Exploring India's cultural heritage

CHENNAI, November 28, 2011
Special Correspondent
The Hindu

A Tamil Brahmi letter dated to 2nd century CE excavated from Phu Khao Thong in Thailand, Mahabaratha scenes in Angkor Vat in Cambodia, a bilingual inscription at Kandahar and the many forms of Lord Ganesha in South East Asia, all provide evidence of India's cultural influence in Asia.

The book, ‘From Kanchi to Cambodia – Greater India revisited', is an attempt to explore how the 2,000-year-old traditions and culture of India amalgamated in the cultures of many countries in Asia, says T.K.V. Rajan, an archaeologist and its author.

Hindu Influence and Southeast Asia

Bali Hindu festival

Tuesday, 02 August 2011
Written by Alexandra R. Kapur-Fic
Asia Sentinel

Did the Hindus get there first?

The flow of Indian cultural values and institutions into Southeast Asia is one of the most remarkable aspects of the region’s history and an intriguing counterpoint to China’s claims that the South China Sea is a Chinese lake because the diplomat and seafarer, Admiral Zheng He, sailed it sometime in the late 14th or early 15th Century.

In fact, an exhaustive study of the cultural values of the region makes it impossible to say that any one ethnic group or civilization has dominated. Hinduism has been a force in mixing distinctly disparate religions together for thousands of years in Southeast Asia to the point that often Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism and animism simply fuse so that one resembles the other despite their vastly divergent roots.

Buddhism is practiced in Hindu temples in Cambodia, Muslim wedding rituals and wedding dress in Malaysia are based on Hindu rites. The Garuda is the name of Indonesia’s airline; a likeness of the mythical bird sits proudly on the front of the Bank of Thailand headquarters in Bangkok. The Naga, the sacred Hindu serpent, is prevalent in both Buddhist and Hindi cultures. There are Mount Merus-- the sacred golden mountain in Hindu text--in many countries all the way to Tanganyika.

The idea of Asia

August 21, 2010
Pallavi Aiyar
Business Standard (India)

Geo-strategic pundits may reduce Asia to a quagmire of border disputes and nuclear weapons. But there is another, older, more closely-bound entity. Pallavi Aiyar seeks it out

The in-vogue idea of the ‘rise of Asia’ can be irksome. Lumping together civilisationally disparate entities like India and China with a motley collection of South-east, Central and West ‘Asian’ countries smacks of a persistent Orientalism, whereby a European definition of the exotic east prevails over the reality of how ‘Asians’ in fact perceive each other and themselves.

But an ongoing exhibition in Brussels, ‘A Passage to Asia’, is a powerful challenge to this scepticism, transporting the visitor across millennia to times before nationalisms and modern nation states clarified once blurry boundaries and identities.

It tells a story of sparkling precious stones and revolutionary religions, fragrant spices and radical technologies. It is a story that is ancient, yet startlingly modern, centred on manufacturing, investments, risks and profits; in short the forces of globalisation and trade that enabled India and China to dominate as economic and cultural powerhouses for much of history.

As a result it finds resonance with the Asia-boosters of today, giving their hype depth by underscoring how the emerging countries of the continent are in fact merely re-emerging. Moreover, at a time when geo-strategic pundits tend to reduce the region to a quagmire of border disputes and nuclear weapons, the exhibition reveals the historical existence of another kind of Asia, bound a lot closer together and more syncretically than either imaginable or imagined today.

What we see here are the points where modern day Mongolia, China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan meet and spill over into each other; where Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia are laced together by Indian winds and Chinese breath.

‘A Passage to Asia’ was conceived as a cultural adjunct to the eighth ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) summit that will be held in early October in Brussels this year. Given that ‘Asia’ consists of 16 countries within this framework, Jan Van Alphen, the exhibition’s curator, confesses he was initially at a loss over how to focus the display.

There is an Asian culture that can be found in snatches all across the region, he insists. He points to the arc of Buddhist grottoes from Dunhuang in China’s Gansu province to Bamiyan in Afghanistan and on to the Ajanta and Ellora caves in India. He talks of the pathways Hinduism forged from India across the seas to Indonesia and Malaysia, and overland to Burma.

He alludes to the ‘pax Mongolica’ that saw the Mongols carve out vast territories across Eurasia, from Japan to the Balkans, in the 13th and 14th centuries. Bronze passports (on display at the exhibition) were issued to travellers along the Silk Route at the time, guaranteeing unimpeded passage.

The Silk Route, the mesh of paths that connected Antioch in the west to Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) in China, may be the most well-known of the overland trade routes within Asia and between Asia and Europe, but it was not the only one. Predating it by thousands of years a number of sea and land routes created interlinkages across Eurasia, with India already in contact with Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and South-east Asia. There was a jade route, an animal skin route and even a lapis lazuli route via which the blue stone travelled west from Afghanistan to Egypt and Greece and east to India and Japan.

“But how do you tell these stories through objects? That was the challenge,” says Van Alphen with a smile. In the end the curator decided to arrange the exhibition into 10 sub-themes, each underlain by the two meta-themes of faith and trade.

‘Vessels for Life and Death’ kicks off the show with receptacles used to contain foodstuffs, beverages and human remains, from India, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea and Japan. Dating from the 4th millennium BCE to the 2nd millennium CE, these vessels draw attention to the strong cultural elements that bound these far-flung areas together.

There are separate sections on the Silk Route and sea routes as well as traded commodities, in particular ceramics from China and Korea, and Gujarati textiles.

Indian clothing was a ‘hot ticket’ item in the Roman empire, Islamic world and Ottoman Turkey. But the exhibits focus on textiles from Gujarat which from the 10th century CE onward grew so popular that they altogether replaced traditional textiles in many East and South-east Asian countries.

The Gujarati combination of advanced textile printing technology, plentiful labour and quick delivery times proved unbeatable. Customisation was the name of the game even back then, with Indian weavers able to add specific motifs to fabrics on demand. Indian textiles were so highly valued that they were used quite literally as a currency. Van Alphen tells of families in South-east Asia collecting these textiles as investments over centuries. Later European colonialists used them to help gain monopolies over the spice trade. They would order fabric in India and exchange it for spices in South-east Asia.

Moving on from commodities, the exhibition showcases additional displays on Hinduism and Buddhism as threads knitting the region together, as well as displays on ‘Religions of the Book’. In this last section we learn how Islam was carried out of India by traders into Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Christianity’s spread across the continent is showcased by, amongst other objects, Mughal miniatures from Goa, which show the baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary with Hindu tikas on their forehead.

From bronze drums to embroidered cloth and painted maps, the 400-plus carefully chosen objects on display bring to life the creative energy unleashed by centuries of mélange.

The role of India as a hub and disseminator of ‘Asian’ culture is also illuminated, resurrecting long-forgotten and rarely cultivated cross-border ties that pre-date our modern identities. Indian seafarers had use of sturdy ships and a good understanding of the monsoon winds, which allowed them to travel across the seas successfully. Even as far back as the Indus valley civilisation, seals were found in India bearing images of ships with masts.

Moreover, the great religions of Asia almost always spread via India. The oldest cultures in Vietnam: the Champa and Funan in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, for example, were Hindu civilisations. If you look at temples from Indonesia to Cambodia, the inscriptions on them are in Pali and Sanskrit, which are Indian languages. Buddhism spread both westward and eastward from India. This was, after all, the “biggest idea ever invented and exported”, says Van Alphen with a grin.

“In our exhibition, India and China are the two poles with several satellites around them,” he says. And it is apposite that just as they are “booming again, we remind ourselves of their dominance in the past”.

The invitation to rethink the idea of Asia as a cross-border and cross-civilisational, yet not altogether incoherent entity is relevant to the current context as well.

Of course the romance of the past inescapably loses some lustre in the cold light of modern-day reality. The exhibition’s organisers found themselves dealing with the Chinese objecting to boundaries shown around Bhutan, the Indians critical of borders demarcating Kashmir and Pakistan, the Japanese worried about the denomination of the sea that separates them from Korea and vice versa.

But in the end the objections were either withdrawn or worked around, and 16 Asian countries were able to cooperate closely enough to contribute to this remarkable show. A sliver of hope that, borders notwithstanding, a more collaborative future is possible. n

‘Passage to Asia’ is on at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels until October 10.

Mr. Geetesh Sharma get your history straight: There was no Vietnamese in Ho Chi Minh City 2,000 years ago!

South Indians were the ancient money bags in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh city (IANS Books)

05-Mar-2010
Source: Madhusree Chatterjee

New Delhi, March 5 (IANS) Vietnam - the bloody stage for a 30-year-war with France and then the US - was once home to a bustling Hindu settlement devoted to Shiva and Vishnu. Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, was the business hub of the South Indian Chettiyar community that set up money-lending businesses.

'The relation between India and Ho Chi Minh city dates back to more than two centuries when the Chettiyars, the trading community from south India, first came to the city to establish their money lending business.

'Subsequently, when they flourished, they entered the retail trade and formed a place for themselves in local society. They were followed by several other trading communities and religious groups from India,' writes veteran journalist, scholar and social activist Geetesh Sharma in his new book, 'Traces of Indian Culture in Vietnam'.

Ties between India and Vietnam date back to more than 2,000 years when Hindu traders from the Bhagalpur region established the ancient Champa kingdom in central Vietnam, Sharma says.

The book, published by Banyan Tree Books Pvt Ltd, the English publishing wing of Rajkamal Publications, was released by ICCR president Karan Singh in the capital Wednesday.

The 77-year-old Kolkata-based writer, who has visited Vietnam 13 times, had been researching the historical ties between the two nations since 1982.

'Vietnam - once a household name in Kolkata made popular by Communist slogans such as 'tomar naam, amar naam, Vietnam' (your name, my name is Vietnam) - captured my imagination in the 1970s when I attended demonstrations against the Vietnam war in the city. I realised that Vietnam shared a lot with India - and Bengal,' the writer told IANS.

'The first lot of people who migrated to Vietnam during the first and fourth century AD were temple artisans and traders from Bihar, Bengal and Orissa. Hindu culture is still alive in Vietnam. Several communities of ethnic Cham people in the country speak a tongue that is a phonetic blend of Devanagari and Sanskrit. I also came upon a local theatre troupe which performs a version of Ramayana,' Sharma said.

The Vietnamese adaptation of Ramayana, 'Ms Sita', is woven around the lives of local prince Po Liem [KI-Media Note: Not Po Liem but Preah Ream!] , a local version of king Rama and his wife Sita.

'The king dies and the crown is passed on to the king's ex-wife's son. Liem and Sita are forced to live in the forest. Demon Riep (Ravana) falls under the spell of Sita's enchanting beauty and forces her to become his wife. Po Liem rescues Sita with the help of General Hanuman,' Sharma said, narrating the story.

But the Vietnamese Ramayana ends with a twist in the tale. Sita refuses to return to the palace with Rama and pledges that she would see him only in death. 'She enters the imperial palace to die in Po Liem's arms'.

Sharma has toured 17 ancient Hindu sites across Vietnam.

'Vietnam has at least 200 Hindu temples. Mysol, a Unesco World Heritage Site, alone had 40 temples before the Vietnam war; but bombings reduced their number to 20. The remaining temples have been restored,' he said.

Sharma also quotes new research to prove that Hindus had settled down along the banks of the Mekong river in southern Vietnam.

'It is an incontrovertible fact that by the time of the establishment of the Hindu Champa kingdom in central Vietnam, a large number of Brahmins, Kshatriyas and traders had settled down in southern parts of Vietnam.

'The Hindu caste hierarchy in Vietnam was free of Shudras. Recent excavations in a large area of the Mekong delta have unearthed relics of Hindu gods and goddesses - mostly Shivalingas and yonis,' he said.

Sharma said the Fu Nan dynasty, the ruling dynasty in the Mekong delta, was established by a Brahmin named Kaundinya from India.

'According to a Chinese version, Kaundinya, who came to Vietnam from India via Cambodia, married a local princess Nagi and founded the dynasty. Shiva commanded supreme obeisance among the Hindus followed by Vishnu and the Buddha. Subsequently, the Buddha replaced Shiva,' Sharma said.

(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)

Cultural ties between India and Cambodia

Sunday, December 02, 2007
Dr Sarharuddin Ahmed
The Assam Tribune (India)

Dr R Das Gupta while making a serious and systematic study of the sculptures of Mediaeval Assam remarked, “The Ahom temple reliefs are framed in rectangular panels with foiled arches for the top. The arches multiply when the number of figures is more two.... The human figures have the feet in said view, the body in front view and the faces usually in profile. Sometimes front faces are large, a local ethnic characteristic feature as we also see in the Khmer reliefs from Angkor in Cambodia. Such similarity raises the question of some real artistic connection between the stone carver’s technique and ideals for figures between Assam and Angkorian Cambodia. But history is silent about any such connections” (The Journal of the Assam Research Society, Vol. xxvii, 1983). Dr. Das Gupta made his observations about 25 years ago. Sunanda K Dattta-Ray, Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of South Indian Studies, Singapore who has visited Assam very recently as a State Guest stressed on the old connection between India and Kambujadesa - ancient Cambodia in his article “India’s Look East Policy should include a revival of cultural ties” (The Telegraph, 20.10.07). While making some observations on the cultural ties between India and Cambodia, Datta-Ray concludes, “The past that lives on, sublimely perhaps, deserves to be nurtured, not in India alone but throughout Southeast Asia with museums, language instruction, research centers and educational tours and exchanges. An Association of Southeast Asian Nations project perhaps financed by the Asian Development Bank, to trace, establish and strengthen cultural links between the Asean and Asean’s most important dialogue partner”.

Indeed, both the aforesaid observations deserve rapt attention for lightening the cultural ties between India and Southeast Asia more specifically Cambodia. It is gathered from the inscriptions of Kambujadesa or ancient Cambodia that many places and many of the useful public institutions bore Sanskrit names. There were many towns, such as Tamrapura, Adhyapura, Dhruvapura, Jyesthapura, Vikramapura, Bhavapura, Insanapura etc. Public institutions carried Sanskrit names like- Viprasala (learned Assembly), Sarasvati (Public School), Pustaka Asrama (Library), Satra (Guest House), Arogyasala (Hospital) and Vahnigriha (a temple where the sacrificial fire is regularly maintained). Further, the kings, queens, nobles and priests etc. had Sanskrit names. Even the female servants had the name of Sanskrit origin, e.g. Devadasi.

The asramas were the centres of culture and learning. The gurus taught their pupils in the asramas in the traditional Indian manner. Reference to fourteen sciences (four Vedas – Rig, Yaur, Sama and Atharva; Six Vedangas namely – Siksa, Kalpa, Nirukta, Vyakarana, Chanda and Yotisa; Dharma-Sastra and Puranas; and finally two Indian law books - Manusmrti and Yagyavalka Smrti) is severally found in the ancient Cambodian inscriptions (RC Majumdar’s Inscriptions of Kambuja, Pre Rup Stele Inscriptions of Rajendravarman, verse 135). Moreover, in the inscriptions of ancient Cambodia, references are made to Indian epic characters with the same degree of reverence or contempt. This leads us to conjecture that the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were highly practised by the learned circle of ancient Cambodia. Apart from the two epics, there are also references to Panini, Vatsyayana, Visalaksa, Pravarasena, Mayura, Gunadhya and Susruta together with their work are mentioned. In may be presumed that the scholars had the intimate knowledge of the works of Kalidasa.

The most important point to be noted here is that the inscriptions are written in beautiful Kavya-style. The composers of the Prasasties exhibited a thorough acquaintance with the most developed rules and conventions of Sanskrit rhetoric and prosody.

It is not only the external form of India’s traditional life that was prevalent in ancient Cambodia, but even the very view of life has been shaped by the Indian ideas of ethics and morality. In the concluding part of the royal charters, sometimes it is found that imprecatory verses are usually quoted in order to show the merits and good results derived from honouring the grant and that hell and suffering coming out of violating the same. These verses are usually the sayings of a sage or sages or quoted from the Dharmasastras.

In the present context, the formation of the word ‘Kambuja’ is taken to be noteworthy. In many of the classical Sanskrit works the word Kamboja (not Kambuja) is referred to. Panini in his Astadhyayi mentions the word Kamboja (IV, I.175). When the word occurs in Panini, it is obvious that it should occur also in the Mahabhasya of Patanjali. While throwing light on the peculiarity of the dialect of the people of Kamboja, Yaska refers to this word (Nirukta, II.2.). It appears that the Kambojas were originally a foreign tribe as is known from the Manusmrti where their association is found with the Sakas and the Yavanas who are traditionally believed to be originally Ksatriya but gradually degraded to the ranks of sudras (Manu.X.44). In determining the geographical boundary of the Kingdom of Raghu and also for showing his military prowess, Kalidasa mentions the word Kamboja (Raghu.iv.69). In the Mahabharata, the very peculiar characteristics of the horses of Kamboja are recorded. It is stated that when the horses of Kamboja ran, their tails and ears and eyes remained motionless (Dronaparva, ch.36. Verse.36). Moreover, this epic, in describing the different rivers, countries and Janapadas of ancient India places Kamboja in the north (Bhismaparva ch.9., verse 65).

Primarily, on the basis of the references found in the classical Sanskrit works, it is concluded that there was celebrated country called Kamboja in the Northwestern part of India. DC Sircar presumes that the name Kambuja (ancient name of Cambodia) is coined on the model of the name of the Kamboja people in North-western India (Indian Epigraphy, p.203). It is already shown that many public institutions of ancient Cambodia had the names of Indian origin. Another instance from the inscriptions of Assam is referred to here. In the Guvakuchi Copper Plate grant of Indrapala (verse 20), occurs the name of a place called Savathi which appears to be a prakritised form of Sravasti. Savathi should have been a locality around modern Rangiya junction of NF Railway some 30 km north of Guwahati. It is conjectured that this Savathi might have been modeled on Sravasti of North Kosala like Ayuthia (from Ayodhya) and also river Mekong (from Ma Ganga) of Kambuja. Hence, it is reasonable to conjecture that Kambuja which is situated to the north-eastern part of India is coined on the model of Kamboja of North-Western India. Because of philological reasons, there is scope to believe that the name Kambuja is just a corrupt form of Kamboja where the vowel O is changed to U.

At the beginning, R Das Gupta is quoted to show the resemblances of architectural designs and sculptures of Assam and Cambodia. The affinities not only confined to art and architecture, but cover the contemporary epigraphical literature also.

First, the language of the epigraphs of the early period of Assam History is Sanskrit. The language of the records of Kambuja or ancient Cambodia is mostly correct Sanskrit, irregularities and mistakes which are few, being probably due to the scribes or engravers rather than the composers.

Secondly, the inscriptions of the Mediaeval Assam (Ahom period) are written partly in Sanskrit and partly in local Tai language. Similarly, the composers of the inscriptions of Kambuja use the local Khmer language in addition to Sanskrit.

Thirdly, some of the literary texts of the copper plates of early Assam are quite long. Dubi Copper Plates of Bhaskaravarman cover altogether 76 verses. A large number of the inscriptions of Kambuja contain 50 stanzas or more, while some contain more than hundred stanzas.

Fourthly, in the inscriptions of Assam, Saka era is commonly used. This practice is noticed in the inscriptions of Cambodia also.

Fifthly, in the copper plate inscriptions of early Assam, the text of the literary portion sometimes is repeated fully in another inscription. This feature is noticed in the inscriptions of Kambuja also.

Sixthly, in the inscriptions of early Assam, the kings are described to have descended from the mythical ancestor, viz., Naraka, the son of Lord Vishnu and Bhumi (i.e., earth). The family is hence called Bhauma-Naraka family. In Kambuja inscriptions also the kings are said to have descended from the mythical couple Kambu Svayambhuva and Mera.

Lastly, the composers of the Assam inscriptions were pessimists in worldly pleasures. They consider the world to be hollow and the life of the human being is as fickle as a drop of water. The authors of the Cambodian inscriptions were also pessimists in nature.

The writer is the Director-in-Charge of the Directorate of Museums, Assam.