Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [110]
One characteristic of Indian civilisation that they brought with them was a tendency to modify and customise the alphabet. Just as there are now at least ten major scripts* derived in India from the Brahmi characters (diffused all over the subcontinent in Aśoka’s time), there are another nine that developed in South-East Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines,† all derived from Indian scripts, many through the Pallava script of the south. The origin of this diversity lies in the variety of writing materials available in different places, but the different styles evidently came to be national icons. In the Cambodian pillars that carry rules for monasteries, Sanskrit in Khmer script on one side is paralleled by Sanskrit in a North Indian script on the other: perhaps there were North Indian devotees as well as Khmers resident here.31
This is just one of many signs that there was heavy cultural traffic in both directions between India and Indo-China during this period. Another example is given by the life of Atīśa, a monk born in Bengal in 982, who went on to become one of the founders of Buddhism in Tibet in his sixties. He had spent his student days in Śri Vijaya, in Sumatra.
In a way, the culture as the Indians brought it will always be a mystery to us. The splendours of Shwe Dagon in Burma, Borobodur in Java, Angkor
Wat in Cambodia, as well as less well-known magnificences in Pagan, Champa, Laos, Bali and Sumatra, built over a millennium from about AD 500, all stemmed from the seminal ideas of the Indians, but at least in terms of architecture there is nothing now quite like them back in India. We can only speculate that styles executed in stone at Borobodur and Angkor Wat may echo the architecture of wooden buildings long vanished from southern India.
Nevertheless, this roll-call of states and civilisations that took their beginnings from India reminds us how vast, how varied and how long lasting this influence was, all the more remarkable because no military force seems to have been applied anywhere to bring in the new, more organised, Indian society. This contrasts sharply with the record of incursions from the other developed civilisation to the north. Ever since the first century AD, China had been putting constant pressure on the Annamite kingdom of northern Vietnam, periodically invading it, and insisting on recognition of China’s emperor as its overlord.
The earliest documented Indianised kingdom—the documentation is Chinese—was set on the lower Mekong, in modern Cambodia and southern Vietnam, probably in the first century AD. It is usually known as Funan, which is a Chinese version of its name. It was really called, in Khmer, Bnam, ‘the mountain’,* and its king as kurung bnam, a translation of Parvatabhū-pala or Śailarāja: bearing this title of ‘King of the Mountain’, he would have established a cult of the god Siva in a high place, so reconciling his legitimacy as an Indian king with the native spirits of the land.32
Funan’s foundation myth, read from a Sanskrit inscription in Champa,33 confirms this. A Brahman named Kauinya (derived from Kuin, one of Siva’s titles) received a javelin from another Brahman, a hero from the Mahabharata named Aśvattāman, and threw it to find the right site for the city. He married a local princess named Soma, daughter of the king of the Nāgas, the many-headed water cobras worshipped as protectors of Khmer riches.
Thereafter, major Sanskrit-speaking states were set up all over South-East Asia, Sumatra and Java.† Their names are themselves in Sanskrit, and show either a sentimental link with other Indian holy places far away, or an attempt to Indianise local names. It is often difficult now to locate them exactly. In Malaya, Lankasuka, controlling one much-used overland route from the Bay of Bengal to the Gulf of Siam, beside Tāmbralinga (Ligor), Takkola (Takuapa) and Kāaha (Kedah);