THE REGIONAL KINGDOMS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIAthe deeds of historical rulers. The historian and the literary critic may find
these works deficient from many points of view, but they were certainly of
great importance in establishing a regional identity which showed much
local colour whilst maintaining a link with the ‘great tradition’.
INDIA’S IMPACT ON SOUTHEAST ASIA:
CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
The transmission of Indian culture to distant parts of Central Asia, China,
Japan, and especially Southeast Asia is one of the greatest achievements of
Indian history or even of the history of mankind. None of the other great
civilisations—not even the Hellenic—had been able to achieve a similar
success without military conquest. In this brief survey of India’s history,
there is no room for an adequate discussion of the development of the
‘Indianised’ states of Southeast Asia which can boast of such magnificent
temple cities as Pagan (Burma; constructed from 1044 to 1287), Angkor
(Cambodia; constructed from 889 to c. 1300), and the Borobudur (Java;
early ninth century). Though they were influenced by Indian culture, they
are nevertheless part and parcel of the history of those respective countries.
Here we will limit our observations to some fundamental problems
concerning the transmission of Indian culture to the vast region of
Southeast Asia.
Who spread Indian culture in Southeast Asia?Historians have formulated several theories regarding the transmission of
Indian culture to Southeast Asia: (1) the ‘Kshatriya’ theory; (2) the
‘Vaishya’ theory; (3) the ‘Brahmin’ theory. The Kshatriya theory states that
Indian warriors colonised Southeast Asia; this proposition has now been
rejected by most scholars although it was very prominent some time ago.
The Vaishya theory attributes the spread of Indian culture to traders; it is
certainly much more plausible than the Kshatriya theory, but does not
seem to explain the large number of Sanskrit loan words in Southeast
Asian languages. The Brahmin hypothesis credits Brahmins with the
transmission of Indian culture; this would account for the prevalence of
these loan words, but may have to be amplified by some reference to the
Buddhists as well as to the traders. We shall return to these theories, but
first we shall try to understand the rise and fall of the Kshatriya theory.
It owed its origin to the Indian freedom movement. Indian historians,
smarting under the stigma of their own colonial subjection, tried to
compensate for this by showing that at least in ancient times Indians had
been strong enough to establish colonies of their own. In 1926 the Greater
India Society was established in Calcutta and in subsequent years the
renowned Indian historian R.C.Majumdar published his series of studies,