Chapter 10 Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia 385length in later Chinese chronicles, such as the Liangshu (History of the Liang
Dynasty). They tell of an Indian Brahman named Kaundinya who was said to
have married a local Naga princess and founded the ruling house of Funan,
“changing the rules according to the customs of India.” Kings had adopted the
Indian honorific—varman, meaning “protected by,” in names such as Jaya-
varman and Gunavarman. Texts on columns were written in both Sanskrit and
ancient Khmer. A footprint of Vishnu was venerated. And everywhere princes
undertook the drainage of marshlands, the building of irrigation channels, and
the digging of reservoirs.
Archaeologists have supplemented our knowledge of Funan. At sites like Oc
Eo, excavated by Malleret in 1944, a large canal completed 1,800 years ago is
clearly visible from the air and five ramparts and four moats were found on exca-
vation. Thriving trade with both India and China is evidenced by exotic trinkets:
Chinese mirrors, rings, and seals with Brahmi script from India and even by
Roman coins, which dated to the reign of Marcus Aurelius, 161–180 C.E.
Bali. The most enduring of the Indianized nagaras of Southeast Asia is
Bali, which survived into the twentieth century and in some ways survives still
as a richly Hindu ceremonial culture focused on village temples, the only
Hindu state outside South Asia. The state itself disappeared in gunfire and
flames in 1906:
The Dutch army appeared, for reasons of its own, at Sanur on the south
coast and fought its way into Badung, where the king, his wives, his chil-
dren, and his entourage marched in a splendid mass suicide into the direct
fire of its guns. Within the week, the king and crown prince of Tabanan had
been captured, but they managed to destroy themselves, the one by poison,
the other by knife, their first evening in Dutch custody. Two years later, in
1908, this strange ritual was repeated in the most illustrious state of all,
Klungkung, the nominal “capital” of traditional Bali; the king and court
again paraded, half entranced, half dazed with opium, out of the palace
into the reluctant fire of the by now thoroughly bewildered Dutch troops. It
was quite literally the death of the old order. It expired as it had lived:
absorbed in a pageant. (Geertz 1980:11–13)
In its heyday Bali was, as Geertz sees it, a “theater state,” where great royal
theatrical rites—cremations, tooth filings, temple dedications, pilgrimage, and
blood sacrifices—drew together the people, the priests, and the rulers in a sin-
gle sociopolitical ritual drama. Where others have argued that royal cults exist
for the purpose of legitimating a particular political order, it is Geertz’s view
that “mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state, but rather the state,
even in its final gasp, was a device for the enactment of mass ritual” (Geertz
1980:13). And Lansing (1991) supported this view somewhat indirectly by
demonstrating that Bali’s vast, terraced irrigation system is not the work of
political rulers but of a separate hierarchy of water temples, water temple festi-
vals, and water temple priests. That is to say, the rulers of Bali were doing little
of a practical, bureaucratic nature to justify their existence. Rather, they were