2 - Debating Indian Influence in Southeast Asia

Summary

Thanks to its geographic location between two of the largest and oldest civilizations, India and China, and its central place on the classical trade route between China and India extending to the Middle East and Africa, Southeast Asia has been a region with significant exposure to foreign ideas, culture and concepts of statecraft, including Indian, Chinese and Western, through-out history. Not surprisingly therefore, Southeast Asia for a long time was regarded by many as a cultural extension and “lesser version” of india and China, a receptacle of cultural and political ideas from the two. Paul Wheatley draws attention to the importance of Indian influence as a case of transmission of culture and ideas: “the process by which the peoples of western South-east Asia came to think of themselves as part of Bharatavarsa (even though they had no conception of ‘India’ as we know it) represents one of the most impressive instances of large-scale acculturation in the history of the world.” (Wheatley 1982: 27–28).

Early writings about Southeast Asia reflected a preoccupation with the influence of Indian ideas and culture and to a lesser extent, the influence of other cultures, including Chinese, Islamic and Western. As John legge put it, “most pre-war studies … of Southeast Asian history” were marked by “a tendency of scholars to see that history as shaped by influences external to the region rather than as the product of an internal dynamic” (Legge 1992: 6). It was this view which came under attack, especially in the post-World War II period, as a result of new research, archaeological discoveries, and an element of nationalist “imagining” by local scholars about the region's distinctive and “autonomous” past. In the new context, historians asserted Southeast Asia's claim to be a “culturally independent region” (Osborne 1990: 5). Not only did they point to Southeast Asia's distinctive civilizational past pre-dating the advent of Indian and Chinese influences, but also to the resilience of its cultural, social and political features which had survived the coming of foreign influences of all kind.