Sri Ksetra, 3rd Century BCE to 6th Century CE: Indianization, Synergies, Creation

Abstract

George Cœdès, the celebrated epigrapher of Sanskrit and Old Khmer, developed a theory of the Indianization of Southeast Asia in a colonial context in the 1930s, as a parallel to contemporary research on the Romanization of Europe. Qualified in the Asian case as a cultural, not a military, colonization, Cœdès wrote: “In the majority of cases [in Southeast Asia], one passes without transition from a late Neolithic to the first traces of Hinduism [my translation and emphasis].” He proposed processes of intensifying cultural colonization in the 2nd and 3rd centuries with enduring results by the 4th century. This view permeated the work of many scholars, e.g. K. N. Chaudhuri, up to 1990. It is an undeniable fact that, at different times in the 1st millennium CE, societies throughout most of Southeast Asia that previously lacked systems of writing – and had therefore been widely assumed by scholars of Indianization to lack organized social structures, religions, art, and architecture – adopted Indian scripts and bodies of Indian sacred texts and adapted Indian religious thought, architecture, and art. The exact nature of this much-invoked Indianization of Southeast Asia, its human agencies, its driving forces, and its timing, all demand constant reinterrogation through research. This chapter is such an attempt, justified by the fact that the valuable archaeological publications since c. 1990 to have addressed this problem include little up-to-date research on the Pyu sites of Myanmar, which covered the most extensive geographical area of any culture in mainland