29 - From Mandalas to Microchips: The Indian Imprint on the Construction of Singapore

Summary

THE CLASSICAL AGE

The classical Indian influence on Southeast Asia was a largely benign one. According to G. Coedes in The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, Indians “nowhere engaged in military conquest and annexation in the name of a state or mother country”. The Indian kingdoms that emerged in “Farther India” enjoyed only ties of tradition with Indian dynasties; there was no political dependence. It is true that from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries A.D., the South Indian Chola Kingdom, a great naval power, protected its merchants from the Coromandel Coast in the Strait of Malacca, and it is also true that Rajendra Chola attacked Kedah in 1025, ransacked its capital and carried its treasures back home. However, this incursion was the result of rivalry that had developed between the Cholas and the Srivijaya Empire: the Cholas exercised no control over the Malay Peninsula. Unlike Western imperial expeditions to Asia later, the flag did not follow trade. Instead, one form which India's relationship with Southeast Asia took was the transmission of the notion of the mandala, a Sanskrit term featured in Indian manuals of governance that demarcated the power of kings in terms of circles forming around them. O.W. Wolters reads the map of early Southeast Asia as a patchwork of often overlapping mandalas. While, in theory, a king imbued with divine and universal authority claimed hegemony over other rulers in his mandala who were his allies and vassals, in practice, the mandala represented “an often unstable political situation in a vaguely defined geographical area without fixed boundaries”. Smaller centres tended to look in all directions for security as the spheres expanded or contracted. Each mandala contained tributary rulers among whom some would repudiate their vassalage when opportunity arrived and embark on building up their own set of vassals. The mandala system did not stop war, but victories rarely obliterated local centres, whether by colonization or through the power of centralized institutions of government. Amitav Acharya makes a convincing case for treating the mandala system as one of the sources of contemporary Southeast Asia's regional state-system, two other sources being Stanley Tambiah's notion of “galactic polity” and Clifford Geertz's “theatre state” in Bali — both of which bore, of course, India's civilizational imprint.