By the opening of the Christian are the civilization of India and begun
to spread across the Bay of Bengal into both island and mainland
south-east Asia, and by the fifth century A.D. Indianised states, that
is to say states organized along the traditional lines of Indian
political theory and following the Buddhists or Hindu religions, had
established themselves in many regions of Burma, Thialand, Indo-China,
Malaysia, and Indonesia. Some of these states were in time to grow into
great empires dominating the zone between metropolitan India and the
Chiense southern border, which has sometimes been dscribed as "Further
India' or "Greater India", once rooted in South-East Again soil, Indian
civilization evolved in part through the action of forces of South-East
Asian origin, and in part through the influence of cultural and
political changes in the Indian Subcontinent civilization in terms of a
series of 'waves' and there are good reasons for considering that such
"waves" are still breaking in south East Asian beaches today.
The cultures of modern-East Asia all provide evidence of a long period of contact with India.
- Manyu South-East Asian languages (Maley and Javanese are good
examples) contain an important proportion of words of Sanskrit of
Dravidian origin. Some of these languages, like Thai, are still written
in scripts which are clearly derived from Indian models.
- South East Asian concepts of kingship and authority, even in regions
which are now dominated by Islam, owe much to ancient Hindu political
theory. The Thai monarchy, though following Hinayana Buddhism of the
Sinhalese type, still requires the presence of Gour Brahmans (who by now
have become Thai in all but name) for the proper performance of its
ceremonials.
- The traditional dance and shadow-puppet theatres in many South-East
Asian regions, in Thailand, Malaya, and Java for example, contniue to
fascinate their audiences with the adventures of Rama and Sita and
Hanuman.
- It is difficult to determine the precise Indian influence on the great
South-East Asian monuments as the Borobodur stupa in Java and the Khmer
temples of Combodia. Theser structures are obviously in the Indian
tradition. Their ground-plans, for example, and the subject matter of
their sculptural decoration, can easily be related to Indian religious
texts.
" Yet a careful study of monuments such as these suggests that the
Indian aspects is only one part of the story. While beyond doubt showing
sings of Indian influence yet Borobodur and Angkor Wat are not copies
of Indian structures. There exists nothing quite like them in the Indian
archaeological record. The vast majority of the Hindu and Buddhist
monuments of south east Asia which were constructed in the pre-European
period, that is to say before the opening of the sixteenth century,
possess, as it were, a definite South-East Asian flavour. It is
reasonable to consider the styles of art and architecture of the Khemrs,
Chams, and Javanese as styles in their own right and something much
more than the imitation of Indian prototypes. These styles, as coedes
and other scholars have expressed, It, are Indiansed rather than Indian.
The Indian inheritance in South-East Asia is not to be found in the
unthinking repetition of Indian forms, rather, it is to be seen in the
inspiration which Indian gave to south East Asia to adopt its own
cultures so as to absorb and develop Indian concepts. The resulting
syntheses are peculiar to south-east Asia.
The images of Buddha and Vishnu, lingas and other Hindu cult objects of
the early period are far more 'Indian' and far less characteristic of
any regional culture. Almost ubiquitos in south-east Asia, for example
is a category of Buddha image showing very clear signs of Gupta or
Amravati influence, and some examples of this can, on the established
principles of India iconography, be dated to very early in the Christian
era. Specimens have been found in Indo-China, Thailand, Burma,
Malayisa, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
In time of process of regional evolution, the interaction of Indna and
indigenous ideas began to produce a number of distinctive styles of
Indianised south-east Asian art and architecture. The man art of Burma
and of the socalled kingdom of Dvaravati in what is now Thailand, while
retaining much that might be called Gupta, and by the sixth century A.D.
begun to show a number of distinctive features of its own, some of them
easy to detect by eye but very hard to define verbally. Perhaps the
most obvious representation of the human face, which comes to show
Physcial features characteristics of a non-Indian ethnic group. The
Khemrs, Chams, and Javanese had all likewise by the end of the eights
century evolved styles so individual as to have become something much
more than a refletion of one or more Indian prototypes.
There is much evidence to suggest that Indian ideas, as well as Indian
art, were modified in 'Further Indian' through the influence of
indigenous cultures.
The cult of the Devaraja, the God King, though certainly expressed in
Indian terminology, developed, so many scholars believe, into a
distinctive corpus the political and consmological ideas which behind
the proliferation of Khmer temples built in the form of of mystic
mountains and the Javanese chandis which were not only places of worship
but also royal tombs and mechanisms, as it were, designed to line the
dynasty on earth with the spirit world. No more extreme examples of this
cult with its identification on furler with God, be it Siva, Vishnu or
Buddha, can be found than in Angkor Thom, the city of the late twelth
and ear thirteenth century Khmer ruler Jayavarma VII. Here, on the
gateway towers of the city, and on its central monuments, the Bayon, the
face of theking himself becomes the dominant architecture motif. From
all four sides of every tower of the Bayon, Jayavarman VII looks out
over his capital, his lips and eyes suggesting an enigmatic and slightly
malevolent smile. This is something which the Roman emperors, who
defined themselves in their onw lifetimes, would have understood, but
which would have been beyond the comprehension of the great Hindu and
Buddhist dynasties of India. The Devaraja cult of the Khemrs, Chams, and
Javanese Indianlised kings has survived to the present day in Thailand,
where it explains many features of the modern Thai monarchy.
The individually of the major art styles of Indianised sout-east Asia
is, as we have already noted, to a great extent the result of
interaction between Indian and preIndian indigenous south-east Asian
concepts and traditions. The south -East Asian component in this
cultural equatioin, however, is far more difficult to define than the
Indian.
