The Colonial Conundrum

HOW WE VIEW HISTORY IS TIED UP WITH our contemporary concerns, predicaments and ambitions. As imperial projects multiplied and colonial empires expanded from the 17th cen­tury, the idea of the West as an advanced and civilising force consolidated. Alongside so did the idea of a genealogy leading directly back to the Greeks as being the lodestone of Western civilisation. If subsequent scholarship has criti­cally examined and deconstructed such ideas, the primacy of the Greeks in the Western imag­ination has remained. We will look at how the evolution of the idea of Indian colonies in the first millennium of the Common Era contrasts with the treatment of Greek colonies in the first millennium BCE to illustrate how impe­rialism and colonialism beget different legacies in Europe and Asia.

In the first millennium CE a process of extraordinary dimensions saw an explosion of ideas, religions, scripts, literatures and ico­nography from the Indian subcontinent in Southeast Asia. Across present-day Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia and In­donesia, Indic influences proliferated. The monumental remnants of these influences still dominate landscapes of both mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, as for instance the structures in Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Borobudur in Indonesia; such temples as have survived the US bombings in Vietnam in My Son and other places. For well over a century historians have debated: What explains the transfer of these influences from India across such a vast geography? No clear answer has emerged.

Till a century ago the answer seemed straightforward. To colonial schol­ars and officials from Britain, France and the Netherlands who had between them carved up Southeast Asia into their colonies—the literature, epigraphs, iconography and architecture that survived from the first millennium could only have been the work of an external agent—someone much like themselves; in other words, colonisers.

Given the proliferation of Hindu and Buddhist motifs and icons and, of course, the numerous Sanskrit inscriptions, it seemed also natural to posit an earlier colonisation from India: that it was Indian colonists who were respon­sible for the significant literary, architectural and other achievements of the first millennium in Southeast Asia. This seemed plausible and, moreover, most directly supported by the epigraphic and archaeological evidence.

THE VIEW FROM INDIA

To historians in India in the first two-three decades of the 20th century, this mass of historical information emerging from the Dutch, French and British colonies in Southeast Asia seemed particularly relevant. Because they studied Sanskrit and Prakrit epigraphs and manuscripts, they were familiar with the variety of scripts and metres used; and because they had knowledge of the ar­chitecture and iconography of ancient India, they easily recognised the Indic underpinnings of the ancient cultures of Southeast Asia.

From this, many Indian historians concluded that maritime and continental South Asia then was not something distant but actually very proximate—a territory in which ancient Indians seemed to be doing much the same things that they had been doing in India. By 1926 some of these scholars had grouped themselves into the Society for the Study of Greater India.

The coming together of a group of scholars under this single umbrella rep­resented an unusual moment in Indian historiography. It was the first, and to date perhaps the only, concerted foray by a cohort of historians from India into the history of regions and countries outside the Indian subcontinent. The members of the Greater India Society may have contested the suggestion they were pioneers in the study of non-Indian history. In their view they were study­ing India, albeit Greater India—a vast region physically distant from India, yet one they regarded as being permeated with symbols, ideas, religions, scripts, language and literature from India for well over a millennium.

Western scholars of the time recognised the strong credentials which many Indians brought to the study of ancient Southeast Asia but viewed these efforts with some condescension. One such characterisation would see the Indian scholarship as being marked “by some kind of wishful thinking, had a vision of huge fleets of daring adventurers, equalling the British Drakes, Cavendishes and other navigators, who sailed out, crossed the Indian Ocean, and settled in Java [where] these navigators founded colonies, built fortresses and towns and developed a trade with the mother-country which prospered for centuries, whilst talented artists, arrived from Bengal, Kalinga and Gujarat, erected the matchless monuments in Java.”

It is clear that quite apart from their schol­arly interest what underwrote this group or at least many members of this group was na­tionalist sentiment. Even the most assertive of these scholars was however conscious that these were colonies with a difference—they were not the result of military conquest; sec­ondly these colonies were not in a subordinate relationship to their source centres in India, nor were they the subjects of colonial exploitation.

Ancient Indian colonies in Southeast Asia were however a characterisation that could only coexist uneasily with new emergent intellectual trends as the forces propelling de­colonisation grew stronger in Asia as a whole. Other explanatory paradigms were sought and deployed to explain the enigma of these ancient Indic influences and vestiges. Enigma it certainly was for clearly they were not the result or the outcome of political or military conquest. Barring one single episode of a Chola naval expedition against the Srivijaya ruler in Indonesia in the 11th century CE, there is no evidence of military conquest or political domination being the cause of the diffusion of the wide-ranging Indian influences. Neither did these influences appear to be the outcome of state-directed or controlled activity on the Indian side. In fact, evidence of the Indian imprint in Southeast Asia is not found in any significant way in Indian liter­ary or epigraphic sources but almost entirely in the Southeast Asian sources.

IF NOT COLONIES, WHAT THEN?

To a new generation of scholars from the 1950s, the idea of viewing Southeast Asia from the perspective of Indian colonisation presented additional difficulties. Crediting Indian colo­nists with the visible feats in architecture, literature and sculpture, which in turn sug­gested states with considerable capacities to mobilise resources, took away agency from the indigenous populations. It also implied that Southeast Asia was a kind of primitive blank slate till Indian colonists arrived on the scene and energised the locals and raised them to a higher level of civilisation.

This ‘colonialism’ hurdle meant the surfac­ing of a number of other descriptors—each would try and act as a shorthand phrase to actu­ally explain how exactly Indian ideas travelled so far from the subcontinent to Southeast Asia. None of these descriptors-cum-conceptual schemes was however sufficiently influential among scholars of ancient Southeast Asia to command a substantial consensus.

Most prominent was French historian George Coedès’ thesis in the 1950s that it was not colonies or colonisation but rather what emerged were “Indianized states” and the phenomenon at work was “Indianization”. To others this concept was still too close to, and reminiscent of, colonialism and colonies. Also being entirely Indocentric, it was seen as not addressing or underplaying the vexed question of local agency.

The contrasting thesis emphasised indig­enous capacities and processes rather than an external agent. In this perspective Indian influences, rather than initiating something new or marking a new phase of Southeast Asian history, had only played a role in assert­ing what were essentially indigenous ideas, cultures and faiths. In other words, the Indic influences so striking on the surface were no more than the packaging or the envelope which indigenous forces and realities donned and acquired. The process, therefore, whereby Indian influences appeared in Southeast Asia was one of Indi­genization rather than Indianisation. This hypothesis was put forward in the mid-1930s by a Dutch civil ser­vant, JC van Leur, who evocatively argued that the historical evidence pointed to indigenous Indonesian agency rather than a Hindu or an Indian colonisation being the opera­tive factor. In his words, Indonesian rulers called Indian civilisation to the East: “[T]hat is to say they sum­moned the Brahmin priesthood to their courts”.

Sheldon Pollock used the term “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” to describe the totality of Indian influences in Southeast Asia, even while dismissing colonisa­tion as a plausible explanation for the widespread use of Sanskrit from the 5th century CE onwards in Cambodia, Indonesia and over large parts of Southeast Asia. This, too, has been criticised as being too Indocentric.

For the non-specialist, this is a bewildering terminological range—principally to explain the vast evidence of Indian influences over a long period of time but perhaps, to some extent, to distance themselves from even a hint of the thesis that what Southeast Asia had gone through was a colonisation by people from India.

These were largely scholarly debates and the weighing of evidence within each explanatory framework was often a highly specialised exercise with a fair amount of abstract theory thrown in. The lay interested public was not a part of these deliberations and for the millions who visit the great archaeological sites of Angkor or Borobudur or the island of Bali and elsewhere, the Indian influence is self-evident and the want of a straightforward explanatory term means their enigmatic quality is further enhanced.

PARALLELS FARTHER AFIELD

What are the other equivalent cases of a wide diffusion of a culture and language comparable to the spread of Indic influences along with the commanding pres­ence that Sanskrit established in Southeast Asia over a large part of the first millennium CE and even later?

There is a Mediterranean parallel that may offer some greater relevance: Greek ‘colonies’ in what is termed the archaic period—circa 8th -6th century BCE. For historians of the ancient world this is known also as the period of Greek colonisa­tion of the Mediterranean and even beyond, and to which there are references in mythology and also some amount of archaeological evidence. What are called Greek colonies were in effect settlements along the southern coast of Italy, in Sicily, farther afield in the Balkans, in Asia Minor or what is today Turkey, in Spain, and in present-day Egypt and Libya.

This expansion of Greek settlements as a consequence of migration was the outcome of various factors, including demographic pressures, trade, perhaps a shortage of arable land in the Greek mainland and other factors. It was manifestly not the result of military con­quest such as occurred in a later period. In that sense it was comprehensively different from the expansion of Greek culture all the way to the Hindu Kush and to India in the Hellenis­tic period from the 3rd century BCE onwards, for that happened with Greek armies led by Alexander acting as the vanguard for the estab­lishment of Greek influence.

Traditional histories, based in part on refer­ences in mythology, ascribed to the whole pro­cess of archaic Greek colonisation the character of an organised enterprise. They attributed it to different city states—which then comprised mainland Greece—organising such migra­tions and, moreover, that relations between the source city state and the new settlement remained strong. Establishing such settle­ments could be accompanied sometimes by a fair amount of violence, with the expulsion of the original settlers, and accompanied also by a transplanting of Greek culture, language, etc.

The terms colonies and colonialism in many traditional histories thus appeared to be a rea­sonable fit to describe these settlements. More recently, other historians have disagreed and disputed the application of the term colony or colonisation to describe these 8-6th century BCE processes. These were not organised enterprises of city states but smaller, disparate migrations over long periods of time. The use of an umbrella term ‘Greek colonisation’ is in itself problematic since the earliest stirrings of a possible Greek identity would emerge only much later. Finally, it is argued, in these early Greek settlements the kind of asymmetrical relationship with indig­enous populations, which a colonial relation­ship would imply, is absent and a more hybrid coexistence is what the evidence suggests.

The point is that, notwithstanding such per­spectives, and these have gathered a fair degree of scholarly consensus, the use of the term ‘Greek colonies’ and ‘Greek colonisation’ persisted and continued in both popular and scholarly literature. In the latter we can find various pro­visos and disclaimers being attached to the term which, of course, continues to be used.

COLONIES AND COLONIES

What explains this persistence of the C-word in the Greek case? At least part of the answer lies in the significance of these settlements in the overall span of Greek history. Thus, it has been pointed out that the best-preserved Greek temples in the world are found not in Greece but along the southern Italian coasts where Greek settlements were found dating back to the 8th century BCE. This was the region named Magna Graecia. Incidentally, and not surprisingly, some in the Greater India Society had referred to Southeast Asia in the first millennium CE as “Magna India”.

Perhaps this has to be seen also in the context of the salience of Greece and Greek civilisation and their widely perceived role as being the cradle of Western civilisation. Colonies were an intrinsic part of this mental universe as indeed was ascribing similar colonies to their imagined Greek forbears. There may thus be scholarly critiques about the use of the term ‘colonies’ to describe Greek settle­ments in Italy and elsewhere but no real pushback against the use of the term.

On the other hand, an emergent Indian scholarship on Southeast Asia from the 1920s would find that the Indian or Hindu colonialism label had become a major burden by the 1950s. Its nationalist underpinnings, combined with the fact that many of the members of this fraternity frequently used the term colonies to describe the subject of their study, meant that in the post-colonial world of the 1950s and later this scholarship would acquire a connotation of unsuitability. So strong was the pushback against the ‘colonies’ tag that it doomed the Greater India Society to a premature demise by the end of the 1950s and with it also came to an end a nascent tradition of studying regions and countries outside South Asia.

Why did the use of the C-word for ancient India become such a burden for scholarship in India while it has persisted in Europe with regard to ancient Greece? Memories of colonialism are vastly different in the East and in the West, but its legacies mould thinking in both geographies to a far greater extent than is generally admitted.

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