2 - Fearsome Bleeding, Boogeyman Gods and Chaos Victorious: A Conjectural History of Insular South Asian Religious Tropes

Summary

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Buriall (n.d. [1643], p. 190)

One…source, though not strictly legitimate as evidence for…ancient religious traditions as they existed before Indian or Chinese influence…[is] our knowledge of the religious practices current in recent times among… tribal peoples of the area. Such communities have preserved distinctive cultural traditions characteristic of those who, like the ancestors of modern Southeast Asians, live in small groups and lack a written language or fulltime religious specialists.

de Casparis and Mabbett (1999, p. 280)

It seems fitting that we start our inquiry into the relationships between Indic, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian language-speaking peoples in Monsoon Asia by trying to reconstruct the situation around 1500 BC, before Indian thought took solid form in the Vedas and Austronesianspeakers dominated the islands. We know that there were people in the islands for thousands of years before that, early forms of Homo erectus and now-extinct variants of Homo sapiens like the Hobbits of Flores or the Denisovans who left traces of their genetic material in the outer islands. At a guess, these people tended to be short and dark, like Munda of Chota Nagpur, some inhabitants of the Mentawai islands, or Semang of interior central West Malaysia.

Little trace of their original languages remains (Blust 2013). “It seems reasonably safe to assume that Andamanese is the sole remaining linguistic representative of pre-Neolithic Southeast Asia, its roots perhaps going back as far as the initial colonization of Southeast Asia by modern humans—an isolate that has remained largely unaffected by the vast linguistic spreads that have occurred elsewhere in Southeast Asia in Neolithic and post-Neolithic times” (Burenhult 1996, p. 14), though northern Andamanese may have Austroasiatic affinities (Blevins in Blust 2013, p. xx, fn. 7). The other linguistic isolate is Shompen, traditionally spoken by foragers among the Austroasiatic-speaking Nicobarese (Blench 2010). Blust (2013) suggests that these people may have migrated to Indonesia not through Malaysia but by sea, from Burma.