Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia -SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM

-He concerned with the 'early modern' epoch. He talked about the global and connected character of
the early modern period, which Extend from the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the
eighteenth century. There are reasons to choose 14th century, like to delink the notion of 'modernity'
from a particular European trajectory, and to argue that it represents a more-or-less global shift, with
many different sources and roots, and—inevitably—many different forms and meanings depending on
which society we look at it from. Nevertheless, some obvious unifying features are present. Like, the
early modern period defines a new sense of the limits of inhabited world because it is in a fundamental
way an age of travel and discovery, of geographical redefinition. Rather than treat the European voyages
of exploration as the sole or even the single most important focus, we need to bear in mind that the
period witnesses the expansion in a number of cultures of travel, as well as the concomitant
development of travel-literature as a literary genre. But the early modern period also sees other shifts.
Among these is a heightening of the long-term structural conflict between settled agricultural and urban
societies on the one hand, and nomadic groups on the other. He argued for certain broadly universal
conflicts during the period in life-styles, and modes of resource-use. These shifts are equally
accompanied by complex changes in political theology. The early modern construct of the Universal
Empire obviously had classical roots, but was considerably reworked in the new geographical and
political settings of the period. There was coexistence of such seemingly archaic forms of political
articulation as empires and the notion of an emerging 'modernity'.
- Scholars like Anthony Reid, Lieberman himself and Denys Lombard, have opened up the doors of
comparison, and to project early modern Southeast Asia, on a world stage. Anthony Reid talks about
'autonomous history' of Southeast Asia. Victor Lieberman argued to take the geographical units as given
from the conventional wisdom, and then proceed to a higher level of comparison using these very units
as building-blocks.
- But he concentrated on 'connected histories' as opposed to 'comparative histories'.
- Contrary to what 'area studies' implicitly presumes, a good part of the dynamic in early modern history
was provided by the interface between the local and regional ('micro'-level), and the supra-regional, at
times even global ('macro'-level).
- He Considered the Bay of Bengal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He witness on the one
hand the development of networks of commercial exchange, and on the other hand a significant nexus
by which military elites, courtiers and religious specialists crossed the Bay on a regular basis. Even Shah
Sulaiman's ambassador, Muhammad Rabi', makes it clear that the Persian influence in Ayutthaya was
played out through the commercial networks of the Bay of Bengal. So Mainland Southeast Asia in this
period was not isolated from the Indian world.
- For example, millenarian conjuncture operated over a good part of the Old World in the sixteenth
century and was also the backdrop to discussions between Akbar and Monserrate, which took place just
eleven years before the year 1000 A.H (1591-92). This was a time when many Muslims in southern and
western Asia, as well as North Africa anxiously awaited signs that the end of the world was nigh, and
when the Most Catholic Monarch, Philip II of Spain, equally wrote gloomily about this.
-Speaking of supra-local connections in the early modern world, we tend to focus on world bullion flows
and their impact, firearms or the circulation of renegades and mercenaries. But ideas and mental
contructs, too, flowed across political boundaries in that world, and—even if they found specific local
expression—enable us to see that what we are dealing with are not separate and comparable, but
connected histories.
-Akbar and Monserrate were conversing on the impending End of the World obviously reflects -First, it
points to the conspicuous presence of European Catholic missionary orders, who—made their way to
Asian and African courts, and thus were an element of circulation in early modern Eurasia, together with
mercenaries, renegades, diplomats, Buddhist monks and Sufis. So we cannot neglect a change in the
nature and scale of elite movement across political boundaries. The Akbar-Monserrate conversation
points to the permeability of what are often assumed to be closed 'cultural zones', and the existence of
vocabularies that cut across local religious traditions, these vocabularies were partly 'secular'. And,
finally, the locus of the conversation itself is not without interest, the conversation on Messianism thus
represents one of the many ideological currents that were present in Akbar's court at this crucial
moment of transition.
-The notion of the 'early modern' is hence linked, if not directly, to a changed domain of global
interaction that has to do with such diverse matters as the legacy of Chinggis Khan and Timur, the
Counter-Reformation and its overseas drive to proselytize, as well as the so-called Voyages of Discovery.
- The sixteenth century thus saw the emergence of a new set of material conditions within which
millenarianism could arise, and propagate itself both as a current that embraced a large geographical
space, and as a phenomenon that had specific, and even unique, local manifestations. Millenarianism,
like money, allows us to approach a problem of global dimensions, but with quite different local
manifestations. This means in turn that we cannot attempt a 'macrohistory' of the problem without
muddying our boots in the bogs of 'micro-history'.
-Taking a broad view of the Ottoman Empire, Iran and North Africa, we see that in the context of the
year 1000 A.H., expectations in these areas were not uniformly apocalyptic. Rather, they also hovered
optimistically around the possibility of a re-ordering of the known world, through the intercession of a
mujaddid (or 'Renewer'); thus, at least one celebrated religious reformer of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries in India, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, assumed the title of
mujaddid-i alf-i sjini ('Renewer of the Second Millennium'). The idea of the mujaddid paralleled, but did
not replace, another idea with deep roots in Islamic history, namely the notion of the Imam Mahdi, the
Concealed or Expected One, who would emerge to reform the world in a radical fashion. Cornell
Fleischer has demonstrated, the Ottoman Empire, had a long-drawn-out flirtation with Mahdism in the
mid-sixteenth century.
- Millerarianism was thus a force to be reckoned with, and a potent and complex political strategy,
indeed as far as Southeast Asia. The Ottoman version of sixteenth-century millenarianism contained
significant areas of commonality with both Iran, India and the Christian Mediterranean. Several spheres
of the circulation of powerful myths and ideological constructs relating to state formation existed in
early modern Eurasia, and that these often transcended the boundaries defined for us retrospectively by
nation-states or Area Studies.
-He shifted the grounds of discussion from Lieberman's highly materialist conception to a rather
broader-based conception of early modern history. Nationalism has blinded us to the possibility of
connection, and historical ethnography, the thrust of such ethnography has always been to emphasize
difference, and more usually the positional superiority of the observer over the observed.

Turning the stones over: Sixteenth-century millenarianism from the Tagus to the Ganges -Sanjay
Subrahmanyam
-In this article he talked about, political millenarianism as dominating ideology, as a building-block of
empire and fuel for imperial ambition. He refered here to the complex of interlinked millenarian political
movements that seems to accompany the process of European expansion, at times providing them with
crucial ideological inputs. He uses definition of Jonathan Spence to define millenarianism as a ’pattern of
belief that promised the possibility of a final world in which there would be cosmos without chaos, a
world of making wonderful without imperfections, an eternal peace beyond history, a changeless realm
ruled by an unchallenged god, after a war’.
-In 1540, a Venetian envoy, Michele Membre found himself in Safavid Iran, in court of Shah Tahmasp, he
wrote, The King has a sister in his house who he does not want to be married, because, he says, he is
keeping her to be the wife of the Mahdi. He explored a millenarian conjuncture that operated over a
good part of the Old World in the sixteenth century, and which was the backdrop to such discussions as
that between Akbar and Monserrate. He focuses in particular on the instances of Portugal and India.
Now, much has been written in recent years about the millenarian aspirations that helped drive
Columbus on his westward voyage, and the curious and ironical-parallel between that millenarianism
and the apocalyptic vision of some of the indigenous American peoples that the Spaniards encountered
in the aftermath of 1492.
-The sixteenth century thus saw the emergence of a new set of material conditions within which
millenarianism could arise, and propagate itself both as a current that embraced a large geographical
space, and as a phenomenon that had specific, and even unique, local manifestations.
-The Safavids, a dynasty with overt messianistic pretensions. The founder of the dynasty, Shah Isma’il,
on assuming royal titles in 1501, emerged rapidly as a figure with an eschatological aura surrounding
him. His own poetry, is significant for its simultaneous identification with Alexander, God and ’Ali, and its
use of the pen-name of Khatâ ’i, which is to say ’The Sinner’. It is of interest to note that the Messianic
pretensions of Shah Isma’il, which undoubtedly played a role in binding his followers to him, and to their
ability to confront what were at times daunting military odds, had a dual effect on those who were
outside of the fold. With the accession in Iran of Shah ’Abbas in the late 1580s, the millenarian
atmosphere there took on a decidedly different twist.
-In India, the dawn of the tenth century of the Hegiran calendar was accompanied directly by a powerful
millenarian movement, that of the Mahdawis. The movement can be traced to the charismatic figure of
a certain Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri (1443-1505), who fled the city of Jaunpur after its fall to the Lodi
dynasty from Delhi. Sayyid Muhammad saw the fall of Jaunpur as a sign of the coming troubles, and
after a voyage to the Hijaz (where he polished his skills as a theologian), returned to India where in 900
A.H., he declared himself to be the Mahdi. While the Mahdawi movement disappears partly from view
over the next few decades, there is little doubt that it continued to command numerous followers, in
particularly among some of the Afghans resident in northern India. The next great manifestation had to
await the approach of another significant marker in the millenarian calendar, the year 960 A.H. (1552-
53). Once more, Badayuni is a valuable source of information on the movement, which in this phase
centred around the figures of Shaikh ’Abdullah Niyazi (himself an Afghan, as his name suggests), and his
disciple Shaikh ’alma’ ibn Hasan Bayanwi (or Bangali). The political context was the troubled reign in
northern India of Islam Shah Sur. All this in turn left a mark on the next generation of ideologues at the
court of Akbar.
-The shifts that are visible in the terms of the discussion in Akbar’s court in the 1570s cannot be
explained by a single circumstance alone. There was, first of all, the fact that the conquests of Gujarat
and Bengal between 1572 and 1577 made the Mughal Empire an enterprise on a much larger scale, it
became possible in the 1570s for Akbar’s ideologues and courtiers to see him as operating on the same
scale of power as the Ottoman Sultan. Also, non-sectarian Islamic Messianism had that potential,
especially because in the popular imagination, it could easily be extended to include even non-Muslims
in state functioning. Finally, the calendar itself exerted its own pressures. Each year from 987 thus
brought forth its own rumours and predictions. Tarikh- I Alfi (literally ’The ThousandYear History’) was
quite clearly a project that made sense in a millenarian setting. But by the time the millennium began its
approach, the Mughal court surely sensed that this was a rather unstable basis on which to found a
long-term dynastic ideology. Thus, in the 1590s, the mature Akbarian ideological statement came to
centre on the elements of divine effulgence ( farr-i izadi) that illuminated the ruler and set him apart,
and the institutional arrangement of the Tauhid-i Ilahi, wherein members of the ruling class were tied to
the Mughal ruler as his spiritual disciples. Thus, the actual year 1000 (1591-92) passed without any great
ceremony.
-This very same potential towards the epistemological subsumption of older traditions into a newer one
appears to be one of the most powerful aspects of millenarian ideologies associated with European
expansion in the sixteenth century. Thus, Portuguese millenarianism of the period certainly shared
certain common traits and themes with the cases we have set out above, that have ranged
geographically from Istanbul to India.
-This article has argued, that the power of synchronism was significant in the sixteenth century. As
possibilities were opened up of a new conjuncture within which cultural and material processes in
different societies could find a synergy. Coincidentally, this happened at a time when the Islamic world
was psychologically preparing itself for a great millenarian climacteric, indeed the greatest that it had
known to date.

THE MILLENNIAL SOVEREIGN SACRED KINGSHIP AND SAINTHOOD IN ISLAM -A. Azfar Moin
- His book focuses on the institution of sacred kingship in the Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal empires of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
- The Divine Religion (Din-i Ilahi) of Akbar generated an immense controversy – a controversy, it can be
said, of global proportions. Reports and rumors of how a great Muslim emperor had turned against
Islam were followed with interest in Shi‘i Iran, Sunni Transoxania, and Catholic Portugal and Spain. Akbar
had claimed to be the world’s greatest sovereign and spiritual guide at the turn of the Islamic
millennium. He had claimed, in effect, to be the awaited messiah. In doing so, he had embraced a
powerful and pervasive myth of sovereignty. He had competed for the millennial prize with many
others. Indeed, the emperor’s critics considered his spiritual pretensions to be far from original. On the
contrary, they accused him of trying to mimic the messianic success of the founder of the Safavid empire
in Iran, Shah Isma‘il.
- That Akbar’s millennial project in India evoked comparisons with Shah Isma‘il’s militant messianism in
Iran is indicative of a strong similarity between the two enduring Muslim empires of sixteenth century
Iran and India. It brings into focus the startling fact that both imperial polities, in their formative phases,
had seriously engaged with messianic and saintly forms of sovereignty. This similarity, importantly, was
not a coincidence but the result of a shared history. Specifically, the imperial projects of the Mughals
and the Safavids in the first half of the sixteenth century had competed for the same set of material
resources, patronage and kinship networks, and cultural symbols. Akbar’s Timurid father and
grandfather, Humayun and Babur, had both sought refuge and military assistance from the Safavids at
low points in their royal careers and had witnessed the workings of the Safavid court and Sufi
organization up close. The Safavids, in turn, had adopted the highly stylized forms and fashions of late-
Timurid courts as they evolved from a Sufi order into an imperial dynasty. The two nascent sixteenth
century empires had in effect drawn upon a shared cultural context and learned from one another’s
modes and methods. If an element of commonality is assumed between these two dynasties, it is
ascribed to the “mystical” practices of Sufism.
- In a literal and “thin” sense the messianic myth was a prophecy about the coming of the messiah or the
millennial being, but in a descriptive and “thick” sense, it simultaneously invoked of a series of inter-
related cultural meanings. He recovered this millenarian epistemology and to show how it constituted
both elite and popular worldviews in early modern Iran and India. Transmigration was an important
component of millenarian theories of kingship and widely-made and widelybelieved messianic claims of
Sufi saints. Indeed, transmigration was much more than just an idea. Rather, it was a social fact
experienced by far too many people. The millennium, thus, could be put into practice with differing
degrees of temporal intensity.
- Beginning in the early sixteenth century, both empires developed in close interaction and competition
with each other. The Mughal practice of establishing close connections with networks of devotional
brotherhood and “heretical” mendicant orders was based on similar traditions of rule in Timurid Iran
and Central Asia. The Mughal devotional cult for imperial officers and courtiers had an immediate and
living precedent in Safavid practice. Mughal dependence on Indian astrologers did not reduce their
dependence on Iranian ones.
- If Babur had come to India speaking and writing in Turkish and hunting on horseback, his great
grandson Jahangir was most comfortable speaking in Hindi and shooting tigers perched on an elephant.
Indeed, if Jahangir had met Babur, the only language the two men would have been able to converse in
was Persian. Persian became the language of administration and culture in the Mughal empire and
remained so until early nineteenth century. By one estimate, under the Mughals, there were more
Persian literate people in India than there were in Iran. A great number of Iranian soldiers,
administrators, merchants, men of religion and learning came to Mughal India to seek their fortune,
leaving an indelible print on the languages, cities, buildings, and religions of India.
-Akbar’s style of sacred kingship was a variation on a historical theme. This is not to deny its inventive
form and Indian content and context. Rather, it is to assert that this inventiveness built upon received
institutional and narrative forms that were part of Timurid and Safavid legacies inherited by the
Mughals. Whether it was the notion of the returning soul or the conception of recurring time cycles,
there was much in common between the Iranian heritage of the Mughals and that of their Indian polity.
 Parul Ma’am
The Concept of Cultural Convergence Revisited Reflections on India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia
-Hermann Kulke
-He presented ‘convergence thesis’ of India’s early influence in Southeast Asia. The focus is on India’s
strong impact on the emergence of the early kingdoms in the middle of the first millennium CE during
the second stage of early state formation in Southeast Asia. For a long time, Western knowledge about
Southeast Asia has been overshadowed by the fame of India and the greatness of her culture.
- Southeast Asian historical research by European scholars developed parallel to the progress of Western
colonization in that part of the world. Particularly French and Dutch historians in the late 19th and early
20th century, criticized as ‘Indocentric’. Indocentric (mis)interpretation of Southeast Asian history and
culture culminated during the twenties and thirties of the last century when nationalist Indian historians
introduced the concept of ‘Greater India’ and ‘Hindu Colonies’ in Southeast Asia. In 1926, the Greater
India Society was established in Calcutta and in the following year, the first volume of a series of
monographs on The Indian Colonies in the Far East was published by R C Majumdar. Majumdar became
the most prominent proponent of this school. In a special lecture delivered in 1940 he asserted that ‘the
Hindu colonists [in Southeast Asia] brought with them the whole framework of their culture and
civilization and this was transplanted in its entirety among the people who had not yet emerged from
their primitive barbarism’ Nilakanta Sastri also titled a short article in the Journal of the Greater India
Society as ‘The Tamil Land and the Eastern Colonies’. van Leur and F. D. K. Bosch ,I W Mabbett attacked
this. Despite its undeniable merits, the concept of Indianization thus still kept, tough in an alleviated
way, to the beaten track, neglecting indigenous Southeast Asian initiative. Coedès, too, speaks of the
‘transplantation’ of the Indian civilization into Southeast Asia.
- The paradigmatic change was caused by the far-reaching and sweeping prehistoric archaeological
discoveries in mainland Southeast Asia. Ian Glover asserted on the basis of his own seminal
archaeological research that ‘the first civilizations of Southeast Asia had their origins in the prehistoric
past and were not brought by advanced immigrants from the west’.
-In 1999, two substantial articles were published by Monica L Smith and Roy E Jordaan. The title of
Smith’s article ‘“Indianization” from the Indian Point of View’ (Smith 1999) is a critical evaluation of the
Indian sources on India’s contacts with Southeast Asia. Smith rightly emphasizes that ‘prior to the fourth
century C.E. Indian trade activities appear to have been relatively infrequent. In her conclusion, she
points out that the term ‘Indianization’ ‘conceals the complexities of socio-political organization in the
first millennium C.E’. As has been argued above, she, too, emphasizes that a genuine adoption of Indian
traditions is discernible only after the 4th century, and was undertaken by dynastic leaders of Southeast
Asia who were increasing their dominance over local groups as well as improving their contacts with
other cultures. Jordaan’s article follows a very different line as can already be detected from its title,
‘The Sailendras, the Status of the Ksatriya Theory, and the Development of Hindu-Javanese Temple
Architecture’
-Sheldon Pollock’s seminal paper (1996) on the Sanskrit cosmopolis. Right from the beginning, Pollock
emphasises the almost concurrent spread of Sanskrit in south India and Southeast Asia in the first
millennium CE. But ‘no political power [...] was at work here. He is certainly right when he observes that
after World War II, decolonization predictably ‘stimulated a quest for the local, the indigenous, the
autochthonous’.
-Daud Ali’s article ‘The Early Inscriptions of Indonesia and the Problem of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis‘ (Ali
2011) contains, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive debate so far on Pollock’s concept of the
Sanskrit Cosmopolis in the Southeast Asian context. Important in our context is that Ali emphasizes
critically Pollock’s refusal to take notice of the extensive literature on recent theories of state formation
in South and Southeast Asia.
Monuments, Motifs, Myths: Architecture and its Transformations in Early India and Southeast Asia
-Parul Pandya Dhar[ In Book- (Shyam Saran Editor) Cultural and Civilisational Links between India and
Southeast Asia Historical and Contemporary Dimensions]
-Since ancient times, India and Southeast Asia have engaged in an intense exchange of ideas, knowledge
systems, objects and people traversing vast expanses over land and seas. The historiography of these
early interactions has, since the 1950s or so, witnessed an important paradigm shift, with the dominant
framework of ‘Indianization’ yielding to an increased emphasis on ‘localization’ processes. She
investigates the dynamics of localization of architectural language in early India and Southeast Asia. A
close investigation of the architectonics and iconography of these monuments—their underlying
concepts and motifs, affiliations and diversities—reveals an intricate web of relationships between the
cultural zones of contact and provides significant insights into ancient cosmopolitan circuits of exchange.
-While the architectural vocabulary of the seventh–eighth-century temples of Southeast Asia reveals
close generic links with Indian temples, the details of their form and embellishment clearly indicate that
the beginnings of the transmission of architectural ideas and forms between India and Southeast Asia
need to be investigated from a period earlier than that of the earliest, well-preserved seventh–eighth-
century temples from Southeast Asia. The localization of Indian architectural knowledge systems in the
Southeast Asian regions and their assimilation with local predilections and building practices are already
in evidence in the earliest preserved Southeast Asian temples.
-Although the architectural concepts, plans and elevations of Southeast Asian temples have many
obvious commonalities with Indian temples of the Gupta and post-Gupta periods—a fact that has been
reiterated in several studies on Southeast Asian architecture—it is equally crucial to understand the
processes of localization that render these early monuments distinct from their Indian counterparts.
Take, for example, the elevation of Caṇḍi Arjuna situated on the Dieng Plateau in Central Java. The
structure rests on a raised platform (jagati/upapıt̄hạ ) whose mouldings correspond with Indian
prototypes. Yet the sequence of the platform mouldings, the particular arrangement of the parts
forming the whole and the rhythm of its progressions and recessions are in fact more akin to those seen
on image pedestals, especially the bronze images of deities, which, unlike the monuments themselves,
were portable and are well known to have been carried across circuitous sea and land routes between
South and Southeast Asia since ancient times.
-The distinctive storeys that make up the superstructure of Canḍi Arjuna ̣ lend this monument an
appearance that is comparable to some seventh century Western Calukyan temples at Badami, as well
as a few of the Pallavan ̄ period monoliths at Mamallapuram, for example the Dharmaraja and Arjuna ̄
Rathas. This apparent visual correspondence has led several scholars to look for direct links between the
Western Calukyan, Pallavan and Southeast Asian temples. Yet, a closer scrutiny of the architecture of
Canḍi Arjuna reveals a combination of several ̣ disparate architectural features—some that correspond
to the northern Indian tradition and others to the southern Indian. By the late seventh century in Central
Java, the specific forms and shapes of some of the architectural mouldings reveal a distinctive ̣ Javanese
character. The formality in structure and logic of Canḍi Arjuna ̣ certainly reveals Indian influence, but it
also indicates processes of localization that had begun to mature into a distinctive architectural
language by this time. In pre-seventh-century time, there is clear evidence of a rich, intra-Southeast
Asian architectural dialogue during this period: the Javanese, the Khmer and the Cham architects and
sculptors were also drawing architectural ideas, motifs and forms liberally from each other. This
suggests an intense criss-cross of architectural ideas and forms, and circuitous routes of interface of
Southeast Asian with Indian modes and systems of architectural knowledge.
-The motif of Meru as the mountain of gods at the centre of the universe, with its summit being the
highest point on earth, is a well established one not only in Indian cosmography but also as a symbol of
Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina cosmology. Purāṇic literature abounds in descriptive references to the Meru
—as the world axis, as the central mountain with four buttress mountains; the navel of the universe
encircled by the concentric rings of land and seas (sapta-saindhavaḥ); the mountain upon whose summit
is the city of gods and beneath which are the netherworlds of demons or asuras; the governing principle
for the movement of heavenly bodies; and the orienting principle for the directions represented by
dikpālas or divinities of the directions (Mabbett). In Buddhism too, the concept of the Meru integrates
the idea of a vertical spiritual ascent through stages across the worlds of desire (kāmaloka), form
(rūpaloka) and formlessness. These conceptual underpinnings of the Meru translate into the literature,
architecture and epigraphy of South and Southeast Asia. The architectonics and iconography of the
Meru signify many levels of meaning—metaphysical, religious and political. The realm of the gods in
heaven finds a parallel in the realm of kings who are compared with gods on earth. Borobudur in
Indonesia in a Buddhist context and Angkor Wat in Cambodia in a Hindu context are supreme
architectural manifestations of the Meru concept.
-The iconography of the Cambodian temple mountains reveals a coming together of the religious,
political and economic aspects of ancient Cambodian society. Cambodian artistic genius localizes the
Meru symbolism of India within its own belief in the supernatural powers of the mountain, with rituals
of kingship and its concerns for water resource management. The mountain as the abode of gods and its
connections with the king of the mountains takes the form of the grand temple-mountains of Cambodia.
In the process, visualizations of the Meru of Indian textual discourse assumes forms that have no close
parallels on Indian soil.
- Localization in this case has entailed the appropriation of a concept which took unprecedented forms
to serve new contexts and perceptions. Cambodian temple-mountains clearly reveal that the nature of
influence in art was not necessarily always based on direct visual prototypes which were replicated in a
localized idiom or style. Despite a known shared basis for temple forms in ancient India and Cambodia,
the transmission of influence in this case cannot be classified as a formal correspondence. Rather, it
reveals transference of an idea or text—-a ‘mental’ image, which journeys across. When translated to
materiality, it results in the composition and formalization of a new type of monumental architecture.
- During the long course of its journey, one witnesses several visual incarnations of Toraṇas motif in
consonance with changing contexts. The rationale for its persistent presence rests in the realm of the
aesthetic, symbolic, honorific, didactic and other such purposes. In a different spatiotemporal context,
for example, in the different Southeast Asian regions, from about the seventh century onwards, the
toraṇas took on newer forms and the motifs found on them were selectively assimilated and localized.
- It is the prabhavalı ̄ s of the portable bronze icons and manuscript ̄ illustrations rather than the static
architectural forms which seem to have played a greater role in influencing the toranạ forms seen on
the doorways and walls of Javanese canḍịs. Furthermore, from the range of early toranạ forms it is only
the type with the combination of kalamukha ̄ and makara forms that gains currency in Javanese
architecture. The patterns and imagery seen on Javanese toranạ s suggest sporadic borrowings of ideas
and motifs, and not complete forms. These shared ideas and motifs may be likened to alphabets and
phrases, which led to the creation of a distinctively new language of the toranạ as a symbolic and ornamental
motif in Java.
- It is also equally necessary to investigate more closely the intra Southeast Asian exchanges and the
filter of intermediate cultures in the dynamics of cross-cultural architectural exchange. The role of
portable architectural models in the transmission of architectural ideas and forms is another important
aspect that needs further attention. Localization of architectural knowledge entailed a selective
appropriation and adaptation of forms based on local predilections and needs. As the translation of the
Meru concept aptly illustrates, at times shared religious and philosophical concepts created distinct
architectural imagery in the different zones of contact. In such cases, the creation of architectural forms
proceeded from the transmission of ideas/texts which were translated into the shape of newer
imageries and forms. At other times, as in the case of Javanese caṇḍis, visual correspondences between
Indian and Southeast Asian buildings suggest more direct transmissions and localization processes from
an earlier period.
Art in Translation: Interpreting Icons and Narratives across the Indian Ocean -Parul Pandya Dhar
-India and the Southeast Asian nation’s cultures have been active participants in a rich trans-regional
cultural dialogue since ancient times. Her discussion here is based on icons and narratives that belong to
the period from about the sixth to twelfth centuries CE, referred to as the ‘early medieval’ in South
Asian history. Interactions between early India and Southeast Asia traversed the tangible domain of
goods and artefacts but also went beyond this to include intangible exchanges—of ideas, knowledge
systems, beliefs, and practices. Long-distance material and human migrations transpired on account of a
variety of reasons—pilgrimage, trade, war, diplomacy, and more. Often the tangible and intangible
domains were inextricably connected, with human agency playing a central role. Narratives of such
travels and translocations, and of their subsequent localization in the different zones of contact, had a
deep impact in the realm of visual arts.
-The visuality of early cultural encounters between India and Southeast Asia attains maturity, diversity,
and complexity from about the fifth-sixth centuries of the Common Era. Cross-cultural histories of art
move beyond the limits imposed by regional and political boundaries to investigate and conceptualize
inter-relationships between art forms across diverse spatial, cultural, and temporal zones (Canepa).
-During the 19th and 20th centuries, colonial histories of large parts of Southern Asia determined that
European writers, particularly French, English, and Dutch archaeologists, historians, and art historians
wrote the earliest modern comparative histories of Indian and Southeast Asian art (Legge 1999). Initial
research focused on the identification of a shared vocabulary of key art concepts, symbols, motifs, and
forms across the cultural zones of contact—the different regions of Southeast Asia and their close
affinity to Indian concepts and art forms. Texts such as George Çoedes’s The Indianized States of
Southeast Asia (1968) and R.C. Majumdar’s Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East (1927) provided
distinct yet overarching frameworks of a dominant Indian influence during the early phase of research.
Several other Indian and European scholars have made significant contributions to the subject, including
but not limited to scholars such as Paul Mus, A.J. Bernet Kempers, H.B. Sarkar, A.K. Coomaraswamy, K.A.
Nilakanta Sastri, H.G. Quaritch Wales, Paul Pelliot, Henri Parmentier, Jean Boisselier, F.D.K. Bosch, and
Claude Jacques.
-The Greater India Society was formed in 1926 in Kolkata. The idea of Indian colonies across Southeast
Asia, shared by some of its members and proponents, was based on the undeniable strong presence of
Indian influence, at least among the early Southeast Asian elite cultures, as observed in the spread of
Indian religions, languages, monumental architecture and art. These Indian and European scholars
brought to light many significant facets of the India-Southeast Asia 99 cultural dialogue, which
generations of scholars continue to draw upon. Their writings need to be understood in the context of
their times – a period of rising nationalist sentiments in response to the British colonization of India and
a period of European colonization of Southeast Asian countries. Apart from the problematic assumption
of Indian colonization of Southeast Asia, the most glaring omission in several of these early works is a
denial of agency to, or an assumed passivity of, the Southeast Asian players in the processes of cultural
interaction. A shift in focus from Indianization to localization and convergence, has been provided by
scholars like Ian Mabbett (1977), Hermann Kulke (2014), and Pierre-Yves Manguin (2011), among others.
-Art in Translation: Modes and Contexts:- Religious images—carved, moulded, or painted on portable
objects—were carried by pilgrims, traders, priests, and monks on long-distance journeys by land and sea
between India and Southeast Asia. Political embassies included gifts, often images of deities – Buddhist
and Hindu – which were sent as goodwill gestures from the court of one king to another. Beyond such
peaceful migrations, conflict and war also led to the dispersal of artistic vocabulary. And so, alongside
the realm of artistic ideas and letters, artistic imagery – iconic and narrative – also travelled
transregionally in intra-Asian contexts.
-The Multivalence of an Icon: Iconography of Avalokiteshvara Portable artefacts such as terracotta seals
or tablets and bronze icons were carriers of iconographic formulae across South and Southeast Asia
(Ghosh). Illustrated manuscripts, the earliest ones no longer available, were also carriers of art and
architectural forms across long distances. Such objects played an important role in the formulation of art
vocabularies in distant lands were associated with human endeavour, beliefs, and the impulse for travel.
Among such iconographies of travel, carried on small objects across the seas, is the image and
iconography of bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, a Buddhist deity who became popular in many parts of
Southeast Asia. With the spread of Buddhism from India to large parts of Asia, the humane appeal of
bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara as the ultimate embodiment of compassion, protection, and deliverance
made him an increasingly popular icon for worship in Southeast Asia. It is only during the sixth century
CE that the iconography of Avalokiteshvara as a saviour from worldly perils and disasters gained greater
significance (Chutiwongs).
-Although based on Indian prototypes, local beliefs in each of the Southeast Asian regions had an
important role to play. While the Theravada tradition of Myanmar and Central Thailand discouraged
‘superhuman’ forms in Avalokiteshvara iconography, Champa (in present-day Vietnam) and Cambodia,
where Shaivism was the dominant State religion, developed elaborate, larger-than-life iconographies of
Avalokiteshvara. As Lokeshvara or Lokanatha – the lord or the protector of the people – his status at
times rose to that of a State cult, expressed in monumental art and architecture, from which the king
derived legitimacy, as for example, at Dong Duong in Champa in the late ninth – early tenth centuries
during the reign of King Indravarman II. Another important dimension to the popularity and propagation
of the Avalokiteshvara cult relates to trade. His role as the protector of sailors, merchants, and traders.
Careful visual analysis of the stylistics and iconography of art remains, coupled with archaeological
insights on the distribution and spread of Avalokiteshvara shrines and icons continue to enlighten our
understanding of the multivalence of the Avalokiteshvara icon at the intersections of aesthetics, religion,
politics, and trade.
-Travelling Narratives: The Ramayana in Flux:- Much has been written about the ways in which the
Ramayana has been retold, rewritten, re-enacted, and refashioned across the South and Southeast Asian
landscape. It remains an integral part of the cultural consciousness and political imagination of the Asian
people. The retelling of the Ramayana in different media—oral, textual, epigraphic, performative, and
sculptural—are closely interlinked (Filliozat). The Prambanan Ramayana sculptures provides insights into
the inherent flux in the assimilation of varied versions of the epic—the Uttararamacharita of Bhavabhuti,
the Uttarakanda extension of the Valmiki Ramayana, the Kakawin-Ramayana, and the Hikayat Seri Rama
—all of which share a few parallels with the mid-ninth-century Prambanan version in stone. The Hikayat
Seri Rama is a 16th-century Malay recension of the story and reveals Islamic influence. Between these
and the many unrecorded oral versions of the text, rest processes of localization of the epic in Central
Java.
-The few case studies relating to the iconography of early cultural encounters between India and
Southeast Asia discussed here yield a range of meanings in which aesthetic, religious, political, and social
aspects are inextricably intertwined. The nature of cross-cultural correspondence appears to vary in the
case of iconic as compared to narrative art. However, it is necessary to qualify that the categories of
‘iconic’ and ‘narrative’ art are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
-The canonical prescriptions for making religious icons have been laid out in Indian art treatises. These
prescriptions do ensure a strong and noticeable transregional visual correspondence of icons and
iconography across India and Southeast Asia. This visual similarity of icons in trans-regional contexts in
further strengthened by the modes of transmission, that is, through actual travelling portable artefacts
and manuals. Visual narratives such as the Ramayana narratives reveal greater variety and imagination
in the different regions of Southeast Asia. This is in part because art treatises do not lay out detailed
rules for composing visual narratives. The artist is thus at far greater liberty in conceptualizing and
sculpting a narrative panel as compared to a religious icon. Visual correspondence with Indian narrative
counterparts is reduced also because of the differing modes of transmission of these narratives.