Book review: Himanshu Prabha Ray (Ed.),Recentering Southeast Asia: Politics,Religion and Maritime Connections

The Argument

The volume’s basic premise is that colonization reframed political boundaries by creating the artificial blocs of South and Southeast Asia, with Burma (now Myanmar) firmly placed within the latter. This geographic recentring, one that would be further exacerbated by the US’ Area Studies programme from the 1950s, meant that Burma’s historical–cultural connections with communities and networks across what is now South Asia were ignored in constructing its past. The volume argues that studying the early maritime history and culture of Burma or other countries in the region in isolation remains counterproductive and makes another recentring necessary.

The Introduction (Chapter 1) underscores that a second, and more ominous, outcome of colonization was its tendency to control the minds of the colonized and thereby influence history-writing. The development of archaeology under state sponsorship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the monumentalizing of heritage, played a significant role in this process by documenting and categorizing archaeological sites and monuments in a particular way. This created monolithic identities for Hindu and Buddhist monuments in India and Southeast Asia which recent archaeological data are now contesting.

Contents 1

Recentering Southeast Asia’s focus is India and shows how Southeast Asia was constructed from the lens of India’s Hindu–Buddhist past. It does not rehash the old Indianization thesis. The first section looks at the late colonial period, when what is now ‘Southeast Asia’ was framed and positioned in the mind. This positioning was not confined to Southeast Asia, but was visible across the ocean as a whole. Simultaneously, large-scale movements of people across the Bay of Bengal created fertile ground for political mobilization by thinkers such as Rabindranath Tagore and by leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of the Indian National Congress. Madhavan K. Palat’s nuanced Chapter 2 shows Nehru, despite his avowed intellectual openness, adopting many of the notions propagated by twentieth-century Orientalism regarding the spread of Indian culture to Southeast Asia. However, this understanding of the past had to be rewired when several countries in the region, including India, attained independence, and the reconstruction of multiple pasts acquired urgency as India prepared to host the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1947 (T. C. A. Raghavan in Chapter 3). We should remember that this conference of 1947 was the genesis, in Nehru’s mind certainly, for the first large-scale Afro-Asian conference, the Bandung Conference, a meeting of newly independent states, which would take place from 18 to 24 April 1955 at Bandung in Indonesia.

Interestingly, just when the Cold War era started redrawing Asia into regional blocs, post–Second World War realities went the other way by reimagining a shared past. This development impacted politics, religious practice, memory and history-writing in Japan. Chapters 4 and 5 by Koji Osawa and Takahiro Kojima reveal how Japan redefined its Theravāda Buddhism, a quite recent import which had acquired militaristic and geopolitical dimensions, with reference to Buddhism in Thailand and Burma, respectively. And as Japan was confronted with bringing home from Burma the remains of its dead soldiers, a deeper reflection on the nature of Japanese Buddhism became imperative.

Contents 2

The second section challenges the late nineteenth-century creation of artificial boundaries between South and Southeast Asia, the construction of distinct and discrete South and Southeast Asian cultures and identities and the classification of artistic styles based on the rise and fall of polities, such as ‘Gupta temple’, ‘Chola temple’ and Dvaravati ‘Buddhist style’ monuments. It tells us that a striking aspect of the recent archaeological data is the emphasis on local and regional diversity, whether in the context of Buddhism, the Hindu temple or inscriptions. To bring this cultural diversity into focus, this section interrogates sources, processes and artefacts with chapters on maritime linkages (Himanshu Prabha Ray), afterlives of Hindu temples in South and Southeast Asia (Emma Natalia Stein) and monuments and inscriptions from Vietnam and central India (Trần Kỳ Phương and Nguyễn Thị Tú Anh, and Ashish Kumar).

An Indic Past

Recentering Southeast Asia highlights India and shows us how Southeast Asia was seen from the vantage of India’s Hindu–Buddhist past. Raghavan points to a particular failure of the Greater India Society in this regard:

There was … the problematic issue of the silence of the Greater India Society on Islam in India, on the Islamic heritage of South East Asia or indeed on the Islamic links between India and South East Asia. These silences reinforced the view that what fuelled this tradition of historical scholarship in India was not simply nationalism or even a celebration of past greatness and achievement but a more exclusionary ‘Hindu nationalism’. (p. 76).

Missing in the first section is the fact that a distinctive Bay of Bengal public sphere flourished in its port-cities between the 1880s and 1920s, the latter years coinciding with the time when the Greater Indian Society started taking shape. This was not merely Hindu or Buddhist; Islam was a decisive stakeholder in this enterprise. Based on and supported by the intelligentsias of intersecting diasporas, this world was rooted in pan-religious Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu movements. Studies by Sugata Bose, Sunil Amrith and Mark Ravinder Frost reveal that the diaspora intelligentsia of the port-cities shared similar concerns for reform, and they oversaw parallel campaigns for religious revival, social and educational improvement and constitutional change. ¹ This shared concern was reflected in a journey undertaken in 1907 from Suez, via Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong to Yokohama. With a hope of converting Meiji Japan to Islam, the Egyptian al-Jarjawi, an anonymous Tunisian, the Egyptian religious scholar and incumbent imam of the Great Mosque of Calcutta Shaykh Ahmad Musa, a Chinese Muslim named Sayyid Sulayman, a Russian Muslim called Hajji Mukhlis Mahmud and the Indian preacher Sayyid Husayn ‘Abd al-Mun’im travelled by sea together to attend the second World Congress of Religions in Tokyo. ²

A second critique is that, excepting the chapters by Ray and Stein, the volume privileges the countries of Mainland Southeast Asia at the expense of Island Southeast Asia (the Malay world and Indonesia come to mind), but this is to be expected in a collection of conference papers, particularly since, as the editor writes in the Preface, many of the conference participants were unable to contribute to the book. Also, two chapters in this section highlight Vietnam which hovers uneasily between Southeast and East Asia in scholarly understanding. This, of course, is another instance of the outcome of area studies divisions.

Global History

One way out of the malign influence of area studies classifications is by adopting a global approach to the region. Raghavan hints at this when he writes ‘the Greater India Society was an incipient, but ultimately failed, attempt by Indian scholars to study India in the context of its wider global history’ (p. 77).

Let us see the backstory to Raghavan’s statement.

Some 75 years back, John Sydenham Furnivall—natural science student at Trinity Hall, Cambridge from 1896 to 1899, subsequently member of the British Indian Civil Service from 1901 in Burma, and thereafter historian of Burma and Indonesia—argued for Southeast Asian history to be rightfully considered for its place as a self-contained region in global history. Nine years before his death in 1960, in his speech to the Siam Society in 1951, Furnivall highlighted the newly decolonized ‘Tropical Far East’ (his name for the region stretching from ‘Burma to the Philippines and from the borders of China down to Indonesia’—that is, both continental and maritime Southeast Asia)—as a crucial connector:

At the present time the whole of the Tropical Far East is obviously and dangerously entangled in world history. But … our entanglement in world history is nothing new, but is as old as history…. The subsequent course of [its] history may conveniently be divided into three chapters: the Age of Discoveries; the Age of Contact through India; and the Age of Direct Contact between East and West. In each chapter one can trace a succession of turning points when changes in China or the West synchronised at least approximately with new developments in the Tropical Far East, suggesting the possibility, or even the probability, of a causal relation between the two series of events. ³

Citing the geography of global economic networks, Furnivall, neither a world historian and certainly not a postcolonial radical, saw this world as a high-tension spider’s web marked by three key factors: India, the China trade and Southeast Asia’s own foundational agency in the spice trade. Significant changes in any one sector affected not only all of Asia but also the West. Furnivall’s plea for the distinctiveness of Southeast Asian history as a contributing element to world history was new for its time, notwithstanding the region’s strategic location, and its role as a vital connector between China and India.

The Presence of China

This role brings us to China’s position in the region. Can India–Southeast Asia linkages be studied without referencing China? From ca. 1400, as the Ming consolidated power and started on their gunboat diplomacy across the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asian polities changed religious affiliations, joined new commercial networks and began moving towards China. Melaka port-city, appearing in 1402–03, became a crucial connector between China and India. Founded by the Hindu prince Parameswara from Palembang, it became an Islamic polity with Chinese backup. Neighbouring polities were incentivized to convert to Islam since China’s maritime expeditions were backed by a formidable Chinese Muslim sailing class. Admiral Zheng He, for instance, was a practising Muslim. As oceanic explorations were underway from 1405, China assisted in Melaka’s growth as a clearing-house for Indian Ocean trade alongside establishing a Ming maritime base there.

In East Asia, the Champa–Việt coast underwent a different experience. According to John Whitmore, over the span of two millennia, the major civilizational influences on this coast began as Sinic in the third century ce, became strongly Indic for the next 1200 years, before becoming hugely (though not completely) Sinic since the fifteenth century. As Nagara Champa and Đại Việt parted ways in the fifteenth century, Champa strengthened its Śaivism, while Đại Việt abandoned its early Indic elements and became markedly Sinic. A part of the new belief system in Đại Việt was a strong feeling among the growing literati class of belonging to the ‘domain of manifest civility’, that is, the broad spread of Sinic/East Asian civilization. This view, for the first time, drew a sharp line between being ‘within’ this civilized (Sinic) world and lying ‘outside’ it. Champa now lay firmly on the outside, whereas previously the two realms had co-existed comfortably culturally, if not politically. But by 1470, Champa too became Sinicized. ⁴

A third shift, one from Śaivism to Theravāda Buddhism, is seen in Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat’s incisive study of the śaivite Baphuon temple. ⁵ The troubled history of this eleventh-century temple, located within Cambodia’s vast Angkor complex, shows a shift from Hinduism and Mahāyāna Buddhism to Theravāda Buddhism in the first half of the fifteenth century.

A study of these three types of shifts reveals a phase transition occurring around 1450 in the eastern Indian Ocean world, ⁶ and the chapters in this volume could have reflected on the nature of the Sinic–Indic divide, the factors behind phase transitions, and how these impacted India–Southeast Asia relations over time.

Conclusion

Despite these gaps, the strength of this collection lies in its attempt to situate India in the context of its wider global history in Asia. It raises fundamental questions about how we view our past and how we have constructed our identities. Despite a plethora of scholarly works on cross-cultural linkages and India–Southeast Asia relations, modern Indian scholarship has not addressed the issue of escaping the double tyranny of archaeological imperialism and cultural captivity that colonial imaginaries still dictate. Nor has it found a way beyond what the Greater India Society wished to do, but ultimately failed. This volume, therefore, has the potential to generate new research on mobilities and flows not just across the Bay of Bengal but across the Indian Ocean at large.