Chapter 6 - Indianization Reconsidered: India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia

Summary

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.

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 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.