INTRODUCTION

The mapping of the active networks of circulation and exchange in Eurasia during the Middle Ages would make easier the comparison between cultural systems which, although different among them, were not kept in sealed boxes. This is certainly the case of the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad and Tang China. Chang'an and Baghdad were at that time two of the largest cities in the world, marked by strong rule, successful diplomatic relationships, economic expansion, and a cultural efflorescence characterized by a cosmopolitan style. A comparative methodology allows to effectively describe both entanglements and contacts among artistic and architectural practices belonging to different cultural systems that appear distant on the geographic chart, but are actually much closer than originally thought. The case of Tang China is particularly evident through the adoption of Central Asian fashion and customs at the court of Chang'an. Similarly relevant is the appreciation for Chinese porcelains at the Abbassid court, which would eventually lead to the production of local imitations and adoptions of new patterns and shapes. The adoption of models moving within the broad borders of Asia is very relevant to our days. If trade is what unites the modern global system and Asia is the focal point of the new century, this phenomenon cannot be understood without searching in the past for a similar phenomenon of interconnectedness and mobility of objects, workers, written texts, and ideas. Bentley (1996, p. 752) maintains that in the discourse of cross-cultural interactions in premodern times there are three kinds of processes which had significant repercussions across the boundaries of societies and cultural regions: mass migrations, campaign of imperial expansions, and long-distance trade. Different interactions between the Mediterranean and Asia are here presented following a chronological order, focusing in particular on how trade and trade diaspora communities played an important role to facilitate the transportation and exchange of commodities and at the same time served as avenues of diffusion of technology and also religious beliefs in both premodern and modern societies. In fact the selected case studies show how long-distance trade has contributed to the diffusion of Islam to China under the Tang dynasty (618–907) and in Japan under the Taishō (1912–26) and early Shōwa (1926–89) eras.

INTRODUCTION

By examining some key texts written by the Dutch clergymen Abrahmus Rogerius, Philippus Baldaeus and François Valentijn, I discuss how knowledge about precolonial southeastern India was produced, disseminated, and consumed. Although by their very nature these Dutch accounts are culturally mediated and coloured by religious presuppositions and agendas, an analysis of some of these texts may help the historian to evoke some prevalent Western ideas about the society in the Coromandel region in the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth century).

The need to create and improve upon the rudimentary knowledge about the East that was inaugurated by Herodotus in his Histories would continue in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds through the Renaissance and early modern Europe. For example, in the so-called Age of Explorations the European curiosity to learn about Asia metamorphosed into the systematic creation of tangible knowledge. In fact, the survival of the nascent states in the fiercely competitive, and religion-inspired and ideologically fragmented society of Western Europe depended on the creation and documentation of new knowledge (van Linschoten 1885). For example, charting the sea routes, mapping regions, river estuaries or strategic ports, documenting commodities, and describing local populations and their belief systems, all constituted practical and usable forms of knowledge. In post-Enlightenment eighteenth-century Europe, knowledge about Asia was deployed not only for the strategic and commercial purposes but also to understand and define the European Self in contrast to the Asian Other. The creation, documentation, and dissemination of knowledge through the printing and publishing revolution also bequeathed important information about the functioning of social categories and “superstitious” beliefs on the different regions of the continent.

In this chapter I shall focus on Valentijn's writings about the social and religious aspects of Hindu society in southeastern India during his time. Before the Dutch came to the region, the Portuguese missionaries had tried to advance the cause of Christianity in the region.

INTRODUCTION: PROBLEMS OF SPATIAL ORIENTATION IN VIETNAMESE HISTORY

History was born when some specific times and places were connected. While the spatial frame defines historical experience, the agents who act in time and space give meaning to history. Approaches to the evolution of Vietnamese geography mostly concentrate on the internal structure of the historically mobile spaces in which the relationship between movement and imagination constructs the recognizable configuration of Vietnam. Keith Taylor's pattern of regional conflict and Li Tana's new way of conceptualizing Vietnam target the “Southeast Asian character” of Cochinchina, in contrast to the Sinicized Tonkin (Taylor 1998; Li 1998a). Victor Lieberman borrows Pierre Gourou's terminology to describe the Vietnamese coast as “the least coherent territory in the world” (Gourou 1936, p. 8; Lieberman 2003, p. 338). Nola Cooke (1991, 1995) and Choi Byung Wook (2004) recommend the process of political centralization and Confucianization under which modern Vietnamese states recognized the territorial status of the lower Mekong. The above-mentioned scholars aim to demonstrate the “Southeast Asian” cultural factors in the making of Vietnam, and in so doing, they challenge the conventional monotonous narrative of national unification offered by twentieth century nationalist historiography. This historiography has played down, for the interest of nationalism, Cochinchinese autonomy while defining the Sinicized North as a touchstone of historical evolution through the mythic discourse of nam tien or “marching to the south” as a territorial “manifest destiny”.

Another side of the coin, however, are the scholars who conceptualize Cochinchina as an “East Asian style” political project that settled in “Southeast Asian” landscape. One particular aspect of the Nguyen Cochinchina that has been tackled recently is Confucianism. Historian Liam Kelley challenges previous assumptions suggesting that the Nguyen “differentiated themselves from their own ancestral people in the north in order to secure their own political survival” because the Confucian repertoire was inappropriate for the southern political project (Li 1998b, p. 101).

OWNERSHIP AND VALUES

In his note of 1909, the ethnologist Herbert Hope Risley, a member of the Legislative Department of the British Indian Government, argued on a rather irate note that “… Buddhist bones belong to nobody and have no value!”. The occasion was the proposed presentation of Buddhist relics, discovered from the site of Shah-ji-ki-Dehri near Peshawar (now in Pakistan), to the Buddhists of Burma. The situation was already complicated by competing demands of various communities and associations over the custody of these relics. To make matters worse for the government, the Afghan Muslim landowners of the site, the two brothers Sayed Amir Badshah and Sayed Ahmed Shah, claimed a share in the finds. They supported these claims by citing a prior agreement they had entered with the excavator, Dr David Brainerd Spooner, the Superintending Archaeologist of the Frontier Circle of the Archaeological Survey of India (henceforth, ASI). This agreement, the owners claimed, promised them an equal share in the finds and financial compensation for any loss to cultivation incurred during excavations. Asserting their landowner's rights, the Sayed brothers now claimed half the share of the total finds unearthed from the Dehri or its equivalent financial value from the Buddhists claiming a share of the relics.

The finds from the excavations included four bits of bones, a crystal reliquary, a clay seal intended to encase the bone fragments in the crystal reliquary, an inscribed metal reliquary housing all these objects, and an old coin. The decoding of inscriptions on the metal casket identified the bone fragments as authentic corporeal relics of the Gautama Buddha. For the antiquarians and archaeologists, the inscriptions, more importantly, attested the reliquary and the remains of the ancient stūpa (Buddhist funerary and/or commemorative mound) at the site of Shah-ji-ki-Dehri as the gift of the second-century monarch of the Kushan Dynasty, Kanishka (Asher 2012) (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2).

The situation created by such demand was entirely new for the colonial state. The problem of determining the price of centuries-old Buddhist bones unprecedented, and the Afghan Muslims were never seen to take any keen interest in Buddhist remains that abound throughout this region. In fact, beginning with the nineteenth century, Muslims in general, and especially Pathan Muslims of the Northwest Frontier region, were stereotypically represented in the colonial archives as ignorant native vandals, mischievous troublemakers, religious fanatics, and zealous iconoclasts.

INTRODUCTION

“I encourage you for ribāṭ. […] Two eyes will never be touched by the fire of Hell: an eye which weeps out of fear of the omnipotent God and an eye which spends the night in guarding in the Cause of God against the infidels,” says Qāḍī Muḥammad al-Kālikūtī in a war-speech written around 1570 to incite his audience against the Portuguese intruders into the Malabar Coast in southwest India. This passage catches our attention for its use of the concept of ribāṭ—an unusual term in the socio-cultural context of the battles between the European and Asian powers in the waters of Indian Ocean.

This chapter is an attempt to examine the micro-level, socio-cultural setting of a region in the Malabar Coast in the sixteenth century (and its entanglements in the broader predicaments of the Indian Ocean world), at the time of wars between the Portuguese and the local rulers, the Zamorins, along with their Muslim supporters. The Muslim involvement in the anti-Portuguese wars was not inadvertent; rather, it was part of a larger web of commercial and religious interests, traditions, and histories. The Muslims in Malabar did have personal motivations to wage war, but so did the Zamorins, the Portuguese, the Mamlūks, and the Ottomans to collaborate with or counter one another in the maritime littoral. The existing conceptualizations of these battles have ignored the ways in which the local communities perceived and framed their military engagements in terms of a wider worldview and praxis. This chapter enquires such indigenous justifications and conceptualizations by looking at their own writings, and it suggests that the local Muslims ratiocinated their geo-political spheres in terms of ribāṭ, a concept of coastal guardianship rooted in Islamic vocabulary of war and peace.

In the last four decades, several historians have suggested various models to understand the political spectra in which the Muslims of Malabar or of broader South Asia had existed and operated. In a broader South Asian context, they have conceptualized the frontier zones in different ways (Eaton 1978; Gommans 2002; Green 2012; Hasan 2004; Ernst 2009). Although their studies inform my discussion, one should bear in mind that their analysis is grounded on a Delhi/Mughal-centrism, for they focus on the idea that a particular “space” becomes a frontier thanks to its being peripheral to an imperial centre.

The concept of Sanskritic Buddhism is discussed here in connection with the problem of a standard, common or universal form of the Buddhist religion. Buddhism has a heterogeneous appearance, manifesting in a variety of sects and ethnic or national types, and whatever homogeneity it possesses has been hard to articulate, both for those within the religion as well as for those outside it. The question of how much of Buddhism is universal, that is, especially prevalent and accepted, cannot be answered solely with citations of canonical scripture, as every sect has its own canonical language and iteration of the canon. What will be discussed in this chapter is the notion of commonality, and in particular the applications of a common discursive or metadiscursive protocol. The focus will be on the use of Sanskrit, the only canonical language of Buddhism that was also a sacred language for non-Buddhists within its native territory.

Some of the factors that led Buddhists to take up Sanskrit—originally the preserve of Brahmins, an exclusive “language of the gods”—have most recently been examined by Johannes Bronkhorst, Vincent Eltschinger, Jan Houben and others. As the rationales for adoption are now receiving due scholarly attention, this chapter will examine the ways in which Sanskrit and Buddhism work together in practice, and the extent to which this combination displays a degree of universality that is not found in either the language or the religion on its own. To this end, both the classical and the modern situation will be looked at, as they complement each other and demonstrate different kinds of universality. Many other aspects of Sanskritic Buddhism, such as its associated canons, genres, institutions, social systems, writing systems, and constructions of sacred space, are yet to be studied systematically and can be mentioned only in passing here.

THE SANSKRIT LANGUAGE IN COMBINATION WITH THE BUDDHIST RELIGION

Sanskritic Buddhism is the form of the Buddhist religion that propagates some or all of its discourses in a variety of Sanskrit. A Sanskritic environment is one in which other languages can be used together with Sanskrit, or where a non-standard variety of Sanskrit can be used. The expression “Sanskritic Buddhism” was probably first used in a 1906 review referring to “Northern (Sanskritic) Buddhism”.

In 1947, between 23 March and 2 April, New Delhi played host to the Asian Relations Conference over ten days. Studying the newspapers of the time allows us to capture the minutiae of this first attempt to articulate an idea of Asia. The newspapers, an underutilized source of research, help us capture in some detail, the sentiment of the moment, the various conversations that emerged at the time, their trajectory and allow us to ponder whether what followed was inevitable.

March 1947 was four and a half months before the Indian nation formally came into being. The months leading up to the conference had witnessed the bloodiest communal riots in the eastern regions of Bengal and Bihar and more recently in Lahore, Amritsar, and surrounding areas of Delhi. In fact, there was ongoing unrest in and around Delhi and the Punjab during the conference—news that featured on the front pages of daily newspapers. The India to which the delegates arrived, had learnt, a few weeks earlier from the British Government on 20 February 1947 its plan for India's future—stating that they intend to leave India by June 1948. This statement and its ramifications were still being discussed in political and social circles as well as in the press at the time of the conference. The statement had also announced that there would be a change in Viceroy to oversee the transition. At the time of hosting the conference, no one had a clue that Indian independence was going to be fast-tracked from June 1948 to August 1947, and that the country would be partitioned at birth. The light at the end of the tunnel of colonial rule was however visible and the country, led by Nehru, was working towards a future where India as a nation would have a global presence and establish independent relations with the other nations of the world.

Despite the volatile conditions and the acrimony characterizing Indian political life at that time, the Interim Government of India headed by Nehru went ahead with hosting the conference for which preparations had been underway for many months.

INTRODUCTION

The rise of British colonialism in the eighteenth century witnessed a simultaneous decline in the political fortunes among Muslims in South Asia. The loss of authority—both political and social—following the dissolution of the Mughal Empire came as a rude shock to the community from which it struggled to recover throughout the nineteenth century. It was from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that Muslims across South Asia started manifesting signs of political and social awareness as a community. One of the contributing factors was the rise of print culture in the 1870s, which, in spite of its delayed reception by South Asian Muslims, was a major turning point shaping their socio-political attitude. Print provided them with the technological tool with which the community could aspire to connect with Muslim societies beyond their immediate homeland, and in turn express themselves as an integral part of the global Muslim ummah (Robinson 1993).

This idea of self-consciousness not only manifested itself within the educated Muslim elite of north India, led by individuals like Syed Ahmed Khan, but almost equally among Muslims in Bengal. The region proved to be the bridgehead to British presence in South Asia after the fall of the Bengal Nawabs in 1757. Bengali Muslims, now concentrated largely in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, constitute one of the largest ethnic communities of Muslims after the Arabs (Ahmed 1996; Eaton 1993). In the run up to the First World War in the early twentieth century, Muslims worldwide, particularly across South Asia, failed to hide their anxiety over a weakening Ottoman Turkish Empire facing the European onslaught. The consequences of this weakness would be dual. First, it pushed into uncertainty the fate of the Islamic Caliphate whose seat was the Ottoman capital at Ankara. Second, growing British presence in a conflict-ridden Hejaz made Turkey's position precarious as the Khadim ul Haramayn ul Sharifayn (Servitor/Protector of the Two Holy Sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina).

In the following discussion I will explore how Bengali periodicals, particularly two—Sultan and Ahl-i Hadith—served as important mediums in keeping Bengali Muslims informed on the course of events around Turkey and the Hejaz. These periodicals, along with other media carrying news on the volatile situation in West Asia, made it possible for Bengali Muslims to overcome their limitation to access printed news in Urdu and English.

INTRODUCTION

The question as to what Asia is, and as to whether there existed one or many Asia(s), has been asked many times over the past two decades or so. Yet, in spite of a recent wave of studies foregrounded by “borderless”/ global history, and focusing on intra-Asian connections, today's mainstream histories and geographies of Asia are largely the result of colonial and post-colonial national narratives, or of post–World War II global academe, which has framed the “Area Studies Paradigm” and (arbitrarily) divided Asia into the quadrants of South, Central, Southeast, and East Asia.

In this chapter I propose to reconceptualize (i.e., reimagine) Asia by widening the geo-historical framework through which the complex mosaic of cultural and religious phenomena linked by a shared deep history are to be investigated. I begin by offering a historiographical survey tracking the history of the concept of “Maritime Asia”, and exploit it to theorize the long-distance maritime connections and dynamics of interaction among societies throughout the swathe of territory stretching from the Indian Ocean littorals to the Western Pacific. I then apply this perspective to the study of the genesis and spread of Sanskritic Buddhism across Maritime Asia from the third to the fourteenth century CE.

THE IDEA OF MARITIME ASIA

Maritime Asia can be conceived as a dynamic macro-region of intersecting discursive fields across which networks of cultural brokers travelled since time immemorial. From the early centuries of the Common Era, this macroregion constituted an integrated system of littorals and hinterlands connected by the sea routes governed by the seasonal monsoon winds. Influenced by similar environmental and climatic factors, Maritime Asia formed an ideal theatre for the circulation of crops, people, goods, languages, beliefs and ritual systems, and ideas. Spreading across the superimposed geopolitical boundaries of modern nation-states, and transcending such equally arbitrary and historically constructed geographical entities as South/Southeast/ East Asia, I imagine Maritime Asia as forming a single interconnected network, and arguably even an integral cultural ecumene with a shared background of human, intellectual, and environmental history. More than a mere (and static) geographical expression, Maritime Asia is a metaphor representing dynamic social networks that may help us to make sense of complex historical processes, like for example the circulation of Indic religions—most notably, tantric traditions—across Asia.

THE ARRESTING GAZE: ASIA IS FRAMED

Asia reveals itself, over iced coffee.

A few years I ago I found myself walking down Orchard Road in downtown Singapore. I walked past one of those generic coffee bars that serve beverages that purport to have some family resemblance to coffee; and chanced upon two tourists who were sitting outside as they enjoyed their iced caramel lattes. Both were male, Caucasian, and both were uniformly dressed in some kind of “Camel Trophy-Safari” kind of get-up (presumably to blend in with the background, if not each other). Then one of them said to the other: “I believe that here I have found the heart of Asia”.

That Asia can reveal its heart over iced coffee in a high-street urban coffee bar is not surprising, for that is indeed the state of Asia today. Before proceeding any further, I would like to situate this discussion in the context of the here-and-now, which is a modern Asia that exists firmly in the modern era.

In this chapter I wish to raise a problem—one that I have not been able to resolve myself, and one which is itself a symptom of the modern times we live in. That we today are embedded in modernity seems fairly self-evident: Asia's political boundaries today are basically the same boundaries that were drawn in the nineteenth century, when the power of colonial capitalism was at its height. Our nation-states, built as they were on the foundations of colonies of the past (none of which were ever democracies, it could be added) are fundamentally modern constructs in the mould of the Westphalian model. Our epistemologies and vocabularies are likewise modern, replete with references to citizenship, economic agents, assets and commodities, territories, and spaces that are often taken as ontologically set and given. In terms of who and what we are, our sense of identity and what constitutes identities that are Asian are also predicated upon a binary logic where an oppositional form of dialectics is seen to be at work.

INTRODUCTION

Not much is known about the settlement processes that have contributed to create the unique ethnic and cultural diversity in the highlands of Sumatra. Archaeological fieldwork since 2003 in the upland regions—in Kerinci, the highlands of Jambi (Bonatz et al. 2009; Bonatz 2012; Tjoa-Bonatz 2009, 2015a), and in Tanah Datar, West Sumatra—point to commercial interactions between the highland and maritime regions since the first millennium CE. From 2010 to 2014, an interdisciplinary team under the direction of Dominik Bonatz has undertaken field research in Tanah Datar (literally “flat land”), a valley in West Sumatra in the core area of the Minangkabau community (Figures 13.1 and 13.2). The Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology at Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin) sponsored by the German Research Foundation has pursued excavations and surveys in cooperation with international institutions. Meanwhile, Arlo Griffiths (École française d'Extrême-Orient Jakarta) directed an epigraphic research project. The focus of the project is the reign of King Ādityavarman (c.1347–75), who established the centre of his polity in the highlands of Tanah Datar and issued twenty-two inscriptions from the middle of the fourteenth century. These dated inscriptions (Figure 13.3) provide the chronological anchor and fulcrum of the research project, which deals with the archaeological remains and the reconstruction of regional settlement processes before and after this period (Tjoa-Bonatz forthcoming).

Many fundamental changes can be identified in the societies of Southeast Asia when a new global economy emerged in the fifteenth century, a period characterized by Reid (1993) as the “Age of Commerce”. Scholars have emphasized the importance of the fifteenth century as the starting point for the modern period of Southeast Asian history (see, e.g., Wade and Laichen 2010). When archaeological materials are brought into account, a key question that arises when this shift appeared, probably not as a sudden event, a sharp discontinuity with the former times, but as a gradual change towards new economic modes that were already in existence before 1400 (Miksic 2010, p. 385). The archaeological material at hand to test this hypothesis in island Southeast Asia is rather limited.

European colonialism, embedded in the values of early capitalism, was, as we well know today, the fecund breeding ground of what was named as Orientalism, the obverse image of all that was then necessarily defined as the Occidental. This historical shift that began in the late seventeenth century gathered momentum in the eighteenth century and came to its fullness in the nineteenth century, forming a long and complex cultural, political, economic, and psychological narrative. This multilayered, multicultural, mixed race account still shapes the ways in which the new global order responds even in the twenty-first century. While initially it was the German and French orientalists who awoke to the “discovery” of new Asian civilizations with rich ancient cultures and traditions, ultimately it was the British colonialists with their army of erudite bureaucrats, lawmakers, and savants who were most successful in “translating” Asia and exporting it back to their mother country—a country soon to be named as Great Britain—from the Asian colonies. Among other modes they did this through lithographs and watercolours; poems, plays and novels; language, script, material objects, and ideas.

Eighteenth-century England, with its vast sweeping changes brought upon by the bloodless Glorious Revolution of 1688 altered forever the relationship between the British sovereign and the British people and became the natural breeding ground for this intercultural transfer. In consequence, in the “long eighteenth century” (thus named by literary critics), there were now present newly awakened republican subjects with a sense of their own individual worth. A populace living in hamlet, village, county, and increasingly in freshly industrialized towns, who were slowly discarding what the poet William Blake would famously describe as their “mind forg'd manacles.” This spirit of libertarianism was fuelled by the increasing literacy that, in turn, led subjects to think about themselves in novel ways. The question “Who am I?” could no longer be answered in terms of the former Elizabethan “Great Chain of Being” where, for centuries, a person was cast in the smithy of an iron class demography, a system as old as the history of the founding of feudal Britain itself.

This edited volume stems from the conference “Imagining Asia(s): Networks, Actors, Sites” held at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in October 2016, jointly organized by the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre (Singapore) and Nalanda University (India). This event, bringing together fourteen scholars from various countries, constituted a landmark for the collaboration between the two institutions and, we believe, also a gesture towards the academic and intellectual “rapprochement” between two regions of the world—South and Southeast Asia—whose deeply connected histories have been forgotten for a long time, and need now, more than ever, to be (re)conceptualized as an integrated phenomenon. Indeed, the intellectual agenda driving this conference has been an engagement with the idea of “Asia” in the frame of Area Studies scholarship and, at the same time, a commitment to the study of Intra-Asian networks and connections that has been the hallmark of recent scholarship, including the very series in which this volume has been published.

Asia has long been perceived as a clear and distinct geographical unit. As a continent lying to the east of Europe, it has been malleable to different imaginations and politics. Area studies scholarship, for example, has carved Asia into the seemingly self-contained regions of West and Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and East Asia. These regional configurations reflect more the changing (geo)political and economic interests in these areas rather than any of their historical or cultural roots. Recent scholarship, however, has presented Asia as a cultural entity produced through political imaginations located in specific historical contexts, and revealed the arbitrariness of the Area Studies divide. More importantly, it has advanced the question as to what Asia is, and as to whether there existed one or many Asia(s).

Following the lead of such scholarship, this conference sought to explore Asian societies as interconnected formations through trajectories/ networks of circulation of people, ideas, and objects in the longue durée. Moving beyond the divides of conventional Area Studies scholarship and the arbitrary borders set by late colonial empires and the rise of postcolonial nation-states, this conference mapped critically the configuration of contact zones in which mobile bodies, minds, and cultures interact to foster new images, identities, and imaginations of Asia.