adopted into Hindustani, Malay, and numerous other languages of the Indian Ocean. The connections between Persianate Muslims from different parts of Monsoon Asia persisted into colonial times. In the late nineteenth century and possibly earlier, Hindustani-speaking cultural entrepreneurs played a crucial role in the innovation of Malay literature and theatre, to name only one example.38 At this point we have encountered multiple cosmopoleis: Sanskrit, Pali, Arabic, and Persian. The historical processes that culminated in their establishment, and the ethnolinguistic identities of those who spearheaded it, typically receive little attention in the existing literature. It might be safest to envision a space in which Brahmins, Sufis, monks, merchant-traders, scholars, and pilgrims of various origins – predominantly but not exclusively male – travelled in multiple directions. We may also recall that grand, cosmopolitan narratives typically pay little attention to regions on the periphery. The Maldives, for example, historically constituted a microcosmos of Monsoon Asia and its diverse peoples, languages, and religions, yet this archipelago is typically only mentioned in passing, if at all. As an analytical tool, the cosmopolis is almost by definition unequipped to inform us about non-textual connections. If anything, it is the vernacular domain that contains the most insightful clues about the protagonists of these contact histories. As mentioned previously, cosmopolitan languages are supralocal and therefore of limited value to trace the mobilities and regional origins of their speakers, unless they pronounced them “incorrectly”. It is historically significant, for example, that a small set of Arabic loanwords in Malay exhibit characteristically South Indian pronunciations.39 These and other linguistic inferences add detail to the historiography of Islam in Southeast Asia.

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The importance of maritime links notwithstanding, it should also be kept in mind that a degree of interethnic and linguistic contact happened overland. The introduction of Buddhism into Arakan during the mid-first century CE presumably took place directly from neighboring Bengal. The Daic communities originally inhabiting Yunnan were pushed south by Mongol invasions; as a result, the names Assam (an Indian state), Siam (an archaic name for Thailand), Shan (an ethnic group in Myanmar), and Ahom (a Daic dynasty in Assam) are all cognate.40 Language contact between Mon, Khmer, and Thai was likewise a terrestrial affair. Needless to add, such linguistic legacies of movement are best understood when they are corroborated by written evidence. Bangladesh and north-eastern India, for example, experienced various incursions of Arakanese armies in the early-modern period. These historically documented events partly illuminate the area’s present-day linguistic landscape.

The linguistic connections of Empire European expansionism revolutionized the cultural as well as linguistic histories of Asia and elsewhere. The Portuguese, and in their wake the Dutch, introduced a considerable number of commodities and concepts to the region’s coastal communities. Examples of Portuguese loanwords in numerous languages of Monsoon Asia include armário “cupboard,” bandeira “flag,” couve “cabbage,” leilão “auction,” and pão “bread,”41 whereas Dutch introductions include contract, duit “a kind of coin,” kakhuis “lavatory,” koffie “coffee,” and rantsoen “ration.”42 Portuguese itself underwent profound influence from coastal Indian languages such as Malayalam, whereas Dutch adopted numerous loanwords from Malay and Javanese for things previously unknown in Europe. While Persian continued to be the administrative language of Mughal South Asia and Malay the lingua franca of much of Southeast Asia, Creole Portuguese quickly became the preferred vernacular of enslaved populations in both regions. Several strategic ports had fallen into Portuguese hands at the beginning of the sixteenth century, including Goa in 1510 and Melaka in 1511. The Dutch East India Company (VOC), which by the early seventeenth century had driven out the Portuguese from many of their strongholds across the Indian Ocean, thus ended up incorporating an enslaved population of Lusophone Catholics. As a result, the Portuguese language was firmly established in newly founded Dutch cities, such as Batavia, where a Portuguese-descended community maintained it into the nineteenth century.43 As the Dutch incursions into the Indonesian Archipelago frequently stumbled upon resistance, a number of prominent anti-VOC leaders were exiled to Sri Lanka or Cape Town.44 While Sri Lanka had been in contact with Southeast Asia

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from pre-colonial times, Cape Town saw its first Muslim community as a result of this uprooting. The city’s enslaved and exiled people of diverse Southeast Asian origins came to be categorized under the umbrella term “Malays”. Many indeed spoke a form of Malay as their mother tongue, although other Southeast Asian languages such as Javanese and Bugis must have been in use as well. In addition, intermarriage with South Asian Muslims was common in Cape Town as well as Sri Lanka. As a result, Sri Lankan Malay underwent profound influence from the island’s Muslim Tamil variety known as Shonam (Cōṉam).45 Malay, in turn, donated various terms to Sri Lanka’s languages, such as Sinhala dodol “k.o. sweetmeat,” dūriyan “k.o. fruit,” rambutan “k.o. fruit,” sambōla “k.o. spicy sauce,” and saroma “k.o. garment (sarong)”.46 Cape Town, situated at the south-western tip of Africa, could be seen as an extension of Monsoon Asia beyond its original geography. While Sri Lanka remained connected to Southeast Asia, in Cape Town the Malay language and culture proved harder to preserve intergenerationally. Nevertheless, South and Southeast Asian influences were preserved in the realms of religion and cuisine. A creole language historically known as Cape Dutch gradually replaced Malay and Creole Portuguese as the lingua franca of South Africa’s enslaved- and exiled-descended populations, but not before both languages left their lexical and grammatical imprint on this new language, which would later develop into Afrikaans.47 The British gradually became Asia’s dominant colonial power from the early nineteenth century. This episode of history added another layer of South Asian influence to Southeast Asia’s already complex linguistic patchwork. In the wake of Britain’s expansion, Indian soldiers (sepoys) introduced Shi’itic religious practices and Hindustani loanwords into some regions under British control, such as Sumatra’s western coast and the Straits Settlements.48 In the second half of the nineteenth century, large numbers of indentured laborers from India were shipped to different parts of Southeast Asia to work on plantations and to a lesser degree in mines and construction projects.49 Their origins were diverse, but the majority came from Tamil-speaking backgrounds, while a smaller part spoke Telugu, Malayalam, or other Indian languages. Labourers from India contributed significantly to Burma’s agricultural development, yet most Indian-descended Burmese were denied citizenship after the country’s independence and suffered forced expulsion in 1962. In Malaysia and Singapore, on the other hand, “Indians” – a colonially rooted umbrella term for various South Asian groups, comparable to “Malays” – became part of the national fabric and now form the third largest demographic group in both countries, with Tamil being one of Singapore’s four official languages alongside English, Mandarin, and Malay. While not an official language, Bengali is also widely heard in Singapore due to the influx of high-skilled professionals and manual laborers from India and Bangladesh (see Fig. 5.4).

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Figure 5.4: Bilingual (Bengali and Tamil) advertisement in Singapore. Photograph by Tom Hoogervorst.

After the collapse of European colonialism, various South and Southeast Asian nation-states used language to pay tribute to their classical past. Indonesia’s language planners actively drew from Sanskrit to enrich the vocabulary of standard Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), the country’s Malay-derived official language. To some extent, these were transregional processes. In the 1950s, Indonesia’s state philosophy known as Panca Sila “Five Principles” (Sanskrit: pañcaśīla) lent its name to the Sino-Indian Panchsheel Treaty, which governed the bilateral relations between China and India. More recently, Jakarta’s mass rapid transit system has been named Ratangga (Sanskrit: rathāṅga “part of a chariot”), whereas the presidential campaign of Jokowi revolved around Nawa Cita “Nine Expectations” (Sanskrit: navā + citta). Around the same time, the then Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte proposed to rename the nation to Maharlika (Sanskrit: maharddhika “possessed of great prosperity”). Hindi and other South Asian languages went through similar phases of Sanskrit-inspired lexification, yielding neologisms such as ākāśvāṇī “radio station,” dūrdarśan “television,” and vātānukūlan “air-conditioning,” whereas Urdu relied on Perso-Arabic vocabulary for this purpose: jahāz “jet aircraft,” ṣanʻat “industry,” and taʻlīmī “academic.” In mainland Southeast Asia, this role was typically played by Pali. Consider, for example, such Khmer coinages as nitebandet “jurist” (Pali: nīti + paṇḍita), sekkhasala “workshop” (Pali: sikkhā + sālā), and tesachar “tourism” (Pali: desa + caraṇa). To my knowledge, these processes of linguistic nation-building

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have never been examined comparatively, even though the underlying practices and motivations were similar, albeit mostly uncoordinated, across nation-states.

Continued importance The study of language history in Monsoon Asia – that is, South and Southeast Asia combined – comes with a number of new perspectives and analytical benefits. It is no accident that Southeast Asia’s ancient civilizations and their material as well as textual heritage were predominantly studied at Europe’s Indology departments. Even today, the field features numerous scholars with a footing in Sanskrit. Whether the academic successors of the old Indologists are willing to relabel themselves as scholars of “Monsoon Asia” remains to be seen, although at least one prominent scholar has recently done so.50 Methodologically, the region’s overlapping linguistic cosmopoleis and other contact networks are best approached as parts of a singular phenomenon. People across Monsoon Asia have sought to define themselves through a largely shared repertoire of linguistic resources, ranging from unwritten trade vernaculars to prestigious carriers of politics and aesthetics, and from European-derived creoles to (re-)Sanskritized national languages. Philological skills are as crucial as ever to make sense of the region’s connected histories. This is especially so since efforts to understand history through non-Western sources are by definition exercises in studying antiquated languages.51 In this regard, one hopes that scholars of and from Monsoon Asia remain as connected as many of their predecessors arguably were. Knowledge of past connections and commonalities across Monsoon Asia acquires renewed importance at a time when multiple groups are asserting exaggerated or fictitious claims to historical precedence within particular countries. The greatest challenge of studying Monsoon Asia, linguistically or otherwise, will be to deal with the toxic twosome of nationalism and religious exclusionism. This is particularly important since competing Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim supremacists rely on almost exactly the same methods to rewrite history to their advantage. Language and (false) etymologies often prove central to communal claims of antiquity or indigeneity in a given region at the cost of others. On typological grounds, antihistorical convictions that, say, Java’s Borobudur or certain wayang personae go back to Islamic prototypes differ but slightly from those that India’s Taj Mahal was originally a Śaivist shrine. There is something nefarious to such ostensibly innocent views, which can be found in printed publications and social media alike. Unlike the academically rigorous indigenism of late-colonial times – such as the Greater India Movement – much of the “fake” history and historical linguistics we see today chiefly provide crude narrative fodder for ethnoreligious supremacy.

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This leads me to make one final observation, which only tangentially relates to language history. The most bitterly contested fault line between what is traditionally regarded as South Asia and Southeast Asia is the homeland of Myanmar’s prosecuted Rohingya minority. Although their language history has never been subjected to a thorough, monograph-length study, much of the violence committed against this group is fuelled by a government-sponsored narrative that centres on their ethnolinguistic otherness.52 As such, the Rohingya have become the latest victims of attempts by nation-states and organized religion to erase the historical legacies of cultural, linguistic, and racial diversity intrinsic to the wider region they inhabit. One challenge for scholars of Monsoon Asia, then, is to provide historical depth and context to these multi-dimensional conflicts, along with a range of other real-life problems that affect this heavily populated part of the world.

Notes 1

Umberto Ansaldo, Contact Languages: Ecology and Evolution in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

2

Murray B. Emenau, Language and linguistic arena: Essays by Murray B. Emenau, selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1980); N. J. Enfield, “Areal linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34, no. 1 (2005): 181-206; Antoinette Schapper, “Wallacea: A linguistic arena,” Archipel 90 (2015): 99-152.

3

Daniel Perret, Writing for Eternity: A Survey of Epigraphy in Southeast Asia (Paris: École française d’Extrême Orient, 2018); see fig. 5.1. on the languages discussed in this chapter.

4

Arlo Griffiths and D. Chritian Lammerts, “Epigraphy: Southeast Asia,” in Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Buddhism, eds. Jonathan A. Silk, Oskar von Hinüber and Vincent Eltschinger (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 988-1009.

5

See Pierre-Yves Manguin, “New Paradigms for the Early Relationship between South and Southeast Asia: The Contribution of Southeast Asian Archaeology,” in this volume.

6

Ian C. Glover and Bérénice Bellina, “Ban Don Ta Phet and Khao Sam Kaeo: The earliest Indian Contacts re-assessed,” in Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on cross-cultural exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani and Geoff Wade (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), 17-45.

7

Sunil Gupta, “The Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere (1000 BC – AD 500),” Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 25 (2007): 21-30.

8

Mark Donohue and Tim Denham, “Banana (Musa spp.) Domestication in the Asia-Pacific Region: Linguistic and Archaeobotanical Perspectives,” Ethnobotany Research & Applications 7 (2009): 293-332; Cristina Castillo and Dorian Q. Fuller, “Still too fragmentary and dependent on chance? Advances in the study of early Southeast Asian Archaeobotany,” in 50 years of archaeology in Southeast Asia: Essays in honour of Ian Glover, eds. B. Bellina et al. (Bangkok: River Books, 2010), 93-111.

9

Daud Ali, “Connected histories? Regional historiography and theories of cultural contact between early South and Southeast Asia,” in Islamic Connections: Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia, eds. R. Michael Feener and Teren Sevea (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009), 1-24.

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10

Hermann Kulke, “Indian colonies, Indianization or cultural convergence? Reflections on the ­changing image of India’s role in South-East Asia,” in Onderzoek in Zuidoost-Azië: Agenda’s voor de jaren negentig, ed. H. Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, 1990), 8-32.

11

Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the gods in the world of men: Sanskrit, culture and power in premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

12

Pollock, The language of the gods in the world of men, 26.

13

Herman Tieken, “The process of vernacularization in South Asia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 51 (2008): 379.

14

Emmanuel Francis, “Praising the King in Tamil during the Pallava period,” in Bilingual discourse and cross-cultural fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in medieval India, eds. Whitney Cox and Vincenzo Vergiani (Pondicherry: Institut français de Pondichérry, 2013), 359-409; cf. Andrew Olett, Language of the snakes: Prakit, Sanskrit, and the language order of premodern India (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).

15

Alexander Adelaar, “Malay and Javanese loanwords in Malagasy, Tagalog and Siraya (Formosa),” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 150, no. 1 (1994): 50-65.

16

Tom G. Hoogervorst, Southeast Asia and the ancient Indian Ocean World (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013), 107, 114.

17

George Cœdès, Les états Hinduisés d’Indochine et d’Indonésie (Paris: De Boccard, 1948).

18

J. G. de Casparis, “New evidence on cultural relations between Java and Ceylon in ancient times,” Artibus Asiae 24, no. 3/4 (1961): 241-243 and 245-248; Jeffrey Roger Sundberg, “The wilderness monks of the Abhayagirivihāra and the origins of Sino-Javanese esoteric Buddhism,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 160, no. 1 (2004): 95-123.

19

Hudaya Kandahjaya, “A study on the origin and significance of Borobudur” (PhD diss., Graduate Theological Union, 2004), 68-9; Arlo Griffiths, “Inscriptions of Sumatra: III. The Padang Lawas corpus studied along with inscriptions from Sorik Merapi (North Sumatra) and from Muara Takus (Riau),” in History of Padang Lawas, North Sumatra, II, ed. Daniel Perret (Paris: Association Archipel, 2014), 242-243.

20

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Introduction,” in Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on cross-cultural exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (Singapore, ISEAS, 2011), xviii.

21

Jan Wisseman Christie, “Asian sea trade between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and its impact on the states of Java and Bali,” in Archaeology of seafaring: The Indian Ocean in the ancient period, ed. Himanshu Prabha (Delhi: Pragati Publications, 1999), 246-247.

22

J. G. de Casparis, “Some notes on words of ‘Middle-Indian’ origin in Indonesian languages (especially Old Javanese),” in Papers from the III European Colloquium on Malay and Indonesian Studies, Naples, 2-4 June, 1981, eds. Luigi Santa Maria, Faizah Soenoto Rivai and Antonio Sorrentino (Naples: Institute Universitario Orientale, 1988), 51-69; Tom G. Hoogervorst, “The role of “Prakrit” in Maritime Southeast Asia through 101 etymologies,” in Spirits and ships: Cultural transfers in early Monsoon Asia, eds. Andrea Acri, Roger Blench and Alexandra Landmann (Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2017), 375-440.

23

Tom G. Hoogervorst, “Detecting pre-modern lexical influence from South India in Maritime Southeast Asia,” Archipel 89 (2015): 63-93; Tom G. Hoogervorst, “Linguistic Intersections between Malay and Tamil,” in Sojourners to Settlers: Tamils in Southeast Asia and Singapore, Volume 1, eds. Arun Mahizhnan and Nalina Gopal (Singapore: Indian Heritage Centre and Institute of Policy Studies, 2019), 55-68.

24

Boonyarit Chaisuwan, “Early contacts between India and the Andaman Coast in Thailand from the second century BCE to eleventh century CE,” in Early interactions between South and Southeast

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Asia: Reflections on cross-cultural exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), 83-112. 25

Jan Wisseman Christie, “The medieval Tamil-language inscriptions in Southeast Asia and China,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29 (1998): 239-68; N. Karashima and Y. Subbarayalu, “Ancient and medieval Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions relating to Southeast Asia and China,” in Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola naval expeditions to Southeast Asia, eds. H. Kulke, K. Kesavapany and V. Sakhuja (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009), 271-91.

26

E. Edwards McKinnon, “Continuity and change in South Indian involvement in northern Sumatra: The inferences of archaeological evidence from Kota Cina and Lamreh,” in Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on cross-cultural exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), 137-60; Daniel Perret and Heddy Surachman, “South Asia and the Tapanuli area (North-West Sumatra): Ninth-fourteenth centuries CE,” in Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on cross-cultural exchange, eds. PierreYves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), 161-75.

27

J. Tideman, Hindoe-invloed in noordelijk Batakland (Amsterdam: De Valk, 1936); Harry Parkin, Batak fruit of Hindu thought (Madras: The Christian Literature Society, 1978).

28

Hoogervorst, Southeast Asia and the ancient Indian Ocean World, 18, 27-28.

29

Tilman Frasch, “A Pāli cosmopolis? Sri Lanka and the Theravāda Buddhist ecumene, c. 500– 1500,” in Sri Lanka at the crossroads of history, eds. Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern (London: UCL Press, 2017), 66-76.

30

Paulin G. Djité, The Language Difference: Language and Development in the Greater Mekong SubRegion (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2011), 22.

31

Gustaaf Houtman, “Traditions of Buddhist practice in Burma,” (Phd. diss., School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London, 1990), 9.

32

J. G. de Casparis, “Senarat Paranavitana Memorial Lecture: Sri Lanka and Maritime Southeast Asia in ancient times,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka (new series), 41 (1996): 238; Hoogervorst, Southeast Asia and the ancient Indian Ocean World, 34-36.

33

Ronit Ricci, Islam translated: Literature, conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011) and “Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia,” in this volume.

34

Michael Laffan, “Finding Java: Muslim nomenclature of insular Southeast Asia from Śrîvijaya to Snouck Hurgronje” (Singapore: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 2005; ARI Working Paper 52); Mahmood Kooria, Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi’i Texts across the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

35

Tomáš Petrů, “‘Lands below the Winds’ as part of the Persian Cosmopolis: An inquiry into linguistic and cultural borrowings from the Persianate societies in the Malay World,” Moussons 27, no. 1 (2016): 147-161; Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

36

Lesley Pullen, Patterned Splendour: Textiles Presented on Javanese Metal and Stone Sculptures, Eighth to Fifteenth Century (Singapore: NUS Press, 2021).

37

Allesandro Bausani, “Note sui vocaboli persiani in malese-indonesiano,” Annali Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 14 (1966): 1-32.

38

Vladimir Braginsky and Anna Suvorova, “New wave of Indian inspiration: Translations from Urdu in Malay traditional literature and theatre,” Indonesia and the Malay World 36, no. 104 (2008): 115-53.

39

Torsten Tschacher, “Tamil,” in Encyclopedia of Arabic language and linguistics, Volume IV: Q-Z, ed. Kees Versteegh (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 433-36.

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40

George van Driem, Languages of the Himalayas: An ethnolinguistic handbook of the Greater Himalayan region containing an introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of language (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 329.

41

Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado, Portuguese vocables in Asiatic languages (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1936).

42

Nicoline van der Sijs, Nederlandse woorden wereldwijd (Den Haag: Sdu, 2010).

43

Philippe Maurer, The former Portuguese creole of Batavia and Tugu (Indonesia) (London and Colombo: Battlebridge Publications, 2001).

44

Ronit Ricci, ed., Exile in colonial Asia: Kings, convicts, commemoration (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016).

45

Peter Slomanson, “Known, inferable, and discoverable in Sri Lankan Malay research,” in The genesis of Sri Lanka Malay: A case of extreme language contact, ed. Sebastian Nordhoff (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 85-119.

46

P. B. Sannasgala, A study of Sinhala vocables of Dutch origin: With appendices of Portuguese and Malay/Javanese borrowings (Colombo: The Netherlands-Alumni Association of Sri Lanka, 1976), 96-107; Hoogervorst, Southeast Asia and the ancient Indian Ocean World, 35.

47

Hans den Besten, “The slaves’ languages in the Dutch Cape colony and Afrikaans vir,” Linguistics 38, no. 5 (2000): 949-971.

48

Ph.S. van Ronkel, “Nadere gegevens omtrent het Hasan-Hoesain feest,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 56 (1914): 334-44; David Lunn and Julia Byl, “One story ends and another begins: Reading the Syair Tabut of Encik Ali,” Indonesia and the Malay World 45, no. 133 (2017): 391-420.

49

See Sunil Amrith, “Human Traffic: Asian Migration in the Age of Steam,” in this volume.

50

Andrea Acri, Roger Blench and Alexandra Landmann, eds., Spirits and ships: Cultural transfers in early Monsoon Asia (Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2017); Anrea Acri, “Revisiting the Monsoon Asia Idea: Old Problems and New Directions,” in this volume.

51

Cf. Velchuru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800 (New York: Other Press, 2003).

52

Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanrnar’s hidden genocide (London: Hurst, 2016).

CHAPTER 6

Indianization Reconsidered: India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia Hermann Kulke

Abstract

Indian influence is an essential part of Southeast Asia’s cultural history, but it has also been a controversial one. During the colonial period, some Indian nationalists came to see Southeast Asian cultures as products of an ancient ‘colonization’ by Indians. As the countries of South and Southeast Asia obtained their independence, the idea of immigrant Indian rulers was largely abandoned in favour of Brahmanical cultural influences. Perspectives, however, remained Indocentric, and the term ‘Indianization’ was widely and uncritically used. Then in the late twentieth century, new archaeological research on the indigenous foundations of Southeast Asia’s early states paved the way for a new paradigm featuring a progressive convergence of cultural developments on both sides of the Bay of Bengal. Both in South India and in Southeast Asia, according to this model, the main attraction of Hinduism and other cultural borrowings from the north of India was their potential for legitimizing the rise of emerging local chiefs to the status of kings.

Keywords: Southeast Asia, Indianization, cultural convergence, state formation, legitimation

Western knowledge about Southeast Asia has long been overshadowed by the fame of India and the greatness of her culture. Ever since Alexander’s India campaign more than two thousand years ago, India has almost continuously remained, from a European point of view, the main attraction in the East. “Trans-Gangetic India” (India extra Gangem), the name used by Claudius Ptolemy for the countries of Southeast Asia, is as symptomatic of this attitude as more recent names like Further India, East Indies, the Indies, Indian Archipelago or Islands, Insulinde, Hinterindien, Nederlandsch-Indië, Indochina, and Indonesia.1 Southeast Asian historical research by European scholars developed in parallel with the progress of Western colonization in that part of the world. The arduous epigraphical and chronological work of a small group of (particularly French and Dutch) historians of the pioneer generation in the late nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries has rightly been criticized as “Indocentric”. But in order to do justice to it, one has to keep in mind that at the time, these pioneers had to resist even greater prejudices concerning Southeast Asia’s alleged cultural and historical insignificance vis-à-vis the greatness of the neighbouring cultures and empires of India and China. The easiest and most effective way to overcome this preconception was to show that Southeast Asia itself produced, or at least possessed, several of the most important monuments of India’s culture as a whole – for instance, Borobudur and Angkor Vat. And since at that time next to nothing was known about the autochthonous pre- and protohistory of Southeast Asia, what was more understandable than proclaiming an Indian origin for the early Southeast Asian states and cultures, and defining them as Indian kingdoms? One should not forget that this approach to Southeast Asian history served to legitimize the domination of Europeans as successors to their erstwhile Indian predecessors, who had also arrived from a westerly direction. Manguin rightly highlights the writings of Emile Gaspardone, a scholar of Vietnam who as early as 1936 reproached Indochinese archeology and colonial scholars for having been “absorbed by India,” downplaying or even censoring endogenous developments. The prevailing French view of the time was that cultural contributions that preceded France’s “civilizing mission” could only have come, like that mission itself, from the outside.2 But the Indocentric (mis)interpretation of Southeast Asian history and culture reached its culmination when nationalist Indian historians introduced the concept of “Greater India” and “Hindu colonies” in Southeast Asia. In 1926 the “Greater India Society” was established in Calcutta, and already in the following year the first volume of a series of monographs on “The Indian Colonies in the Far East” was published by R.C. Majumdar, who became the most prominent proponent of this school. In a special lecture delivered in 1940, he declared that “the Hindu colonists [in Southeast Asia] brought with them the whole framework of their culture and civilization and this was transplanted in its entirety among the people who had not yet emerged from their primitive barbarism”.3 Majumdar has rightly been criticized for such statements, but one should keep in mind that under the impact of anticolonial Hindu nationalism, even the acclaimed historian K.A. Nilakanta Sastri published an article entitled “The Tamil Land and the Eastern Colonies” in the Journal of the Greater India Society.4 The concept of “Greater India”, however, did not long survive the demise of European power in the East. It fell into disuse in the 1960s and 70s as even Indian historians started to avoid “the much maligned term of colonies”.5 Instead, “Indianization” was now the new keyword. It has to be regarded primarily as a reaction against the untenable concept of “Indian colonies” in the Far East, and against the obvious excesses to which that concept had given rise. Critical debate about the mechanisms of Indianization of Southeast Asia was indirectly but

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strongly influenced by Max Weber’s concept of the Hinduization of South India, in the first millennium CE, under the religiously and politically guiding role of invited North Indian Brahmins. According to Weber, the major attraction of these men was their capacity to legitimize the rise of local leaders and little kings in processes of early state formation: “Legitimation by a recognized religion has always been decisive for an alliance between politically and socially dominant classes and the priesthood. Integration into the Hindu community provided religious domination for the ruling stratum [Herrenschicht]. It not only endowed the ruling stratum of the barbarians with recognized ranking in the cultural world of Hindus, but, through their transformation into castes, secured their superiority over the subject classes with an efficiency unsurpassed by any other religion.”6

In 1934 a young Dutch student, J.C. van Leur, had already dealt the concept of Indian colonies in Southeast Asia a first blow in his doctoral thesis “On Early Asian Trade”.7 Strongly influenced by Max Weber’s studies on India and his statements about the active role played by local rulers in the process of Hinduization in central and southern India,8 Van Leur came to very similar conclusions about early Indonesian rulers: ”In the same sort of attempt at […] organizing and domesticating their states and subjects, they called Indian civilization to the east – that is to say, they summoned the Brahman priesthood to their courts. There were, then, no ‘Hindu colonization’ in which ‘colonial states’ arose from intermittent trading voyages followed by permanent trading settlements, no ‘Hindu colonies’ from which the primitive indigenous population and first of all its headmen took over the superior civilization from the west.”9

Van Leur did not survive to see his life’s work recognized, not even in the Netherlands. He died in the Pacific War at the age of 34. The impact of his “often rather bold and heretical hypotheses”10 was first felt in 1946, only a few months after Indonesia had declared its independence, when Professor F.D.K. Bosch delivered his famous inaugural lecture at Leiden University on “The Problem of the Hindu Colonization of Indonesia”.11 Having meanwhile arrived at similar conclusions, Bosch referred specifically to Van Leur’s thesis when he undertook for the first time a systematic study of different theories of Indianization which he labelled as “Brahmana,” “Kshatriya” and “Vaishya” hypotheses. In a careful analysis he refuted both the Kshatriya-warrior and the Vaishya-trader hypotheses, and came to the conclusion that Brahmins were the major agents of Indianization. Bosch’s lecture initiated a long and often vexed discussion about the processes of Indianization which may be regarded as the major theoretical

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issue of classical Southeast Asian studies during the first two or three decades after World War II. This debate reached a preliminary conclusion in 1977 with two comprehensive and well-balanced articles by I.W. Mabbett.12 Mabbett described van Leur’s thesis as “a salutary new perspective, a desirable corrective to the habit of seeing Southeast Asia as a mere blank page for Indian, Islamic and Western intruders.”13 But he also pointed out “that the actual process of ‘Indianization’ is nowhere reliably portrayed; what is portrayed by the earliest evidence is the operation of kingdoms already Indianized; and therefore the various theories that have been offered are speculation.”14 Mabbett’s reluctance to choose between those theories was certainly justified in view of the scholarship of the 1970s, although the intensification of detailed local archaeological research in Southeast Asia in the subsequent decades has arguably provided evidence which changes the picture.15 But Mabbetts’s most ground-breaking idea, which opened the way to further analysis in this direction, was that the term ‘Indianization’, and indeed the term ‘India’, are anachronistic and inaccurate in this context, because a homogeneous cultural entity called India never existed in practice. The concept of Indianization has, without doubt, led to a more refined analysis of the whole complex of India’s cultural influences in Southeast Asia. As its major advantage one may regard its final refutation of the Kshatriya, or warrior, hypothesis and the emphasis it laid instead on the role played by Brahmins as advisors and ritual specialists at the courts of Southeast Asia – without, however, neglecting the importance of trade and traders either. At the same time, concentrating on the “Brahmin hypothesis” also had the serious consequence of perpetuating the Indocentric view of early Southeast Asian history. The challenge raised by Van Leur in 1934, with his scornful observation that “to what an extent Indonesian shipping played an active role is a question never raised”, was not taken up seriously in the early Indianization studies.16 Despite its undeniable merits, the concept of Indianization still kept to the beaten track in so far as it tended to neglect the relevance of indigenous Southeast Asian initiative. George Coedès’ famous standard work The Indianized States of Southeast Asia is a good example in this context. Originally published in French in 1944, it was revised several times prior to being translated into English, with Coedès’ approval, in 1967. Unlike Majumdar, Coedès argued that Indianization reflected underlying similarities, not disparities, between Indian and Southeast Asian cultures. “[T]he Indians were not confronted by uncultured ‘savages’ but, on the contrary, by people endowed with a civilization that had traits in common with the civilization of pre-Aryan India. The speed and ease with which the Aryanized Indians propagated their culture is undoubtedly explained by the fact that, in the customs and beliefs of these immigrants, the natives discovered, under an Indian veneer, a base common to all of monsoon Asia.”17

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In his assessment of the socio-cultural history of the early convergence of India and Southeast Asia, Coedès thus already anticipated much of what will soon be further elaborated. However, it is difficult to agree with his analysis of developments in the first centuries CE, which he describes as the time of “the first Indian kingdoms” in Southeast Asia, even though there are no Sanskrit inscriptions from that period. Why Coedès stuck to the outdated term “Indian kingdom” in the English translation of his great work remains an unanswered question. The traditional colonial and Hindu national concepts of Indian kingdoms and Indian colonies in the Far East regarded India’s impact during the fourth and fifth centuries CE as marking the beginning of Southeast Asia’s historical development. In the late twentieth century, however, new archaeological findings began to suggest an almost opposite interpretation: that we have to understand the early and apparently congenial acceptance of India’s influence as the final stage of Southeast Asia’s indigenous pre- and protohistory. Sooner or later, then, the whole idea of Indianization was bound to come under fire. In 1983, in a lecture entitled “India and Maritime South East Asia. A Lasting Relationship,” J.G. de Casparis proposed an important broadening of the concept. ”[I]nstead of the conception based on the principle of initial ‘Indianization’, I propose to substitute the pattern of a lasting relationship between the Indian subcontinent and maritime South East Asia. The relatively simple, or perhaps simplistic, view of Indianization is replaced by a complicated network of relations, both between various parts of each of the two great regions and between the two regions themselves.”18

A year earlier Paul Wheatley, in an influential presidential address to the Association for Asian Studies on the origins of civilization in Southeast Asia, had observed: “the tide of revisionism that is currently sweeping through Southeast Asian historiography has in effect taken us back almost to the point where we have to consider re-evaluating almost every text bearing on the protohistory period and many from later times”.19 This paradigmatic change was caused by far-reaching archaeological discoveries about the prehistory of Southeast Asia, and by a growing rejection of the old idea that any changes which took place in prehistory must have resulted either from population movements, or from the diffusion of cultural traits into the region from outside. Prior to the classical period of Indianization, Wheatley insisted, Southeast Asia had already seen an endogenous development of sophisticated polities and hierarchies. ”[A]t about the beginning of the Christian era, Southeast Asia was occupied by a mosaic of societies and cultures within a common, recognizably Southeast Asian trajectory of cultural evolution. Organizationally, these communities ran the whole gamut from bands

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through tribes to chiefdoms, including strongly developed paramountcies exhibiting substantial degrees of centralized direction, hereditary hierarchical statuses, and dominantly redistributive modes of economic integration not far removed from those of true states.”20

Wheatley then arrived at an inference which is of great importance for our considerations here: “that it is in these pre- and protohistoric paramountcies that much of the dynamism of the so-called Hinduization process should be sought.”21 In 2007, Ian Glover, too, asserted on the basis of his own seminal archaeological research that “the first civilizations of Southeast Asia had their origins in the prehistoric past and were not brought by advanced immigrants from the west”.22 The new archaeological findings, then, clearly show that the confident acceptance of India’s influence and the subsequent Indianization has not to be understood only as the beginning but as the final stage, even culmination, of Southeast Asia’s indigenous protohistory. As we owe to Pierre Manguin a short but comprehensive definition of our present understanding of Indianization, it may be quoted at some length. “On the one hand, Southeast Asian societies that thrived between the fifth century BCE and the fifth century CE were for long treated, at best, as prehistoric communities, that were increasingly complex, but were cut off from the economic transformations and developments in world economy happening elsewhere in Asia. On the other hand, we had the far more sophisticated polities who had adopted and adapted – or ‘localized’, to use Oliver Wolters’ handy concept23 – a set of cultural values imported from India: political and religious ideologies, a broad spectrum of architectural and iconographic agendas, together with a distinguished language, Sanskrit, and scripts soon adapted to transcribe their own languages. In the still currently accepted meaning of the term, the Southeast Asian polities, starting around the third or fourth century CE, had then become “Indianized”. In the absence of written sources and monuments, philology and art history were unable to fill in the gap between the two phases of Southeast Asian history. Much of the research carried out in the past few decades had been focused on this historiographic gap which for the convenience sake most historians now designate as protohistory of Southeast Asia. It is now perceived as a millennium-long phase of exchange between the two shores of the Bay of Bengal leading, among other processes, to the Indianization of those parts of the region that straddled the main routes of exchange between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.”24

A major concern of the present chapter will be to add to the ground-breaking new archaeological insights into the proto-history of Southeast Asia some relevant epigraphical evidence of processes of early state formation on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, and their convergence as activating factors of Indianization.25 In the past, the early medieval states of eastern and southern India as well as Southeast Asia were depicted as feudal or centralized kingdoms, or even as empires. More recent

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studies, particularly on India, have depicted segmentary, integrative, or processual modes of early medieval state formation. A favourite subject of these studies is the shared sovereignty of “little kings” and their competition with the “imperial” ritual sovereignty of great regional kingdoms (often designated as empires) like those of the Cholas or Rashtrakutas and the Eastern Gangas and Suryavamshis of Odisha.26 Space does not permit explaining in detail these new theoretical approaches to early state formation and their relevance to processes of Indianization. Let me instead illuminate a few cases of the early phase of Indianization using their epigraphical evidence. I begin with Funan, Southeast Asia’s first so-called “empire”. In his early standard monograph on Angkor, L.P. Briggs depicts third-century Funan under King Fan Shih-man as an “empire more than a thousand miles in extent, with boundaries perhaps as wide as those of which the proudest Khmer Emperor could later boast”.27 More recent research, however, particularly by C. Jacques and M. Vickery,28 has shown that none of these statements can be accepted any longer as established facts.29 Briggs’ “imperial interpretation” of Funan, which had a strong impact on the early post-war historiography of Southeast Asia, is clearly contradicted by its earliest inscription, the famous Vo-canh inscription of the Raja Sri Mara from central Vietnam. Coedès identified this man with the great king Fan Shi-man, and dated him on palaeographical grounds between the third and fifth centuries CE.30 However, to my understanding the Vo-canh inscription does not depict an ”empire”, but the transition of a chiefdom to the status of an early kingdom. The inscription refers only to the “king” (raja), his own relatives (svajana), the “royal lineage” (rajakula), and the host of kings (rajagana), most likely the heads of minor lineages. Furthermore, the welfare of the “people” (praja) – comprising, most likely, the whole clan – is invoked twice. No other patrimonial administrative officers are mentioned. Obviously Sri Mara’s “state affairs” were still the affairs of his own patriarchal household. He ruled his people through the traditional means of “conciliation and gifts” (sama-dana), as described more explicitly in Sanjaya’s inscription of early eighth-century Java. The seven famous stone inscriptions of Mulavarman from Kutei in East Kalimantan depict the rise, within three generations, of a strong local chiefdom to an early kingdom under the already clearly recognizable impact of Indianization.31 These earliest inscriptions of Indonesia, now displayed in the National Museum at Jakarta, are incised impressively on seven sacrificial stone pillars (yupa) which still strongly resemble tribal menhirs.32 On palaeographical grounds their date is assumed to be c. 400 CE. One of these inscriptions relates the genealogy of Mulavarman’s “dynasty”. It begins with the grandfather, Kundunga, about whom only his Sanskrit title Narendra (“Lord of Men”) is known (a title which, however, might have been conferred upon him posthumously by his son or grandson). In the second generation an incipient change is clearly discernable. Kundunga’s son

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adopted the Sanskrit name Asvavarman and is explicitly praised as the “maker” of a (royal) lineage or “dynasty” (vamsa-karta). The political significance of this foundation of a “dynasty” is unknown. Sociologically, however, it must have meant a considerable rise in status for Asvavarman’s family or lineage within his own clan. Under Asvavarman’s son Mulavarman, a new socio-political change took place that appears to have marked the emergence of an early kingdom proper. Mulavarman assumed the foreign (Indian) royal title raja, defeated neighbouring chiefs or “landlords” (parthiva) and made them “tribute givers” (kara-da). He invited Brahmins “who came hither” (iha-agata), produced the series of impressive inscriptions, and were showered by Mulavarman with gifts of land and cows. They performed grand ceremonies at Vaprakesvara, a “most sacred place” (punyatama ksetra) near his own town (svaka pura), and incised the yupa inscriptions. It is very likely that Vaprakesvara was associated with the cult of a deified ancestor, the very root of the dynasty, established by Mulavarman’s father. The name Mulavarman, “protegé (varman) of the root (mula)”, strongly supports this inference. A clearly visible process of state formation and urbanization of an early kingdom under the impact of Indianization is documented in West Java by Purnavarman’s Taruma inscriptions of the late fifth century.33 Purnavarman is praised as “Lord (isvara) of the city (nagara) of Taruma”, whereas his grandfather Pinabahu conquered the “cities of the enemies” (arinagara). Pinabahu already bore the royal title “Foremost King of Kings” (rajadhiraja), and is praised for having dug a canal in his city (puri); Purnavarman later followed this with a canal of his own, cutting across the cantonement (sibira). Here, too, we come across three generations of ruling rajas who have already been able to impose their authority upon other chiefs. Like their counterparts from Vo-canh and Kutei, the Taruma inscriptions do not refer to any court officials other than members of the royal family. Yet they do record visible signs of Indianization, even in this period before royal courts and “cities” became adorned with Hindu and Buddhist sculptures. One depicts the human footprints “of the illustrious Purnavarman, the Lord of Tarumanagara”, which are compared with Lord Vishnu’s. Another inscription nearby displays footprints of the king’s royal elephant, which are those of Indra’s divine Airavata elephant.34 From the Taruma and Kutei inscriptions, John Miksic draws a conclusion that is important for our considerations about early Indianization in Southeast Asia. “The fact that these earliest inscriptions from Indonesia are written neither in a local language nor in an Indian vernacular, but in the ritual language of Sanskrit, reinforces the inference that the adoption of South Asian cultural elements was a conscious intellectual exercise initiated by Indonesian elites, rather then the result of frequent contact between Indonesians and Indians of the middle level of society.”35

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We shall now conclude our epigraphical presentation of early Southeast Asian inscriptions with the famous late seventh-century Sabokingking inscription of Srivijaya, Southeast Asia’s first trans-regional state and famous thalassocracy.36 This inscription, too, represents the climax and completion of an Indianization process, now in the context of a maritime kingdom. As it offers a transparent, almost pictorial view of the obstacles to, as well as the process of, state formation under the impact of Indianization, we shall devote some particular attention to it. Even today Srivijaya is an elusive polity, and until 1918 almost nothing was known about it. In that year, George Coedès gave it its second birth by connecting the name of Srivijaya not with an unknown king, as had previously been customary, but with a great kingdom mentioned in medieval Arab and Chinese sources under names like Sribuza or Shilifoshi/San-fo-ts’i.37 Following the first critical and detailed publication of the relevant inscriptions by De Casparis in 1956,38 interest in and research on Srivijaya concentrated even more strongly than before on the political and cultural history of the kingdom, while its prehistory, in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, was neglected. In the last three decades, however, this gap has been partly closed thanks to intensive, internationally supported archaeological research.39 It has finally been proved that Palembang, with its three royal inscriptions, was Srivijaya’s capital from the 680s onward. At nearby sites closer to the sea, archaeologists have also found protohistoric settlements with large wooden houses of the third to fifth centuries, and in Kota Kapur, on the offshore island Banka, a fortification and a Vaishnava temple with small statues. Manguin interprets the Kota Kapur site as a “small link in a long chain of Vaishnava settlements, strewn from the Mekong delta to the Thai-Malay Peninsula, and Sumatra, Java, and Bali.”40 As an inscription records, Kota Kapur was annexed by Srivijaya in 686.41 This “transregional Indianization” in seventh-century Southeast Asia is also well documented by the reports of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims on their way to India. The writings of the monk I-Ching/Yijing are particularly instructive. During several visits between 671 and 695, I-Ching spent a total of nine years in parts of the future Srivijaya. During his first trip to India he stayed for six months in Malayu to study Sanskrit.42 “In the fortified city of Fo-shi (Malayu) there are more than a thousand Buddhist priests whose minds are bent on study and good works. They examine and study all possible subjects exactly as in Madhyadesa (India). Their rules and ceremonies are identical with those in India. If a Chinese priest wishes to go to the west to understand and read (the original Buddhist texts) there, he would be wise to spend a year or two there. He might then go to central India.“43

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Figure 6.1: Sabokingking inscription, Museum Nasional Indonesia. Photograph by Gunawan Kartapranata (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12121980).

Let us now come to the impressive Sabokingking stone inscription from Palembang. A substantial 148 by 157 cm in size (Fig. 6.1),44 it depicts a seven-headed cobra, standing on a pedestal with a water outlet in the form of a vagina (yoni), and is clearly intended as an instrument of royal power. Its inscription, written in Old Malay, contains dreadful imprecations and curses against disloyal members of the royal family, local chiefs, and servants. Kinspeople and subjects of the ruler were forced to take oaths of loyalty by drinking water which had been poured over the serpent-shaped inscription, thereby cursing themselves if they should prove guilty of disloyalty and treason.

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In regard to the degree of socio-political Indianization of Srivijaya in the late seventh century, the great number of titles and professional designations used in the inscription is revealing. In strong contrast to contemporary inscriptions elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the centrally located Sabokingking inscription45 contains a very detailed list of Sanskrit titles of officers and servants present at the court of Srivijaya. Another significant aspect of this list is the apparently indiscriminate use of Malay as well as Sanskrit terms to designate both court personnel, and professional groups outside the court.46 At the top of the hierarchy stood the Datu, “who protects all the mandalas (provinces) of the Kadatuan Srivijaya,” together with various princes of royal blood (rajaputra). These are followed by more than a dozen professions with Sanskrit titles like bhupati (landlords), senapati (military leaders), nayaka (officers), chata-bhata (regular and irregular soldiers), pratyaya (secretaries), dandanayaka (court officers), and kayastha (clerks). Other Sanskrit terms found in the inscription include sthana (place, residency), paura (citizens), bhumi (country, realm), desa (territory, smaller than bhumi), samaryada (neighbourhood, hinterland), mandala (tributary chieftaincy), vala (army), satru (enemy), dravya (tax, tribute), droha (treason), vaniyaga (merchant), vihara (monastery), devata (divinity, deified ancestor), and bhakti (devotion, submissiveness, loyalty). This list clearly documents successful state formation, rudimentary urbanization, and the development of a state ideology under the impact of Indianization. The list of Malay terms creates the image of a traditional local chieftain (datu), his village (kadatuan) with his personal residence (tnah rumah) and patrimonial dependants (hulun tuhan), consiting of slaves (hulun) and their leaders (tuhan), a “surveyor of groups of workmen” (tuha an vatak), royal washermen (marsi haji), and royal women (bini haji). The fact that Malay terms like datu and kadatuan are retained even for crucial institutions like “king” (datu) and “royal residence” (kadatuan) is revealing in terms of the limits of Indianization. Obviously there was no complete “Sanskitization” here. The term ka-datu-an, the residence of the datu, is related to Javanese keraton, a term well known from the famous Kraton (royal palace) in present-day Yogyakarta. Although an international harbour city, Srivijaya still designated its major locally produced item of merchandise, gold, by its Malay name, mas, not by its Sanskrit equivalent suvarna, while the sea captains ranging out from it across the Malay maritime world retained their Malay title puhavam. In terms of the social depth of Indianization, it is also significant that the high Sanskrit titles mentioned in the Sabokingking inscription, located in the central kadatuan of the Srivijayan king, do not feature in other Srivijaya inscriptions found in outlying areas (the mandala inscriptions). One might go so far as to say that the Malay terms listed above depict almost the ideal type of a “pre-Indianized chieftaincy”. As illustrated by these selected examples, the inscriptions of mainland and maritime Southeast from the fourth to the seventh centuries reveal the early stages

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of state formation under the impact of Indianization. They depict the socio-political rise of a particular family (kula) or clan (vamsa) within its own society, and the stepwise emergence of early kingdoms. Mulavarman’s yupa inscriptions bear witness to “first victories” over neighbouring chiefs and the establishment of “royal authority” beyond the clan territory, legitimized by Brahmins “who have come hither” (iha agata) as “extra-patrimonial functionaries” and experts of religious and magic knowledge. In the rock inscriptions of Purnavarman, the “Lord (isvara) of the city (nagara) of Taruma” goes a step further in terms of religious legitimation by having his own footprints compared with those of the god Vishnu, and the footprints of his elephant with those of Vishnu’s elephant Airavata. It was at this stage of state formation in Southeast Asia that Indian influence seems to have fallen increasingly on fertile ground. Brahmins were not only welcome as administrators; clearly there was also a tremendous demand, which traditional indigenous institutions were not fully able to meet, for socio-cultural ways of legitimating incipient states created initially by violent means. The late-seventh century inscriptions of Srivijaya represented a climax of Indianization in Southeast Asia, and acted virtually as godfathers of Srivijaya’s claim to “imperial” status in the region. The rise of Srivijaya under Jayanaga as the first kingdom of its size in the history of Sumatra evidently required additional means of legitimation, above and beyond those which had served its smaller predecessors, for its annexation of existing little kingdoms, the future mandalas of Srivijaya. This was duly provided by, among other things, the Sabokingking inscription with its terrifying self-curses, carved on a royal cobra, and by its vernacular counterparts in the mandala provinces. Yet at the same time, as noted, the preservation in Srivijaya’s inscriptions of Malay designations for certain professions and local institutions reveals the limits of politically useful Indianization.47 The current revival (albeit a hesitant one) of recognition for the usefulness of the idea of Indianization is justified in regard to the early phases of early state formation in Southeast Asia during the mid-first millennium CE. It loses its validity with the rise, from the eighth century onward, of great medieval kingdoms like Srivijaya, the Sailendra state, Singhasari and Majapahit in maritime Southeast Asia, or Champa, Angkor, Pagan, Sukhothai, and Ayutthaya in mainland Southeast Asia. To characterize these polities, and the societies they dominated, as Indianized would be as problematic as describing all the nations of Western Europe as Latinized, or those of Eastern Europe as Byzantinized. As already mentioned, it is also sensible to consider Indianization in Southeast Asia as a result of the convergence of similar processes of early state formation playing out simultaneously on both sides of the Bay of Bengal. In regard to the existence of chieftaincies and little kingdoms in this period on the Indian side, Samudragupta’s famous Allahabad inscription of the mid-fourth century is revealing. It records

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that king’s southern digvijaya (“world conquest”) and victory over about twelve principalities in eastern and coastal India. Samudragupta captured “all the rajas of the southern region, set them free, gave them clemency and reinstated them”.48 The history of these rajas is nearly unknown. But we may assume that many of them had already passed through trajectories of political and socio-economic evolution similar to those taking place in contemporary Southeast Asia.49 This development is particularly well illustrated by an example from southern Odisha. Seventh- and eighth-century inscriptions of the Sailodbhava dynasty of Kongodamandala (Southern Odisha/Kalinga) include a revealing dynastic foundation legend which most probably goes back to the late fourth or early fifth centuries CE.50 This legend relates how Pulindasena, who was famous among the people of Kalinga, requested Lord Siva to relieve him of the burden of rulership. Siva granted this wish and a young man, Sailodbhava, appeared out of a piece of rock (sila-sakala-udbhedi). Both names, Pulindasena (who had no title) and Sailodbhava, clearly reveal a tribal origin of the dynasty. The Pulindas were a well-known tribe of ancient Central India, and Pulindasena may have been a military chief (sena) of this tribe. The name of his legendary successor Sailodbhava (saila-udbhava, “born from the mountain”) and the designation of nearby Mahendragiri, eastern India’s highest mountain, as the “great family mountain” (brhat-kula-giri), clearly point to the mountainous and tribal homeland of the founders of the dynasty, from where they conquered the nearby fertile valley of the Rishikulya river in coastal South Odisha.51 The inscriptions of the seventh and eighth centuries depict them as stern followers of Hinduism who claimed to rule their early kingdom according to Hindu sastras. Nearly a dozen such dynastic foundation legends and stories of divine metamorphosis, whereby tribal thakuranis (uniconic tribal or village deities) become tutelary Hindu deities of early kingdoms, are known from epigraphic sources in Orissa from the early centuries of the second half of the first millennium CE.52 They all testify to stages of incipient state formation connected with protracted processes of socio-economic change and cultural transformation initiated by immigrant North Indian Brahmins. In the Indian context we are accustomed to calling these processes Hinduization, a term which is effectively synonymous with Indianization in Southeast Asia.53 With our present knowledge about the already far advanced material culture and trade relations of the societies of eastern and southern India and Southeast Asia at the beginning of the Common Era, and by reinterpreting supposed “empires” as chiefdoms, principalities, and early kingdoms, we are now able to get a clear view of the convergence of comparable processes of early state formation on both sides of the Bay of Bengal.54 As a consequence of this convergence, the indigenous processes of early state formation in Southeast Asia were doubtlessly influenced and accelerated by Indianization. In a similar way as in contemporary southern

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and coastal India, rulers of Southeast Asia “summoned” (or more likely: invited) Brahmins to their little courts in order to legitimize and strengthen their claim to superior authority and power through Brahminical advice – a procedure which, as we know from anthropologists, is not sanctioned by tribal norms. A concrete illustration of convergent and nearly simultaneous development on both sides of the Bay of Bengal is provided by the emergence of Hindu temple architecture. It is well known that since the age of the Mauryas in the third and fourth centuries BCE, India had already been producing masterpieces of Buddhist art and stupa architecture. But despite their unique greatness, even centres of Buddhist art like Amaravati and Nagarjunikonda on India’s eastern coast had no direct impact on Southeast Asia’s art and architecture. But as soon as Hindu temple architecture in stone became a symbol of royal power for emerging kingdoms in eastern India in the sixth and seventh centuries CE, similar temples also started to appear in Southeast Asia, notably on Java’s Dieng Plateau.55 We need not be concerned here with detailed questions regarding the development of Hindu and Buddhist architecture in Southeast Asia. Suffice it briefly to underline three salient points. First, the early temples of Southeast Asia are more or less contemporary with those Hindu temples which sprang up like mushrooms in central, southern and eastern India from the early seventh century onward. Second, from the very beginning the temples of Southeast Asia exhibit peculiar regional styles, in the same way as the various Indian regions developed their own regional styles of temple architecture. Third, the spread of Hindu temple architecture beyond the frontiers of the former Gupta Empire on both sides of the Bay of Bengal was directly linked with the emergence of the early regional kingdoms and the socio-political projects of Hinduization (in India) and Indianization (in Southeast Asia).56 If we look at developments of the mid-first millennium CE, we observe a similarity and convergence of social and cultural evolutions in both regions. As already emphasized, it was this nearness between the emerging early kingdoms in the coastal regions of both sides of the Bay of Bengal, and their sociocultural convergence, rather than the social distance between imperial culture of North Indian states and emerging early kingdoms of Southeast Asia, which made the Indian model so attractive to Southeast Asian rulers. For obvious reasons, the Hindu model of a “limited universal kingship” that helped to create early local or subregional “kingdoms” in coastal eastern and southern India was also attractive to emerging rulers in Southeast Asia – more so, significantly, than any borrowing from the truly imperial Guptas of Northern India, whose model did not yet fit the requirements of Southeast Asian rulers. The Brahmins and scribes who brought the so-called Pallava grantha script to Indonesia in about 400 CE, then, were not emissaries of powerful Hindu rulers of South India (where indeed no powerful

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empires existed at that time). They came instead from the courts of early kingdoms like the that of the Pallavas, whose rulers had only recently been able to establish their authority and “domesticate” their people with the help of invited Brahmins. In doing so these rulers had successfully solved problems similar to those which their counterparts in Southeast Asia were also facing. Once we look in this way at the societies on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, we understand why India’s culture did not reach Southeast Asia through an act of “transplantation”, but rather through various kinds of convergence in a “complicated network of relations” (De Casparis) between partners in a common “process of civilization” which affected both sides of the Bay of Bengal. While accommodating the concept of Indianization, the convergence thesis also leaves room for indigenous agency in Southeast Asia. It interprets developments in early Southeast Asia within the framework of an overarching historical process affecting the societies of South and Southeast Asia as a whole.57 According to this thesis, it was the socio-economic and political convergence of both regions, and their intensive mutual trade since the early centuries of the first millennium CE, which required – and made possible – similar solutions to similar problems of social change. By triggering various processes of Indianization, it immensely enriched Southeast Asian cultural development. Whereas early theorists of Indianization assumed that it was the perceived distance between India’s great culture and Southeast Asia’s parochial cultures that inspired Southeast Asians to adopt elements of the former, the convergence hypothesis postulates socio-political nearness as a major factor promoting Indianization in early Southeast Asia. Let us conclude our discussion with some remarks about contributions to the “Indianization discourse” that have been made since the publication, in Leiden in 1990, of the essay in which I introduced the convergence thesis.58 In 1999 two relevant articles were published, one by Monica L. Smith and another by Roy E. Jordaan. The title of Smith’s article, “‘Indianization’ from the Indian Point of View”59 might lead one to expect a treatise on Indian concepts of Indianization – “Indian Colonies in the Far East” and suchlike. But instead it is a critical evaluation of the Indian sources on India’s contacts with Southeast Asia. Smith writes that “prior to the fourth century C.E. Indian trade activities appear to have been relatively infrequent […] as the level of open-water seafaring technology in the subcontinent appears to be rather limited”.60 Indian depictions of boats from early centuries show “river-boats rather than seagoing craft”. She also assumes that “whatever contact was sustained in the early first millennium between Southeast Asia and the subcontinent was likely to have been initiated by individuals sailing from Southeast Asia”.61 In her conclusion she points out that the term Indianization “conceals the complexities of socio-political organization in the first millennium C.E.”62 Much of her argument follows the lines I have sketched above: genuine adoption of Indian

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traditions is discernible in Southeast Asia only from the fourth century, and was undertaken by emerging local dynasties which were in the process of increasing their dominance over neighbouring groups, as well as developing their contacts with other cultures. In contrast to my own arguments, however, Smith regards as the point of origin of the Indianization process the political expansion of the Guptas from the late fourth century onward. This expansion, she argues, “provided a powerful, coherent and attractive ensemble of religious motifs and bureaucratic mechanism.”63 I agree that the fame of the Gupta Empire and its culture may be an underrated factor in my convergence thesis, which links developments in Southeast Asia primarily with those in coastal eastern and southern India. I am therefore surprised that ultimately, she comes to a conclusion that appears fully compatible with my own. “[A]fter the fourth century C.E. many of the areas along the eastern Indian Ocean sustained the development of complex political entities that adopted Indian political terms and religious motifs. These Indian traditions were attractive because they had been fashioned into a coherent socio-political model by groups in the subcontinent.”64

That Jordaan’s 1999 article follows a very different line of argument is already evident from its title: “The Sailendras, the Status of the Ksatriya Theory, and the Development of Hindu-Javanese Temple Architecture.”65 Jordaan attempts to refute the theory of F.D.K. Bosch, doyen of Dutch Indonesia scholars in the mid-twentieth century, that Javanese temple architecture was based on architectural manuals (silpa-sastra) obtained by Javanese pilgrims from India. Instead he claims that the classical monuments of Central Java, in particularly Borobudur, are essentially Indian creations. The Sailendra dynasty which sponsored their construction, he argues, was Indian in origin and brought with it in its entourage Indian craftsmen. The appearance and rise to power of that dynasty in Java, moreover, can be regarded as evidence that Bosch was wrong to dismiss the Kshatriya (warrior) theory of Indianization.66 There exists, of course, a general agreement that the art of the Sailendras was strongly influenced by the art of the Pala dynasty of Bihar and Bengal, of which the best-known example is the great monastic “Buddhist University” of Nalanda. But it is revealing to note that Jordaan is unable to substantiate his claim of an Indian origin of the Sailendras by reference to any reliable historical source, and so ultimately cannot make good the aim of his paper “to re-assess the ksatriya theory.”67 In his more recent monograph The Mahārājas of the Isles: The Śailendras and the Problem of Śrivijaya, Jordaan concedes that the origins of the Sailendras are still shrouded in myth.68 Yet he comes to a strange conclusion: “Just as the notion of local genius has reached the limits of its explanatory power in the field of Javanese art history, so the hypothesis of the Javanese origin of the Sailendra dynasty has

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been found wanting by a number of scholars, and they are reviving the hypothesis of an Indian origin.”69 Attempting to justify this statement, Jordaan refers only to publications (dated 1983 and 1994) by two deceased Indian historians known for their support of the outdated Hindu nationalist “Indian Colonialist School.” A uniquely influential recent contributor to the critical debate on Indianization is Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock, with his seminal and controversial 1996 paper on the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis”70 and his monumental work of 2006 on Sanskrit as The Language of the Gods in the World of Men.71 These publications range over many issues, of which I will take up only those which pertain to Southeast Asia and to the legitimation and convergence theories of Indianization. Whereas Southeast Asia is a major subject in Pollock’s 1996 paper, India predominates in his monograph of 2006. In the paper Pollock emphasizes the almost simultaneous spread of Sanskrit in South India and Southeast Asia in the first millennium CE, and associates this with a shared system of political aesthetics. “[N]o political power […] was at work here. Sanskrit’s spread was effected by traditional intellectuals and religious professionals. […] Sanskrit articulated politics not as material power […] but politics as aesthetic power. To some degree the Sanskrit ‘cosmopolis’ I shall describe consists precisely in this common aesthetics of political culture, a kind of poetry of politics.”72

After unambiguously dismissing any form of Indian “colonization” of Southeast Asia as a possible explanation for the spread of Sanskrit, Pollock notes that from about the fifth century onward, “Sanskrit inscriptions appear with an almost breath-taking simultaneity and with increasing frequency” across Southeast Asia. He then charts “very briefly [but in fact in great detail!] the career of public Sanskrit” in two areas, the Khmer country and Java.73 Having shown that in these places no significant Sanskrit poetry existed outside the royal inscriptional prasasti poetry, he concludes that Sanskrit was “exclusively the cosmopolitan language of elite self-presentation” (Angkor) and “the first vehicle for literized royal self-expression” (Java).74 So far, so good. Problems arise only with his comprehensive concluding section. Pollock is certainly right when he observes that after World War II, decolonization “predictably stimulated a quest for the local, the indigenous, the autochthonous”. But his criticism of important works in this vein by Oliver Wolters, Anthony Reid and others is sometimes problematic. Wolters asserted that Indianization did not introduce “an entirely new chapter in the region’s history,” but rather “brought ancient and persisting indigenous beliefs into sharper focus”.75 Pollock characterizes this as “defensive indigenism” and goes so far as to declare that “the very concepts ‘indigenism’ and ‘autochthonism’ are empty ones.”76 In addition, referring also to J. Filliozat’s idea that the spread of Sanskrit was driven by practical interregional

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communication needs,77 he expresses an uneasiness with what he calls a “weak functionalism” that “seems not only anachronistic but conceptually flawed”.78 Paul Wheatley comes in for even stronger criticism for his “post-Independence indigenist revisionism” and his adherence to “a stronger and more refined functionalism [that] holds that the idea-system of which Sanskrit was the vehicle was needed for political ‘legitimation’”.79 Pollock questions Wheatley’s belief that Southeast Asians “came to realize the value of Indian concepts as a means of legitimizing their political status, and possibly, stratifying their subjects”, and that this was why they summoned to their courts Brahmans skilled in protocol and ritual.”80 Moreover, Pollock correctly observes that “this explanatory framework remains intact in Hermann Kulke’s recent analysis”. After a rather lengthy quotation from my Leiden convergence paper of 1990, including a statement to the effect that a need for a new type of political legitimation must have existed on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, he declares: “There is nothing obvious in this statement at all, for there is no reason to accept legitimation theory in the first place, though it is ubiquitous in the literature especially on the question of the transculturation of the Sanskrit cosmopolis.”81 Pollock is, of course, entitled to assume “that it is a fact that the theoretical basis for this entire explanatory structure has been exploded by contemporary social theory.” He refers here to Anthony Giddens’ critique of functionalism, with its well-known conclusion that social systems “have no ‘needs’”. But it is strange that Pollock bases his supposed debunking of the legitimation theory more or less exclusively on Giddens’ insistence that the concrete conditions of the rise and decline of social institutions need to be analyzed directly in each historical case.82 After all, that is exactly what Wheatley did, and what I have tried to do in developing my Indianization and convergence theses. Perhaps not surprisingly, a thorough scrutiny of Pollock’s work reveals several instances in which his own narrative seems to verge on “functionalism”. In the introduction to his monumental work of 2006, for example, he makes clear that one of his main interests is in the “political dimension” of the Sanskrit cosmopolis.83 Elsewhere he asks: “how are we to grasp the power of such cultural forms, their attraction for local people, their careers, their hegemony over or compromise with the vernacular?”84 One need not be an uncritical adherent of postmodern discourses to agree that these questions surely have as much to do with competition, contestation, and consolidation of political control as they do with Pollock’s main paradigm, “the aesthetics of political culture”. Or, one might ask, is Pollock really of the opinion that matters of “elite self-presentation” and “literized royal self-expression” operate sans politics, or in a world in which the existence of elites does not require legitimacy or legitimation? Three contributions to a conference on “Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange”, held at the Institute

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of Southeast Asian Studies at Singapore in 2007, deal critically with Pollock’s Cosmopolis.85 Julie Romain’s article on the temples of the Dieng Plateau, firstly, focuses comparatively on seventh- and eighth-century temple sites in Central Java, Tamil Nadu and Orissa – all places where the chronology of temple construction “immediately follows the rise of Pollock’s ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis.”86 After remarking that “the degree of ‘cultural convergence’ of Indian and Javanese visual art traditions challenges the traditional model of influence used to explain Indian cultural diffusion in Southeast Asia,”87 Romain proposes that Pollock’s “recent work on the formation of a ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ is a useful framework for thinking about the diffusion of Indian art tradition in Southeast Asia.”88 But she also detects a significant difference. “Unlike the exclusive use of Sanskrit as language of royal political expression, there was not an exclusive Indian art style that was adopted across Southeast Asia.” Certain regional Indian art traditions had a stronger impact on Southeast Asian art than others, but none was hegemonic. Of particular relevance in our context is Romain’s conclusion that Indianized visual art in Southeast Asia was “vernacular from the start.” Further research, she recommends, should concentrate on the significance of the Dieng temples “at the local level for the Javanese”, and on “a more thorough examination of Dieng as a site in relation to the political centre of Central Java at Prambanan.”89 In another article in the same conference-based collection, Johannes Bronkhorst observes that Pollock seems to think that by rejecting ‘legitimation theory’ he can also do away with the vital connection between Sanskrit and Brahmins. This allows Pollock to explain the spread of Sanskrit “in terms of the language rather than in terms of its users”, and it is from this dubious position that he arrives at his hypothesis of “politics as aesthetic power”.90 Bronkhorst quotes at some length from Van Leur on the role of Brahmins in legitimizing dynastic interests. Whatever objections exist to the word ‘legitimation’, he insists, nothing much can be changed by removing it: “the factual situation remains the same. Brahmans were called to Southeast Asia [and] brought with them their sacred language, Sanskrit.”91 Thirdly and finally in this set, Daud Ali, in an article entitled “The early inscriptions of Indonesia and the problem of the Sanskrit cosmopolis”, provides a rather comprehensive discussion and critique of Pollock’s ideas in the Southeast Asian context.92 Ali emphasizes Pollock’s refusal to take notice of the extensive literature on recent theories of state formation in South and Southeast Asia. “Pollock’s indifference to this scholarship is hardly accidental, being connected with his sustained criticism of the regnant social scientific approaches to ‘ideology’. While his disagreement with historians for their banalisation of Sanskrit sources through the paradigm of ‘legitimation’ may be justified, his own attempt to connect Sanskrit and power would have enhanced considerably by attention to this literature.”93

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Ali then refers at length to the convergence thesis, commenting that “Kulke’s theory of social circulation, networks and convergence clearly in some ways provides a sociological complement to Pollock’s Sanskrit cosmopolis.”94 After scrutinizing Indonesia’s earliest inscription,95 he concludes dissentingly with Pollock that “Sanskrit in Southeast Asia was hardly reserved for exclusively ‘eternal’ rhetorical claims; it also articulated quotidian, material ones, particularly as a language of formal affiliation among elites, where it rubbed shoulders with and stimulated the development of other, existing vocabularies of power.”96 Among the most recent contributions to the critical debate on Indianization, Andrea Acri’s comprehensive article “‘Local’ vs. ‘Cosmopolitan’ in the Study of Premodern Southeast Asia” is of particular importance. As the title suggests, it attempts “to redefine the theoretical parameters of both extremes – the Indiacentered and Southeast Asia-centered perspectives – adding a new element of complexity.”97 Acri provides a valuable historiographical survey of more recent conceptual debates on Indianization, starting with an excellent summary of Wolter’s “indigenistic paradigm” and a short account of Coedès’s depiction of the osmosis between Indian and local elements of Southeast Asian’s “hybrid” societies.98 A subchapter entitled “Towards a Change of Paradigm“ then introduces Van Leur, Bosch, Mabbett, and De Casparis. As Acri also summarizes my own “convergence thesis“, and in fact does so better than I am able to do myself, I may be permitted to quote from him at some length. “The theoretical implications of de Casparis analysis were developed by historian of India Hermann Kulke in his study on the changing image of India’s role in Southeast Asia (1990). On the basis of the findings of archaeological campaigns […], Kulke suggested that Southeast Asian cultures were already culturally, socially and technologically refined in the early historical period, sufficiently rich to support developed centralized political organizations. […] This process of Hinduization or Indic influence is therefore to be considered in terms of ‘status raising.’ Indeed, the presence of Brahmins in local courts contributed to raise the status of the whole community […]. [Kulke] then introduced an important change of paradigm: Indianization did not involve any ‘act of transplantation’ but ‘a complicated network of relations’ between partners of mutual ‘process of civilization’ which comprised both sides of the Bay of Bengal. […] The key idea is an (independent) socio-cultural and economic ‘convergence’ between South and Southeast Asia that enabled similar solutions to similar problems of social change. […] The intellectual contributions by Mabbett, de Casparis, and Kulke are significant in that they problematized the false dichotomies elaborated by previous scholarship and re-oriented the field toward a more balanced appreciation of the translocal dynamics involved in the process of exchange of ideas between South and Southeast Asia.”99

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In regard to Pollock’s ideas about the Sanskrit cosmopolis, Acri points out that in part, these echoed concerns already raised by Mabbett and Kulke about the inconsistency of using modern terms like “India” in the context of periods in which the things they refer to did not yet exist. This is also why the problem of “Indianization” paradoxically applies to India itself, as well as to Southeast Asia. But Acri is also critical of Pollock’s strangely vehement critique of the “civilizationalist and defensive indigenism” of Wolters, who allegedly presupposes that Indianization acted on an intrinsic and ahistorical cultural substratum of “Southeast Asianness.” Ironically, Wolters himself derived much of his interpretation of Southeast Asian kingship and political systems from Sanskrit evidence. Acri concludes that given Pollock’s neglect of substantive political and socio-economic issues, his ideas “will have to be tested and complemented by realigning them to social realities rather than keeping the discourse in the realm of literary imagination”.100 Acri’s own approach to the study of the history of Southeast Asia, Indonesia in particular, is based on an extension of Wolters’ indigenistic paradigm into shared cultural processes at trans-regional levels. His main hypothesis is that Monsoon Asia in the proto- and early historical period, and Maritime Asia in the medieval period, were geographical arenas united by shared histories of fluid translocal dynamics, including Indianization and the circulation of Indian religions across Asia.101 In his own words once again: “In this essay […] I presented the extended geo-environmental metaphors of ‘Monsoon Asia’ and ‘Maritime Asia’ as alternatives to the previous paradigms, advocating the application of the concept of networks and a maritime approach. My findings suggest the need to move beyond the top-down phenomena described by Pollock into the direction of ‘convergence’ and ‘cultural affinities’ sketched by Kulke and perhaps extend the ‘shared cultural matrix’ elaborated by Wolters beyond the (constructed) geographical, social and linguistic borders of Southeast Asia”.102

Notes 1

Paul Wheatley, “Presidential Address: India Beyond the Ganges – Desultory Reflections on the Origins of Civilization in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 42 (1982): 13.

2

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “De la ‘Grande Inde’ à l’Asie du Sud-Est: la contribution de l’archéologie,” Comptes rendus des Séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 144, no. 4 (2000): 1489.

3

R.C. Majumdar, Greater India (Bombay: Dayanand College Book Depot, 1941; Sain Das Foundation Lecture, 1940), 21.

4

K.A.N. Sastri, “The Tamil Land and Eastern Colonies.” Journal of the Greater Indian Society 11 (1944): 26-28.

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5

H.B. Sarkar, Some Contributions of India to the Ancient Civilization of Indonesia and Malaysia (Calcutta, 1970).

6

Max Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, trans. and ed. H. Gerth and D. Martindale (New York: The Free Press, 1958 [1920]), 16. Weber’s original German text emphasizes the importance of legitimation even more strongly: “Die Eingliederung in die hinduistische Gemeinschaft legitimierte die soziale Lage der Herrenschicht religiös.”

7

J. C. van Leur, Eenige beschouwingen betreffende den ouden Asiatischen handel (PhD diss., Rijksuniversiteit Leiden; Middelburg: G.W. den Boer, 1934). The English translation was published posthumously (under the title “On Early Asian Trade”), together with a selection of his publications, in the monograph J. C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1955), 1-116.

8

Hermann Kulke, “Max Weber’s Contribution to the Study of ‘Hinduization’ in India and ‘Indianization’ in Southeast Asia.” In Recent Research on Max Weber’s Studies of Hinduism, ed. D. Kantowsky (München: Welforum Verlag: 1986), 97-116.

9

Van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society, 98.

10

Ibid., introduction by the editors, VIII.

11

F.D.K. Bosch, “The Problem of the Hindu Colonisation of Indonesia,” in his Selected Studies in Indonesian Archaeology (Den Hague: Nijhoff, 1961), 1-22.

12

Ian W. Mabbett, “The ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia: reflections on the prehistoric sources”, and “The ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia: reflections on the historical sources.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 8, no. 1 (1977), 1-14, and vol. 8, no. 2 (1977): 143-161.

13

Mabbett, “The ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia,” 144.

14

Ibid., 155.

15

Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani and Geoff Wade, eds., Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), Part I, “New Archaeological Evidence from South and Southeast Asia” (containing 10 articles), 3-242.

16

For the socio-political and cultural impact of maritime trade see particularly the studies of H.P. Ray, The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994) and The Archaeology of Seafaring in Ancient South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

17

Georges Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), 15.

18

De Casparis, India and Maritime South East Asia, 18.

19

Wheatley, “Presidential Address,” 27.

20

Ibid., 16. See also Hermann Kulke, “The Early and the Imperial Kingdom in Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, eds. D.G. Marr and A.C. Milner (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), 1-22. Reprinted in: idem, Kings and Cults: State Formation and Legitimation in India and Southeast Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993) 262-293.

21

Ibid.

22

I. C. Glover, “Early States and Cities in Southeast Asia: Transition from Prehistory to History” (revised version of a paper contributed to the conference State Formation and the Early State in South and Southeast Asia Reconsidered, Asia Research Institute, University of Singapore, 21-23 March 2007).

23

O.W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1999 [1982]), 173, note 103: “‘Localization’ assumes that what was localized had originally made a considerable impression even though it had to be locally construed”.

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24

Manguin, “Introduction,” in Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia, XIV, referring primarily to the first part of the volume, “New Archaeolocgical Evidence from South and Southeast Asia” with its ten articles (3-242).

25

Kulke, “The Early and the Imperial Kingdom in Southeast Asia”; Hermann Kulke, “Indian Colonies, Indianization or Cultural Convergence? Reflections on the Changing Image of India’s Role in Southeast Asia,” in Onderzoek in Zuidoost-Azië: Agenda’s voor de Jaren Negentig, ed. H. Schulte Nordholdt (Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost-Azië en Oceanië, 1990), 8-32; Hermann Kulke, “The Early and the Imperial Kingdom: A Processual Model of Integrative State Formation in Early Medieval India,” in Rethinking Early Medieval India: A Reader, ed. U. Singh (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91-119; Hermann Kulke, “The Concept of Cultural Convergence Revisited: Reflections on India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia,” in Asian Encounters: Networks of Cultural Interaction, eds. U. Singh and P.P. Dhar (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3-19; Hermann Kulke, “Śrīvijaya Revisited: Reflections on State Formation of a Southeast Asian Thalassocracy,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 102 (2016): 45-97.

26

G. Berkemer and M. Frenz, eds., Sharing Sovereignty: The Little Kingdom in South Asia (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2003); B. Schnepel, The Jungle Kings: Ethnohistorical Aspects of Politics and Ritual in Orissa (Delhi: Manohar, 2002); B.P. Sahu and Hermann Kulke, eds., Interrogating Political Systems. Integrative Processes and States in Pre-Modern India (Delhi: Manohar, 2015); K. Veluthat, The Early Medieval in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009); S. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); O.W. Wolters, “Restudying some Chinese Writings on Sriwijaya,” Indonesia 42 (1986): 1-42; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Amorphous Nature of Coastal Polities in Insular Southeast Asia: Restricted Centres, Extended Peripheries,” Moussons 5 (2002): 73-99; Kulke, “The Early and the Imperial Kingdom in Southeast Asia”; Hermann Kulke, “The Early and Imperial Kingdom: A Processural Model of Integrative State Formation in Early Medieval India,” in The State in India 1000-1700, ed. Hermann Kulke (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1-22.

27 28

L.P. Briggs, The Ancient Khmer Empire (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1951), 18. C. Jacques, “‘Funan’, ‘Zhenla’: The Reality Concealed by these Chinese Views of Indochina,” in Early South East Asia, eds. R.B. Smith and W. Watson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 371-379; M. Vickery, Society, Economics and Politics in Pre-Angkor Cambodia: The 7th-8th Centuries (Tokyo: Toyo Bunko/Centre for East Asian Studies, 1998).

29

In this regard one may also refer to O.W. Wolters’ study on seventh century Chenla, a post-Funan state of which he notes “that the evidence reflects the multiplicity of regional centres in the land which for convenience, we call ‘Cambodia’. Greater unities were still only the fragile consequence of the power of an individual leader. This kind of unity quickly dissolved when an overlord died or lost the confidence of his allies”. Wolters concludes that “in this situation the term ‘kingdom’ is an inappropriate one.” O.W. Wolters, “North-Western Cambodia in the Seventh Century,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 37 (1974): 371.

30

Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, 40 and 278, fn. 38.

31

J. Vogel, “The Yupa Inscriptions of King Mulavarman from Koetei (east Borneo),” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië 74 (1918): 167-232; Hermann Kulke, “Epigraphical References to the ‘City’ and the ‘State’ in Early Indonesia: A Reassessment of the Evidence,” Indonesia 52 (1991): 4-5.

32

B. Ch. Chhabra, Expansion of Indo-Aryan Culture during Pallava Rule (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1963), 85-92.

33

Chhabra, Expansion of Indo-Aryan Culture, 93-97.

34

Ibid., 93 and 95.

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35

J. N. Miksic, “The Classical Cultures of Indonesia,” in Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History, eds. I. Glover and P. Bellwood (London: Routledge, 2004), 235; see also Daud Ali, “The early inscriptions of Indonesia and the problem of the Sanskrit cosmopolis,” in Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: reflections on cross-cultural exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), 286.

36

Pierre-Yves Manguin, “At the Origins of Sriwijaya: The Emergence of State and City in Southeast Sumatra,” in State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-Modern South and Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study in Asian Society, eds. N. Karashima and N. Hirosue (Tokyo: Toyo Bunko, 2017), 89-114; Pierre-Yves Manguin, J. Cameron and A. Indrajaya, “Early States of Insular Southeast Asia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia, eds. C.F.W. Higham and N.C. Kim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 765-790.

37

Georges Coedès, “Le royaume de Çrīvijaya,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extreme-Orient 18 (1918): 1-36; Coedés, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia; N. J. Krom, “De Sumatraansche periode der Javaansche Geschiedenis” (Leiden: Brill, 1919); Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Srivijaya,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia, eds. C.F.W. Higham and N.C. Kim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 791-818; Hermann Kulke, “Kadatuan Srivijaya – Kraton or Empire of Srivijaya?” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 80 (1993): 159-180.

38

J.G. de Casparis, Prasasti Indonesia, vol. II. Selected Inscriptions from the 7th to 9th Centuries (Bandung: Masa Baru, 1956); see also Georges Coedès, “Les inscriptions malaises de Çrīvijaya,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extreme-Orient 30 (1930): 29-80.

39

See particularly Manguin, “Srivijaya.”

40

J. W. Christie, “State Formation in Early Maritime Southeast Asia: A Consideration of the Theories and the Data,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 51 (1995): 235-288.; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Transmission of Vaisnavism across the Bay of Bengal: Trade Networks and State Formation in Early Historic Southeast Asia,” in Early Global Interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World, vol. 2, ed. A. Schottenhammer (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 51-69.

41

Manguin, “The Amorphous Nature of Coastal Polities”; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Archaeology of Early Maritime Polities of Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History, eds. I. Glover and P. Bellwood (London: Routledge, 2004), 234-256; Christie, “State Formation in Early Maritime Southeast Asia.”

42

Malayu, most likely present Jambi, was also annexed by Srivijaya in 680. See Manguin and Indrajaya, “Early States of Insular Southeast Asia.”

43

Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, 81.

44

The inscription was found at Talaga Batu in the outskirts of Palembang, the location of ancient Srivijaya. For bibliographical details of the other inscriptions of Srivijaya, see Kulke, “Kadatuan Srivijaya,” 160, fn. 7.

45

See Manguin’s excellent maps in Kulke, “Śrīvijaya Revisited,” 50-51.

46

For all details see J.G. de Casparis, “Some Notes on the Oldest Inscriptions of Indonesia,” in Man of Indonesian Letters: Essays in Honour of Professor A. Teeuw, eds. C. Helwig and S. Robson (Dordrecht: Foris, 1986), 15-46; Kulke,”Kadatuan Srivijaya,” 160-164; and more recently Manguin, “Srivijaya.”

47

M. L. Smith, “‘Indianization’ from the Indian Point of View: Trade and Cultural Contacts with Southeast Asia in the Early First Millennium C.E.,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42 (1999): 1-26.

48

Of particular importance for our considerations are India’s coastal regions and the early political centres in their immediate hinterland (for instance, Kanchipuram and Bhubaneswar) as these must have been visited frequently by Southeast Asian traders and other visitors.

indianization reconsidered: india’s early influence in southeast asia 179

49

For coastal Eastern and Southern India, see S. Seneviratne, “Kalinga and Andhra: The Process of Secondary State Formation in Early India,” Indian Historical Review 7 (1980/81): 54-69; for a more general discussion see B.D. Chattopadhyaya, “Political Processes and Structure of Polity in Early Medieval India: Problems of Perspective” (Presidential Address, Indian History Congress, 44th Session, Burdwan, 1983). For Southeast Asia, see a wide range of articles in N. Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Volume One, From Early Times to c. 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and in Glover and Bellwood, Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History, as well as C. Higham, Early Cultures of Mainland Southeast Asia (Bangkok: River Books, 2002). For early maritime contacts see Ray, The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia and The Archaeology of Seafaring in Ancient South Asia.

50

D.C. Sircar, “Two Sailodbhava Grants from Banpur,” Epigraphia Indica 39 (1951): 32-43.

51

S. Tripathy, Descriptive Topographical Catalogue of Orissa Inscriptions (Delhi: Manohar, 2010), 183.

52

A. Eschmann, “Hinduization of Tribal Deities in Orissa: The Śākta and Śaiva Typology,” in The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa, eds. A. Eschmann, H. Kulke and G. C. Tripathi (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), 79-98; Schnepel, The Jungle Kings; Kulke, “Indian Colonies, Indianization or Cultural Convergence?”; Hermann Kulke, “Tribal Deities at Princely Courts: The Feudatory Rajas of Central Orissa and Their Tutelary Deities (istadevatas),” in The Realm of the Sacred, ed. S. Mahapatra (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1992), 56-78; Kulke, “The Concept of Cultural Convergence Revisited”; Hermann Kulke, “Early State Formation and “Indianization”: Reflections on the Concept of Cultural Convergence,” in Medieval Religious Movements and Social Change: A Report of the Project on the Indian Epigraphical Studies, ed. N. Karashima (Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, 2016): 157-178; and particularly Hermann Kulke, “Convergence of Tribalization and Hinduization: Kingship Ideology in the Feudatory States in Odisha,” in Raja-mandala: The Kings’ Circle; Court Society as Paradigm in India, eds. E. Francis and R. Rousseleau, Puruṣārtha 37 (2020): 84-103.

53

See particularly Smith, “‘Indianization’ from the Indian Point of View” and Kulke, “Convergence of Tribalization and Hinduization.”

54

B.P. Sahu, Changing Gaze: Regions and the Constructions of Early India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013); Sarkar, Some Contributions of India.

55

Christie, “State Formation in Early Maritime Southeast Asia”; J. Romain, “Indian Architecture in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’: The Temples of the Dieng Plateau,” in Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani and G. Wade (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 299-316.

56

Veluthat, The Early Medieval in South India; Vickery, Society, Economics and Politics in pre-Angkor Cambodia; Smith, “‘Indianization’ from the Indian Point of View”; Kulke, “Max Weber’s Contribution” and “Convergence of Tribalization and Hinduization.”

57

Kulke, “Indian Colonies, Indianization or Cultural Convergence?”; I. Glover and P. Bellwood, eds., Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (London: Routledge, 2004).

58

Kulke, “Indian Colonies, Indianization or Cultural Convergence?”

59

Smith, “‘Indianization’ from the Indian Point of View”.

60

Ibid., 15.

61

Ibid., 6.

62

Ibid., 18.

63

Ibid., 15.

64

Ibid., 19.

65

R. E. Jordaan, “The Sailendras, the Status of the Ksatriya Theory, and the Development of HinduJavanese Temple Architecture,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 155 (1999): 210-243.

66

Jordaan, “The Sailendras, the Status of the Ksatriya Theory,” 213.

180 hermann kulke

67

Jordaan, “The Sailendras, the Status of the Ksatriya Theory,” 218.

68

R.E. Jordaan and B.E. Colless, The Mahārājas of the Isles: the Śailendras and the Problem of Śrivijaya (Leiden: Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, 2009).

69

Ibid., 125 and 126.

70

Sheldon Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300–1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization, and the Question of Ideology,” in Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, ed. J.E.M. Houben (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 197-247.

71

Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006): “Legitimation, Ideology, and Related Functionalisms” (511-524) and “Indigenism and Other Culture-Power Concepts of Modernity” (525-566).

72

Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” 198.

73

Ibid., 217.

74

Ibid., 226 and 229

75

Wolters, “Restudying some Chinese Writings,” 11.

76

Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” 234.

77

J. Filliozat, “Le Sanskrit et le Pali en Asie du sud-est,” Comptes rendus des Séances de l’Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres (1977): 398-406.

78

Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” 235.

79

Ibid., 236.

80

P. Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula before A.D. 1500 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaysia Press, 1961), 161.

81

Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” 236, fn. 46. He complains for instance that “functionalist legitimation theory undergirds the entire conceptual framework of the new Cambridge History of Southeast Asia,” quoting several passages from its first volume, edited by N. Tarling in 1992.

82

“Institutional features come about historically [original emphasis], as a result of concrete conditions that have in every case to be directly analyzed.” A. Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 18.

83

Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 12.

84

Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis”, 230.

85

Manguin et al., eds., Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia.

86

Romain, “Indian Architecture in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’”.

87

Kulke, “Indian Colonies, Indianization or Cultural Convergence?”

88

Romain, “Indian Architecture in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’,” 300.

89

Ibid., 314.

90

Johannes Bronkhorst, “The spread of Sanskrit in Southeast Asia”, in Early interactions between South and Southeast Asia: reflections on cross-cultural exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), 265.

91

Bronkhorst, “The spread of Sanskrit,” 270. In a footnote (page 273), Bronkhorst offers the interesting suggestion to replace the word “legitimation” with “protection’: “Protection of the ruling groups’ and ‘sacral protection of dynastic interests’ may give less reason for objection.”

92

Ali, “The early inscriptions of Indonesia”.

93

Ibid., 281

94

Ibid., 282

95

Bronkhorst, “The spread of Sanskrit,” 273.

96

Ali, “The early inscriptions of Indonesia,” 290-291.

indianization reconsidered: india’s early influence in southeast asia 181

97

Andrea Acri, “‘Local’ vs. ‘cosmopolitan’ in the study of premodern Southeast Asia,” Suvannabhumi: Multi-Disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9, no. 1 (2017): 9.

98

Ibid., 13.

99

Ibid., 19-21.

100

Ibid., 24. In fn. 5, Acri also refers to the earlier commentaries on Pollock’s theory by Bronkhorst, Ali and Kulke (“The Concept of Cultural Convergence Revisited”).

101

Ibid., 28.

102

Ibid., 28.

CHAPTER 7

Local Projects and Transregional Modalities: The Pali Arena1 Anne M. Blackburn

Abstract This chapter demonstrates how persons in Southern Asian locations leveraged travel, other forms of communication, and the institutional, intellectual, and symbolic resources of the Pali arena to achieve local goals. This essay contests the “metageographic divide” between South Asia and Southeast Asia, and does so through several interlocking concepts involving space, time, and language. Empirical examples are drawn from the early second millennium AD – a period of quickening Buddhist circulations linked to changes in the Indian Ocean trading ecosystem – and from the colonial era. Looking through the lens of “Southern Asia” rather than standard postWorld War II areal frameworks invites new ways of analyzing differences within the larger region, and frees conceptual space to investigate the geographic imaginaries of Buddhists prior to the twentieth century.

Keywords: Buddhism; Indian Ocean; Pali; sovereignty; colonialism

The pages that follow show how persons in Southern Asian locations leveraged travel, other forms of communication, and the institutional, intellectual, and symbolic resources of the Pali arena in order to achieve local goals. Participants in the Pali arena are connected and partly unified through Pali language and textual traditions but retain strong internal local and sub-regional differentiation.2 Local aims and projects drive and embrace transregional connections; such connections presume mutual intelligibility via Pali language and concepts. However, the Pali arena is multilingual, since persons drawing on its resources are also shaped by – and communicating within – local languages (such as forms of Tai language, Sinhala, Mon, Burmese, and Khmer) as well as other transregional languages (such as Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and Tamil). The persons and locales participating in the Pali arena vary historically. Such participation expands and contracts in relation to particular historical conditions. Thinking and writing of the Pali arena open a way to examine – according to the historian’s specific analytical needs and concerns – all of what occurs when persons orient themselves towards a

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buddha-sāsana anchored by authoritative Pali-language texts, and when they draw on the intellectual resources transmitted in Pali. While some scholars have used the term “Pali cosmopolis” in discussing Buddhist transregional connections,3 I do not follow suit. The weight of Sheldon Pollock’s concept of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” among historians of Southern Asia and Indologists can easily lead to misapprehension of the Pali arena’s distinctive history.4 This chapter shares with others in this volume a wish to contest the “metageographic divide” between South Asia and Southeast Asia, and does so through several concepts involving space and geography. In addition to the Pali arena, this chapter refers to the larger geography of Southern Asia and a sub-region within that referred to as Bay of Bengal-Plus. As noted above, participation in the Pali arena may expand or contract in relation to many interactive causal factors. In the first part of this chapter, examples are developed from a time of expansion, during the early centuries of the second millennium AD, when persons in much of Bay of Bengal-Plus came to participate in the Pali arena. The final section shows that in the colonial era, communication among participants in the Pali arena quickened, and they came to include persons from locations outside Southern Asia, such as scholars and scholar-Buddhists from locations in Europe, Japan, and China. Looking at the regions of South and Southeast Asia together allows us to identify similarities that confound the arbitrary post-World War Two distinction between South Asia and Southeast Asia. It also invites new ways of analyzing differences within the larger region, since patterns of difference may emerge on matrixes other than that of South Asia versus Southeast Asia. The distinction between South Asia and Southeast Asia is arguably unhelpful in academic writing on the premodern period because the distinction is at odds with our historical evidence. Buddhists participating in the Pali arena acted – in composing texts, undertaking pilgrimages, and conducting diplomacy linked to buddha-sāsana,5 for instance – as if these regions were not distinct. This was the case for the movement of non-Buddhists also.6 Stepping back from the South Asia/Southeast Asia distinction also frees conceptual space to investigate the geographic imaginaries of Buddhists prior to the twentieth century. Exploring this is often difficult, given the paucity of evidence, yet progress can be made by examining early forms of mapping and by looking closely at the terms used to refer to the spaces comprising buddha-sāsana.7 These terms vary somewhat by period and by writer, and the differences sometimes suggest competing hierarchies of space and other forms of spatial argument. An excellent example of this is the term “suvaṇṇabhūmi” (Golden Land) mentioned in Pali vaṃsa accounts of the Indian King Asoka’s sending messengers of dhamma (Gotama Buddha’s teachings) to locations beyond his realm. Subsequently, supporters of buddha-sāsana in many different lands sought to identify their geographies with Asoka’s emissaries. Therefore, we find competing conceptions of “suvaṇṇabhūmi”

local projects and transregional modalities: the pali arena 185

in texts and epigraphy.8 There are no perfect geographic analytical or framing terms for our use since participants in buddha-sāsana varied among themselves in which geographic terms they used under what circumstances, and because all terms introduced externally by scholars carry their own historical and theoretical weight. Here, and in other recent work,9 I use the term Southern Asia to refer to what has been referred to as South Asia and Southeast Asia in post-World War Two parlance. This region – stretching from India, Sri Lanka, and the Himalayas through mainland Southeast Asia and across the Indonesian archipelago – has long been a site of dynamic and overlapping interaction among Buddhists, and among Buddhists, Muslims, and theists now often referred to as Hindus. Southern Asia is a unit of analysis characterized by a long history of strong economic and cultural integration. This regional landscape was constituted by similar patterns of political formation and ways of marking the presence of supramundane (divine/cosmic) power within human landscapes. Writing and speaking about Southern Asia encourages us to think of the space ranging from the Indian subcontinent to Indonesia, and from Tibet to Sri Lanka, as a geographic space with a long history of material and intellectual interconnection, according to more than one pattern of connection and functional geography.10 The term Southern Asia also functions well within a wider triadic conception of the Indian Ocean world, along with Western Asia and the Sinosphere/Sinic world. While the term Monsoon Asia has many merits as an organizing term, as contributions to this volume show, I find it somewhat too capacious when examining participation in the Pali arena. For most of the second millennium AD, participants in the Pali arena dwelt in an area I refer to as Bay of Bengal-Plus, a sub-unit of the larger Indian Ocean environment including the Bay of Bengal area plus the Coromandel Coast, Laṅkā, and the maritime spaces along Burmese, Mon, and Tai territories.11 Although these locations were strongly impacted by commerce, and military and diplomatic activities, involving a wider geography – stretching across the western Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and the Arabian peninsula and east into Fujian – activities occurring within the Pali arena were most often undertaken by persons in Bay of Bengal-Plus until the late nineteenth century.

Changing Indian Ocean networks There is clear evidence that participants in the Pali arena already included those from what are now Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, as well as the Indian subcontinent and Laṅkā by the middle of the first millennium AD.12 The inscriptional record, containing shorter and longer passages quoting from, or at least congruent with, a number of Pali-language Buddhist texts, attests to the circulation of persons and

186 anne m. blackburn

texts, whether communicated orally or in writing.13 Remains in stone and metal show that visual motifs associated with Buddhist narratives in Pali as well as Sanskrit were well known outside the Indian subcontinent and Laṅkā. On the island of Laṅkā, in the fifth century, a corpus of authoritative Pali scriptures was delineated through the work of commentators writing in Pali to elucidate what they held to be Buddhavacana, Buddha’s teaching.14 With some regional variation, this body of scripture plus commentary came to orient the ritual and intellectual life of an expanding community of Buddhists in Southern Asia participating in the Pali arena.15 Buddhist connections running along maritime networks altered during the eleventh and twelfth centuries as the Indian Ocean ecosystem changed. The eleventh century saw a sharp rise in international trade through the Indian Ocean region, due in part to the co-presence of the Cōla, the Song, and the Fāṭimid polities, all strongly oriented towards trade.16 There were new opportunities to accrue wealth by sea. This spurred competition for the control of ports and goods, which, in turn, reshaped political and military arrangements in Southern Asia and beyond.17

Premodern projects Although the historical record is patchy for the first half of the second millennium AD, it is possible to read extant histories of buddha-sāsana in conjunction with royal inscriptions and evidence of trade to preliminarily reconstruct some of the contexts in which Southern Asian persons utilized the communicative resources of the wider region in support of specific local projects. These show us how participants in the Pali arena drew on transregional processes in statecraft as well as to support aspects of Buddhist institutional life. Two striking examples of Buddhist technologies of statecraft involving the transregional resources of the Pali arena occurred on the island of Laṅkā in the later eleventh century, and in deltaic Burma (now Burma/Myanmar) during the later fifteenth century.18 After the Poḷonnaruva king Vijayabāhu I (r. 1058-1114) regained control of Lankan island from the Cōḷas in the mid-1070s, he made a striking overture to a ruler in deltaic Burma, which he referred to as Rāmañña, requesting a mission of fully ordained Buddhist monks (bhikkhus) from Rāmañña to restart the island’s Buddhist monastic lineage. This followed his earlier overture to the ruler of Rāmañña, seeking aid against the Cōḷas (Cv. 58: 8-10).19 Perhaps the island’s Buddhist monastic community had become fragile during the Cōḷa era, lacking patronage. More likely, the island’s Cōḷa rulers had supported a line of bhikkhus whom the new ruler was keen to remove from institutional power at the recommencement of local rule. According to the likely thirteenth-century installment of Mahāvaṃsa – a serial history of buddha-sāsana composed on Laṅkā in Pali language – a quorum

local projects and transregional modalities: the pali arena 187

of monks did indeed arrive from Rāmañña, and Vijayabāhu I used them to create a new local community of monks defined through receipt of a new monastic ordination (upasampadā) administered by the quorum of foreign bhikkhus (Cv. 60: 4-7).20 This was the first introduction of monastic ordination from outside the island reported by Lankan histories of buddha-sāsana after the founding of a monastic community at Anurādhapura on the island, said by these texts to have occurred in the third century BC by monks and nuns associated with the Indic King Asoka. Although many other instances of monastic reorganization or renewal of royal favor to monks are reported within these texts prior to the era of Vijayabāhu I, there is no reference to ordination through or with foreign monks between the Asokan era and the eleventh century. It is possible that foreign monks did play such a role between the era of Asoka and Vijayabāhu I but remained uncelebrated. This is, however, unlikely, since there is no reference to such activities in extant inscriptions or in Nikāya Saṅgrahaya, a Sinhala-language sāsana-history composed in the late 1300s. Vijayabāhu I’s creation of a new monastic ordination line in Laṅkā through the Buddhist monks imported from Rāmañña signaled a new era of connectivity among Buddhists of Southern Asia. This is our first documented case of a ruler using foreigners to transform existing sāsana-institutional and political-administrative life within local territories. The importation of a monastic quorum for upasampadā, and the creation of a new monastic line at home by having local monks under Vijayabāhu I’s authority reordain within the new monastic line, accomplished a great deal for the sponsoring monarch. In the first place, this increased the number of fully ordained monks available within the kingdom to conduct rituals of merit-making and protection for the court and its subjects. In addition, creating a new royally sponsored community of bhikkhus ordained in the new line provided a framework for reallocating senior posts within the monastic bureaucracy. This had implications for the overall balance of power in a sovereign’s realm, since high-level monks played important roles in political alliances around the royal court, and because reordination allowed a sovereign to redefine which lands were deemed free of tax and labor obligations to the crown.21 Importing Buddhist scholar-monks, sometimes also using them to create new ordination lines as Vijayabāhu I had done at Poḷonnaruva, became a regular feature of Lankan governance and monastic culture in subsequent centuries. These moves were generally associated with efforts to strengthen buddha-sāsana institutions after periods of military instability, to make protective merit for the sovereign and their polity, and with sovereign efforts to expand and deepen their political control. Royal courts on the Southern Asian mainland also used this technology of statecraft under similar circumstances. From Chiang Mai, in what is now northern Thailand, we find textual references to such activities occurring during the fourteenth and

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fifteenth centuries, relying on links between Chiang Mai, Martaban, and Koṭṭē.22 We know most about the dramatic deployment of this technology of statecraft to support sovereignty at the fifteenth-century kingdom of Haṃsavatī (now Bago, south of Yangon), thanks to lengthy inscriptions composed at Haṃsavatī in Pali and Mon languages at the behest of the ruling king Rāmādhipati (also known as Dhammazedi and Dhammaceti). As at Poḷonnaruva and the Chiang Mai, Rāmādhipati obtained a new ordination line for his polity, supporting the voyage of monks from Haṃsavatī to the court of Koṭṭē in southwestern Laṅkā. There the Haṃsavatī monks disrobed and received a fresh monastic ordination. On their return to deltaic Burma, the new ordinands participated in a royal reorganization of monastic institutions and bureaucracy, and thus came to control senior ranks within the saṅgha at Haṃsavatī, under the king’s authority (KI, 52, 241).23 Rāmādhipati created a royal monopoly on upasampadā for all of deltaic Burma over which he claimed control, and authorized specific arenas for royally authorized monastic ritual practice. In other words, transregional connections related to monastic practice were used as a technique in the expansion and centralization of political power over what were earlier independent deltaic polities at Martaban (now Mottama) and Pathein.24 In addition, through inscriptional texts and installations in the built environment, Rāmādhipati drew on another technology of statecraft linked to buddha-sāsana and ideas of sovereign practice available within the Pali arena, forms of statecraft that functioned according to logics of inheritance and imitation. Rāmādhipati’s sovereign practice and expression highlighted his indebtedness to past royal precedents at Patna (now in India) and Anurādhapura and Poḷonnaruva (now in Sri Lanka). For instance, the ordination activities just described were portrayed as instances of “purification” undertaken to protect buddha-sāsana, and following the model of past rulers such as the Indic King Asoka (fl. third century BC) and Parakramabāhu I at Poḷonnaruva (fl. twelfth century AD). In addition, in his inscriptional voice, Rāmādhipati argued that his realm, which he referred to as the land of Rāmañña (Rāmañña-desa), contained corporeal relics of Gotama Buddha and had received monastic emissaries of King Asoka in the early centuries after Gotama Buddha’s death.25 Importing upasampadā and celebrating transregional genealogies were flexible tools for local leaders. They allowed a local ruler and that person’s monastic allies to restructure local institutions, to shape their karmic legacies through the merit-making involved in support for buddha-sāsana, and to embrace the prestige offered by association with idealized past sovereigns whose biographies circulated among participants in the Pali arena. All of this was possible without the requirement to adopt from the foreign location more in the way of textual foci, devotional ritual practices, and aesthetic norms than was locally congenial. Moreover, because ordination lines were established with local monastics as leaders, the new ordination line did not subject local

local projects and transregional modalities: the pali arena 189

monastic institutions or their sovereign patrons to the authority of senior monks located in other polities. The records of the eighteenth-century Siyām Nikāya, a monastic lineage founded in the Lankan Kandyan kingdom (contemporary with Dutch colonial presence in parts of Laṅkā and elsewhere in Southern Asia) through ordination introduced from Ayutthaya, provide a particularly rich example of this since records are more abundant than for comparable earlier premodern cases. Although texts were brought from Ayutthaya to Kandy,26 there is no evidence that the Kandyan monastics adopted devotional styles, forms of monastic bureaucracy, or modes of monastic education from Ayutthaya.27 The transregional contacts embraced through these technologies of statecraft were precisely those carrying no threat of military or symbolic subordination. It is difficult to chart with any certainty how individuals (whether lay or monastic) made use of (or were caught up in) the transregional connectivity of Southern Asia for projects undertaken without sovereign support, since there is very little in the way of evidence, far less than for comparable periods in eastern Asia, central Asia, and the Himalayas. There are several reasons for this, including a climate hostile to the preservation of documents, pre-colonial bureaucratic record-keeping that appears to have been less extensive than in some other premodern contexts, the relatively late adoption of paper (rather than palm leaves) for writing in many parts of the region, and a long and violent colonial era that compromised much local archival material. Most of the evidence that remains is not well suited to reconstruct in any detail the nature of Buddhist activities below the level of elites (whether monastic and non-monastic) associated with royal courts and sub-regional centers of cultural and administrative activity, though there are scattered and late exceptions.28 Moreover, longer narrative epigraphy, extremely helpful for reconstructing the nature and date of patronage activities related to buddha-sāsana (as well as other matters), tends to foreground royal actors. Nonetheless, there are many tantalizing hints in literary and epigraphic materials throughout the region, suggesting that it was not uncommon for lay and monastic participants in the Pali arena to undertake projects that involved transregional travel and the movement of letters, texts, ritual objects, and other gifts. For instance, in inscriptions from Bagan, Sukhothai, and Chiang Mai we find scattered references to monks described as “Sīhala” or “Sīhala-traveled,” indicating associations with locations on the island of Laṅkā. Inscriptions and sāsana histories (including those referred to in this chapter) detail exchanges of letters, gifts, and texts. Architectural features and visual culture show the transmission of patterns and narratives. Monastic lineage histories often recount stories of monastic travelers (not all of whom set out on royal missions). While the latter can rarely be confirmed fully, and may contain some fictive elements, there is sufficient overlap between such narratives, what we know of trade and other forms of mobility within the region, and epigraphic

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evidence of individual travels, to indicate that Buddhists were on the move in Southern Asia for reasons other than state-sponsored projects. What drove Buddhist monastics and their lay associates to undertake long and arduous journeys along the riverine and maritime routes of Southern Asia?29 Such journeys required negotiating transit across the borders of several polities, as well as leveraging complex shipping routes, as we can see from the descriptions of such travel in epigraphy and lineage histories. Some monastic lineage histories portray explicit motivations for such monastic journeys: to undertake a pilgrimage to celebrated sites associated with Gotama Buddha, to obtain buddha-relics from foreign lands, and to rectify or purify monastic practice at home by learning how monastic rituals and disciplinary practices were conducted elsewhere. Thus, for instance, Ñāṇagambhīra, a monk active in early fifteenth-century Chiang Mai, is described in several northern Tai tamnān (histories of buddha-sāsana), including versions of the Tamnān Wat Pa Däng, as disturbed by reports that Lankan monks had criticized Chiang Mai monastic practice and determined to take instruction at Anurādhapura on Laṅkā in order to rectify matters in his home lineage.30 Sukhothai Inscriptions 2 and 11 are fragmented and somewhat difficult to interpret. Yet, together they appear to portray the Sukhothai monk Śrīśrādhārajacūlāmuṇi as drawn by reports of Buddhist practice in Laṅkā and determined to undertake a pilgrimage to key island locations.31 The author of the fourteenth-century Saddhammasaṅgaha, appears to have been a Tai monk who traveled to Laṅkā for studies and reported on the state of Lankan Buddhist textual traditions after return to Ayutthaya.32 There must also have been monastics eager to escape difficult circumstances, monks with wanderlust, and some caught up in political upheavals who sought – or were required – to take up longer- or shorter-term residence in foreign lands.33

Colonial difference? The region of Southern Asia has a deep colonial history, involving Portuguese, Dutch, French and British projects, operating along different timelines at diverse locations within the region. In this chapter I focus on nineteenth-century British colonial Southern Asia (involving the Indian subcontinent, Burma, and Laṅkā/ Ceylon), in order to explore the difference made by colonial rule to trans-regional Buddhist projects in the region. Removal of local sovereigns from power (in 1815 on Laṅkā and in 1885 in Burma after the last of the Anglo-Burmese Wars) reshaped the institutional life of buddha-sāsana in Southern Asia. However, results were not uniform across the region, since a ruler’s role as apex patron of Buddhist institutions, arbiter of monastic disputes, and head of an extended network of elite bureaucrats and

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administrators varied historically. The Lankan Kandyan kingdom, the last independent polity on the island prior to the British takeover, had achieved control over a centralized monastic structure that operated through much of the island on the basis of teacher-student lineages and royally approved monastic leaders.34 In contrast, monastic institutions in late pre-colonial Burma were much more decentralized; the authority of the king and monastic leaders appointed by the king were more modest, and often contested.35 In both cases, however, the dissolution of the local monarchies, and the advent of colonial administrators, reshaped the social arena in which lay and monastic Buddhists functioned. While the British Raj declined to pay the role of apex patron for Buddha-sāsana (in part due to Christian missionary pressure at home), colonial administrators in the field became involved in many aspects of Buddhist institutional life. These involvements varied across time and location within the empire, but included decisions related to monastic administrative appointments, Buddhist educational institutions and curricula, ownership of temple and monastery lands, etc.36 Lay and monastic Buddhists spent much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developing new approaches to patronage, education, and governance. In doing so they responded to many factors, including absent kings, colonial bureaucratic presence, rapid changes in local class dynamics caused by colonial-era economies that affected Buddhist patronage, and new communications technologies in Southern Asia and beyond. A striking example of how transregional connections relating to buddha-sāsana were drawn into local projects during the colonial era comes from Laṅkā, where the dissolution of a Lankan royal house prepared to serve as the ultimate patron and arbiter of Buddhist monastic affairs, created mixed responses among the island’s monks and their lay supporters. Some, such as Hikkaḍuvē Sumaṅgala – a leading Buddhist monk in the second half of the nineteenth century – feared for the future of Buddha-sāsana in Laṅkā without a royal guarantor. This sense of threat and uncertainty led Hikkaḍuvē to join a petition to the King of Siam (Rāma V), requesting that he become the “ecclesiastical sovereign” for Buddhists in Siam, Burma, and Ceylon. Lankans turned to the ruler of Siam as a royal Buddhist ally after the British colonial takeover of the Kandyan Kingdom and Upper Burma.37 For others on the island, the king’s absence created welcome opportunities, since the last reigning line of kings on the island had endorsed a caste-restrictive monastic fraternity as the monastic order with a monopoly on higher ordination and, therefore, access to the best education and to monastic leadership positions. During the colonial era novice monks from caste groups that had been excluded from Kandyan upasampadā received support from wealthy Lankan laymen for travel to Burma. A series of such groups studied at Buddhist monastic centers in Burma, receiving higher ordination from Burmese monks. They then imported these ordination lines to Laṅkā, as monks had done earlier in both directions. Over time, this resulted in the

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growth of a new monastic fraternity, the Amarapura Nikāya (in several branches), as well as the Rāmañña Nikāya.38 In Burma, the combination of an absent king and a colonial regime ill-informed about local Buddhist affairs made possible new alliances. For instance, residents of colonial Burma from sub-regions as diverse as Shan States, Upper Burma, and the lower Burmese maritime region collaborated to establish an apex leader of the Burmese monastic community – the thathanabaing. What appeared to colonial administrators to be the reintroduction of long-standing past royal practice was, in fact, a relative novelty (the post had been used only intermittently in the pre-colonial period, and without wide institutional reach) that allowed new Buddhist elites to build prestige and obtain control over monastic institutional resources.39 There were many Southern Asian experiments related to buddha-sāsana occurring within the dynamic social fields of colonial Burma and Ceylon. In addition to those just mentioned, they included the proliferation of lay-administered Buddhist associations promoting diverse causes and forms of practice, Buddhist schools for both monastic and lay youth, and new printing presses distributing a variety of texts and newspapers related to Buddha-sāsana, including vernacular commentaries on Buddhist scriptures.40 Many of these activities, like those discussed earlier in this chapter, involved trans-regional networks in support of local projects. Historical memory of pre-colonial connectivity played a role in this; past precedents were claimed in support of colonial-era partnerships. It is clear that knowledge of earlier transregional projects shaped the imagination of Southern Asian Buddhists, especially those who had experienced elite monastic education. Monastic lineage texts and sāsana histories studied by monks, and by some lay people, recounted, and often celebrated, transregional connections. Moreover, by the nineteenth century, in part because of the increasing communications infrastructure made possible through railways, steamships, and printed newspapers, the wider world of Southern Asia was even more accessible to the consciousness of local Buddhists within that region than it had been in the past. Buddhists active in the Pali arena knew more about one another’s recent events and activities more quickly than in the past, and could communicate with one another more rapidly, now through telegraph and colonial postal services carried along steam and rail lines. These new travel technologies also allowed a larger number of lay and monastic Buddhists to travel through the region of Southern Asia more quickly, for commercial, personal, and devotional reasons.41 The increasing speed and density of contact with other participants in the Pali arena, as well as an expanding awareness of Buddhists elsewhere in Asia, had subtle but important cumulative effects on how Buddhists delineated themselves as groups within the wider Buddha-sāsana. One sign of this was the emerging distinction between “Northern” and “Southern” Buddhism, used by some European

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and American scholars of Buddhism but adopted by some Buddhists themselves, including Japanese Buddhist scholars.42 Northern Buddhism referred to the sphere of Mahāyāna Buddhism, including its distinctive esoteric dimensions sometimes now known as Vajrayāna Buddhism. Southern Buddhism was identified with authoritative texts in Pali language. During the nineteenth century, contact across Buddhist sub-groups intensified, in part because Japanese Buddhists sought connections to Buddhist historical locations on the Indian subcontinent and studied the Pali tradition in Europe and Laṅkā.43 Throughout Asia, Buddhists participated in new global associations such as the Maha Bodhi Society and the Theosophical Society.44 These associations created arenas of contact in person, and through print, within which participants in buddha-sāsana became more aware of similarities and differences in doctrine, monastic discipline, devotional ritual, language, aesthetics, etc. that appeared around the wider Buddhist world. Although not many Buddhists in Southern Asia referred to themselves as Southern Buddhists (rather than participants in Buddha-sāsana and/or in X/Y lineage) during the nineteenth century, the term began to circulate in literati circles as term of reference operating at a new taxonomic scale. This helped to prepare the ground for the adoption of the term Theravāda Buddhism in the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, we should not underestimate the impact of either Christianity or the emerging field of comparative religions on the identifying terms used by participants in the Pali arena and beyond. One indication of this was the fascination of Lankan newspapers with foreign Buddhist travelers to the island. These became a favorite topic for a brief mention in both Sinhala- and English-language press. At a time when many Lankan Buddhists felt, to greater or lesser degrees, some sense of threat from the growing presence of Christian missionaries and a colonial administration that was culturally – if not officially – Christian, foreign Buddhist travelers to Lanka were often celebrated. In this celebratory news coverage, the implicit argument was at least two-fold: buddha-sāsana remains vital; global leaders include Buddhists, not just Christians. In this spirit, visits by members of the Siamese royal family, who regularly traveled through the port of Colombo on European and regional travel, received close attention, even when their temple and relic pilgrimages were incidental to, rather than the central goal of, a Lankan port call. The regional press also followed the research visits of scholars of Buddhism from Europe and America to Southern Asia, and sometimes noted the publication of authoritative Buddhist texts translated overseas. The relationship between foreign, non-Buddhist, scholars of the sāsana and local Buddhist scholars was complex and variable. Conceptual frameworks and interpretive emphases circulated with many unexpected consequences.45 Gradually, buddha-sāsana, as supported by participants in the Pali arena, became known to more and more of its adherents as Theravāda Buddhism.46 And, as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wore on,

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the local projects of Southern Asian Buddhists were cultivated along even wider transregional circulations.47

Notes 1

I express my thanks to Nira Wickramasinghe for helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

2

The concept of the “Pali arena” is explained at length in Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties Across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena, 1200-1550, forthcoming with the University of Hawai’i Press. This paragraph draws from the Introduction to that work.

3

Alastair Gornall and Justin Henry, “Beautifully Moral: Cosmopolitan Issues in Medieval Pali,” in Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History, eds. Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern (London: UCL Press, 2017), 77-93; Tilman Frasch, “A Pāli Cosmopolis? Sri Lanka and the Theravāda Buddhist Ecumene, c. 500-1500,” in Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History, eds. Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern (London: UCL Press, 2017), 66-76.

4

The distinction between the Pali arena and the Sanskrit cosmopolis is discussed at length in Blackburn, Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties, Introduction.

5

Buddha-sāsana refers to the teachings of a buddha and the institutions and persons who help to transmit and sustain such teachings.

6

Michael R. Feener and Anne M. Blackburn, eds., Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia: Comparative Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018).

7

Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University

8

Prapod Assavavirulhakarn, The Ascendancy of Theravāda Buddhism in Southeast Asia (Chiang

of Hawaii Press, 1994). Mai: Silkworm Books, 2010); Peter Skilling, “Many Lands of Gold,” in Suvaṇṇabhūmi: The Golden Land, eds. Bunchar Pongpanich and Somchet Thinapong (Bangkok: Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency, 2018), 191-217. 9

Anne M. Blackburn, “Buddhist Connections in the Indian Ocean: Changes in Monastic Mobility 1000-1500,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58, no. 3 (2015): 237-266; Anne M. Blackburn and Michael R. Feener. “Sufis and Saṅgha in Motion: Towards a Comparative Study of Religious Orders and Networks in Southern Asia,” in Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia: Comparative Perspectives, eds. Michael R. Feener and Anne M. Blackburn (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018), 1-19.

10

Anne M. Blackburn, “Making Buddhist Kingdoms Across the Indian Ocean, 1200-1500.” Paper presented at Princeton University, 14 April 2016.

11

See further, Blackburn, “Introduction,” in Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties.

12

Prapod, Ascendancy.

13

Peter Skilling, “The Advent of Theravāda Buddhism to Mainland South-east Asia,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 20 (1997): 93-107; Arlo Griffiths and D. Christian Lammerts, “Epigraphy: Southeast Asia,” in Brill Encyclopedia of Buddhism, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

14

Steven Collins, “On the Very Idea of the Pali Canon,” Journal of the Pali Text Society 15 (1990): 89-126.

15

Anne M. Blackburn, “Looking for the Vinaya: Monastic Discipline in the Practical Canons of the Theravada,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 22 (1999): 255-289.

local projects and transregional modalities: the pali arena 195

16

Hermann Kulke, “Rivalry and Competition in the Bay of Bengal in the Eleventh Century and Its Bearing on Indian Ocean Studies,” in Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800, eds. Om Prakash and Denys Lombard (Delhi: Manohar, 1999), 17-36; Haraprasad Ray, “Trade between South India and China, 1368-1644,” in Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800, eds. Om Prakash and Denys Lombard (Delhi: Manohar, 1999), 37-46.

17

On the implications of this for connections linked to buddha-sāsana, and a longer bibliography on Indian Ocean history and trade, see Anne M. Blackburn, “Buddhist Connections.”

18

Blackburn, “Making Buddhist kingdoms”; Anne M. Blackburn, “Indian Ocean Networks and Premodern Buddhist Technologies of Statecraft,” paper presented at Yale University, 23 February 2017.

19

Wilhelm Geiger, ed., Cūlavaṃsa, Being the More Recent Part of the Mahāvaṃsa (London: Pali Text

20

This is also reported within Pūjavaliya, Rājāvaliya, and Nikāya Saṅgrahaya. See also Epigraphia

Society, 1980). Citations are by chapter and verse number. Zeylanica, Being Lithic and Other Inscriptions of Ceylon (Colombo: Ceylon Government Printer, 7 vols, 1904-84), 2.40. 21

See further, Michael Aung-Thwin, “The Role of Sāsana Reform in Burmese History: Economic Dimensions of a Religious Purification,” Journal of Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (1979): 671-688; Michael Aung-Thwin, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985); R.A.L.H. Gunawardana, Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka (Tucson: The Association for Asian Studies, 1979); Blackburn, Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties.

22

See for instance: Sao Sāimong Mangrāi, The Pādaeng Chronicle and the Jengtung State Chronicle Translated (Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, 1981); N. A. Jayawickrema, trans., The Sheaf of Garlands of the Epochs of the Conqueror: Being a Translation of the Jinakalamalipakaranam of Ratnapanna Thera of Thailand (London: Pali Text Society, 1968).

23

KI refers to Kalyāṇi Inscriptions, with page numbers from the following edition: Taw Sein Ko, trans. and ed. “The Kalyāṇī Inscriptions Erected by King Dhammaceti at Pegu in 1476,” Indian Antiquary 22 (1893).

24

Michael Aung-Thwin, The Mists of Ramañña: The Legend That Was Lower Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 311; Jon Fernquist, “The Ecology of Burman-Mon Warfare and the Premodern Agrarian State (1383-1425),” SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 6, nos. 1-2 (2008): 70-118, esp. 85-93.

25

For further details and additional relevant sources, see Blackburn, Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties.

26

Oskar von Hinüber, “Remarks on a List of Books Sent to Ceylon from Siam in the 18th Century,” Journal of the Pali Text Society 12 (1988): 175-83.

27

G. Hēmapāla Vijayawardhana and P.B. Mīgaskumbura, Siyam-Śrī Laṃkā Āgamika Sambandhanā, (Colombo: Pradīpa Prakāsakayō, 1993); Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

28

See for instance, Alexey Kirichenko, “The Itineraries of ‘Sīhaḷa Monk’ Sāralaṅkā: Buddhist Interactions in Eighteenth-Century Southern Asia,” in Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia: Comparative Perspectives, eds. Michael R. Feener and Anne M. Blackburn (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018), 48-74.

29

Although the order of Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs) was established in the lifetime of Gotama Buddha, it appears not to have reached mainland Tai, Mon, Burmese, and Khmer areas in the premodern period. Evidence of bhikkhunīs in Laṅkā is not available after the eleventh century or twelfth centuries until the twentieth. See R.A.L.H. Gunawardhana, “Subtile silks of Ferreous

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Firmness: Buddhist Nuns in Ancient and Early Medieval Sri Lanka and their Role in the Propagation of Buddhism,” Sri Lanka Journal of Humanities 14 (1988): 1-59. 30

Saimong, Chronicle; Blackburn, “Buddhist Connections.”

31

Prasert na Nagara and A.B. Griwold, Epigraphic and Historical Studies (Bangkok: The Historical Society, 1992), 378-404, 409-14.

32

Nedimāle Saddhānanda, ed. “Saddhamma Saṃgaho.” Journal of the Pali Text Society (1890): 21-90.

33

Kirichenko, “Itineraries.”

34

Lorna Dewaraja, The Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka 1707-1782 (Colombo: Lake House, 1988); Anne M. Blackburn, Buddhist Learning.

35

Alexey Kirichenko, “The Thathanabaing Project,” in Theravada Buddhism in Colonial Contexts, ed. Thomas Borchert (New York: Routledge, 2018), 138-161

36

Kitsiri Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society 1750-1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976); Anne M. Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Alicia Turner, Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014).

37

Blackburn, Locations.

38

Malalgoda, Sinhalese Society; Michael Roberts, Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karāva Elite in Sri Lanka: 1500-1931 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

39

Kirichenko, “Thathanabaing.”

40

Erik Braun, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Turner, Saving Buddhism; Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism.

41

See further in this regard Mark Frost, “‘Wider Opportunities’: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global Dimension in Colombo,” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (2002): 937-67.

42

Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Richard Jaffe, Seeking Śakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

43

Jaffe, Śakyamuni.

44

Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: University of Indianna Press, 1996); Alan Trevithick, The Revival of Buddhist Pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811-1949): Anagarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Temple (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 2007); Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism; and Steven Kemper, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

45

Philip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Charles Hallisey, “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Budhism,” in Curators of the Buddha, ed. Donald S. Lopez (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 31-61; Snodgrass, Presenting Buddhism; Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism; Jaffe, Śakyamuni.

46

Todd LeRoy Perreira, “Whence Theravāda? The Modern Genealogy of an Ancient Term,” in How Theravāda is Theravāda? Exploring Buddhist Identities, eds. Peter Skilling, Jason A. Carbine, Claudio Cicuzza, and Santi Pakdeekham (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2012), 443-571. Sven Bretfeld, “Resonant paradigms in the Study of Religions and the Emergence of Theravāda Buddhism,” Religion 42, no. 2 (2012): 273-297.

47

Anne M. Blackburn, “Circulations: Linked Spaces and Divergent Temporalities in the Pali World,” in the Routledge Handbook of Theravada Buddhism, eds. Ashley Thompson and Steven Berkwitz (London: Routledge, 2022), 58-69.

CHAPTER 8

Muslim Circulations and Islamic Conversion in Monsoon Asia R. Michael Feener

Abstract The Islamization of South and Southeast Asia has often been characterized in terms of the diffusion of a “Middle Eastern” religious tradition from West to East. This chapter presents attempts to move beyond such simplistic assumptions to address the complexities of the historical dynamics of Islamization and vernacularization in this region as multi-vectored and interconnected processes of social transformation. Framing discussions of the geographic spread of Muslim merchant communities and the conversion of local populations to Islam across Southern – or “Monsoon” – Asia facilitates a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which evolving patterns of trans-regional circulation and interactions with diverse local societies have shaped the formation of a major part of the Muslim world.

Keywords: Islam; Indian Ocean; history; Maldives; Indonesia

Within the first century of Islamic history, Muslims were already active in expanding networks of maritime commerce across the Indian Ocean, establishing settlements of sojourning merchants on the western coast of India1 and opening up sea routes to southern China.2 By the tenth century, Chinese court chronicles present with increasing frequency reports of tribute trade missions with envoys bearing distinctly Muslim names coming to the Celestial Court3 from the ports of maritime Southern Asia.4 From their expanding itineraries in eastern waters during the same period, Muslims also spread Arabic-language accounts of exotic locales, including India, China, Angkor, and Champa, beyond the expanding borders of a new world of Islam.5 By nature of the seasonal monsoon cycles, Muslims who ventured out across coasts and Islands of the Indian Ocean sojourned at points all along those coasts. Their temporary transit through the region may have initiated small communities of migrant or mixed trading populations during the earliest phase of the history of Islam, when connections between Tang China and the Abbasids supported movement across the great stretch of Monsoon Asia.6 It was, however, still to be several centuries before sources reveal any indications of a transition from these sojourner

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communities to any demographically significant conversion of local populations to Islam. This essay explores the long histories through which shifting patterns of Muslim circulation through this seascape came to shape the Islamization of much of the region, with particular emphasis on the notable acceleration of these social transformations over the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.7 Conceptualizing these historical processes in terms of “circulations” rather than of the “transmission” of Islam in the Indian Ocean world can contribute to more nuanced understandings of the complex, multi-vectored processes by which Southern Asia came to be home to some of the world’s largest Muslim populations, and how this region became an integral part of the world of Islam over the medieval and early modern periods. As I have highlighted elsewhere, discussions of Islamization in Southern Asia have had a tendency toward preoccupation with questions of ‘origin’ and often preoccupied with identifying ‘the’ source for Islam’s arrival into the region.8 Since the second half of the twentieth century, moreover, linear models of Islamization have increasingly been deployed in polemic contexts of debates framed more by modern political and identity concerns rather than informed by any clear new empirical evidence. Envisioning cultural interactions between Muslim societies along multiple vectors can facilitate more nuanced appreciation of Islam as a global civilization that moves us beyond models of a Middle Eastern ‘centre’ with Asian and African ‘peripheries.’9 To understand the ways in which local populations along the coasts of Southern Asia came to identify themselves as Muslim, and how the region came to be integrated within an expanding world of Islam, we need to remind ourselves that pre-modern ‘conversion’ to Islam is more usefully approached in terms of temporally extended processes, rather than as a discrete event. From this perspective, the ‘Islamization’ of Southern Asia occurred over several centuries through the evolution of small communities of migrant Muslim traders established during annual trading seasons, to longer-term sojourner settlements, and the eventual conversion of significant portions of the local population. Nearly forty years ago, Ricklefs highlighted the importance of such long-term perspectives on Islamization of one demographically significant part of Southern Asia: the Indonesian island of Java. His framing discussions of social change not in terms of a distinct and irreversible conversion event, but rather in terms of complex processes unfolding over six centuries marks a critical intervention into discussions that can help us to reconsider histories of Islamization well beyond the shores of Java.10 Approaches to historical Islamization along these lines in pre-modern contexts across Asia and Africa have more recently been pursued by a number of scholars in their contributions to an important new volume on the subject. In his editor’s introduction to that collection, Andrew Peacock looks beyond the paradigm of individual conversion to a new faith to stress the importance of

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understanding Islamization across diverse parts of the pre-modern world in terms of broad processes of cultural change and social transformation. The collection also highlights the importance of a comparative perspective to facilitate critical reflection on some of the dominant tropes in discussions of the history of Muslim societies.11 Conceptualizations of Islamization framed in such ways can help to avoid some of the vexing problems that have tended to shape discussions of Islam in Southern Asia. One prominent example of this comes in the form of assumptions about the ‘late’ or ‘foreign’ character of Islam in ‘convert’ societies.12 By contrast, a comparative view across the chronologies of Islamization for coastal regions of Southern Asia in relation to those of near contemporary Islamization of majority populations in Palestine or Anatolia forces us to confront questions such as why the latter are so easily assimilated into common views of the ‘core’ region of the Muslim world, while the former seem to be perpetually regarded as ‘peripheries’.

Circulations and conversions across the monsoon seascape of Southern Asia Modern Area Studies distinctions between ‘South Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’ are of rather limited utility in framing discussions of the Indian Ocean circulations that shaped early dynamics of Islamization in the region that is the focus of this volume. In her contribution to this collection, Blackburn also uses the term ‘Southern Asia’ as “a unit of analysis characterized by a long history of strong economic and cultural integration […] constituted by similar patterns of political formation and ways of marking the presence of supramundane (divine/cosmic) power within human landscapes”. In a recent book that she and I have co-edited, we used the same term as a rubric under which to bring together historians of both Buddhism and Islam in comparative conversations about the ways in which those two proselytizing religious traditions created particular mechanisms for both integration and distinction across the region.13 The histories of both Islam and Buddhism in Southern Asia have played out across the complex and multi-lingual seascape of the region, wherein distinct historical formations were shaped by the shifting prominence of particular modes of connection – all linked by the monsoon cycles of Asia – but by no means strictly determined by these environmental factors. André Wink has called particular attention to the importance of rivers and deltas in defining “a highly differentiated but coherent political economy of exchange” along the Indian Ocean littoral. The ecology of pre-modern port cities established in such places contributed to their relatively fragile and “demographically volatile” histories. In such environments were established the first Muslim merchant communities in coastal entrepôts scattered across the region.14 While initially small, their relative importance came to greatly outpace their demographic profiles, as

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Muslim sojourners in port cities of Southern Asia came to transform the economic life and the structures of local states in ways that facilitated the conversion of local elites, and eventually to the spread of Islam among indigenous populations from the interior. The growth and ascendance of local Muslim communities across the region were integrally related to broader developments of seaborne commerce across the Indian Ocean and South China seas. By the eleventh century diverse local dynamics in Fatimid Egypt, Song China, and the Chola dynasty in South India contributed to a significant expansion of trans-regional maritime trade.15 The transformations of this period appear to have involved not only an increase in the volume of shipping, but also a remapping of the major pathways of commerce and culture. On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, that period saw the emergence of a number of significant sites of long-distance trade, connected to multiple networks that overlapped and intersected in complex ways to facilitate the circulation of objects, cultural forms, and peoples through the island from China, the Middle East, and South Asia. These included interior highland sites like Si Pamutung/Padang Lawas16 as well as a number of coastal entrepôts at Kota Cina,17 Lamri,18 and Barus.19 The last of these sites is the most extensively documented Sumatran port of the period, and reveals what might be seen as a pattern of sorts for the Islamization of other port polities in the region: with Arab and Persian traders in evidence there by the ninth century, and Marakkayar Tamil Muslims from South India by the eleventh, but with Islamization of local communities apparent only from the late thirteenth century, and the appearance of a new local style of carved stone Islamic funerary monument datable only to the mid-fourteenth.20

From long-distance circulations to local conversions One of the earliest Arabic accounts of eastward maritime trade routes – the Akhbār al-ṣīn wa-’l-Hind, dating to the mid-ninth century – describes the course of an itinerary for long sailings from Sīrāf in the Gulf to Khānfū/Guangzhou,21 and traces of some ill-fated voyages along this route are known to us through recent work on shipwrecks in the seas off Southern Asia.22 Chaudhuri, however, has posited that after c. 1,000 CE there evolved a tripartite segmentation into overlapping regional circulations of the South China Sea, Bay of Bengal, and the western Indian Ocean.23 Within this mapping, the central circle of the three contained much of the region identified by the editors of this volume as ‘Monsoon Asia’. It was still, however, not until considerably later than this that we have evidence of any significant shifts toward the establishment of Muslim societies in this region at a level beyond that of merchant sojourner communities. Exactly how this happened is extremely difficult

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conclusively to determine from the fragmentary source base available to us for the micro-dynamics of any particular port polity of Southern Asia in pre-modern times. Bearing in mind the critiques of earlier theories of religious ‘conversion’ noted at the outset of this essay, we need to be wary here of any claims to a single explanatory factor or the positing of a single source for the coming of Islam to any particular part of the region. Indeed, Southern Asia has long been a meeting point for peoples of diverse geographic origins and cultural backgrounds who moved through the patterns of circulation that shaped the Islamization of the region. Narrative traditions in a number of Muslim vernacular literatures present – often in miraculous terms – dramatic episodes of conversion that tend to be focused on a local ruler’s embrace of the new faith. Such texts, however, may also be read as attempts to recast complex historical processes of economic shifts, political transitions, cultural contact and intermarriage within frameworks of heroic individual action or the triumph of religious truth.24 In general terms, then, we can recognize that the Islamization of Southern Asia and the integration of this region within an expanding Muslim world were effected simultaneously through complexly interrelated economic, political, and cultural transformations. This included the attractions of the prosperity and cultural styles of Muslim merchants who could at times become influential on local traders and the rulers of the ports that they frequented. At the same time there appears to have been a significant degree of intermarriage between high-status male sojourners and local women, which would have produced offspring who could have identified with the faith of their fathers while forming new generations of Muslim merchant elites with local roots. The expansion of local Muslim communities beyond court circles and the mixed families of merchant intermarriages appears to have reached tipping points in particular contexts that eventually triggered wider identifications with the increasingly prestigious faith of Islam among broader populations of would-be converts. Anthony Reid has further highlighted the ways in which broader structural dynamics of the “Age of Commerce” served to accelerate conversion to Christianity as well as to Islam. Within contexts of expanding maritime trade and the development of new port polities across the region, these traditions afforded both a high degree of portability and access to trans-regional networks associated with wealth, the power of writing and memorization, healing, the promise of a predictable moral universe, and images of military success.25 The last of these factors has, however, often been ignored or marginalized in other studies of the early Islamization of the archipelago, where dominant discourses have long emphasized models of the peaceful commercial cosmopolitanism of trading systems, and imaginations of Sufi syncretism.26 Since the 1990s, however, even some of the leading proponents of arguments for the role of Sufism were beginning to critically re-evaluate such

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arguments.27 More recent scholarship exploring an expanded range of primary source material has, moreover, been unable to identify any surviving evidence for the transmission of specific Sufi orders (ṭarīqa) prior to the seventeenth century.28 On the other hand, we do have textual sources indicating armed campaigns for the expansion of territory under Islamizing sultans at that time in South Sulawesi29 and even earlier, as far back as fourteenth-century Sumatra.30 With the intensification of commercial and cultural circulations in Southern Asia, we see the consolidation of nascent Muslim communities across the region in the post-Mongol period. Sebastian Prange has highlighted the interconnected processes of Islamization on the Malabar Coast and in the Indonesian Archipelago, seeing a significant shift toward the acceleration of Islamization starting from the thirteenth century in relation to the increased integration of Muslim trading networks in the Indian Ocean.31 Following the violent temporary disruptions of overland Eurasian trade routes caused by the Mongol expansion, a new dynamism was interjected into the maritime circulations of Southern Asia.32 Reflections of these shifts can, for example, be seen in the appearance of a new term in Arabic: ‘Jāwa’ – which came to be used as a toponym for parts of island Southeast Asia – in descriptions of the region’s exotic export products, and finally as an element in the names of Muslims associated with the new frontier of the maritime Muslim world.33 The earliest onomastic usage of ‘Jāwī’ that has yet come to light is found in a text describing a renowned teacher of Sufism in Arabia in the thirteenth century, Abū A ʿ bd Allāh Masʿūd b. A ʿ bd Allāh al-Jāwī.34 We find scholars referred to with the word Jāwī as an element of their names (nisba) indicating a geographic association as teachers as well as students in evolving scholarly networks connecting Arabia to the shores of Southern Asia and beyond through the nineteenth century.35 Their careers can be mapped in relation to the development of interconnected constellations of Arabic-based Sufi and Shāfiʿī vernacular traditions across the Indian Ocean littoral in the medieval and early modern periods.36 However these scholars should not be thought of as simply ’nodes’ in the linear ‘transmission’ of some fixed corpus of Islamic knowledge. Rather they were actively engaged with the ongoing production of texts that served to substantively redefine aspects of an evolving tradition. Mahmood Kooria, for example, has demonstrated the degree to which the canon of the Shāfiʿī school of Islamic jurisprudence emerged from circulations connecting communities of scholars in South Asia and Arabia in the sixteenth century.37 Beyond the specific sphere of fiqh, Torsten Tschacher has highlighted the benefits of approaching the Islamization of the region in terms of “patterns of convergence and divergence within a circulatory regime,” in which Muslim traditions from South India and the Indonesian Archipelago “converged in shared patterns of conversion, religious organization, and engagement with Islamic textual traditions,

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both Arabic and vernacular”.38 Ronit Ricci has since pushed these lines of investigation in other directions to explore the production of multiple and connected Southern Asian vernaculars: Tamil, Malay and Javanese linking diverse Muslim societies over the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.39

Muslim commercial centers and court cultures With the prosperity of the Fatimids and Ayyubids in Egypt and the Southern Song in China, the maritime routes connecting the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean experienced a reinvigoration over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.40 Through these intensified circulations, new visions of Islamic prestige and power inspired imaginations as far away as Sumatra. Indeed, early rulers of the Sultanate of Pasai that rose on the northeast coast of that Indonesian island at the end of the thirteenth century adopted the regnal titles of the thirteenth-century Ayyūbid and Mamlūk rulers al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ, al-Malik al-Ẓāhir, and al-Malik al-Manṣūr.41 Pasai also appears to have bolstered its claims to Islamic political legitimacy by welcoming émigrés and descendants of the ʿAbbāsid nobility who appear to have fled eastward overseas in the wake of the Mongol conquest of Baghdad.42 The court culture of this early Sumatran sultanate appears to have been predominantly expressed in Arabic, and drew on styles current in other sultanates of its day, including Delhi, with official titles for court officers and the nobility from precedents in this prominent Muslim power in India and elsewhere. The influence of Indo-Persian culture on Pasai also contributed to the early formation of vernacular Islamic literary traditions in Malay.43 At the same time, two Tamil inscriptions located in Southern India testify to the presence of Pasai merchants there in the early thirteenth century44 and the Malay texts of the Hikayat RajaRaja Pasai and the Sejarah Melayu emphasize the importance of an Islamic Holy Man – a descendent of the first caliph Abu Bakr – from a kingdom of South India, as an important point of connection in the narrative of its early Islamization.45 The narration of his journey in the latter text presents a sweep across the Indian Ocean from Mekka via the Coromandel Coast to the Islamizing Sumatran ports of Barus, Lamri, Aru, and Perlak before arriving at Pasai.46 The accelerating trade flows of the time contributed to the growth of a number of particular nodes in which commercial prosperity and religious legitimacy came together in Muslim port polities like Pasai. When Ibn Baṭṭūṭa visited there in the mid-fourteenth century, he described the Sultan as an adherent of the Shāfiʿī school of jurisprudence, a patron of religious scholars, and the leader of campaigns to bring the unbelievers under his rule and to exact from them the jizya (tax) as the price of protection under an Islamic ruler.47 Pasai, moreover, continued to be

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regarded by later Muslim port polities of the region as a centre of Arabic learning and literature well after its political pre-eminence had passed.48 These normative markers of medieval Muslim sovereignty, however, were not the only ways in which the sultans of Pasai established their authority. For, as Kenneth Hall has noted, they also deftly negotiated a privileged position for themselves between upstream and downstream communities through the performance of ritualized redistribution embedded within local traditions.49 Pasai was thus at the same time notable for both the adoption of cultural styles and elements from elsewhere through the commercial and cultural circulations of the region, and as an important site for the emergence of early styles of vernacular Islamic traditions.50 This is particularly clear from the material culture legacy of hundreds of distinctive Muslim funerary markers that survive today in North Aceh.51 Coincident with the flourishing of Pasai in the fourteenth century, we enter a significant period of transition in the history of Southeast Asia, when we first see glimpses of a new dynamic of Islam in the region: from small port enclaves of ‘foreign’ Muslims living, working, and dying on the coasts of the Indonesian archipelago to the beginnings of Islamization of local communities. This is evident in the proliferation of inscribed Muslim gravestones and other monuments across the region, including at Brunei,52 Jolo,53 Terengganu54 Barus55, and Lamri.56 While we now have sufficient reason to doubt Damais’ interpretation of inscribed stones found at Troloyo near the capital of Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit as indicating a Muslim presence at court in the mid-fourteenth century57, there does appear to have been significant Islamization elsewhere in East Java at the time. Alexander Wain in fact goes so far as to characterize Gresik as “a specifically Chinese city, ruled by a Muslim.”58 Within this broader context of acceleration in the establishment of local Muslim communities in island Southeast Asia, we have the rise of a new power in the Straits with the rise of Melaka, which eventually displaced Pasai as the region’s most important Muslim port polity. As was the case with the early Islamization of the Pesisir, an important factor in Melaka’s ascendancy in the early fifteenth century was its special relationship with China. The Ming Shi-Lu reports that in 1405, the Yongle Emperor granted a stele inscription that endorsed Melaka’s aspirations to “forever remain our subordinate state and annually carry out your tribute duties”.59 Over the years that followed Melaka became a regular port of call for the fleets of Chinese Muslim admiral Zheng He, who led a series of voyages by massive armadas across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.60 It was during this dramatically heightened Chinese maritime engagement with Melaka that the ruler of that port polity converted to Islam in the early fifteenth century.61 Melaka’s rise was linked to a significant increase in demand from markets in China, the Middle East, and increasingly in Europe for exotic spices that were

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obtainable at that time only from some of the smallest islands at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago. Over the course of the fifteenth century, this facilitated new prosperity and political prominence for regional Southeast Asian ports involved in the transit of these rare commodities, particularly Melaka and the coastal cities of the north Java coast.62 With its strategic position between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, Melaka attracted traders from all across the expanding maritime Muslim world of the time, making it one of the world’s most prosperous cities. A century after its founding, its merchant community included: “Moors from Cairo, Mecca, Aden, Abyssinians, men of Kilwa, Malindi, Ormuz, Parsees, Rumes, Turks, Turkomans, Christian Armenians, Gujaratees, men of Chaul, Dabhol, Goa, of the kingdom of Deccan, Malabars and Klings, merchants from Orissa, Ceylon, Bengal, Arakan, Pegu, Siamese, men of Kedah, Malays, men of Pahang, Patani, Cambodia, Champa, Cochin China, Chinese, Lequeos, men of Brunei, Luçoes, men of Tamjompura, Laue, Banka, Linga they have a thousand other islands, Moluccas, Banda, Bima, Timor, Madura, Java, Sunda, Palembang, Jambi, Tongkal, Indragiri, Kappatta, Menangkabau, Siak, Arqua, […] Aru, Bata, country of the Tomjano, Pase, Pedir, Maldives.”63

The diversity of Melaka’s merchant community indexes multiple nodal points within the maritime circulations across Monsoon Asia in the sixteenth century. In Melaka, diverse expressions and understandings of Islam came together, and contributed to the formation of a new Malay Muslim vernacular culture that was to be a formative influence on the understandings and experiences of Islam in a growing number of different societies in the region.64 During Melaka’s heyday in the fifteenth century, Muslim communities were also being consolidated in a number of port polities across the Indonesian archipelago, including at Patani,65 Brunei,66 Ternate,67 and the North Coast of Java. The last of these regions – known as the Pesisir – was, like Melaka, Islamized to a considerable extent within contexts of increasing engagement with Chinese Muslim maritime connections in the early fifteenth century.68 Thereafter we see swift expansion across islands connected with Java through circulations of commerce and culture including Ambon and other ‘Spice Islands’ of Maluku.69

Iberian intrusion and intensified Islamization The exceptional prosperity of these Muslim-dominated trading ports made them an attractive target for Portuguese campaigns to take control of Asian trade in the early sixteenth century. In 1511, they managed to capture Melaka, which resulted in

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a scattering of traders who had been based there in a diaspora that, in turn, further facilitated the further proliferation and expansion of new Muslim communities across the region. Within less than fifty years of the Portuguese taking Melaka, we have reports of the Islamization of a host of other port polities across the region. The Portuguese intrusion into the maritime trade networks of Southern Asia, however, not only stimulated diasporas and the emergence of new Muslim communities across the region. It also served to galvanize a new sense of Islamic identity moulded in opposition to Iberian intrusions into the maritime Muslim world of Southern Asia. This has been read by some historians as one of a ‘race’ between Islam and Christianity that fuelled the expansion of both religions across the region in the early modern era.70 Anthony Reid has characterized the period between 1550-1650 as “a remarkable period of conversion” to both Christianity and Islam in Southeast Asia – in which the arrival of the Iberians set into play new dynamics of competition by fostering the emergence of “a new political character to religious identity.”71 In this both commercial and crusading impulses combined and mutually reinforced each other in propelling new dynamics into the reconfigurations of trade routes and patterns of religious conversion across the region. At the same time, these new developments within the maritime circulations of Southern Asia came to impact political and cultural developments well beyond the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean.72 Over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Muslim opposition to the ‘infidel’ Iberians took the form of armed campaigns across Southern Asia. In 1550, Johor organized an anti-Portuguese coalition of Muslim port polities that included a number of smaller states of the Malay Peninsula, and Jepara on the north coast of Java.73 In 1575, Sultan Babullah of Ternate seized the Portuguese fortress there and expelled them from the north Maluku island – reversing the progress that Christianity had begun to make in the eastern reaches of the Archipelago.74 Sultan Buisan of Maguindanao later forged an alliance with the Babullah’s successor and, in 1599 led a coalition of Muslim forces in raids on Spanish settlements in the Visayas.75 Local opposition to European Christian expansion in Southern Asia did not, however, necessarily serve to foster a heightened sense of Muslim solidarity. Malabar was a region of southern India that was at the forefront of confrontations with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Some of the earliest local texts of Muslim literary production on this stretch of the Indian coast took the form of Arabic texts stressing the heroic armed struggles against the Portuguese.76 The Fatḥ al-Mubīn, however, rebukes the Muslim empires of the day who ignored calls for assistance from Malabar’s Muslim traders while the Hindu Zamorin “who loves the Muslims” actively took up the cause.77 Another Malabari Arabic text – the Tuḥfat al-Mujāhidīn – is also critical of those Muslim powers that did not come to the aid

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of their co-religionists in Malabar, but also recognizes those who did: in particular the sultans of Aceh and Mamlūk Egypt.78 One of Malabar’s closest Muslim neighbours on the maritime routes across Southern Asia is the Maldives, which also became a flashpoint of conflict with the Portuguese. Conflicting claims to control and fluctuations of royal power in this Indian Ocean archipelago of atolls shaped over the course of the sixteenth century by deepening entanglements not only with neighbouring Malabar, but also with the emerging sultanate of Aceh, which helped to arm and provision Maldivian resistance to the Portuguese.79 It is important to note here, however, that a “race for conversion” between Muslims and Christians was not a significant factor in the primary Islamization of the Maldives – as that had been consolidated centuries earlier following the acceptance of Islam by the king and the transfer of support from Buddhist institutions to Islamic religious endowments over the second half of the twelfth century.80 Over the centuries that followed, Islam in the Maldives developed in conversation with broader emerging patterns of Sufism and Shāfiʿī jurisprudence that came to characterize Muslim communities across much of maritime Southern Asia.81

Southern Asian sultanates During the sixteenth century, Aceh rose to become a dominant Muslim power in the region and a rallying point for opposition to further Portuguese expansion recognized by their co-religionists in Malabar and the Maldives. At the same time, it projected this oppositional identity onto a broader global stage through contacts with the Ottoman authorities in Istanbul.82 Beyond appeals to military alliance and counter-crusader solidarity, Aceh’s Islamic court culture drew upon connections with the contemporary Muslim agrarian empire of the Mughals as well the Ottomans in the selective adaptation of cultural elements in fields ranging from landscaping to literary composition.83 By the seventeenth century, it had become well established in its own right as a center for the production of Islamic religious texts in both Arabic and Malay.84 Aside from its role as an important site of production for works in the Islamic religious sciences, Aceh was also distinguished during the seventeenth century as a center of Malay literary production and a model for the redefinition of Muslim courtly culture in the region. Indeed, the earliest surviving work of jurisprudence in Malay was compiled by the same author that produced a monumental work of Malay literature incorporating a universal history from the creation of the world to Aceh’s Sultan Iskandar Thani together with treatments of kingly virtues and related subjects. This author, Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī d. 1658, was himself an embodiment of

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Southern Asia’s maritime circulations: a Gujarati Muslim of South Arabian descent who was born into a family with far-flung connections in the commercial and cultural networks across the Indian Ocean littoral.85 Al-Rānīrī was the most prolific writer in Malay among a number of Muslim scholars from abroad who were attracted to move to Aceh under court patronage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.86 The power and prestige of the Acehnese court in the seventeenth century enabled it not only to take up the mantle of Muslim Malay culture rooted in the earlier tradition of Melaka, but also to significantly transform it to the extent that Leonard Andaya has characterized Aceh as establishing “new standards of Malayness based on Islamic models in literature and in court administration and behaviour”.87 In Aceh, as in Pasai and Melaka in earlier centuries, we can thus observe a complex “cultural alchemy”88 in which multiple strands of influence from all across Southern Asia and beyond contributed to, but did not necessarily determine, the shape of evolving vernacular expressions of Islam. Aceh was one of a number of Southeast Asian sultanates that capitalized on the booming trade of the period and used its prosperity to develop new forms of Islamic culture as they grew to new levels of power and prestige in the seventeenth century. Two of its most important contemporaries in the Indonesian Archipelago were Banten in West Java89 and Makassar in South Sulawesi.90 From these large regional sultanates, moreover, distinct cultural styles developed that came to be influential in the formation of the local traditions of a number of smaller port polities that flourished across island Southeast Asia over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – a period which might be productively conceived of as “the great age of Muslim vernaculars”.91 While Banten, Makassar, and Aceh were all predominantly maritime sultanates, they were contemporary with the rise of another new Islamic political formation in the region: the Javanese agrarian state of Mataram. The Muslim port polities that had been established on Java’s north coast since the early fifteenth century fell under the control of the growing power of this inland kingdom over the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The founder of Mataram, Senapati, had himself converted to Islam only in 1576, and his royal authority was bolstered both by the spiritual power of his new faith, and by claims to legitimacy rooted in pre-Islamic Javanese traditions. It was in the early seventeenth century, however, that Mataram flourished most notably under the reign of Sultan Agung (1613-1646). This ruler of Mataram masterfully fused elements of Javanese culture and religious cosmology with a strong sense of Islamic identity, as evident, for example, in his creation of a new Javano-Islamic chronological system that modified the Indic Śaka calendar previously in use to reckon years after AJ 1555/1633 CE according to the Islamic lunar system. More dramatically, Agung combined claims to supernatural power rooted in his mystical ‘marriage’ to Ratu Kidul, the Javanese ‘Goddess of the

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Figure 8.1: Minaret of the mosque of Sunan Kudus on the north coast of Java, Indonesia. Photograph by R. Michael Feener.

Southern Ocean’, with the adoption of the title of ‘sultan’ for which he sent an embassy to Mekka. Agung cast himself in the role of a heroic ‘Sufi warrior’ on the frontier of an expanding Dār al-Islām, while back at his refined court he commissioned the production of a new corpus of Javano-Islamic court literature. His remarkable career as ‘reconciler’ of Javanese traditions and Islam served to establish the foundations of what Ricklefs has referred to as a ‘mystic synthesis’ that framed Javanese Muslim identity and experience for two centuries.92 The adoption of Islam as the religion of the Javanese population as a whole under Mataram thus presents one of the region’s most dramatic manifestations of a transition between the maritime circulations of elite Muslim individuals and mass local conversions to Islam.

Colonial coda The voyage of the Javanese embassy that brought the title of Sultan back to Agung from Mekka was arranged by the British, who were promised rewards of valuable trading concessions in the Pesisir ports that Mataram had brought under the control of its inland court. In 1642, the British ship Reformation carrying Javanese pilgrims

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and considerable funds to perform the hajj on behalf of Sultan Agung, was attacked by the VOC as it attempted to sail past Batavia.93 The interventions of the British and the Dutch into the affairs of Muslim states in Southern Asia over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shaped new colonial entanglements with dynamics that were to become further transformed and accelerated in the age of steam. With that, however, we enter into a rather different set of histories of circulation, as the patterns and pace of movement across various parts of the Muslim world were altered by the increasing intervention of European colonial powers.94 Networks of commercial and cultural exchange had long connected the coasts of Southern Asia even before the rise of Islam. Over the centuries that followed, there was a gradual transformation of small Muslim merchant communities in port polities across the region into nascent communities of local converts – resulting eventually in the establishment of major Muslim population centres that shape the global demographics of Islam to this day. This chapter has traced these developments across the region with attention to both the intensification of connections between nodal points in an expanding Islamic world, and the processes by which new vernacular forms of Muslim cultural expression proliferated across the region over the late medieval and early modern periods.

Notes 1

André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Volume I: Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam, 7th-11th Centuries (Boston: Brill, 1996).

2

O.W. Wolters, The Fall of Srivijaya in Malay History (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1970), 32.

3

Jitsuzo Kuwabara. “On P’u Shou-keng, a Man of the Western Regions, who was the Superintendent of the Trading Ship’s Office in Chüan-chou towards the End of the Sung Dynasty,” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 2 (1928): 1-79; M. Nakahara, “Muslim Merchants in NanHai,” in Islam in Asia: Volume II, Southeast and East Asia, eds. Raphael Israeli and Anthony H. Johns (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984); Geoff Wade, “Early Muslim Expansion in South-East Asia, Eighth to Fifteenth Centuries,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 3, eds. David O. Morgan and Anthony Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 366-408.

4

In this chapter, I use the term ‘Southern Asia’ for the region, following the use of this designation developed in a recent book by Anne Blackburn and myself, Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia: Comparative Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018). This terminology has also been used in Blackburn’s contribution to this volume, and is discussed further below in this essay as well. The areas conceptualized in these two ways overlap considerably, and within the framework of this volume could be viewed as synonymous.

5

Ibn Nadim, The Fihrist of al-Nadim, tr. Bayard Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Muhammad Husayn Nainar, Arab Geographers’ Knowledge of Southern India (Calicut: Other Books, 2011).

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6

Angela Schottenhammer, “China’s Increasing Integration into the Indian Ocean World Until Song Times: Sea Routes, Connections, Trades,” in Early Global Interconnectivity Across the Indian Ocean World, vol. 1, ed. Angela Schottenhammer (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 21-52.

7

The spread of Islam across more inland areas of South Asia was animated by dynamics markedly different from those characteristics of this maritime world, including overland conquest. The extensive historiography of such expansive agrarian empires has produced a vast literature of its own, and will not be treated in this essay. For more on that, see: André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, vols. 1 and 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1996, 1997).

8

A classic example of this is G.W.J Drewes’ 1968 essay “New Light on the Coming of Islam to Indonesia.” This has been reproduced in a thick anthology of other earlier works on process of transmission and competition in the face of European expansion: Alijah Gordon, ed., The Propagation of Islam in the Malay Archipelago (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 2001).

9

R. Michael Feener, “Issues and Ideologies in the Study of Regional Muslim Cultures,” in Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies of South and Southeast Asia, eds. R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Press, 2009), 13-23.

10

M.C. Ricklefs first outlined a periodization of three stages in “Six Centuries of Islamization in Java,” in Conversion to Islam, ed. Nehemia Levtzion (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), 100-128. He later developed this in the respective volumes of his trilogy on the Islamizaton of the Javanese: M.C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries (Norwalk, Connecticut: East Bridge, 2006); Polarising Javanese Society: Islamic and Other Visions, c. 1830-1930 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007); Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, c. 1930 to Present (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012).

11

A.C.S. Peacock, ed., Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

12

William R. Roff, “Islam Obscured? Some Reflections on Studies of Islam and Society in Southeast Asia,” Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), 3-32.

13

R. Michael Feener and Anne M. Blackburn, eds., Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia: Comparative Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019).

14

André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, Volume III: Indo-Islamic Society, 14th-15th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

15

Dionisius Agius, Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 106; Hermann Kulke, “The Naval Expeditions of the Cholas in the Context of Asian History,” in Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola Naval Expeditions to Southeast Asia, eds. Hermann Kulke, K. Kesavapany and Vijay Sakhuja (Singapore: ISEAS Press, 2009), 1-19; Paul Wheatley, “Geographical Notes on Some Commodities Involved in Sung Maritime Trade,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 32, no. 2 (1959): 1-139.

16

Daniel Perret and Heddy Surachman, History of Padang Lawas, I: The Site of Si Pamutung, 9th Century-13th Century AD (Paris: Association Archipel, 2014).

17

E.E. McKinnon, “Continuity and Change in South Indian Involvement in Northern Sumatra: The Inferences of Archaeological Evidence from Kota Cina and Lamreh,” in Early Interactions Between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), 137–60.

18

R. Michael Feener et al., “Islamisation and the Formation of a Vernacular Muslim Material Culture in 15th-century Northern Sumatra,” Indonesia and the Malay World 49/143 (2021): 1-41; Patrick Daly, et al., “Archaeological investigation of the historic trading port of Lamri on the coast of Aceh, Indonesia,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 105 (2019): 115-144.

212 r. michael feener

19

Claude Guillot, ed., Histoire de Barus, Sumatra: Le Site de Lobu Tua, I. Études et Documents (Paris: Association Archipel, 1998); Histoire de Barus, Sumatra: Le Site de Lobu Tua, II. Étude archéologique et Documents (Paris: Association Archipel, 2003).

20

Daniel Perret and H. Surachman, eds., Histoire de Barus III: Regards sur une place marchande de l’océan Indien, XIIe-milieu du XVIIe s. (Paris: Association Archipel, 2009).

21

al-Sīrāfī, Abū Zayd, Akhbār al-ṣīn wa-’l-Hind, trans. Tim Mackintosh-Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 30-34.

22

Michael Flecker, “A Ninth-Century Arab Shipwreck in Indonesia: The First Archaeological Evidence of Direct Trade with China,” in Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds, eds. Regina Krahl, John Guy, J. Keith Wilson and Julian Raby (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2010); Horst Liebner, The Siren of Cirebon: A Tenth-Century Trading Vessel Lost in the Java Sea (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2014).

23

K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 41.

24

Russell Jones, “Ten Conversion Myths from Indonesia,” in Conversion to Islam, ed. Nehemia Levtzion (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), 129-158.

25

Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, vol. 2, Expansion and Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 150-160.

26

For recent critiques of dominant models of Islamic cosmopolitanism in Asia, see: R. Michael Feener and Joshua Gedacht, “Hijra, Hajj and Muslim Mobilities: Considering Coercion and Asymmetrical Power Dynamics in Histories of Islamic Cosmopolitanism,” in Challenging Cosmopolitanism: Coercion, Mobility and Displacement in Islamic Asia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 1-29.

27

A.H. Johns, “Sufism in Southeast Asia: Reflections and Reconsiderations with Special Reference to the Role of Sufism,” Southeast Asian Studies 31, no. 1 (1993): 43-61; R. Michael Feener, “A Re-examination of the Place of al-Ḥallāj in the History of Islam in Southeast Asia,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 154, no. 4 (1998): 571-592.

28

Michael Laffan, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 11-13.

29

Thomas Gibson, Islamic Narrative and Authority in Southeast Asia: From the 16th to the 21st Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 49-52.

30

In the mid-14th century, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa described Sultan al-Malik al-Ẓāhir of Pasai as a leader of campaigns to bring the unbelievers of neighboring Sumatran regions under his rule “and to exact from them the jizya as the price of protection under an Islamic ruler.” H.A.R. Gibb and C.F. Beckingham. The Travels of Ibn Battuta, AD 1325-1354, vol. 4 (Surrey and Ashgate: Routledge, 2015), 876-877.

31

Sebastian Prange, “Like Banners on the Sea: Muslim Trade Networks and Islamization in Malabar and Maritime Southeast Asia,” in Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, eds. R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (Singapore: ISEAS, Press, 2009), 36.

32

Yasuhiro Yokkaichi, “Chinese and Muslim Diasporas and the Indian Ocean Trade Network under Mongol Hegemony,” in The East Asian “Mediterranean”: Maritime Crossroads of Culture, Commerce and Human Migration, ed. A. Schottenhammer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 73-102.

33

Michael Laffan, “Finding Java: Muslim Nomenclature of Insular Southeast Asia from Srivijaya to Snouck Hurgronje,” in Southeast Asia and the Middle East: Islam, Movement, and the Longue Durée, ed. Eric Tagliacozzo (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009), 17-64.

34

R. Michael Feener and Michael F. Laffan, “Sufi Scents across the Indian Ocean: Yemeni Hagiography and the Earliest History of Southeast Asian Islam,” Archipel 70 (2005): 185-208.

muslim circulations and islamic conversion in monsoon asia  213

35

R. Michael Feener, “ʿAbd al-Samad in Arabia: The Yemeni Years of a Shaykh from Sumatra,” Southeast Asian Studies 4, no. 2 (2015): 259-277.

36

Azyumardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia: Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern ‘Ulamā in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004).

37

Mahmood Kooria, Cosmopolis of Law: Islamic Legal Ideas and Texts across the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean Worlds (PhD. Diss., Leiden University, 2016).

38

Torsten Tschacher, “Circulating Islam: Understanding Convergence and Divergence in the Islamic Traditions of Ma’bar and Nusantara,” in Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, eds. R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (Singapore: ISEAS, Press, 2009), 48-67.

39

Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

40

Philippe Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History, vol. 2, From the Seventh Century to the Fifteenth Century CE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 190-203, 299-309.

41

A.H. Johns, “Islamization in Southeast Asia: Reflections and Reconsiderations with Special Reference to the Role of Sufism,” Southeast Asian Studies 31, no. 1 (1993): 50-51.

42

Ludvik Kalus and Claude Guillot, Les Monuments Funéraires et l’Histoire du Sultanat de Pasai à Sumatra, XIIIe-XVIe siècles (Paris: Association Archipel, 2008).

43

Teuku Iskandar, “Aceh as a Crucible of Muslim-Malay Literature,” in Mapping the Acehnese Past, eds. R. Michael Feener, Patrick Daly and Anthony Reid (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011), 36-64.

44

Y. Subbarayalu, “A Trade Guild Tamil Inscription at Neusu, Aceh,” in Histoire de Barus III: Regards sur une place marchande de l’océan Indien, XIIe-milieu du XVIIe S., eds. Daniel Perret and Heddy Surachman (Paris: Association Archipel, 2009), 529–32; Y. Subbarayalu, “Anjuvannam: A Maritime Trade Guild of Medieval Times,” in Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola Naval Expeditions to Southeast Asia, eds. H. Kulke, K. Kesavapany, and V. Sakhuja (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009), 158–67.

45

A. H. Hill, Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai (Singapore: Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1961).

46

C.C. Brown, Malay Annals, translated from MS Raffles No. 18 (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2009), 40-42.

47

Gibb and Beckingham, Travels of Ibn Battuta, vol. 4, 877.

48

R. Roolvink, “The Answer of Pasai,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 38, no. 2 (1965): 129-139.

49

Kenneth Hall, “Upstream and Downstream Unification in Southeast Asia’s First Islamic Polity: The Changing Sense of Community in the Fifteenth Century Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai Court Chronicle,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 44, no. 2 (2001): 198-229.

50

Elizabeth Lambourn, “The Formation of the Batu Aceh Tradition in Fifteenth-Century SumuderaPasai,” Indonesia and the Malay World 32 (2004): 211-248.

51

Kalus and Guillot, Les Monuments. Near contemporary to this, we also find the emergence of completely different local styles of Muslim gravestones in the northern Sumatra sites of Barus (Perret and Surrachman, Histoire de Barus III) and Lamri (Feener et al. “Islamisation and the Formation of a Vernacular Muslim Material Culture”). Full documentation of a large sample of these stones is available at: R. Michael Feener, ed., The Maritime Asia Heritage Survey Database (https://maritimeasiaheritage.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp). For 3D digital models of select examples, see: R. Michael Feener and Alexandru Hegyi, “Islamic Inscriptions,” MAHS Sketchfab Collection (https:// sketchfab.com/MaritimeAsiaHeritageSurvey/collections/islamic-inscriptions).

52

Chen Da Sheng, “Une pierre tombale du début du XIVe s. retrouvée à Brunei,” Archipel 42 (1991): 47-52.

214 r. michael feener

53

Roderick Orlina, “Revisiting Sulu Relics: Islamic Epigraphy from Jolo, Philippines,” in Writing for Eternity: A Survey of Epigraphy in Southeast Asia, ed. Daniel Perret (Paris: EFEO, 2018), 377-384.

54

Muhammad Zainiy Uthman, Batu Bersurat of Terengganu: Its Correct Date, Religio-Cultural, and Scientific Dimension (Selangor: Department of National Heritage, 2012).

55

Daniel Perret, Heddy Surachman, and Ludvik Kalus, “Six siècles d’art funéraire Musulman à Barus,” in Histoire de Barus III: Regards sur une place marchande de l’océan Indien, XIIe-milieu du XVIIe s., eds. D. Perret and H. Surachman (Paris: Association Archipel, 2009), 473-506.

56

R. Michael Feener et al, “Islamisation and the Formation of a Vernacular Muslim Material Culture in 15th-century Northern Sumatra,” Indonesia and the Malay World 49/143 (2021): 1-41.

57

Louis-Charles Damais, “Études javanaises: I. Les Tombes musulmanes datées de Trålåyå,” Bulletin de l‘École française d’Extrême-Orient 48, no. 2 (1957): 353-416; Hadi Sidomulyo, “Gravestones and candi stones: Reflections on the grave complex of Troloyo,” Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 99 (2012-2013): 95-152.

58

Alexander Wain, “China and the Rise of Islam on Java,” in Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History, ed. A.C.S. Peacock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 435.

59

Geoff Wade, Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu (Singapore: NUS Press, 2005): http://epress.nus.edu. sg/msl/reign/yong-le/year-3-month-10-day-20

60

Tansen Sen, “The Impact of Zheng He’s Expeditions on Indian Ocean Interactions,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 79, no. 3 (2016): 609–36.

61

C.H. Wake, “Melaka in the Fifteenth Century: Malay Historical Traditions and the Politics of Islamization,” in Melaka: The Transformation of a Malay Capital, c. 1400-1980, ed. Paul Wheatley & Kernial Singh (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University of Press, 1983), 104-128.

62

S.O. Robson, “Java at the Crossroads: Aspects of Javanese Cultural history in the 14th and 15th Centuries,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 137, no. 2/3 (1981): 259-292.

63

Armando Cortesão, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), 268.

64

Leonard Y. Andaya, Leaves of the Same Tree: Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka (Singapore:

65

Daniel Perret, “Réflexions Sur L’émergence du Sultanat de Patani,” in Études sur L’histoire du

NUS Press, 2010), 15. Sultanat de Patani, eds. D. Perret, A. Srisuchat, and S. Thanasuk (Paris: École française d’Extrême Orient, 2004), 17-36. 66

Marie-Sybille de Vienne, Brunei: From the Age of Commerce to the 21st Century (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015), 45-49.

67

Roderich Ptak, “The Northern Trade Route to the Spice Islands: South China Sea – Sulu Zone – North Moluccas 14th to early 16th century,” Archipel 43 (1992): 27-56,

68

Wain, “China and the Rise of Islam on Java,” 433.

69

H.J. de Graaf, De Geschiedenis van Ambon en de Zuid-Molukken (Franeker: Uitgeverij T. Wever B.V., 1977), 21; Leonard Y. Andaya, The World of Maluku (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1993), 57-58.

70

B. Schrieke, Indonesian Sociological Studies, vol. 2 (The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1957), 309.

71

Anthony Reid, “Islamization and Christianization in Southeast Asia: The Critical Phase, 1550-1650,” in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief, ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 151-179.

72

R.B. Serjeant, The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast: Ḥaḍramī Chronicles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

73

Anthony Reid, “Sixteenth Century Turkish Influence in Western Indonesia,” The Journal of Southeast Asian History 10, no. 3 (1969): 403.

muslim circulations and islamic conversion in monsoon asia  215

74

Leonard Y. Andaya, “Baabullah,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, eds. Kate Fleet et al. (2009). http:// ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2197/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_23251

75

Portia L. Reyes, “Buisan of Maguindanao,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, eds. Kate Fleet et al. (2009). http://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2197/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_23122

76

Stephen Frederic Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mappilas of Malabar, 14981922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

77

Qadi Muhammad, Fath al-Mubin: A Contemporary Account of the Portuguese Invasion of Malabar in Arabic Verse (Calicut: Other Books, 2015), 69.

78

Zainuddin Makhdum, Tuhfat al-Mujahidin: A Historical Epic of the Sixteenth Century (Calicut, India:

79

Hasan Taj al-Din, The Islamic History of the Maldive Islands, ed. Hikoichi Yajima (Tokyo University

Other Books, 2012). of Foreign Studies, 2 vols, 1982-1984); Jorge Dos Santos Alves, “Kalu Muhammad Hilali, Sultan of the Maldives, 1491-1528,” Archipel 70 (2005): 53-65; A.C.S. Peacock, “Sufi Cosmopolitanism in the Seventeenth-Century Indian Ocean: Shariʿa, Lineage and Royal Power in Southeast Asia and the Maldives,” in Challenging Cosmopolitanism: Coercion, Mobility, and Displacement in Islamic Asia, eds. Joshua Gedacht and R. Michael Feener (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 53-80. 80

R. Michael Feener, “Maldives,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, eds. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 89-93.

81

A new digital archive of source material for the history of Islam in the Maldives, including digitized manuscripts, maps, architectural drawings, photographs, and oral history recordings is available at: R. Michael Feener, ed., Maritime Asia Heritage Survey (https://maritimeasiaheritage.cseas. kyoto-u.ac.jp/). For more on this resource, see: R. Michael Feener et al., “The Maldives Heritage Survey,” Antiquity 95/381 (2021): 1-9.

82

Ismail H. Göksoy, “Ottoman-Aceh Relations as Documented in Turkish Sources,” in Mapping the Acehnese Past, eds. R. Michael Feener, Patrick Daly and Anthony Reid (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011), 65-96.

83

Vladimir Braginsky, “Structure, Date and Sources of Hikayat Aceh Revisited: The Problem of Mughal-Malay Literary Ties,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 162, no. 4 (2008): 441467; Oman Fathhurahman, “New Textual Evidence for the Intellectual and Religious Connections between the Ottomans and Aceh,” in From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks, and Southeast Asia, eds. Andrew Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 441-467.

84

A.H. Johns, “Malay Sufism as illustrated in an anonymous collection of 17th century tracts,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 32, no. 2 (1954): 1-111; Peter Riddell, Islam and The Malay-Indonesian World: Transmissions and Responses (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001); Peter Riddell, Malay Court Religion, Culture and Language: Interpreting the Qurʾān in 17th Century Aceh (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

85

Paul Wormser, Le Bustan al-Salatin de Nuruddin ar-Raniri: Réflexions sur le rôle culturel d’un étranger dans le monde Malais au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Association Archipel, 2012).

86

Riddell, Islam and The Malay-Indonesian World.

87

Leonard Y. Andaya, Leaves of the Same Tree: Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka (Singapore:

88

Ludvik Kalus and Claude Guillot, Les Monuments Funéraires et l’Histoire du Sultanat de Pasai à

NUS Press, 2010). Sumatra, XIIIe-XVIe siècles (Paris: Association Archipel, 2008), 117. 89

H. Djajadiningrat, Tinjauan Kritis tentang Sajarah Banten: Sumbangan bagi Pengenalan Sifat-sifat Penulisan Sejarah Jawa (Jakarta: Jambatan, 1983); Martin van Bruinessen, “Shari’a Court, Tarekat and Pesantren: Religious Institutions in the Banten Sultanate,” Archipel 50 (1995): 165-200; Claude Guillot, Banten: Sejarah dan Peradaban Abad X-XVII (Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia, 2008).

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90

J. Noorduyn, “De Islamisering van Makasar,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 112 (1956): 247-266; Christian Pelras, “Religion, Tradition, and the Dynamics of Islamization in South Sulawesi,” Archipel 30 (1985): 107-135; William Cummings, “Scripting Islamization: Arabic Texts in Early Modern Makassar,” Ethnohistory 48, no. 4 (2001): 559-86.

91

R. Michael Feener, “Southeast Asian Localisations of Islam and Participation within a Global Umma, c. 1500-1800,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 3, eds. David O. Morgan and Anthony Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 470-503.

92

Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java.

93

Theodore G. Th. Pigeaud, Islamic States in Java 1500-1700 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 49.

94

R. Michael Feener, “New Networks and New Knowledge: Migrations, Communications and the Refiguration of the Muslim Community in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 6, ed. Robert Hefner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 39-68.

CHAPTER 9

Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia Ronit Ricci

Abstract Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as pivotal to understanding interactions among Muslims in South and Southeast Asia. What if we thought of language and literature as an additional network, one that crisscrossed these regions over centuries and provided a powerful site of interaction and exchange facilitated by the dissemination of stories, ideas and beliefs? This chapter presents a history of such networks in Southeast India and the Indonesian-Malay world, drawing on sources in Javanese, Malay and Tamil. Drawing on Pollock’s theory of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis of 300-1300 AD it argues for a later, partially overlapping Arabic Cosmopolis in some of the same regions. Within this cosmopolis, literary networks contributed to the adoption of modes of expression and creativity common across great geographical and cultural spaces.

Keywords: Islam; literature; networks; Indonesia; India; translation

From its birthplace in Arabia, in the seventh century, Islam spread over vast geographical and cultural distances, emerging as a cosmopolitan religion. Through broad networks of travel, trade and learning, combined with a shared faith and legal system, people from multiple world regions joined in a universal community.1 This community had a beating heart in the form of the sacred city, for “daily and annually across time and space, the history of Islam flows from Mecca and back to Mecca. It flows through myriad networks. They connect individuals and institutions, at once affirming and transforming them.”2 Although the central status of Mecca cannot be disputed, in this chapter I highlight a different yet pivotal part of the Muslim world and the history of its networks, which, too, have served to connect and transform. South and Southeast Asia have been, and remain, crucially important in terms of linguistic and cultural diversity as well as intellectual and literary output. They are also home to the world’s majority of Muslims. A better understanding of the nature of contacts, exchange and transmission between and within these regions offers insight into the broad contours of Islamic history as well as its very local manifestations.

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In my discussion I focus primarily on the Tamil-speaking region of Southeast India and the Indonesian-Malay Archipelago with stress on Sumatra and Java. However, the Islamic cosmopolitan sphere I examine was clearly larger, spanning parts of Sulawesi and Madura, parts of the Philippines and the Subcontinent, communities in Sri Lanka and southern Thailand, much of present-day Malaysia and beyond. Different kinds of networks, often intertwined, traversed these regions, forging connections between and among individuals and communities. To the oft-mentioned networks of travel, trade, and Sufi brotherhoods, often presented in the scholarship as the paths by which Islam spread and flourished in these regions, I propose adding the literary networks: these connected Muslims across boundaries of space and culture, and helped introduce and sustain a complex web of prior texts and new interpretations, crucial to the establishment of both local and global Islamic identities. The literary networks I consider were comprised of many shared works, including stories, poems, genealogies, histories, and treatises on a broad range of topics; they also included the readers, listeners, authors, translators and scribes who created the texts, translated and transmitted them, and engaged with them in various ways, thus facilitating the networks, enhancing their reach and significance. Beyond particular texts and individuals, thinking about literary networks also means exploring the multi-layered histories of contacts, selection, interpretation and serendipity that shaped the networks as we have come to know them today. Islamic literary works were told and re-told in local languages which were profoundly influenced and shaped by the influx of Arabic, defined broadly as the bearer of new stories, ideas, beliefs, scripts, and linguistic and literary forms. Such inscribed texts, as well as oral sources, poetics and genres, were to a large extent shared by Muslims across these linguistically and culturally diverse regions. They contributed to the rise of a common repository of images, memories and meaning that in turn fostered a consciousness of belonging to a trans-local community. The two-way connections many literary works had – both to a larger Islamic world and to very local communities – made them dynamic sites of interaction, contestation, and negotiations of boundaries. Competing agendas (as, for example, between creative and standardizing impulses), often played out between their pages. Islamization was an ongoing process in South and Southeast Asia, as it was in many regions. Literary texts of various kinds played an important role in enhancing and shaping this process by introducing those who converted to Islam to their newly acquired faith, history, practices and genealogies as well as by reaffirming the truths of Islam for those who were already members of the universal umma. As Muslim societies expanded additional texts were translated and composed, further enhancing Islamization. Literature produced within local Muslim communities, and the literary networks that extended across and beyond the local – especially when studied comparatively

islamic literary networks in south and southeast asia 219

– provide new insights into the history of Islam in these regions, the balance between local and global elements privileged by particular Muslim authors and societies, and the roles played by literary transmission and translation in their histories. In the following pages I first discuss Islamization processes in South and Southeast Asia with an emphasis on these regions as inter-connected nodal points of material and cultural exchange. I then briefly introduce one literary example, the textual tradition of the Book of One Thousand Questions, a well know Islamic book, as a lens through which questions of Islamization, networking, and literary and linguistic transformation can be examined. It offers a model for the kind of literature, and literary networks, we might study in an attempt to address these broad themes. The One Thousand Questions will be explored as an element of what I term, following Pollock’s theorization of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia, a trans-local Islamic sphere in which language and literature played major roles.

Islamization in the Indonesian Archipelago and Southeast India and contacts between these regions The spread of Islam in the Indonesian-Malay region was a complex process which has been much debated by scholars, both local and foreign. These have suggested various theories regarding Islam’s arrival and acceptance by indigenous populations, based for the most part on archeological findings, travelers’ accounts, and local chronicles. Historical evidence taken together points to a slow and gradual process of Islam’s spread: by the end of the thirteenth century it was established in north Sumatra; in the fourteenth century in northeast Malaya, Brunei, parts of east Java and the southern Philippines; and in the fifteenth century in Malacca and other areas of the Malay Peninsula; in the sixteenth century the coastal areas of central and east Java were mostly Islamic while its western region and much of the interior was not.3 Turning to the Tamil land, archeological evidence suggests an Islamic presence – rooted in Arab trade – in the Coromandel region of southeast India since the eighth century AD.4 Nearby Sri Lanka, with its old-rooted Muslim-Tamil population, has also long been associated with the important pilgrimage site of Adam’s Peak, the place where, according to early Arab traditions, Adam was believed to have fallen from paradise to earth.5 Further evidence on the spread of Islam and Muslim life in the region comes from traveler accounts, including those of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta.6 The latter, for example, describes in his fourteenth-century travelogue the Islamic death rites performed for his deceased daughter by the Emperor of Delhi, the many mosques found in the Maldives’ islands, and his encounters with Muslim sheikhs and ‘saints’ across Hindustan.7

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The influence of Sufis has been viewed as central to the spread of Islam in the Archipelago and south India. With their focus on personal devotion, healing and the charismatic power of teachers and saints, Sufis have provided a bridge between the beliefs of non-Muslims and Muslim worship, as they have in many other regions of South and Southeast Asia. Tomb shrines, often associated with Sufi masters, have given rise to devotional cults which served as a critical force in the expansion of Islam. Contacts of many kinds provided the material “backbone” for the emergence of Islamic literary networks. The coasts of Southeast India and Indonesia were part of the Indian Ocean’s commercial network where goods and shared texts and values crossed the seas carried by Muslim merchants, pilgrims, soldiers and scholars, and where coastal towns, which functioned as important trade centers and ports, developed into major centers of Islamic learning and culture. For example, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Sultanate of Banten on Java’s northern coast had extensive trade contacts with the Chulias, Muslim traders from the Coromandel coast, many of whom settled in the town.8 Iron, steel, diamonds and fabrics were exported to Aceh via Masulipatnam from the Persianized kingdom of Golconda in the seventeenth century, in exchange for benzoin, camphor and pepper.9 Shipping records from Malacca and Nagapattinam in the eighteenth century show the continuing strength of trade from Coromandel to Southeast Asia even in the face of growing European competition, pointing to a “remarkable persistence of old forms of trade”.10 Besides trade the Muslims of South India and the Archipelago shared a variety of relationships: at least as early as the seventeenth century they had a shared set of pilgrimage sites, some of which are still popular today. Well known in South India is the lineage of the seventeenth-century Sufi mystic sheikh Sadaqatullah of Kayalpattinam, whose tomb continues to attract devotees from Malaysia and Indonesia; members of the two communities intermarried, with the Marakkaiyar, claiming descent from Arab seafarers, preferring intermarriage with the Muslims of the Archipelago over marriage with the lower strata of Tamil Muslim society.11 The madh’hab (school of Islamic law) followed by Javanese and South Indian Muslims living along the coast was one and the same (Shafi’i); contacts in the sphere of Islamic education appear to have been strong, with similar institutions emerging in Tamil Nadu, Sumatra and Java; Indonesian pilgrims on their way to Arabia used to stop in the Maldives,12 and in the eighteenth century a Coromandel mosque existed in Batavia. Under colonial auspices, contacts – whether through trade or the deployment, employment or exile of subjects – continued. For example, throughout the eighteenth-century members of royal families from across the Indonesian Archipelago, along with their retinues, were exiled to Dutch Ceylon where they and their descendants founded mosques and Islamic educational institutions and

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where their contacts with local Tamil Muslims assisted them in maintaining their faith far from their homelands. Of special interest to my discussion are the contacts between Southeast India and the Archipelago as portrayed and understood in the literature. Various localities in the Archipelago are mentioned in early Sanskrit and Tamil texts.13 The lands of Indonesia figure in a significant number of south Indian Sufi legends and chronicles as the place a guru must go to perform feats of forest asceticism, portrayed as a “sort of exotic wild terrain to test his power to the utmost extent”.14 India is often mentioned in Javanese and Malay literature as the land “above the winds” (atas angin) contrasted with the lands “below the winds” (bawah angin), connoting the Archipelago. Bayly notes the similarities between the Javanese tales of the wali sanga (the nine ‘saints’ credited with bringing Islam to Java) and of Tamil teachers fulfilling the same mission.15 Following the evidence for sustained contacts between Muslims in Tamil Nadu and the Archipelago and the mutuality of a flow of people, ideas and practices that is found in examples such as those mentioned above, I turn now to a more detailed discussion of the roles played by literary texts that, to a large degree, were shared by Muslims from linguistically and culturally diverse communities in the region. Such works enhanced a sense of common ground and familiarity with a particular vocabulary, idiom and belief system; they also, concurrently, inspired local creativity and provided a means to address local concerns and agendas. For scholars in the present such literature provides a site for examining the ways particular societies articulated how and why Islam was initially accepted, why professing Islam remains important, and how these processes were remembered and understood. Reading the literature means, in part, being attentive to how language is employed within it and considering what particular ways of usage may suggest. The spread of Islam in the regions discussed here, however distant from the Mid-East culturally and geographically, cannot be fully grasped without seriously considering the role of Arabic and the profound changes that its incorporation – at many levels – into local vernaculars has brought about. “Arabic” must be considered not in a narrow linguistic sense but broadly, including ideas about its sanctity, its resulting un-translatability, and the range of ideas and stories that it carried along as its legacy. A discussion of literary production in Muslim communities, of translation, transmission, literary networks and the emergence of an Islamic cosmopolitan sphere in these regions – shaped to a large degree by language and literature – must include a close look at Arabic’s impact. The aforementioned Book of One Thousand Questions will now be briefly introduced as a site for thinking about the role of literature, and literary networks, in Islamization processes and in the way Islam was understood and represented in different periods and places across the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia.

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The Book of One Thousand Questions Drawing on early hadith traditions and first formulated in Arabic around the tenth century, the One Thousand Questions’ narrative frame is straightforward: a Jewish leader in seventh century Arabia, Abdullah Ibnu Salam, meets with the Prophet Muhammad.16 He informs the Prophet that he wishes to ask him some questions and, should he be convinced by the replies, he and his people will embrace Islam. The questions – spanning multiple topics, from the afterlife to mysticism – are then posed and answered, and the Jews, realizing Muhammad is the “seal of the prophets,” convert. Most likely reflecting the intellectual and doctrinal struggle between Jews and Muslims in the early days of Islam’s development, the One Thousand Questions – with conversion issues at its heart – later circulated far and wide. It was translated into Turkish, Latin, French, Italian, Dutch, German and English and, more specifically, to the regions discussed here, into Persian, Urdu, Bugis, Sundanese, Malay, Tamil and Javanese, and the list could go on. The way the story was told and re-told in different languages and cultural contexts provides a glimpse into the histories and shifting agendas of Muslim communities that emerged far from the birthplace of this story and of their religion. The questions – and the replies – present us with the issues deemed central at particular moments, by particular authors, in particular places, pointing above all – through the conversion narrative –to why one should choose to become and remain a Muslim. The One Thousand Questions’ variations – across languages and periods – are numerous and complex. Often the same question, presented by Ibnu Salam to the Prophet in different versions, received different replies – very much contextbound – in different languages. For example, Ibnu Salam’s question about who is destined for hell in the afterlife provided different authors with the opportunity to present depictions of sinners and their punishments in hell. Such depictions, in turn, helped define the boundaries of permitted and forbidden behaviors in living, worldly Muslim societies. In the Tamil region, where Muslims were a small minority, the One Thousand Questions emphasized the dire consequences of following non-Muslim local customs like weeping, falling to the ground and beating one’s chest over the body of a deceased relative, as well as listening to music of any kind. On Java, on the other hand, where versions of the One Thousand Questions were inscribed for the most part in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the majority of Javanese professed Islam, authors were less concerned with setting the boundaries between Islam and other traditions. Hell does not figure prominently in these One Thousand Questions versions and the list of sinners is quite formulaic, including, among others, Jews, Christians, polytheists, fire-worshippers, and hypocrites. The focus of Javanese authors seems to have lain elsewhere, more in the

islamic literary networks in south and southeast asia 223

realm of intra-Muslim – rather than inter-religious – debates, showing a tendency to subordinate many themes to an elaborate examination of mystical teachings. The Book of One Thousand Questions played a role in the inclusion of its audiences within a geographically and culturally diverse Muslim world by introducing and disseminating stories, dialogues, questions, historical and mythic characters, Arabic/Islamic terminology and vocabulary, Qur’anic quotes, and a gallery of shared images. It was especially well-suited to this role by way of the astonishing scope of materials and issues it raised and addressed; the many inter-textual links of these materials to other scriptures, texts, translations and oral traditions; its appeal both to converts and to long-time Muslims; the authority of the Prophet lying at its center; and its dissemination across many cultures and languages. This, as well as many additional shared texts, translated and adapted, participated in shaping a multi-layered, interconnected Islamic literary world, presenting audiences with repeated mention of certain ideas, characters and themes that tied them both to their local community and to a wider, trans-local one possessing a common history. I now examine more closely the contours of the latter, larger Islamic sphere which emerged in south India and the Archipelago, itself part of a geographically even greater Islamic cosmopolitan civilization.

Literary networks and the Arabic Cosmopolis To the common discussions of Muslim networks of trade, scholarship, politics and travel I have proposed adding the literary networks, through which Muslims of different places and cultures were – however symbolically – connected. My stress in thinking about these links is centered on the ways in which literature and language participated in creating, forging and sustaining such networks, which extended across both time and space. When discussing “language,” or “the linguistic,” I am thinking here of the many ways in which Islam, most notably via the Arabic language, has had an impact on Javanese, Tamil and Malay. This impact must be examined in a context in which, for Muslims worldwide, Arabic possesses a unique status among languages. It is considered the perfect tongue, in which God’s divine decrees were communicated to His Prophet. Consequently, at least ideally, the Qur’an is considered untranslatable and Arabic works more generally are held in high esteem.17 Muslims in South and Southeast Asia proved no exception in their reverence for the Arabic language, setting up institutions where it could be studied, adopting its script to their own languages, borrowing its religious terminology and everyday vocabulary, praying in it and embracing its literary and historical narratives and forms. As a result, when we consider an Islamic cosmopolitanism in these regions

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Arabic features as one of its major elements. Translation, too, emerges as one of its foundational practices. Sheldon Pollock’s work on the Sanskrit cosmopolis provides an inspiring and useful framework for thinking about the diverse regions discussed here, the long time period over which Islamization unfolded in them and the powerful roles of language and literature in shaping Muslim communities and consciousness. Pollock introduced the concept of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” of 300-1300 AD, claiming a unique political and cultural status for that language, which developed almost simultaneously across large parts of India and Southeast Asia. He then charted the history of the transition from the use of cosmopolitan Sanskrit in literary works to the emergence of vernacular literary cultures and compared the process to the one which unfolded in Europe, where Latin was replaced by vernacular production. The major goals of his study were to examine the rise and spread of Sanskrit inscriptions, the formation of vernacular literary cultures and the ways the vernacular not only reconfigured the cosmopolitan language but also how the two produced each other in the course of their interaction.18 I adopt his cosmopolis model to think about the ways in which another cosmopolitan language – Arabic – rose to prominence in some of the same regions at a later period. Thinking about Arabic in these regions means assessing a continuum or an ongoing process. It means looking not only at the scope of materials produced but also at the range of ways in which Arabic’s role was played out in particular languages, texts and scripts: from works composed solely in Arabic and the use of the language in private and public spheres through interlinear translations, to the ways in which Arabic was integrated into the vernacular. My focus on Arabicized – rather than strictly Arabic – language and literary cultures includes the wide range of instances in which Arabic influence on local languages is evident, with Arabic combining with, rather than replacing, those languages. This phenomenon is, I suggest, strongly linked to the phenomenon discussed by Pollock for an earlier period: throughout South India and Java during the Sanskrit cosmopolis era local languages were absorbing much Sanskrit vocabulary, literary conventions, genres and themes. Works were written, very consciously, in hybrid forms of language. Compositions in manipravalam, a metaphorical and linguistic stringing together of Sanskrit “pearls” (mani) and Tamil “coral” (pravalam) on a single necklace, highlighted the beauty and expressiveness of both while maintaining a line of distinction.19 In Java the Kawi language combined an old form of Javanese with Sanskrit, producing literary works considered to this day among the most intricate and captivating of Javanese literature. Thus the tendency to adopt an initially foreign vocabulary, along with themes, styles, ideas and stories, was not at all new in this region. A long history – not only of linguistic borrowing but of such combined literary production – was already in

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place when Arabic was introduced by traders, theologians, travelers and translated works. I’d like to suggest that the processes which produced Kawi, for example, prepared the ground in an important way for the elaborate and deep adaptation of Muslim textual models into Javanese. Linguistic change and borrowing are, of course, not in any way unique to this case but the extent to which it took place – first with Sanskrit, later with Arabic, providing historical continuity – is far-ranging and impressive in its scope. In both cases the combinations emerging from the use of a cosmopolitan language along with a local one opened up new and intriguing possibilities. A major difference between the Sanskrit cosmopolis and the Arabic one had to do with the fact that “Sanskrit was not diffused by a single, scripture-based religion,”20 a condition which was clearly central to the spread of Arabic. Despite this substantial difference both were similar in that no organized political power, no colonial enterprise, no military conquest nor large migration were involved in their diffusion. There also seems to have been an affinity between the understanding of both languages as forms of powerful, potent speech capable of altering and affecting human reality. Pollock coined the term “cosmopolitan vernaculars” to label emergent regional literary languages like Kannada or Marathi that conformed to a superposed model established in the cosmopolitan Sanskrit tradition in everything from lexicon and versification to figures, genres and themes.21 As is well known, vernacular writing and literary texts were already in existence in Javanese and Tamil long before the arrival of Islam (a result, in part, of the Sanskrit cosmopolis epoch) and Malay too has recently been shown to possess local systems of writing which preceded the use of jawi.22 For Javanese and Tamil especially (for which much more evidence of the early literary traditions survives) no claim can be made that a vernacular literary tradition first arose in the shadow of Arabic, as Pollock claims for Kannada as influenced by Sanskrit. However, there is no doubt that Arabic deeply affected and reshaped linguistic and literary practices, making these languages –as used by Muslim authors and audiences – into vernaculars linked to a different cosmopolitan order than that to which they had previously belonged. Arabic, then, inaugurated both a new cosmopolitan age and a new vernacular one. In terms of the comparison I draw here its diffusion and impact resemble most closely the developments Pollock describes for the early vernacular age. At that time Sanskrit provided the ultimate code for local literary cultures that, through emulation, competition and imaginative selection were developing in their own, independent directions. The later interactions between Arabic and vernaculars like Tamil or Malay provide an example of “a strong tendency with wider application, perhaps even a law: it is only in response to a superposed and prestigious form of preexistent literature that a new vernacular literature develops.”23 Such

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developments, in turn, are closely related to Pollock’s aim of examining not only how the vernacular reconfigures the cosmopolitan or vice versa but how the two produce each other in the course of their interaction.24 Rather than think, as has been the common practice, solely of the ways in which, for example, Javanese has been Arabicized by the contact with speakers and writers of Arabic and Islamic sources, we may also think of how Arabic itself, in such a setting, was “vernacularized”. The spelling, pronunciation and often also the meaning of Arabic words changed markedly when adopted into Javanese with Arabic literary genres and themes also taking on a local twist. For audiences who were unfamiliar with the vocabulary as well as grammatical and syntactical elements of “real” Arabic, this form of the language was Arabic. Such audiences across South and Southeast Asia were by no means negligible in size and importance and they – along with their forms of vernacularized Arabic – formed an integral component of the cosmopolis. In addition, many Muslims from these regions participated in networks of sheikhs, Sufi gurus, theologians, reformers and disciples from across the Muslim world who converged on Mecca for the hajj pilgrimage and often for longer periods of stay and study. We know that the neighborhood of Southeast Asians in the sacred city, known as kampong Jawah, was the largest of any visiting groups in the mid-nineteenth century and that no language besides Arabic was as widely understood there at the time as Malay.25 From this we may deduce that not only in distant lands but also in Islam’s historical heartland, Arabic was being influenced by the various vernaculars as it was, in turn, changing them. Arabic then, with its many manifestations within the literary worlds of Muslims in the region, played a major role in creating and maintaining literary networks within a sphere of shared idioms, ideas and stories. The “literary” is here considered in a broad sense that encompasses written, oral and aural materials which connected Muslims across the Arabic cosmopolis. The rise and spread of Arabic’s influence cannot be significantly gleaned – as is the case for Sanskrit – from royal inscriptions. But examples of its dissemination abound. The vocabulary of Islamic texts is infused with Arabic but also everyday speech – especially in Javanese and Malay – is laden with it. This includes the language of both the sacred and the ordinary, like daily greetings, the names of the days of the week and personal names. Arabic’s influence on grammatical structures – often via interlinear translation – is evident, as well as its impact on poetics and literary genres. The three languages discussed – Tamil, Malay and Javanese – all adopted modified forms of the Arabic script, used for translated as well as original writings. An important feature of the cosmopolis, this orthographic transformation allowed Muslims in diverse locales to experience their own languages in the shared, religiously charged form of Arabic.26

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Beyond the realm of manuscripts and books Arabic script was to be found in the Archipelago above all on tombstones. In the Tamil region Arabic epitaphs in Kayalpatnam, dating from the fifteenth century, record names and Hijri death dates. Some include sections of religious text, genealogies, and occupations like qāḍī (judge), amīr (military title), ṣadr (local governor) and tājir (learned merchant), employing the Arabic titles of the kind routinely adopted by rulers, members of the nobility and literary figures in both Southern India and the Archipelago.27 The literary networks that crisscrossed the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia were determined and defined not solely by the use of a certain “amount” of Arabic but by the type of works disseminated and the extent of that dissemination. Islamic theological, grammatical and moral works were told in local languages, as were the deeds and adventures of early Muslim warriors and kings. Tales of the Prophet’s companions and previous prophets – those leading up to Muhammad – were widespread. The stories narrating the life of Muhammad himself were, of course, pivotal to such literary networks. Central episodes from his biography – his birth, ascent to the heavens, splitting of the moon, and his death – became cornerstones in an early history that came to be shared by all who followed his path, no matter their mother tongue. Not only were literary works translated and adapted into regional languages but there is evidence of single textual sources being written in more than one of the region’s languages. Complex combinations were created: for example, some Tamil poets composed multi-lingual verses comprised of Arabic, Persian and Urdu, in addition to Tamil. A book on Islamic medicine, inscribed in 1807 and currently in the Indonesian National Library collection, was written in four languages as well: Javanese, Persian, Tamil and Arabic.28 Such multiple language volumes were an additional contribution to bridging linguistic gaps between Muslims from different communities which enhanced the creation of shared repositories of knowledge. Educational institutions played an important role in fostering a sense of shared identity within the cosmopolis. In religious educational centers Arabic and its branches of learning – grammar, syntax, Islamic jurisprudence, Qur’anic exegesis, hadith – were routinely taught to new generations of pupils. Madrasahs in south India and pesantren on Java and Sumatra provided a similar structure for learning – from the very basics of Arabic to highly specialized knowledge – and for bonding with Islamic scholars and other members of the community. From their ranks often emerged the religious officials, leaders and teachers who would, in turn, train and inform their own disciples. Religious teachers traveled in a quest to disseminate their knowledge and religious convictions to others, expanding the geographical and cultural limits of the cosmopolis. It is known from the Sejarah Melayu (“Malay Annals”) that Tamil Muslim teachers were influential in the Malay regions in the fifteenth century.

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The Annals also claim – as does the Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai (“Book of the Pasai Kings”) – that the apostles of Islam reached Malay shores from the Coromandel coast.29 Shu’ayb discusses at length the deeds of Umar Wali, a Tamil ‘saint’ who spent years in the forests of Sumatra, propagating Islam;30 Bayly mentions a Tamil pir from Vetalai who, while meditating in a Sumatran jungle, encountered and overcame a fierce elephant. In gratitude the sultan granted him his daughter in marriage and nominated him as successor to the Achehnese sultanate;31 Javanese nobles and their retinues, exiled to Sri Lanka from the eighteenth century onwards, brought with them – if not in written, certainly in oral form – stories and traditions which were eventually shared with other Muslims on the island32. Although the historical accuracy of some of these developments cannot always be determined with certainty, such traditions attest to a sustained memory of participation in promoting Arabicized networks of language, literature and learning that connected Muslims across the region. In discussing such connecting ties mention must be made of the wide-ranging spiritual and intellectual networks of the Sufis. Individual masters, and to an even greater extent the various schools of mysticism which coalesced into Sufi orders, “knitted together widely scattered communities with shared literatures and spiritual genealogies”.33 Similar stories relating the tolerance of Sufi masters towards non-Islamic forms of worship and their powers of healing, their supernatural perceptions and generosity towards the poor circulate in different regions and strengthen the impression that these figures played a central role in introducing local populations to aspects of Islam that are broadly shared among them, including a reverence towards ‘saints,’ an emphasis on hagiographic literature, and an acceptance of pre-Islamic traditions. Although the Muslim communities discussed here no doubt had a strong sense of attachment to their particular locales there were also ways in which a sense of place or space transcended the local towards the wider region and beyond. A shared notion of sacred space (differing from that found in Western Asia or North India) is evident in the architectural resemblances among the fifteenth-century Great Mosque of Demak, the eighteenth-century Selo mosque in Yogyakarta, the mosques of South India including those of Kayalpatnam and the Malabar coast (fourteenth century onwards), as well as the eighteenth-century Kampong Laut mosque in Kelantan, Malaysia.34 In a way parallel to that which I noted for Islamic literature, through which a distant and foreign history gradually became familiar by way of translation and intertextuality, within the sacred space of the mosques an attempt was sometimes made to introduce and recreate a faraway geography of great importance and sanctity for the local, often recently-converted faithful. For example, the threelobed mihrābs (a niche in a wall indicating the kiblah, direction of prayer) of the

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mosques in Madura and Kayalpatnam, of a type uncommon in India, are modeled on the mihrāb in Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock.35 A related yet more remarkable instance is found in Kudus, on Java’s northern coast. The sole place in Java to adopt an Arabic name, it bears that of Islam’s third most sacred city, Jerusalem (al-Quds). The town’s mosque, erected in the sixteenth century by Sunan Kudus, is known to this day as Mesjid al-Aqsa, the name of Jerusalem’s ancient mosque built on the Temple Mount, where Muhammad is believed to have passed on his Night Journey to the heavens. The mosque’s foundational charter, inscribed in Arabic and said to have been brought from Jerusalem by Sunan Kudus himself, may be interpreted as drawing a parallel between this leader in an Islamizing Java and the biblical unifier of Jerusalem, King David.36 In Java localization through site names was apparently uncommon, but in this case a distant, sacred city and its holy mosque were erected anew in Java, mapping a center of Islamic piety and sanctity upon it. Sunan Kudus’ journey to Jerusalem represented a venture into a larger Islamic world. It resulted in the enrichment and authentication of the Arabic cosmopolis he belonged to, linking it explicitly to the historical heartland while declaring its own centrality. The Kudus inscription points to a political role accorded to Arabic within the cosmopolis as it was chosen, without the more typical translation act, to legitimize the ruler of a new Islamic center likely modeled on Jerusalem, ruled and rebuilt at the time by another leader of an expanding Islamic power, Suleiman the Magnificent. Another case in point is the account of the famed Sunan Kalijaga orienting Java’s first mosque (b. 1479, Demak) and the mosque in Mecca towards one another, figuring in many Javanese chronicles. It too attests to important notions of space, directionality of power within the Muslim world and the claims made by members of the cosmopolis regarding their place and role within and beyond it as sanctified histories and geographies were adopted as their own. Taken together textual accounts, inscriptions and epitaphs attest to the many ways in which Arabic and Arabicized language participated in the creation of new understandings of space, community and authority. And so, despite the many differences that continued to exist among Muslim communities of various origins within the cosmopolis, they also shared a great deal. Central to trans-local ties were a reverence towards, and a certain familiarity with, Arabic language and terminology, Arabic’s textual world, and religious figures representing Islam, all of which fostered a common bond. The sheer volume and scope of Arabic and Arabicized materials in the region is testimony to their centrality. All these instances unfolded within the larger framework not only of the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia where Muslims read and listened to textual works in their own languages, but also in the context of a global Muslim culture which emphasized the power of language to a great extent: Allah’s creative powers

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were condensed in and expressed through the single imperative kun (Be!) and His words were recorded for all future generations in the Qur’an. It is in large part these fundamental beliefs in the power of words that fostered the ideals and practices in the linguistic and literary spheres connecting diverse Muslim communities. These literary connections, as well as those of architecture, religious practice, trade, travel and learning – in their multiple dimensions – contributed to an ongoing process that gave rise to a shared cosmopolis of ideas, beliefs, idioms and stories.

Notes 1

For an expanded version of this chapter see Ronit Ricci, “Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia,” Journal of Islamic Studies 21, no. 1 (2010): 1-28. For a much fuller articulation of the ideas presented here see Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

2

Miriam Cooke and Bruce B. Lawrence, “Introduction,” in Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop, eds. Miriam Cook and Bruce B. Lawrence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 1.

3

Merle C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1300 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 4-13. For a detailed, authoritative study of Islamization in Java across several centuries see Merle C. Ricklefs’ trilogy: Mystic synthesis in Java: A history of Islamization from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries (Norwalk, Connecticut: EastBridge, 2006); Polarising Javanese Society: Islamic and Other Visions (c. 1830–1930) (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007); Islamisation and its Opponents in Java, c. 1930 to the present (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012).

4

Susan Elizabeth Schomburg, “”Reviving Religion”: The Qadiri Sufi Order, Popular Devotion to Sufi Saint Muhyiuddin ‘Abdul Qadir Al-Gilani, and Processes Of “Islamization” In Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2003), 19-20.

5

J. Pedersen, “Adam,” in P. Bearman et al., eds., Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition (Leiden: Brill, 2009) http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_SIM-0295

6

Takya Shu’ayb ‘Alim, Arabic, Arwi and Persian in Sarandib and Tamil Nadu (Madras: Imamul ‘Arus Trust, 1993), 21.

7

Anonymous, The Travels of Ibn Batuta, translated from the abridged Arabic Manuscript Copies, trans. Samuel Lee (London: Oriental Translation Committee, 1829; reprinted by Nabu Public Domain Reprints). The examples appear on pages 142, 177, 195-6 respectively.

8

Claude Guillot, “Banten and the Bay of Bengal During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800, eds. Om Prakash and Denys Lombard (New Delhi: Manohar/Indian Council of Historical Research, 1999), 163-181.

9

Denys Lombard, “The Indian World as Seen from Acheh in the Seventeenth Century,” in Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800, eds. Om Prakash and Denys Lombard (New Delhi: Manohar/Indian Council of Historical Research, 1999), 186.

10

Sinnappah Arasaratnam, “The Chulia Muslim Merchants in Southeast Asia, 1650-1800,” in Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World, ed. Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), 139.

11

Susan Bayly, “Islam and State Power in Pre-Colonial South India,” in India and Indonesia During the Ancien Regime, eds. P.J. Marshall and R. van Niel (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), 145.

12

Shu’ayb ‘Alim, Arabic, Arwi and Persian in Sarandib and Tamil Nadu, 26.

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13

On the Tamil case see Anne E. Monius, Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 112. On references to Southeast Asia in early Sanskrit literature see H.B Sarkar, “A Geographical Introduction to Southeast Asia: The Indian Perspective,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 137 (1981): 293-323.

14

Bayly, “Islam and State Power in Pre-Colonial South India,” 143-164.

15

Ibid., 153-154; Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 74, 117.

16

The major versions consulted are, in Tamil: Cayitu ‘Hassan’ Muhammad, ed., Ayira Macala: Islamiyat Tamil Ilakkiya Ulakin Mutar Kappiyam (Madras: M. Itris Maraikkayar, 1984); in Malay: Edwar Djamaris, ed., Hikayat Seribu Masalah (Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1994); in Javanese (both anonymous): Serat Samud, Pura Pakualaman Library, Yogyakarta, 1884 (MS. St. 80); Serat Suluk Samud Ibnu Salam, Museum Sono Budoyo Library, Yogyakarta, 1898, transcribed 1932 (MS. P173a). Additional versions are mentioned below.

17

On the question of the Qur’an’s translatability see A.L. Tibawi, “Is the Qur’an Translatable?,” The Muslim World 52 (1962): 4-16.

18

Sheldon Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” The Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (1998): 6-8.

19

On manipravalam see K. Venkatachari, Manipravala Literature of the Srivaisnava Acaryas (Bombay: Ananthacarya Research Institute, 1978).

20

Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” 12.

21

Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 322.

22

Uli Kozok, The Tanjung Tanah Code of Law: The Oldest Extant Malay Manuscript (Cambridge: St Catharine’s College and the University Press, 2004), 10-12.

23

Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 328.

24

Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” 6-8.

25

On Kampong Jawah see Snouck C. Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century, trans. J.H. Monahan (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1931 [1888-89]), 215-292.

26

On the profound influence of Arabic on Malay see P. S. van Ronkel, “Over de invloed der Arabische syntaxis op de Maleische,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 41 (1899): 498-528.

27

Mehrdad Shokoohy, Muslim Architecture of South India: The Sultanate of Ma’bar and the Traditions of Maritime Settlers on the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts (Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Goa) (London: Routledge, 2003), 275-290.

28

Shu’ayb ‘Alim, Arabic, Arwi and Persian in Sarandib and Tamil Nadu, 105-106.

29

Stuart Robson, “Java at the Crossroads,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 137 (1981), 262.

30

Shu’ayb ‘Alim, Arabic, Arwi and Persian in Sarandib and Tamil Nadu, 502.

31

Bayly, “Islam and State Power in Pre-Colonial South India,” 155.

32

B.A Hussainmiya, Orang Rejimen: The Malays of the Ceylon Rifle Regiment (Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1990), 38-42.

33

Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204-1760 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 28.

34

Shokoohy, Muslim Architecture of South India, 249.

35

Ibid., 55, 91.

36

On the Kudus mosque and inscription see Claude Guillot and Ludvik Kalus, “Kota Yerusalem di Jawa dan Mesjidnya Al-Aqsa: Piagam Pembangunan Mesjid Kudus Bertahun 956h/1549m,” in Inskripsi Islam Tertua di Indonesia (Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia/EFEO, 2008), 101-132.

CHAPTER 10

Languages of Law: Islamic Legal Cosmopolis and its Arabic and Malay Microcosmoi Mahmood Kooria

Abstract In premodern Monsoon Asia, the legal worlds of diverse traditions formed a cosmopolis of laws that expanded chronologically and geographically. Without necessarily replacing one another, they all coexisted in a larger domain with fluctuating influences over time and place. In this legal cosmopolis, each tradition had its own aggregation of juridical, linguistic and contextual variants. In South and Southeast Asia, Islam has accordingly formed its own cosmopolis of law by incorporating a network of different juridical texts, institutions and scholars and by the meaningful use of these variants through shared vocabularies and languages. Focusing on the Shāfiʿī School of Islamic law and its major proponents in Malay and Arabic textual productions, this chapter argues that the intentional choice of a lingua franca contributed to the wider reception and longer sustainability of this particular legal school. The Arabic and Malay microcosmoi thus strengthened the larger cosmopolis of Islamic law through transregional and translinguistic exchanges across legal, cultural and continental borders.

Keywords: Islamic law; Shāfiʿī school; Malay; Arabic; textual productions

Law was one of the most important realms that set frameworks for transregional interactions among individuals, communities and institutions in the premodern world. It synchronised structures of exchange through commonly agreed practices and expectations.1 The written legal treatises, along with unwritten customs, norms and rituals, prescribed ideal forms of social, cultural, economic and political relations to maintain order, peace and affinity in the societies in which they operated. These written and unwritten laws influenced each other in the long run, both internally and externally, through spatial and temporal concurrences. While the unwritten laws of the premodern world may be inaccessible, the written texts provide a rich archive to understand the ways in which the communities struggled towards constructing an ideal world through the active and passive conversations of individual communities and institutions. In Monsoon Asia, the legal worlds of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, along with several minor traditions indigenous to specific lands and times, formed a cosmopolis of laws which

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expanded chronologically vertically and geographically horizontally. In the premodern period no tradition replaced another entirely. Instead, they all coexisted in a larger domain with fluctuating influences over time and place.2 Within this legal cosmopolis, each tradition and religion had its own aggregation of diverse juridical, linguistic, geographical and chronological variants. In South and Southeast Asia, Islam has accordingly formed its own cosmopolis of law by incorporating a network of different juridical texts, languages, institutions and scholars and by the meaningful use of these variants through shared vocabularies. The predominance of particular streams of law over others in the course of time was the outcome. This chapter explores the nuances of such formations and formulations, with a close examination of Arabic and Malay textual productions of Islamic laws in South and Southeast Asia. It delineates the extent to which Islam and its law facilitated reciprocation between people from both those subcontinents. The burgeoning scholarship of the last decade on the circulations of law within the Indian Ocean rim, from East Africa to East Asia, has persuasively demonstrated the centrality of law for transregional and trans-imperial interactions in the premodern and modern world.3 The maritime networks of scholars, lawyers, courts, codes and texts facilitated multi-directional transfers of laws across regional and religious boundaries. Engseng Ho, Nurfadzilah Yahya and Sumit Mandal have explored how itinerant communities, such as the Hadramis and other Arabs, grappled with the juridical notions inherent to Islam in the oceanic littoral, simultaneously compromising and conflicting with local religious ideas and with external and dominant imperial, colonial and post-colonial judicial structures.4 Through a historical anthropological approach to legal documents, Brinkley Messick has shown the microscopic nature of juridical production and dissemination by the political-cum-scholarly entities.5 Iza Hussin, Fahad Bishara, and Joel Blecher have emphasised the crisscrossing of legal ideas across the maritime littoral. This exposed the role of legal codes and documents in the continuum of local and trans-local communities in everyday matters concerning politics, trade and diplomacy.6 For most individuals participating in such transregional networks of the socio-economy, an item in a legal document and in supporting texts or codes provided a basis for the legitimacy of their profession, possession, and power. These aspects, in turn, provide us potential materials to identify “thick trans-regionalism” embedded in the materials produced by the diverse mobile maritime communities of Asia and Africa.7 All these recent studies not only exemplify the growing literature on different kinds of circulations of law, texts, people and institutions in the Indian Ocean littoral, but they also highlight the role of Islamic law in such circulations, both in the premodern and the modern periods, before and after European colonial empires dominated the sphere of law. In these studies,

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however, the role of language has been seriously marginalised when considering the production, dissemination and practice of law. In the religious and juridical encounters across the borders of continents and subcontinents language barriers must have been a huge obstacle for participant groups and individuals who came from a wide range of regional, linguistic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. How did people overcome this obstacle legalistically and linguistically? The works of Sheldon Pollock on the Sanskrit cosmopolis and Ronit Ricci’s study on the Arabic cosmopolis in South and Southeast Asia have answered some aspects of this question, when they suggest that Sanskrit and then Arabic stood as the lingua franca for literary and cultural productions in both regions.8 Ricci’s work is more related to the focus of this article, although the function of the language in the legal realm per se is not her focus. In fact, language is certainly one of the most important aspects, if not the most important, of trans-regional law, be it for plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses, audiences, evidence, texts, codes or general court procedure. I have elsewhere addressed this question with regard to foreign languages and translations in early Islamic judicial procedures, but we know hardly anything about its role in such multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious contexts as that of the Indian Ocean, apart from an insightful article by Henri Chambert-Loir on the language of the law in seventeenth-century Aceh.9 In this article he enters this gap in dialogue with the aforementioned literature where it concerned the circulations of communities, institutions and individuals in the littoral and their trans-regional interactions between South and Southeast Asia, principally in Malay and Arabic. How and why did the participants from both subcontinents leave the comfort zones of their own languages to address local and wider audiences? What were the implications of their efforts to cross linguistic boundaries? Did their attempts lead to one particular variant of Islamic law, that of the Shāfiʿī School, as the predominant school of legalistic and intellectual engagement, at a time when there were several other forms and streams of laws? This article addresses these questions by focusing on some significant legal texts and jurists who contributed to the strengthening of Islam and its law in Monsoon Asia. These texts and scholars adhered to one of two major language microcosmoi of the oceanic littoral. Emphasising this aspect I argue that because one particular Islamic legal stream took varying linguistic and cultural contexts into its consideration, it managed to dominate South and Southeast Asian coastal communities and to find wider acceptance among more adherents. The circulation of Islam and its laws did not promote or insist on a monolithic language cosmopolis (pace the Arabic cosmopolis, suggested by Ronit Ricci). Arabic was a lingua franca in this littoral, but it was not the only one from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It coexisted with several other powerful languages

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through which the Muslim missionaries, mariners and merchants communicated with each other in their everyday meetings at markets, mosques and manors. In the premodern Indian Ocean rim there existed several other language cosmopolises, as when Persian, Portuguese, Swahili and Malay coexisted with Arabic.10 In South and Southeast Asia, Malay and Arabic contributed equally to the spread and survival of Islam in general and of its law in particular.11 An intentional selection of the language for writing works of law contributed to the sustenance of Shāfiʿī legalism in the Indian Ocean littoral. Shāfiʿīsm, one of the four major Sunnī schools of law, was founded by the Arabian jurist Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī (767-820 CE) and found a wide following across Monsoon Asia and eastern and southern Africa. Involving one or more languages with Arabic has been crucial to the sustainability of any of the intellectual networks of Islam and particularly of legal schools, as we see in the Ḥanafī realms of Mughal South Asia and the Ottoman Near East, as well as in the Mālikī domains of the North Africa and Andalusia and the Shīʿī sphere of Ṣafavid Persia. Legal compilations in Arabic were complemented by those in Turkish and Persian and several other languages. Shāfiʿīsm did this through the attention and ability of its scholars to write in both Arabic and the regional lingua franca. An open approach among those jurists to navigate between these languages played an important role in making their school the dominant one in the Indian Ocean world from the sixteenth century onwards. This resonates very much with the trajectories of the French civil code (Code civil des Français, widely known as the Code Napoleon) in the nineteenth century across several countries of Europe and the Americas, Africa and Asia, where French was often considered to be the language of civil law while the jurists simultaneously facilitated its communication with, and translation into, several other regional or national languages.12 In the following pages I shall explore these nuances: I start by analysing the capacity of law and language to connect Monsoon Asia, in which an Islamic legal cosmopolis strengthened the increasing mobility of scholars, sailors and traders, with shared expressions and understandings from the sixteenth century onward. In the next section I shall describe some of the most important legal texts from South and Southeast Asia written in Arabic and Malay. The texts Qurrat al-ʿayn by a Malabari scholar Zayn al-Dīn bin Aḥmad (d. 1583?) and its commentary Nihāyat al-zayn by a Javanese scholar ʿUmar Nawawī al-Bantanī (d. 1898) represent the Arabic microcosmos of the Shāfiʿī legal cosmopolis, whereas Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm by Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī of Gujarat (d. 1658) and its commentary Sabīl al-muhtadīn by Muḥammad Arshad al-Banjārī of Kalimantan (1710–1812) epitomise its Malay microcosmos. I shall focus on the aspect of language in these texts in the last section of the chapter and conclude by highlighting the role of local and trans-local linguistic and cultural contexts that enabled the spread and survival of one specific school of law among the Muslim communities of oceanic littoral.

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Locating law and language Islamic connections between South and Southeast Asia can be traced to the early centuries of Islamic expansion in those regions.13 There are accounts of South Asian Muslim preachers, scholars and merchants arriving in Southeast Asian kingdoms and regions and spreading Islam through different engagements and encounters. One important trend in historiography, though now dated, asserts the origin of Islam in the Malay world to Indian Muslim itinerants, particularly from Gujarat, Bengal, Coromandel and/or Malabar. Some pseudo-historical figures, such as Maulana Naina bin Naina al-Malabari, dominate mythological narratives on the early Islamic connections between these regions and the expansion and endurance of Islam in the archipelago. Some of these narratives are clearly anachronistic and have yet to be verified on the basis of solid historical evidence. What solid evidence we do have for connections from the thirteenth century onward consists of fragmentary tombstones and inscriptions.14 From the sixteenth century onward such Islamic connections between both subcontinents intensified at an unprecedented pace through religious and intellectual exchanges. There was a growing presence of South Asian authors, scholars, soldiers, teachers and preachers in Southeast Asia, as more and more Southeast Asians arrived in India and Sri Lanka as travellers, traders, exiles, scholars, sailors and soldiers. This movement of people had implications for the circulation of ideas about features of Islamic law from the sixteenth century onward. In that century the Shāfiʿī School of Islamic law began to dominate the coasts of both subcontinents along with several other parts of the Indian Ocean littoral, with the ideas and texts of the school becoming apparent in scholarly exchanges. This provided the common ground on which jurists of Monsoon Asia interacted. Although the arrival of European powers in the Indian Ocean interrupted the Middle Eastern predominance in maritime trade it did not affect the existing networks of Islamic people, texts and ideas. Rather it streamlined their mobility through standard forms of Islamic legal and mystical cultures, such as the Shāfiʿī School of law and the Shaṭṭāriya order of Sufism. In coastal South Asia and Southeast Asia both the legal school and the mystical order had established varying degrees of presence and influence in the sixteenth century, if not before. The Shaṭṭāriya order was followed in the coastal belts of Gujarat, Konkan, Malabar, Coromandel and Bengal in that century, along with other mystical orders, including Qādiriyya, Naqshabandiyya, and Kāzarūniyya. It also found followers in Aceh, Sumatra, Java, Perak and Sulawesi.15 The interconnectivity between both regions in terms of mystical ideas is yet to be explored, but for the moment suffice to say that the mystical orders often formed a stepping stone for itinerants to share their understanding of Islam with their hosting communities, future coreligionists and even nascent opponents.

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Apart from the essential elements of the religion and the related rituals and laws which constituted it, the nuanced legalistic engagements were often secondary to initial interactions. Even so, it is hard to generalise for all the regions in South and Southeast Asia. The consensus among historians of Southeast Asian Islam is that mystical (or perhaps mythical) figures and groups, such as the nine holy men (Walisongo), spread Islam in the region, and legal schools like Shāfiʿīsm entered much later. Often the followers of the religion showed little interest in legalised interpretations of Islam. As an example, Muḥammad al-Ḥāmid al-Ranīrī, an Islamic jurist in the court of the Aceh Sultanate in the late-sixteenth century, is often quoted. He had to quit the place because the students were not interested in learning law.16 He left for Mecca/ Hijaz in 1583 to study Sufism and came back six years later to teach mysticism to his old and new audience. From 1589 he taught there until 1604. This predominance of mysticism continued in Aceh in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, as most of the textual productions from the region indicate.17 The law marked its strength in the everyday practice of rituals and as a basic curriculum, but it continued to be nominal as an advanced discipline of higher education and school of thought.18 In coastal South Asia too Islamic legal thought as such was marginal until the mid-sixteenth century, but from then we find more textual productions based on the positive legal thought. In Malabar, Gujarat, Sind and Coromandel there was notable production and dissemination of mystical works until the early sixteenth century, but by the mid-sixteenth century more works appeared on Islamic law. This scarcity of legal texts in both regions does not mean that Islamic law was not at all present. We have strong evidence of Muslims in Monsoon Asia following the practice of Islamic legal schools at different levels from as early as the eighth century.19 Until the sixteenth century we have an intermixed legal system, in that many different Sunnī, Shīʿī and Ibāḍī legal traditions coexisted and operated in different regions. As most followers were Sunnīs in Monsoon Asia, the important schools followed in the regions there were Ḥanafīsm, Shāfiʿīsm and Mālikīsm. For example, we note references found at Ḥanafī mosques and institutions in Demak, Gujarat, Coromandel Coast, to a Mālikī mosque and followers in the Maldives and Malabar, and to Shīʿīs and Ibāḍīs in Sind. All these schools coexisted with the Shāfiʿī School which was clearly evident in Sumatra and Malabar from the fourteenth century onward.20 But by the sixteenth century the Shāfiʿī School began to dominate the littoral. This was due to a number of reasons, but mainly to the upsurge of Persian, Yemeni, Swahili and Malay migrants, exiles, sailors and scholars in the littoral. There was also an increasing number of conversions to Islam and within Islam to Shāfiʿīsm at the hands of new missionaries, in an attempt to escape enslavement by Arab Muslim slavers who were theoretically prohibited from enslaving coreligionists. As Islam and its legal frameworks expanded in these regions interactions between scholars, preachers, jurists, pilgrims and other itinerants from both

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subcontinents mutually influenced the spiritual and legal formulations. The nuances of these reciprocated influences become clear in our following discussion on the legal texts. One immediate hurdle obstructing trans-regional exchanges must have been language. In South and Southeast Asia a wide range of languages was spoken in the coastal regions, and most of the itinerants had a vernacular language as their mother tongue. The lingua franca that existed across Monsoon Asia overcame this hurdle for most purposes. Earlier scholarship has enlightened us on the modulations of linguistic negotiations from the ancient period onward. In his conceptualisation of a Sanskrit cosmopolis, Sheldon Pollock suggested Sanskrit was a lingua franca between both these subcontinents from the fifth to the fifteenth century. Following his framework, Ronit Ricci argued that Arabic replaced Sanskrit as a lingua franca in South and Southeast Asian interactions from the fifteenth century onward. Tomáš Petrů, Owen Cornwall and Richard Eaton have recently added the role of Persian that formed its own cosmopolis to the earlier two metanarratives.21 I shall not argue for or against the dominance of any particular linguistic cosmopolis in Monsoon Asia but suggest that all three languages, and in addition Malay, Portuguese and Tamil, were significant factors in the trans-regional exchanges between both subcontinents from the late sixteenth century onward. For Islam and Islamic law the microcosmoi of Arabic and Malay mattered most in this period and the production and circulation of the texts and scholarship in these languages contributed to the success of the Shāfiʿī school of law. The legal texts produced in both South and Southeast Asia validate this point, to which I turn my attention now.

Texts and textures of law A significant amount of Arabic works was begun to be produced in Monsoon Asia as early as the fourteenth century. Despite suggesting an Arabic cosmopolis in South and Southeast Asia, Ricci did not pay attention to the texts written in Arabic in these subcontinents. Her focus was on the works that came out as direct or indirect translations of Arabic texts and the ways in which Arabic vocabularies, imaginaries, and scripts were domesticated by the Tamil, Malay and Javanese Muslim authors. As for writings on Islamic law in Monsoon Asia, works written in Arabic are rather prominent and important. For most authors from these regions Arabic was the most convenient medium to share their ideas and to mark their presence in regional and transregional literary spheres. A few fragmentary legal writings available in the littoral from the fourteenth century onward are directly related to the Shāfiʿī School of law itself. From South Asia we have a fourteenth-century text entitled Qayd al-jāmiʿ by one Faqīh Ḥusayn

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bin Aḥmad.22 It deals with marital rules, proceedings and requirements according to Shāfiʿīsm. We do not have details about its author, apart from a possible reference Ibn Baṭṭūṭa makes to one Faqīh Ḥusayn in his discussion on a miraculous tree found in Malabar.23 Another important Shāfiʿī text from the littoral, Kashf al-durar fī sharḥ al-Muḥarrar by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad bin Yūsuf al-Sindī (d. 1490) is connected to Sind. It is one of the only two known commentaries on the Muḥarrar by Rāfiʿī (d. 1227), a leading scholar of the school.24 Although again we do not have much biographical information on this author, his patronymic Sindī indicates the place with which his family was associated or where he was based. From Southeast Asia, we do not get a complete Arabic legal text until the nineteenth century. Instead, we have a few fragmentary Islamic legal documents from the early fourteenth century. The Terengganu Inscription is the most important among these. In this edict, written in 1302 in Malay with twenty-nine Sanskrit words and ten Arabic words, the king adjudicates the punishment for crimes such as adultery according to Islamic law.25 Otherwise we have a few general legal codes, such as the Undang-Undang Melaka, which do not claim to follow any Islamic legal stream yet incorporate several Islamic legal principles and rulings on marriage, sale and procedure.26 This split between the Arabic and Malay microcosmoi of Monsoon Asia in the language of religion and law is an interesting phenomenon. The languages enable a shared Islamic legal cosmopolis through interconnected languages, laws and translations. The four prominent texts written by some of the most known jurists from the region represent this wider spectrum. First, the Qurrat al-ʿayn by Zayn al-Dīn bin Aḥmad is probably the earliest known complete text on Shāfiʿī law from South Asia. It was written before 1575 as a concise introductory text (mukhtaṣar) to Shāfiʿī law. Its author is said to have written several other texts dealing with legal, historical and ethical issues and he is one of the most celebrated Indian Shāfiʿī jurists. Even so, we do not have much solid evidence of his life and career. According to the popular narratives and uncritical scholarly writings, he is said to have been born into a scholarly family, generally known as the Makhdūms, who had migrated from the Coromandel Coast to Cochin and Ponnāni in the Malabar Coast.27 He was educated with his father and uncle in the mosque-cum-college of Ponnāni as well as in Mecca with reputed scholars of his time. He authored the Qurra upon his return from Arabia, a text that would eventually become the base text for several commentaries and super-commentaries among the Shāfiʿī jurists in South and Southeast Asia as well as in the Middle East and East Africa.28 It has one commentary, written by the author himself in the sixteenth century, which is widely known and studied in the traditional centres of Shāfiʿī learning across the littoral. In its overall approach and structure, the Qurra is just like any other mukhtaṣar text written in the long textual genealogy of the school. It deals with four broad

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major sections of a Shāfiʿī text: laws related to rituals, transactions, marriage and crimes. The text does not classify its chapters as such, but has individual chapters on the laws of prayer, almsgiving, fasting and pilgrimage (all related to rituals); on the laws of sale, power of attorney (devolved authorisation), loan, rent, debt, gift, endowment, declaration and inheritance (all related to transactions); on marriage; and on crimes, apostasy, punishments, holy war, adjudication, case law and evidence, and manumission (all part of crimes). The organisation of the chapters is haphazard, yet it follows a general pattern found in Shāfiʿī law books in categorising and structuring legal issues.29 There are only a few aberrations: it starts with a discussion on laws of prayer, in contrast to other texts in the school which start with a discussion on laws of purity. Starting with the obligation of prayer and its requirements, the Qurra then comes to ritual purity and moves on to other issues. Many chapters have separate subsections, which the author identifies with the term faṣl (an Arabic term indicating a paragraph or article). This sub-sectioning is similarly imbalanced, as some chapters do not have any subsections while there are up to ten subsections for chapters on prayer, sale and marriage. The Qurra is a very concise text that just meets the requirements of a book and escapes the framework of a pamphlet. The extremely precise formulations do not engage with the previous discourses in the school on any legal problems, but directly describe and pronounce rulings for each issue. All these aspects might make it an intellectually unengaging and uninteresting text for specialist readers, but it catered to the needs of a general audience whom the author probably had in mind.30 Its rulings always confirm the most valid views in the school, and occasionally provide apt opinions for actual problems the author had encountered in his life related to socio-cultural issues in his immediate context. Through this text readers could start learning the basic principles and requirements of Islamic law, even if they were not interested in the rigorous legal debates of earlier scholars on each issue. Since the text is very short, any student could memorise it easily, following the general practice in the Islamic world for learning important texts by heart. For the systematic expansion of the Shāfiʿī ideas through primary level introduction to the Islamic rituals and laws, this sort of introductory text contributed more efficiently than any other advanced texts of the school. The text of the Qurra thus should be read against the background of the increasing influence of the Shāfiʿī ideas and scholars in the sixteenth-century littoral. As mentioned earlier, the author also wrote a commentary on the Qurra, and both texts are circulated together in the Islamic world as a single compilation. More than the base text, this commentary became famous and celebrated among Shāfiʿī jurists of the Indian Ocean littoral as an intermediate textbook, reference, source for commentaries, super-commentaries, summaries, etc., thus furthering the circulation of textual and legalistic ideas of the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis and representing the

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rising interest in its doctrines. However, a few jurists did go back to the base text to poetise and write commentaries on it, as the Javanese scholar ʿUmar Nawawī al-Bantanī did in the late nineteenth century.31 Bantanī’s Nihāyat al-zayn, the second text under our focus, is the only commentary on the Qurra known and available down to us so far.32 Printed in Egypt in July 1881 for the first time, the text has been an important source of legal scholarship among the Southeast Asian students based either in the Middle East or in the Malay world itself. Bantanī does not mention his motivation for writing the text. He only says that through this he aims to help jurist colleagues “who are underprivileged like me”.33 This reference to himself as “underprivileged” (qāṣirīn) is an expression of modesty. Although such self-denunciatory tropes are common in the Arabic texts, Bantanī was particularly known among his contemporaries for his humility. When Snouck Hurgronje, the Dutch Arabist, met him in Mecca in the late nineteenth century, he noted: “In social intercourse of any kind, he rather joins courteously in the conversation than dominates it, and never starts any scientific discussion without cause given by others. An Arab who did not know him might pass a whole evening in his society without noticing that he was the author of about twenty learned Arabic works.”34 Bantanī was born and brought up in Banten in West Java, and he moved to Mecca in 1828 after an initial education at the pesantrens (traditional centres of Islamic learning) of Java and a short career of teaching in his hometown. He stayed in Mecca as a student, teacher, author and muftī (law-giver) until his death.35 Through his extensive writings he became an influential author widely appreciated in the Malay world. His oeuvre consisted of varied disciplines, such as law, mysticism, theology and ethics, and became essential textbooks in the pesantrens. Because of this a scholar went on to identify Bantanī as the “intellectual master” of the pesantrens.36 His Nihāyat al-zayn also was taught and used in the pesantrens. It is one of his most famous legal texts among the Indonesian Shāfiʿīs.37 Martin van Bruinessen writes that it “is widely used” as a kitāb kuning (literally “yellow book,” a generic term for a textbook of the pesantrens) while the base text Qurra itself “never became popular” in the region.38 The Nihāya follows the long textual complex of the Shāfiʿī School by bringing together most of the known and some unknown texts into the legal discussions. While the Qurra avoided any form of engagement with earlier discourses, the Nihāya brings in several debates and discussions on each phrase and ruling of the Qurra. It takes the Qurra word by word, gives explanations for its legal complexity, and also elaborates on its sentence structures, syntaxes, phrases, etc. If the word under consideration happens to be a historical person or place it gives a somewhat detailed account. It does all these through quotations and borrowings from the extensive textual corpus of the school. It makes this approach very clear in the preface: “Whatever is written in this book is none of my own. It is all taken from the

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wordings of [previous] authors.”39 It goes on to say that its main source of reference is the Nihāyat al-amal, a lesser-known text in the school written by Muḥammad bin Ibrāhīm Abū Khuḍayr al-Dimyāṭī. It also made use of other renowned texts of the school, such as the Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj and the Fatḥ al-jawād of Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 1566), the Nihāyat al-muḥtāj of Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ramlī (d. 1596), and a commentary on the Ghāyat al-ikhtiṣār (also known as Matn, Mukhtaṣar and Taqrīb) of Abū Shujāʿ Aḥmad bin al-Ḥasan (d. 1197). Bringing together passages from these diverse references into coherent narratives, the Nihāya articulated the arguments of the Qurra to the extent that addresses topics beyond the concern of primary students of Shāfiʿī law. It became a dependable textbook and reference material for intermediate and advanced students of the legal school across the littoral. Although the main audience was the Southeast Asian students (mainly in Indonesia, but also in Malaysia, Thailand and Brunei), it was not limited to them alone. Students and practitioners from South Asia and the Middle East also have been using it. It has been printed in the Middle East several times, from the first to the most recent edition.40 In India I heard about the text for the first time from Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad Nadwī, who was himself the author of texts on Shāfiʿī law circulated in Malabar. It used Arabic to reach beyond the immediate audience of a Malay-speaking world and was esteemed for its wider reception, an issue to be discussed further below. The trajectory of the Qurra and its commentary Nihāya lies in contrast with the course of two other texts written in Malay: the Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm of Ranīrī and its indirect commentary Sabīl al-muhtadīn by Muḥammad Arshad al-Banjārī, two most important Islamic legal texts written in Southeast Asia.41 There are many similarities between these two textual groups, but there are many differences. The most obvious one, of course, is the language, but also the themes covered in the Malay texts are limited. While the Qurra (and hence its commentary) dealt with all the usual topics of a Shāfiʿī text by engaging with the issues of rituals, transactions, marriage and crime, the Ṣirāṭ (and therefore its commentary) deals mainly with the laws concerning the rituals. It is not clear why its author Ranīrī decided to engage with this part exclusively, but it is evidently the most important part and often the starting point of any Islamic law book.42 As this is the first known Islamic legal text written in Malay, he might have wanted to educate his audience on the fundamental rituals of Islam so that they will observe Islam closely following the prescriptions of the scriptures. The text indeed achieved its goal through the wide reception it found among Malay students of Islamic law. It is possibly “the most copied Malay manuscript ever,” with more than 175 copies surviving, and it has been printed several times in regions from Southeast Asia to the Middle East.43 Ranīrī was born and brought up in Rander (in present-day Gujarat in India) in a Ḥaḍramī Arab family that had been settled there for several decades. After

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his initial education in Gujarat he went to Yemen and Mecca for higher studies. Eventually he entered the court of the Aceh Sultanate to practise as a scholar and teacher. Muḥammad al-Ḥāmid, mentioned above, was his uncle, so the place and its intellectual atmosphere must have been familiar to him earlier. Upon his arrival his major concern was the mystical orientation of the region and he opposed the predominant mystical ideas and practices of certain leaders and their followers. His major targets were the mystic Ḥamza Fansūrī and his disciples including Shams al-Dīn Samatrānī. He called their adherence to the mystical ideas of waḥdat al-wujūd pantheistic and hence heretical. By amassing support from the royal household, especially of the then ruler Iskandar Thānī (r. 1636–41) who appointed him as the chief judge in the kingdom, he argued against his opponents, had many of them executed and their books burned in front of the main mosque in Banda Aceh. After a few years, however, Ranīrī had to meet intense criticism from the followers of this mystical order, and they defeated him in debate.44 Consequently he left Aceh for Gujarat, where he lived until his death on 21 September 1658. During his seven-year stay in Aceh he wrote fourteen books on diverse topics, including mysticism, theology, law and history. The Ṣirāṭ is his most important legal text, exclusively concerned with discussions of Shāfiʿī laws. He had discussed law in his other works, either in passing or in detail, but none of those discussions was an exercise in elaborating on law exclusively. The Ṣirāṭ is a comparatively long text with extensive discussions on different ritual laws. It generally follows the chapter framework of the Shāfiʿī texts, starting with a section (kitāb) on purity, then moving on to prayer, almsgiving, fasting, retreat to the mosque and pilgrimage. But it also has sections not usually found in texts on ritual laws. Following the discussion on pilgrimage it has one section on hunting and slaughtering and another on foods, themes which usually appear in Shāfiʿī texts following the discussions on criminal laws. There are eight sections in total, with each section divided into several chapters (bābs) with their sub-chapters, or articles (faṣls). For example, the section on purity is divided into chapters on impurity (najas), ablution, reasons of impurity, bathing, dry ablution (tayammum), menstruation and postnatal bleeding; the first of these chapters (on impurity) is divided into four sub-chapters. In his introductory lines Ranīrī talks about what motivated him to write such a text. He says that there is no such text on Shāfiʿī law for the use of Malay Muslims, many of whom do not understand Arabic. By writing this text for them he expects rewards from God for the virtues it disseminates, because the Prophet has said that one who guides people to good things will earn the same reward as the person who actually does good things.45 The Ṣirāṭ is based on such major sources as the Minhāj of Yaḥyā bin Sharaf al-Nawawī (1233–1277) and its various commentaries and summaries: these include the Manhaj and its commentary Fatḥ al-Wahhāb, both written

languages of law 245

by Zakariyā al-Anṣārī (d. 1520); Hidāyat al-muḥtāj (Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj) of Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī; Anwār li aʿmāl al-abrār of Yūsuf bin Ibrāhīm al-Ardabīlī (d. 1377); and ʿUmdat al-sālik wa ʿuddat al-nāsik of Aḥmad bin al-Naqīb (1302–68). In selecting Ibn Ḥajar’s commentary as one of his sources rather than the contemporary Egyptian commentaries of Ramlī and Khaṭīb Sharbīnī (d. 1570), he shows an affinity with the Meccan version of Shāfiʿīsm, a split that emerged in the school in the late sixteenth century. The author drew upon a very wide repository of Shāfiʿī texts written in Arabic in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries to prepare this first Islamic legal text in Malay. This textual interconnectivity is evidence of ever-widening networks of Shāfiʿī texts and ideas spreading across the maritime littoral. The Sabīl al-muhtadīn by Muḥammad Arshad al-Banjārī, the fourth text in our list, was written in 1779 at the request of Sultan Taḥmīdullāh bin Tamjīdullāh of Banjar as a commentary on the Ṣirāṭ. In the preface the author praises the Ṣirāṭ by connecting the feature of translating it to the Shāfiʿī textual cosmopolis that “it is one of the best texts translated (Ar. mutarajjima; Mal. bhasakan) into the Jāwī language, because its legal discussions (masāʾil) are excerpted from several legal texts; it amalgamates both scriptural and rational evidences, and the people have gained a lot from it and they have received it very well”.46 Despite this appreciation of his source, he also raises indirect criticisms about the book and its uses of Acehnese words and phrases. His criticism is mainly aimed at its scribes who made several mistakes when they copied the text: “In some [such phrases] in it there is alteration and variation; in some those have been dropped. All those changes have been made by stupid copyists. Therefore, the copies and phrases differed; some of those were ruined; it has become almost impossible to obtain a correct copy (Ar. nuskhat ṣaḥīḥa; Mal. nuskha yang sahiha) ascribed to the author, and a correct copy cannot be distinguished from a wrong copy except by experts. But where are the experts in these places and in these times? For determinations they have decreased, intelligence has reduced, and minds have become confused.”47

Arshad al-Banjārī sets out these reasons as the context into which he wrote his commentary, but his major motivation was the request from the sultan who wanted to have a text on Shāfiʿī law in Jāwī. He says that he wrote the text following the sultan’s orders, even though he is not fully eligible to write such a text as his “knowledge is poor, confidence weak, comprehension feeble and cognisance muddled”. After a short prayer for the text to be accepted as a meritorious activity in the life hereafter he begins the legal discussions. His first chapter on ritual impurity follows the same pattern and order of the Ṣirāṭ. The Sabīl is in many ways an indirect commentary on the Ṣirāṭ, because it does not aim to comment on each word and phrase of the Ṣirāṭ, which is a convention of the

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direct commentaries in the Shāfiʿī School and broadly Islamic law. Instead, it follows the overall structure and contents of the Ṣirāṭ but builds upon its own arguments and rulings. In addition to the Ṣirāṭ’s sources, it also brings in sixteenth-century Egyptian commentaries, the Nihāyat al-muḥtāj of Ramlī and the Mughnī of Khaṭīb Sharbīnī as sources. This is an interesting addition as it bridges the gap between the Meccan and Cairene versions of the school by referring to Ramlī, Khaṭīb Sharbīnī and Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī in its discussions. On the very opening of the legal discussions, for example, it brings together both Ibn Ḥajar and Ramlī.48 Such a synthesis of two sub-schools is typical of a larger attempt in the eighteenth century by the Middle Eastern jurists such as Muḥammad al-Kurdī. The synthesis flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which the Nihāya of Nawawī al-Bantanī also took part. Together with other Arabic sources Banjārī also mentions that he has used “several other base texts, commentaries, and super-commentaries in Malay,” but he does not specify what those Malay texts were.

Microcosmoi of Islamic legal cosmopolis For all these four authors from Monsoon Asia, language was an important element in their scholarly careers and communications with both the local and a wider audience. Their attentiveness to language contributed to the success of the Shāfiʿī School and Islamic law in general in the Indian Ocean littoral. In Monsoon Asia the microcosmoi of Arabic and Malay enabled the production and circulation of juridical texts, ideas and scholarship. If the role of Arabic was taken for granted in the Islamic sphere among both historical participants and contemporary observers, the role of Malay as a lingua franca has been largely neglected, especially in Islamic legal historiography. The four texts and authors under our current focus exhibit deliberate choice in their selection of languages, using Arabic, or Malay, or both. This is primarily because these languages were not native to them or to their immediate audiences. Both languages were learned languages for most people in South and Southeast Asia, restricted in use to shared spaces of scholarly, mercantile, political, and diplomatic contacts, in which people from different places and backgrounds communicated with each other. Arabic was commonly used in most Islamic educational institutions, particularly in legal colleges, for jurists believed that a command of Arabic was integral to the proper understanding of Islamic law “because the Sharīʿa is in Arabic”.49 In contrast, Malay appealed as a lingua franca, primarily in Southeast Asia but also spreading beyond to East and South Africa and East Asia through exiles, scholars, traders and pilgrims in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Both the local Southeast Asian communities and diasporas used Malay to study Islam and

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they produced a significant amount of religious and non-religious texts during this period. Scholars who wanted to address the Southeast Asian communities had to master Malay to communicate their ideas smoothly. Those who learned the language and produced texts in it could and did influence the course of Islam in the long run. It was a very difficult task to translate Arabic legal vocabularies and texts into Malay even for native speakers, as there were hardly any precedents in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and producing an Islamic legal language in Malay was still in its infancy. Most authors studied Islamic law in Arabic, using Arabic texts and/or while living in Arabia for many years. Consequently their works showed a significant influence from Arabic in grammar and vocabulary, a dialect often identified as Kitab Malay or the Malay of religious texts.50 Although such texts were difficult to read for an average Malay student without some background in Arabic, the texts did provide a window for many of them to master the laws of their religion in a language closer to them than Arabic. Such deliberately vigorous use of Arabic and Malay led to the success of the Shāfiʿī School in the Indian Ocean littoral. The Qurra and its commentary the Nihāya do not directly mention selecting Arabic, for they must have taken the primacy of Arabic for Islamic legal writing for granted. Though the authors of these books were born and brought up in Malabar or Java they knew that Arabic mattered for the recognition of their works not only among their immediate audiences in Malabar, Java or Mecca, but also in a larger world beyond. Both texts communicated to their non-Arabic speaking audiences as a textbook read and taught through the teachers who had mastered the language. By choosing Arabic rather than regional languages (Malayalam or Javanese) they demonstrated their intention of communicating with the larger Indian Ocean world, where Arabic was still a lingua franca. Using Arabic also enabled their work to be incorporated into the broader Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern Islamic networks of scholars, texts and ideas. The Nihāya is one of the earliest legal texts written in Arabic by a Javanese scholar. Up until then almost all the legal texts available from the archipelago are in Malay, including the Ṣirāṭ, the Sabīl al-muhtadīn or the Mirʾāt al-ṭullāb. Arabic contributed to raising the status of this manual as an important legal text in Islamic educational institutions, such as the pesantrens in Indonesia and beyond. Studying Islamic law in Arabic was, and continues to be, the pedagogical norm in legal colleges. The simplified language of the Qurra enabled its author to write a commentary within a short period. The commentary entitled Fatḥ al-muʿīn became the most celebrated Shāfiʿī text written by an Indian scholar, and it has been circulated from East Africa to East Asia in its own right and through its several commentaries. Ironically, the language formulations of the Fatḥ were rather complicated for non-native speakers of Arabic. This problem deterred its audience from understanding the base text and the commentary and many scholars and teachers of Shāfiʿīsm in

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the littoral complained that it was a difficult (Malay: sulit) text. In several ways this issue also emerged in the dissemination of the Nihāya. It received a restricted coverage within the Malay world when compared with the circulation of Malay legal texts: they became very important for the survival of Shāfiʿīsm there. In the preface of the Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī mentions that he chose to write it in Malay because there was nothing of that sort in the language and his colleagues asked him to write one.51 The “request from colleagues” is a usual trope in Islamic texts that might not correspond to actual requests, but to a wider demand for a text like that. Its language is somewhat complicated, mixing highly Arabicised Malay vocabulary alongside Acehnese and non-Acehnese terms. In the preface it gives the Arabic text first, followed by an interpretative translation in Malay. However, once it comes to actual legal discussions it uses Malay alone; any complete sentences in Arabic are marginal. The very highly Arabicised Malay (or Kitab Malay) has an abstruse vocabulary that a lay reader might find difficult to follow. What is more, the Malay is highly influenced by Bahasa Aceh and Persian and Urdu.52 Arshad al-Banjārī says that non-Malay and non-Arabic terms are inserted by the “stupid copyists,” but we cannot validate this statement for we do not have the original manuscript written by Ranīrī. It is quite possible that Ranīrī himself used such terms, as he was based in Aceh during its writing and he had a South Asian upbringing where Persian and Urdu were predominant among the intellectual and political elites and he was well-versed in all these languages. Language difficulties motivated Arshad al-Banjārī to write his commentary the Sabīl al-muhtadīn, in which he explained how the high influence of Acehnese and Arabic vocabularies in the Ṣirāṭ makes it a difficult text to follow.53 The Sabīl thus became an important text of Shāfiʿī law which was studied, taught and circulated widely in the Islamic educational realms of Southeast Asia. The text was taught in the intermediate level of Malay Islamic law colleges, often after the students finished studying the primary texts such as the Safīnat al-najāt.54 The most advantageous aspect of both texts is that they can be read and studied without a strong command of Arabic. Although knowledge of Arabic is an added advantage in reading the texts, it is not at all mandatory. One would not miss anything by skipping the Arabic parts, as all the Arabic sentences have been translated into Malay. The fact that the Ṣirāṭ is one of the most copied Malay manuscripts in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries demonstrate its wider receptivity and usage among the students and scholars of Islamic law and its Shāfiʿī stream.55 From the late nineteenth century onward it has been often reprinted multiple times, sometimes in the margin of the Sabīl al-muhtadīn which was usually printed without the Ṣirāṭ.56 The printed editions circulated not only in the Malay Archipelago but also in Sri Lanka and South Africa. This indicates both texts received widespread recognition owing to their exclusive use of Malay.57 In the Islamic educational centres among the

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Figure 10.1: Opening pages of the Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm of Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī, from a manuscript copy from nineteenth-century Aceh. British Library, Or 15979, ff. 2v-3r (https://a2.typepad.com/6a0192ac16c415970d01b7c749bffa970b-pi).

Malay communities in Southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean world the text propagated Shāfiʿī legalism just as much as Shāfiʿī legalism promoted the relevance of the text. This mutually complementary process was influenced partly by the uses of Malay. It proves that language contributed to a wider receptivity and acceptance among Malay Shāfiʿīs in the littoral, stretching from the Cape Malays in South Africa to Maguindanao and Sulu in the Philippines. This duality of Arabic and Malay microcosmoi in the history of Islamic law should be taken into account more often, not only to understand how and why the Shāfiʿī school spread and succeeded in the Indian Ocean littoral, but also to understand the multi-directional, multi-linguistic and multi-ethnic compositions in the history of Islam in the littoral. Instead of seeing its history in “peripheries”, as a single story of Islamic expansion at the hands of Arabs and through Arabic, we need to take into account the microcosmoi that helped the ultimate survival of multiple doctrines. As the Arabs and Arabic played a role in the history of Islam in South and Southeast Asia, the local communities and languages also, perhaps even more, advanced the support for their religion and its survival by the works

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they produced, the debates they initiated, the sermons they delivered, all in the languages the people could understand and relate to.58 While a regional lingua franca such as Malay facilitated the subcontinental recognition of the ideas and doctrines they upheld, a transregional lingua franca such as Arabic enabled the regional scholars to communicate with the larger world of Islamic scholarship. This simultaneous selection of more than one language, in this case Arabic and Malay, contributed to the preservation of Shāfiʿī legalism in the maritime littoral.

Conclusion Involving some other language or languages along with Arabic has been crucial to the sustainability of the intellectual networks of Islam and particularly of those of legal schools, as we see in the Ḥanafī realms of South Asia and Near East and the Shīʿī sphere of Persia, where the production of legal texts in Arabic complemented those in Turkish and Persian, as just one example. Shāfiʿīsm did this through scholars with the attention and ability to write in Arabic or in the regional lingua franca. As we have seen, the choice of language was not easy for these authors. All had different native languages, but they chose to write in Arabic or Malay in order to address larger audiences beyond their immediate realms. Coming from a Malayalam-speaking sphere, Zayn al-Dīn wrote in Arabic. His commentator Nawawī al-Bantanī did the same though coming from a Javanese sphere. Ranīrī took a different course: he came from an Arab family based in Gujarat where Gujarati was the predominant language, but wrote in Malay. For his commentator Banjārī Malay was a lingua franca and his native language was Banjar. This appeared to be an advantage for all of them in the long run, as their texts were circulated in the larger microcosmoi of the Shāfiʿī cosmopolis of Monsoon Asia. An open approach among Shāfiʿī jurists to navigate between these languages played an important role in making Shāfiʿīsm the dominant legal school in the Indian Ocean world from the sixteenth century onwards. This Shāfiʿīsation process coincided with the larger conversion process that was going on in the same regions where the school stood as the main, if not the only, framework for new Muslims to assimilate the teachings of Islam. The increasing circulation of Shāfiʿī Muslims from Yemen, Persia, Hijaz, Egypt, Iraq and the Levant across the oceanic littoral opened up the doctrines of the school to Asian and African followers. They, in turn, spread the school through their own frameworks utilising the same maritime networks through such groups as Malabaris, Gujaratis, Tamils, Malays, Swahilis and Habshis. The textual interconnectivities between the Qurra, written by a Malabari jurist, and its commentary the Nihāya, by a Javanese/Meccan scholar, as well as between the Ṣirāṭ by a Ḥaḍramı̄ /Indian scholar and its commentary Sabīl al-muhtadīn by a

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Banjari/Malay scholar, demonstrate multi-directional journeys within the larger cosmopolis of Islamic law through intersections between language microcosmoi. As much as languages facilitated the transregional interactions of political, commercial and religious groups of diverse origins, the laws also ensured an easy continuum of exchanges of sources, texts, doctrines, rules, ideals and vocabularies among people from different backgrounds and interests. The interconnected cosmopolises of languages and laws thus provided common grounds for the itinerant groups of the Indian Ocean, and they, in turn, translated and transferred what was foreign into local and local into foreign. In the Islamic legal cosmopolis that prevailed in the premodern Indian Ocean, the Shāfiʿī stream dominated these exchanges within and outside the Muslim communities from the sixteenth century onward, along with the intensification of conversions into Islam in coastal South Asia and island Southeast Asia. The contributions of home-grown Muslim jurists to the Islamic textual longue durée through their critical engagements with the laws and languages of Islam have produced a vast corpus of the literature that modifies the existing understanding of Islamic historiography, especially of legal historiography, of the oceanic littoral.

Notes 1

On the role of law in the global interactions between 1400 and 1800 CE, see Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow, “Legal Encounters and the Origins of Global Law,” in The Cambridge World History, vol. 6, part 2, Patterns of Change, eds. Jerry Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Merry WiesnerHanks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 80–100.

2

Tom Hoogervorst, “Legal Diglossia, Lexical Borrowing and Mixed Judicial Systems in Early Islamic Java and Sumatra,” in Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas and Practices, eds. Mahmood Kooria and Sanne Ravensbergen (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 39-63.

3

For two collective attempts, see the contributions in special issues of journals: Mahmood Kooria and Sanne Ravensbergen, eds., “The Indian Ocean of Law: Hybridity and Space,” Itinerario 43, no. 2 (2018): 151–322; Renisa Mawani and Iza Hussin, eds. “The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean Itineraries,” Law and History Review 32, no. 4 (2014): 733–889.

4

Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006); Sumit Mandal, Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020).

5

Brinkley Messick, Sharī’a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); idem, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

6

Iza R. Hussin, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Fahad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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2017); Joel Blecher, Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). 7

Engseng Ho, “Afterword: Mobile Law and Thick Transregionalism,” Law and History Review 32, no. 4 (2014): 883–889.

8

Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

9

Mahmood Kooria, “Words of A ʿ jam in the World of Arab: Translation and Translator in Early Islamic Judicial Procedure,” in Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, eds. Intisar Rabb and Abigail Balbale (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), 71–90; Henri Chambert-Loir, “Islamic Law in 17th Century Aceh,” Archipel 94 (2017): 51–96.

10

Jos Gommans, “Continuity and Change in the Indian Ocean Basin,” in The Cambridge World History, vol. 6, part 2, eds. Jerry Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 182–209. On the use of Persian as a lingua franca in the littoral and its existence in a Persian cosmopolis, see Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, eds. The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Nile Green, ed. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Gagan Sood, India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Tomáš Petrů, “‘Lands below the Winds’ as Part of the Persian Cosmopolis: An Inquiry into Linguistic and Cultural Borrowings from the Persianate societies in the Malay World,” Moussons 27 (2016): 147–161.

11

On the role of Arabic language in the legal literature of Malabar in South Asia, see Ḥusayn C. S., “Musāhamāt ʿulamāʾ Kayralā fī al-adab al-fiqh bi al-lughat al-ʿArabiyya” (PhD diss., University of Calicut, 2004).

12

Mellinkoff, David, The Language of the Law (Eugene: Resource Publications, 2004), 95–135; cf. Bernard Schwartz, ed. The Code Napoleon and the Common-law World (New York: New York University Press, 1956).

13

For an overview of the Islamic connections between both subcontinents, see R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea, eds. Islamic Connections: Studies of South and Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009).

14

Elizabeth Lambourn, “Carving and Communities: Marble Carving for Muslim Patrons at Khambhāt and Around the Indian Ocean Rim, Late Thirteenth-Mid-Fifteenth Centuries,” Ars Orientalis 34 (2007): 99–133; idem, “From Cambay to Samudera-Pasai and Gresik: the Export of Gujarati Grave Memorials to Sumatra and Java In the Fifteenth Century CE,” Indonesia and the Malay World 31, no. 90 (2003): 221–284.

15

Sebastian Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, C. 1400-1650 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020); Azyumardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia: Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern Ulama in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004); Richard Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Tayka Shuʿayb ʿĀlim, Arabic, Arwi, and Persian in Sarandib and Tamil Nadu: A Study of the Contributions of Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu to Arabic, Arwi, Persian, and Urdu Languages, Literature, and Education (Madras: Imāmul ʿArūs Trust, 1993); Oman Fathurrahman, Tarekat Syattariyah Di Minangkabau (Jakarta: Prenada Media Group, 2007).

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16

Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī, Bustan al-salatin Bab II, Pasal 13, ed. T. Iskandar (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1966), 33.

17

Erawadi, Tradisi, wacana, dan dinamika intelektual Islam Aceh abad XVIII dan XIX (Jakarta: Departemen Agama RI, 2009).

18

Mohammad Hannan Hassan, “Islamic Legal Thought and Practices of Seventeenth-Century Aceh: Treating the Others” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2014); Chambert-Loir, “Islamic Law in 17th Century Aceh”.

19

Mahmood Kooria, “The Formation of Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean Rim, c. 615–1000 CE,” in Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas and Practices, eds. Mahmood Kooria and Sanne Ravensbergen (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 14-38.

20

Abū A ʿ bd Allāh Muḥammad bin A ʿ bd Allāh Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭūṭa: Tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār fī gharāʾ̄ib al-amṣār wa-ʿajāʾ̄ib al-asfār, eds. Muḥammad A ʿ bd al-Munʿim al-ʿUryān and Musṭafā al-Qaṣṣāṣ (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-ʿUlūm, 1987), 631–632.

21

Petrů, “Lands below the Winds”; Richard Eaton, “The Persian Cosmopolis (900–1900) and the Sanskrit Cosmopolis (400–1400),” in The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, eds. Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 63-83.

22

K. M. Muhammad, Arabi Sāhityattinu Kēraḷattint̲e Saṃbhāvana (Tirūraṅṅāṭi: Ashrafi Book Centre, 2012), 62–63.

23

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Riḥla, 574. The local scholars believe that both Ḥusayns are the same. Muhammad, Arabi Sāhityattinu, 62.

24

Aḥmad Mayqarī Shumaylat al-Ahdal, Sullam al-Mutaʿallim al-muḥtāj ilā maʿrifat rumuz al-Minhāj, ed., Ismāʿīl ʿUthmān Zayn (Jeddah, Dār al-Minhāj, 2005), 630–631.

25

Ayang Utriza Yakin, “Dialectic between Islamic Law and Adat Law in the Nusantara: A Reinterpretation on the Terengganu Inscription in the 14th Century,” Heritage of Nusantara: International Journal of Religious Literature and Heritage 3, no. 2 (2014): 293–312.

26

Liaw Yock Fang, Undang-Undang Melaka: The Laws of Melaka (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976).

27

For some hagiographical and biographical writings on him, see Rafīq ʿAbd al-Barr al-Wāfī, “al-Juhūd al-fiqhiyya li al-Imām Aḥmad Zayn al-Dīn al-Makhdūm al-Malaybārī wa duwaruhu fī nashr al-Maḏhab al-Shāfiʿī fī al-Hind” (PhD diss., al-Azhar University, 2014); Husain Raṇṭattāṇi, Makhdūmuṃ Ponnāniyuṃ (Ponnāni: Jumuʿattu Paḷḷi Paripālana Committee, 2010); P. Muhamed Kunju, “The Makhdums of Ponnani” (PhD diss., University of Kerala, 2004); O.P. Mayankutty, “Role of Makhdums in the Anti-Colonial Struggles of Sixteenth-Century Malabar” (PhD diss., Calicut University, 2007).

28

Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī, “Qurrat al-ʿayn bi muhimmāt al-dīn,” in his Fatḥ al-muʿīn, ed. Bassām ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Jābī (Limassol: al-Jaffān wa al-Jābī /Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2005).

29

On the general pattern of chapterization in the Shāfiʿī legal texts, see ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Ibrāhīm Abū Sulaymān, Tartīb al-mawḍūʿāt al-fiqhiyya wa munāsabatuh fī al-maḏāhib al-arbaʿa (Mecca, Jāmiʿat Umm al-Qurā, 1988), 59–69.

30

al-Malaybārī, “Qurrat al-ʿayn,” 35.

31

Two Malabari scholars, Muḥammad Musliyār bin Aḥmad Arīkalī (d. 1952) and Anwar ʿAbd Allāh al-Faḍfarī, wrote poetised versions of the Qurra. I have not managed to locate the first poem, but the second poem has been published: Anwar ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Faḍfarī, al-Naẓm al-wafī fī al-fiqh al-Shāfiʿī (Riyadh: Dār al-Ṣamīʿī, 2013).

32

I came across a reference to another possible commentary from Somalia entitled Sharḥ Saʿīd bin Muʾallif [li] Qurrat al-ʿayn [sic] bi muhimmāt al-dīn. This commentary is a 444-page manuscript and is mentioned as one of the most circulated Shāfiʿī texts in Somalia. But we do not know the name of its author or scribe, or even its date of composition. From its given title it seems a priori

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to be a commentary by one Saʿīd bin Muʾallif. Only by being able to cross-check it against the other commentaries could we make more interesting observations on the extent of the circulation and reception of the text. 33

Nawawī al-Bantanī, Nihāyat al-zayn fī irshād al-mubtadiʾīn bi-sharḥ Qurrat al-ʿayn bi-muhimmāt al-dīn (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-ʿĀmirat al-Sharafiyya, 1881).

34

C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century: Daily Life, Customs and Learning (Leiden: Brill, 2007 [1888-89]), 290.

35

For his biography, the major sources are Aboe Bakar Djajadiningrat, Tarājim ʿulamāʾ al-Jāwah, Leiden University Special Collections, Or. 7111, unpaginated; Hurgronje, Mekka; Chaidar, Sejarah pujangga Islam Syech Nawawi Albanteni, Indonesia (Jakarta: Sarana Utama, 1978); cf. Alex Wijoyo, “Shaykh Nawawi of Banten: Texts, Authority, and the Gloss Tradition” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1997).

36

Abd Rahman, “Nawawī al-Bantanī: An Intellectual Master of the Pesantren Tradition,” Studia Islamika 3, no. 3 (1996): 81–114.

37

Wijoyo, “Shaykh Nawawi of Banten,” 173–174.

38

Martin van Bruinessen, “Kitab Kuning: Books in Arabic Script Used in the Pesantren Milieu; Comments on a New Collection in the KITLV Library,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 146, nos. 2–3 (1990): 247.

39

Muḥammad bin Ibrāhīm Abū Khuḍayr al-Dimyāṭī, Nihāyat al-amal li man raghib fī ṣiḥḥat al-ʿaqīdat

40

For a recent Middle East edition, see al-Bantanī, Nawawī, Nihāyat al-zayn (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub

wa al-ʿamal (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Maymaniyya, 1895). al-ʿIlmiyya, 2002). 41

The other earliest known works in this category are Mirʾāt al-ṭullāb fī tashīl maʿrifat al-aḥkām al-sharʿiyya li Malik al-Wahhāb by ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Sinkilī (d. 1693), who wrote it at the request of the Acehnese queen Ṣafiyat al-Dīn Tāj al-ʿĀlam (r. 1641–1675); and Safīnat al-ḥukkām fī takhlīṣ al-Khaṣṣām written in 1740 by Jalāl al-Dīn bin Shaykh Muhammad Kamāl al-Dīn bin al-Qāḍī al-Tarusānī. On a comparative study of these two texts and their importance in the Southeast Asian Islamic legal tradition, see Chambert-Loir, “Islamic Law in 17th Century Aceh”.

42

Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī, Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, British Library Or. 15979. There are several other incomplete or earlier manuscripts of the text digitalised under the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. For example, see EAP329/1/23; EAP329/10/104; EAP229/6/4; EAP119/1/14; EAP329/5/5.

43

Chambert-Loir, “Islamic Law in 17th Century Aceh,” 56.

44

On these debates and reasons that led to his departure, see Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Rānīrī and the Wujūdiyyah of 17th century Acheh (Singapore: MBRAS & Malaysia Printers Limited, 1966); Takeshi Ito, “Why did Nuruddin ar-Raniri Leave Aceh in 1054 A.H.?,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 134 (1978): 489–491. On his major opponent who defeated him in his debate, see Sher Banu A.L. Khan, “What happened to Sayf al-Rijal?,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 168, no. 1 (2012): 100–111.

45

Ranīrī, Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, ff. 3r-4r.

46

Muḥammad Arshad al-Banjārī, Sabīl al-muhtadīn li tafaqquh fī amr al-dīn (Mecca: Maṭbaʿat al-Mīriyya, 1892), 3.

47

Banjārī, Sabīl al-muhtadīn, 3.

48

Ibid., 5.

49

Imām al-Ḥaramaynī ʿAbd al-Malik al-Juwaynī, Nihāyat al-maṭlab fī dirāyat al-maḏhab, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm Maḥmūd al-Dayyib (Jiddah: Dār al-Minhāj, 2007), 18: 478.

50

Chambert-Loir, “Islamic Law in 17th Century Aceh,” passim.

51

al-Ranīrī, Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm.

languages of law 255

52

For example, the use farman in Allah farman for “qāla Allah”.

53

Banjārī, Sabīl al-muhtadīn.

54

L.W.C. van den Berg, “Het Mohammedaansche godsdienstonderwijs op Java en Madoera en de daarbij gebruikte Arabische boeken,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 31 (1886): 518–555.

55

For a list of its numerous manuscript copies from the Malay world and beyond, see Jamalluddin bin Hashim and Abdul Karim bin Ali, “Kitab Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm oleh Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī: Satu Soratan,” Journal Fiqh, 5 (2008): 197–215.

56

For example, see two editions of the Sabīl al-muhtadīn with and without Ṣirāṭ in the margin: in 1882 with Ṣirāṭ, and in 1912 without it.

57

On the usage of the text as an important source law for the Malay Muslims of South Africa, see John S. Mayson, The Malays of Cape Town, South Africa (Manchester: J. Galt & Co., 1861), 22; on its presence in Sri Lanka, see Ronit Ricci, “Remembering Java’s Islamization: A View from Sri Lanka,” in Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, eds. James L. Gelvin and Nile Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 190, 201.

58

This argument stands in line with the latest literature on the contributions of Southeast Asian communities in the making of Islam and its laws. See for example, Hussin, Politics of Islamic Law; Francis R. Bradley, Forging Islamic Power and Place: The Legacy of Shaykh Daud bin ‘Abd Allah al-Fatani in Mecca and Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016).

CHAPTER 11

Human Traffic: Asian Migration in the Age of Steam1 Sunil Amrith

Abstract This chapter examines the vast increase in the scale of mobility across the Bay of Bengal that began in the middle of the nineteenth century. It shows how earlier, smaller-scale routes of mobility laid the groundwork for mass migration, including networks of recruitment. Using a range of colonial and vernacular sources, the chapter examines the interplay of freedom and constraint, mobility and immobility, that underpinned a movement of people that transformed both the landscape and the demography of Southeast Asia. The new modes of governing migration that arose through this process, both legal and extralegal, had lasting consequences in shaping the citizenship laws and migration policies of post-colonial states.

Keywords: Migration; plantations; Bay of Bengal; freedom; capitalism

In early 1870, W.L. Hathaway, Sub-Collector of the South Indian district of Thanjavur, condemned the “traffic” in people across the Bay of Bengal. He wrote that migration between South India and Malaya was “a regularly organized system of kidnapping”. Time and again, “captives were shipped from Negapatam for Penang and other countries, where the males were employed as coolies, and the females sold to a life of prostitution”. This “traffic,” Hathaway wrote, “is contrary to the law, […which] makes it illegal to assist any native of India in emigrating.” He insisted that the Madras government intervene to stop the traffic, and embarrassed the authorities in a long letter to The Friend of India, a journal read by British and Indian critics of imperial policy. Hathaway made the “traffic” his personal mission. From his base in Nagapatnam, he waged war on shipowners and labor contractors. At the start of 1870’s “emigration season,” he ordered a raid on a warehouse where migrants waited to board ships for Southeast Asia. The problem arose when their cases came before the local magistrate. Each migrant insisted that he acted of his own free will. Young boys declared that the labor recruiters were their “fathers” or “uncles”; they hadn’t signed contracts, so there was no evidence that they were “migrating for the

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purposes of labor”. “It is useless to attempt to unravel the real facts of the case,” Hathaway lamented; “people themselves will not reveal the truth.” This was an old problem. The local Police Weekly Circular had reported a similar case a few years earlier. On finding a warehouse full of “coolies crowded together like beasts,” the police superintendent refused to let their ship depart. Questioning the detained men, he concluded that “I fancy they had got their stories cut and dried ready for use; for they answered satisfactorily enough; and they all produced parents, uncles, or guardians.” The police superintendent thought, “this coolie trade has reached such large dimensions that there is plenty of room for an Emigration Agent here”.2 The debate surrounding Hathaway’s missive finally secured this goal – in 1873, a Protector of Emigrants was appointed to oversee migration to Southeast Asia. By 1870, the movement between South India and the Straits Settlements was well-established. It looked set to grow. Already, cases of overcrowded ships and fugitive shipowners had come to the government’s attention. With the planters of the Straits crying for more labor, Hathaway and his colleagues in local government argued that it would be disastrous to lift legal restraints on migration between India and Malaya. British planters and their spokesmen in the Straits responded with the case for free migration. Connections across the Bay, they argued, were entirely natural. Malaya was really an extension of India; Indian laborers hardly thought it a “foreign” land. The tension between freedom and migration would resurface time and again in the years to come. The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a time of transformation in the Bay of Bengal’s history. The slow intensification of “traffic” through the nineteenth century was jolted into expansion; the trickle became a torrent. Steam energy made the crossing faster, easier, and cheaper. Imperial power charged into the interior. By treaty and by conquest, colonial states moved beyond their coastal strongholds, preceded or followed by European and Chinese and Indian investors. Coffee. Sugar. Tea. Tobacco. Rubber. Southeast Asia’s frontiers promised vast profit. Wherever in the world they found local communities stubborn in their economic independence – cultivators who found wage labor unattractive, or people who resisted enslavement – European settlers perpetuated the “myth of the lazy native”. “No gain,” Alexander Kyd wrote from Penang, “will induce a Malay to constant and unremitted Industry.” So labor, like capital, had to be imported. Chinese capitalists had a ready source: through their brotherhoods and regional associations they mobilized men in evergreater numbers as steamships brought the China coast nearer. Europeans, without access to Chinese networks, turned where the sugar planters of Mauritius and the Caribbean had first resorted after the abolition of slavery – to British India.3 A few figures convey the scale of change. The exodus to Ceylon began first. From the 1840s, tens of thousands of Indian laborers a year arrived in Ceylon to work on

human traffic: asian migration in the age of steam 259

the coffee plantations. By the end of the 1850s, this had grown to nearly a hundred thousand arrivals annually. Between half and three-quarters of them returned to India each year. The longer journey across the Bay of Bengal to Malaya involved smaller numbers until the 1880s, but by the end of that decade, twenty-two thousand people arrived at the ports of the Straits Settlements from South India. From the 1880s, Burma was the third great destination for Indian labor, and would attract the most migrants of all. By 1911, over one hundred thousand people each year arrived from India in each of these three destinations across the Bay of Bengal.4 The statistics are notoriously imprecise, but in the century between 1840 and 1940, somewhere around eight million people traveled from India to Ceylon, four million to Malaya, and between twelve and fifteen million to Burma; a varying but large proportion, well over half, returned to India within three to seven years. Most of this movement occurred after 1870. Whole families moved to and from Ceylon; to Malaya and Burma, the migrants were mostly men until the 1920s. Consider this in the context of all Indian migration overseas: from the beginning of organized Indian emigration in 1834, until 1940, well over ninety per cent of all Indian emigrants went to Ceylon, Burma and Malaya. Put simply, the Bay of Bengal accounts for nearly the sum total of India’s emigration history in the age of empire. Consider this, now, in a global context. Migration around the Bay of Bengal was comparable in scale to trans-Atlantic migration in the same era: some twenty-six million people arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1930, from southern and eastern Europe, from East Asia and the Pacific. Add Chinese migration to Southeast Asia to the equation – around nineteen million people in the century after 1840, more widely dispersed than their Indian counterparts – and it is clear that the region where the Indian Ocean met the South China Sea was home to one of the world’s great migrations. The main difference between the Asian and the Atlantic circuits lies in the numbers who settled rather than returned. Between six and seven million people of Indian origin, and a similar number of Chinese, had settled overseas by the end of the 1930s; American demographer Kingsley Davis contrasted this with the eighty-five million people of British origin who lived outside the British Isles by that time.5

The power of steam “The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam, let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade,” Joseph Conrad wrote.6 The opening of the canal in 1869 reshaped the Bay of Bengal’s geography. It brought the Bay within weeks’ not months’ journey of Europe. Suez reconnected the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean. Through the sliver of the canal, steam power reordered the

260 sunil amrith

world. It gave incalculable impetus to the expansion of world trade. Conrad’s “new ships, new men, new methods of trade” sparked mass migration, east and west, and stimulated commodity production across the tropical world. As steamships glided over the oceans, no longer at the mercy of the prevailing winds, undersea telegraph cables engirdled the world beneath the seas’ surface. By 1870, the British India Submarine Telegraph Company connected Bombay with the Red Sea. A year later, cables crossed the Bay of Bengal. News of prices and harvests now traveled instantaneously. On land, railroads compressed time and distance, and attracted huge capital investment. As the Transcontinentals snaked their way across the North American continent, so the Indian railways provided the sinews of imperial power in South Asia. Land and sea routes converged as radials upon port cities that pulsed with people, their fabric sagging under the weight of new wealth and new misery. In the nineteenth century inorganic energy broke almost every conceivable limit to growth.7 Rails, rivers, and seas intersected. As the Suez Canal brought the Bay of Bengal closer to Europe, the railways extended the sea’s reach beyond the coasts. Like a “magnetic field,” Braudel wrote, the Mediterranean cast its influence far from its shores. Similarly, the life of the Bay of Bengal drew the products of the land, and the sons of the soil, into its steam-powered web. By the 1880s migrants came not only from the coastal regions, but also from further inland. Most of those who crossed the Bay were no longer from traditional seafaring communities. On the other end of their voyages, railroads brought the ports closer to the frontiers: once Ceylon’s railways reached the Kandyan highlands, the infamous “long walk” from port to plantation was eased. Railway construction in Burma was slower to take off, given the country’s thousands of miles of navigable waterways; but as the railways developed, Indian migrants followed the steel lines from Rangoon. For more than a millennium, the Bay had been a highway between India and China. Throughout that time, traders and states sought shortcuts around it, and ways around the vulnerable “choke point” of the Straits of Melaka. In the first millennium, traders had used overland portage across the Isthmus of Kra – the narrow strip of land in southern Thailand before it widens out into the Malay Peninsula – to connect the Bay to the South China Sea. The rise of Melaka as Southeast Asia’s great emporium diverted traffic away to the south. But in the nineteenth century the railways offered the promise anew, using a northerly route to reach China’s interior and feed into its internal waterways. The engineer Arthur Cotton imagined eastern Bengal’s railways as the first step in a line from Calcutta to Canton. Competing proposals envisaged a line from Chittagong to Yunnan via Bhamo, and another cutting through the Shan States. A rail link between India and China remained a perennial dream. In 1904, the British government signed an agreement with the Consul-General in Yunnan to build a railroad from Burma to China; in the 1930s, the plans remained under consideration – not for the last time.8

human traffic: asian migration in the age of steam 261

Steam power demanded new sources of energy and made new demands on the land. Before the age of steam, “more energy could be captured from the wind … by changing the number, arrangement, and operation of sails on ships”. The clippers of the early nineteenth century represented the highest achievement of these adjustments. They were elegant, streamlined craft that could reach unprecedented speeds. But the energy that steam could provide surpassed even the most efficient use of wind; steam engines harnessed matter buried deep in the earth for thousands of years.9 By the middle of the nineteenth century, steam-powered vessels were a common sight on the Ganges: the East India Company owned ten river steamboats by 1850, and a number of ocean-going steamships. They demanded supplies of coal. The mid-nineteenth century saw the rapid development of coalfields in eastern India – in Burdwan, Sylhet, Assam, Palamau and in Cuttack, in Orissa. Where coal was unavailable, the Company sought firewood as an alternative, creating a thriving market for fuel. Burma’s untapped energy resources, located centrally along the Bay of Bengal’s routes, beckoned British administrators and shipping companies.10 The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company was formed in 1865, owned by the brothers Henderson, originally from the village of Pittenween in Fifeshire, Scotland. The family’s fortunes rose from the initial misfortune of George Henderson, who shipwrecked while commanding a sailing vessel “trading to the near east”. He survived the ordeal, and installed himself in Italy, where he flourished in the marble trade to Britain – the Glasgow end of the business was handled by his three brothers. By the 1850s, the Hendersons had abandoned marble and moved into long-distance shipping: they owned a small fleet that sailed between Scotland, New York and Quebec; at the turn of the 1860s, they were at the “forefront” of the “emigrant trade” to New Zealand. On the return journey from New Zealand, the Hendersons’ vessels began to call at Rangoon, where they took on cargoes of rice and teak. Before long, the Burma rice trade proved so profitable that they abandoned the antipodean leg of the voyage altogether; around the same time, they purchased a small fleet of steam-powered river craft to profit from the Irrawaddy’s flourishing trade. A promotional booklet of 1872 assured potential investors that “there is no trade to the east more capable of […] continuous expansion than that of Burmah”. The Irrawaddy had “its banks studded with towns and villages, crowded with an active, industrious population to whom this river is the great highway”. Until the advent of steam, “the whole traffic on the river was conducted by native boats” – up to twenty-five thousand of them. Now steam power, “by its speed, regularity, and safety, is gradually superseding native craft”; all that was needed was a “sufficient supply of plant to monopolise, in great measure, the traffic”. For two decades, the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company imported its coal directly from Britain; from the 1890s, supplies began to arrive from the coalfields of Bengal. Already by 1890 Dalah, across the river from Rangoon, had developed into a thriving dry dock and repair station:

262 sunil amrith

“here also were situated Boiler Shops, Erecting Shops, Machine Shops, Carpenters Shops and all the other type of shops which go to make up a shipyard.”11 But steam triumphed over sail more gradually than we might imagine. Scale and state protection gave European transportation firms a competitive advantage, but Asian shipping merchants fought back. Well into the 1870s, sailing ships followed their old routes around the Indian Ocean and across the South China Sea. Crossing the Bay of Bengal remained risky.12 But by then, the advance of passenger steam shipping was underway. Beginning in the 1860s, the British India Steam Navigation Company (BISNC) established a growing hold over passenger shipping across the Bay. In 1861, the BISNC launched a monthly steamer between Calcutta, Akyab and Rangoon. Within a decade, fortnightly and then weekly steamer services connected Rangoon with the ports of the eastern Indian coast, north of Madras: Coconada, Vizagapatnam, Bimlipatnam, Calingapatnam, Baruva, and Gopalpur. By the 1880s, a weekly steamer service ran from Madras, Pondicherry, Cuddalore, Karaikal and Nagapatnam to Penang, Port Swettenham, and Singapore. Today many of these ports are faded provincial towns. Visitors might struggle to imagine them as thriving maritime centers, but for older people, their old names, many of which have changed, evoke another world: a Bay of Bengal world that encompassed eastern India and Southeast Asia. The annual number of passenger journeys between South India and Malaya in both directions, grew from an average of fifteen thousand in the 1870s, to nearly forty thousand by the end of the 1880s.13 The traffic between Madras and Ceylon, even larger in scale, was dominated by ships on the short crossing (under two hours) between Talaimannar and Danushkodi; a supplementary steamer service between Colombo and Tuticorin ran twice a week.14 By the end of the nineteenth century, indigenous shipping was pushed to the margins of both legality and commercial viability. As the great rivers Kaveri, Krishna and Godavari spilled into the Bay of Bengal, so the sons of their valleys crossed it, pouring in their thousands into Burma and Malaya. The steamship changed people’s sense of proximity. New routes linked port cities but also braided distant hinterlands – the Kaveri delta and the Malayan forest; coastal Andhra and the rice fields of Lower Burma. As families fanned out across the Bay, “the names of villages” were “plaited into one map”.15

From maritime to terrestrial empires The “breaking of the dam” redistributed power around the Indian Ocean. Although they began as coastal trading enclaves, European empires developed a terrestrial obsession in the nineteenth century; sovereignty was beached. Dutch rule in Indonesia epitomized this shift: desperate for revenue after the Napoleonic wars,

human traffic: asian migration in the age of steam 263

the Dutch administration put Java to work, instituting a system of forced cultivation and corvée labor; they retreated from inter-Asian trade; they staked their fortunes on plantation production.16 After the Indian Rebellion of 1857 – the most widespread revolt against British rule in India until the 1940s – the Raj consolidated its hold on the land as the basis of imperial rule: mapping, surveying and assessing territory; settling nomadic peoples; seizing common property and forest resources for the state.17 With lethal military technologies from the foundries and shipyards of industrial Europe, a renewed thrust of aggressive expansion brought almost all of Southeast Asia, with the exception of Thailand, under European control. Lower Burma fell to British conquest after the Anglo-Burmese war of 1852. The French assumed direct control in Indochina, piecemeal, a decade later. In the 1870s, the British “forward movement” pushed into the Malay Peninsula, suborning Malay sultans in a series of treaties, expanding from the port cities of the Straits Settlements into the interior. By 1885, the British conquest of Burma was complete. The Dutch conquest of Indonesia took longer, provoking a bloody war of resistance in Aceh that lasted from 1873 to 1908. With the opening of the Suez Canal, India became the “nodal point” of the Indian Ocean, allowing the projection of British power eastward – to Southeast Asia – and westward, to the coast of eastern Africa. Indian systems of governance (varieties of “indirect rule”), Indian legal regimes (the Indian Penal Code), and Indian district officers moved out across the Indian Ocean. English officials, schooled in the Indian administration, implemented and adapted Indian models of rule in the Straits Settlements, in Egypt, and in east and west Africa. Indian soldiers secured colonial rule around the ocean’s rim.18 Above all, Indian laborers fanned out to power the capitalist transformation of the land – they cleared bush, planted trees, built railways. They moved, in by far the greatest numbers, to just three destinations across the Bay of Bengal: Ceylon, Burma, and Malaya. Ceylon’s mutation from a strategic trading post to a plantation colony set the stage for a sweeping change around the Bay’s littoral: within decades the region became one of the world’s foremost suppliers of raw materials. The conversion of its forests into monoculture plantations, its valleys into acres of paddy fields, set in train a migration of labor so vast that it dwarfed the earlier movement of indentured workers to Mauritius and the Caribbean. That migrant labor to Southeast Asia came almost entirely from the south of India was due in equal measure to proximity, precedent, and policy. The “uninterrupted intercourse” between South India and Ceylon, and between South India and the Malay world, provided a base on which to build. Networks of transportation, methods of recruitment, and sources of finance already existed, ripe for expansion under the power of steam. In the second half of the nineteenth century the channels of communication between South India and Southeast Asia deepened.

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Ceylon’s planters, accustomed to working with Tamil labor, maintained this source of supply when they moved across the Bay to Malaya. Colonial officials, accustomed to seeing India as a land of too many people, turned to the subcontinent when labor was scarce elsewhere. The concept of race, accustomed to conflating circumstantial behaviour with immutable traits, held Tamil labor to be, always and everywhere, “docile” – feckless, but amenable to discipline. As migration reached massive proportions, drawing in many from inland communities not previously connected with the world of the Bay of Bengal, the churning effects of colonial capitalism clashed with enduring forces of immobility. South India had long been a place where people moved around: priests and mendicants, artisans and warriors. In his classic work on medieval South India, Burton Stein wrote of the “peripatetic ways of many in South Indian society,” highlighting the succession of migration and conquest, and the gradual integration of newcomers. Initially, the circulations that knitted South India together were small in scale but culturally significant: the movement of Brahmin ritual specialists, poets, and scribes. Military mobility gained importance – throughout the medieval era, communities of Telugu peasant-warriors invaded and settled in the Tamil country. Under the rule of the Chola Empire in the second millennium, lower peasant groups were absorbed into “expanding trade and agrarian systems”. Urban settlements grew up around large temples. Religious change both shaped and responded to economic transformation. The rise of the Saiva devotional movement saw the rise of wealthy temple complexes supported by peasant groups. The twelfth century “introduced the great age of religious pilgrimage in the Tamil country”: a widening circle of itinerancy that stretched across the southern peninsula.19 The environment shaped circulation and exchange. Three distinct ecological regions made up the Tamil country: the river valleys, based on irrigated rice cultivation, wealthy temple towns, and Brahmin ritual authority; the plains, where a harsher climate encouraged herding, hunting, and the cultivation of hardier grains; and the Kongu region, a frontier that combined characteristics of plains and valley societies, and had interactions with both. The valleys had long looked outward, exporting rice to Ceylon and to Southeast Asia, and importing precious luxuries from distant shores; it is no surprise that they would dominate the mass migration to Southeast Asia after 1870. The valleys were interdependent with the plains; plainsmen exchanged specialist services – including military protection and construction labor – for surplus food from the valleys. Over time, distinctions “broke down the land and sea boundaries which had kept Tamilnad in relative isolation”: greater internal mobility between complementary environments interacted with the greater external mobility between the coasts and the other side of the Bay of Bengal.20 But movement took place amid servitude. The most common form of immobility in the Tamil districts was the pannaiyal system of “permanent farm servants,”

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compared by British commentators at the time to European serfdom. Servants were tied to the land, but there were instances when pannaiyals could be sold independently – sold, on most definitions, as slaves. Such forms of tied labor, on Dharma Kumar’s account, “spanned a wide range from near-freedom to near-slavery”. Often, bondage came with a corresponding entitlement, even a right, on the part of the servants to demand employment, access to land, and support. Inevitably, such customary rights came under the greatest strain during periods of dearth and famine. At the turn of the nineteenth century bonded agricultural laborers made up a “sizeable proportion of the total population” – up to twenty per cent – of many Tamil districts. British observers interpreted the nature of South Indian bonded labor as a form of slavery; the British abolitionist movement focused its attention on Indian “domestic slavery,” yet the interventions of the colonial state did little to change the structure of agrarian society until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.21 Alongside these ancient institutions, newer forms of immobility spread with the consolidation of colonial rule over South India. For weavers, artisans, professional soldiers, and many others, the British conquest brought economic ruin. Cheap Lancashire textiles flooded the Indian market. The traditional mobility of Indian weaving communities declined as they fell behind the productivity of Britain’s mechanized textile mills. Contrary to the predictions of contemporaries including Karl Marx, South Indian society underwent a process of deindustrialization, rather than modernization, in the nineteenth century. It experienced a shift towards lower-quality, lower value-added production, and a decline in hand-weaving, which was particularly important in securing women’s livelihoods. Urban residents were pushed onto increasingly marginal lands and hard-scrabble subsistence. The acute vulnerability of large parts of South India to famine was one result of this enforced decline.22

Nature and labor The power of steam promised the conquest of the monsoons. Yet less than a decade after the opening of the Suez Canal, the monsoons demonstrated their enduring power over human life – they failed. The failure was global, and catastrophic. The El-Niño Southern Oscillation in 1877-8 – a periodic warming of the waters in the equatorial Pacific off the coast of Peru, with effects across the global climate system, including a weakening of the Asian monsoon – was the worst “since records began”. The rains failed across lands as far apart as southern India, China, Java, Egypt, and northeastern Brazil. Primary producers were already vulnerable when the drought came – jolted by the burst bubble of American railroad stocks, the global economic depression of the 1870s caused a downward spiral in commodity

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prices, and squeezed producers who had expanded too far and too fast into cash crops, often at the expense of food production. Drought turned to catastrophe in part because of the economic orthodoxies of the British Empire: British officials, loath to interfere with market forces, were niggardly with relief, having dismantled many pre-existing systems of social support.23 In India, the famine was worst in the south and across the Deccan plain. William Cornish – a doctor and a humanitarian, harshly critical of British famine policy – wrote that “we saw children of all ages in such a condition of emaciation that nothing but a photographic picture could convey an adequate representation of their state.”24 “When the dead are so numerous that they lie unburied,” Cornish lamented, “when people leave their villages by wholesale and when village officials fly from their posts in panic, we can never get accurate accounts of vital statistics”. Even in their absence, the death toll is estimated in the millions. At the time and subsequently, observers assumed a direct connection between the famine of the 1870s and the increase in Indian emigration, which accelerated at that very moment. Famine was the ultimate “push factor,” to use a term first popularized by the American geographer Harry Jerome in the 1920s. George Grierson – folklorist, linguist, and colonial administrator – toured Bengal and Bihar in early 1883, charged with investigating the causes and consequences of Indian emigration overseas. “Surely emigration may be looked upon as an engine of immense power for good to India,” he wrote, as “the more safety-valves there are for a pent up population in time of famine, the greater chance there will be of saving life”. Migration, on Grierson’s account, was a natural flow of population governed by economic and environmental conditions. He correlated the price of rice with levels of emigration, and found that the “agreement between these two lines is almost complete”. Emigration, on this view, was a “vent” for India’s surplus population: as the New World absorbed Europe’s poor in increasing numbers, so the frontiers of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia promised to do the same for India. The Governor of the Straits Settlements wrote that clearing the forests of the Malay Peninsula would open new opportunities to “numbers of laborers of a country already greatly overstocked, and which is periodically visited by famine to a most lamentable extent”.25 But the link between famine and migration was, in truth, more complex. Faced with a chronic shortage of labor, British administrators across the Bay of Bengal saw opportunity in the famine. One official in Burma wondered, in March 1877, if “in view of the prevalence of very wide-spread famine in the Presidency of Madras, an impulse could not be given, by special arrangements, for a more extended emigration of laborers from the distressed tracts to British Burma, partly as a measure of relief from the famine, and partly in promotion of the settlement of population in this province”.26 The plans failed. A year later, the Government of Burma again

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offered work on public construction projects to famine victims in Madras – the scheme was suspended because only eight hundred people volunteered. Numerous other schemes to resettle famine victims overseas faltered.27 By contrast, Ceylon did see an upsurge in migration because of the famine. The number of Indian laborers arriving in Ceylon doubled between 1875 and 1876, and exceeded one hundred and sixty thousand in each of the two worst years of the famine, 1876 and 1877; return migration from Ceylon to India fell significantly. The migrants to Ceylon came almost entirely from those regions “already accustomed to short-term labor migration”: the dry regions of Thanjavur, and south-eastern Madurai. Those who saw emigration to Ceylon as a means of survival came from regions which already had close connections with the island. Migration to Ceylon had begun decades earlier, it was already well established by the 1870s. “In view of the severe and protracted nature of the famine,” David Arnold concludes, “it might be asked why the exodus from Madras was not even greater”. In part this was because of the obstacles in the way of those who migrated – panicked officials tried to stop them from leaving their villages; recruiters at the emigration depots rejected them as unfit for labor. The relative lack of famine-induced emigration showed the “limited extent to which rural labor in Madras had ceased to be tied to the land and villages”.28 Economic opportunity and cheaper transportation made it easier for young men, and a smaller number of women, to leave their homelands and seek their fortunes in Southeast Asia at a time of catastrophe. But they did not react blindly to the furies of nature. What appears to be natural takes work: policies and legislation, chance and intention, technology and energy – not famine alone – combined to “push” migration across the Bay of Bengal. Between regions of surplus and deficit population, or rainfall, or land, lay the hopes of individuals and the strategies of families, and the coercion enshrined in laws written in distant chambers.

The industry of migration The essential link between crisis and opportunity was provided by what, today, we would call the “migration industry”. Labor recruiters, shipping agents, petty financiers, and speculators worked together with – and, at times, against – the colonial state and European planters. They mobilized the South Indian countryside, and they channelled labor across the Bay. The “migration industry” of South India combined very old features of the indigenous labor market with the capital of European agency houses, and the force of colonial laws of contract. The law made a clear distinction between migrants under contracts of indenture and those who made their own arrangements through intermediaries; but these were points on

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a spectrum. They all used a combination of inducement and coercion and – above all – debt to mobilize workers in South India, and then immobilize them on the plantations of Ceylon or Malaya. Ceylon was the first to undergo a transformation, beginning in the 1830s, as coffee plantations spread on the island. As we have seen, the 1840s witnessed an early peak in labor migration; nearly one hundred thousand people arrived from India in 1844. But the decline in the fortunes of the coffee industry – in part because of competition between producers around the world – saw migration fall off. In the late 1860s, as the opening of the Suez Canal integrated the global economy, coffee leaf disease ravaged Ceylon’s plantations, and ruined many planters. After experimenting with alternatives, capitalists and the colonial state settled on tea. In the 1880s, the number of acres planted with tea grew from nine thousand to over 150,000, while the area of coffee plantations diminished from 252,000 to 98,000 acres. In many cases, coffee plantations were converted directly into tea estates. With tea came a surge in migration. State-operated ferries ran between Paumba and Mannar, and between Tuticorin and Colombo; the disaster of famine in South India made Ceylon all the more attractive. The North Road – which had, itself, been built by Indian workers – ran for one hundred and ten miles between the Port of Mannar and the Kandyan highlands; it was a marked improvement on the brutal walk through swamp and jungle that had greeted arrivals from India a few decades earlier. The migrants, now, “practically never belonged to nomadic and marginal groups, but were recruited among the settled populations of the rice-growing districts”. And although low-caste and dalit communities were well-represented, so, too, were the landed and dominant castes of the southern Tamil districts.29 The kangany dominated recruitment from the start in Ceylon. A Tamil word meaning “overseer,” kan means “eye” in Tamil; in the Tamil Bible, kangany is the term for a bishop – overseer of the congregation. By the 1870s, “head” kanganies, who supplied several estates, emerged as powerful brokers: each of them employed many subordinates, in charge of the workforce on individual plantations. The cultivation of tea, unlike coffee, required labor year-round; and the rhythms of work on tea plantations made them more suitable for women and children. Whole family groups now dominated the movement from India to Ceylon. Here, as elsewhere, debt was at the heart of the system. The “coast advance” that the kangany made to the families of the laborers – or to the masters of bonded servants, to free them – kept the workers in his control, and these advances ballooned. Debts migrated with the workers. If they died on the plantations, as so many did, the debts passed on to their families. The cost of the workers’ food and lodging, and their purchases from the estate stores which the kangany often owned, added to their financial burdens. Migration to Ceylon was most clearly an extension of earlier traditions of movement; it was built on proximity, habit, and deep connections of caste and

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kinship. Movement over longer distances required more work on the part of the state and employers. In Malaya, kangany recruitment coexisted with, and eventually displaced, the system of indentured labor, adopted from the earlier migration of Indian workers to the sugar colonies of the Indian Ocean and the West Indies. “The soil is good,” one Malayan planter wrote in 1836, “the climate is fine,” and “nought is waiting but the hand of man to bring abundance to our doors”.30 In the nineteenth century, those “hands” came almost exclusively from South India. As sugar cultivation expanded in the 1850s in Province Wellesley – on the Malayan mainland, across the water from Penang – demand for Indian labor intensified.31 Distance meant shipping costs to Malaya were greater than to Ceylon: to recover their investments, brokers and planters insisted that laborers sign contracts of indenture of between three and five years. Planters were obsessed with desertion. They enforced iron discipline. Speculators in India gathered up willing or unwilling recruits and despatched them across the Bay, confident that the growing demand for “hands” would bring handsome profits. Planters raised recruits on their own, too, working through their Indian agents: Adamson, Taggart and Company (the Scottish presence was ubiquitous), and two Indian firms, Ganapathi Pillai and the Madura Company. The recruitment of low-caste Hindu or dalit workers for Malaya, along with many from the cultivating castes, changed the balance of migration across the Bay of Bengal, once dominated by Tamil-speaking Muslims. Between 1866, when detailed statistics began, and 1910, when indentured labor was abolished in Malaya, up to 250,000 workers moved from India to Malaya under contracts of indenture. In the 1870s and 1880s, between seventy and eighty per cent of Indian workers went under indenture – they began a chain reaction that outstripped and then displaced altogether the system of indenture. By the turn of the twentieth century, kangany recruitment was paramount. This had everything to do with the rise of “Raja rubber”.32 The fortunes of coffee and sugar planters in Malaya had been disappointing; neither crop turned the rapid profits that investors had hoped for. By the early twentieth century, rubber was so lucrative that Malaya had become the most valuable tropical colony in the whole of the British Empire. Rubber trees were indigenous to the Malay Peninsula, but the Victorian quest for “improvement” led imperial agronomists and botanists to experiment with transplantation. The Brazilian hevea species was more productive, and hardier, than the native rubber trees of Malaya. Henry Wickham, an English prospector working in the Amazon, harvested thousands of wild hevea seeds in the 1870s and sent them to Kew Gardens, the “botanical heart” of the British Empire. In 1876-7, seedlings were exported to Ceylon, and a small number to Singapore, where their potential was truly realized. Henry Ridley was curator of the Botanical Gardens of Singapore; he saw Malaya’s commercial future in the cultivation of the hevea tree. It was Ridley who devised

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the “herringbone form of excision, peeling away a limited area of the outer bark, but leaving the inner cambium intact,” so that tapping rubber would not kill the trees. The angle of the cut and its depth, the overpowering smell of the sap – these would become “second nature” for tens of thousands of young men from South India. Expansion was rapid. In 1905, twenty thousand hectares were planted with rubber in Malaya – by 1910, over ten times that area.33 Rubber planters saw that the kangany system represented the quickest and most efficient way of getting labor. Unlike their counterparts in Ceylon, Malaya’s kanganies recruited for single estates on which they were already employed, and so operated on a smaller scale. Their success in Malaya is clear from the numbers of workers the kanganies managed to recruit. By the end of the 1880s, over twenty thousand people each year arrived in the ports of the Straits Settlements from South India; in 1911, that number was over one hundred thousand. The geography of the Malay Peninsula changed rapidly – the migrant population moved inland. In 1881, Singapore and Penang still accounted for 39,000 out of the 44,000 Indians resident in Malaya at the time of the census; by 1901, the two cities’ combined population of 55,600 was matched by a plantation population of equal size, mostly in Selangor and Perak.34 In his pioneering investigation of the history of Indian emigration to Malaya, undertaken in the 1960s, Kernial Singh Sandhu noted that “almost every laborer who was questioned […] invariably included the recruiter or agent among his ‘reasons’” for migration. Traveling through Malaysia’s plantation lands forty years later – and, in so many ways, this is a work in Sandhu’s footsteps – I had the same experience. In the narratives and family memories of most Tamil migrants to Southeast Asia, fate, chance and decision are personified in the figure of the kangany. The kangany was usually a known person; his chance reappearance in the village, which eventually the villagers came to expect, started millions of journeys across the Bay of Bengal. The kangany created tight connections between South Indian villages and particular Malayan plantations; between local shrines at home, and estate temples overseas (Fig 11.1). In different guises, the kangany appears as a brutal agent of the power of the European planters, or as the person who provided alienated Tamil estate workers with a sense of community.35 By the early twentieth century, British officials and Indian nationalist observers had come to agree that the kangany was a shark; and it is mostly through their eyes that we see this essential, but almost invisible, figure in the Bay of Bengal’s history. The Calcutta nationalist daily, Amrita Bazar Patrika described the kangany as “like a tin god clothed in gorgeous velvet coat and lace turban and bedecked with costly jewels in his ears and his fingers”; another newspaper commented that “he instils in the minds of these ignorant seekers of fortune” the idea of Malaya as El Dorado: “his gold attracts like [a] magnet”.36 In

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Figure 11.1: Small plantation shrine in Malaysia. Photograph by Sunil Amrith.

one recent reminiscence, the kangany’s affectations appear more humble, and for that reason perhaps more believable. The family of Palanisamy, who worked as a kangany in the late 1910s or early 1920s, recall his frequent trips to India to recruit workers, during which he cut a striking figure with his short trousers and shirt and close-cropped hair, and a whistle that dangled from his waistband.37

Burma and the Chettiars In Burma, a similar system of recruitment prevailed under a different name, and under different conditions: there the recruiter was known as a maistry. The movement from India to Burma really took off in the 1880s, and was far more diverse in its composition than migration to Ceylon or Malaya. Most migrants to Burma came not from the Tamil districts of the far south, but from the Telugu-speaking area north of Madras – today’s Andhra Pradesh coast. They were joined by migrants from the Tamil region, from Orissa, and from Bengal. Adding to the arrivals by sea, an older, overland movement continued, back and forth, across the watery frontier from Chittagong into Burma: movement across a realm that was once ruled by the kingdom of Arakan. Unlike in Ceylon or Malaya, Burma’s development did not depend on plantation agriculture. There, Indian migrants were dispersed across a wide range of occupations. They were as likely to work in small-scale industry as

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on the land, and they were less concentrated in particular workplaces. In this sense, migration to Burma was the freest of the three; but the system of debt and advances played a similar role in enabling migration, and in binding indebted migrants. Two further contrasts stood out between Burma, on the one hand, and Ceylon and Malaya, on the other. The first was juridical: Burma was ruled as a province of British India. Indian migrants to Burma were “domestic” migrants, despite having crossed the Bay; as such, they came under far less control and surveillance by the colonial state. Secondly, in Burma, South Indian capital, and not just labor, was essential to the metamorphoses of the late-nineteenth century. Imagine, for a moment, the experience of a Chettiar agent, still a youth, crossing the Bay of Bengal to Burma in the 1880s. He receives his initiation from the man he is sent to replace. Together they live in an isolated compound, iron bars on the windows, in Hanthawaddy district of Lower Burma, surrounded by the emerald sea of paddy fields along the Irrawaddy Delta. The Chettiars develop the intimacy and intuition to decide who in the village is trustworthy. It is a lonely life. They spend their days crouched over a writing desk and account ledger; their records are immaculate. They are part of the life of the village, yet always removed. We do not know in what language they speak: most likely a pidgin Burmese, spiced with English, Tamil, and Hindustani. The Chettiars take in deposits after the harvest; they lend directly to cultivators, and also to Burmese moneylenders who work the bazaar, re-loaning the money at higher interest. They finance the flow of trinkets and manufactures from England and from India: canned milk, biscuits, soap, glassware and crockery, “portraits of Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm, Christmas cards, and pictures cut from the illustrated magazines of the day”.38 Though isolated physically, the agent is never cut off from the flow of information and capital that are like blood circulating through the arteries of the Chettiar community, from its heart in India’s deep south to its limbs in Burma, Siam, Malaya, and Indochina. Once a week, the community’s elders convene at the Chettiar temple in Mogul Street, Rangoon, which stands “at the centre of an international web of finance closely connected with the banking systems in Madras, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, and Saigon”. They discuss community affairs. They set interest rates for different kinds of loans and deposits, beginning with the internal rate for transactions between Chettiar firms. They assess market conditions. They distil rumors of war, faltering monsoons, and new shipping lines into a single figure: the interest rate. They do business with European exchange banks, who are quite willing to lend to Chettiar firms, and with Chinese traders and bankers. People move back and forth. Our new apprentice will soon be alone, as his mentor returns home for a period of rest. The Chettiars began as a caste of salt traders. By the eighteenth century they had moved into banking, and grew experienced in the use of sophisticated financial

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instruments. Their first forays abroad were to Ceylon, where they financed the early expansion of coffee. Alongside Tamil Muslim partners (or competitors), they imported rice and textiles to the island; they exported areca and cinnamon and coffee. Until British banks muscled in, they also handled currency exchange. The Chettiars followed the British military into Southeast Asia – to the Straits Settlements and Tenasserim, and then moved beyond the British Empire, to Indonesia and Indochina. Southeast Asia’s frontiers brought a better return on their capital than the Indian market, and the “wild east” saw fewer restrictions on their activities. By the turn of the twentieth century far more Chettiar capital was invested overseas than in Madras: they invested in Burma, above all. When they arrived in Lower Burma, Chettiar bankers found the Irrawaddy delta paved with gold. After the Second Anglo-Burmese war (1852), British authorities lifted the ban on rice exports from Burma, which the Konbaung dynasty had imposed. As the global conflicts of mid-century disrupted the international rice market – the 1857 rebellion in India; the American Civil War, which disrupted rice supplies from the Carolinas – Burma emerged as a major rice exporter. The Suez Canal brought Burmese rice to the world. Initially, most Burmese rice went to Europe. Around the turn of the twentieth century, demand from Burma’s neighbors grew. The thousands of migrant laborers on Malaya’s plantations had to be fed, and Malaya could not produce rice on that scale. Burmese production soared just as population growth put pressure on the rice-producing heartlands of eastern India; by the 1920s, Burmese rice would flood the domestic Indian market too. The weakness of Burma’s credit markets gave the Chettiars their opportunity. Before the 1870s, Burmese pioneers expanded into the Irrawaddy Delta and increased rice cultivation slowly but steadily. They relied on relatives and shopkeepers for credit to tide them over until the harvest, or to finance occasional cash purchases. As new lands were colonized in a headlong rush after the opening of the Suez Canal, the need for credit became acute. The Chettiars were the only group that could supply it. European exchange banks dominated the export economy, but had no desire to lend to Burmese cultivators – but they were willing to lend to Chettiar firms, with whom they had established a sound relationship. Indigenous Burmese moneylenders were active, but lacked the capital to lend on a large scale. Initially Chettiar firms stayed close to Rangoon, and financed cultivation in its immediate hinterland. By the 1880s, the Chettiars had moved along Burma’s railway lines. They made loans directly to Burmese cultivators, who pledged land and property as collateral. The results were dramatic. Burma exported 162,000 tons of rice in 1855; by 1905-6, the figure was two million tons. In the same period, the land area devoted to paddy grew from 700,000 acres to over six million. Over those years, the price of rice rose from forty-five rupees to one hundred and twenty rupees for a hundred baskets. By the turn of the twentieth century, around three hundred

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and fifty Chettiar banking firms operated in Burma, with a working capital of one hundred and fifty million rupees. Burma’s rice revolution was both consequence and instigator of the changes sweeping the Bay of Bengal. As Indian migrant workers began to pour in, they found a wider range of occupations, which paid better than plantation work in Malaya or Ceylon. Many were employed in small-scale industry: milling and packing and processing rice, working on the docks or on the railways. The movement of Indian labor to Burma was seasonal. It followed the syncopated rhythms linking cycles of cultivation and rainfall in eastern India and Burma. By the turn of the twentieth century, more than half of the Indian residents of Burma lived outside Rangoon: in Bassein and Moulmein, in market towns like Henzada, Toungoo and Myaungmya, and in rural hamlets in the lower Delta, where they lived in huts on the edges of the rice fields. But it was in Rangoon that the transformation of Burma was most startlingly on display. Rangoon had become an “Indian city” by 1900; it remained so until the catastrophic 1930s. In all, more Indian migrants traveled to Burma than to any other destination: between twelve and fifteen million in all, the vast majority of them in the years from 1880 to 1940; theirs remains almost an untold story.39

Degrees of freedom Three routes: Ceylon. Burma. Malaya. Viewed in aggregate, each had its own social and geographical dynamic. The Telugu districts provided Burma with most of its labor; the deep south of Tamil Nadu was most closely linked with Ceylon – Thanjavur, Tirunelveli and the area around Madras, with Malaya. But there was sufficient overlap between these routes that they intersected: the lines became tangled. Within particular villages, even within single families, men would take their chances with different destinations: one brother in Burma, another in Malaya. They spread their bets, mitigated the enormous risks they took. Others’ journeys encompassed the Bay within a lifetime: a few years in Ceylon, a period back home, and then on to Burma or Malaya. Choice was not always in the hands of migrants: chance and accident played their roles in determining who ended up where. For some, the world overseas remained abstract until they set sail, not knowing quite where they were headed – echoes remained of the old idea of “Suvarnabhumi,” a mythic frontier in the east. Ceylon and Malaya had an especially close relationship – beginning with the planters who took coffee from Ceylon to Malaya, and with them a preference for Tamil labor. By the late-nineteenth century, Tamil families in Sri Lanka sought new frontiers in Malaya: they worked as plantation managers and kanganies; and, from the early twentieth century, an educated class of Ceylon Tamil migrants filled the ranks of the Straits Settlements’ bureaucracy and its law courts.

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We do not need a view from on high to see the Bay of Bengal whole: many itineraries, many family histories, were built upon circulation around this maritime world. The lives of Indian migrants circulated, on paper, through the archival labyrinth of the British Empire. Documents, like people, moved from colony to colony, from department to department, from coast to coast. The earliest days I spent working on this project at the National Archives of India were filled with confusion, as multiple handlists and catalogs lay open before me. Official deliberations on migration moved around among the institutions of state every few years: from the Department of Revenue and Agriculture to the Department of Home, Revenue and Agriculture; from there back to Revenue and Agriculture, and then to Commerce and Industry. Each of these shifts in administrative logic reveals a change in the way the state envisaged and defined the problem of migration in relation to agricultural production, taxation, land, and industrialization. In Burma, Malaya, and Ceylon, debates on immigration – as if in mirror image – came under the Departments of Labour, and under the Protectors of Indian Immigrants. And stories of migration appear in other records – consular and diplomatic correspondence, for instance – where migrants’ journeys crossed political boundaries. The organization of the archive of migration illustrates the choices, and the accidents, that determined who would be responsible for the journeys of millions of people overseas. Before the language of citizenship became widespread, the law provided a way in which even the most disadvantaged could appeal for protection, assert claims to public respect, and defend customs that remained sacrosanct even where abuse was widespread – though the odds, always, were in favour of the wealthy and the powerful. The voices of migrants were only “heard” in Madras or Calcutta, and so they survive to be heard by historians, when they were expressed in particular ways – in petitions (though only if they followed convention), in legal testimony (though this testimony was not always believed), and, above all, if they arrived through British intermediaries: medical officers, magistrates, and missionaries.40 As correspondence between Malaya and India grew, the inhumanity of plantation life became harder to ignore; evidence mounted that Tamil laborers in Malaya were “habitually flogged.”41 British officials with the courage of their convictions – among them, Collector Hathaway of Thanjavur – concluded that the government should act to prevent further emigration to Southeast Asia, because the system was so open to abuse. But Malaya’s planters needed their labor, and they had powerful backers in London. The planters justified unrestrained migration by invoking the Victorian shibboleth of free trade: freedom of movement within the Empire was fundamental. Furthermore, they insisted, circular migration around the Bay of Bengal was rooted in local tradition. “To the traditional connexion of the Straits with India,” they argued, “we may fairly enough trust to ensure the immigrants’ interest”. There was

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no further need for government intervention.42 But the language of freedom was double-edged. Indian administrators and humanitarians argued that restrictions on freedom of movement would enhance the human freedom of their Indian subjects: saving them from unjust contracts, which they were never truly free to enter into. And even purely economic arguments in favour of freedom could undermine, just as much as bolster, the planters’ case. Hathaway’s successor, Henry Sullivan Thomas, was Collector of Thanjavur between 1874 and 1878 – he made his career as an administrator in South India, and would later write a treatise on the history of the fishing rod in India – argued that, “the principle should be that nothing more is to be attempted or countenanced than the unabused removal of the obstructions to the spontaneous flow of labor from a cheap to a dear market.” Contrary to the planters’ claim that the flow of labor between India and Malaya was natural and spontaneous, he showed that it would be impossible without government intervention at every stage of the process: “primitive accumulation,” as Marx saw clearly, depended on the power of the state. As such, Thomas wrote, “if the Government legalizes and aids a blind contract for labor at a price below the market price of the place to which it is going, then it directly injures the emigrant and indirectly injures the two countries”. He was particularly concerned that “if it were good policy for India to interest herself in sending labor anywhere, it should [be …] in distributing it to the less-populated parts of India, where it is most wanted as, for instance, to its own coffee and tea planting industries”. Thomas’s conclusion was stark: “if English capital in Burma, the Straits, Ceylon or anywhere else, has gone where it cannot live without unfair bolstering at the expense of India, then the sooner it finds it out and remedies its mistake the better”. Thomas was prescient: the debate over freedom of migration across the Bay would continue into the twentieth century; by the 1930s, Indian nationalists would make exactly the arguments against emigration that Thomas had outlined.43 Though the motivations for official concern were often self-interested, even cynical – upholding the system by putting its horrors down to individual cases of “abuse” – government interest in the conditions of Indian labor overseas had an unintended consequence: they opened up the imperial state to claims by migrant workers – claims that held them to their own promises of justice. Yet British Indian officials proved reluctant to act on their views, and the Malayan planters appeared to win the argument: the likes of Hathaway and Thomas were lone voices. The desire not to “inconvenience” Malaya’s planters prevented Indian officials from “ordering at once the immediate cessation of emigration” to Malaya, which the weight of the evidence before them suggested that they ought to do.44 But if colonial administrators were unwilling to follow through on the implications of their findings, Indian nationalists and social reformers took up the cudgels of reform.

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By the first decade of the twentieth century, Indian and Chinese journalists, social reformers, nationalists, and government officials turned their attention to the condition of Indian and Chinese “coolies” in the world. For both Indian and Chinese political leaders, their inability to protect their countrymen abroad epitomized national weakness. As “free” Asian migrants began to experience legal discrimination in, and exclusion from, the settler colonies and the United States, the presence of the “coolie” branded Indians and Chinese everywhere with the stigma of unfreedom and humiliation.45 Led by venerable liberal politician Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Indian public figures raised once again the question of the condition of Indian labor migrants, as British humanitarians and anti-slavery campaigners had done in the 1840s. Addressing the imperial legislative council, of which he was a member, in 1912, Gokhale spoke of the “vast and terrible amount of suffering” caused by the system of indentured labor, the “personal violence” and “bitterness” that it brought.46 He used the imperial authorities’ own statistics on diet and wages and mortality to draw attention to the plight of Indian emigrants. Beyond the suffering of migrant workers, “disgrace” in the eyes of the world was the greatest concern of the Indian elites who condemned indentured labor.47 Indentured labor, Gokhale declared in 1912, was “degrading from a national point of view,” for “wherever the system exists, there the Indian are only known as coolies, no matter what their position might be”.48 Respectable Indian merchants and lawyers overseas, he implied, were tainted by association with their toiling countrymen. The denial of political rights to Indians in South Africa became an urgent public issue in India, spurred by the activity of an increasingly prominent lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi. Racial discrimination in the settler colonies was particularly galling to many elite Indians, but this was not the only issue at stake.49 Anxiety about Indian emigration stimulated wider concerns about India’s poverty and its potential for economic development; concerns about India’s frontiers, and its connections with the broader region. Because of its proximity to India, and the historical connections across the Bay of Bengal, Malaya stood in a very different relationship with India than the distant sugar colonies of the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean. The image of an Indian community marooned far from home carried little weight in the Malayan context. But the new awareness of Indian labor migration around the world placed the condition of workers within an imperial and an international politics of reform: the problem of the “coolie” became at once more emotive and more general. By the 1910s, literate Indians in Malaya intervened in their own right in the debate on indentured and plantation labor.50 A Kuala Lumpur-based Indian writer, J.D. Samy, wrote that in Malaya “the coolie is literally unrepresented,” as he described in detail the “sufferings that the poor, illiterate and ignorant coolies daily undergo”.51

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The publicity given to the suffering of migrant labor by Indian politicians and social reformers was one of many challenges to the empire-wide system of indentured labor migration by the early twentieth century. Hugh Tinker’s exhaustive consideration of the internal debates within the British Empire leading to the abolition of indentured labor concluded that a coalition of humanitarians, missionaries, and Indian liberal reformers first “condemned” and then “dismantled” the global export of Indian indentured labor.52 Imperial authorities worried about the political opposition to indentured labor in India, which gathered force after Gokhale’s intervention in 1912.53 At the same time, the profitability of indentured labor declined, as planters across the British Empire found new ways to recruit “free” labor using ties of kinship and debt.54 These broader imperial pressures contributed to the specific decision to end indentured labor migration to Malaya, but there the economic arguments against the use of indentured labor were particularly powerful.55 With the vertiginous rise of rubber, and the conversion of tracts of coffee and sugar land into rubber plantations in Malaya, planters found that the system of indentured labor simply could not provide them with a large or steady enough supply of labor. The last batch of indentured workers arrived in Malaya in 1910 – their terms of indenture expired in 1913, marking the end of the system’s life in Malaya. In Ceylon and Burma, of course, the system of indentured labor was never used. Around the Bay of Bengal, the end of indenture had limited impact: it was already a system in decline; and recruitment by kanganies, which both pre-dated and outlasted indenture, shared many of its vices. Between the 1870s and the early twentieth century, connections across the Bay of Bengal underwent a change in scale. However imprecise the statistics, it is certain that a comparable number of people crossed the Bay as crossed the Atlantic. Indian and Chinese migrants were less likely than their Atlantic counterparts to settle permanently overseas. But were they necessarily less free? Many observers, at the time and since, would answer that they were. Writing in the 1870s, one British official in Madras declared that “any analogy” between Indian migration to Southeast Asia “and the spontaneous emigration of a free and intelligent people in England and elsewhere” would be “fallacious and illusory”.56 But the thousands of young men who crossed the Bay of Bengal did so with “different degrees of freedom,” to borrow a phrase from Rebecca Scott’s study of Cuba and Louisiana after slavery.57

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Notes 1

This chapter is an abridged version of Chapter 4 of the author’s book Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (2013), reproduced by permission of Harvard University Press.

2

Madras Public Proceedings, No. 40 of 13 September 1870, India Office Records IOR/P/449/10; Friend of India, 14 April 1870, 433; Memorandum by E.F. Webster, Collector of Tanjore to Chief Secretary, Government, 25 March 1881, National Archives of India (New Delhi), Revenue and Agricultural Department, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 19-21, January 1882; Police Weekly Circular, Feb 4 1865, in extract from diary of Assistant Superintendant of Police, Madras Public Proceedings No. 40 of 13 September 1870.

3

Alexander Kyd, Memorandum on Penang, 1 September 1787, Straits Settlements Factory Records, India Office Records IOR/G/34/1; Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century and its Functions in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: Frank Cass, 1977).

4

Patrick Peebles, Plantation Tamils of Ceylon (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2001); Madras Public Proceedings, vol. 832, 12 Dec 1848, Numbers 7-8, Appendix: “Ships Arriving in Prince of Wales Island”, Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai; Kernial Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: some aspects of their immigration and settlement (1786-1957) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 304; Straits Settlements, Reports on Indian Immigration (Singapore and Penang: Government Printer), 1880-1911; Michael Adas, The Burma Delta: economic development and social change on an Asian rice frontier, 1852-1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).

5

Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846-1940,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2004): 155-89; Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951).

6

Joseph Conrad, “The End of the Tether,” in Youth, A Narrative, and Two Other Stories (London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1902), 168.

7

E.A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

8

Arthur Cotton, “On Communication Between India and China by Line of the Burhampooter,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographic Society of London 11, no. 6 (1886-7); John Ogilvy Hay, A Map Shewing the Various Routes Proposed for Connecting China with India and Europe through Burmah and Developing the Trade of Eastern Bengal, Burmah & China (London: Edward Stanford, 1875); Henry Duckworth, New Commercial Route to China (Capt. Sprye’s Proposition) (London: George Philip and Son, 1861); Ifekhar Iqbal, “The Space between the Nation and the Empire: 1905 and Trans-regional Trajectories on Northeastern India, Burma and Southwestern China,” paper presented at Tufts University, December 2010.

9 10

Wrigley, Energy, 242. Sayako Kanda, “Environmental Changes, the Emergence of a Fuel Market, and the Working Conditions of Salt Makers in Bengal, c. 1780-1845,” International Review of Social History 55 (2010): 123-51.

11

The Irrawaddy Flotilla & Burmese Steam Navigation Company, Limited [Promotional leaflet, 1872]; typescript dated 6 May 1940, written by R.J. Wilkinson, Irrawaddy Flotilla Company Manager in Burma and later a Director in Glasgow; Typescript note on the IFC’s “parent company,” enclosed with letter to T. Cormack, 26 January 1937. All files found in: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Papers of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company (uncatalogued), MS79/077, Box 1.

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12

T. Braddell, Colonial Secretary, Straits Settlements to D.F. Carmichael, Acting Chief Secretary to the Government, Fort Saint George, 23 Dec 1874, Madras Public Proceedings, no. 87 of 26 Jan 1875, India Office Records IOR/P/276.

13

Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, appendices 3-4; Michael Adas, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change, 96.

14

Report of the Deck Passenger Committee, 1921, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Government Printer, 1921), 9-10.

15

Derek Walcott, “Another Life,” in Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 76.

16

Sumit K. Mandal, Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), Chapter 2.

17

Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

18

Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

19

Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980); Burton Stein, “Circulation and the Historical Geography of Tamil Country,” Journal of Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (1977): 7-26.

20

Christopher Baker, An Indian Rural Economy 1880-1955: The Tamilnad Countryside (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 19-97.

21

Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in Madras Presidency During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

22

Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Historical Issues of Deindustrialization in Nineteenth-Century South India,” in How India Clothed the World, eds. Giorgio Riello and Thirthankar Roy (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 415-35.

23

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso Books, 2002).

24

William Digby, The Famine Campaign in Southern India (Madras and Bombay Presidencies and Province of Mysore, 1876-1878), vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1878), 112-3.

25

F.A. Weld to the Earl of Kimberley, 5 May 1881, National Archives of India (New Delhi), Department of Revenue and Agriculture, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 10-17, November 1881.

26

Secretary to the Chief Commissioner, British Burma to The Secretary to the Government of India, Rangoon, 3 March 1877: NAI: Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce: Emigration Branch, March 1877, Proceedings 3-4 (“Emigration from Madras to Burma”).

27

David Arnold, “Famine in Peasant Consciousness and Peasant Action: Madras, 1876-8,” in Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. R Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 62-115; S. Ambirajan, “Malthusian Population Theory and Indian Famine Policy in the Nineteenth Century,” Population Studies 30, no. 1 (1976): 5-14.

28

Arnold, “Famine in Peasant Consciousness.”

29

Meyer, “Labour Circulation.”

30

“Agricole,” letter to the Straits Free Press, 9 June 1836, cited in Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 48.

31

Sandhu, Indians in Malaya.

32

Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 79.

33

William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 236; Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Colin Barlow, The Natural Rubber Industry: Its Development, Technology and Economy in Malaysia (Kuala

human traffic: asian migration in the age of steam 281

Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1978); J.H. Drabble, Rubber in Malaya, 1876-1922: The Genesis of an Industry (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1972). 34

Calculated from Straits Settlements, Reports on Indian Immigration (Singapore and Penang), 18801911.

35

Jan Breman, Labour Migration and Rural Transformation in Colonial Asia (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1990); Ravindra K. Jain, South Indians on the Plantation Frontier in Malaya (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).

36

Cited in Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 101-2.

37

Muthammal Palanisamy, Nadu Vittu Nadu [“From Shore to Shore”] (Chennai, 2007).

38

Adas, Burma Delta, 75.

39

Burma Provincial Banking Enquiry (Grantham) Committee, vol. 1 [Report], Banking and Credit in Burma (Rangoon: Government Press, 1930); Report on Settlement Operations in the Syriam Township, Hanthawaddy District, 1880-81 (Rangoon: Government Press, 1882); Report on Settlement Operations in the Hanthawaddy and Pegu Districts (1882-83) (Rangoon: Government Press, 1884); Proceedings of the Government of Burma, Department of Revenue and Agriculture (May 1906), India Office Records IOR/P/7237; see also Adas, Burma Delta and Sean Turnell, Fiery Dragons: Banks, Lenders and Microfinance in Burma (Copenhagen, NIAS Press, 2009).

40

On legal testimony, see Shahid Amin, “Approver’s Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case of Chauri Chaura,” in Subaltern Studies, vol. 5, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 166-202.

41

A.O. Hume (Secretary to the Government of India) to colonial secretary, Singapore, 9 June 1874, National Archives of India, Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 10-13, June 1874; J.D.M. Coghill, Acting Colonial Surgeon, Province Wellesley, to Magistrate of Police and CEO, Province Wellesley, 16 November 1873, National Archives of India, Department of Revenue Agriculture and Commerce, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 10-13, June 1874; Office Memo No. 4223, 4 Dec 1873, from A.E. Anson (Lieutenant-Governor of Penang), National Archives of India, Department of Revenue Agriculture and Commerce, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 10-13, June 1874.

42

Telegram from Government of Madras, 15 January 1872, National Archives of India, Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 12-34, “Emigration from Madras to Penang,” March 1872.

43

H.S. Thomas, Collector of Tanjore to W. Hudleston, Chief Secretary to the Government, Fort St George, dated Vallam, 4 March 1876, Madras Public Proceedings, No. 882 (1876), India Office Records IOR/P/1038.

44

A.O. Hume (Secretary to the Government of India) to Colonial Secretary, Singapore, 9 June 1874, National Archives of India, Department of Revenue Agriculture and Commerce, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 10-13, June 1874.

45

Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008).

46

John S. Hoyland, ed., Gopal Krishna Gokhale: His Life and Speeches (Calcutta: Y.M.C.A. Publishing House, 1933), 176-7.

47

Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery and Indian Indentured Labour in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 167-71.

48

Hoyland, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, 179.

49

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Brij Lal, “Kunti’s Cry: indentured women on Fiji plantations,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 22, no. 1 (1985): 55-71; Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (London: Anthem, 2002).

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50

Cf. Ambikapat Rai, The Indian Coolie in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, 1914).

51

J.D. Samy, “The Indian Coolies in the Federated Malay States: The Perils of Ignorance,” typescript, National Archives of India, Department of Commerce and Industry, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 2-3 (B), July 1914. I have not been able to determine where the above article was published, but file notes indicate that it was indeed published in the English-language press in Malaya.

52

Hugh Tinker, A new system of slavery: the export of Indian labour overseas, 1930-1920 (London: Institute of Race Relations by Oxford University Press, 1974), 288-366.

53

File note by Hardinge, 28 August 1915, National Archives of India, Department of Commerce and Industry, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 56-73 (A), December 1915.

54

David Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

55

From R.G. Watson (Federated Malay States) to Earle of Crewe, Colonial Office, 30 December 1909, National Archives of India, Department of Commerce and Industry, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 3-4, May, 1910; L.H. Clayton (Superintendant of Indian Immigration) to the Federal Secretary, Kuala Lumpur, 16 December 1909, National Archives of India, Department of Commerce and Industry, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 3-4, May 1910; Colonial Office to India Office (Confidential), 11 March 1910, National Archives of India, Department of Commerce and Industry, Emigration Branch, Proceedings 3-4, May 1910.

56

Chief Secretary to the Government of Fort Saint George to the Secretary to the Government of India, Department of Revenue and Agriculture, 19 March 1883, National Archives of India, Department of Revenue and Agriculture, Emigration Branch, Proceeding 24, July 1883.

57

Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005).

CHAPTER 12

The Problem of Transregional Framing in Asian History: Charmed Knowledge Networks and Moral Geographies of “Greater India”1 Marieke Bloembergen

Abstract Since the nineteenth century, today’s South and Southeast Asia have become part of scholarly and popular geographies that define the region as a single, superior, civilization with Hindu-Buddhist spiritual traits and its origins in India. These moral geographies of “Greater India” are still current in universities, museums, textbooks, and popular culture across the world. This chapter explores, for the period from the 1890s to the 1960s, how associational networks of scholars, intellectuals, and “Asian art” collectors, and of theosophists and Buddhist revivalists, linking Indonesia, mainland Asia, and the West helped shape these moral geographies and enabled the inclusion of predominantly Islamic Indonesia. It contributes to recent debates on the role of religion and affections in Orientalism, by starting from sites zooming in on knowledge exchange, and by analyzing object biographies, exploring the changing taxonomies, violence, and limits of cultural understanding as objects travel from their sites of origin to elsewhere in the world. It warns against pitfalls of transnational, “Oceanic” approaches to Asian history that focus on cultural flows – including the idea of Monsoon Asia itself – as these can exaggerate the region’s cultural unity and, in doing so, reify the moral geographies of Greater India that the article interrogates.

Keywords: Greater India; Indonesia; transnational knowledge networks; Asian art; heritage; religion; affections; (post-)colonialism

Let us acknowledge it, let us feel that India is not confined in the Geography of India – and then we shall find our message from our part. India can live and grow by spreading abroad – not the political India, but the ideal India Rabindranath Tagore, 19202

“Monsoon Asia” is only one of many possible ‘transregional’ frameworks to study South and Southeast Asia, that scholars have proposed in the course of the long twentieth century. Academic reasons these proposals may have had, they were and

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are all also political, and have political effects. In his Foreword to Revealing India’s Past (1939), the famous French Sanskritist and expert on Buddhist iconography Alfred Foucher reflected on the trend of “Pacific Ocean” congresses that archaeologists had been organizing in Asia since the late 1920s. He suggested also having “Indian Ocean” congresses, where, he reasoned, scholars could contemplate the remarkable Hindu-Buddhist civilization of Asia. To understand this civilizational puzzle, he argued, one had to recognize that India was the “center” and “cornerstone.”3 The island of Java in the Netherlands Indies was, in that same regard, “only an Indian colony,” as he had explained in a public lecture much earlier.4 Foucher did not seem to care whether local subjects in Java, colonized by the Dutch and forming a majority of Muslims since at least the sixteenth century, would agree with this. Nor would he have imagined the potential violence of this common scholarly habit of his time: treating what today are South Asia and Southeast Asia as a single cultural region. This article analyzes, for the period from the 1890s to the 1960s, the makings and politics of a persistent framework of thinking about Asia, for which Foucher’s ideas are representative: “Greater India”. Both an academic and political concept in Foucher’s time, in this essay I use it to refer to a much larger and more fluent yet palpable set of ideas that people in both Asia and the West project on today’s South and Southeast Asia. This Greater India implies the idea of a spiritual HinduBuddhist civilization that, since ancient times, had spread its wellness from India over a receiving southern region. To its influential believers, it provided the superior standard for understanding culture in what we now call Southeast Asia. In light of the spatial turn and trans-oceanic and transnational approaches to Asian history, which this volume also reflects, it is pertinent to explore the workings and legacies of this way of viewing the region. Over the past three decades, in the context of a widely felt discomfort about state- and empire-centered historiographies and the artificial boundaries of Area Studies, the “Indian Ocean” has once again become a popular frame for historians of South and Southeast Asia, driven by historical and empathic efforts to understand marginalized “local” and diasporic perspectives.5 The present volume’s editors’ choice for the framing ‘Monsoon Asia’ is a comparable outcome of this drive. As the example of Foucher shows, however, the framing of transregional geographies as an analytical tool is not new, but rather is indebted to older colonial scholarship that, as others have pointed out before, was not unproblematic.6 Although inspired by these more recent “Oceanic” and transnational approaches to Asian history, and lauding the initiative of this volume’s editors, to provide a textbook for students to learn from these attempts, this article also warns against their pitfalls as they can reproduce elite-centred essentializing views on the region as a cultural unity and, in doing so, reify ideas of Greater India.

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Greater India thinking has displayed a continuity and worldwide reach that, via academia, museums, and popular culture worldwide, has exercised a lasting influence on how people in Asia and the West view South and Southeast Asia. Ideas of Greater India resonate in the worldwide popularity of Yoga and Ayurveda, perceived as unchanged, wholesome goods from an ancient India. And, as this article highlights, they dominate in archaeological research and study in and on Asia, in “Asian art” collecting, exhibits and marketing, and the category of Asian art itself. The question is how and why such ideas developed in that field, and how they thereby became part and parcel of (epistemic) violence, structuring the way many people across the world think of Asia as an overwhelmingly HinduBuddhist, spiritual, Indianized good. From the Metropolitan Museum in New York to Musée Guimet in Paris and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, well-choreographed exhibitions strategically use light and space to emphasize the spiritual power and inner beauty of Hindu and Buddhist statues, evoking ideas of Greater India. In this way, they obfuscate the violence underlying how objects were collected and depict Southeast Asia as the passive recipient of a superior Indian civilization.7 At the same time, Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, is usually absent from both old and new permanent displays of “art” from the Islamic world, like those in the Louvre in Paris (2012) or the Metropolitan in New York (2015). This parallel and complementary problem of ignoring Indonesian Islam has been observed by other scholars as well, though they have focused on the imagination, collecting, and study of Islam.8 We need to scrutinize why and how this double bias developed and helped create a persistent moral-cum-spatial imagination of “Asia” as a greater Hindu-Buddhist India. This may also help explain the larger question of why we construct ideas about space in moral and civilizational terms? How and why does the reputation of one idea (here Greater India) come to dominate at the expense of others? And how does this affect our relationships with others, whether we live or move inside or outside of that space? In the 1920s and 1930s, the idea of Greater India became most clearly embodied politically in the Greater India Society, founded in Calcutta in 1926. This society was formed by Bengali historians and intellectuals with whom the internationally well-connected Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore associated. It heralded a nationalist vision of a benign, spiritual, Indian civilization having disseminated across Asia in the past, and it propagated the study and revival of that civilization in the present.9 The present chapter’s opening quotation is illustrative for the idealistic, and un-complicating optimism this way of thinking entailed. Telling for a colonial mindset, Tagore wrote these lines inspired by stories he had heard while in the Netherlands about (Hindu) Bali, believing it to be a pure remainder of Indian culture. He did so without ever having met actual Balinese, writing about them to an English intellectual soul mate.

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In a groundbreaking essay, Susan Bayly showed how much this society’s vision of Greater India was inspired by French scholars, in particular one of Foucher’s colleagues, the Sanskritist Sylvain Lévi in Paris, and how it took on explicit political forms in India.10 Most critical studies have explored this problem from an Indiacentered perspective. Here, I will instead follow the perspective of the outsider inside: Indonesia. The question is why and how a predominantly Islamic Indonesia became situated in this Greater India-mindset. To answer this, I explore the roles of sites in Indonesia (ancient religious sites, transforming into heritage sites), their moveable objects, and the affections they stir, as well as the knowledge networks that connect these three categories. I employ a mobile, sites-centered, objects-biographical approach, zooming in on the charmed knowledge networks that objects created, in order to understand how multiple, changing power relations and violence shape knowledge and vice versa.11 Engaging with recent debates on the role of religion in the study of Orientalism,12 I propose that the motif of love, or empathy, and the related concept of “cultural understanding,” and (perceived) affections in knowledge production can help explain the ossifying endurance of ideas of Greater India. I argue, moreover, that the Greater India mindset has plural forms and centers and has had a reach far beyond Calcutta in time and space. To understand the magnitude of its global socio-political impact, we need to explore Greater India thinking beyond Indiacentered perspectives and understand the workings of “transnational” power relations elsewhere, such as those generated by intercolonial and inter-Asian knowledge networks located in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia. In exploring the role of affections in creating such moral geographies I am inspired by the work of literary scholar Leela Gandhi.13 Her Affective Communities (2006) focuses on the politics of friendships between figures that have been marginalized by postcolonial and national histories and that seem to have crossed the divide between colonizers and colonized: the theosophists, vegetarians, and spiritual seekers who traveled between Europe and India during the high tide of imperialism around 1900. Though not taken seriously in national historiographies, these figures were cultural elites who often had financial and political power as well. They were part of the kinds of networks that I focus on here: scholars of Asia, connoisseurs and collectors of “Asian art”, Asia-born nationalist intellectuals and gurus, Buddhist revivalists, theosophists, and other spiritual seekers. They came together in an associational movement of Asian art lovers against the background of a taxonomical shift, starting in the 1910s, toward the appreciation of ancient religious sculpture from Asia as high-brow art. Followers of this movement self-identified as “Friends of Asian Art” or “Friends of Asia.” Gandhi argues that the “affective communities” she discerns could transcend colonial difference and feed into anticolonial critiques.14 In what follows, I build on that insight to argue

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that affective relationships – between these “Friends of Asian Art,” and their love for “art” objects – became both part of anticolonial critiques and supportive of European colonialism. Moreover, they generated blindness toward, or passive tolerance of, the violence of heritage formation within and beyond colonial and postcolonial state borders. All along, these affections fed into India-centered forms of cultural imperialism that ignored Islam or pushed it out of sight.

Local genius: criticizing Indianization theory Intriguingly, despite the enduring legacy of Greater India thinking in museums, popular culture and certain academic worlds, scholarly critiques of the Greater India paradigm, strongly driven by empathy, reach back to the heyday of Greater Indian scholarship. These critiques, however, have been predominantly archaeological and have had little impact beyond that field. Only recently has it started to subtly influence museums of Asian art, and it has triggered some alternative exhibits of Islamic art that include or even focus on Southeast Asia.15 In most older museums, though, curators wishing to show more interactive perspectives on ancient Hindu-Buddhist Asia are hampered by bias in their collections and perhaps by their love for them. From the 1910s, colonial scholars working in the Netherlands Indies, French Indochina, or British Burma and the Malay States began to write critiques of the Greater India paradigm. They did so partly in reaction to their India-oriented Sanskrit teachers, and in the context of a booming study of prehistory in Asia, which resulted in the trendy “Pacific Ocean” congresses mentioned earlier.16 Against “Greater India,” and working with terms like “flows,” “acculturation,” and “adaptation,” they postulated another romantic concept, that of a creative “local genius” which functioned before the Indians arrived.17 Basing their thoughts on research they conducted in the region, and sympathizing with what they deemed “local,” these scholars provided alternative concepts, sources, and methods of research that could contribute to recognition and gauging of the role of local agency in the region’s civilizational history. In that sense, their work influenced the postcolonial generation of scholars, and in postcolonial Indonesia “local genius” became an argument in archaeology and history writing that emphasized the creative nation.18 After World War II and violent recolonization wars, when countries in Asia gained formal independence, criticism against Indianization theory continued in archaeological and historical studies, including in the West.19 In the United States, the new “Area Studies” departments and approaches were developed partly with the help of colonial scholars who had, by today’s standard, unusually long-term research experience in Asia. These new university departments set Southeast Asia

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apart from South Asia, now as separate regions. Against that backdrop, from the early 1960s “Indianization” theory, along with European and colonial state-centered historical writing on the region, met with new forms of criticism. These took the form of a sub-regional focus on “autonomous” history and, in handbooks, on the study of Southeast Asia “in itself.”20 The influential Southeast Asian scholar O. W. Wolters, based at Cornell University, critiqued the idea that “Indianization” had introduced a whole new chapter in the region. Taking stock of pre-Indian, prehistorical, and archaeological research in the region, he preferred to talk about “Hindu” or “religious” influences (rather than “Indian” or “political” ones), which “brought ancient and persistent indigenous beliefs into sharper focus.” Wolters argued that Southeast Asian Kingdoms had developed all along while “localizing” the (Indic) model of a mandala in the form of multiple overlapping mandalas – circles around one king with divine, universal authority.21 And yet, in the postwar period the Greater India perspective continued to dominate the field of the arts of South and Southeast Asia. The Metropolitan Museum in New York, for example, after a huge renovation of its Asian art galleries, reopened in 1960 with an exhibition encapsulating material remains of Southeast Asia entitled “The Sculpture of Greater India.”22 Similarly telling is the opening sentence from a popular academic handbook of 1967, Art of Southeast Asia: “The culture of India has been one of the world’s most powerful civilizing forces […] the members of that circle of civilizations beyond Burma clustered around the Gulf of Siam and the Java Sea virtually owe their very existence to the creative influence of Indian ideas.”23 Still today, despite persistent scholarly criticisms of Greater India views,24 and though some institutions, most notably the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, have produced more nuanced efforts that emphasize reciprocity, we continue to encounter the shining presence of Greater India not only inside most prestigious museums of Asian art or world civilization, but also outside, in influential high-brow media. Thus, to a jubilant reviewer in the New York Review of Books, two blockbuster Metropolitan Museum exhibits: “Buddhism along the Silkroad” (2012-2013) and “Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Southeast Asia” (2014), were proof that “[…] it is now increasingly clear […] India during this period radiated its philosophies, political ideas, and architectural forms out over an entire continent not by conquest but by sheer cultural sophistication.”25 He emphasized that “the cultural flow was overwhelmingly one way,” quoting in affirmation Michael Wood, from Wood’s BBC television series on India, that “history is full of Empires of the Sword, but India alone created an Empire of the Spirit.”26 Nor is it helpful that even some of the scholarship that problematizes Indianization theory still works with conference titles like, “Early Indian Influences in Southeast Asia.”27 If we continue to think of a Hindu-Buddhist India as the

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source of the cultural-political developments of other regions, then concepts such as adoption, adaption, acculturation, localization, and even interaction remain mere ornaments to a shining center, and a shining idea.28 More nuanced scholarly studies critical of Indianization theory will, moreover, do little to enlighten popular culture worldwide, in which Asia still often stands for India, yoga, the Buddha, and spiritualism. Why, we must ask, is it still so hard for curatorial experts, or art historians of the region’s ancient Hindu-Buddhist past and the material sources it left behind to write about Southeast Asia or its sub-regions without starting with India? I think the answer lies in the questions, priorities, and networks of archaeological knowledge production, art collecting, and art marketing, in taxonomic shifts in the appreciation of ancient religious objects from Asia, and thus in love and its potential epistemic violence. By loving, capturing, or moving away an object, we may destroy a unity between the object and its site of origin, and disregard local memories, concerns, and care. This is to enact a form of injustice, because these local concerns matter, whether or not the objects still carry the same meanings as they did for those for whom they were originally made.29 If we want to understand the violent nature, functioning and implications of knowledge production, and the global trade in “Asian” antiquities, implying such love, developing from around 1900, we have to let our historical imagination speak, not through the art displays in the museum, but through the sites of ancient Hindu-Buddhist temples, shrines as well as (Islamic) graveyards in Asia, that delivered objects for them. In what follows I show how various knowledge networks encountering (at) such sites and objects, transformed or destroyed these sites while caring and thereby helped situating Indonesia in moral geographies of Greater India – even if it does not seem so at first sight.

Moveable objects, petrifying love In 1884, in the midst of the ongoing war of conquest waged by the Dutch colonial army in Aceh, on Sumatra in the Netherlands Indies, the French adventurer-geographer Paul Fauque visited an old, and – he apparently presumed – abandoned Islamic graveyard near Kota Raja and took away three fourteenth-century stiles that he thought were wonderfully sculpted. He sent them to France as a gift to the Musée de Trocadéro, the ethnographic museum in Paris recently founded by the Ministry of Public Education, in 1878. In his official report, Fauque described the Islamic funeral practices he had observed in the region and the particularities – date, form, and size – of the stiles, information he must have gotten from local informants. He also provided drawings of the stiles.30 Partly for documentation, he made sure photographs were taken of himself at the graveyard and of the three tombs from

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which he took the stiles. Later, in November 1885, these images were used in a seminar at a session of the French Geographical Society in Paris.31 Accentuating the conventional self-image of the colonial archaeologist as a great discoverer of unknown and neglected ancient civilizations, Fauque provided no information as to the conditions under which he took hold of the Islamic stiles.32 What had impressed him most was not necessarily their function but rather their beauty, or the aesthetic characteristics with which he could identify. He recognized in them a mix of “Hindu and Arab arts,” which he thought exemplified the “high level” of taste among the ancient population living in Aceh during the “invasion of the Muslims” in the Malay archipelago, which he situated in the mid-fourteenth century.33 Thus, a selective aesthetic sensation of a French scholar-adventurer, generating his love for the objects, and his abducting them from their original site, signed the curious fate of three ancient Islamic stiles from Sumatra. The stiles were transferred a number of times between various ethnographic museums in Paris and, on the way, they were elevated from the category of ethnographic artifact to that of religious art. Since 1930, they have been held by the Museum of Asian Art in Paris, Musée Guimet.34 Fauque recognized the objects as unmistakably Islamic, and he noted the Arabic text on the back of one, which his unnamed informant translated as a five-times repetition of “Allah.” As such, the stiles are today the only objects from Indonesia on display in Musée Guimet that we can clearly identify as Islamic.

Figure 12.1: Indonesian section, Musée Guimet, November 2017. A Buddha head attributed to one of Borobudur’s Buddha statues is in the centre. The Islamic stiles from Aceh are visible in the rear, in the left corner. Photograph by Marieke Bloembergen.

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Musée Guimet modernized its permanent exhibition in the 1930s under curator Philip Stern, and like most prestigious museums of Asian art across the world it has ever since employed seductive exhibition techniques to create a modern shrine of ancient remains of Asian Hindu and Buddhist pasts, defined as religious art. The museum was founded in 1889 by the French industrialist and social reformer Émile Guimet (1836-1918), who, before he opened his first museum in his hometown of Lyon in 1876 had traveled to Egypt, Greece, Japan, India, and China.35 Set up originally as a museum of the history of religion for the education of the French people, today it exhibits objects originating from Afghanistan in the west to Japan and Korea in the east. India is presented as the creative source of inspiration, but, in a French touch, the treasures from former French Angkor, in the museum’s central court, form the proud and beating heart of the permanent exhibition. Here, within the framework of “Indianized Buddhist” art from Southeast Asia, the Indonesian section – located between those of Burma and Vietnam – also shows mostly material remains of Indonesia’s pre-Islamic, Hindu-Buddhist past. Most of the objects date from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries. For the visitors’ guidance, the museum’s general introduction to this section presents India as the standard: “Dans la statuaire les apports Indiens sont encore discernible, quoique transfiguré par un art empreint de grâce et du douceur (In the sculptures, the Indian influences are still visible, however transformed by an imprint of grace and softness).36 Again, this narrative and the manner of exhibiting are not unique. The three Islamic stiles from Sumatra seem therefore all the more remarkable, contradicting as they do the contention of this article that, from the 1880s-1960s, what drew the eyes of Orientalists, adventurers, archaeologists, and collectors in Indonesia was Hindu-Buddhist by dedication. The stiles also seem to defy my previous observation that Indonesia, in almost all the world’s prestigious museums of Asian art, ends up represented as a Hindu-Buddhist country. At the same time, due to their “mixed Hindu-Arab style” the Islamic stiles were well-suited to the scholarly diffusionist theorizing on civilizational history that emerged around 1900.37 Like the other Indonesian objects kept in museums of Asian art or of universal civilizations (such as the British Museum), the Islamic stiles were subjected to a dominant interest among scholars and collectors in the external, Indian, civilizational influences in local Asian histories. From around 1910, this interest became pivotal to the inception of a new category of, and theorizing on, “Asian art” and the emergence of the “Friends of Asian Art” movement and market, which I will address below in more depth. Meanwhile, around 1900, Java’s Hindu-Buddhist sites became better known internationally, connecting the networks of scholars, local elites, pilgrims, collectors, and intellectuals from Asia and the West, within a context of rising nationalism, transnational religious revival movements, and multicentered forms of pan-Asianism. These networks, feeding into a new Asian art market that set the standards

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of valuation, helped situate Javanese moveable antiquities, and thereby Java and (Hindu) Bali, in moral geographies of Greater India, albeit with different centers.

Whose Asia is one In June 1899, the eighth-century giant Buddhist shrine Borobudur and the nearby ninth-century Hindu-temple complex of Prambanan in Central Java hosted the French Mission archéologique de l’Indo Chine, founded in Saigon the previous year. This mission was the first of a series of institutional research missions-in-exchange between colonial Java, Indochina, and India. It was prompted by the hypothesis that Indochina’s civilizations, in particular the kingdom of Champa (second-fifteenth centuries), via India, owed much to Java: “son origine, sa religion, et ses arts” (its origin, its religion, and its arts).38 Newer in the field than other European Asiatic Societies, the Mission archéologique was founded for the good of a Greater France and in conscious competition with research taking place in older European colonies in Asia. By the end of 1899, it had changed its name to Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and in 1902 it moved to Hanoi. In its founding charter, the EFEO formulated its aim to study the archaeology and philology of Indochina and “neighboring civilizations” in “l’ensemble des pays d’Éxtrême-Orient” (the cluster of countries of the Far East).39 At the first Orientalist Congress it organized in Asia, in Hanoi in 1902, it legitimized this aim by declaring Asia a “civilizational” unity.40 “The geographic situation of Indochina, the variety of civilizations to be found here, the mingling of races and languages, religions and arts that has taken place here, mark it out as a natural home for all research on East Asia, from India to Malaysia and Japan.”41 This vision of the region as “one” placed French Indo-China at its center. It suited the EFEO’s diffusionist (and then dominant) interest in the origins and flows of ancient Indian civilizational influences in the region, from what was then called “India proper,” in “Further India,” which encompassed today’s Southeast Asia.42 It implied more than just a field of study: it had moral-political implications since it seeded site-based ideas about the differentiated beauty of “Asian civilization,” and hierarchies between its divisions in terms of their origin, diffusion, importation, and deviation and/or (poor) imitation and thus decline. From this perspective, Indologist Louis Finot, the EFEO’s first director, wrote that Panataran temple in East Java represented a stage “plus avancé” and was a prototype for studying temple art of Champa.43 The EFEO’s articulation of the region as a cultural ‘one’ at the congress in Hanoi in 1902 coincided well with competing Asia-based views on the region that considered Asia as a wholesome cultural unity, yet superior to the West – which however

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had other centres. These views reflected nascent anticolonial, pan-Asianist, and nationalist ideals – in which a superior Asian civilization as spiritual, became an argument against, and solution for, the materialist, superficial and warmongering West.44 Ironically, these views were based on the same (Hindu-Buddhist) material remains of the past in Asia, and were partly shaped by, and interacted with, the developing colonial-scholarly ideas on the nature, origin and civilizational influences of Asian culture(s) in Asia.45 In 1903, the Japanese intellectual and artconnoisseur Okakura Tenshin, in his The Ideals of the East, likewise declared “Asia” as “one.” His message was famously received as the dawn of a new age amongst cultural elites in wider Asia.46 Okakura based his ideas of a unity of Asia on the same domain as did the French, but he referred to it as “the great civilizational arts of China and India,” reflecting “the aesthetic values of Buddhism.” Okakura’s Asia, moreover, had different moral centers. Ancient Vedic India played an honorable role as “the motherland” of all Asiatic thought and religion. Through his connections with art collectors and Japan aficionados in Boston, Okakura became an advisor for collectors of “Asian art” in Europe and the United States. In 1904, he was invited to catalogue the collection of Chinese and Japanese paintings of the new and prestigious Boston Museum of Fine Arts (a civil initiative founded in 1876).47 This museum would soon develop a strong interest in “Indian” art as well, within which it included art of Java. Starting in 1917, the year LankanEnglish intellectual and art-critic Ananada K. Coomaraswamy, at the advice of Okakura, became its curator, this museum hosted a set of objects originating from the Netherlands Indies/Indonesia, collected and displayed in Greater India framing.48 In the same inspiration, Okakura would, for a time, become a good friend of another famous thinker, the internationally adored Bengali poet, philosopher, and globetrotter Tagore, Asia’s first Nobel prize winner (in 1913), who briefly associated with the Greater India Society. Like Okakura, Tagore situated the heart of Asian civilization in India. Unlike Okakura, Tagore would, in 1926 and 1927, travel southeast from India to visit Malaysia, Indochina, and the Netherlands Indies, which he recognized as “India beyond its modern political boundaries.” He thereby incorporated this wider region into his idea of Greater India.49 Here, it is as relevant to ponder upon what drove Tagore to the Netherlands Indies in particular. His early expectations about this region were pivotal for his understanding of what the Greater Indian world (should) look like. For, initially, a popular, and romantic imagination of Bali – that is Hindu Bali –, above all made Tagore long to see the archipelago, and further inspired him toward concretizing plans to revive a truthful Greater India. Taking over the romantic colonial attitude of the charmed circles of scholars and lyric artists he met in Europe, he did so without ever having met actual Balinese, writing about them to an English intellectual soul mate.50 During his visit to the Netherlands in 1920, in the framework of one of his

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Figure 12.2: Borobudur, with some of its famous visitors, September 1927. From left to right: the Indian linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji; Rabindranath Tagore; Keesje Bake Timmers (wife of the Dutch indologist Arnold Bake); the Dutch social democrat Sam Koperberg (secretary of the Java Institute); the Indian painter and musician Dhirendra Krishna Deva Varman; the Dutch archaeologist Pieter Vincent Van Stein Callenfels (representing the Netherlands Indies Archaeological Service); and the Indian architect Surendranath Kar. Photograph by Arnold Bake (Leiden University Library, KITLV Collection, Collectie Bake).

European tours, Tagore had been enthused by stories about Bali, and the ‘delightful Balinese people’. Tagore listened to Dutch Bali aficionados who showed him pictures of (and told him about their bungalow in) Bali, viewed Balinese objects in the ethnographic museum of the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam, and eavesdropped on British and Dutch orientalist ideas on Bali as the living remains of ancient HinduJava – put forward, notably, by the head of the ethnographic Museum at the Colonial Institute at the time, J.C. van Eerde.51 Thus, Tagore concluded that “these people, who had their seclusion that saved their simplicity from all hurts of the present day they have, I am sure, kept pure some beauty of truth that belonged to India”.52 This strong impression of Bali triggered Tagore to write to one of his English friends, India-based Christian missionary and social reformer C.F. Andrews, to ponder further on his plans for the international Visva Bharati University he was to develop in Santiniketan – presented as a “Universal family of man, “ where the best of East and West should meet, but clearly Asianist in purpose, as Stolte has shown.53 During his European tour of 1920, when ideas for Visva Bharati’s

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foundation where maturing, Tagore, from Holland, wrote to Andrews (who became a lifelong supporter of Tagore’s plans) about the pure ancient Indian civilizational beauty he presumed to be present in Bali: We must found a special chair in Visva Bharati for the Study of Greater India. We must train teachers by sending them to these places and to China and Japan. The relics of true history of India are outside India. […] The civilisation of India, like the banyan tree, has spread its beneficent shade away from its own birth place. Let us acknowledge it, let us feel that India is not confined in the Geography of India – and then we shall find our message from our part. India can live and grow by spreading abroad – not the political India, but the ideal India. Our Santiniketan is for this mission.54

Tagore may have heralded a relatively more inclusive vision of the character of Asian civilization than Okakura, he emphasized, however, the high value of ancient HinduBuddhist India, not Islamic India, as its unifying force.55 And with that Greater India in mind, in September 1927, the sixty-six-year-old Tagore traveled to Bali, where he was disappointed by the lack of modern comforts, and to Java, where he admired the temples. At Borobodur, as he wrote in his poem of the same title, he was while looking at it, overwhelmed with a deep sense of loss: of Buddha’s gift to the world and thus ancient India’s message of “immeasurable love.”56 In 1928, apparently still overwhelmed by his impressions, Tagore wrote to a friend that his visit to Java and Bali had filled him with the wish to send Indian scholars to that region to study and to help recover these “neglected and forgotten outposts of Indian civilization … for our own enrichment and for the benefit of the inhabitants.”57 And indeed, in the late 1920s some members of the Greater India Society did gather data in Java and published histories that depicted the archipelago as ancient colonies of a wholesome India.58

Orientalist alliances: theosophy, Buddhist revivalism and re-sacralizing sites While Indian, French and Dutch archaeologists, Indologists, arthistorians, architects and intellectuals were trying to gauge the meanings of Hindu-Buddhist temple architecture across the ‘Greater Indian’ region from, they thought, a strictly scholarly vantage point, this didn’t hinder others from taking more clearly spiritual and religious interests in sites that had become the object of archaeological research and restoration works. They were part and parcel of the politics of heritage formation, which involved the development of affective relationships between various actors engaging differently with sites, but from shared interests into “keeping,” leading to what I refer to as “Orientalist alliances”.59 These alliances, of scholarly and spiritual interests, together contributed to the further re-sacralization of sites.60

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Recent scholarly research on the ‘globalizing’ Buddhist revival has pointed to the crucial role of monks like Anagarika Dharmapala in Lanka, of foremen of the international Theosophical Society (founded in New York in 1875, and, from 1883, with its headquarters in India), and of reformist Buddhist King Chulalongkorn, as motors in the Buddhist revival in Asia. This revival was, notably, partly stimulated by, and stimulator of, the archaeological rediscovery of and care for ancient Buddhist sites, which has mainly been studied for the politics of heritage in South Asia.61 At the site of Bodh Gaya in north India, where Buddha is said to have found enlightenment, Dharmapala, partly inspired by the poet and journalist Edwin Arnold’s worries about the state of this temple, started, with his Mahabodhi Society (founded in 1891), a global movement for the revival of Buddhism, and for the maintenance and restoration of Buddhist sites in Asia. All this, next to scholarly interests, stimulated inter-Asian pilgrimages and heritage activism concerning Asia’s ancient Buddhist sites, and, thereby, the articulation of another moral geography that partly overlapped with “Greater India”: that of one larger “Buddhist Asia,” most often referred to as “Theravadan”. Professionalizing “Asian” archaeology and philology, as well as nationalist “Asianist” ideologies, drew on this geographical imagination. It is interesting to see how the site of Borobudur in the course of the nineteenth century, through the convergence of political, scholarly, religious and touristic interests, not only became an object of new local forms of historical awareness, but also became situated in these transnational moral geographies of a Buddhist Asia. Notably, as soon as Borobudur became more accessible – after its rediscovery and uncovering under the British interregnum of Lieutenant General T.S. Raffles in 1814, and especially after its galleries were further cleaned and opened up in the 1830s, it inspired Javanese (Muslim) visitors to ponder upon previously existing Buddhist beliefs in Java.62 By the 1880s Borobudur had further opened up. While transforming into a – gated – heritage site with an entrance, a visitors’ guestbook and the first site guidebooks appearing, it brought together archaeological research, modern forms of ‘site-seeing’ and religious contemplation. Modest forms of more organized tourist trips to Borobudur, with an average of 20 visitors a day, only started in the 1880s. A qualitative study of Borobudur’s guestbook covering the 1880s-1890s reveals that quite some individuals among the tourists and scholars visiting the temple – Christians and expressed atheists – were clearly aware of the Buddhist revival movement that started in Asia, and that had reached out to Europe and the US as well. By that time, the bestseller The light of Asia (1879), by Edwin Arnold, an exalted poem on the life of Buddha, had popularized Buddhism in Europe and the US.63 To some visitors, with awareness of this Buddhist revival, or part of it, seeing and climbing an ancient and magnificent Buddhist site like Borobudur, with its reliefs depicting the lives and previous lives of the Buddha,

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was a deeply moving experience. Such experiences also helped situate Borobudur in a wider moral geography of a “Buddhist Asia,” which overlapped with certain versions of Greater India. In this framework, as I have pointed out elsewhere, we should also appreciate the remarkable theosophical happening at Borobudur, back in the Netherlands Indies, taking place in 1908.64 On 18 April of that year, at the occasion of the first annual congress of the Netherlands Indies section of the Theosophical Society which officially united the local lodges, about 70 theosophists, men and some women, Javanese, Dutch and Chinese, gathered for a solemn contemplation and climb of Borobudur, along its multi-layered galleries. Coincidentally, this happened precisely when Borobodur experienced its first major, state-supported restoration (1908-1910), under the direction of the Dutch engineer Theodor van Erp, who hosted the theosophists in his house on the site. Together they climbed the temple, and with Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia as a guide, read the reliefs depicting Buddha’s life, slowly moving to the highest stupa where they held hands. In the eyes of some Dutch and Javanese participants, this event marked the arrival of a new age of progress through spiritual means, and some expressed a sense of brotherhood and oneness with the higher good. Inspired perhaps by the beauty of the temple and the moment, these expressions were as romantic as they were exclusive, certainly when we take into account the colonial hierarchies, and the racial thinking, that determined the activities of the Theosophical Society – also in the Netherlands Indies. Nonetheless, the Theosophical Society in the Netherlands Indies attracted a remarkable number of Javanese, Chinese and later on also Sumatran and Balinese members, generating engagements with supra-local, spiritual ideas, and a so-called pergerakan kebatinan (a movement for spiritual progress), with longue durée in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia. These, likewise, often took India as origin and standard of an Asian spiritual civilization, thereby contributing to moral geographies of Greater India in Indonesia.65 What this event also shows, is how the international theosophical “moment” of around 1900 and the related Buddhist revivalist activism, had – as elsewhere – a deep impact on the re-sacralization of Hindu-Buddhist sites in the Dutch East Indies. Not only were these sites, with the support of the colonial state, being explored (as we saw by Dutch colonial and foreign archaeologists), restored, and even reconstructed. Since 1913 the Dutch East Indies Archaeological Survey was officially in charge of selection and procedures. In parallel, sites became the objects of local, and international, theosophical and re-invented Buddhist appropriation and rituals. One of these was the celebration of Vesak – in which today, Buddhists all over the world, commemorate the enlightenment and death of the Buddha. Likewise, through inter-Asian, (European) Buddhist revivalist, and the international theosophical society’s mediation, Vesak entered the Netherlands Indies, first, since the

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late 1910s, in theosophical and Chinese Buddhist lodges.66 At Borobudur, Vesak has been celebrated since the late 1920s, with some interruptions, up to the present, incorporating the temple, once again, into international moral geographies of a Buddhist Asia. Meanwhile, like the archaeological sites, museums both in Asia and the West, holding site-related Hindu-Buddhist remains from Asia’s past, while also attracting scholars and pilgrims, likewise transformed into sites of scholarly and spiritual learning, and sacralization.67 This will take us now to Europe and the US, where an apparent need for spiritual salvation for a warmongering world also entered, and shaped, the field of ‘Asian Art’ theorizing and collecting, supporting identifications with Greater India.

Arts of Greater India – a matter of cultural understanding In 1913, a Buddha head from Borobudur was shown at the Buddhist art exhibition of 1913 in Museum Cernuschi, in Paris, founded in 1898 in the mansion of Italian banker and Asian art-collector Henri Cernuschi (1821-1896). There, such religious sculptures became desirable as “distinguished” works of art. As such, this Buddha head changed owners, moving from the famous French art collector Alphonse Kann (1870-1948) to the New York-based Armenian art collector Dikran Kelekian (18661951), who in turn sold it in 1917 to the Metropolitan Museum – for US$3,000.68 In 1918, in the Metropolitan Museum’s Bulletin, a certain “J. B.,” described this new acquisition as proof of “Indian genius”: “It is to native Indian genius that we owe the familiar type of Buddha, the Enlightened One, the type which is so superbly illustrated in addition to our collections of Asiatic art.”69 Borobudur, he said, was a “conspicuous” example of “the masterpieces of Indian art of the classic period.”70 With this kind of connoisseurship, not extraordinary at that time, J. B. identified with a remarkable international movement of art historians, connoisseurs, and collectors who, from the 1910s, came to qualify religious sculpture made in Asia as Indian Art with capital A, of the highest Western standards. They were inspired by new and influential art theories that emphasized the Asian sculptures’ capacity to visualize the divine. Aesthetics-cum-divinity became a powerful motif for evaluating ancient religious sites in Asia, whether they were still in use or not, and carrying away objects from them to museums in Asia and the West. We shall see that a Buddha statue from Borobudur came to play a decisive role in this taxonomic shift, both inside and outside of the museums, which helped place moveable antiquities from Indonesia into moral geographies of Greater India. As Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Parta Mitter have shown, around 1910, a new trend emerged in the theorizing of ancient Hindu and Buddhist sculpture

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with provenance in Asia, conceived as high art. It found fertile ground in Asia and the West alike through the highly influential works pioneered by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Ernest Binfield Havell (1864-1937).71 Havell served as superintendent of the Madras School of Arts (1884-1895) and then at the Government School of Art in Calcutta, before he returned to England in 1906, where he published his most influential works. Coomaraswamy, born of Lankan and English parents, presented his views around 1908 to an international public. Through Okakura, he became the first curator of the new “Indian Section” of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he enjoyed a guru-like status.72 In a pilot study, I explained how the theories of these two intellectuals not only entailed new evaluations of HinduBuddhist antiquities from Asia as expressions of “one” Greater Indian civilization, but also helped to disseminate new, influential exhibition techniques that situated Javanese antiquities more firmly in Greater Indian views on art.73 Most crucial to us here is that both Havell and Coomaraswamy, charmed by the circle around Tagore in Calcutta, placed artistic expressions in Asia under the rubric of Indian art. From this India-centered perspective, both men further argued that Indian art should be appreciated as high art in its own right, and not as a derivative of Greek and Roman standards. The latter view had become commonplace since the late nineteenth-century discovery of Gandharan sculpture, in which Foucher had played such an important role.74 Coomaraswamy, at the Fifteenth International Oriental Congress in Copenhagen in 1908, reasoned that Indian art, with its capacity to conceptualize the divine, was decidedly superior to European forms, where the “gods are but grand and beautiful men.”75 Havell, in his standard work Indian Sculpture and Painting (1908), chose one of the Buddha statues from the north side of Borobudur to make the same argument: “How beautiful it is when the spiritual rather than the physical becomes the type which the artist brings into view.” Though his example was located in Java, Havell concluded that the art was most assuredly “Indian.”76 This same statue from Borobudur (or its photographic representation in Havell’s book) sparked a heated dispute at the Indian Section of the Royal Society of Arts regarding its “artistic quality.” This argument underscores the fate of Hindu-Buddhist antiquities originating from Indonesia in the transforming world of Asian art networks and marketing. The Royal Society’s chair, Bombay-born naturalist Sir George Birdwood (1832-1917), who was a great defender of what was then referred to as Indian “applied arts,” condemned the statue as an “uninspired brazen image.” He added, “A boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as a symbol of passionate purity and serenity of soul.” This qualification, made public in the Royal Society’s journal, incited a manifesto in the Times of 28 February 1910 signed by the prominent painter, art critic, and India aficionado William Rothenstein (1872-1945) and twelve likeminded artist-critics, which sealed the statue’s taxonomic future and prepared the

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foundation of the India Society. To the signers, the Buddha of Borobudur stood for the supreme embodiment of the central religious and divine inspiration of Indian art, which was “one of the great artistic inspirations of the world.”77 Tellingly, neither in the contemporary disputes over the appreciation of Asian art that followed, nor indeed in the critical historiography of this alteration in the evaluation of Hindu-Buddhist material remains – from “malign” to high art – does one encounter anyone questioning the label “Indian.”78 In the context of this inventive moment and the celebration of Greater Indian art, as well as of Asia-based nationalism, from the 1910s onward cultural and economic elites in Asia, Europe, and the United States began to engage with new academic and private associational activities while self-identifying as “Friends of Asian Art” and “Friends of Asia.” Protagonists, amongst them theosophists, proliferated as modern, avant-gardist connoisseurs of art. Others were esteemed academics or self-made experts on ancient Asian languages, archaeology, or cultures. These associations reflected a globally connected, powerful movement of Greater Indian thinking that fed into colonial and intercolonial networks of knowledge. Examples include the India Society, founded by Havell and others in London in 1911; the Vereniging voor Vrienden van Aziatische Kunst (Society of Friends of Asian Arts, VVAK), founded in Amsterdam in 1918 by the publicist of modern art H.F.A. Visser with the support of Rijksmuseum Director F. Schmidt-Degener, and the Association Française des Amis de l’Orient, founded in 1920 at Musée Guimet with Indologist Emile Senart (1847-1928) and Sylvain Lévi as vice-president and secretary, respectively. This era also saw the establishment of new academic institutions directed toward the study of the civilization of “Greater India”: the Instituut Kern in Leiden, founded in 1926 by Sanskritist Jean Philippe Vogel with the support of archaeologist and director of the Netherlands Indies Archaeological Service F.D.K. Bosch, and the Institut de Civilisation Indienne in Paris, founded in 1927 by Sylvain Lévi. Last but not least, back in the Netherlands Indies, a group of Javanese cultural-nationalist elites and Dutch colonial (self-made) scholars of Javanese culture in 1918 founded the Java Instituut in Surakarta. Among the many relevant associations in British India that made efforts to connect with this movement were the Greater India Society and the Indian Society for Oriental Art. The latter published a journal, Rupam (form embodying the highest knowledge present in the Vedas), and was run by the fiercely nationalist, and Greater Indiaoriented art historian C. O. Gangoly.79 These associations shared powerful honorary members. Coomaraswamy is on many of their lists. The Javanese prince Mangkunegara VII, patron and collector of Javanese antiquities, was not only initiator and chair of the Java Instituut but also an honorary member of the India Society. His friend, the Dutch archaeologist Stutterheim (who would become head of the Netherlands Indies’ Archaeological

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Service), promoted the India Society in both the Netherlands Indies and the Netherlands, despite making some ambiguous criticisms of Greater India thinking.80 The India Society, helped by a governing language, endeavored to play a key role in the Friends of Asian Art movement. One of its first publications, in 1912, was Tagore’s own English translation of a portion of his lyrical, Veda-inspired poetic writings in Bengali, “Gitanjali,” with an introduction of the by the then already world famous and influential poet W. B. Yeats.81 One year later this publication brought Tagore the Nobel prize, partly thanks to lobbying by charmed and influential intellectuals and artists he had befriended in Europe. In the 1920s, the India Society hosted and published lectures by international scholarly experts on the wide region of Asia, for which Dutch scholars such as Vogel, Stutterheim, and Visser, the secretary of the Dutch Society of Friends of Asian Arts, were invited as well. They were all asked to discuss the influence of India on the arts of the sub-region of their expertise.82 The India Society’s volume Revealing India’s Past (1939), from which Foucher’s reflections in this article’s introduction were taken, also brought together many internationally admired scholars of the field. What matters here is how these associations, at least those developing in the West, firmly shared a belief that the collection, study, and united display of Asian (read “Indianized”) arts, and contemplation of the civilization in which they could flourish, would benefit the West and the East – it would be good for both empire and Asian nationalist self-esteem. In a 1931 letter to the Times, board members of the India Society used this argument to defend their long-standing (but never realized) plans for a central Museum of Asiatic Art in London: Sir, […] the international value of a Central museum for Asiatic art raises a matter of great importance to the British empire and in fact the world.[…] [T]hroughout Asia & especially in India, art has been the means by which the deepest convictions of humanity have … found expression. The study of art of Asiatic people is as necessary as that of their literature, if we are to understand them and appreciate their present aspirations.83

Foremen of this Friends of Asian Art movement in Europe came to believe that the understanding and appreciation of this (superior) spiritual Oriental “civilization,” perceived as essential to a people or race, and including its spiritual art, was a condition for world peace and reciprocal understanding.84 To achieve these aims, they called for the further study and collecting, and the popularization of the arts and the civilization of Asia, which they defined as spiritual, peaceful, and Indian. They thereby presumed, and identified with, a global as well as Indian nationalist need for Asian (Greater Indian) art museums.85 This imagination became useful again after World War II and the formal independence of the formerly colonized countries in Asia.

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Charmed across decolonization In the 1950s, the newly independent Republic of Indonesia once again became part and parcel of “Art of Greater India” exhibits, supported by Indian Embassies in several places in the world. To all indications, for their curators the categorization remained unproblematic. One such exhibit was held at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1950.86 Organized by the museum’s German curator Henry Trubner, it was introduced by a map of “Greater India,” and displayed loans from private and museum collections in the United States (the majority), Canada, and Europe. Indonesia was represented as “Java,” and exclusively by ancient Buddhist objects from American collections.87 Formed by his studies of Oriental Art at Harvard University, Trubner in his introduction to the catalogue followed Coomaraswamy’s idealist theorizing, explaining how the exhibition’s visitors should appreciate Indian art differently from Western art, as objects made not exclusively to please “aesthetically” but “to satisfy a spiritual need.” Indian art was “not to be judged subjectively on the basis of its outward beauty but primarily […] to be an aid in bringing to life the deity represented, acting as intermediary between the worshipper and the invisible divinity.”88 He thus suggested the possibility of spiritually connecting with this form of art through empathy. This exhibition and its catalogue are enlightening regarding how moral geographies of Greater India can become etched in people’s minds: powerful tools toward this end were the map of Greater India, which framed all objects on display, and the way Trubner defended the initiative: “Today […] sincere efforts are being made to bring about closer relations between the East and the West, it is important that we attain knowledge of India’s great cultural past and realize the tremendous role that country has played in the history of Far Eastern art. The immediate purpose of the exhibition is to bring about an unbiased and true appreciation of Indian art and a deeper understanding of India’s great heritage.”89 So much for the heritage of the other new independent nation-states, the borders of which were obfuscated on the map of Greater India, and whose people were working at home, in parallel, on nation-building through cultural politics. Ironic here is President Soekarno’s December 1953 inauguration of the reconstruction of the Siva temple at Prambanan, a project initiated by the colonial Archaeological Service in the 1920s, as Indonesia’s first national monument. In the country’s National Museum in Jakarta, formerly the museum of the Batavian Society, the Hindu-Buddhist antiquities collected and abducted in the archipelago since colonial times emphatically tell the history, not of India, but of Indonesia.90 Nonetheless, in museums outside of Indonesia, from Los Angeles to Calcutta, Amsterdam to Paris, Hindu-Buddhist temple remains from Java still serve narratives of a Greater India.

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The study and collection of Indonesian antiquities by the seekers central to this article may have been driven by love, inclusiveness, or motives of (spiritual) peace through cultural understanding. But their search also reveals the potential that love has to spawn epistemic violence and appropriation. Fauque, informed by Western theories of civilizational progress, recognized a transformative civilizational moment in the Islamic stiles in Aceh as beauty. The Friends of Asian Art, captivated by Coomaraswamy’s and Havell’s theories, identified the Indian artist’s capacity to visualize the divine in what were, to them, self-familiar images of a meditative man. Through this kind of self-understanding, and through their networks, and by means of text- and object-based interpretations, sales, and exhibitions, the Friends of Asian Art, whether due to Indian nationalist ideals, art-historical connoisseurship, or a longing for world peace, contributed to the global spread of moral geographies of Greater India, with Indonesia situated therein. Multi-sited and varying in form and outlook, these moral geographies entailed exclusion – a steadfast blindness regarding Indonesia’s predominantly Muslim population, which had so many other pasts to identify with beyond those of Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms and mandalas labeled as Indian, Indianized, or Indic. This article warns of the dangers and distortions that transpire from transnational, civilizational-cum-spatial framings of Asia as a homogenized and exclusive field of study. It also alerts us that grounding research and the collection of knowledge, including knowledge of art, in “sympathy” or “affection” will not guarantee truer understandings of “other” people’s cultures, histories, and memories.

Notes 1

A longer – partly differing – version of this article appeared under the title, “The politics of ‘Greater India,’ a moral geography: Moveable antiquities and charmed knowledge networks between Indonesia, India and the West,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 1 (January, 2021): 177-211. I thank Cambridge University Press for granting permission to republish the (revised) essay in this volume. The longer version traced taxonomic shifts in the journeys of several Buddha heads traveling from Borobudur to museums in Europe and the US (not in the present chapter). This essay, instead, dwells a bit longer on Tagore’s perceptions, and adds a paragraph on Theosophical and Buddhist networks, site-resacralization, and the makings of Buddhist moral geographies that compete and partly overlap with those of Greater India.

2

Tagore to C. F. Andrews, 25 Sept. 1920, Santiniketan, Visva-Bharati, Rabindra Bhavan, Correspondence Tagore.

3

Alfred Foucher, “Foreword,” in Revealing India’s Past, ed. John Cumming (London: The India Society, 1939), xiv.

4

Alfred Foucher, “The Greek Origin of the Buddha Image,” in The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology, ed. L. A. Thomas, trans. F. W. Thomas (Paris: Paul Geathner/London: Humphrey Milford, 1917), 115.

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5

For three reviews, see Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 3 (2012): 584-90; Nigel Worden, “Writing the global Indian Ocean: Sailors, slaves, and immigrants; bondage in the Indian Ocean World”, Journal of Global History 12 (2017): 145-154; Michael Laffan, ed., Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Migrations, National Rights (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 1-14. Much consulted, influential studies are Engseng Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes: The View from the other Boat,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 2 (2004): 210-46; Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Engseng Ho, “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies,” Journal of Asian Studies 76, no. 4 (2016): 907-28; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “One Asia or Many? Reflections from Connected History,” Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (2016): 5-43; S. Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006); Prasenjit Duara, “Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for Our Times,” Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 4 (2010): 963-83; Sunil Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014); and, building on the likewise unifying concept “Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” see Sheldon Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300-1300 CE: Transculturation, Vernacularization, and the Question of Ideology,” in Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, ed. Jan E. M. Houben (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 197-247; and Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). See, more recently, among others, Andrea Acri, “Introduction: Esoteric Buddhist Networks along the Maritime Silk Roads, 7th-13th Century AD,” in Esoteric Buddhism in Mediaeval Maritime Asia: Networks of Masters, Texts, Icons, ed. Andrea Acri (Singapore: ISEASYusof Ishak Institute, 2016), 1-25; Nile Green, “The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean,” American Historical Review 123, no. 3 (2018): 846-74; and Kris Alexander, Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

6

Discussed at more length below. Compare, among more recent publications: Craig J. Reynolds, “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 2 (1995): 419-46; Will Hanley, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies,” History Compass 6, no. 5 (2008): 1346-67; Green, “The Waves of Heterotopia,” 874.

7

On the Rijksmuseum’s Asian pavilion, see Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Een klein land dat de wereld bestormt, Het nieuwe Rijksmuseum en het Nederlandse koloniale verleden,” BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 129, no. 1 (2014): 156-69.

8

Finbar Barry Flood, “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (2002): 641-59. On heritage politics regarding Indonesian Islam, see Mirjam Shatanawi, Islam at the Tropenmuseum (Arnhem: LM Publishers, 2015); Chiara Formichi, “Islamic Studies or Asian Studies? Islam in Southeast Asia,” The Muslim World 106 (2016): 696-718; and Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 22-23, 47-60, 276-81.

9

Susan Bayly, “Imaging ‘Greater India’: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 703-44; Susan Bayly, “India’s ‘Empire of Culture’: Sylvain Lévi and the Greater India Society,” in Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935): Etudes indiennes, histoire sociale, eds. L. Bansat-Boudon and R. Lardinois (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006); Carolien Stolte, “Orienting India: Interwar Internationalism in an Asian Inflection, 1917-1937 (PhD diss., Leiden

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University, 2013), 75-118; and Kwa Chong-Guan, “Introduction: Visions of Early Southeast Asia as Greater India,” in Visions of Greater India: An Anthology from the Journal of the Greater India Society (Singapore: Manohar, 2013), xv-xlvii. See also Mark Ravinder Frost, “‘That Great Ocean of Idealism’: Calcutta, the Tagore Circle, and the Idea of Asia, 1900-1920,” in Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural Social and Political Perspectives, eds. Shanti Moorthy and Ashraf Jamal (New York: Routledge, 2010), 251-79; Harald Fischer-Tiné and Carolien Stolte, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905-1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 1 (2012): 56-92. 10

Bayly, “Imaging ‘Greater India’”; Bayly, “India’s ‘Empire of Culture’.”

11

Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Exchange and the Protection of Java’s Antiquities: A Transnational Approach to the Problem of Heritage in Colonial Java,” Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 4 (2013): 1-24; Bloembergen and Eickhoff, The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia; Compare Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 64-92.

12

Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (New York: Routledge, 1999); Roland Lardinois, L’invention de l’Inde: Entre ésotérisme et science (Paris: CNRS, 2007); Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Michael Laffan, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of the Sufi Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Kiri Paramore, ed., Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Alicia Turner, “Pali Scholarship ‘in Its Truest Sense’ in Burma: The Multiple Trajectories in Colonial Deployments of Religion,” Journal of Asian Studies 77, no. 1 (2019): 123-38.

13

Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Compare Alicia Turner, “The Bible, the Bottle, and the Knife: Religion as a Mode for Resisting Colonialism for U Dhammaloka,” Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 1 (2013): 66-77.

14

Gandhi, Affective Communities, 5, 9-10.

15

James Bennett, Crescent Moon: Islamic Art & Civilization in Southeast Asia [exhibition catalogue] Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).

16

Marieke Bloembergen, “Borobudur in ‘the Light of Asia’: Scholars, Pilgrims and Knowledge Networks of Greater India, 1920s-1970s,” In Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Rites, Migrations, Rights, ed. Michael Laffan (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 35-56; J.G. de Casparis, “Historical Writing on Indonesia (Early Period),” in Historians of South East Asia, ed. D.G.E. Hall (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 121-64.

17

H. G. Quaritch Wales, The Making of Greater India: A Study in South-East Asian Culture Change (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1951), 17. Regarding this line of thinking, see F.D.K., Bosch, “A Hypothesis as to the Origin of Indo-Javanese Art,” Rupam 17 (1924): 6-41; F.D.K. Bosch, “Local Genius” en Oud-Javaansche Kunst,” Mededelingen der Koninklijke Academie van Wetenschappen 15, no. 1 (1952): 1-25; Paul Mus, India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa trans. I. W. Mabbett (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University, 1975 [1933]; Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, no 3.); A. J. Bernet Kempers, Cultural Relations between India and Java (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1937; Calcutta University Readership Lectures, 1935); W.F. Stutterheim, Indian Influences in the Lands of the Pacific (Weltevreden: G. Kolff, 1929); W.F. Stutterheim, Indian Influences in OldBalinese Art (London: India Society, 1935); W.F. Stutterheim, “Note on Cultural Relations between South India and Java,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 79 (1939): 157-78; and

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Robert Heine-Geldern, “Prehistoric Research in the Netherlands Indies,” in Science and Scientists in the Netherlands Indies, eds. Pieter Honig and Frans Verdoorn (New York: Board for the Netherlands Indies, Surinam and Curaçao, 1945), 157-178. 18

See “Hasil diskusi arkeologi ‘Local Genius’: Kepribadian budaya dalam bitalitas local,” Kompas [Jakarta], 13 February 1984; Ayatrohaedi et al., Kepribadian Budaya Bangsa (Local Genius) (Jakarta: Pustaka Jaya, 1986).

19

For an extensive review see the longer version of this article: Marieke Bloembergen, “The politics of ‘Greater India’, a moral geography: Moveable antiquities and charmed knowledge networks between Indonesia, India and the West,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 1 (January 2021): 170-211.

20

Harry J. Benda, “The Structure of Southeast Asian History: Some Preliminary Observations,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 3, no. 1 (1962): 103-38; John Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, no. 2 (1961): 73-105.

21

O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1999 [1982]), 21.

22

Aschwin Lippe, “The Sculpture of Greater India,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, February 1960: 177-92.

23

Philip S. Rawson, The Art of Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Java, Bali (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), 7.

24

Paul Wheatley, “Presidential Address: India beyond the Ganges – Desultory Reflections on the Origins of Civilization in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 1 (1982): 13-28; Hermann Kulke, “Indian Colonies, Indianization or Cultural Convergence? Reflections on the Changing Image of India’s Role in South-East Asia,” in Onderzoek in Zuidoost Azië: Agenda’s voor de Jaren Negentig, ed. H. Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost-Azië en Oceanië, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1990), 8-32; Reynolds, “A New Look.”

25

William Dalrymple, “The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms,” New York Review of Books, 21 May 2015. At: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/05/21/great-and-beautiful-lost-kingdoms/ (last accessed 19 July 2020).

26 27

Ibid. Compare Michael Wood, The Story of India (London: BBC Books, 2007), 97. Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Introduction,” in Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, eds. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), xiii.

28

My thanks to Rudolf Mrazek for an inspiring conversation that led me to define this problem in this way (Leiden, 21 Oct. 2019).

29

Compare Davis, Lives of Indian Images. For “local” engagements with Hindu-Buddhist remains in Java, see Pauline Lunsingh-Scheurleer, “Collecting Javanese Antiquities: The Appropriation of a Newly Discovered Hindu-Buddhist Civilization,” in Colonial Collections Revisited, ed. Pieter ter Keurs (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 2007), 71-114; and Bloembergen and Eickhoff, The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia.

30

Paul Fauque, Rapport sur un voyage à Sumatra (Paris: Impr. nationale, 1886), 11; Paul Fauque to Ministre de l’Instruction Publique, 22 Sept. 1884, Archives Nationales de France, F17/2961.

31

The photographs were reproduced by François Marie Alfred Molténi in 1884, and kept, on behalf of the French Geographical Society, at the Bibliothèque nationale française, Collection Molténi, inventory numbers 0530 (Sumatra), 13, “Cimetière Atche,” and 12, “Pierre Tombales.” They are both freely accessible online at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b531365547 (Old stiles at the Islamic graveyard in Aceh), and https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b530000542 (the stiles transformed into “discoveries” of Paul Fauque, who proudly poses next to them).

the problem of transregional framing in asian history 307

32

Compare Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “The Colonial Archaeological Hero Reconsidered: Post-Colonial Perspectives on the ‘Discovery’ of the Prehistoric Past of Indonesia,” in Historiographical Approaches to Past Archaeological Research, eds. Gisela Eberhardt and Fabian Link (Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2015), 133-64; Pierre Labrousse, “Brau de Saint-Pol Lias à Sumatra (1876-1881): Utopies coloniales et figures de l’explorateur,” Archipel 77 (2009): 83-116.

33

Fauque, Rapport sur un voyage, 11-13.

34

Quai Branly, D004174/ 46870, 23 July 1930, Resolution of the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts for an exchange between Musée de l’Homme and Musée Guimet.

35

On Guimet and his museum, see, among others, Keiko Omoto and Francis Macouin, Quand le Japon s’ouvrit au monde (Paris: Gallimard/Réunion des Musées nationaux, 1990); Françoise Chappuis and François Macouin, eds., D’outremer et d’Orient mystique: Les itinéraires d’Émile Guimet (Souilly-laTour: Éditions Findakly, 2001); and Hervé Beaumont, Les aventures d’Émile Guimet: Un industriel voyageur (Paris: Arthaud, 2014).

36

This is based on the author’s several visits to, and consultations of, the permanent display in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2017. For an exhibition in Guimet and its catalogue, and on greater Angkor’s role in the French imagination, see Pierre Baptiste and Theirry Zéphir, eds., Angkor: Naissance d’un mythe; Louis Delaporte et le Cambodge [exhibition catalogue] (Paris: Gallimard/Musée national des Arts asiatiques Guimet, 2013). For Musée Guimet’s collection of objects originating from colonial and postcolonial Indonesia see Albert le Bonheur, La sculpture indonésienne au Musée Guimet: catalogue et étude iconographique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1971). Note: this catalogue does not reference objects that entered the museum after 1968.

37

Daud Ali, “Connected Histories? Regional Historiography and Theories of Cultural Contact between Early South and Southeast Asia,” in Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, eds. R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009), 1-24.

38

Louis Finot, Rapport à M. le Gouverneur Général sur les travaux de la mission archéologique d’Indo-Chine pendant l’année 1899 (Hanoi: EFEO, 1900), 7.

39

Finot, Rapport à M. le Gouverneur Géneral.

40

Catherine Clémentin-Ojha and and Pierre-Yves Manguin, A Century in Asia: The History of the École française d’ Extrême Orient (Singapore: Didier-Millet, 2007), 18; Finot, Rapport à M. le Gouverneurgénéral, 1.

41

From the opening passage of the “Première circulaire du comité d’initiative,” January 1902, translated and quoted in Clémentin-Ojha and Manguin, A Century in Asia, 26.

42

Compare: Clémentin-Ojha and Manguin, A Century in Asia; Pierre Singaravélou, L’École française d’Extrême-Orient ou l’ institution des marges (1898-1956) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 81-83.

43

Finot, Rapport à M. le Gouverneur-général, 7.

44

For an overview, see: Fischer-Tiné and Stolte, “Imagining Asia in Indai”; Frost, “‘That Great Ocean of Idealism’.”

45

Bayly, “Imaging ‘Greater India’”; Stolte, “Orienting India.”

46

Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (London: John Murray, 1903).

47

Tapate Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850-1920 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 166-69; Duara, “Asia Redux.”

48

The first registered acquisition was by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, inventory number 19171014: Durga as mahismardini, a 1917 donation by Bostonian art historian and art collector Denman Waldo Ross (1853-1935), a wealthy trustee of the museum. This object had been on loan to the museum, from Waldo Ross, since 1913.

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49

Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Save Borobudur! The Moral Dynamics of Heritage Formation in Indonesia across Orders and Borders,” in Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission: From Decay to Recovery, ed. Michael Falser (Cham: Springer, 2015), 96-97.

50

Rabindranath Tagore, writing from the Netherlands, to C.F. Andrews, 25-9-1920. Santiniketan, Visva Bharati, Rabindra Bhavan, Correspondence Tagore.

51

J.C. van Eerde, “Hindu-Javaansche en Balische eeredienst,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië 65, no. 1 (1911): 1-39.

52

Tagore to C.F. Andrews, writing from Holland, 25-9-1920, Santiniketan, Visva Bharati, Rabindra Bhavan, Correspondence Tagore.

53

Stolte, “Orienting India,” 83.

54

Tagore to C.F. Andrews, from Holland, 25-9-1920, Santiniketan, Visva Bharati, Rabindra Bhavan, Correspondence Tagore. Note that this letter is on display in one of the first museum halls in the Visva Bharati Museum in Santiniketan (visit of the author to the museum in February 2018).

55

Compare Stolte, “Orienting India,” 81, who points to Tagore’s openness to an experience of Asian kinship and cultural affinity during his journey to Iraq and P `ersia in 1932.

56

Rabindranath Tagore, “Boro-Budur,” in English Writings of Tagore: Poems (vol. 2), compiled by Mohit Kumar Ray (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2007 [1927]), 314-15. On this, see Bloembergen and Eickhoff, The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia, 239-42; and Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Save Borobudur!”, 96-97.

57

R. Tagore, 16 Sept. 1928 [probably to T. K. Birla], Santiniketan, Visva-Bharati, Rabindra Bhavan, Correspondence Tagore, “Java-tour,” 179, 1.

58

Bloembergen, “Borobudur in ‘the Light of Asia’.”

59

Compare Gandhi, Affective Communities; Turner, “the Bible, the Bottle, and the Knife.”

60

Compare (on Siam’s King Chulalongkorn’s pilgrimage to Borobudur in 1896) Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Exchange and the Protection of Java’s Antiquities”; (on Bodh Gaya) Geary 2014 and 2017.

61

Amongst others: Upinder Singh, “Exile and return: The reinvention of Buddhism and Buddhist sites in Modern India,” Journal of South Asian Studies, 26, no. 2 (2010): 193-217; Geary 2014, 2017; Sraman Mukherjee, “Relics, ruins and temple building: Archaeological heritage and the construction of the Dharmarajika Vihara, Calcutta,” in Buddhism in Asia: Revival and reinvention, eds. Nayanjot Lahiri and Upinder Singh (Singapore: ISEAS, 2016), 147-190.

62

For elaborations on the transformation and nineteenth-century receptions of Borobudur summarized in this paragraph, see Bloembergen and Eickhoff, The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia, chapters 1 and 2. See also Soekmono, “Serat Centhini and the Rejected Buddha from the Main Stupa of Borobudur,” in Fruits of Inspiration: Studies in Honour of Prof. J. G. de Casparis, eds. Marijke J. Klokke and Karel R. van Kooij (Groningen: Forsten, 2001), 325.

63

On Buddhism in Europe and America: Philip Almond, The British discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Rick Fields, How the swans came to the lake: a narrative history of Buddhism in America, 3rd ed. (Boston and London: Sambbhala, 1992); Martin Bauman, “Global Buddhism: Developmental periods, regional histories, and a new analytical perspective,” Journal of Global Buddhism 2 (2001): 1-43; Alicia Turner, Laurence Cox and Brian Bocking, The Irish Buddhist: The forgotten monk who faced down the British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

64

More extensively on this gathering, and Netherlands-Indies theosophical connections in the Greater India networks: Bloembergen, “Borobudur in ‘the Light of Asia’”; Marieke Bloembergen, “New spiritual movements, scholars, and ‘Greater India’ in Indonesia,” in Modern times in Southeast Asia, eds. Susie Protschky and Tom van den Berge (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 57-86. Compare Martin Ramstedt, “Colonial Encounters between India and Indonesia,” South Asian History and Culture 2, no. 4 (2011): 522-39. For (national) histories of the Theosophical Society in Indonesia, restricted to colonial times: Herman A.O. Tollenaere, The politics of divine wisdom: theosophy and labour,

the problem of transregional framing in asian history 309

national and women’s movement in Indonesia and South Asia, 1875-1947 (Nijmegen: Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1996; PhD diss.); Iskander P. Nugraha, Teosofi, nationalisme & elite modern Indonesia (Depok: Komunitas Bambu, 2011). 65

On the Greater India dimensions of the pergerakan kebatinan see Bloembergen, “New spiritual movements.”

66

Bloembergen, “Borobudur in ‘the Light of Asia’”; Yulianti, “The making of Buddhism in modern Indonesia: South and Southeast Asian networks and agencies, 1900-1950” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2020); Ramstedt, “Colonial encounters between India and Indonesia”; Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Save Borobudur!”; Compare, for Sri Lanka, Anne Blackburn, “Ceylonese Buddhism in colonial Singapore: new rituals and specialists, 1895-1935,” (Singapore: Asia Research Institute, University of Singapore, 2012; ARI Working Paper 184).

67

Stanley K. Abe, “Inside the Wonderhouse: Buddhist Art and the West,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 63-106; Bloembergen, “Borobudur in ‘the Light of Asia’.”

68

Assistant director of the committee of purchases, to Kelekian, 4 Dec. 1917, Metropolitan Museum Archives, inventory Scu 480 – Sculpture-Purchased – Far East-Javanese – Dikran Kelekian 1917.

69

J. B., “A Buddha Head from Java,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 8 (1918): 22.

70

J. B. “A Buddha Head from Java.” For a more extensive discussion of several Buddha heads from Borobudur, carried away, and traveling across changing valuations and taxonomies to private collections and museums of Asian Art in Europe and the US, see Bloembergen, “The politics of ‘Greater India’,” 182-191.

71

Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1977]); Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1855-1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 8; Tapate Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art, 146-84; Kathleen Taylor, Sir John Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal: ‘An Indian Soul in a European Body?’ (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001), 61-77.

72

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Influence of Greek on Indian Art (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908).

73

Bloembergen, “Borobudur in ‘the Light of Asia’,” 40-41.

74

Abe, “Inside the Wonderhouse”; Alfred Foucher, “Buddhist Art in Java,” in The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology, ed. L.A. Thomas, trans. F.W. Thomas (Paris: Paul Geathner/London: Humphrey Milford, 2017), 205-71.

75

Coomaraswamy, The Influence of Greek on Indian Art, 2-3.

76

Ernest Binfield Havell, Indian Sculpture and Painting: Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces with an Explanation of Their Motives and Ideals (London: John Murray, 1908), 24-26.

77

Bloembergen, “Borobudur in ‘the Light of Asia’,” 41. Tapate Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art, 164-67; Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 269-71.

78

Bloembergen, “Borobudur in ‘the Light of Asia’,” 41.

79

See for example O.C. Gangoly, “The Origin of Indo-Javanese Art,” Rupam 17 (1924): 54-57; O.C. Gangoly, The Art of Java (Calcutta: A. N. Gangoly, 1967).

80

For an analysis of Stutterheim’s ambiguous engagements with Greater India thinking, see ibid., 45-49.

81

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (London: India Society, 1912).

82

For a selection, see Josef Strzygowski et al., The Influences of Indian Art: Six Papers for the Society (London: India Society, 1925). The lectures were widely reported in the British and British Indian Press, and in newspapers elsewhere in Europe, depending on the country of origin of the invited scholar-speaker. See British Library, European Manuscripts F 147/104 and 105, India Society

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Papers, Newspaper cuttings concerning India Society, from 1922. The lectures by Vogel (1925) and Stutterheim (1929 and 1935) were also published separately. See Jean Philippe Vogel, The Relation between the Art of India and Java (London: The India Society, 1925) and Stutterheim, Indian Influences in the Lands of the Pacific and Indian Influences in Old-Balinese Art. 83

“Letter to the Editors of the Times,” signed by John Zetland and Francis Younghusband, draft, before Feb. 1931, British Library, European Manuscripts F147/72, India Society papers, Museum of Asiatic Art, Feb. 1930-Feb. 1931.

84

Compare Sarah Victoria Turner on the “Aspects of Indian Art” exhibition held at the Warburg Institute in London in 1940: “‘Alive and Significant’: ‘Aspects of Indian Art’, Stella Kramrisch and Dora Gordine in South Kensington, c. 1940,” Wasafiri 27, no. 2 (2012): 42. Warburg Institute Director Fritz Saxl framed it with comparably worded high aims of “deeper understanding of the life and thoughts of another race” (quoted from “Photographic Exhibition of Indian Art,” Indian Art and Letters 14, no. 2, 1940: 116).

85

O.C. Gangoly, “A New Museum of Indian Art at Benares,” Indian Art and Letters, new series, 5, no. 1 (1931): 9-13; John de la Valette, “The Encouragement of Art and Archaeology in the Indian States,” Indian Art and Letters, new series, 5, no. 1 (1931): 111-27; Ajit Ghose, “The Need for Museums of Art in India,” Indian Art and Letters, new series, 5, no. 1 (1931): 140-45; H.F.E. Visser, “A Museum of Asiatic Art in Amsterdam,” Indian Art and Letters, new series, 5, no. 1 (1931): 146-47. For more contemporary discussions of the plans for a Museum of Asiatic Art in London in the India Society’s journal Indian Art and Letters, see “Discussion on the Formation of an Oriental Museum in London,” Indian Art and Letters, new series, 5, no. 1 (1931): 40-59; and “Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries, Extracts. 1931,” Indian Art and Letters, new series, 5, no. 1 (1931): 60-64.

86

Henry Trubner, The Art of Greater India, 3000 B.C.-1800 A.D.: An exhibition of Indian Art presented under the patronage of the Embassy of India functioning for the Government of India (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1950); Sherman E. Lee, review of The Art of Greater India, 3000 B.C.-1800 A.D., Artibus Asiae 13 (1950): 119-21. See also Henry Trubner, “The Art of Greater India, 1950,” Bulletin VVAK, new series, 29 (1950): 28-29.

87

Trubner, The Art of Greater India, 107-8.

88

Ibid., xi-xii.

89

Ibid., v.

90

Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Conserving the Past, Mobilizing the Indonesian Future: Archaeological Sites, Regime Change and Heritage Politics in Indonesia in the 1950s,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 167, no. 4 (2011): 405-36; Bloembergen and Eickhoff, The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia.

CHAPTER 13

Pragmatic Asianism: International Socialists in South and Southeast Asia Carolien Stolte

Abstract This chapter looks at the “pragmatic Asianism” of the Asian Socialist Conference (1953-56). Though a short-lived organization, it forms an enlightening prism through which to view the recalibration of South and Southeast Asian regionalism during decolonization and the early Cold War. The organization sought to unite Asian socialists and their respective parties, to support and strengthen the presence of socialist parties in both decolonized and decolonizing Asia, and to link Asian socialists to global socialist platforms. The organization was headquartered in Rangoon and led primarily by socialists from India, Burma and Indonesia. It was precisely the ASC’s refusal to commit to either power bloc that enabled it to formulate a regionally articulated form of solidarity.

Keywords: internationalism; anticolonialism; democratic socialism; Cold War

“The Imperial States, ruling over a large number of Crown Colonies, several of which are vast, have not done much to discharge their responsibilities towards the workings living in them.” In the Spring of 1929, veteran Indian trade union leader Narayan Malhar Joshi (1879-1955) may well have sounded somewhat exasperated while attempting to explain to a largely European audience in Geneva why the slow and rather lukewarm acceptance of Asian labour leaders into international organizations was dangerous. He continued: “It is futile to argue that the translation of ideals into actuality is a slow process. The slowness of evolution makes revolution attractive. The workers of Asia and Africa will not wait for many decades to achieve what the Europeans may have achieved in a century […].”1 The implication of Joshi’s words was that if the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva did not start being more receptive to the voices of Asian representatives, Moscow was waiting in the wings. Attempts to give voice to the workers of Asia as a collective, or at least to those trade union leaders who claimed to represent them, dated back to the early 1920s. During the interwar years, this resulted in initiatives to increase Asian membership of ILO, Asian representation in bodies such as the International Federation of

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Trade Unions (IFTU), and even a short-lived “Asiatic Labour Congress” (1934-1937).2 From their earliest beginnings, these attempts had explicit Asianist underpinnings, seeking to unite Asia around issues that were seen as specific to the region, and requiring regional solutions. A shared history of colonial rule and resulting underdevelopment were considered the root cause of many of these problems, which caused these projects to be marked by strong anti-imperialist rhetoric. When the first session of the Asiatic Labour Congress was convened in Colombo in 1934, the editorial of the Bombay Chronicle read: “till now all international labour alliances and combinations originated from the West. Renascent Asia is now making her experimental efforts in this direction and that is why I consider that this Congress sets up a new landmark in Asiatic history.”3 The Bombay Chronicle’s editor, Syed Abdullah Brelvi, applauded a conference specifically organized around issues pertaining to Asian labor. Under his editorship, the newspaper regularly covered trade union issues, and he felt strongly that the anticolonial struggle could not be successful without the inclusion of workers.4 The trade union leaders who had convened the conference shared this view: they believed in socialism and believed that decolonization was a prerequisite for the amelioration of workers’ circumstances, but they rejected communism as the path forward. They called for direct Asian representation at international bodies such as the ILO and the International Federation of Trade Unions, but did not campaign for orientation towards the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU). They self-identified as “moderates” and “socialists” in contradistinction to “revolutionaries” and “communists,” but were uncompromising on the issue of immediate decolonization: “this Congress records its definite opinion that the grant of political freedom and right of self-determination to such of the countries in Asia as are under foreign domination is essential in the interest of international understanding and world peace.”5 Given the centrality of this anti-imperialist orientation, it is no surprise that studies of this socialist articulation of Asianism have rooted it deeply in the context of the anti-colonial internationalism of the interwar years.6 Few studies, therefore, look beyond the political independence of the nations of its main proponents. This is exacerbated by the fact that for large parts of South and Southeast Asia, decolonization coincided with the postwar overhaul of international institutional life, in which international bodies were created or reconfigured along Cold War lines. Viewed from many places in the world, international socialism transformed itself after the war, and its current iteration developed after 1945. Viewed from South and Southeast Asia, however, such a view overlooks the fact that the key component of the movement’s anti-imperialism was, and continued to be, international solidarity. As the proceedings of many Asian postwar conferences bear out, including those of the famous Bandung Conference of 1955, national independence

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was never the endpoint to anti-colonial internationalism.7 Rather, independence created a responsibility to fight for those who had yet to obtain theirs, and to work collectively towards a more just world order. This chapter looks at the Cold War continuities of this form of Asianism, particularly in the shape of the Asian Socialist Conference (ASC). The Asian Socialist Conference was a short-lived organization, but forms an enlightening prism through which to view the recalibration of South and Southeast Asian regionalism during decolonization and the early Cold War. It sought to unite Asian socialists and their respective parties, to support and strengthen the presence of socialist parties in both decolonized and decolonizing Asia, and to link Asian socialists to global platforms such as the Socialist International and the International Union of Socialist Youth. The organization was headquartered in Rangoon and led primarily by socialists from India, Burma and Indonesia, though almost two hundred socialists from ten countries attended its opening conference.8 Each of the ASC leaders had considerable experience in prewar international anti-imperialist mobilization across South and Southeast Asia, resulting in an articulation of socialist Asianism that was unique to the region. The organization’s success in becoming the Asian interlocutors of multiple international bodies brought this unique form of Asianism onto a global stage. In this way, the ASC shows how connections within the South and Southeast Asian region helped shape a regionalism that was markedly different from the Asian solidarity and peace movements that emerged around the same time, as well as different from the non-aligned regionalism of the Bandung powers.9 This ASC should be considered a continuation of the “Labour Asianism” of the interwar period in several ways. It believed that Asian socialists needed to speak with a single voice in order to be heard globally. They saw fellow socialists as their main international interlocutors, and believed that socialist internationalism was the best way to build an anti-colonial consensus and achieve strong and durable national and international governance. Like the Asiatic Labour Congress of the interwar years, this form of Asianism was a pragmatic alliance in the quest for decolonization and full-fledged representation in hitherto Western-dominated institutions. The shared experience of imperialism, postwar decolonization and the transition to parliamentary democracy, provided unity to the movement. The resulting alliance was used to support those in the region still fighting for independence, particularly British Malaya and French Indo-China. However, this was not an Asianism held together by a clearly articulated map of Asia (real or imagined), or the attribution of key cultural characteristics to the region. Rather, it was held together by an idea of how the countries of Asia should be governed: it intended to create a form of socialism calibrated specifically to postcolonial Asia, but capable of speaking to socialists worldwide.

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Asian socialism, socialist Asianism? In furthering postcolonial transitions to democratic socialism across South and Southeast Asia and projecting an “Asian voice” onto international socialism, arguments of Asian solidarity were an effective rhetorical device.10 In casting the propagation of Asian solidarity and the collaboration between Asian socialists as “Asianism,” this chapter uses the recent definition proposed by Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski. In their view, Asianism includes not only discursive constructs of Asia, but encompasses all its related political, cultural, and social practices.11 This is a departure from understandings of Asianism as primarily ascribing cultural, religious, and other markers to Asia.12 It also is a definition with strong roots in the Indian Asianism of the interwar years: N.C. Banerji likewise used a definition of Asianism which made room for more prosaic alignments, created to further common Asian interest.13 Such more practical expressions of Asianism had been tried and tested in the interwar years, particularly in trade union circles. Both the RILU and the IFTU had used an Asianist frame to court national trade union organizations in Asia. Those national federations themselves, meanwhile, hotly debated their Asian affiliations even in the midst of large-scale strikes and other forms of direct action. At first glance this is counter-intuitive – why would the All-India Trade Union Congress, for instance, fracture over the issue of Asian affiliations during a time of local crisis? In the year of the split, more than 530 thousand workers were involved in strikes, despite increasingly violent responses from the colonial government.14 However, the minutes of the Congress sessions reflect that local and international action were not seen as mutually exclusive or even as dissimilar: just like one union does not make an effective strike, so one national organization from the colonies could not change the global economic order. The condition of Asian workers would only be addressed internationally if there were a strong voice that could claim to speak for a large part of Asia. The Cold War successors of the IFTU and the RILU, the Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the Soviet-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions, raised the same question of which international platform would best address the concerns of the decolonizing world. Labour activists themselves, meanwhile, deftly navigated the waters of the Cold War and quickly learned to use bloc attempts to affiliate the decolonizing world not as constraints, but as opportunities to gain contacts and exchange strategies within their own regions.15 For Asian socialists, however, this constellation resulted in a near-impossible balancing act between the twin priorities of anticolonialism and anti-communism. The members of the Asian Socialist Conference, representing national parties that identified as socialist and including many labour activists in their ranks, were dismayed to find that their preferred international interlocutors at the Socialist International dragged their

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feet on the issue of anticolonialism. At the same time, as Talbot Imlay has shown, its strong connections to the Socialist International effectively “aligned” the ASC.16 The organization’s headquarters and its most active members all hailed from countries whose leaders would soon be the driving force behind the Bandung Conference, and who were already discussing the idea of a third bloc.17 This caused tension, both real and discursive, with the socialist ideal of a “Third Force,” a peaceful route through the Cold War by mitigating the excesses of both capitalism and communism.18 As is shown below, this was exacerbated by the fact that some of the ASC’s leading members preferred to be fully independentof the Socialist International, precisely because it was not all that receptive to the ASC’s core commitment of full and immediate decolonization.19 This too was a discussion point with deep roots in the interwar years and a long afterlife in the Cold War: what was “Asian” about Asian socialism, and how was it distinct from its counterparts? In November 1952, some six weeks before the first international Asian Socialist Conference was to open, the Indian and Burmese leaders of the ASC clarified their positions on Asian socialism and the idea of a third bloc. Rammonhar Lohia, a veteran of interwar anti-imperialism and co-founder of the Congress Socialist Party in 1936, vehemently argued that the idea of a universal socialism existed in theory but not in practice, and looked good only from Europe.20 “Theirs is a gradual and constitutional socialism. Asian socialism cannot afford to be that. The whole Asian situation is such that its application must be drastic – whether in agricultural or industrial processes or in the process of nationalization. Capitalism is incapable of achieving economic reconstruction because of private capital. Any socialist in Asia has got to accept the fact that the present situation is one of gross economic poverty, and that at the same time attempts are being made by the communist parties and the like.”21

U Kyaw Nyein, the Burmese socialist leader who was soon to become Burma’s Deputy Prime Minister for the second time, argued that an Asian socialist bloc could have a crucial reverse impact on the Cold War.22 His exploration of its possibilities was strictly South and Southeast Asian and comprised India, Burma, Indonesia, Siam, and the Philippines. If they were to join forces, “even though we are not economically or militarily strong, we can create world opinion first in Asia and then in the whole world, so as to prevent this war for some time to come”.23 Indian Praja Socialist Party (PSP) leader Madhav Gokhale, finally, reflected on the relationship of Asian socialism to the Socialist International in no uncertain terms: “[Morgan Philips] argues that the Asian socialist parties present a problem to the Socialist International. I should like to put it the other way around. The Socialist International is a problem to Asia. The attitude of many of the European socialists is governed by the assumption that if [they] solve their own problems first, the rest will follow […] to this my reply is no.

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You cannot remain in your own little world.”24 He went on to imply that under these circumstances, the actual representation of an Asian socialist on the board of the SI was a red herring: “Keeping a fitful seat here and there is no solution.”25 But it was precisely these types of statements that caused former diplomat and contemporary observer of Asian regionalism G.H. Jansen to lament that “the noisy hectoring of the solidarity movement and the apologetic mumblings of the socialists produced no more practical results” and that this form of regionalism was “perhaps more vital and alive in the realm of emotion and ideals and aspiration than in the field of practical politics”.26 All the reports of ASC meetings confirm that the “emotions and ideals and aspirations,” especially with regard to Asian independence from colonialism and Cold War interventions, could indeed count on group consensus, but concrete proposals, such as a mutual assistance pact for South and Southeast Asia, could not. But this does not mean that the socialist Asianism of the ASC did not possess concrete viewpoints that set it apart from those of the SI. Lohia: “Every Asian State and every Socialist Party would work for the recognition of Red China for its reinstatement in the United Nations. I don’t have to give the reasons. It is certainly obvious to all our comrades. Otherwise the place of Asia is in danger. But let us not, in any case, deceive ourselves into thinking that Red China belongs to this group […]”,27 “This group,” in other words, was marked by an Asian socialism that differed from international socialism, and a socialist Asianism calibrated for formerly colonized and currently unaligned Asia: the South and Southeast Asian members of the ASC. The real “pragmatic Asianism” of the Asian Socialist Conference, however, existed in practice. Its Asianism existed in the travel of the members and their writings. This was especially apparent in the ASC’s Anti-Colonial Bureau, which was founded in May 1954, a year after the first international conference was held. The Anti-Colonial Bureau was co-led by Jim Markham, a Ghanaian journalist who worked closely with the Rangoon-based headquarters and who almost single-handedly ensured that reporting on anti-imperialism and decolonization in the Bureau’s Newsletter struck a balance between Africa and the South and Southeast Asian region, reinforcing the Asian Socialism’s commitment to full decolonization.28 It was in the Anti-Colonial Bureau that the differences between the course of the Socialist International, and the specificities of the socialist Asianism practiced by the ASC, are brought into view.

Asianism in action: the ASC in South and Southeast Asia The first conference was heralded as an event of significance by the Western press, who considered it an opportunity to steer Asian socialists away from communism. Tillman Durdin, The New York Times’ longtime Asia correspondent, hoped that the conference would result in a ‘permanent organization of Asian socialists linked

pragmatic asianism: international socialists in south and southeast asia  317

with the West’s Socialist International’ – even if, by the close of the conference, his newspaper had become somewhat resentful of the gathering’s more explicit anti-Western critiques and their hesitation to officially affiliate to the SI.29 The Asian press, by contrast, considered it an international platform to press for decolonization. After the Asian Socialists ceased meeting in the 1960s, however, the organization languished in obscurity and has only recently received a new historiographical impetus by its inclusion in the story of the larger world of Cold War-era Afro-Asianism.30 This recent work allows for a view of the ASC as part of a larger set of international engagements in the decolonizing world. It also helps to center the ASC’s own priorities of developing a stable Asian democratic socialist movement and achieving full decolonization, rather than defining it only by its relationship to the Socialist International. For the preparatory meetings of the first international conference of the ASC, the socialists from India, Burma and Indonesia were joined by observers from both wings of the Social Democratic Party of Japan. U Kyaw Nyein welcomed the conference with a speech in which he recalled the elements that bound the countries in attendance: “the bonds of common suffering which we have experienced in our struggle for freedom against the colonial powers […] we Asian Socialist Parties have to fight against poverty and famine left in the trail of the war on the one hand, and vested interests and reactionary forces like feudalism, landlordism, etc., on the other.”31 At the first conference, likewise held in Rangoon in January 1953, the Pakistan Socialist Party and the Pan-Malayan Labour Party, joined by socialist politician Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala as an observer from the Nepali Congress, further filled in the South and Southeast Asian map. This, however, was not an automatic extension of a regional consensus: Koirala came out vocally in support of a third bloc, which the delegate from Pakistan, Pakistan Socialist Party leader Mobarak Sagher, could not.32 By the second international conference, held in Bombay in November 1956, it had become clear that the ASC had become primarily a vehicle for contact and cooperation between socialists from South and Southeast Asia.33 The Vietnam Socialist Party, the Sri Lankan Freedom Party and the Nepali Congress officially joined the organization, and the reunification of Vietnam was high on the agenda. Aside from these newcomers, the Bombay Conference was largely a reunion of the first Rangoon conference, and even some of the observers were second-time attendees. However, too great a focus on the well-documented official conferences of the Asian Socialist Conference skews both its Asian engagements and the conference’s achievements. At first glance, the ASC organized only two international conferences and was disbanded after 1961, and has therefore been dismissed for its lack of tangible results. However, the Bureau met regularly in various configurations in different places – although of the core group’s home countries, Indonesia was

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Figure 13.1: U Kyaw Nyein addresses a mass rally in Rangoon on the ASC’s Dependent Peoples’ Freedom Day, 30 October 1954. Collection of the International Institute of Social History (IISH), BG B5/347.

not among them as they objected to the presence of an Israeli delegate.34 The ASC’s Indonesian secretary Wijono did travel to Stockholm to represent the ASC at the congress of the Socialist International in July 1953, along with Burmese Information Minister U Tun Win, Indian PSP Secretary Prem Bhasin, and Indonesian socialist and later secretary of the Partai Sosialis Indonesia Sitorus.35 Wijono drove the differences between the SI and the ASC home by motioning to commemorate Dependent Peoples’ freedom Day, a motion which was promptly dismissed by the SI. As Wijono later wryly noted: ‘It seemed that the European parties which preponderate in the International were obsessed with the fear of Russian Communist aggression and they were not giving serious thought to the problems in which we Socialists of Asia are chiefly interested such as the question of Freedom of Subject Peoples and Peace Settlement in Asia.”36 Closer to home, the ASC hosted socialist thinkers from across South and Southeast Asia in its headquarters in Rangoon. In 1956, for instance, they invited three socialists from the Jammu-Kashmir Mazdoor Conference, M.A. Hider, Abdus Salam Yalu and A.A. Nizami to consult on the Kashmir problem; invited the Pakistani Socialist Party to

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join the discussion; and hosted Indonesian socialists Yunus and Zauneon for a discussion on “general Asian problems”.37 From Rangoon, fact-finding missions were sent to South Vietnam and Malaya in, as well as to Ceylon. Especially the mission to South Vietnam was a success – the ASC was impressed with the Vietnam Socialist Party and the Bureau recommended them for full membership. The mission coincided with the signing of the ceasefire on July 20. Although the text of the accords was not available, the Bureau rejoiced that “yet another Asian country […] gets an apprehensive yet welcome opportunity to arrange its own affairs”.38 They likened their own countries’ efforts towards the conclusion of the ceasefire to the Asian Conference on Indonesia which had been called by Nehru in 1949 and which had helped build pressure at the UN for Indonesian independence. The ASC saw a crucial role for South and Southeast Asian countries in the maintenance of this new peace, for “the fate of the Vietnamese, the Cambodians and the Laotians depends more on the countries of Asia pursuing an independent foreign policy, than on the sincerity and desire for peace and co-existence of the Sino-Russian and Anglo-American blocs.”39 One could count on the former’s solidarity, but not on the latter’s good intentions. The fact-finding mission to Ceylon, finally, on which Gokhale reported, recommended the induction of the Lanka Sama Samaj Party (LSSP) into the ASC, but Gokhale’s colleagues on the Bureau attached the provision that the LSSP withdraw from the Trotskyist Fourth International first, which the party was unwilling to do. However, the inclusion of Ceylonese representation was considered crucial, and a more moderate alternative was found in the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. And not without success: by the 1956 ASC Conference in Bombay, Ceylon was represented by Minister of Labour Ilangaratne, and the Assistant Secretary Karunatillake. By the close of the conference, they had been joined by Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandanaraike, who addressed the plenary session.40 In the end, it was not so much in the large international conferences, but in the physical act of travel and the routes the Asian socialists chose, that the Asianism of the organization was best expressed. It was no coincidence that Rangoon was a fixed stopover on major carriers’ air routes from Europe, via India, to Indonesia.41 For a brief moment in time, the city became a hub for Asian socialist exchange.

Solidarity in action: the Anti-Colonial Bureau If the Bureau functioned as a hub of “lived Asianism” in the establishment of an Asian socialist network that spanned the breadth of South and Southeast Asia, the ASC’s Anti-Colonial Bureau put into practice its anti-imperialist credentials. Officially established at the 1953 Hyderabad meeting of the ASC, the Anti-Colonial Bureau of the Asian Socialist Conference held its first official meeting in the hill

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station of Kalaw, Burma, on 23-24 May 1954, just before the ASC Bureau meeting there. Kyaw Nyein was elected chairman, while ASC Secretary Hla Aung was seconded to the Anti-Colonial Bureau along with Jim Markham, the Gold Coast delegate mentioned above. Crucially, the Anti-Colonial Bureau included Vietnamese and Malayan members alongside Indian and Indonesian ones, as the former two were the countries in the South and Southeast Asian region in which decolonization was the most acute. For Malaya, Peter Williams, a Ceylonese-born Singaporean and co-founder of the Singapore Labour Party, joined the Anti-Colonial Bureau.42 Pham Van Ngoi represented the Vietnamese Socialist Party, which had been established the previous year in secret by the non-communist Left.43 Though African decolonization remained high on the Anti-Colonial Bureau’s agenda, partly due to the continued presence in Rangoon of Jim Markham, much of the Bureau’s attention was given to Vietnam and Malaya. It is interesting to note that the reporting on the ASC’s mission to Malaya and Indo-China was not nearly as optimistic in the annals of the Anti-Colonial Bureau than in those of the ASC more generally. If Wijono and his Japanese counterpart Roo Watanabe had been impressed by the Vietnamese socialists, their outlook on a durable independence for Vietnam at the crucial juncture of 1954 was less positive. In August, the AntiColonial Bureau’s newsletter carried further notes on the situation in Indo-China, framing it mostly as a cautionary tale: “the tragedy of power-bloc politics should serve as an eye opener to the Freedom Movements. The danger of Communism is a reality as a growing force but the horrors of colonialism cannot be pardoned.”44 By September, this Asian Socialist Study Meeting had completed its report. The result is an overview of South-Vietnamese politics that examined not just the Diem government and gauged its mandate, but covered popular movements and other political forces as well. Its conclusion: “If one compares Vietnam’s political status with Burma, Indonesia, India, or any of the new Asian independent countries then one can say that it is not true that France has granted independence to Vietnam.”45 Indeed, for Asian socialists like Hla Aung, the situation in Vietnam was seen on a spectrum that also included colonial race-based politics in Malaya and the ways in which this spilled over into Malaya’s independence movement.46 Besides being the Joint Secretary of the Asian Socialist Conference, Hla Aung was the Burmese representative on the UN Council of Non-self-governing Territories. The situation in Malaya was watched with a sense of trepidation. In September 1954, most of the editorial board of a socialist student newspaper of the University of Malaya in Singapore, Fajar, were arrested on charges of sedition for writing about western aggression in Asia. In solidarity, the Anti-Colonial Bureau printed Fajar’s offending article to keep it in circulation. It read: “We see signs all over Asia that the West is still a menace. In Indo-China the French, backed by American arms, are striving to suppress the Viet Minh nationalists in their struggle

pragmatic asianism: international socialists in south and southeast asia  321

for freedom. […] Republican India is being dragged into the theatre of war by the purchase of American military bases in Pakistan. Now we are told that Asia is to be defended, whether she likes it or not. A military pact is being formed against Asian objections and without Asian participation. […] Its long-term object is to prevent the development of any movement in Asia that will stand up against the West.”47 Fajar is referring here to SEATO, which was signed by Malaya “without the sanction of its people”. Angrily the students declare: “the solidarity of Asia is the solidarity of the oppressed. This alone is our fight and we will be dragged into no other.”48 By 1955, the core mission of the ASC Anti-Colonial Bureau had become crystallized: it reflected “the initiative of the Asian Socialist Conferences to fight in two fronts against the domination, subjection, denial of freedom and merciless exploitation of western imperialism and the neo-Soviet imperialism”.49 Other keenly observed developments included the new Singaporean constitution, granting the territory a greater amount of autonomy within Malaya, and the first general election in Singapore on 2 April 1955. It also closely monitored the situation in Goa, particularly Portuguese oppression of the movement that advocated joining India. Predictably, it also made much of the fact that the Maharashtra branch of the Praja Socialist Party, one of the ASC’s main sponsors, regularly crossed the border to provide satyagrahis for Goan protests. The voice of Rammanohar Lohia is clearly heard when the Anti-Colonial Bureau’s Newsletter states that “We are confident that he and his satyagrahis will return triumphant […]” and that “there are only two courses open to the people of India under the circumstances: either they may helplessly watch on the heroic struggle of their Goan brothers or should rush to their help, whatever the odds.”50 It is important to note that this South- and Southeast Asian focus did not exclude solidarity with freedom movements elsewhere. Quite the opposite – much of the Anti-Colonial Bureau’s Newsletter was actually devoted to the anticolonial struggles in African territories. Aside from Jim Markham’s contributions, Hla Aung’s speeches too spoke of “Africa and Asia” as joined in the same struggle. Algeria was a case in point, with newsletter article often directly addressing the fighters in Algeria, casting the war as a proximate and intimate concern: “Your struggle is in essence the human protest against the dejection, degradation and poverty, against the frustration and indignity which this system entails for the people suffering under it.”51 But it is interesting that here, too, the point of departure was still Asian anti-imperialism: “We are still puzzled at the attitude of the French Colonial administration for being unable to learn the lessons from Dien Bien Phu in Indochina that sending French NATO troops to Algeria to suppress the national political aspirations is no solution for colonial domination and that peoples’ determination to fight for self-determination is bound to win at the end.”52 One of the concrete outcomes of the Anti-Colonial Bureau’s activities was that the Asian Socialist Conference teamed up with the Movement for Colonial Freedom

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and the International Union of Socialist Youth to organize a World Conference for Colonial Liberation, which took place at Margate in London in November of 1955. Among the delegates were representatives of the People’s Action Party of Malaya, the Praja Socialist Party in India, the Lanka Sama Samaj Party of Ceylon, and the Democratic Front of South Vietnam. Burmese delegates represented the Asian Socialist Conference.53 A few delegates did not receive visa to travel, which was vocally condemned as a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The history in which the conference placed itself at once confirmed and belied their social-democratic ideals: “the congress of Peoples against Imperialism, in the past, had done valuable work for the freedom of dependent peoples. With its transformation into the Movement for Colonial Freedom its tasks have become more concrete.”54 But also: “the increasing awareness of among peoples and governments for the necessity of strengthening the authority of the United Nations Organization in its indispensable function of safeguarding the interests of the Dependent Peoples and helping them achieve their freedom and independence, must be given a point and shape.”55 Major concerns included the full implementation of the Geneva Accords and the reunification of Vietnam, the formation of SEATO as a ‘threat to the peoples of Asia’ and proposed talks between the Chief Ministers of the Federation of Malaya and Singapore and the Malayan Communist Party, as a path to peace and immediate and full independence. The repeal of the Emergency Regulations in Malaya and the Public Security Bill in Singapore, as well as the release of political prisoners, were also on the agenda.56 It is striking, however, that not all independence movements were equal. West Papua figured on the agenda only because a representative from Derde Weg (Third Way) urged the Dutch and Indonesian governments to seek a solution to their conflict over Irian “through peaceful negotiations in accordance with the charter of the United Nations and the resolution which has been passed at the Bandung Conference of the Asian and African Peoples”.57 The Third Way was an anti-imperialist offshoot of the Dutch Peace Movement, founded by a few Dutch intellectuals, which rejected both the NATO and the Warsaw Pact and therefore felt a natural affinity with the Bandung Moment. One of the founders was W.F. Wertheim, a sociologist of Southeast Asia at the University of Amsterdam, who started his career at the Batavia School of Law in Indonesia and had strong views on the perils of neocolonialism.58 However, at the conference there was no mention of the people of Irian or of their right to self-determination. The prominence of Indonesian socialists in the ASC and the (Afro-)Asian movement more generally might be part of the explanation.59 It was likely exacerbated by the fact that Nath Pai, the president of the International Union of Socialist Youth who co-sponsored the conference, was a prominent figure in the All India Goa Freedom Movement. Pai, and the Praja Socialist Party which was prominent in the ASC, saw Goa as

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a textbook case where collective South and Southeast Asian action might yield the removal of one more pocket of European presence in the region. This caused Dutch-occupied West Papua to be equated with Goa rather than with Tibet or East Turkestan.60 A certain degree of selection in the recipients of Asian solidarity notwithstanding, the Anti-Colonial Bureau made the ASC an attractive interlocutor when it came to foreign engagements. Participation in events like the Margate conference provided the Anti-Colonial Bureau, and by extension the Asian Socialist Conference, with a global audience. And even after the ASC was disbanded, its socialists and their parties continued their anti-imperialist efforts as well as their links to the Socialist International and the International Union of Socialist Youth. Jayaprakash Narayan became president of a newly established Afro-Asian Council in 1960, which was first convened in New Delhi, worked in close contact with the IUSY and was in other ways a continuation of the Anti-Colonial Bureau as well: it argued for immediate and full decolonization, parliamentary elections, universal suffrage, and to “work for the right to self-determination of the people of Tibet and all other peoples; the speedy end of all forms of colonialism and racialism; and the defence of human rights and liberties in Asia and Africa”.61

Pragmatic Asianism eclipsed The idea of a unified voice of Asian socialism did not survive the 1950s. The ASC continued its publications from an increasingly sparse headquarters in Rangoon, where departing staff members were not replaced due to a lack of funds, and eventually only Hla Aung was left to run both the ASC and the Anti-Colonial Bureau. Others have remarked on the early Cold War as marked by an “open 1950s” and a more “closed” 1960s, characterized by two different generations of leadership.62 The history of the South and Southeast Asian regionalism of the ASC certainly fits this model. The interwar internationalist credentials of many of its active members and the rhetoric of anti-imperialist solidarity made the organization more a part of the long international struggle for political decolonization than a product of the Cold War. Their strategies had been tested in the 1920s and 1930s, which led Saul Rose, Clement Attlee’s secretary at the British Labour Party, to sigh that at the ASC there was clearly ‘a spice of enjoyment’ in “re-fighting bygone battles – rather like the Irishman who declared that the British were the enemy that he liked to fight best”.63 The ASC’s Asianism, moreover, fit the proliferation of regionalist activity in the years leading up to the Bandung Conference. This moment of Asianist enthusiasm, however, transformed after the ‘closed’ 1960s arrived along with new national leadership and the suppression of socialist

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parties in Burma, Indonesia, and Nepal. In India, the PSP fractured into smaller organizations. The ASC’s periodicals ceased publication. Its leaders, however, did not stop their meetings and found ways to voice Asian concerns internationally in other ways. If Jayaprakash Narayan’s Afro-Asian Council was a continuation of the Anti-Colonial Bureau, so the Young Asian Socialist Conference (Bombay 1965) continued the ASC’s work.64 The shared experience of colonial occupation by Western European powers, and the shared fear of new forms of imperialism by the United States and the Soviet Union, continued to be the drivers of this form of South and Southeast Asian solidarity. In this sense, the South and Southeast Asian of the ASC really functioned as a “region,” bordered by the Soviet Central Asia Republics and revolutionary China to the north, and resolutely aligned Australia to the south. It was precisely the ASC’s refusal to commit fully to either power bloc that enabled it to formulate such a regionally articulated form of solidarity. In other words, the Asian Socialist Conference practiced a pragmatic Asianism, calibrated to South and Southeast Asian interests.

Notes 1

“International Labour Conference,” Trade Union Record, July 1929, 4-5.

2

Geert van Goethem, The Amsterdam International: the world of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913-1945 (London: Ashgate, 2006); Carolien Stolte, “Bringing Asia to the World: Indian trade unionism and the long road towards the Asiatic Labour Congress, 1919-1937,” Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (2012), 257-278.

3

Editorial, The Bombay Chronicle, 25 May 1934.

4

Milton Israel, Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Indian Nationalist Struggle, 1920-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 241-2. On Brelvi’s reporting on Bombay textile workers, see Ramachandra Guha, ‘The Good Indian’, The Hindu, 15 February 2009.

5

“Resolutions of the Colombo Congress”, The Trade Union Record, May/June 1934, 10. The Trade Union Record was the official bulletin of the All-India Trade Union Congress before the 1929 split, after which non-communist unions seceded as the socialist National Trade Union Federation, and took The Trade Union Record with them.

6

Michele Louro, Comrades Against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Michele Louro et al., The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020).

7

On this issue see, among many others, Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan, eds., Bandung Revisited (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008); Christopher J. Lee, ed., Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2010); Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis, eds., The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2022).

pragmatic asianism: international socialists in south and southeast asia  325

8

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Preparatory Committee of the Second Congress of the Asian Socialist Conference, ‘Three Years of Asian Socialist Conference,’ Bombay, November 1956.

9

The differences between these competing forms of regionalism were first raised by G.H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 250-267.

10

Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski, eds., Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015).

11

Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski, “Introduction,” in Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration, eds. Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015), 1.

12

Among the founding texts of this type of Asianism are Keshab Chandra Sen’s Review of Indian Theism and Okakura Kakuzo’s The Ideals of the East. See T.E. Slater, Keshab Chandra Sen and the Brahma Samaj: Being a Brief Review of Indian Theism from 1830 to 1884; together with selections from Mr. Sen’s works (Madras: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1884); Okakura Kakuzo, The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan (London: John Murray, 1904).

13

N.C. Banerji, Asianism and other Essays (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1930).

14

Percy Glading, “The Growth of the Indian Strike Movement,” Labour Monthly 12, no. 7 (1929): 429.

15

For concrete examples, see the articles in the special issue “Trade Union Networks and the Politics of Expertise in an Age of Afro-Asian Solidarity,” Journal of Social History 53, no. 2 (2019), edited by Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis.

16

See also Talbot C. Imlay “International Socialism and Decolonization during the 1950s: Competing Rights and the Postcolonial Order,” American Historical Review (2013): 1110.

17

For the antecedents of the Bandung Conference see Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment. For works that frame the ASC as part of the trajectory towards non-alignment, see Frank Trager “Burma’s Foreign Policy, 1948-56: Neutralism, Third Force, and Rice,” The Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 1 (1969): 89-102; Kyaw Zaw Win, “The Asian Socialist Conference in 1953 as precursor to the Bandung Conference in 1955,” paper presented at the 15th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Canberra, 2004; Sally Percival Wood, “Retrieving the Bandung Conference… Moment by Moment,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 43, no. 3 (2012), 529-530.

18

Su Lin Lewis, “Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-colonial Freedom, 1952-1956,” Journal of World History 29, no. 1-2 (2019): esp. 61-2.

19

On the position of the Socialist International in this period, see Peter Kemseke, Towards an era of Development: the Globalization of Socialism and Christian Democracy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006); Talbot C. Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 409-462.

20

Rammanohar Lohia, “The Principles and Objectives of Socialism in Asia,” Socialist Asia 7 (1952): 17.

21

Lohia, “The Principles and Objectives,” 21.

22

U Kyaw Nyein, “How I look at the Third Force,” Socialist Asia 7 (1952), 12-16: 15.

23

Nyein, “How I look,” 16.

24

M.S. Gokhale, “Asian Socialist and the Socialist International,” Socialist Asia 7 (1952), 9-12: 10. Morgan Philips was the head of the Socialist International.

25

Gokhale, “Asian Socialist,” 11.

26

Jansen, Afro-Asia and non-alignment, 267.

27

Rammanohar Lohia, “Foreign Policy Issues Before Asian Socialists,” Socialist Asia 8 (1952): 16.

28

On Markham’s work in Rangoon and his further work in anti-colonial internationalism, see Gerard McCann, “Where was the ‘Afro’ in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s ‘Bandung Moment’ in 1950s Asia,” Journal of World History 29, no. 1-2 (2019): 89-123.

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29

Tillman Durin, “Socialists Open Parley in Burma,” The New York Times, 7 January 1953, 2. For the latter, see the editorial “Asian Socialists,” The New York Times, 17 January 1953, 14.

30

Previously, the existing work was limited to the works by Kyaw Zaw Win, Talbot, and Kemseke cited above. For its inclusion in Cold War Afro-Asianism, see in particular Lewis, “Asian Socialism”, and McCann, “Where was the ‘Afro’ in Afro-Asia?”.

31

U Kyaw Nyein, “Common Ties that Bind us Together”. Speech delivered by U Kyaw Nyein welcoming delegates to the Preparatory Meeting of the Asian Socialist Conference. Socialist Asia 3 (1952), 1.

32

By this time the PSP was no longer a force of significance in Pakistani politics, and Sagher had to take on the duties of secretary, treasurer and editor of Socialist Weekly, the party’s publication. Saul Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 62-3.

33

Japan and Israel remained members but figured much less in the ASC’s activities. The ASC Bureau met once in Tokyo in November 1954.

34

Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, 242.

35

‘Delegates to Stockholm’, Socialist Asia 3 (1953): 6. On Sitorus’ career, see J.D. Legge, Intellectuals and Nationalism in Indonesia (Jakarta: Equinox, 2010 [1988]), 83-5.

36

Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, 239.

37

International Institute of Social History (IISH), Asian Socialist Conference Information Bulletin, 1 (1956), 10.

38

‘Ceasefire in Indo-China’, Socialist Asia, 4 (1954), 1.

39

Ibid., 2.

40

Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, 247.

41

For the argument that air travel helped shape the nature of postwar Afro-Asian conferencing, see Su Lin Lewis, “Skies that Bind: Air Travel in the Bandung Era,” in Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World, eds. Stephen Legg, Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder, and Benjamin Thorpe (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 234-252.

42

On Peter Williams’ career in 1950s Malaya, see C.M. Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), 241.

43

The Vietnamese Socialist party advocated a unified independent Vietnam with universal suffrage and was supported by the Socialist International, but repressed by the South Vietnamese government in the 1960s. See Peter Lamb, Historical Dictionary of Socialism (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 3rd ed. 2016), 482.

44

IISH, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 3, August 1954, 1.

45

IISH, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 4, September 1954, 8.

46

Speech by Hla Aung in New York, quoted in the Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 6, February 1955, 4.

47

IISH, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 4, September 1954, 3.

48

Ibid., 4.

49

IISH, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 6 (February 1955), 9.

50

IISH, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 9, May 1955, 6.

51

IISH, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 10, June 1955, 6.

52

Ibid. On the complex intersections of Asianism and Afro-Asianism, see McCann, “Where was the ‘Afro’ in Afro-Asia?”.

53

IISH, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 16, December 1955, 1.

54

IISH, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 16, December 1955, 2.

55

IISH, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 16, December 1955, 2.

56

Ibid., 3.

57

IISH, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter, no. 16, December 1955, 5.

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58

W.F. Wertheim, Herrijzend Azië: opstellen over de oosterse samenleving (Arnhem: Van Lochum Slaterus, 1950); and his later works Indonesië: van vorstenrijk tot neo-kolonie (Meppel: Boom, 1978) and Emancipation in Asia: positive and negative lessons from China (Rotterdam: CASP, 1983).

59

On this issue see Emma Kluge, “West Papua and the International History of Decolonization, 19619,” The International History Review 42, no. 6 (2020).

60

On the complex activism around the “fragments” of the (post)colonial state, see Lydia Walker, “Jayaprakash Narayan and the Politics of Reconciliation for the Postcolonial State and its Fragments,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 56, no. 2 (2019): 147-169.

61

IISH, International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) Archives 1094: Afro-Asian Council, 1960s.

62

Mark T. Berger, “After the Third World? History, destiny and the fate of Third Worldism,” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2004): 9-39; Stolte, “Trade Union Networks and the Politics of Expertise.”

63

Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia, 11.

64

IISH, International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) Archives 1094-609, “Socialist Solution for Asia: A Report on the 1965 Asian Socialist Conference in Bombay”.

CHAPTER 14

The Informality Trap: Politics, Governance and Informal Institutions in South and Southeast Asia Ward Berenschot

Abstract This essay focuses on an important similarity of the character of state-citizen interaction found across South and Southeast Asia: the dependency of citizens on personal connections to deal with state institutions. While the capacity of Asian states to penetrate society is growing, personal exchanges of favors through informal social networks often undermine the capacity of state institutions to implement policies and laws in an impersonal, rule-bound manner. As a result, South and Southeast Asian countries are sometimes described as “patronage democracies” because of the dependence of citizens on clientelistic exchanges with politicians to gain access to state benefits. This informality is often attributed to particular “Asian” cultural traits: in this view the pervasiveness of clientelism, identity politics, and the particularized implementation of state regulations are due to the importance that Asian citizens attach to personal obligations and norms of reciprocity. In this essay I develop an alternative explanation. I argue that the importance of personal exchange relations grew out of the particular colonial process of state formation that most Asian countries went through. As the state has generally been experienced as an alien and oppressive force, personal exchange relationships have been a stronger guarantee of personal security and welfare. As a result politics and governance in South and Southeast Asia are shaped by a massive collective action problem: while both citizens and power holders might prefer a rule-bound state and a strong rule of law, they would jeopardize their welfare, security and career if they ignored the obligations embedded in personal relationships.

Keywords: Informality; governance; clientelism; rule of law

For a brief moment in 2013, Hambit Binti was one of Indonesia’s most famous politicians. This district head of Gunung Mas, a remote but resource-rich backwater in Central Kalimantan, made the headlines of all national newspapers. Yet the news was hardly flattering. Through a middleman Binti had bribed Akhil Mochtar, the chief justice of Indonesia’s constitutional court. Binti had given Mochtar at least 250 thousand US dollars. The constitutional court was about to decide on the contested

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results of Gunung Mas’ recent district head elections. With the bribe Binti wanted to ensure that he would win another term as district head. Unfortunately for Binti, Indonesia’s anti-corruption agency KPK had gotten wind of the deal. Their investigators swooped in and arrested both Mochtar and Binti. Binti was eventually sentenced to a four-year prison term.1 A few months after these sensational events, I went to Gunung Mas to study the elections that had led to Binti’s arrests. I had expected to encounter outrage and shame about Binti’s behavior. Yet I found the criticism to be surprisingly muted. Many people I spoke to were actually very appreciative of Binti. They emphasized how helpful he had been. They spoke about how Binti kept a stash of money in his office for the purpose of helping out visitors. I heard glowing stories of how Binti would hand out this money to people needing an expensive surgery, help to finance a wedding, or just to start a business. Others told me how Binti had arranged a job for them at the district government. They all emphasized how approachable Binti was. He would always receive people in need of support. I often could not conceal my amazement during such conversations. Binti’s bribes had tarnished the image of both Indonesia’s judiciary and the district of Gunung Mas. He was known for handing out concessions to palm oil companies in exchange for lavish campaign donations – which often led to conflicts between the incoming palm oil company and village communities. He drove around in expensive cars while most of his constituents were poor. Surely such a blatantly corrupt man would not be remembered fondly? Yet I gradually realized that I did not see Binti through the same eyes as my informants. This was driven home to me one night when I shared a beer with Toguh (name changed), an experienced local journalist. Toguh again waxed on about Binti’s generosity. But when I challenged him, he put his finger on the specific kind of morality that underpinned Binti’s local popularity. “During the election campaign he gives 200 thousand rupiah [about 15 USD] to people. If people have received money, they cannot complain afterwards [about corruption]. They have the feeling they have an obligation to the district head, a hutang budi (“debt of honour”). If people are already paid, why should they complain?”. As the evening lengthened, it turned out that Toguh himself was feeling such an honor debt: “My luck is that I have a family relationship with Binti. So I have a friend who was poor and needed a job, we could just go to him. Then the district head [Binti] talked to the department head and arranged a [low-paying] job. He did not ask for a fee, he just asked ‘work well, so that you do not put me to shame.’ And when the election campaign came, my friend supported the bupati. The district head did not have to ask for this, my friend knew his position [tahu diri, literally, ‘knew himself’].”

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With these remarks Toguh provided examples of what I will argue is a key feature of politics and governance across most of Asia: the pervasive tension between formal and informal institutions. On the one hand Toguh and my other informants were aware that Binti had violated laws and regulations by his bribing of judges, his vote buying and his nepotistic bureaucratic appointments. On the other hand Toguh also judged this behavior in terms of prevalent informal institutions. He invoked norms of reciprocity and family bonds which, he felt, also needed to be honoured. The willingness of Binti to help people and his generosity in handing out money had, in Toguh’s eyes, bound people to him. These gifts and favors had made it improper and thus uncomfortable for people to oppose Binti’s behavior. While it might be important to defend Indonesia’s formal institutions, one should not violate equally important informal institutions. This impact of informal institutions and personal networks on politics and governance of South and Southeast Asia is the topic of this essay. While the capacity of Asian states to penetrate society is growing, personal exchanges of favors through informal social networks regularly undermine the capacity of state institutions to implement policies and laws in an impersonal, rule-bound manner. Politics often takes a clientelistic form, as politicians mobilize support not through policy proposals but rather by promising to reward their supporters with personal favors. As a result, a striking commonality of South and Southeast Asian countries is that many of them are regularly described as “patronage democracies”. Throughout this region citizens regularly rely on clientelistic exchanges with politicians: they provide electoral support in exchange of promises of politicians to gain access to state benefits. At the same time business opportunities are often obtained through collusive arrangements. Entrepreneurs regularly fund election campaigns in exchange for business licences, government contracts or – in Binti’s case – concessions for natural resource extraction. In this essay I will use the term “informality” to capture these different forms of personal and often clientelistic exchange relations. With that word I refer to the wide-ranging ways in which personal connections are used to obtain power and privileges. The aims of this essay are threefold. In the first part I will provide a brief and, by necessity, somewhat superficial overview of the role of informal exchange relations in shaping governance and politics across South and Southeast Asia. In the second part I will review the various ways in which social scientists working on politics and governance in Asia have generally described informality, and how they have explained why informality is such a prominent feature of politics and governance. I will briefly discuss three dominant modes of analysis – instrumentalist, culturalist and historical institutionalist. In the third part of this essay I will argue that these three approaches are complementary, as they describe different

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constituent elements of an “informality trap”. Politics and governance in South and Southeast Asia are shaped by a massive collective action problem: while both citizens and power holders might prefer a rule-bound state and a strong rule of law, they would jeopardize their welfare, security and career if they would ignore the obligations embedded in personal relationships. In developing this arguments I aim to provide an overview of the literature on informal dimensions of politics and governance. At the same time I rely indirectly on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in India (in 2005-2006) and Indonesia (20132014). In both these periods and countries I studied local politics as my fieldwork revolved around shadowing local politicians and tracing the networks through which they built and sustained their popularity.2

Informality and governance across Monsoon Asia Before diving into this topic, a few words on terminology are needed. The discussion and study of informal dimensions of politics and governance are greatly hampered by the difficulty of coming up with clear concepts and words. While formal institutions are usually fairly clearly identifiable things – think of laws, policies, political parties, courts – informality refers to a much more fuzzy part of reality. In an attempt to generate some clarity, I propose an interpretation of informality – the role of personal relations in shaping access to power and privileges – that has three main ingredients. Firstly, with this term I refer to the role of informal social networks. These are connections between people that, unlike work-related connections, stem from everyday social life, such as family, friendship, ethnic bonds or being an alumnus of the same university. In a context of strongly institutionalized state institutions, such connections would not really impact the chances of citizens to gain access to, say, a government job, admission to a school or an electricity connection. But across most of Asia, such informal networks have a considerable impact on whether or not one can obtain such benefits. The second element of informality concerns informal institutions. With this term I refer to the social norms and obligations that are embedded in personal relationships.3 Binti’s reasoning at the start of this essay provided examples of such informal institutions as he emphasized how gifts and favors generate “debts of honour” that need to be fulfilled. The third element of how I use informality concerns clientelism. Clientelism is also an informal institution, but then an informal institution instrumentalized by politics: clientelism refers to the practice of providing material goods and privileged access to state benefits in exchange for electoral support. Toguh’s vote buying is an example of clientelistic behavior, as well as his provision of concessions to companies who funded his election campaign. In these three

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ways – through social networks, informal institutions and clientelism – personal exchange relations shape the access to power and privileges and, by extension, the character of governance and politics. So how pervasive is this informality? Are we talking about merely an exotic feature of politics in the interior of Central Kalimantan, or is this a central element of governance and politics across Asia? This is a difficult question to answer: a key feature of informality is that it most effective when hidden from public view – which makes it all the more difficult to assess its pervasiveness. Yet one way of approaching this question is by taking a look at the World Bank’s World Governance Indicators. The indicators incorporate a wide range of data on various aspects of governance such as corruption, the rule of law and the effectiveness of government policies. While these indicators can be criticized for their rough and arguably western-centred approximation of reality, their advantage is that they provide us with a quick opportunity to explore how Asian countries compare. The table focuses on three dimensions of governance: the rule of law, corruption, and regulatory quality. In doing so, these indicators all provide a measure of the strength of formal institutions like laws and policies – and, hence, their weakness is an indication of the relative importance of informal institutions. The country scores are given in percentile ranks, which means that they indicate how a country scores relative to other countries.4 The scores of South and Southeast Asian countries on these governance indicators yield two striking conclusions. The first is that, compared to not only wealthy western OECD countries but also Latin America, our region generally scores quite poorly. Across countries like Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, the rule of law is limited, corruption is rife and government regulations have limited impact. A second conclusion is that there is quite some variation across Monsoon Asia. It is noticeable that some non-democracies in the region actually score a bit better: in Singapore and, to a lesser extent, Thailand and Malaysia, the capacity of governments to implement policies and uphold laws is stronger compared to their more democratic neighbours like the Philippines, Indonesia or India (while Vietnam and its autocratic neighbours Cambodia and Laos score quite poorly). While these differences might be attributed to many factors, this variation does pose questions about the impact of democracy on governance – something I will take up later. Generally speaking, however, the high incidence of corruption, the limited capacity of states to implement state regulation and the relative weakness of the rule of law – according to these governance indicators – all suggest that informality regularly undermines the functioning of formal institutions across Monsoon Asia. Such indications of the importance of informality can also be found in the more qualitative literature on politics and governance in South and Southeast Asia. Clientelism has been, for instance, a long-standing preoccupation of academic

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Figure 14.1: Monsoon Asia: governance indicators. Source: World Bank, Worldwide Governance Indicators (https://databank.worldbank.org/source/ worldwide-governance-indicators).

research in this region. Already in the 1950’s and 1960’s several important studies on India, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia saw patron-client relationships as important building blocks of political life.5 These studies had in common that they focused on how political leaders mobilized their followers through personal bonds and favoritism. At the time, a common expectation was that economic growth and strengthening democratic institutions would gradually lead to the demise of such clientelistic practices. Yet while the region has become wealthier and democratic institutions have by and large strengthened, clientelistic practices remain pervasive. This observation has led to a second wave of studies on political clientelism from the 2000’s onwards. Studies on elections in various countries – including Pakistan,6 the Philippines,7 Malaysia,8 Indonesia,9 and India10 – all found that

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clientelism remains a dominant mode of attracting voters. Relatedly, various studies on political parties found that they are relatively weakly institutionalized and fractious – particularly in countries like the Philippines or Thailand or Indonesia – as a result of pervasive clientelism.11 Such informal exchange relations also play an important role in the study of capitalism and economic development in the region. In this field a common theme is the importance of cultivating relationships with powerholders as a means to obtain business opportunities. In this way various studies have argued that in much of South Asia12 and Southeast Asia13 rich, well-connected economic elites could emerge through skillful development of informally used ties with bureaucrats and politicians, which served this “oligarchy” as a means to obtain import licences, concessions for natural resource exploitation and government subsidies.14 As Mustaaq Khan and Kwame Jomo have discussed in a masterful survey of such informal dimensions of enterpreneuralism in our region, the capacity and willingness to pay bribes to powerholders is an important determinant of economic success.15 Studies of this phenomenon in, for example, the Phillipines16 and Korea17 have used words like “booty capitalism” and “crony capitalism” to describe the pervasiveness of nepotism and rent-seeking in the way in which economic opportunities are acquired. Thirdly, informality plays an important role in the literature on governance in South and Southeast Asia. Studies on a range of topics – from the functioning of judicial institutions18 to public service provision19 and bureaucratic employment20 – find that informal networks and clientelistic exchanges influence and sometimes distort the impact of laws and policies – in a way that, for example, welfare programs in Indonesia end up in the hands of the well-connected rather than the needy,21 that the police in India is more responsive to the well-connected,22 or that land tenure regulations in Malaysia end up benefiting powerful palm oil companies rather than poor farmers.23 Studies on public service provision in South and Southeast Asia regularly observe that poorer citizens tend to depend on various kinds of intermediaries or brokers in order to get access to state benefits such as health care, sanitation, education or infrastructure. When poorer citizens deal with state institutions, they often need to employ such informal networks and personal connections with politicians in order to get things done.24 In short, both quantitative indicators as well as up-close studies of politics and governance suggest that informality is a central element of political strategies, business practices as well as the everyday functioning of state institutions across much of Asia. With that conclusion I do not imply that laws, policies and formal procedures are irrelevant for understanding how states operate or how resources are allocated. Laws and policies matter greatly – either because people do try to adhere to them, or because they want to create the impression that they follow them. But at the same time the actual impact of state laws and policies are mediated

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through informal institutions and networks – which often blunts or undermines this impact, or creates a considerable gap between what the policies look like on paper, and how they operate in practice. These observations beg the question: why is informality so pervasive across much of South and Southeast Asia? What are the reasons that informality is such an important element in governance and politics? In the next sections I will discuss three different types of answers to these questions found in the literature. I distinguish instrumentalist, culturalist and historical-institutionalist approaches to informality.

Informality as an instrument A first approach describes informality mainly as an instrument that economic and political elites employ in pursuit of wealth and power. The pervasiveness of informality is in this approach largely explained by focusing on how that informality enables politicians, bureaucrats and, occasionally, voters to defend their interests. This approach proceeds quite explicitly from rational choice models of political behavior. Politicians adopt clientelistic strategies out of a conscious assessment of cost-benefit analyses of their yield. Voters, on their end, engage in clientelistic exchanges because they are considered effective in maximizing access to jobs and services. Their vote is largely premised on assessments about which party or candidate has proven to be (or will be) more forthcoming in providing access to state resources. In such an analysis, the role of both social norms and values in driving clientelistic exchanges is downplayed or explicitly denied. Rather, the emphasis is on what purposes informal practices serve. In this way, for example, various authors have focused on how informal, clientelistic relations between politicians and business elites serve both groups to obtain and protect wealth. For example, in a fine book on local politics in Indonesia Vedi Hadiz argues that “predatory elites” rely on informal exchange relationships as a means to siphon of state budgets25. In a similar vein a well-read book on India’s “patronage democracy” by Kanchan Chandra highlights how a targeted distribution of state resources is a very effective means for local politicians to cultivate electoral support. In her view the political salience of ethnicity and caste go hand in hand with informality. She argues that when people rely on informal connections to deal with state institutions, they engage in “head counting”: they prefer to vote for a co-ethnic as this provides a greater reassurance that these politicians will respond to their (informal) requests once in power.26 In a similar way the susceptibility of voters to clientelistic exchanges is viewed in terms of cost-benefit analyses. Voters reciprocate the received money or favors with their vote out of a pragmatic assessment of the negative consequences of non-compliance. Clientelistic exchanges succeed, in this view, because voters are

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afraid that if they did not reciprocate political favors at the polling booth, future access to state resources would be curtailed. Clientelistic politics thus thrives on “perverse accountability”:27 when politicians control access to state resources, voters have an interest in responding to their clientelistic strategies, since they might otherwise lose access to these resources. In this vein much research trying to explain (particularly) the pervasiveness of clientelism focuses on identifying the factors that influence such cost-benefit analysis. In this light it has been argued that poverty and a lack of education make people more susceptible to clientelism.28 Others have argued that clientelism is more pervasive when economic diversification is limited. Where economies are dependent on a few elite-controlled economic activities (such as natural resource extraction), an independent media and civil society are less likely to emerge – which makes it more difficult to scrutinize elites and more easy for these elites to engage in predatory behavior.29 A limitation of the instrumentalist approach is its somewhat one-sided emphasis on cost-benefit analyses. Toguh’s remarks above provide various hints that the pervasiveness of informality cannot only be attributed to usefulness and effectiveness as norms and perceptions of social obligations also play an important role. These social obligations are the focus of the second, very different approach to informality.

Informality as a cultural phenomenon This approach could be termed “culturalist” because it interprets the importance of informality in terms of the prevalence of particular social norms and ideas. The running theme of these – mainly anthropological – studies is that the “mutual expectations of partners [in a patron-client relationship] are backed by community values and rituals”.30 These values and expectations have, these scholars argue, grown out other spheres of life – e.g. agriculture and religion – and were subsequently incorporated in newly emerging political relationships as the (colonial) state expanded. Studies adopting such a norm-oriented interpretation emphasize – like Toguh in the introduction to this essay – that politicians do not only need to be useful persons; they need to be good persons. Their role as patron and provider is driven by moral conventions: the way in which, for example, politicians busy themselves providing goods or services to constituents is not just a simple “purchase” of political support as these acts are motivated by the wish to adhere to how a good ruler or politician needs to behave. Neither do voters, for their end, reciprocate such acts merely out of strategic calculations, but also out of a need to fulfil the

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obligations accumulated by benefiting from the patron’s largesse. As an astute observer of Thai politics wrote, “Politicians capitalize on the morality of reciprocal obligation. […] Not to adhere to this norm is to put oneself outside the sphere of normal social interaction”.31 In this sense researchers in this tradition – mainly anthropologists – criticize instrumentalist analyses for their implicit grounding in western conceptualizations of political representation. Clientelistic politics, the culturalists argue, is facilitated and legitimated by particular ideas of how those who govern and those they govern should relate to each other. We cannot and should not assume that western ideas about ‘proper behavior’ of political leaders are shared by people with a very different (colonial) historical experience of how states and rulers operate. Such “relational morality” can be observed in different aspects of informality. The functioning of a political leader is circumscribed by ideas and expectations of how a patron should behave towards those whose loyalty he claims. The patron’s act of handing out money, for example, can be interpreted as a performance intended to signal their adherence to ideas about what a good ruler should be like. Writing about patronage in India, Piliavsky argues, for example, that clientelistic politics is driven by the need to display a “selfless munificence”: “Political giving is never only a matter of redistributing resources, it is also necessarily a rhetorical act that conveys largesse as a politician’s virtue”.32 This is how culturalists interpret vote buying: they describe the distribution of money before elections not a market transaction but rather an ostentatious display of magnificence intended to prove one’s worthiness to rule.33 In a similar vein Jackson, who studied the Indonesian state in the 1970’s, related the pervasiveness of patron-client relations to the cultural tropes of “bapakism” and “anak buah”. The role of a patron (“bapak”) comes with a wide range of duties to care for the material and emotional needs of his anak buah (“followers”). The inherent inequality in this relationship is accepted just as long as the bapak fulfils these obligations. “Social injustice and corruption are felt only if a patron fails to redistribute his bounty among his clients or if the patron […] abandons the diffuse responsibilities of a bapak towards his anak buah.”34 Subordinates engage in active attempts to embed themselves in such “bapak-anak buah” dependency relations since this relationship provides a coveted sense of security and protection. Such an emphasis on social norms also offers a very different – compared to the instrumentalist approach – interpretation of the behavior of these anak buah or clients. Their reciprocation of rendered services at, say, the polling booth is not motivated by an assessment of the costs of non-compliance, but rather by a sense of obligation. By receiving money and help from politicians or their brokers, voters incur the kind of “moral debt” (hutang budi) that Toguh referred to above. This moral debt needs to be repaid (balas budi, returning the favor or literately “a moral response”). Both voters and politicians regularly use such moral terms

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to describe their interactions. This suggests that the need to repay such debt does not just stem from fear of repercussions, but also from interpretations of personal ethics and duty. These can be deep-seated beliefs: the ways in which people speak of shame and feelings of discomfort when failing to reciprocate, suggest that norms of reciprocity are embodied and operate at a subconscious level. To use a term from relational sociology, they form part of the habitus – the internalized habits of perception and appreciation that guide us in everyday interactions. Clientelistic exchanges thrive on internalized norms and emotions like shame and pride – thus providing another reason why these exchanges cannot be reduced to cold-blooded cost-benefit calculations. Such an interpretation, for example, offers a much better explanation of why vote-buying can succeed in the absence of strict vote monitoring: politicians do not need actual enforcement when they can count on prevalent social norms to discipline voters. Yet despite the relevance of social norms and particular interpretations of personal ethics there is something unsatisfying in the way this literature explains the persistence of informality. The way in which this literature stresses that the “donor-patron ideal has endured for centuries”35 leaves many important questions unanswered. Firstly, this literature paints a very static picture and offers little analytical tools to describe and explain variation and changes in political behavior. The emphasis on deep-seated cultural norms does little to help us identify whether and how, for example, clientelistic practices are changing, nor does it help to explain when and why clientelistic practices fade away. The insistence that “moral conventions persist across space and time”36 provides no analytical handles for comparative analysis, and leaves the unwarranted impression that informal institutions are eternal. Furthermore, the emphasis of this literature on a particular and different political subjectivity of Asians compared to westerners is unsatisfying. This is not only due to a tendency in some of the earlier literature to essentialize “culture” as an explanation for clientelistic practices. Even the more sophisticated analyses mentioned above provide little explanation as to why these “norms of reciprocity” have such a strong hold on people. We learn little about why people obey this “moral logic” underpinning patron-client relations. Such analysis resurrects old orientalist notions of a fundamental Eastern “otherness” while paying relatively little attention to the ways in which particular political and economic dynamics have led to the prevalence of these social norms.37 In that sense the focus on norms of reciprocity and interpersonal ethics is simply too narrow. Informal institutions are strong not only because people feel a strong need to reciprocate favors. Such feelings of obligation of returning the favor when someone has helped you, might well be universal. The relevant question is thus not just what kind of personal obligations people feel bound to, but how these obligations are weighed vis-à-vis other, more impersonal obligations – particularly

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those towards laws and (state) institutions and abstract notions of a general good. The decision of, in the story above, Hambit Binti to help Toguh’s friend get a government job is not just guided by the strength of family obligations, but also by the commitment Binti feels towards recruitment procedures. The relevant question here is, therefore, not only why Hambit Binti feels strong family obligations toward Toguh and his nephew, but also why he does not experience a similar sense of unease when disregarding the rules and goals of the institution he serves. Or, to take another example, the decision whether to vote for a candidate who has given you money involves weighing your sense of obligation towards this candidate as well as towards your duty to select the most capable candidate. The interpretation of clientelistic practices involves, in short, not just an understanding of why personal obligations carry a particular force, but also an understanding of why impersonal obligations – i.e. towards laws, institutions and interpretations of “the general good” – do not carry a similar force. Both these weaknesses of the culturalist approach – its limited attention to change and to attitudes toward state institutions and procedures – point to the importance of studying how the evolution of state institutions underpins clientelistic practices. That is the focus of the third approach we will now turn to.

Informality as a product of history This approach might be called “historical-institutionalist” as it focuses on the impact of the particular history of state formation in much of South and Southeast Asia. In this view two key particularities of Monsoon Asia – the personalistic style of rule of many pre-colonial rulers and the subsequent period of colonial rule – have generated particular attitudes towards formal and informal institutions, in a way that can explain the pervasiveness of informality. Historical analyses of traditions of kingship and state building have shown that many of the large pre-colonial states such as Majapahit and Mataram empires in Indonesia, the Khmer empire in mainlaind Southeast Asia38 or the Mughal empire in India were built on largely uncodified, patron-client relationships between rulers and vassals that rested on a strong sense of reciprocal obligations.39 The historian Pelras, for example, describes how in South Sulawesi the legitimacy and power of smaller noblemen required the development of a large retinue of followers: Patrons and clients are linked by a number of reciprocal duties and rights. The main duty of a patron toward his clients is to protect them from mistreatment by another nobleman, insecurity, theft, or any other kind of threat, as well as looking after their welfare and sheltering them from poverty […] A person of position could only wield influence in so far as

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he had followers who supported him on the basis of their own self-interest, presuming that if their leader came into a position of authority, then all his or her followers would reap.40

These states were all patrimonial states, as they were manned by families and friends of the rulers and access to power (and economic opportunity) was limited to those favored by rulers. There was little attempt to treat citizens impersonally on the basis of universally applied rules. Various observers have argued that this history of patrimonial rule has engendered particular conceptions of power and statesmanship that continue to animate contemporary politics. Benedict Anderson, for example, argued in a famous essay that the foremost obligation of rulers is “an obligation to Power itself” since the “well-being of the community is regarded as depending on the center’s ability to concentrate power”. This conceptualization, Anderson argued, sustained the patrimonial features of Indonesian politics since it legitimized the use of the wealth of the state for the sustenance of the position and power of the powerholders.41 Patron-client relationships also shaped the feudal relationship between landowners and tenants in many parts of Southeast Asia. Throughout (Southeast) Asia it was (and, in many parts, still is) quite common for tenants to provide various services and labour to their landlord in exchange for protection and support in the face of adversity. By embedding themselves in such an exchange relationship, clients managed to obtain a certain measure of security in an otherwise hostile and volatile environment. Such agricultural patron-client bonds not only embedded norms of reciprocity in conceptions of the “good life”, these bonds also constituted a durable model of how people of different social standing and power should interact. When politicians, political parties and elections made their entry into village life from the early twentieth century onwards, they could not but adapt to these century-old modes of interaction. In other words, agricultural patron-client relations provided a template on which subsequent voter-politician interactions were modelled.42 There is, however, considerable variation in this pattern. In countries like the Philippines,43 Pakistan, and to a lesser extent India, large landowners have remained dominant up to the present day.44 As a result these landowners and their families remain dominant political players. Yet elsewhere the expansion of the (colonial) state served to undermine the obligations that landowners and tenants felt towards each other, and in countries like Indonesia where large landownership was not common, such “feudal” clientelistic relationships are less salient. Yet the pervasiveness of informality cannot simply be attributed to such pre-colonial patterns of social interaction. The character of colonial rule of the Dutch (in Indonesia) and the British (in South Asia and mainland Southeast Asia), the French (in Cambodia and Vietnam) and the Spanish and the United States (in the Philippines) meant that state institutions were at least to a certain extent imposed

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by colonial rulers. Not only did these colonial rulers import institutions and rule systems that were new and unfamiliar to their colonial subjects, the oppressive and authoritarian nature of colonial regimes ensured that state institutions were generally perceived as an alien instrument of oppression. In such a context it is hardly surprising that, after independence, there was little attachment to the institutions and procedures of the state. The colonial experience of the state inhibited the development of bureaucratic autonomy after independence: why would someone prioritize impersonal obligations to rules and regulations over personal obligations to friends and family when these state institutions had been experienced as an alien and threatening force? Furthermore, it bears emphasizing that in many parts the presence of the colonial state was limited, as it played a minor role in providing welfare, arranging health care or even dispensing justice. Even today, in many places in Monsoon Asia, the reliance on (and presence of) the police and the courts is limited, as communities maintain an age-old reliance on traditional, customary institutions (such as jirgas in Pakistan and Afghanistan or adat leaders in Indonesia) to settle disputes and address transgressions. Similarly inhabitants rarely depended on the colonial state for overcoming adversities such as illness or joblessness, which also did not help to inspire confidence in, and support for, the rules and regulations of the state. Relatedly, in their attempt to reduce the costs of maintaining a colonial empire, colonial rulers often relied on local aristocrats in a way that significantly changed local power relations. By providing strong backing to such local leaders, who could do what they wanted as long as they supported the colonial regime, old patterns of accountability no longer constrained local rulers. While large parts of Java were largely ruled by the Dutch themselves (with support from the local priyayi), particularly in Kalimantan and Eastern Indonesia, the Dutch cut operational costs by relying on indirect rule. They supported local kings and sultans in exchange for their obedience to colonial rule. This colonial strategy of “betting on the strong” strengthened the hands of these local rulers vis-à-vis any kind of opposition.45 These rulers were hardly constrained by law; as long as they pleased the Dutch, they had considerable freedom in their dealings with local populations. Comparable experiences with the resulting “decentralized despotism” in Africa led Mamdani to argue that the adoption of indirect rule in some areas generated a “bifurcated state” after the colonizers left.46 In these areas the status of inhabitants of ‘subjects’ continued as neither the law nor citizen rights had not commanded much respect on the ground. In short, the historical-institutionalist approach emphasizes how the particular history of state institutions in Monsoon Asia in various ways undermined popular trust in (and support for) formal institutions, while strengthening the importance of informal institutions. In response to the “culturalists” and “instrumentalists” the historical-institutionalist approach does not deny the importance of social norms or

the informality trap 343

instrumental calculations in sustaining informality. Rather, this approach provides a historical explanation for how this strength of informal institutions arose and why formal institutions do not always command a similar adherence.

The informality trap The advertent reader might have noticed that I do not see these three approaches to informality – instrumentalist, culturalist and institutionalist – as mutually exclusive. Rather, these different approaches highlight three different dimensions of the same phenomenon. These three dimensions are mutually reinforcing, generating self-reinforcing mechanisms. The durability of informality and the strength of informal institutions is, I argue, due to strong reinforcing mechanisms between clientelistic behavior of politicians, the informalized character of state institutions, and the pervasiveness of social norms that emphasize reciprocity. The informalized character of the state stimulates citizens and politicians to engage in clientelistic politics and to value norms of reciprocity, while at the same time reciprocity and clientelism contribute to the informalized nature of state institutions. To grasp this interaction between the character of state institutions, political strategies and social norms, consider the impact of the choice of politicians like Binti to reward loyal supporters with lucrative jobs in the local bureaucracy. Such appointments undermine a meritocratic selection of bureaucrats. This limits bureaucratic capacity as loyal rather than capable administrators are appointed, giving civil servants little incentive to excel. As a result, state institutions have limited capacity to implement policies and uphold regulation. A consequence of this limited bureaucratic capacity is that voters realize that politicians who only talk about policies and ideas are not very credible. Voters know from experience that they need to be skeptical about such promises. As policy proposals are unlikely to make an impact, voters often prefer politicians who provide them with tangible material rewards such as cash or a new mosque. In order to obtain the money to fulfil such wishes, politicians either seek support of rich campaign donors or engage in rent-seeking, both of which further undermine the capacity of state institutions to uphold the rule of law. Voters, having extensive experience of the limited protection that the law provides them, realize that in order to deal with this insecurity, personal relations with family and influential friends are vital to protect their quality of life. The strengths of such personal relations and associated social obligations enable politicians to use such personal networks for their election campaigns. Yet the social obligations that politicians thus accumulate embedded in them are subsequently hard to ignore once such politicians assume office, thus generating a huge loss to the state

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Figure 14.2: The informality trap.

as various state budgets are siphoned off to reward and remunerate the personal connections of elected politicians. The resulting inefficient use of resources limits the capacity of the state to provide social safety nets or alleviate poverty. As citizens thus cannot rely on the state to overcome adversities, they face strong incentives to value and honour norms of reciprocity as an alternative avenue to deal with sickness, unemployment or death of a breadwinner. A failure to reciprocate a favor can create problems in the future when help is needed to fund, say, an expensive hospital visit. Citizens have, in other words, good reasons to value these social obligations because they are an important means to deal with the insecurity and dependency that a weakly institutionalized state generates. As such interpersonal ethics become socially engrained, politicians can draw on them to ensure that the distribution of cash will be reciprocated at election time. Such reinforcing mechanisms, very roughly and overly succinctly formulated here, constitute what I would call an ‘informality trap’. Informalized state institutions with a limited regulatory capacity tend to produce social norms and political behavior that reinforce this informalized character of state institutions.

The challenge of promoting “good governance” This informality trap helps explain why initiatives to strengthen state institutions or – as it this mostly termed – to promote good governance often fail or have limited impact. In virtually every country across Monsoon Asia, initiatives are regularly

the informality trap 345

undertaken to strengthen the rule of law and combat corruption, to reform the bureaucracy, to professionalize the police, or to improve the implementation of environmental regulation, etcetera. Such programs are set up both by national governments or funded by big donor organizations such as the World Bank or foreign governments. Such programs involve a range of well-intentioned interventions, from providing training and skills to strengthening accountability mechanisms, improving oversight mechanisms and boosting the transparency of government institutions. The obstacles that all these interventions run into, is that they are being implemented in the context of incentive structures that tend to work against the aims of these programs. For example, over the years many governments have adopted new policies to formalize the process of recruiting and promoting civil servants. Yet because of the interests that politicians have in having loyal and supportive bureaucrats in the right places, they face strong incentives to find ways to circumvent such rules and regulations about bureaucratic staffing.47 Anti-corruption initiatives have met a similar fate: while many countries now have anti-corruption commissions, their capacity to investigate and expose corrupt officials is often rather effectively undermined by political actors who would not be able to finance expensive (clientelistic) election campaigns if anti-corruption commissions would be breathing down their necks. In other words, police officers, civil servants and politicians will likely listen attentively to the training (and admonitions) about how to faithfully implement state laws, but when they go back to their offices, their careers, their popularity among colleagues and their personal finances still depend on their willingness to dispense personal favors and adopt a flexible attitude towards the implementation of state laws. This tension between the need to adhere to formal institutions as well as deal with the incentives generated by the informality trap is nicely captured by anthropologist Silvia Tidey in a study of civil servants in Kupang in eastern Indonesia. She describes how these civil servants try to balance “kebenaran” (“doing the right thing,” i.e. following rules and regulations) and “etika” (“ethics,” the norms and expectations arising out of personal relationships). One of her informants described such pressures related to etika as follows: Of course you have to help out family. The opportunities for employment here are too limited to just say, “Go make it on your own.” If at a family party a family member walks up to me and asks me to give their child a project, how can I refuse? I will see them again at the next party.48

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Conclusion: a massive collective action problem This need of bureaucrats and politicians (and citizens) to balance the “ethical” and “the right thing” is the main reason why the strengthening of state institutions is not only a matter of providing some training, strengthening supervision or adopting new rules and policies. This realization has in recent years led to a re-thinking about how to promote good governance and strengthen state institutions. Until recently the common, “principal-agent” approach, proceeded from the assumption that state institutions will function better if supervisors and citizens (the “principals”) have a greater capacity to hold their “agents” – politicians and bureaucrats – accountable for their failures. In this view, greater democratization, more transparency and more oversight mechanisms should improve the functioning of governments, because such interventions would make it easier for principals (citizens or other supervisors) to check and punish their agent-officials. As a result, until recently, scholars as well as development experts have focussed on empowering citizens and strengthening accountability relations as the main avenue of good governance promotion. The problem with this approach is that it adopts an overly idealistic view of citizens. It assumes that citizens, once given enough power and information, will force politicians to pay greater attention to strengthening bureaucratic performance, adopting effective policies, and promoting fair and equitable distribution of state resources. It assumes, in other words, that citizens are naturally inclined to favor strong formal institutions and that clientelistic practices originate solely at the initiative of politicians. As I have argued in this article, that is a mistaken assumption. In the context of the informality trap, citizens face incentives to reward politicians for their favoritism and clientelism. It is difficult to be a “principled principal” in this context, since particularly for poor citizens a stubborn insistence on rules and regulations might jeapordize useful relationships with influential politicians. In other words, rather than being a principal-agent problem, the challenge of instituting good governance and strengthening state institutions in South and Southeast Asia is a massive collective action problem: while both citizens and power-holders might personally prefer a rule-bound state and a strong rule of law, they are embedded in relationships that make it difficult to contribute to such a strengthening of formal state institutions. State officials and politicians, in particular, would put at risk their welfare, security and careers if they were to ignore the obligations embedded in personal relationships. That brings us back to Toguh and Binti. If Toguh made a fuss about Binti’s corrupt behavior, he would also lose a highly effective conduit to access jobs and other state benefits. He would jepoardize a personal connection that is vital for his quality of life. My surprise at Toguh’s tolerance for Binti’s corruption was, thus, more reflective of my own background. Having grown up in a context where such personal

the informality trap 347

connections to politicians or bureaucrats are (generally) of little consequence, I have the luxury of being concerned about corruption. My surprise, in other words, betrayed a disregard for the social pressures and incentives shaping Toguh’s life.

Notes 1

For an impressive investigation into these events, see “Ghosts in the machine: the land deals behind the downfall of Indonesia’s top judge”, The Gecko Project, 10-4-2018 (https://thegeckoproject.org/ articles/the-land-deals-behind-the-downfall-of-indonesia%E2%80%99s-top-judge/).

2

See Ward Berenschot, Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State (London and New York: Hurst and Colombia University Press, 2011); Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism and the State in Indonesia (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2019).

3

Cf. Hans-Joachim Lauth, “Informal Institutions and Democracy,” Democratization 7, no. 4 (2000): 21-50.

4

The data for this table is obtained from “The Worldwide Governance Indicator (WGI) project,” accessed March 24, 2022 (http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/).

5

See Frederick George Bailey, Politics and Social Change (Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963); Carl Herman Landé, Leaders, Factions, and Parties: The Structure of Philippine Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).

6

Shandana Khan Mohmand, Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters: Democracy under Inequality in Rural Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

7

Allen Hicken, Edward Aspinall and Meredith Weiss, Electoral Dynamics in the Philippines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

8

Meredith L. Weiss, The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020).

9

Edward Aspinall and Mada Sukmajati, Electoral Dynamics in Indonesia: Money Politics, Patronage and Clientelism at the Grassroots (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016).

10

Anastasia Piliavsky, “Introduction,” in Patronage as Politics in South Asia, ed. Anastasia Piliavsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1-36.

11

See for example John Sidel, “Bossism and Democracy in the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia: Towards an Alternative Framework for the Study of ‘Local Strongmen’,” in Politicising Democracy: The New Politics and Democratisation, eds. John Hariss, Kirstin Stokke, and Olle Tornquist (London: Palgrave, 2004), 51-74; Dirk Tomsa and Andreas Ufen, Party Politics in Southeast Asia: Clientelism and Electoral Competition in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines (London: Routledge, 2013); Daniel Arghiros, Democracy, Development and Decentralization in Provincial Thailand (Richmond: Curzon, 2001).

12

James Crabtree, The Billionaire Raj: A Journey through India’s New Gilded Age (London: Tim Duggan Books, 2019).

13

Toby Carroll, Shahar Hameiri, and Lee Jones, The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Politics and Uneven Development Under Hyperglobalisation (New York: Springer Nature, 2020); Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

14

See also Richard Robison, Indonesia: The Rise of Capital (Sydney: Equinox Publishing, 2009 [1986]).

15

Mushtaq H. Khan and Kwame Sundaram Jomo, Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theory and Evidence in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

348 ward berenschot

16

Paul David Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1998).

17

David C. Kang, Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

18

Sebastiaan Pompe, The Indonesian Supreme Court: A Study of Institutional Collapse (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2005).

19

Ward Berenschot, “Everyday Mediation: The Politics of Public Service Delivery in Gujarat, India,” Development and Change 41, no. 5 (2010): 883-905.

20

Jan H. Pierskalla and Audrey Sacks, “Personnel Politics: Elections, Clientelistic Competition and Teacher Hiring in Indonesia,” British Journal of Political Science 50, no. 4 (2020): 1283-1305; Ward Berenschot “Incumbent Bureaucrats: Why Elections Undermine Civil Service Reform in Indonesia,” Public Administration and Development 38 no. 4 (2018): 135-43.

21

Mulyadi, “Welfare Regime, Social Conflict, and Clientelism in Indonesia,” (PhD diss., Australian National University, 2013).

22

Beatrice Jauregui, Provisional Authority: Police, Order, and Security in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

23

Rob Cramb, “The Political Economy of Large-Scale Oil Palm Development in Sarawak,” in The Oil Palm Complex, eds. Rob Cramb and John McCarthy (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 189-247.

24

See for example Adam Michael Auerbach, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Jennifer Bussell, Clients and Constituents: Political Responsiveness in Patronage Democracies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

25

See Vedi R. Hadiz, Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).

26

Kanchan Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

27

Susan C. Stokes, “Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 3 (2005): 315-325.

28

For a good overview, see Susan Stokes, “Political Clientelism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, eds. Carles Boix and Susan Stokes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 604-627.

29

Ward Berenschot, “The Political Economy of Clientelism: A Comparative Study of Indonesia’s Patronage Democracy,” Comparative Political Studies, 51 no. 12 (2018): 156-593.

30

Alvin W. Gouldner, cited in Stokes, “Political Clientelism,” 608.

31

Arghiros, Democracy, Development and Decentralization in Provincial Thailand, 9.

32

Piliavsky, “Introduction,” 12.

33

Cf. Lisa Björkman, “‘You Can’t Buy a Vote’: Meanings of Money in a Mumbai Election,” American Ethnologist 41, no. 4 (2014): 617-634.

34

Karl D. Jackson, “Bureaucratic Polity: A Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of Power and Communications in Indonesia,” in Political Power and Communications in Indonesia, eds. Karl D. Jackson and Lucien Pye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 36.

35

Piliavsky, “Introduction,” 18.

36

Ibid.

37

Cf. Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2014).

38

Henk Schulte Nordholt, Een Geschiedenis van Zuidoost-Azië (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

the informality trap 349

39

See Tony Day, Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002).

40

Christian Pelras, “Patron-Client Ties among the Bugis and Makassarese of South Sulawesi,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 156, no. 3 (2000): 401 and 402.

41

Benedict R. Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” in Culture and Politics in Indonesia, ed. Claire Holt (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1972), 52. See also Douglas Webber, “A Consolidated Patrimonial Democracy? Democratization in Post-Suharto Indonesia,” Democratization 13, no. 3 (2006): 396-420.

42

See James C. Scott, “The Erosion of Patron-Client Bonds and Social Change in Rural Southeast Asia,” The Journal of Asian Studies 32, no. 1 (1972): 5-37.

43

John Thayer Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999).

44

Mohmand, Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters.

45

Gerry van Klinken, “Citizenship and Local Practices of Rule in Indonesia.” Citizenship Studies 22, no. 2 (2018): 112-28.

46

Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

47

See Berenschot, “Incumbent Bureaucrats,” 135-43.

48

Sylvia Tidey, “Between the Ethical and the Right Thing: How (Not) to Be Corrupt in Indonesian Bureaucracy in an Age of Good Governance,” American Ethnologist 43, no. 4 (2016): 668.

CHAPTER 15

Epics in Worlds of Performance: A South/Southeast Asian Narrativity Bernard Arps1

Abstract From Mahabharata and Ramayana to stories of Amir Hamza, Jesus, and Gesar: across a spectrum of locally and historically peculiar inflections, epics in South and Southeast Asia embody a typical epicality. The author examines seven of its characteristics. South and Southeast Asian epics are fashioned by kinship; they revolve around love, leadership, and land; the dramatis personae exhibit complex patterns of idiosyncrasy versus genericness; the heroes’ adventures tend to be instigated by others; storyworlds and forms of narration highlight feeling (affect); the narration is lavish and organized modularly; the resulting epic realism is heightened, alternate, and mediagenic. Epics are stories, but their critical characteristics are projected on lived experience, yielding understandings of past and present and paradigms for the future.

Keywords: epic narration; epic performance; epic media; epicality; comparative religion

Cultural life in the South/Southeast Asian region, from Afghanistan to the Philippines and Indonesia, favours a certain kind of “story-hood” or “story-ness”: preferred personalities and roles, motivations, courses of events, times, and locations, as well as ways of combining them and understanding them. This narrativity does not reside in stories alone. It is also present in ideas about how things in the world would or should happen. But it is in the telling, enactment, and depiction of stories that narrativity manifests itself most comprehensively and palpably. I propose that it is especially pronounced in the grand and complex hero- and heroine-focused stories often styled epics. Across a dynamic spectrum of locally and historically peculiar inflections, epics in South/Southeast Asia exhibit the features of an epicality (as I shall call it) that is typical for the region. Tellings of the famous Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa partake of this epicality, but so do, among others, the stories of Amir Hamza, champion of Islam avant la lettre, and his offspring, which used to be popular in all of Muslim Asia; the narrative of the successive prophets of Islam in numerous vernaculars across the region; the jātakas, the accounts of earlier lives of the Buddha told and performed in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia; the ever-mutating tale of the

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courtly exploits of medieval Javanese prince Panji and his relatives, once known in an area from Burma to Bali; and the Tibetan stories of Buddhist king Gesar, also told in Mongolia and Central Asia. Heroic narratives with more local distribution like the masculinist stories of Ālhā (North India) and the vast Buginese La Galigo (South Sulawesi, Indonesia) which relates, in numerous episodes, the first generations of humanity, also evince a South/Southeast Asian epicality. The literary inscription, oral and dramatic performance, and visual depiction of these and other epic stories have had a role in elite assertions of authority in South and Southeast Asia for at least two millennia. Highly celebrated epics were reinterpreted to survive the transition from Hindu-Buddhist to Islamic hegemony in parts of the region. This happened, for instance, in early modern Java, where court scholars recognized Muslim mystical truths in centuries-old Hindu and Buddhist epic poems.2 Many epics were introduced from elsewhere. Some marginalized or ousted earlier ones, like the pasyon texts (recounting the Passion of Christ) in several Philippine languages whose unison chanted recitation during Holy Week took the place of native tale-telling.3 New epics were attuned to locally established cultural and religious standards; thus, for instance, the stories of the prophets, above all Muhammad, in early seventeenth-century Bengal.4 Several epics continue to be told in drama, dance, painting, sculpture, and puppetry, and to be employed as charters for power, in the religious realm and in the current global arena of competing nationalisms. In this chapter I synthesize a plethora of fluid features in an attempt to formulate the main narrative traits of South/Southeast Asian epic. In conclusion I will briefly step outside storytelling proper to suggest how epic worldmaking receives new meanings under globalized and mediatized circumstances.

Key characteristics of South/Southeast Asian epics The term epic has classical European roots. Misgivings about its applicability in other contexts are well taken: not all epics are like the Iliad and Odyssey or medieval European romances, just with another religious background or in another cultural environment. But elsewhere, too, grand and elaborate stories are told about heroes and heroines on adventures.5 And once one looks beyond the surface, across languages, and with a broad compass, features appear that, taken together, are typical of South/Southeast Asian epic storytelling. This epicality may be captured in a chain of critical characteristics: (1) an overall outlook concerned not so much with chrono-history as with noble kinship relations, horizontal, vertical, or across lifetimes, (2) and with the interpersonal and factional issues they engender, particularly struggles over love, leadership,

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and land, (3) which are enacted in the dealings of focal personalities who, unique though they are, belong to types on several levels, and who appear vis-à-vis masses of nameless others, (4) and whose undertakings tend to be not of their own design but willed by deities, gurus, parents, or partners, (5) dealings and undertakings that highlight the protagonists’ feelings, moods, and temperaments, as part of an atmospheric storyworld (6) constructed in splendid, modularly structured narration. What results is (7) poetically evoked worlds that, elevated as they are above ordinary social life, are animated by a concentrate of weighty sociopolitical problems, and that therefore, while alternate, are realistic in crucial respects, as well as philosophically fertile. The preceding picture is abstract, while these epics consist in the sounds of sung and spoken languages (Persian, Sanskrit, Pali, Urdu, Hindi, Tibetan, Bengali, Thai, Khmer, Malay, Javanese, Tagalog, and countless others) and music, colours and forms, moving bodies and expressions, which ask to be listened to, watched, and contemplated. Every telling is unlike others, and feels different. This picture is moreover a polythetic composite; not all these traits occur in every South/Southeast Asian epic narration. Nor, I emphasize, are the individual traits exclusive to South/ Southeast Asian epicality. This picture simplifies. Let me, perforce too briefly, complicate and illustrate it.

Fashioned by kinship To borrow Bakhtin’s term for the narrative vantage point that has been commonsense in European-style storytelling from antiquity: the outlook of South/Southeast Asian epics is not in the first place chronotopic.6 Whereas epic as identified in academic scholarship on the basis of European (and some African) material tends to tell the life of a hero, and may expand into an “epic cycle” recounting the history of an event or period (or variably elaborating a particular narrative theme)7, the design principle that governs the storyworlds of South/Southeast Asian epic is kinship. The time-space of South/Southeast Asian epics is fashioned according to the kinship network of their protagonists. This network has multiple dimensions: consanguinity, affinity, and descent, of course, but reincarnation too features as a form of kinship.8 In South/Southeast Asian epics, history and place may be specified and asserted if the political and religious circumstances of narration require, but they are contingent. It is customary to characterize epic as long,9 even endless.10 For South/Southeast Asian epics, which exist primarily as a dynamic field of oral, dramatic, and literary performance, which are told and retold, and which cohere, ramify, and even shrink by dint of their protagonists’ kinship, the image of length misses the point.11 Like

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the kinship that governs them, these epics are, however, expansive. They grow by accruing new plots and motifs around their dramatis personae, and insertions and sequels narrating other generations. They may contract too, losing sight of plots and characters sensed to be peripheral or – in cases where specific tellings are canonized – deemed spurious. In the living epic traditions of South/Southeast Asia new episodes involving beloved characters continue to be invented. The temporality of these episodes relative to a main or canonical story may be irrelevant, unlike their relation in terms of the protagonists’ kinship. Puppeteers of the Malay shadowplay (wayang) created, in performance, a “complex of tales featuring Seri Rama and his descendants”. Besides a Malay version of the Ramayana there was “a mass of minor tales, termed cerita ranting (‘twig’ tales), relating the later or minor adventures of the Ramayana characters”.12 In the Javanese shadowplay, which beside the Ramayana presents Mahabharata-based stories, there is a similar distinction between “branch plays” (lakon carangan) and “trunk plays” (lakon jejer), like in Sundanese rod puppetry with its branch and main plays.13 The shadowplay of Lombok, which tells Hamza stories, distinguishes between plays based on a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century Javanese poetic version of this epic published in the 1930s by the colonial government in Batavia (now Jakarta), plays drawn from local palm-leaf manuscripts, and plays created by puppeteers.14 In all these genres, some branch plays may be performed once and never again, others become fixtures of the repertoire. As Vidya Dehejia has noted for storytelling across South Asia – referring to the canonical literary Mahabharata, popular oral and dramatic performances, Buddhist texts, and narrative sculpture and painting – again and again the chief storyline is brought to a stand to present a subplot featuring a personage who has come in sight.15 This pattern was also part of the narrative dynamics of the epic of Hamza. These dynamics yielded vast expansion when the story was recorded in written form, especially after it began to be printed in the nineteenth century. When Ph. S. van Ronkel compared the Javanese poem of Hamza just referred to, first published in the 1880s in 4,000 pages of Javanese script, with the fourteenth-century Malay ancestor one third its size, he observed a more elaborate style of narration comprising digressions, descriptions of visual images, addition of events, and foreshadowing of later events,16 but also insertion of substantive new stories.17 Familiar characters often received new names; wholly new personages appeared as well.18 In similar vein “In the course of countless retellings before faithful audiences, the Indo-Persian Ḥamzah story seems to have grown generally longer and more elaborate throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”.19 The 46 volumes of the Urdu Dāstān-e Amīr Ḥamzah (Story of Amir Hamza) published 1881-c. 1905, featured, in comparison with earlier renditions, “an unimaginably more sumptuous verbal texture, with far more elaborate and prolonged wordplay, and more

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detailed and colorful descriptions; far more colorful and resonant names; a faster movement of events, and a larger, more complex variety of incidents, outcomes, and whole subplots; […] a new notion of rivalry between the ‘right-handers’ and the ‘left-handers,’ champions who sit on either side of Ḥamzah’s throne”.20 Creation of novel episodes and intrigues with protagonists both established and new shades into the making of sequels, a process that is likewise part and parcel of South/Southeast Asian epic. In accordance with the principle of expansion by kinship they relate the adventures of the canonical heroes’ relatives, especially sons, daughters, and grandchildren, and sometimes still further down the lineage. The latter two-thirds of the 46-volume Urdu text focus on Hamza’s sons and grandsons.21 Adventures involving Rengganis, Hamza’s daughter-in-law, were tremendously popular across the length of Java and in Bali and Lombok, in literature,22 tale-telling, puppetry, theatre, even dance. No Rengganis is known from the Persian versions or the Malay adaptation on which the Javanese literary versions, in turn, are originally based. A Javanese text even tells the adventures of a prince descended from Hamza in the ninth degree.23 Despite its exalted status as scripture in Theravada Buddhism, stories were inserted into and appended to the Vessantara-Jātaka in Cambodia, about further adventures of the hero Vessantara’s son and daughter,24 while in the Kathmandu valley this jātaka ends with a focus on Vessantara’s father as well as his son.25 On the other hand South/Southeast Asian epics may fade at the edges and their normally dynamic form may become frozen when they are canonized or raised to the rank of Heritage. While Panji stories used to be many, with the extended royal family of four kingdoms that formed its cast presenting an inexhaustible source of variations on a single narrative schema,26 this epic is all but defunct in Malay contexts and only a few plots are alive in the current repertoire of Javanese and Balinese shadowplay and dance drama. In Thailand the genre consists in a single libretto with a definite dramatis personae. This is the celebrated Inao of the royal Thai court, attributed to Rama II (1767-1824).27 At least locally and for a time, a South/Southeast Asian epic’s typical narrative variability may be curtailed by authoritative codification or proscription, or it may shrink due to lack of interest.

Love, leadership, land Kinship also furnishes the raw materials for plot. The issues raised in South/ Southeast Asian epic storytelling are diverse; the performance mode, in particular, makes it possible to thematize just about any current interest. But there are tendencies, intertwined with the other characteristics of South/Southeast Asian epic. The big issues that glue together the storylines can be captured under the triad of love,

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leadership, and land. These are precisely the matters that tend to turn problematic when social conventions pre-patterned by kin relations are flouted, when different kinship-based expectations conflict, or when close kin are separated.28 There is little need for examples from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It is well known that the Ramayana’s narrative arises when Rama is exiled to the wilderness at the demand of a queen who wants her own son, Rama’s half-brother, to become king, and that the epic’s main adventures occur because Rama’s wife is desired and abducted by an evil alien ruler. It is well known also that the rivalry between the main characters of the Mahabharata, the five Pandawas and their numerous cousins the Kaurawas, revolves around sovereignty over the capital of Hastina. Parental and spousal love are key motifs here as well, and in folk tellings, for instance in Javanese shadowplay, romantic longing triggers many an episode. Similarly in India’s oral epics. In their enlightening comparative overview, Blackburn and Flueckiger distinguish four types of Indian oral epic: martial, sacrificial, romantic, and miracle-cycle.29 Leaving aside the miracle-cycle epic, they propose that the “martial and sacrificial epics are similar in that both are concerned with power, social obligation, and social unity; they turn on the themes of revenge, regaining lost land, or restoring lost rights.” These epics “stress group solidarity”, whereas epics of the romantic type “celebrate individual actions that threaten that solidarity”; their primary conflict is “a quest for love”.30 The differences are considerable, yet, in order to recognize the flexibility of these stories across actual tellings, to extend the scope to Southeast Asia, and to include Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian epics, it is best to take greater distance and regard the epics they distinguish as one category whose plots are rich enough to contain martial, sacrificial, romantic, and virtuous themes that may potentially be emphasized in all. Love, leadership, and land propel the epics’ macro-plots, but they also feature among the smaller motifs that storytellers, irrespective of the medium of narration, insert and highlight in their stories. For example, the techniques of Hamza tale-telling in India, from Persian narration in seventeenth-century Patna to Urdu narration in nineteenth-century Lucknow, prominently included the depiction of razm (war) and ḥusn o ‘ishq (beauty and love).31 In the framework of South/ Southeast Asian epic the significance of the beauty-and-love category is evident. The former category, too, is unequivocally relevant: like in other epics, in Hamza narratives war tends to be waged to win dominance, a partner, or both.

Idiosyncrasy on several planes The principal protagonists of South/Southeast Asian epics are veritable personalities, with remarkable strengths (some preternatural) but also flaws and quirks.

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Thus Kumbhakarna, a major character in the Ramayana, is a glutton, as is Hamza’s foster brother ‘Umar Ma‘di Karab, a scoundrel who mends his ways; Krishna is the perfect lover; and Asman Pari is vehemently jealous of Hamza’s other wives. The principals’ idiosyncracies are all the more pronounced because, firstly, they do belong to clear sociocultural categories: Kumbhakarna is an ogre (rākśasa), ‘Umar Ma‘di Karab a low-born human, Krishna the ultimate god-king, Asman Pari a fairy. And secondly, because they act against the background of a dramatis personae that is categorial throughout, on multiple levels from a limited set of character types to divisions into left- and right-hand parties, or good and evil. That the prominent protagonists are true personalities does not mean that their mental life is externalized, or that they are shown to undergo some kind of character development. On the whole it is not and they are not.32 Moreover these personalities fit a small set of character types. The mutable form of the Panji epic in Southeast Asia, which yielded ever-changing variants of roughly the same plot peopled in each case by very similar heroes, brings home that even the prominents are typical. “Panji” in one telling is not the same individual as in another, but he definitely is an instance of the same charming, attractive, amorous, and brave characterological type. The “many Ramayanas” identified in South Asia confirm this point:33 within the category formed by the multifarious tellings of the same epic story, the prominent dramatis personae represent types. With regard to Java it has moreover been suggested that Rama, Arjuna, Panji, and Hamza – the principal heroes (at least nominally) of four canonical epics – instantiate the same character type.34 In some respects this is indisputable. In performance traditions where puppet physiology and iconography symbolize, among other things, character, these four are alike visibly and thus also internally: refined, handsome, dignified, introverted, a little aloof. In an Indian context, the same phenomenon has been discussed under the aspect of influence of one epic on another, less authoritative epic. The central male and female protagonists of Ālhā, for instance, show remarkable characterological similarities to those of the Mahabharata.35 But despite this tendency for a limited pool of heroic types to form, each epic hero is an entirely distinct individual, whose self takes shape narratively in entirely different domains of interaction. (Pigeaud severely understated this when he wrote that the individual dramatis personae of Javanese theatre are “not altogether without some characteristics of their own”.36) While Rama wages war to regain his one and only love Sita, Arjuna is married to several daughters of kings and sages (two to five in Javanese accounts) and begets children wherever he goes, Panji wanders in search of his betrothed who has vanished, and Hamza accepts propositions again and again from princesses besotted with him. And this concerns just one facet – linked to love, a key factor in epic plots – of their multifaceted personalities.

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The individualist protagonism of South/Southeast Asian epic occurs, then, as part of a dramatis personae that is pervasively structured into categories. In addition to the character typology that appears even among the prominent figures, the dramatis personae include large numbers of personages in several cross-cutting categories of otherness. Firstly there is a large and shifting cast of nameless and intrinsically stereotypical “extras”: soldiers, servants, officials, country people. The Javanese wayang srambahan, multi-purpose puppets (rod or shadow), furnish an example. Each such puppet can be used to represent different individuals with roughly the same character and status: the ogre king, the refined young knight, the modest lady, and so on. In literary and oral modes of telling, many personages occur in a single episode only, often remaining anonymous. To mention a random example from the epic of Hamza: the main narrative function of the unnamed widowed mother of the goatherd called Siru, Sahsiyar, or Siyah-Sher (his name varying with the version) is as a relative and interactant of more central protagonists that do have individual profiles, in this case especially Hamza, whom Siru has found lying in a stream, unconscious and severely wounded. (They care for Hamza, he recovers, and they are generously rewarded.) Secondly, a distinction tends to be made between good and evil sides. Many interesting ambivalences and exceptions notwithstanding, these parties have remarkably clear-cut membership, acted out openly in the battle scenes that dot most epics. The Pandawas versus the Kaurawas in the Mahabharata are an example, as are Hamza’s Arab and other Muslim followers versus the infidels. This distinction intersects that between prominent and stereotypical personages. Yet even in Mahabharata-based puppetry in Java, for instance, a third side often appears, the ogres from overseas, who constitute a binary opposite vis-à-vis the humans, irrespective of whether the latter are evil or good. These aliens reinforce the epic problematic: they compound the difficulty of attaining the desired love, leadership, or land, as they seek the same bride or divine boon for their ruler that the human factions are competing for. The matter is complicated still further by a distinction between left-hand and right-hand characters such as is made in Javanese and Balinese shadow play but also in the Urdu Hamza text referred to earlier.37 Idiosyncrasy on several intersecting levels is what characterizes the personages peopling the South/Southeast Asian epics. The prominents have distinct profiles, thrown into further relief by the nameless population that surrounds them. At the same time, like the formulaic others with whom they interact, they are idiosyncratic also as types. The typology has multiple planes and partitions and there are remarkable exceptions in category membership. The resulting structure is intricate and dynamic.

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Multiple heroes, exploits unsought Although the prominent protagonists in South/Southeast Asian epics each have distinctive personality traits, often their actions and interactions reveal them as remarkably conventional. It is not psychological complexity or sensitivity that defines them, but sheer heroicity: prowess (or rectitude in the more pacific epics), invincibility, resolve. This goes for the male ones and in the Hamza many female ones too. Especially for heroines, beauty and virtue are essential. In epithets and descriptive characterizations the same hyper-heroic merits are eulogized. The acknowledged heroes’ stereotypicality has two narrative correlates. Although a particular personage may seem to be an epic’s principal and that epic may even be named after him, many storylines tend to follow others. In accordance with the kinship-based way of being of the epics they are mostly siblings, children and grandchildren, future and current partners, companions, and rivalling relatives. In the Mahabharata, lacking as it does a single nominal hero, this multiple protagonism is obvious, also according to the alternative titles of the epic’s main part: Bhāratayuddha (War of the Bharatas, i.e. the dynasty of which the opposing cousins are scions) and Pandawa Jaya (The Pandawas Victorious). The same goes for the Ramayana, witness for example the importance of the monkey Hanuman, while in narrative practice Hamza’s adoptive brother and trusted companion ‘Amar bin Umayya is as prominent as and characterologically more colourful than the epic’s title hero. Another narrative correlate, crucial for understanding and appreciating South/ Southeast Asian epicality (and indeed the broader narrativity in which this epicality is central), is that the heroes’ exploits tend to find their root causes in the desires and plans – malevolent or virtuous – of others. The principals move about all the time. Typically these journeys that turn out adventurous are not instigated by the heroes themselves: they are requested by a relative or prospective partner, suggested by a sage, commanded by a king, or ordained by a deity. The powerful instigators stay in place. This phenomenon has been observed in scholarship on Indian epics, but in rather different terms and specifically with regard to divinities. Deities in the Mahabharata and Ālhā are “deeply involved in the struggles of the heroes, protecting them, helping them, and advising them”.38 Indeed Smith identified such divine involvement as the fundamental ideology of the Indian epics.39 He argued that these narratives represent humans as the gods’ scapegoats, a condition from which they cannot free themselves. Whether this is an insightful generalization with regard to the epics in Indian Hindu environments I cannot judge. For the Indic epics in Muslim contexts, like in Java, for the epics in Hinduistic Bali, for Buddhist and Islamic epics, and for the pasyon it goes too far. Hamza, for instance, is repeatedly able to better his fortunes by returning to God, whom he had begun

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to forget out of devotion to a human beloved or sheer arrogance. Nevertheless in these stories too initiatives are often taken for the heroes, and motivations provided to them, by dramatis personae of superior authority or wisdom. To capture this phenomenon of distributed agency one should generalize further: not restrict the motivator or instigator role to divinities (as Schomer and Smith did), and include motivation and instigation irrespective of their moral status. Exile, for instance, is a recurring theme. Rama has many of his adventures as a consequence of being banished to the wilderness with his wife and brother by his father. Sita herself will be exiled by Rama. The Pandawas are exiled for seventeen years after losing a game of dice. Prince Vessantara and his family are banished from their kingdom by popular demand. And so on. When, for instance in Panji narratives, protagonists do travel wholly of their own accord, they wander about aimlessly,40 and when Panji and his brothers search for Panji’s vanished betrothed or spouse, this is necessitated by uncontrollable yearning.41 The exploits of these protagonists, too, befall them. These cases, key to the Panji epic’s overarching plot, also fall in the category of unsought adventures that helps to endow South/Southeast Asian epic with its appeal.

Affectfulness Prime among the sociopolitical matters routinely foregrounded and problematized in South/Southeast Asian epic is affect. The prominence of feelings is striking because, as noted, individual personages’ reasonings, while also key to plot, are more rarely expressed. The key dramatis personae are typified by their temperaments, their dealings are rich in sentiments, and a personage’s mood may be thematized so compellingly that a social situation in the story world is pervaded by it, creating a hyper-emotive atmosphere. Tension and rage, heartbreaking sadness, joyful elation, indomitable defiance, infatuation, awe, wonderment, and so on may be described in words by the narrator, embodied through a change of facial expression or a change of puppet, acted out in movement, posture, dialogue or monologue, suggested in the music accompanying the drama or narration, or evoked by quoting a poem or song. Often several such techniques are used in combination. Moods may be highlighted by suddenly bursting into existence from calm neutrality or from another mood. Oral Hamza narration in South Asia is a case in point. The tale-teller’s handbook from 1630s Patna referred to earlier consists largely of an anthology of texts from divergent sources grouped into four categories: battle (razm), courtly assembly (bazm), courtship (ḥusn o ‘ishq, beauty and love), and trickery (‘ayyārī). Meant as sources of inspiration and quotation in performance, these categories are toolboxes

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for the art.42 While these categories concern four types of scenes distinguished by the kind of dramatic action that dominates them, it should be obvious that at the same time they are distinct in the affective realm. These texts may help to create, respectively, an ambience of valour; grandeur; loveliness and passion; and humorousness, wit, and astonishment. In a nineteenth-century account of the theory, the courtship had been replaced by enchanted worlds (ṭilism),43 but clearly this category too was a matter of ambience. Literary tellings of the epics are also affectful throughout. As a rule they are cast in verse, and this verse is chanted or sung. Often the verse is arranged in stanzas. These chunks of text, patterned by melody and metre, are atmospheric units. According to the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, the śloka, the stanzaic verse form that dominates the two big Sanskrit epics, was created in person by the Rāmāyaṇa’s mythic narrator, Vālmīki. The first śloka was an utterance of Vālmīki triggered by the grief (śoka, hence the name of the form) he felt upon seeing a bird in love being killed; it was “fit for the accompaniment of string and percussion instruments”.44 To remain with the Ramayana, Tulsidas’s late sixteenth-century bhakti-version called the Rāmcaritmānas utilizes several metres; verses in one of these metres “seem to be inserted at moments of heightened emotion” while the metre of the bulk of the narrative is “more prosaic”.45 In Thailand each chapter of the Vessantara-Jātaka is recited with a melody and rhythm that expresses its specific mood,46 and in Saiyad Sultān’s early seventeenth-century Bengali biography of the Prophet Muhammad “[m]ore than a score of rāgas are named […]; a particular rāga is specified for individual sections of the text, presumably selected on account of suitability to the mood of the poetic theme at hand”.47 Finally, the Javanese verse forms of epic literature par excellence for at least 400 years, tembang, comprise stanzas with distinctive metres and melodies that according to court poetics are assigned temperaments and moods and in other traditions are untheorized but do differ in terms of affect.48 In South/Southeast Asian epic literature, then, text tends to be presented in metrico-melodic parcels that packet the narrative in atmosphere. On a different level from these affect-evoking devices in performative and literary practice, the plotlines of individual epics abound in events occasioned and defined by emotion. Some of these emotive episodes are famous, and decisive for the overall plot: Draupadi’s embarrassment and rage in the Mahabharata, Rama’s desperate longing for the vanished Sita, Hamza’s insuperable grief over the death of his beloved Mihr Nigar. Of course this is hardly unique to South/Southeast Asia; far be it from me to suggest that epic elsewhere is emotionally bland. But there are differences. Aristotle’s catharsis illustrates a noteworthy one. In a nutshell, it poses undesired emotion as a condition to be purged, as opposed to, in the traditions under discussion, affect as an always ambient human property that, at moments of intensification and focus, sparks off action and adventure.

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It is acknowledged through the region but theorized in most detail in India – particularly in the rasa theory known from the Nāṭyaśāstra49 – that performances have an emotional impact on audiences. They may be designed for that. Two examples must suffice, both from Java though almost a millennium apart. In the eleventh-century Shivaite poem Arjunawiwāha (‘Arjuna’s nuptials’), which elaborates on an episode from the Mahabharata, God Indra disguised as a sage counsels Arjuna: “There are those who, watching wayang, weep in sadness, silly and gullible, / While they do know that it is carved hide that is moving and speaking. / They show themselves fond of appearances, failing to appreciate / The truth that all being is unreality, a mirage”.50 An 1870s textbook for shadowplay stipulates that a puppeteer should possess, besides “the ability […] to make people laugh”, “the ability to induce emotions like pity and fondness for the personages in the spectators”.51 In this genre of epic narration, as in others across the region, there are dedicated strategies for drawing spectators and readers into the story’s emotive universe. These techniques and strategies include sensorily rich forms of narration, and composition of the performance or text from atmospherically distinct building blocks. They yield a peculiar epic story world which extends, I suggest, to the lived experience of people in South/Southeast Asia. A vivid example occurs annually in the Philippines. In Pampanga, Central Luzon (and probably elsewhere too), an “emotional contagion” is produced by the communal sung recitation of pasyon that colours Holy Week.52 In the sorrowful ambience created by the pasyon’s melodious poetic narrative, which can be heard everywhere, various other forms of devotion, including self-flagellation and crucifixion, achieve their cultural significance.53

Splendid modular narration Indeed the narration of South/Southeast Asian epic is normally profuse, even sumptuous. Colourful costumed dramatico-musical performance is a prevalent kind of epic narration across the entire region (see Fig. 15.1). Even the story with scriptural status that is the Vessantara-Jātaka is or was performed as drama in Thailand54 and Burma,55 while its ritual recitation in the Kathmandu Valley takes on dramatic qualities for it “is not only the story of the generous prince but also an encouragement to perform the Eighth-Day Vow, the event during which the story of the generous prince is regularly told”.56 In parts of Java, atmospheric elements of the verse biography of the Islamic prophet Yusuf (Joseph) – likewise a religiously significant epic text – are mirrored in ritual acts performed by participants at set points during nocturnal reading sessions.57 Intricate paintings, murals, reliefs, and statuary are common as well. In Southeast Asia polychrome puppetry has been a conspicuous mode of performing

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Figure 15.1 (left): Topeng (masked) performers from Madura or East Java. Photograph by Kurkdjian, 1905 or 1906. Leiden University Library, Collection KITLV 10859. Figure 15.2 (right): Mahmood Farooqui tells the epic story of Karna from the Mahabharata. Photograph: Dastangoi Collective, 2018/Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Mahmood_farooqi_.jpg).

the epics for centuries, and in parts of India it used to be for the Ramayana; not to mention the use of narrative scrolls in the telling of several epics across South and Southeast Asia. Other South/Southeast Asian epics are (traditionally at least) not dramatized or represented visually but through the human voice only, their wordings perhaps recorded in manuscripts; this applies, for instance, to the Buginese La Galigo.58 But when epic storytelling is oral, its multisensory potential is nonetheless utilized to advantage. It employs florid language usually chanted or sung,59 not rarely with instrumental accompaniment. It has a visual and corporeal aspect; for instance, the narrator’s gestures were an integral part of Indo-Persian Hamza storytelling (see Fig. 15.2).60 Even in the mode of epic narration that is performatively most restrained, that is seated and unaccompanied recitation from manuscripts and books, the language is poetic and the words are sung. In many cases, moreover, the setting is made rich and beautiful. Filipino reciters of the pasyon face an altar adorned with images of Christ, burning candles, and flowers. In Shan State (Burma) and Thailand, the monk who chants the Pali text of the Vessantara-Jātaka is seated

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in a thronelike chair in a specially decorated preaching hall, whose decorations include images of the narrative.61 The worlds that South/Southeast Asian epic narrates are magnificent as well. Palaces and pleasure-gardens, battlefields and hermitages, mountains and countryside are impressive and beautiful. The prominent dramatis personae’s behaviour is grand. The good are exemplarily so, the wicked are ultra-evil, the wisdom of the wise is profound. These personages frequently engage in performative conduct. As they show sadness or bravado or stately restraint, they are conscious of the impressions they make on the other dramatis personae. Those who hear, read, or see the narration are invited to attend to these ostentatious modes of behaviour as well. (It should be clear that this multiple-level performativeness runs through several of the other epic characteristics I have identified.) The flow of aesthetic sensation in all formats is neither steady nor chaotic. The texts, performances, and narrative images are composed in modular fashion: they are created from building blocks that expert members of the audience know to be discrete. Two kinds of narrative module are widespread. One is scenes; South/ Southeast Asian epic narration is scenic. The other is poetic verses that bring out an atmosphere. The most conspicuous narrative units, scenes, are visualized as flamboyant tableaus that depict encounters. Given that the epic storyworlds invariably come into being as a result of protagonists’ journeys, it is remarkable that the journeying itself is typically passed over. It demarcates scenes. What counts more is the meetings, both source and result of the movement. The encounters belong to a limited set of types, often in stock settings. I have noted that the theory of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century Hamza storytelling in northern India concerned four kinds of scenes.62 There is ample local, historical, and generic variation across South/Southeast Asia, but scenes of confrontation, amorous interaction, courtly assembly, and humour are not limited to Hamza or India. A fifth kind of scene is also common, one in which a wise senior character teaches another character. These encounters involving personal instruction are archetypal for Buddhist epic, but also occur in Mahabharatas and Ramayanas, the Hamza, and so on. They possess key structural importance in South/Southeast Asian epic, as in them the heroes receive the motivation to act and to travel. Scenes in drama and puppetry tend to be delimited with music, meta-narrative formulas, entrances and exits, and other formal techniques. In stanzaic literature, cantos (strings of stanzas in the same verse form) constitute metrico-melodic chapters. These interlock with the scenes, the principal divisions in the narrative dimension. Dehejia distinguishes seven types of visual narration in Indian sculpture and painting over the centuries, from the stone reliefs on early Buddhist stupas to colonial-era paper manuscripts.63 All are scenic. Making out what I would call the

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modules – here too, scenes showing personages interacting – may require expert knowledge. Formal visual dividers between scenes may be lacking. The placement of scenes may not reflect the order of occurrence. But then in time-based narrative presentation, too, scenes may be separated by anything ranging from clear-cut boundaries through soft transitions to subtle shifts of focus from one interaction to another. And listeners or spectators may likewise be challenged to identify the temporal relation between encounters narrated subsequently, for it may remain implicit whether a new scene preceded, coincided with, or followed the scene that was just narrated. A device of epic narration deployed across the region in drama, puppetry, oral storytelling, and certain literary genres, is the insertion of poetic stanzas and songs to help create or reinvigorate an affect-laden atmosphere.64 This is modular in another way. Often the lyrics of such evocatory verses are quoted from texts. These may be the perceived literary sources of the narrative. Thus from time to time the Old Javanese prose tellings of the Mahabharata and Ramayana contain ślokas from the Sanskrit exemplars. The function of these quotations has been subject to debate.65 With regard to the Persian verses found in Malay epic texts Brakel has ventured that “possibly they contribute to the creation of the desired atmosphere (rasa) in which the action fulfils itself”.66 I concur. The overarching nature of these interjected stanzas is affective. The affect sought may be an emotion, it may also be a matter of invoking the poetic exemplariness of the narrative’s canonical source, or its religious or intellectual authority, likewise something felt. In the case of the Sanskrit ślokas dotting Old Javanese narrations and the Persian verses in Malay, the practice both reflects and generates a particular philological sensibility, one that delights in infusing a prized mythico-religious and lingual alterity into the here and now of the narrative, and that of the reading and hearing. The sources of verses that are quoted in South/Southeast Asian epic narrative may be unrelated to the particular story that is being told. This is often so in the mood songs sung in puppetry from Java67 and Bali.68 Persophone Hamza storytelling in early seventeenth-century India knew a technique called “ornate recitation” (muraṣṣa‘-khvānī) which consisted in inserting a prose or verse passage from an existing text into the narration. According to Khan’s analysis this led to a certain “degree of alienation […] to the bulk of the romance, as apprehended by the audience”,69 but I propose to regard it in the opposite direction: at selected junctures, “ornate recitation” evokes the values concentrated in these quotations and imbues the epic storyworld with them. These values are manifold. Sources recommended in the narrator’s handbook from which this information derives included the Shahnama, a Sufi allegory, moralistic fables, and historiographical works.70 In yet other cases, such as the Rāmcaritmānas, evocatory stanzas are not quotations but part of the literary composition itself. They stand out because their

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metres differ from the workaday narrative metres that carry the bulk of the text.71 Likewise, according to Wadley’s comparative analysis of oral epic from various Indian regions, speech or chant which advances the narrative tends to be interspersed with songs that “provide critical thematic development, often at points of crisis or tension” or that serve as interludes.72 In some genres, drumming has these same functions73 while in the mood songs of wayang across Indonesia not only the lyrics but also the instrumental accompaniment help to evoke atmospheres.74 The evocatory force of these verses is not necessarily textual or even lingual. The narrative building blocks – the scenes depicting encounters engendered and strung together by means of the protagonists’ travel, and the ready-made affective interludes at significant junctures – are not merely tools enabling fluent and attractive storytelling. It is in terms of these modules that South/Southeast Asian epic worlds are experienced. The very being of these epics is modular, both on the plane of performance and within the stories. This intricately interlocking modularity, typical of South/Southeast Asian epic, also patterns actual lifeworlds, at least in certain ritual domains. Music/motion versus speech/stasis segments, which follow each other in Southeast Asian puppetry, have also been identified in Javanese weddings and social dance parties.75 When, in a daily event announced with music, a Mughal emperor displayed himself to his gathered subjects and visiting envoys through a viewing window high up in the palace wall, also to hear grievances and maintain justice,76 this constituted an epic scene not in staged, screened, or recited narration but in everyday esthetico-political practice.

Overall: heightened-alternate realism, mediagenic The outcome of these processes is a South/Southeast Asian epic realism. In commentary of a scholarly bent especially, the world built in South/Southeast Asian epic narrative tends to be placed in the past, the historical imagination, or the realm of fancy. Using European concepts that used to lack validity in most parts of the world, it is labelled mythological or legendary. For audiences devoted to them, meanwhile, these epics’ events may transpire in a universe that is current and pertinent here and now. Their degree and manner of historicity may be beside the point. While it is possible to perceive it as unfolding purely in narration and to immerse oneself in it as such, this epic world is realistic. Anderson’s discussion of central Javanese shadowplay’s main dramatis personae “as human types and as bearers of contrasting values” illustrates this.77 The main characters were familiar figures, alive in society. Some served as role models, other were losers or villains one loved to hate. From these epic examples “The Javanese child learns […] the philosophical teachings which will later orient him to the outside world”.78 The

epics in worlds of performance 367

same could be said about other regions and social groups in history, their respective epic protagonists, and the issues thematized in their interactions: the central cast of the Ramayana throughout India and mainland Southeast Asia; Hamza and his family, companions, and perennial rivals in nineteenth-century north India, Java, and Lombok; and so on. This epic realism is heightened and alternate. It does not preclude marvels, even in Muslim contexts. The category of mirabilia (Ar. ‘ajā’ib) was an established theme of Islamicate writing: “Generally, Muslims understood ‘ajā’ib as real and celebrated these astonishing things because they provoked awe at God’s magnificent creation”.79 The Mahabharata and Ramayana’s wondrous side attracted Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) and his son Jahangir (r. 1605-1627).80 Even over a century later a Persophone storyteller who had worked among nobility in Akbar’s times was remembered as having “on the tip of his tongue the entire Mahābhārata, than which there is no more reliable book in India. It is made up of odd names and strange tales”.81 The realism of epic has been raised as a problem in cultural criticism over the centuries. Audiences and readers were taken to task for being seduced by it. An example is the eleventh-century Old Javanese Arjuna’s Nuptials on wayang (quoted above), another is the repeated disparagement of the belief that Hamza’s heroic deeds in the service of Islam actually happened as recounted in the epic.82 A few times the copyist of the pre-1600 Javanese poem Stories of Amir inserted the Arabic formula meaning “And God knows the truth best”.83 This is “conventionally used to express uncertainty or skepticism”.84 It lards also the Malay version of the same narrative85 and is invoked in the Urdu one.86 Hamza was by no means the only object of such reservations. The javanesque stories and texts branded as lying and sinful in Malay Muslim circles from at least 1600 to 1900 were epic.87 A major ground for disdain was that to their audiences they felt real. The critics themselves knew better. In a diverse range of religious and political contexts, misgivings are voiced about the heightenedness of South/Southeast Asian epic – a quality that cross-cuts several of the epic characteristics I have discussed. South/Southeast Asian epic storyworlds are not only augmented in that they feature preternatural beings, capabilities, and feats, and intensified as to affect (problematized in Arjuna’s Nuptials with reference to shadowplay), but also elevated as regards the social status of their main dramatis personae. This is why wayang, notwithstanding its popularity with the Javanese peasantry and proletariat, was controversial in Indonesian Communism.88 Also after Communism’s eradication in 1965-66, celebrated author and cultural critic Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006) dismissed wayang and its repertoire for being bellicose and focused exclusively on an elite.89 In effect, however, its augmented and elevated storyworlds and the scorn they may generate among the orthodox do not disqualify South/Southeast Asian epic for

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contemporary public popularity; quite the contrary. South/Southeast Asian epics are mediagenic. South/Southeast Asian epic storyworlds exemplify the kind of reality that video game designers long to build for gamers: one that is exciting and intriguing, inviting sustained immersion. Hence a gamification of epic is incipient.90 Other electronic media have firmly established themselves as channels for South/Southeast Asian epics. Their principled affectfulness appeals to media industries. Their central thematics in the realms of romance, dominion, and territory remain relevant under changing socio-political circumstances. Add to this the banal focus on elite protagonists (in parts of the world where state politics tends to be practised by entire families, often dynasties) and it is evident why states and other institutions, communities, and individual artists may employ epic characters, plots, or texts in contemporary media to cast light on current concerns. This happens across the region in a range of forms, such as print literature and rap lyrics drawn from the Gesar epic in Tibet.91 Probably the most famous example is the long and immensely successful Ramayan and Mahabharat serials produced by Indian state television in the late 1980s.92 Elsewhere too, for instance in Bali, these mediatized epics, very Indian-looking and -sounding, were watched with curiosity.93 They inspired waves of Indonesian television drama, portraying heroic and romantic adventures in mythic or local pasts imagined inventively; this trend continues. In India the Ramayan and Mahabharat were rebroadcast to globally unprecedented ratings during Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and again in 2021. The mode of narration is of course adapted to the affordances and conventions of the medium. In his analysis of the television Ramayan, Lutgendorf contrasts modern literature’s “narrative eye, which […] ranges freely over the entire universe,” a manner of depiction that has come into its own in film and television with “the camera’s roving and all-seeing eye”,94 with the Ramcaritamanas in which “[i]t is almost as if the storyteller (and the audience) must physically accompany some character […] in order to move about within the geography of the tale”.95 But personage-focused storylines – typical of South/Southeast Asian epic tale-telling and puppetry across the board, including dramatic, danced, and visual genres without a storyteller – are not alien to modern media. At least one globally popular media genre tends to be woven together from personage-focused story threads: soaps. Overall, remarkably little accommodation of critical characteristics turns out to be necessary when South/Southeast epic narratives are cast in electronic and digital media. The continuing pertinence of South/Southeast Asian epic and the requisite changes are not exclusively an organic historical process, running its intrinsic, natural course. Intellectual and political interventions from outside or above play a role. Thus, for instance, the Gesar epic, recounted by tale-tellers and in Tibet also through dance and paintings, has been appropriated by the Chinese authorities. Its

epics in worlds of performance 369

protagonist is cast as a literary and ethical model for all of China, and its narrators are awarded exceptional social standing.96 The “Gesar epic tradition”, situated in China, was “inscribed in 2009 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” by UNESCO.97 Other epic genres – including from India, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Philippines – have received the same recognition. “Epic” is a live term in political discourse across the globe, and epics may be prized national Heritage.98 They feature in a surge of nationalistic monumentalization rooted in the eighteenth-century western European “paradigm for the invention of folklore and the symbolic construction of national epics”.99 That South/Southeast Asian epic may be oriented to consumption outside the region is illustrated by another instance of epic mediatization, Garin Nugroho’s remarkable art movie Opera Jawa (2006). Inspired by a Ramayana episode,100 its patron and projected audience were western. Nevertheless, with a key exception, Opera Jawa holds on to the salient traits of South/Southeast Asian epic. Its neotraditional musical, poetic, visual, and choreographic style is even epic to an extravagant degree, proudly holding up to outsiders the existence of a profound Javanese interpretive competence. The innovation concerns the heroes and their exploits. They are not aristocrats but entrepreneurs and artists. They struggle morally like in traditional epic, but their motivations to act arise primarily from themselves, not more powerful or wiser others. Opera Jawa exemplifies how the heritagization of epic occurs not only by and for UNESCO-esque inscription in a worldwide register but also for the global market of art and cinema, and how the traits of South/ Southeast Asian epic may be subject to discreet but incisive historical change.

Conclusion Narrative realism is a multifarious, dynamic, relational, and perspectival quality, perhaps a process, that works in two directions: feeling a lived, actual world shine through a story world and recognizing sameness, but also rendering elements of story worlds recognizable in an actual world, present or distant in time. Describing South/Southeast Asian epics in terms of kinship, social themes, personalities, agency, and so on, I elaborated the former perspective. These epics are realistic from the latter perspective when the alternates – an epic universe and a lived one – are merged in the performance of ritual moments, or ideologically as expressed in discourse. In ritual the participants’ lifeworlds tend also to be heightened, taking on properties and qualities of the epic world. Epic elements help to ritualize reality. Examples mentioned earlier are the symbolic acts at key points in the recitation of Yusuf’s biography in parts of Java, the modularity of action at social events like

370 BERNARD ARPS

weddings in Java as well, the decorative setting of Vessantara-Jātaka performance in Thailand and Shan State, the rituals of Holy Week in an affective ambience created by the reading of the pasyon in the Philippines, and a Mughal emperor’s daily appearance to the public. Next to these practices, perceptions of the world are discursively and ideologically infused with epic ideas in diverse ways, from the use of names of epic protagonists as proper names, to assimilation of the epics’ kinship-based organization with that of ruling dynasties by incorporating epic heroes into royal genealogies, as happens inter alia in Java101 and Sri Lanka and Thailand.102 The heightenedness of epic – that quality which may strike the context-insensitive observer as merely enchanting or bizarre storytelling – flows out into cultural and social elevation in actuality. I have described epic worlds and how they are narrated into being. Epics are stories, but their critical characteristics can be projected upon lived experience, yielding understandings of past and present, models for social practice, blueprints for the future. This is epicality.

Notes 1

This chapter’s ideas began to fall into place when I was a member of the research group New Directions in the Study of Javanese Literature (2018/19) at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, co-funded by IIAS and the Marie Curie Actions, FP7, as part of the EURIAS Fellowship Programme.

2

Bernard Arps, “The Power of the Heart That Blazes in the World: An Islamic Theory of Religions in Early Modern Java,” Indonesia and the Malay World 47, no. 139 (2019): 308-34.

3

Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979), 12 and 14.

4

Ayesha A. Irani, “The Prophetic Principle of Light and Love: Nūr Muḥammad in Early Modern Bengali Literature,” History of Religions 55, no. 4 (2016): 391-428; Ayesha A. Irani, The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

5

Critiques of the label epic in South/Southeast Asian contexts include Amin Sweeney (regarding Malay texts), David Shulman (the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa), and Steven Collins (the most celebrated jātaka). See Amin Sweeney, “Literacy and the Epic in the Malay World,” in Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia, eds. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger and Laurie J. Sears (Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Studies, University of Michigan, 1991), 17-29; David Shulman, “Toward A Historical Poetics of the Sanskrit Epics,” in David Shulman, The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2001), 21-39; Steven Collins, “Introduction, Dramatis Personae, and Chapters in the Vessantara Jātaka,” in Readings of the Vessantara Jātaka, ed. Steven Collins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 12. I use the term because it facilitates comparison and because a category so named has come to feature in global discourse. In my usage epic denotes ways of composing and presenting stories. Besides protagonists, plots, and other story-world elements, this includes modes of narration.

epics in worlds of performance 371

6

M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics,” in M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84-258.

7

Jack Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 103.

8

Patrick Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jātaka and the Idea of the Perfect Man (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 30.

9

Stuart H. Blackburn and Joyce B. Flueckinger, “Introduction,” in Oral Epics in India, eds. Stuart H. Blackburn et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 11.

10

Karin Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 148

11

I am discussing epics here, not individual narrations.

12

Amin Sweeney, “Three Hours from Three Minutes,” in Authors and Audiences in Traditional Malay Literature, by Amin Sweeney (Berkeley: Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, 1980), 41-42.

13

Andrew N. Weintraub, Power Plays: Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004), 48-50.

14

Philip Yampolsky, Lombok, Kalimantan, Banyumas: Little-Known Forms of Gamelan and Wayang (Washington: Smithsonian Folkways, 1997), 13. (Liner notes accompanying the audio CD of the same title.)

15

Vidya Dehejia, “India’s Visual Narratives: The Dominance of Space over Time,” in Paradigms of Indian Architecture: Space and Time in Representation and Design, ed. G. H. R. Tillotson (Richmond: Curzon, 1998), 101-102.

16

Ph. S. van Ronkel, De roman van Amir Hamza (Leiden: Brill, 1895), 188.

17

Van Ronkel, De roman van Amir Hamza, 184, 188.

18

Ibid., 192, 193, 197, 220.

19

Francess W. Pritchett, The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 6.

20

Pritchett, The Romance Tradition in Urdu, 27, summarizing observations by Farooqi.

21

Ibid., 26.

22

Poerbatjaraka, P. Voorhoeve and C. Hooykaas, Indonesische handschriften (Bandung: Nix, 1950), 1-17.

23

Poerbatjaraka et al., Indonesische handschriften, 89.

24

Katharine A. Bowie, “The Historical Vicissitudes of the Vessantara Jataka in Mainland Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 49 (2018): 49.

25

Christoph Emmrich, “How Bisvaṃtara Got His Dharma Body: Story, Ritual, and the Domestic in the Composition of a Newar Jātaka,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 132 (2012): 559-61.

26

Poerbatjaraka, Pandji-verhalen onderling vergeleken (Bandoeng: Nix, 1940).

27

Stuart Robson, “Panji and Inao: Questions of Cultural and Textual History,” Journal of the Siam Society 84, no. 2 (1996): 39-53; Stuart Robson and Prateep Changchit, “The Cave Scene or Bussaba Consults the Candle,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 155 (1999): 579-95; Christopher Joll and Srawut Aree, “Thai Adaptations of the Javanese Panji in Cosmopolitan Ayutthaya,” Southeast Asian Studies [Kyoto] 9, no. 1 (2020): 3-25.

28

The dogma, established under European intellectual hegemony, of an intrinsic connection between epic and nation used to be irrelevant to South/Southeast Asian epics in general. For this dogma, see Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Sheldon Pollock, The Language of

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the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 544-565. Many South/Southeast Asian epics do not address the “nation” among which they are told. But they do tend to thematize conflicts over love, land, and leadership, which allows them to be placed in the service of, among other things, modern nationalism. Rather than a source of definition, this should be a theme of inquiry; witness for instance Maconi’s fascinating discussion of the Chinese terminology for Tibetan Gesar narratives, against the background of the political idea that China should have an epic but lacks one. See Lara Maconi, “Gesar de Pékin? Le sort du Roi Gesar de Gling, héros épique tibétain, en Chine (post-) maoïste,” in Formes modernes de la poésie épique: Nouvelles approches, ed. Judith Labarthe (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2004), 407-11. 29

Blackburn and Flueckiger, “Introduction,” 4-5.

30

Ibid., 5.

31

Pasha M. Khan, “Notes on ‘Abdul Nabī Fakhrul Zamānī and Other Indo-Persian Storytellers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Urdu and Indo-Persian Thought, Poetics, and Belles Lettres, ed. Alireza Korangy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 61; Pritchett, The Romance Tradition in Urdu, 15.

32

Their moods and sentiments, however, may be thematized; see below. Brenda E.F. Beck, “Core Triangles in the Folk Epics of India,” in Oral Epics in India, eds. Stuart H. Blackburn et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 155-75.

33

Paula Richman, ed., Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Paula Richman, ed., Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Paula Richman, ed., Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008).

34

Th. Pigeaud, “The Romance of Amir Hamza in Java,” in Bingkisan budi: Een bundel opstellen aan Dr Philippus Samuel van Ronkel door vrienden en leerlingen aangeboden op zijn tachtigste verjaardag, 1 Augustus 1950 (Leiden: Sijthof, 1950), 235-40.

35

Karine Schomer, “Paradigms for the Kali Yuga: the heroes of the Ālhā epic and their fate,” in Oral Epics in India, eds. Stuart H. Blackburn et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 14-48.

36

Pigeaud, “The Romance of Amir Hamza in Java,” 236-37.

37

Benedict R. O’G Anderson, Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1965); Arps, “The Power of the Heart,” 315-16, 317.

38 39

Schomer, “Paradigms for the Kali Yuga,” 146. John D. Smith, “Scapegoats of the Gods: The Ideology of the Indian Epics,” in Oral Epics in India, eds. Stuart H. Blackburn et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 176-94.

40

e.g. Poerbatjaraka, Pandji-verhalen onderling vergeleken, 73.

41

e.g. ibid., 344-46.

42

Pasha M. Khan, “A Handbook for Storytellers: The Ṭirāz al-Akhbār and the Qissa Genre,” in Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, eds. Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield (Cambridge: Open Book, 2015), 203; Khan, “Notes on ‘Abdul Nabī Fakhrul Zamānī and Other Indo-Persian Storytellers,” 61.

43

Pritchett, The Romance Tradition in Urdu, 42; Khan, “A Handbook for Storytellers,” 189.

44

Robert P. Goldman, trans. P. Robert, Rāmāyaṇa Book One: Boyhood, by Vālmīki (New York: New York University Press and JJC Foundation, 2005), 47; Shulman, “Toward a Historical Poetics,” 31-32.

45

Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 16.

46

Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy, 35-36.

epics in worlds of performance 373

47

Irani, “The Prophetic Principle of Light,” 396; see also Ayesha A. Irani, The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 88.

48

Bernard Arps, Tembang in Two Traditions: Performance and Interpretation of Javanese Literature (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1992).

49

Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men.

50

My translation; cf. Stuart Robson, ed. and trans., Arjunawiwāha: The Marriage of Arjuna of Mpu Kaṇwa (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), 58-59.

51

Bernard Arps, Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind: The Javanese Shadow-Play Dewa Ruci Performed by Ki Anom Soeroto; A Study in Performance Philology (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 44, 38.

52

Julius Bautista, The Way of the Cross: Suffering Selfhoods in the Roman Catholic Philippines (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019), 31-45.

53

Bautista, The Way of the Cross, 9.

54

Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy, 40.

55

Bowie, “The Historical Vicissitudes of the Vessantara Jataka,” 37.

56

Emmrich, “How Bisvaṃtara Got His Dharma Body,” 540.

57

Arps, Tembang in Two Traditions.

58

Sirtjo Koolhof, “The ‘La Galigo’: A Bugis Encyclopedia and Its Growth,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 155, no. 3 (1999): 362, 370-71; Jennifer Lindsay, “Intercultural Expectations: I La Galigo in Singapore,” The Drama Review 51, no. 2 (2007): 73.

59

Blackburn and Flueckiger, “Introduction,” 3-4.

60

Khan, “A Handbook for Storytellers,” 198-99, 203.

61

Sengpan Pannyawamsa, “Recital of the Tham Vessantara-Jātaka: A Social-Cultural Phenomenon in Kengtung, Eastern Shan State, Myanmar,” Contemporary Buddhism 10 (2009): 127-28, 131-32; Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy, 40-41.

62

Khan, “A Handbook for Storytellers,” 198-99, 203; Khan, “Notes on ‘Abdul Nabī Fakhrul Zamānī,” 64-65.

63

Vidya Dehejia, “On Modes of Visual Narration in Early Buddhist Art,” The Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 37492; Vidya Dehejia, “The Treatment of Narrative in Jagat Singh’s Rāmāyaṇa: A Preliminary Study,” Artibus Asiae 56 (1996): 303-24; Dehejia, “India’s Visual Narratives.”

64

This device has spread outside the region. Mair suggests that “the characteristically Indian prosimetric or chantefable form (alternating prose and verse)” came to China with Buddhism in the seventh century. See Victor H. Mair, “The Buddhist Tradition of Prosimetric Oral Narrative in Chinese Literature,” Oral Tradition 3 (1988): 106.

65

Tjan Tjoe Siem, review of Abraham Anthony Fokker, Wirāṭaparwa, opnieuw uitgegeven, vertaald en toegelicht I (1938), Djåwå 19, no. 2 (1939): 120; P. J. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 89-92; Mary Sabina Zurbuchen, The Language of Balinese Shadow Theater (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 179-81; S. Supomo, “From Śakti to Shahāda: The Quest for New Meanings in a Changing World Order,’ in Islam: Essays on Scripture, Thought and Society; A Festschrift in Honour of Anthony H. Johns, eds. Peter G. Riddell and Tony Street (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 219-36.

66

L.F. Brakel, The Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah: A Medieval Muslim-Malay Romance (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 15.

67

Arps, Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind, 75.

68

H. I. R. Hinzler, Bima Swarga in Balinese Wayang (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981), 267-280.

69

Khan, “Notes on ‘Abdul Nabī Fakhrul Zamānī,” 64.

70

Khan, “A Handbook for Storytellers,” 206-07.

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71

Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text, 16.

72

Susan S. Wadley, “Choosing a Path: Performance Strategies in a North Indian Epic,” in Oral Epics in India, eds. Stuart H. Blackburn et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 100.

73

Wadley, “Choosing a Path,” 100.

74

Arps, Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind, 74-75.

75

Bernard Arps, “Flat Puppets on an Empty Screen, Stories in the Round: Imagining Space in Wayang Kulit and the Worlds Beyond,” Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia 17, no. 3 (2016): 438-72.

76

Catherine B. Asher, “A Ray from the Sun: Mughal Ideology and the Visual Construction of the Divine,” in The Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience, ed. Matthew T. Kapstein (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 176-78 and 184.

77

Anderson, Mythology and the Tolerance, 11.

78

Ibid., 24.

79

Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 109.

80

Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 110, 210-11.

81

Khan, “Notes on ‘Abdul Nabī Fakhrul Zamānī,” 30.

82

A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 45, 47, referring to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century critics in Syria and Iran.

83

Bernard Arps, “Princess Sodara Kartika Frees Amir from Prison: The Epic of Amir Hamza (?16th Century),” Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia, 22, no. 3 (2021): 651-74.

84

Pritchett, The Romance Tradition in Urdu, 255.

85

A. Samad Ahmad, Hikayat Amir Hamzah (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1987).

86

Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami, The Adventures of Amir Hamza, Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction: Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Musharraf Ali Farooqi (New York: The Modern Library, 2007).

87

Bernard Arps, “Drona’s Betrayal and Bima’s Brutality: Javanaiserie in Malay Culture,” in Traces of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in Javanese and Malay Literature, eds. Willem van der Molen and Ding Choo Ming (Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2018), 58-98.

88

Ruth McVey, “The Wayang Controversy in Indonesian Communism,” in Context, Meaning and Power in Southeast Asia, eds. Mark Hobart and Robert H. Taylor (Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1986), 21-51.

89

August Hans den Boef and Kees Snoek, Pramoedya Ananta Toer: Essay en interview (Breda: De Geus/ Manus Amici/NOVIB, 1992), 54.

90

e.g. Xenia Zeiler, “The Global Mediatization of Hinduism through Digital Games: Representation versus Simulation in Hanuman: Boy Warrior,” in Playing with Religion in Digital Games, eds. Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory Price Grieve (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 66-87.

91

Lara Maconi, “Gesar de Pékin?”, 379-83.

92

Philip Lutgendorf, “Ramayan: The Video,” The Drama Review 34, no. 2 (1990): 127-76; Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham, North Carolina and London: Duke University Press, 1999).

93

Mark Hobart, “Changing Audiences: Representing Development and Religion in Balinese Theatre and Television” (conference paper, 2006, online at eprints.soas.ac.uk/7146/1/Changing_audiences. pdf), 3.

94

Lutgendorf, “Ramayan: The Video,” 155.

epics in worlds of performance 375

95

Ibid., 154-155.

96

Maconi, “Gesar de Pékin?”.

97

See for example “Gesar epic tradition,” UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, accessed April 4, 2022, https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/gesar-epic-tradition-00204

98

Jan Jansen and Henk M. J. Maier, “Hear! Hear! Epics are a booming business!”, in Epic Adventures: Heroic Narrative in the Oral Perfomance Traditions of Four Continents, eds. Jan Jansen and Henk M. J. Maier (Münster: Lit, 2004), 7-10.

99

Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 160.

100

Aoyama Toru, “Localization of the Other in the Indonesian Film ‘Opera Jawa’: A Case of Telling a Ramayana Story in a Muslim Community,” in Making a Difference: Representing/Constructing the Other in Asian/African Media, Cinema and Languages, ed. Toru Aoyama (Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2012), 33-42; René Lysloff, review of Garin Nugroho, Opera Jawa (Requiem from Java) (2006), Visual Anthropology 28, no. 5 (2015): 451-53; Ugoran Prasad and Intan Paramaditha, “Performing the Multicultural Space in Opera Jawa: The Tension between National and Transnational Stages,” in Asian Cinema and the Use of Space: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Lilian Chee and Edna Lim (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 155-70.

101

Arps, “The Power of the Heart,” 315.

102

Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy, 97-104.

CHAPTER 16

Postscript: The Many Worlds of Monsoon Asia Nira Wickramasinghe

Abstract In this postscript I will suggest that the themes, vocabularies and conceptual fields that are at the heart of this volume invite the perceptive reader to think beyond the region covered and reach out to much broader ideas of space, time and identities. In particular, it calls us to navigate the Oceanic turn in history writing where fluidity and liquid spaces are increasingly shifting to the centre stage.

Keywords: circulation; oceanic histories; postcolonialism; Area Studies

Spaces of circulation The region we call Monsoon Asia inhabits many places and times. It bears the traces of a vibrant past of overlapping, creolized and interdependent worlds. It is a palimpsest creatively evoked by the authors of the present volume that is posed between interrelated fields – archaeology, philology, linguistics, global history, politics and area studies. Grounded in source material in the local languages of the region and engaging with this material and the constellation of already existing works in a critical manner, this volume is particularly concerned with vernacular frameworks of significance. It seamlessly propels analysis outside the familiar space, giving agency to a variety of forms of expression. Monsoon Asia urges us to think of the terms we use when referring to the type of relations that were forged between places and people over the centuries. These were spaces where cultures circulated and collided and where multiple meanings intersected. The network metaphor is usefully deployed to describe the movement of people, things and ideas in the region. Manguin, for instance, refers to a “Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere” where trans-cultural and mutual processes took place within complex sets of networks, in terms of chronology, of directionality, of quality or of intensity. Ricci and Kooria enlist the trope of “cosmopolis” to think through intercultural exchange in the region, as a refashioning of local diversities in literature, architecture or law. Stolte writes how connections within Monsoon

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Asia shaped socialist Asianism during decolonization and the early Cold War; and challenged pre-war and post-war contexts as separate. Kapil Raj recently problematized the metaphor of the network used by many scholars to read and understand intercultural relations in the region.1 He quite rightly pointed out that the network as a point-to-point connection, failed to take into account the role of intermediaries that are necessary to sustain relationships and the power relationships between them. Instead he proposed using the notion of “spaces of circulation” to think with. Spaces of circulation suggest “a fabric with topographical unevenness, (power) asymmetries, and also the possibility of tapping into an already existing continuum, or cloud, of relations, rather than merely building individual linkages”.2 In many ways the critique by Bloembergen, Kulke and Manguin of models of diffusion and action-reaction resonate with Raj’s endorsement of circulation’s ability to cover processes of “encounter, negotiation, reconfiguration and mutation of knowledge”.3 Proponents of “histoire croisée” ask of scholars to go a step further by refusing to assume pre-existing entities and protagonists. This approach reveals their emergence in the very course of interaction through a logic of differentiation and self-articulation in reciprocity. Thus theirs is a call to shift perspectives on the various interacting entities, historicize their different viewpoints in order to understand how they are ultimately socially grounded.4 The “histoire croisée” approach can be destabilizing but letting go of certainties opens up the possibility of new questions that yield new knowledge. In a similar vein, Willem van Schendel suggests that the heuristic impulse behind imagining areas, and the high-quality contextualized knowledge that area studies produce, may be harnessed to imagine other spatial configurations. These could be “crosscutting” areas, the worldwide honeycomb of borderlands, or the process geographies of transnational flows. Van Schendel argued for a vision of regions as shifting and polymorphous, capable of assuming “unfamiliar spatial forms – lattices, archipelagoes, hollow rings, lattices”.5 His work, in many ways, laid the foundation for the oceanic turn in area studies where the Indian Ocean has acquired a new lease of life.

The view from the Indian Ocean As Isabel Hofmeyr and Barbara Watson Andaya have shown, a conventional focus on areas, as blocks of territory neglects the enormously important human connections created by seas and oceans. In their stead, the Indian Ocean can be deployed as a method to think beyond conventional ideas of historical time and space, and offer an “escape” from the prevailing “terracentrism” of traditional history writing.6 The trend is not new. It began with the work of historians of oceans and seas

postscript: the many worlds of monsoon asia 379

who located their work within a tradition of transnational history writing. Sujit Sivasundaram has deftly traced the scholarly paths that eventually led to the revisionist pluralism across space and time that allow scholars today to cross-temporal thresholds of the past such as “Islamic sea” or “The early modern Indian Ocean” and boundaries of national and regional units borne out of nationalist or Cold War politics.7 From another perspective, a focus on the sea enables a critique of how area studies collapse into the history of subcontinents and large landmasses, ignoring their watery margins and, in turn, losing how forms of law, government, or racial and cosmopolitan thought and practice are crystallized at the water’s edge in the modern era, in the Qing empire, or in South Asian successor states in the eighteenth century. To think of seas and through seas and in our case the Indian Ocean, is thus to add several more dimensions, planes and viewing points to the present global turn in historiography and at once to consider spaces as concatenations of the human and non-human. A specific theme which has generated great debate in world history is of course the nature of connections. On this score, the rise of oceanic histories intersected with postcoloniality, a critique of empires and nations which led to attempts to find common ground of exchange between the dominated. This is apparent in such elaborations as the “Black Atlantic”, the Pacific as a “sea of islands”, or the “subaltern” Indian Ocean. Yet it has been pointed out that an emphasis on such connectivity can achieve an end opposite to its aim, by privileging the cosmopolitan and the mobile in motion rather than the enslaved or the labouring lascar in place. It can naturalize a space of exchange and interaction which is disconnected from hinterlands, the confined, the subjugated and the particular. Thus there is a constant need to probe the worldliness of these putative cosmopolitan spaces and their ethical treatment of the stranger/other. Francoise Lionnet reminds us that in the Indian ocean world lies a history of coerced contact that produced unpredictable cultural formations.8 One important and positive change that has been facilitated by the Oceanic turn in the global scholarly field, is the new centrality given to smaller spaces that languished at the periphery of the periphery (to borrow a phrase from Françoise Vergès). If you take the example of the Indian Ocean, for scholars of Sri Lanka or the Andamans the Indian Ocean has offered a way of breaking asymmetries that are no longer on the lines of North-South but within areas. In South Asian studies, history as a field of scholarship is most often appropriated by historians of India, and the smaller nation-states – from Sri Lanka to Nepal – tend to be anthropologized rather than historicized.9 Smaller nation-states like Bangladesh or Pakistan are also politicized and studied as theatres of current violent “terrorist” politics. One consequence of the restructuring of university teaching and research along cultural clusters – area specializations – has been that larger states dominate teaching and

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research. In most area studies programs, national languages or languages spoken by numerically large groups within an area, are privileged. Indian Ocean studies have in a sense, provided a refuge for historians of the periphery who study islands such as Sri Lanka, the Andamans or Mauritius, and coastal regions. “Islands,” writes Hofmeyr, “play a significant conceptual role on Oceanic history, constituting an anti-continental geography that relativizes the territorial obsession of much nation state-focused history”.10 Coastal areas have similar “arrested histories” as Stoler calls them, pasts that remain suspended in historiography.11 The work of Ronit Ricci (see Chapter 9) on circuits of cultural exchange that has traced the flows of materials between the spheres of Tamil, Arabic and Malay incorporating within a single study South India, Sri Lanka and the Malay-Indonesian world methodologically exemplifies the promise of models of area studies that transcend given geographical spaces. It paves the way for other studies that approach places as a crossroads in the way Denys Lombard once described Java.12 Inserting marginal places within a wider arc would be a response of a sort to mainstream historiography’s view of small places and marginal groups as being unproductive of historical explanation. Oceanic worlds that incorporate connected areas of Monsoon Asia offer rich possibilities for working beyond the templates of the nation-state and beyond conventional area studies. They make visible a range of lateral relations and vital sinews of connection that would otherwise remain unseen. Building on the critiques of terra-centric approaches, Tessa Morris-Suzuki pushes the boundaries even further. She acknowledges the limitations imposed by a conventional geographical image of cultural or civilization area and argues for “anti–area studies” that would take widely dispersed and differing points on the face of the globe (points that may be cities, minority communities, frontier zones, etc.) as a basis for exploring shared historical and social issues. She uses the notion of liquid area studies, the idea that an area is brought into being only by human activity – travel, trade, and communication. In other words, rather than being a solid thing, embedded in the bedrock of geography, an area is rather like a fountain, which is given shape only by constant activity and movement. So from the oceanic turn to liquid area emerges a new architecture of areas that is concerned with margins and smaller spaces.

Monsoon Asia cultures Monsoon Asia invites us to reflect on the cross-fertilization that occurred between places in the Indian ocean world that came into contact. In the linguistic realm, as

postscript: the many worlds of monsoon asia 381

Hoogervorst argues, the last two millennia saw a number of different language-mediated cosmopolei while in the realm of everyday lived experience perceptions of the word by people across the region were infused with a certain form of epicality as discussed by Arps. An added feature of cultural interaction suggested by Piers Larson for Madagascar is a form of cultural and linguistic agility, an idea of linguistic discontinuity and multilingualism where there is a moving in and out of languages and cultures rather than mixity.13 Looking at the period under colonialism and empire, Vergès points out that the bricolage of cultures spawned through cultural encounters was created in a situation of domination and conflict. Edouard Glissant describes “the entanglement or what he calls the ‘relation’ between different cultures forced into cohabitation in the colonial context”.14 The Indianoceanness that comprises both anchorages and moorings is a feature of the Monsoon Asia world, constantly in movement yet rooted.15 The cultural processes in Monsoon Asia resonate with the Glissantian understanding of cultures in constant flux, drawing in new members or allowing others to leave in an open and generous manner.

Monsoon winds of change If we understand Monsoon Asia as a fluid space, a space of circulation and mutation where cultures are in constant motion like the winds that give it its name, it can only thrive as an idea to think with. But can it be an idea that has effects in today’s world? As a space for the flourishing of a new form of humanism it continues to have potential. Can Monsoon Asia find in its past of rich cultural exchanges, transoceanic trade and diasporic flows the resources to invent new social and political forms of being that are based on respect for cultural differences and cultural melanges? People of the region may need to look closer to their time and think anew about these older and now devalued ideas of the Third World, Afro-Asian solidarity and Non-Alignment that propelled the countries of Monsoon Asia to the centre stage of world politics in the 1950s and 1960s. For this, one may need, following Mahmood Mamdani, to decolonize the political community by stripping away the nation, the tribe or the caste as a locus of political identification and commitment.16 By breaking free of subjectivities nurtured by and under colonial rule, people of Monsoon Asia would continue being multiple and changing in their everyday life while assembling through a political process coalitions based on common ideals and unique visions of freedom, justice and equality. In this era of resurgent exclusivist nationalism and extreme forms of religious belonging, building on a legacy and translating and extending it, is a dream worthwhile pursuing.

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Notes 1

Kapil Raj, “Networks of knowledge, or spaces of circulation? The birth of British cartography in colonial south Asia in the late eighteenth century,” Global Intellectual History 2, no. 1 (2017), 49-66. On the network, see Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Auguste Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

2

Kapil Raj, “Networks of knowledge,” 52.

3

Raj, “Networks of knowledge,” 58.

4

Werner Michael and Zimmermann Bénédicte, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 30-50.

5

Willem van Schendel, “Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: jumping scale in Southeast Asia.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20, no. 6 (2002): 664.

6

Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 3 (2012): 584-584; Barbara Watson Andaya, “Oceans Unbounded: Transversing Asia across ‘Area Studies’,” The Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 4 (2006): 669-690.

7

Sujit Sivasundaram, “The Indian Ocean,” in Oceanic Histories, eds. D. Armitage, A. Bashford, and S. Sivasundaram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 31.

8

Francoise Lionnet, “Cosmopolitan or Creole Lives? Globalized Oceans and Insular Identities,” Profession (2011): 23–43.

9

The discrepancy between the number of anthropologists of Sri Lanka, as compared to historians in international academia is too striking to be accidental.

10

Hofmeyr, “The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method,” 588.

11

Anne Stoler, Along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010), 33; see also Carole McGranahan, Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA and Memories of a Forgotten War (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010).

12

Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour Javanais: Essai d’Histoire Globale (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1990).

13

Pier M. Larson, “The Vernacular Life of the Street: Ratsitatanina and Indian Ocean Créolité,” Slavery and Abolition 29, no. 3, (2008): 327-359.

14

Cited in Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, eds. Encarnación Gutierrez Rodríguez and Shirley Ann Tate (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 27.

15

Françoise Vergès, Carpanin Marimoutou and Stephen Muecke, “Moorings: Indian Ocean Creolisations,” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 9, no. 1 (January 2012): 1-39.

16

Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020).

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About the authors

Andrea Acri (PhD, Leiden University) holds the chair of Tantric Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE, PSL University) in Paris. He was a faculty member of research and higher education institutions in India (Nalanda University), Singapore (ISEAS and ARI/NUS), Australia (ANU), and the Netherlands (IIAS). His main research interests are Śaiva and Buddhist Tantric traditions, and the comparative religious history of South and Southeast Asia, with special emphasis on connected histories and intra-Asian maritime transfers. Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. His books include Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the furies of nature and the fortunes of migrants (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013), from which his chapter in the present volume is drawn, and Unruly Waters: how rain, rivers, coasts and seas have shaped Asia’s history (New York: Basic Books, 2018). Amrith received a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities. Bernard Arps is fascinated by worldmaking through performance, texts, and media, especially in religious contexts in Southeast Asia. Currently Professor of Indonesian and Javanese Language and Culture at Leiden University, his most recent book is Tall tree, nest of the wind: a study in performance philology (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016). Ward Berenschot is Professor of Comparative Political Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a senior researcher at the KITLV (Royal Netherlands Insitute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies). Studying politics and citizenship in India and Indonesia, he is the author of Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State (London: Hurst, 2011) and co-author of Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2019). Anne M. Blackburn is Professor and Chair of the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Blackburn studies Buddhism at the intersection of intellectual and institutional histories, and political economy, with a particular interest in Buddhist circulations involving locations now known as Sri Lanka, India, Burma, and Thailand.

432 about the authors

Marieke Bloembergen is senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), and professor in Heritage and Postcolonial Studies in Indonesian History at Leiden University. Her most recent monograph, co-authored with Martijn Eickhoff, is The politics of heritage in Indonesia: A cultural history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Currently she is working on a book manuscript entitled “The relics of true history.” Indonesia and the politics of Greater India, a moral geography, 1880s-1990s. R. Michael Feener is Professor of Cross-regional Studies at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, and an Associate Member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively in the fields of Islamic studies and Southeast Asian history, as well as on post-disaster reconstruction, religion and development. He is currently also Director of the Maritime Asia Heritage Survey: https://maritimeasiaheritage.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ Jos Gommans is Professor of Colonial and Global History at Leiden University. He publishes primarily on medieval and early-modern South and Central Asian history, Dutch colonial history, and global intellectual history. Currently he is working on a connective history of Plato’s political legacy in Europe and the Islamic world. David Henley is Professor of Contemporary Indonesia Studies at Leiden University. He has published on a wide range of topics in relation to Southeast Asia, including ethnicity and nationalism, environmental history, economic development and finance, political institutions and ideology, and cultures of the human body. Tom Hoogervorst, affiliated to the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), is a historical linguist who has worked primarily on Malay and Javanese. Through a focus on language contact and lexical borrowing, he approaches language as a tool with which to reconstruct forgotten episodes of cultural contact. His recent work has focused on the language history of Indonesia’s Chinese minority. Mahmood Kooria is a researcher at Leiden University and a visiting member of faculty in the Department of History, Ashoka University. In addition to several journal articles and book chapters, he has authored Islamic Law in Circulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) and co-edited Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas, and Practices (New York, NY: Routledge, 2022) and Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).

about the authors 433

Hermann Kulke is Professor Emeritus of Asian History, University of Kiel. Born in 1938, he obtained his PhD in Indology at Freiburg University in 1967. He also studied the Khmer language at Yale and London universities, was Assistant Professor at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, and has been a Visiting Professor at Utkal University Bhubaneswar, JNU Delhi, and the National University of Singapore. In 2006 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Asiatic Society (Kolkata), and in 2010 he received the Padma Shri award from the President of India. Pierre-Yves Manguin is Emeritus Professor at the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (French School of the Far East). His research focuses on history and archaeology of the coastal states and trade networks of Southeast Asia. He has led archaeological work in Indonesia and Vietnam and published on themes related to the maritime history and archaeology of Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea. He has written on the archaeology of Funan (Vietnam), Srivijaya (Sumatra), and Tarumanagara (West Java), and on Southeast Asian shipbuilding and sailing traditions. Ronit Ricci is the Sternberg-Tamir Chair in Comparative Cultures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She also holds an appointment at the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. Her research interests include Javanese and Malay manuscript cultures, Translation Studies, and Islamic literatures of South and Southeast Asia. Her current project explores interlinear translations from across the Indonesian-Malay world. Carolien Stolte is a Senior Lecturer in History at Leiden University. She is broadly interested in the history of regionalist formations, and has published widely on the international history of South Asia. She currently co-directs the Afro-Asian Networks project with Su Lin Lewis (Bristol University). Nira Wickramasinghe is Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. She has published on a range of topics including identity politics, colonial society, and slavery in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean world. Her most recent publication is Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures Abalahin, Andrew, 23, 65, 75, 81 Aceh, 35, 43, 112, 204, 207-208, 220, 235,

archaeology, 10, 14, 28, 37, 67, 377; and Bay of Bengal, 140, 143; and Greater India Society,

237-238, 244-245, 248-249, 263, 289-290,

187-300, 294; and concept of Monsoon

290, 303

Asia; 71-72, 77, 79, 82; and neolithic Asia,

Africa, 19, 21, 28, 47, 101, 111, 114, 198, 234, 250, 342, 353; and Asian Socialist Conference, 311, 316, 320-323; Eastern, 13, 24, 43, 234, 240, 247, 263; North, 43, 236; West 263 agency, 70, 80, 146, 169, 286, 360, 369, 377; of Southeast Asian people, 119-121, 123, 128 agriculture, 12-13, 29, 38, 72, 83-85, 87, 122, 148, 269, 271, 275, 315, 337; and patron client relations, 341; and rice cultivation, 13, 48,

23; and sites, 28-29, 31, 40; and Southeast Asia, 119, 122-131, 131n1, 155, 158-160, 163, 174 architecture, 12, 15, 189, 230, 380; and concept of Monsoon Asia, 71; and Greater India, 288, 294, 295; and South Asia, 160, 168; and Southeast Asia, 119-122, 140, 143, 170; and temples, 168 art history, 67, 119, 122, 126-127, 130, 160, 170, 289, 195, 298, 300, 303

66; and state-building, 101-103, 105-107,

Ashoka, 97, 101, 115

109, 114; agricultural revolution, 23, 81,

Asianism: labour, 43, 313; pan-, 291; pragmatic,

140 Akbar, 367 America, 193, 236; Latin, 46, 138, 333; North, 107, 260, 265, 320-321; see also United

45, 311-314, 319, 323-324; socialist, 314, 316, 378 Asian Socialist Conference (ASC), 45, 313, 315-324

States Andaman Islands, 81, 83, 379-380

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 353

Andaya, Barbara Watson, 117n25, 378

Bandung Conference, 21, 45, 48, 312-313, 315,

Andaya, Leonard, 117n25, 208

322-323

Anderson, Benedict, 341, 366

Bangladesh, 9, 17, 48, 74, 147, 149, 379

Angkor Wat, 98, 141, 156, 161

Batavia, see Jakarta

anticolonialism, 20, 47, 293; and Asian Socialist

Bengal, Bay of, 15-16, 20, 23-24, 31-32, 40-41,

Conference, 311-312, 314-315, 321; and

48, 76, 79, 83, 85, 99, 102, 111, 119, 121,

Leela Gandhi, 286-287

125, 127, 155, 160, 166-169, 172, 174; and

Arab: -ian peninsula, 185; merchants, 113;

Interaction Sphere, 28, 37, 75, 130, 377;

-ian Sea, 10, 12, 99, 111; Arabic as a lingua

and languages, 138-140, 144; and mobility,

franca, 233, 235-236, 239, 247, 250; Arabic

257-264, 266, 269, 270, 272, 274-275,

cosmopolis, 15, 43, 137, 144, 146, 217, 219, 221, 223-230, 235, 377; see also Islam area studies, 15, 47, 63-64, 70, 75, 89, 137-138, 199, 284, 287, 377-380

277-278; -Plus, 184-183 Bengali, 33, 149, 285, 293, 301, 353, 361 Blache, Paul Vidal de la, 65 Bombay, see Mumbai

436 index

Borobudur, 150, 156, 180, 290, 292, 294, 296-300, 303n1

climate, 12, 29, 65, 66, 69, 71, 97, 103, 127, 189, 164-265, 269; and droughts, 85, 265-266;

Braudel, Fernand, 16, 39, 99, 260

and floods, 80, 102; and hurricanes,

British Empire, 20, 44, 51, 104, 107, 113-114,

30, 58n131; and monsoon cycle, 12, 13,

148, 190-191, 209-210, 269, 272, 300-301, 313, 323; and migration in Asia, 257-263, 265-266, 269-270, 273, 275-278 Buddhism, 14-17, 19, 22, 26, 47, 82, 88, 98, 104, 130, 139, 150; and architecture, 27, 32, 42, 162, 168, 295-298; and East Asia, 37, 163; and epics, 352, 355-356, 359, 364; and

38, 69-72, 78, 97, 99, 197, 199, 265; and tsunamis, 65, 80; and typhoons, 29 Coedès, George, 14, 38, 66-67, 90n18, 120-121, 143, 158-159, 161, 163 Cold War, 48, 50, 70, 378-379; and pragmatic Asianism, 311-317, 323, 326n30 colonialism, 20, 47, 69, 137-138, 149, 183, 283,

Greater India, 283-289, 291, 293, 295-300;

287, 311, 316, 320, 322-323, 381; see also

and Indianization, 40, 74, 80, 119, 120, 126;

anticolonialism, British-, Dutch-, French-,

and South Asia, 24, 144, 194; and Southeast

Spanish Empire

Asia, 33, 35, 42, 74, 80, 204; and Pali arena,

communism, 312, 314-316, 320, 367

183-194; legal world, 233; monks, 9, 10, 23,

contact, 22, 26, 29, 31, 34, 41, 71-72, 77, 99-100,

26, 105, 186; revival, 295-298; spread of, 64,

119-120, 162, 169-170, 379-380; and

71, 73, 74, 80, 140, 147

anticolonial movements, 20, 314, 317, 323;

Burma, see Myanmar

and Islam, 201, 207, 217-221; and language, 40, 64, 137-151, 226, 246

Cambodia, 15, 17, 22, 32, 49, 50, 102, 109, 112, 121, 123, 125, 185, 205, 319, 333, 341, 355, 369; see also French Indochina capitalism, 46, 110-111, 257-258, 263-264, 268, 315, 335

conversion: and Buddhism, 26; and Islam, 35, 42, 197-210, 218, 222-223, 228, 238, 250-251 corruption, 46, 330, 333, 338, 344-246 cosmopolis, 16, 34, 97, 137, 139, 142, 217, 224, 377; Arab, 15, 43, 144, 219, 221, 223,

Caribbean, 46, 258, 263, 277

226-229, 234-236, 239; Islamic law, 233-234,

caste system, 18, 20, 24, 26, 36, 104, 106, 109,

236, 239-241, 249, 246, 250-251; Malay, 43,

111, 157, 191, 268-269, 272, 336, 381

227, 233, 236, 240, 249; Pali, 15, 24, 41, 144,

Ceylon, see Sri Lanka

184; Persian, 146; Sanskrit, 15, 39, 41, 43,

Chettiars, 44, 271-274

75, 140, 143-144, 171-175, 184, 217, 219,

China, 9, 13-38, 42, 44, 45, 49-50, 156, 184,

224-225, 239; see also Arab, Malay, Pali,

204, 258, 260, 265, 291, 293, 324, 369; and archaeology, 120-121, 123, 125-126,

Sanskrit culture: and concept of Monsoon Asia, 12,

128-129; and concept of Monsoon Asia, 65,

14-21, 63-90; convergence, 17, 37, 41, 79,

72-76, 79, 86-89; and language, 17, 22, 138,

121, 137, 155, 159, 166, 168-175, 296; see

148-149; and Sinosphere, 9, 21, 37, 50, 185;

also epic, Indianization, Greater India,

and Song dynasty, 34, 186, 200, 203; and

Pali, Persian

state-building, 101, 104, 106, 112-114; and Tang dynasty, 33, 37, 197 China Sea, South, 10, 12, 16, 21, 27-29, 35, 49, 78-79, 109, 124, 126, 129, 160, 200, 205, 259-260, 262 Chola Empire, 19, 27, 106, 200, 264 Christianity, 37, 42, 111, 205-207, 222, 246, 359;

decolonization, 20, 51, 121, 171, 378, 381; and Asian Socialist Conference, 49, 311-317, 320, 323; and Greater India Society, 302 Dirks, Nicholas, 19 Dutch Empire, 20, 40, 69, 109, 110-113, 155, 157, 170, 189-190, 210, 242, 262-263, 294,

Catholicism, 147; and missionaries, 191,

297, 301, 322-323, 341-342; and concept of

193, 201, 275, 278, 294

Greater India, 284, 289, 294-295, 297, 300-

clientelism, 20, 46, 49, 329-346

301; and languages in Asia, 147-148, 222

index 437

Egypt, 200, 203, 207, 242, 245-246, 250, 263, 265, 291 empire, 37, 98, 101-106, 111-114, 160-161, 167, 191, 206, 234, 259, 262, 284, 288, 281; charter, 39, 98, 103-105, 114, 116n17; frontier, 107, 115n3; see also British, China, Chola, Dutch, French, Gupta, Maurya, Mughal,

Greece, 12, 37, 120, 130, 291, 299 governance, 20, 45-46, 313; and Buddhism, 187, 191; and informality trap, 330-336; colonial forms of, 263; good, 344, 346 Guimet, Émile, 291, 307n35; see also Musée Guimet Gupta Empire, 82, 104, 127, 168, 170

Spanish, state epic: epicality, 47, 351-353, 359, 370, 381; media,

habitus, 339

351-352, 366, 368-369; narration, 351, 353,

Hamza, Story of Amir, 46, 351, 354-367

362-366, 368; performance, 351, 354, 362,

Hathaway, W.L., 257-258, 275-276

364

Hikkaduvē Sumangala, 191

Europe, 18, 32, 40, 98-101, 104, 106, 114, 120,

Himalayas, 12, 73, 83, 87, 138, 185, 189

130, 142, 147, 184, 193, 204, 224, 236, 259,

Hindi, 13, 144, 149, 353

260, 263, 273, 315, 319; and concept of

Hinduism, 14, 40, 64, 72-73, 80, 82, 85, 88,

Greater India, 286, 293, 296, 298, 300-302;

126, 140, 155, 167, 233; and brahmins,

colonialism, 44, 137, 138, 149, 210, 234, 287;

26, 32, 35, 41, 73, 98, 105, 146, 157-158,

Eastern, 166, 259; Western, 166, 324, 369

162, 166-169, 173-174, 264; Hinduization, 92n41, 119, 139, 157, 160, 167-168, 174; and

Fauque, Paul, 289-290, 303, 306n31

monuments, 15, 16, 41, 168, 292

film, 368-369

histoire croisée, 378

freedom, 257-258, 265, 274-278, 312, 321-322,

historiography, 10, 63, 89, 121, 123, 146,

342, 381 French Empire, 63, 65, 66, 69, 86, 89, 99, 113, 155, 156, 190, 236, 263, 286, 289, 290-292,

159-161, 174, 237, 246, 251, 284, 286, 300, 317, 365, 379-380 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 304n5, 378, 380

321, 341 indentured labour, 148, 263, 269, 277-278 Gallois, Lucien, 65

India: British in, 113-114, 258, 260, 262, 272,

Ganges, 32, 68, 85, 102, 261

276; Indianization, 9, 14, 20, 24-27, 32,

Gaspardone, Emile, 156

34-38, 40-41, 43, 47, 70, 72, 75, 89, 119,

geography, 9, 38, 175, 228-229, 368, 380; and

122, 124, 126-131, 155-182, 287-289;

concept of Monsoon Asia, 12-16, 47, 63,

Indocentrism, 41, 155-156, 158; migration

65-78, 82, 85-88; and Greater India, 16, 38,

from South, 257-259, 262-265, 267-268, 270,

283, 290, 297, 303n1; and language, 144,

272, 276; North, 15, 98, 138, 143, 146, 157,

148; and longue durée of Asia, 97-99, 101,

167-168, 228, 296, 352, 367; South, 15, 19,

103-104, 114; and migration, 259, 270, 274;

27-28, 83-84, 99, 102, 111-113, 138, 143-144,

and spread of Islam, 197, 199, 201, 217,

155, 157, 168, 171, 200, 202, 203, 220-228,

121, 223, 227, 233-234; and Pali arena, 184-185 Glissant, Edouard, 381 Greater India: art of, 298-303; concept of, 14, 44-45, 50, 70, 98, 120, 138, 151, 156, 283, 292-295, 297; and Indology, 292, 294, 295, 300; Society, 69, 120, 156, 285, 293, 295, 300; and Tagore 283, 285, 294, 295, 301, 303n1 Greater Magadha, 38, 63, 82-86, 89

380; see also Greater India Indian Ocean: Eastern, 170; Western, 99, 111, 113, 128, 185, 200; world, 10, 13, 27, 95, 146, 185, 198, 236, 247, 249, 250, 379-380 Indochina, 12, 29, 65, 68, 120, 155, 263, 272-273, 292-293, 321; French, 122, 287, 292, 313, 320; see also Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia Indology, 56, 67, 82, 150, 443; and Greater India Society, 292, 294, 295, 300; Indologists, 25-26, 35, 38-39, 82, 88, 104, 119, 143, 150, 184

438 index

Indonesia, 10, 17-18, 21-22, 24, 29, 34, 36, 50-51,

217, 221-229, 236-239, 247, 250; language,

112-113, 380; and archaeology, 123; and

33, 40, 138, 142-143, 147-148, 223-227, 247;

concept of Monsoon Asia, 67, 69, 72, 74;

literature, 33, 43, 47, 129, 150, 222, 352-359,

and etymology, 12; and language, 13, 40,

361-362, 366-367, 360-370; migration, 263,

47, 147, 149; and literature, 46, 50, 351-352,

265; nationalism, 300; North, 126, 205, 206;

366-367, 368-570; and Greater India,

West, 120, 162, 208, 242

25, 283, 285-287, 289-290, 293, 297-299, 302-303; and Indianization, 35, 157-158, 161-162, 164, 168, 170, 173-174; and Islam, 35, 42-43, 155, 197-198, 200, 202-205, 208, 209, 217, 219, 220-221, 227, 242-243, 247; and migration, 262-263, 273; and Pali arena, 185; and politics, 45-46, 50, 311-313,

Khmer, 22, 40, 50, 123, 138, 141, 142-144, 147, 149, 161, 171, 183, 195n29, 340, 353 kinship, 18-20, 46-47, 269, 278; in epics, 351-356, 359, 369-370 Korea, 13, 37, 71, 291, 335; North, 74; South, 17, 48, 50

315, 317-322, 324-336, 338, 340-342, 345 informality, 329, 331-340; informality trap, 45-46, 343-346 internationalism, 312-313

Laos, 15, 18, 22, 73, 333; see also French Indochina law, 104, 377, 379; and China, 31, 37; and

Iran, 71, 101, 106, 110-111; see also Persia

politics in Asia, 20, 46, 49, 329, 331-332,

Islam: Islamic communities in Asia, 42-43, 144,

335, 339-340, 342-343, 345; book, 241,

148, 200-207, 218, 221-222, 224, 228-230,

243; citizenship, 257, 264, 275; Indian, 14;

236, 251; Islamic cosmopolis, 218, 221, 223;

Islamic, 43, 220, 233-251; lawyers, 234, 277;

Islamization, 16, 20, 33-35, 39-40, 42, 144,

see also rule of law, informality

197-207, 218-219, 221, 224; and literary

Lévi, Sylvain, 38, 66, 82, 90n13, 91n18, 286, 300

works, 43, 203, 218, 220, 223, 228; Muslim

Leur, J.C. van, 128, 157-158, 173-174

merchants, 197, 199, 201, 210, 220; Shafi’i

linguistics, 25, 33, 85, 138-147, 266, 294, 377,

School of Islamic jurisprudence, 43, 202-

380-382; Arabic, 217-219, 221, 223-225,

203, 207, 220, 233, 235-251; spread of, 35,

227, 280, 233-236, 239, 249; and concept of

42-43, 144, 146, 200, 219-220, 221; Islamic

Monsoon Asia, 64, 67, 72, 77, 79, 80, 82-83,

sultanates in Asia, 35, 48, 102, 106-107, 111112, 202-210, 220, 238, 244-245, 263, 342,

87-88; and cosmopolis, 51, 137, 150-151 Lombard, Denys, 75, 380

361; see also Arab, conversion, Indonesia, Islamic law, Java, network

Madagascar, 24, 128, 142, 381 Majapahit, 32, 35, 107, 108, 109, 166, 204, 340

Jahangir, 367

Makassar, 208

Jakarta, 51, 149, 161, 302, 354; Batavia, 110, 113,

Malay, 44, 269-270, 273, 275-230, 320; archipel-

147, 210, 220, 302, 322 Japan, 13, 17, 28, 37-38, 41, 47, 50, 65, 71, 73,

ago, 217, 248, 290; law, 233-251; as lingua franca, 43, 142, 147-148, 233, 246, 250;

107, 112, 291-293, 295, 317, 320; and

literature, 10, 146, 207, 221; microcosmoi,

Buddhism, 184, 193; and language, 37; -ese

43, 233, 236, 240, 249; migration, 257-258,

occupation of East and Southeast Asia, 20,

262-264, 269-278; peninsula, 24, 27-29, 33,

122; Sea of, 37

69, 88, 102, 112, 163, 206, 219, 260, 263, 266,

Java, 31-32, 34, 102, 108, 109, 112, 342, 380; archaeology, 120; Central, 27, 32, 170, 173, 292, 366; East, 32, 88, 108, 204, 219, 294,

269-270; people, 32, 35, 148, 205, 249-250, 269, 269-270, 276-277, 320; trade, 27 Malaysia, 17-18, 34, 40, 43-44, 48, 73, 84,

363; Greater India, 284, 288, 291-297, 299,

148, 218, 220, 228, 243, 291, 293; and

300, 302; Indianization, 15, 25, 41, 51, 72,

informality trap, 333-335; and Asian

75, 88, 161-163, 165, 168, 170-171, 173; Islam, 34-35, 42-43, 150, 198, 203, 208-209,

migration, 270, 271 Maldives, 74, 146, 197, 205, 207, 219, 238

index 439

Manguin, Pierre-Yves, 16, 29, 39, 52, 89, 156, 160, 163, 377-378 Mahabharata, 46, 351, 354, 356-359, 361-365,

287-288, 291; and migration, 259-260, 262-263, 271-275, 278; and Pali arena, 185-186, 188, 190-192

363, 367, 370n5 map, 45, 58n131, 66, 68, 69, 74, 81, 87, 263, 302, 313, 317

nationalism, 18, 50, 75, 150, 286, 291, 293, 296, 300, 301, 320, 352, 369, 379, 381;

Marx, Karl, 265, 276 ; and historiography, 104

anticolonial, 20; Indian, 14, 44, 70, 98,

Mauritius, 258, 263, 380

155-156, 171, 270, 276, 277, 285, 302, 303;

Maurya Empire, 39, 102, 105, 168 Mecca, 42, 204, 217, 226, 229, 238, 240, 242, 244-247, 250 Mediterranean Sea, 39, 76, 99, 101, 110, 122, 130, 255, 260 Middle East, 32-33, 42, 104, 106, 138, 197, 200, 204, 237, 240, 242-243, 246-247

Javanese, 300; religious, 50, 286 Nepal, 17, 45, 74, 77, 143, 317, 324, 379 network, 23, 27, 35, 64, 78, 87, 89, 125-126, 10, 159, 169, 174, 377-378; anticolonial, 319; Buddhist, 41-42, 88, 140, 144; commercial, 36, 77, 79, 97, 101, 107, 109-113, 122-129, 197, 200-201, 206, 210, 217, 250; and

migration; labour, 267-268, 277-278

informality, 334-335, 343, 353; Islamic,

Monsoon Asia, 10, 11, 12, 377, 380-381;

42-43, 146, 202, 208, 217-230, 234, 236-237,

and archaeology, 71-72, 77, 79, 82; and

245, 247, 250; and knowledge of Greater

architecture, 71; and culture, 12, 14-21,

India, 44, 283, 286, 289, 291, 294, 300, 303;

63-90; and geography, 12-16, 47, 63, 65-78,

and language, 137-138, 140, 150; literary,

82, 85-88; and Indonesia, 67, 69, 72, 74;

43, 46, 202; and migration, 257-258, 263;

and linguistics, 64, 67, 72, 77, 79, 80, 82-83, 87-88; intellectual genealogy of, 63-89;

and Pali arena, 185-186, 190, 192 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 321-322

and Sri Lanka, 71, 74; contrast with China, 65, 72-76, 79, 86-89; criticism of concept, 12, 44, 283-284; politics in, 332-333, 340, 342; see also climate, Greater India, Indianization

One Thousand Questions, book of, 43, 219, 221-223 Orientalism, 66, 86, 99, 121-122, 140, 283, 286, 291-292, 294-295, 339

Mughal Empire, 35, 43, 107, 111, 115n3, 146-147, 207, 236, 340, 366-367, 370 Mumbai, 45, 260, 299, 317, 319 Mus, Paul, 38, 66-67, 70, 72-73, 75-77, 82, 87-89 museum, 283-310; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 288, 293, 299; British Museum, 291; Los Angeles County Museum, 302; Louvre, 285; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 285, 288, 298; Musée Guimet, 285, 290,

Pacific Ocean, 79, 284, 287 Pakistan, 10, 17, 21, 45-46, 71, 74, 317-318, 321, 333-334, 341-342, 379 palaeography, 120, 161 Pali, 22, 23, 25, 40-41, 137, 139, 144, 146, 149-150, 183-186, 193, 353; cosmopolis, 15, 24, 144, 185 Persia, 22, 24, 33, 35, 40, 128, 200; culture, 33,

290, 291, 300, 307n35; Museum Nasional

203, 220; Gulf, 99, 113; language, 25, 129,

Indonesia, 161, 164, 302; Rijksmuseum,

137, 146, 147, 183, 222, 227, 236-239, 248,

285, 300 music, 222, 294, 253, 360, 362, 364, 366, 369; and

250, 353-356, 363, 365; see also Iran Philippines, 10, 13, 18, 21, 29, 49, 68, 74, 112,

dance, 352, 355, 366, 368; and instruments,

142, 149, 218, 249, 315; and epics 351-352,

366; and song, 360, 365-366

362, 364, 370; and informality trap,

Myanmar, 15, 17, 20-22, 24, 24-25, 31, 44-45 48, 52, 69, 74, 77, 81, 109, 121, 122, 128, 144, 147-148 151, 186, 266; and Asian Socialist Conference, 311, 313, 315, 317, 320, 324; and epics, 252, 262-263; and Greater India,

333-334, 341 philology, 40, 50, 67, 82, 119-120, 137-138, 150, 160, 292, 296, 365, 377

440 index

plantation, 113, 148, 257, 260, 263, 270, 271, 273-275, 277-278; coffee, 259, 268; tea, 44, 468 Pollock, Sheldon, 15, 39, 40-41, 75, 104, 142, 171-175, 184, 217, 219, 224-225, 235, 239 Ptolemy, Claudius, 68, 155

South Africa, 148, 246, 248-249, 277; and Afrikaans, 148 sovereignty, 19, 67, 126, 161, 183, 187-191, 204, 262, 356 Spanish Empire, 112, 138, 206, 341 Sri Lanka, 17, 21-22, 24, 28, 32, 109, 112-113, 351, 370, 379-380; and concept of Monsoon

Qurrat al-‘ayn, 236, 240, 242

Asia, 71, 74; and Islam, 43, 205, 218-219, 228, 237, 248; migration from and to, 44,

Raj, Kapil, 387

258-260, 262-265, 267-276, 278; and Pali

Ramayana, 46, 108, 351, 354, 356-361, 363-369,

arena, 15, 41-42, 185, 188, 190-192; politics,

370n5 Rangoon, 45, 260, 261-262, 272-273, 275; and Asian Socialist Conference, 311, 313, 316-320, 323 religion, 23, 37, 64, 67, 69-70, 73, 75, 77, 87-89,

45, 48-49, 317, 319-320, 322; Sinhala language, 138, 143-144, 148, 183, 187, 193; see also Pali, Tamil Srivijaya, 24, 27, 33, 98, 102, 123, 125, 126, 129, 163, 165-166, 170

107, 126, 130, 146, 148, 234, 238; and epics,

state: craft, 37, 42, 146, 186-189; formation, 41,

351; and Greater India, 283, 286, 291-293;

47, 76, 102, 107, 110, 115, 119, 125-129,

monuments, 14, 119; politics, 18, 37, 50,

155, 157, 160-163, 165-167, 173; frontier,

151, 157, 337; priests, 22, 26, 88, 157, 163,

39, 97-98, 105-107, 114; temple, 39, 97-98,

264; texts, 121, 143, 207, 227, 247; see also Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity

105-107; see also informality structuralism, 70

Ronkel, Ph. S. van, 354

Suez Canal, 259-260, 263, 265, 268, 273

rule of law, 46, 49, 329, 331, 333, 343-344, 346

Sumatra, 9-10, 27-28, 32-33, 74, 80, 88, 102, 112, 115n10, 148, 163, 166; and Greater India,

Sabokingking inscription, 129, 164, 165-166

289-291, 297; and Indianization, 35, 123,

Sanskrit, 15, 25, 73, 82; Sanskritization, 40, 75,

126-127; and Islam, 42, 43, 200, 202-203,

98, 115, 130, 142, 150; as a lingua franca,

217, 219-220, 227-228, 237-238; and

235, 239; cosmopolis, 15, 39, 41, 140,

language, 35, 123, 126-127

143-144, 171-175, 184, 217, 219, 224-225, 235, 239 Schendel, Willem van, 75, 86, 378 Schlemmer, Grégoire, 70, 86, 89 Siam, see Thailand Singapore, 10, 18, 20, 102; and anticolonial

Tagalog, 353 Tagore, Rabindranath, 25; and Greater India Society, 283, 285, 294, 295, 301, 303n1 Tamil, 10, 144, 148, 156, 200, 227, 250, 264-265, 268, 270-271, 274, 275; language, 22, 25,

movements, 320-322; and Asian migration,

31-32, 40, 43, 106, 137, 142-144, 149, 183,

22, 44, 148-149, 262, 269-270, 272; and

203, 217, 221-226, 239, 268, 272, 380;

Indianization, 173; and informality trap,

Muslims, 220-221, 227, 269, 273; Nadu, 32,

46, 48, 51, 333

43, 106, 173, 217, 220-221, 274

Sion, Jules, 38, 65, 90n8

Tenshin, Okakura, 293

Sivasundaram, Sujit, 379

television, 149, 288, 368

slavery, 18, 258, 265, 278; abolition of, 258, 265,

Thailand, 17, 20, 22, 24, 28-29, 48, 123, 128, 140,

258; enslaved people, 147-148, 165, 265,

143-144, 147, 218, 243, 260, 263; language,

379; slavers, 238

22, 40, 138, 144, 147; literature, 353, 355,

socialism, 312-315; Asian, 314-316, 323; democratic, 311, 314; international, 312, 314, 416

361-363, 369-370; and Pali cosmopolis, 15, 49, 185, 187; politics in, 333-334, 337 Thomas, Henry Sullivan, 276

index 441

theatre, 146, 355, 357; plays, 358, 368; states, 19, 104 Theosophy, 45, 193, 283, 286, 295-298, 300, 303n1, 308n64 Tibet, 9-10, 33, 47, 74, 77, 86, 185, 323, 352, 368; Tibetan, 138, 353

United Nations, 316, 319-320, 322 United States, 18, 48-49, 60, 70, 259, 277, 293, 296, 298, 300, 302, 324, 341; see also America Urdu, 149, 22, 227, 248; in epics, 253- 356, 358, 367

trade, 26, 31, 99, 104-105, 107, 109-111, 122, 127, 142, 146, 237, 246, 260, 262; Chinese,

Vergès, Françoise, 379, 381

33-35, 112-113, 128-129, 272; Indian, 31, 32,

Vietnam, 13, 18, 22, 28, 33, 46, 72, 109, 120-121,

35, 73, 111, 113, 143, 158; Muslim, 42, 113, 197-203, 205-206, 210, 220, 225, 227, 237; Tamil, 144; trading companies, 109-110,

123, 125, 127, 138, 156, 161, 291, 317, 319322, 333, 341; see also French Indochina Vijayanagara, 107, 115n3

112, 210, 147, 261; trading networks, 36, 77, 79, 97, 101, 107, 109-113, 122-129, 197, 200-201, 206, 210, 217, 250; translation, 127; and Buddhism, 193; and China, 21, 128; and Islamic law, 217-219,

wayang (shadow play), 150, 354, 358, 362, 366-367 Weber, Max, 156-157 Wink, André, 199

221, 223-229, 235-236, 239-240, 245, 247248, 251; and the Book of One Thousand

Yellow Sea, 37

Questions, 43, 222 Zomia, 38-39, 63, 75, 86-88, 96n109