Empire: World History - 183. The Poet Kings: Taking Hinduism to Southeast Asia

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

India’s transformation of the ancient world is indisputable, and tangible evidence of this can be found in the magnificent Hindu and Buddhist temples scattered across the landscapes of South East Asia. But what was the process by which India transported its vast empire of art, culture, architecture, technology, religion and even writing to South East Asia? The story largely derives in the ascent of international trade from India across the Bay of Bengal, to places like Malaysia, Thailand and even China. The formidable Pallava dynasty transmitted the famous tradition of Indian temple building far beyond the borders of India, along with majestic notions of Hindu kingship, and the burgeoning Indian renaissance in art and poetry that flourished from the 6th century. But who were the Pallavas, rulers of southern India and architects of a cultural revolution? Join Anita and William as they discuss one of the most extraordinary cultural and architectural exports of all time, and the birth of one common, mighty Indosphere in the East. To fill out the survey: survey.empirepoduk.com To buy William's book: https://coles-books.co.uk/the-golden-road-by-william-dalrymple-signed-edition Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producers: Anouska Lewis and Tabby Syrett Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Durhampool. You're on a roll, aren't you? It's all just glorious stuff. And we're just rolling along with William Durhampool because his new book, The Golden Road, out and we are traveling this golden road with him. And in the last episodes, we were talking about

the export of Buddhism and Buddhist monks to China who help this extraordinary female character from history. Empress Wuzetian take over China ostensibly. She's vile to her children, may have smothered one at birth, but, you know, she rises and rises and with her rise all these extraordinary monuments in China. All exports, if you like, from India, and we've been talking about the Indisphere, the spread of Indian ideas. We're going to India today, William, and we're going to the south of India. And maybe we should just focus in on one place, which I know you love very, very much, which I don't know many people listening in India will be familiar with.

Mamalipuram. Tell us where it is and what it is. So, Mamalipuram is one of my all-time favorite places in India. When I first went there in the 1980s, I went there in 1984, I was 18 and just absolutely loved it. In those days, it was a tiny village on the ocean, filled with amazing ancient monuments. And you come at it from the interior. And as you near the coast, you can see the blue of the sea in the distance. And the palm trees get thicker and it gets very fertile. And as you approach Mamalapuram, which was the great port of southern India for the early Middle Ages from the kind of six, seventh, eighth centuries, you begin to see. You begin to see.

these extraordinary boulders erupting out of the landscape, like sort of giant beads of mercury, slightly shiny in the sun, in strange shapes like a sort of Henry Moore sculpture. And many of these have been sculpted. And when you go to the centre of the town, there's this famous sculpted hillside where the story of Arjuna's penance, one of the great stories of the Mahabarad is sculpted in life size with elephants and preaching cats and flying dogs. deities and sort of Bollywood trailers full of sort of dancers. And it's a wonderful, wonderful monument. Over the years, since then, Madras has expanded into one of the great metropolis

of Asia, Chennai. And Mamalapuram is now slightly in danger of being engulfed by its suburbs, but it's still an extraordinary spot. And there's so many monuments there that, you know, I must have been there 10 or 15 times over the last 20 years. And it's only on my most recent visit that I came across. The Adi Varaha Cave, this extraordinary cave temple, slightly apart from the other monuments in Mamalapurum. And it's not part of the sort of main cultural park, which you buy tickets for.

You know, there are bus parks outside and everyone's going around. It's still a living temple. And you have to find the man who's got the key to the interior and track him down and make an arrangement for him to show you. But inside this cave temple, hidden away. and I only finally got to see it in the last couple of years, are portrait sculptures of the rulers of South India at this period, the Palava dynasty, and particularly the extraordinary character

who will be talking about mainly today, Mahendra Varmun Palava, who lived from about 5-71 to 6.30, and was the man who really began a lot of the things that we regard as the high culture of South India now. He brought back devotional Hinduism. after a long period of Buddhist dominance, he began probably the casting of bronze images of Hindu gods that rose to its peak under the Choluz, the famous image of the dancing Shiva.

He also was a great playwright. And amazingly, we have two of his plays still surviving and still performed in South India. One of them is called The Fars of the Drunken's Games. And it's like a Beckett play or a waiting for Godo or something. There's two people in a bar when the play opens. There's one guy who is a drunken worshipper of the god Shiva, and he's there with his girlfriend, who's a courtesan. And they get into an argument with a Buddhist monk who's also in the bar.

And the Buddhist monk has got a skull, which is using both as a drinking cup and a begging bowl. Oh, it's very good. Already, hooked. And the monk is reminiscing about the many luxuries of his monastery and the splen. food and drink. And this is, you know, it's got the same sort of vibe as the Reformation in Britain where everyone thought the monks were too fat and too prosperous and not living ascetic lives. This is the same criticism being made about Buddhist monks at this period. Well, he's in a bar to start with it. It's not exactly where you want to find your Buddhist monks,

is it necessarily? Anyway, eventually a dog comes along, grabs the skull and runs off with it, and that's the end of the play. But it's still performed. It's still performed. Right. Then there's another play, which is a very similar sort of thing, where, again, this sort of sense of the absurd, there's a holy man who's a celebrated saint and ascetic. And he exchanges souls with a beautiful cortizan due to a mix-up by the god of death, Yammer. And each character speaks out of the mouth of the other. So the saint speaks out of the mouth of the courtazan, and the courtesan speaks with the voice of the saint. Right. And it's all about sort of identity mix-ups and lots of poking fun at Buddhists. Basically, your original Victor Victoria. It's very good.

Yeah, no, it's an extraordinary. And this is written by the king. He's the man that also started the tradition of stone temple building in South India, which is what in a sense South India is best known for. I know him from that very famous statue, which is sort of him standing next to two hardly clad beauties. And he looks like this sort of great regal figure, fully clothed. And these two almost naked, are they bare-breasted or do they have some kind of jewelry thing on? That doesn't have quite the same resonance at the time, I think, that it would do, to us in that no one wore clothes.

No one did, I know. We said that in Coenor, they wore strings of jewels instead. But he's sort of gripping the wrist of one of them and pointing in one direction. And he looks sort of broad. He's not a handsome chap. No, he's Jowley, I would say. He's Jowley. He enjoys his food, I think, and he's telling a story, and he's got his hand up. And he's in mid- anecdote. He's in mid-an anecdote. He's gripping the poor woman by the wrist, so she's literally a captive

audience, and this is captured in stone. But both of these have their heads sort of inclined towards us. So this is the statue inside the Adivaraha cave in Manapuram. Right. And what's important about this is that South India is slightly off the cultural map for a while. You have most of the action in early India taking place in the north. The Buddha is from the north. The Guptas who bring about the Hindu revival in the 4th and 5th centuries are from the north.

And South India is somewhere that has very few monuments dating, from before the 5th or 6th century, certainly that are still standing. There are lost Buddhist monasteries that we know of that are no longer there. But the beginning of the Hindu temple tradition in South India, which was the thing that South India is going to become very, very famous for, begins with this man. Right. Okay. And what we see at this period in the 6th century is South India having a major cultural revival. Beautiful statues are being carved, beautiful bronzes are being cast, amazing works of literature are being written and performed. And as always, great moments of

cultural effervescence tend to come along with major economic revivals. And the story we're going to be telling in this episode is the story of how the beginning of massive international trade between India, across the Bay of Bengal to places like Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Mekong Delta, Cambodia and ultimately China, produces huge prosperity with Indians going out to Southeast Asia to buy raw materials coming back and in the process, transmitting their culture across the Bay of Bengal. When you say South India has a tradition which will become world famous of building temples, I mean, you're not kidding, even among Indian temples, which are ornate, to say the least,

The ones that dot South India are massive. They are gargantuan, just the scale and size of these things. How do you describe them? Like pyramids with the tops lopped off. Exactly, yeah. Square-topped, but ornate balconies leading up, and every single inch of it carved or with some kind of depiction from Holy Scripture, they are extraordinary outside but also extraordinary inside.

And even to this day, even those ancient sites, you will have cues and cues of people. They are active sites of worship. It's a living classical tradition, yeah. Exactly right. That you're reaching back hundreds and hundreds of years and worshipping in exactly the same way that people would have done. So this tradition begins with this man, with our man, Mahendra Vellman Palova. And what's important is that not only does he begin this tradition in South India,

he transmits it across the Bay of Bengal. So for the first time, you begin to get Hindu and Buddhist monuments coming up miles and miles outside the borders of India in Southeast Asia. Well, you know what I'm going to ask you, don't you? I need an origin story. Who was he? And where does he come from? So the Palavas first appear, there are references to them from about the third, fourth century, but Mahendra Vaman Palava is the person who is the first sort of substantial character. We have a picture of him, we know what he looks like. The Palavas were locked in a rivalry with another dynasty in South India called the Chalukyas,

who lives slightly further inland towards Goa. Badami is where they were based. And these two dynasties knock against each other as great rivals. and there are moments when the Palavas attack the Chilukas and there are a moment when the Chilukyas attack the Palavas. Mahendra Varmin Palava comes to power just after a moment when this rivalry is at its peak. And the story that we're telling today,

the story of the Palavas, is sort of bookmarked by Palava triumphs over the Chalukas. But in the middle, there's one moment when the Chilukis come and burn Mamalapuram, and they burn the great capital of Kachipuram. and it's this moment of revival and the palaver recovery from that that begins this projection of power and culture across the Bay of Bengal. And it's one of the great sort of turning points of history. What we've got to remember is that before this point, the trade and the direction of focus in South India was very much, as we said in an earlier episode, towards the Red Sea and the Romans. But this is the same period that the Goths and the Huns are beginning to take over great chunks of the Roman Empire,

Alaric, Sacks, Rome in the 5th century. And there is a blockade by the Persians, people call the Blemies who are nomads, take over the ports of the Red Sea. And suddenly, the guys in South India are not getting the huge amounts of gold that they've been used to coming for 400 years from the Roman Empire. And there's this moment of crisis that just precedes this period, when people are wondering, you know, where they're going to find their gold from, where they're going to get the money to build all the things they want to build and the trade to keep them in business. And what you see at this period is this sort of creaking of cogs and levers and the changing of gears when India begins to look from the West Coast trading with Rome to face eastwards to trade with Southeast Asia.

It's a modern story that one, isn't it? Really a little bit. It's sort of what's happening economically now even. Absolutely. And it is the lands known in ancient Hindu scriptures and texts as Svarna Bumi, the lands of gold and Savonadvipa, the islands of gold. And in the great Indian epics, the Ramayana and so on, the monkey king Suggra talks about these lands where gold can just be picked up as easily as mud. And this whole area gets the reputation of being the source of gold. And what you find at this period, under both the Chilukirs and the Palovas and spanning both is the creation of these merchant guilds. And they're very important, the South Indian merchant guilds. And they are a bit like a kind of Indian version of the East India Company. They set up their own militarized

trading fleets with archers to protect them from pirates. There are some hints that they have settlements which they defend themselves with their own military forces in Thailand and in Malaysia, a little enclaves. There's never at this period any suggestion of an Indian military conquest of Southeast Asia. These are merchants going out to protect themselves with their own bodyguards and their own soldiers. But it is a militarized trade and it's coming out of the ports of the Palavans and looking eastwards at these very, very rich lands in Southeast Asia, which are at that moment untapped markets. So that, I mean, that's the Palava background. That's the background into which he is born. I mean, apart from being a playwright, do we know anything

about his sensibility and what he's like and is he a laugh? Is he stern? Is he, you know, what is he like? He is a laugh. And I think you get that in this sculpture, this life-size sculpture in the Adivara heart cave, with him with his two wives, you get very much the fact that he's got a smile on his face. He's telling a story. Both the women's heads are inclined towards him as if listening. And he takes all these titles. I mean, this was a normal thing for Hindu rulers. Oh, I like this. Yeah. Let's go through some of them, because let's not skip this because it's quite wonderful. Okay, so the first one is the curious-minded, and then you've got the tiger. He toys with that for a bit. Then he toys with drunk with pleasure, which I quite love.

You can see where he's coming from. I mean, he should have settled drunk with pleasure. Yeah, no, he sounds all right. And he of drunken revelry. He of drunken revelry. So of all of those titles, which one does he choose? He chooses the lot. Why not? Pyricking. And his monuments are ringed with inscriptions, which give all these different titles. So he's not, I don't think he's a modest man. I think he's fair to say, but he knows his own wealth. But he's an extremely important character, because I think he was born at a time when the Jane faith was most closely associated with his dynasty. I've got to remember, there are many different forms of religion circulating in South India at this time. There are hero stones, for example, all over South India, where the

kind of worship of warrior heroes seems to be in the case. You even get still, at the beginning of this period, megalithic sites where people are worshipping, you know, stone circles and great megaliths. The Buddhists have been building a lot of monasteries in Andhra Pradesh, the Jains are around, and there is the different forms of early Hinduism. But what you see at the beginning of Mahendra Palafas reign is the great rise of devotional Hinduism and the beginning of building of stone temples. This was the new thing, the fact that they were stone to the great Hindu gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. And I've had lovely trips going all over South India and looking at Mahendra Palava's different cave temples, which are the earliest in the region. And they're often carved into rocks in the middle of fields or boulders are hollowed up at the top of mountains. And he carves these guardian figures with clubs. And then you see these tiny angel shrines. And these are literally the first surviving Hindu shrines in South India that we have. I adore anyone who builds things like a builder or a carver.

I mean, I just wonder if there's a slight dichotomy. Is he a spiritual man? Because of all the titles that, you know, he took all of them. None of them mentioned God. I mean, no, seriously, they don't mention God. You know, they talk about the mind. They talk about the flesh. They don't talk about something bigger than himself.

So is it possible that he was somebody who knew about power and projection of power? And that meant more than perhaps, you know, the tenets of Hinduism did? I think that the sheer fact that he built so many temples. is a very, very important buck. And it's during his reign that we get the rise of these popular Tamil saints who are leading crowds of ecstatic Tamil devotees from shrine to shrines, singing these gorgeous, passionate Tamil songs about their longing for Vishnu or Shiva. And I think there's some sense in which Buddhism was a bit abstract.

It was all about asceticism, about searching inwards. This sort of Hinduism was about falling in love with a god, finding a divine partner almost. Oh gosh, I mean, you know, Hinduism is all about putting human foibles and characteristics on the supernatural. You know, they fall in love, they fall out, they have wars, they are naughty children, they grow up. You know, the stories are so relatable, which is why Hinduism, you know, sort of transcends literacy a lot of the time. But at this period, under Mahendra Palava, you get these songs of strong devotion, this Bhakti songs beginning to be composed by the Tamil saints. And they're, I don't know, sort of transmuting their deep yearning for the divine into the language of a human lover,

eternally suspended between union and separation, pain and unfulfilled longing. And out of this well of devotionism and spiritualism, which is happening at the same time as our king, Mahendra, is writing his plays and carving his sculptures and building his first temples, You get figures like this young woman, Saint Andal, who's still warmly remembered by women in South India. I've met old women who were following her footsteps from temple to temple. She ends up in Sri Rangam, where she's sort of swallowed up by the gods. I'll just read you a translation of some of her lines. This is Andal, and it's quite sort of startlingly frank, even by today's standards.

This is her writing her love song to her divine lover. My life will be spared only if he will come to stay with me for one night. If he will enter me so as to leave the imprint of his saffron paste upon my breasts, mixing, churning, maddening me inside, gathering my swollen ripeness, spilling nectar, as my body and blood burst into flower. Hello, what? Seventh century India. I mean, that's quite a lot, isn't it?

But do you know what it reminds me of, sort of this sort of likening of passion, human passion to divine passion? The Sufis do something similar, don't they? When they do that too about being bold over. Exactly that. And ravished by love, you know, divine love. And some of this poetry is so beautiful. My favourite translations are by the modern Tamil poet, A.K. Ramanujan, who died, I think, in the 70s. I was writing in the 60s and 70s.

Here's another of his poems from this period, translated by Ramanujan. Our Lord is here. He lives within me. And we're done with growing and perishing, waxing and waning like the moon, done with knowing and unknowing like sunshine and night dark. That's beautiful. I think it's good stuff. I love that. Powerful, potent stuff.

Yeah. Okay. So this is the time of, would you call it a renaissance of art of some sort? Oh, definitely. And then there's one character who emerges from this world, who is arguably one of the two or three greatest and most admired writers in Sanskrit. And this is a guy we know by his nickname, Danden, the stick wielder. And he's about one generation after Menopo, but very much part of this renaissance. His dates are 665 to 720.

So again, this is the same period that Wuzetian is on the throne in China. who's her Chinese Empress, just in case you needed reminding. Same period that Mahendra Palava and his son are busy in Kachipurum and Mamalipurum. And Danden is, I suppose you could call him the Jack Kerouac of Sanskrit poetry. He writes this sort of road novel, like on the road, called Dasakumara Charita, which is what ten young men did. And it's made up of ten fictional autobiographies written in gorgeous prose with what One critic is called Words that Seemed to be dancing.

I think that's Sheldon Pollock. Oh, that's beautiful. And again, it's quite sort of racy. Yeah. It tells these stories of youthful wanderlust, like Jet Keroux on the road, going from girlfriend to girlfriend bar to bar. This is comparable. And it talks about wanderlust, adventures, riots, thievery, murder, seduction, love bites,

and every imaginable variety of sexual and amorous experimentation. I think many people in the day don't realize quite how racy their classical poetry is from this period. I don't know why they're surprised. It's got a very large population. Just saying. Just saying. But you know what? Another interesting thing is that North Indians don't know much about South Indian history. It's true.

They really don't. And what's lovely about Danin is we know quite a lot about his life. He was one of these people who was made homeless and an orphan by the Chilukia's attacking the Palava capital of country. Pachypuram. The capital is burnt down and Danden, along with his two orphan sisters, wander the roads. And the stories in his road novel, Daskhamara Characca are the sort of adventures we imagine he must have got up to as an orphan, as a clever, talented, literary jack-of-all-trades on the road between court to court, until he comes back to Kachipuram, when there's a revival of the palavas, they defeat the Chalukyas and they come back. And this is the golden age. It's now

the time of Mahendra Palava's son, Mamala, after whom Mamala Puram is named, and he rebuilds Mamalapurum as the great port. The Palavas are now the supreme power in South India, and Danden is the kind of court poet. He's the poet laureate. He writes plays, he writes works of prose, and he also writes works of criticism. His book on Sanskrit poetry and on the appreciation of literature is one of the great sort of classics. It's called the Caviar Dasha or the mirror of poetry. And what we see is that as palaver trade and palaver power cross the ocean, as ships and fleets begin to leave Mamalapuram and cross the Bay of Bengal to Burma,

the Mekong Delta and China, Danden's poetry and the palaver script go with it. And the result of all this is that every single, single script in Southeast Asia. Every pre-Islamic script in Southeast Asia derives from the Palava Brahmi, that the kind of cursive round script that you see in South India is transmitted and becomes the origin for every Southeast Asian script. And this is happening at this period. Wait a minute, you're missing out the best, best bit of that, which you pointed out on a previous episode not so long ago, was that the reason it looks so different to the normal Sanskrit, which is spiky and has edges, the reason it's so rounded, and if you've seen Thai

writing, it's much the same time, I was written the same, and the South East Asian languages all written the same, is because they were writing on palm leaves. Exactly. And you couldn't do jagged because it would go through the leaf. It's lovely, that, isn't it? That just blew my brain that detail. I loved it so much. So he's writing in this new South Indian script, but his work is going to spread far beyond

South India, isn't it? And what we see is that in a couple of generations, you have even Chinese tongue poetry in faraway Cheyenne and Loyang on the Chinese coast, taking in his criticism of poetry. And the caveat dash, his mirror of poetry, his extraordinary book about the beauty of literature and critiquing the poetry of the time is read all over Southeast Asia and in China. So this is a moment when everything is beginning to revive. Trade is reviving. Fleets of ships are crossing the oceans. Temples are beginning to come up. Sculpture is being sculpted. Bronzes are being cast. Danden is writing these masterworks. And it's like sort of pulsing outwards. Imagine a sort of waves of ideas of forms of

building, ways of constructing temples and cities, plans for cities. All these ideas, the rudiments of South Indian civilization are being shared with peoples from very different worlds in the jungles of Southeast Asia. So that beautiful description of this pulsing of Indian culture that is being thrown out far and away, join us after the break where we find out where it reaches and the effect that it has. See you after the break. Welcome back. So William, we weren't talking about all of this amazing richness of culture and art and spirituality and religion. poetry and all of this stuff, pulsing its way across the Bay of Bengal. How far does it pulse and where does it reach? So what you're seeing at this period on the far side of the Bay of Bengal is

very similar to what you've just seen happening in South India a generation before. You're finding new towns springing up along the coast and up the major river systems. The difference is that in Southeast Asia, there had been no literate culture before. There were small tribal chieftains with small pre-literate worlds, but you're beginning to get the arrival of many different sorts of Indian ideas on the far side of the Bay of Bengal. And what you're seeing is, first of all, a series of non-religious ideas which are passing over. How do you build a city? How do you smelt different sorts of iron?

How do you build a moat? So, William, I've got a question. What exactly is there in Southeast Asia? Because, you know, as we say, these new ideas aren't exported to a wilderness and desert. There must be belief systems. There must be poetry and music of their own. So is something being displaced or is something going to merge with the Hinduism that's coming? So because there's no literature and writing before the palaver script is imported in Southeast Asia, we don't have any writings from the pre-Indic period, if you like. and we have to work out from material remains and archaeology, what was there before.

There seemed to have been systems of worship of sacred mountains, springs and water are sacred, belief in tree spirits, all of which are things which were common to India. Sort of like the druids did similar things. Early cultures do this, yeah. Absolutely. And there is a long tradition preceding this of Indian traders coming to trade, often very simple, goods like beads with the peoples of Southeast Asia. What does Southeast Asians have that the traders want? I mean, I'm wondering what the magnet is for these people who are coming out of

India who want to do trade. What is it there after from Southeast Asia? First and foremost, it's clearly gold. Right. They haven't found rich deposits of gold yet in India. In fact, it turns out to be a very big gold mines in the Deccan, but they were not at use in this period. People didn't know about them. And so they're bringing amazing amounts of gold and precious metals. But there's also a whole variety of sort of forest goods. There's camphor, teak woods, spices, resins, and most of all, you get these rich deposits of gold. There are large gold mines in Sumatra and Sarawak. And you find as early as the kind of Buddhist Jataka tales, stories of Indian princes. There's a Jataka story from the Buddhist tradition about Prince Polar Janaka's journey to the lands of gold,

Savarna Bumi, where he goes to. to amass the wealth that he will need to recapture his father's throne. And so there's this old tradition that if you do make the crossing of the Bay of Bengal, there are riches that side which will lure you on. But what you're seeing at this period is a huge acceleration of that. And largely headed towards Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, where? All these different places. All of those places all at the same time, right?

Yeah. In Myanmar or Burma, you get signs of Indian technical influence from about the second century BC. So they are importing Indian ideas of hydraulics and irrigation, certain sorts of iron smelting, even there's signs that Indian brick sizes, for example, are being copied in Burma. That's interesting. Buddhism comes later.

And you get by the 5th century AD only signs that Indian Buddhist monasteries have set up branches in the lands of Burma. Similar story in Thailand, where you're getting Indian pottery very early on from the first century CE. But you don't get Shiva Lingy. or images of Vishnu until about the fourth or fifth century. And then in Thailand, by the fifth century, you get these extraordinary Dharma chakra, these wheels of the law springing up all over Thailand.

So you've got hints that you've got forms of Hinduism becoming very popular in Thailand around the 5th century AD. Okay. And so those are the early sort of tentacles that go out. At what point do the traders start setting up more permanent trading posts, you know, that could be seen as a trading city, if you like? So the big place, which you get very clear signs of a large Indian trading diaspora coming in large fleets, similar to the large fleets that used to go to the Red Sea, is the Mekong Delta, is the area now between Vietnam and Cambodia, where the Mekong River hits the sea.

And between the mouth of the river on the Vietnamese side and the Cambodian side, there are these. two major trading ports, which back onto a lagoon that looks very like when you go there, the Venetian lagoon. And it's the kind of place that you can winter a ship. If you've sailed the monsoon over the other side, you could actually keep your ship safely in the lagoon with little danger of storms over the winter. And these two trading ports, Oc Ayo and Ancour Borei, have these hills on the edge of them, where you see the very first sign of Indian religion putting down roots in Southeast Asia. So in Okaio, from about 100 AD, you get a moated settlement built very much on an Indian plan of a sort, very similar to the sort of cities being founded on the

coast of India, with brick walls and moats. And by about the fourth of this century, you begin to get signs of Hinduism. People are making small statuettes of Vishnu. You're getting large Shiva the lingams. And you're also getting a sort of import of Roman luxuries, which the Indians are shipping on. Some of them fake. They're selling fake Roman intallios, which they've made on the coast of India. I think they're pretending of the real thing. We talked about the gucky purse. Yes, the version of the gucky purse. I wanted to just make one thing to those who aren't from a Hindu background who may not know this, but Hinduism apart from the very, very large monuments. and this is where the archaeological finds can be great or small.

The clues are either teeny or enormous. And that's because in Hinduism, you don't have to go to a temple, although these massive temples are created in the glory of whichever avatar of the god you're going to worship. You know, whether it's Vishnu or it's Hindu Brahma or as Hindu Shiva. They all have different temples and different acolytes. But each home itself has God in it. So that's why little shrines, domestic shrines, are all. You know, replete in the archaeological history because you can make your own temple in your own home.

You don't have to go somewhere. You don't have to go through a priest to touch God. God is with you. And so that's why, you know, these tiny little statues are really of huge importance because they show you the spread among normal people. You're absolutely right. And the first sign we have that Hinduism has really reached Southeast Asia in a big way is the manufacture and wide distribution of tiny little images of Vishnu that you can hold in your hand. There you go, mass production. Yeah. I wanted to know. I mean, we talked about the export of Buddhism from India and China absorbing it and indeed embracing it a time when India is losing it. What do they think of this sort of onslaught of Hinduism, the Chinese? I mean, this is all in their sphere of influence. You know, all of these countries are in their backyard. Exactly that. This is much closer to China than it is to India. And yet, fascinatingly, you know, they're not taking on the

philosophy of Confucius. They're not taking on the Chinese script, except for a sort of small bit of North Vietnam. What takes root is Hinduism, different forms of Hinduism, different forms of Buddhism. And increasingly, you're getting signs that Brahmins are crossing over and bringing their celebrity, bringing their prestige, bringing their administrative techniques, they are literate, they can keep books. And they are promising the rulers of South East Asia that they will become powerful Hindu kings supported by the great gods, Brahms, and and Shiva. And we begin to get diplomatic letters turning up in the Chinese archives, talking about the Indians taking over Southeast Asia or arriving in large numbers. Worryed about them,

diplomatic letters saying, hello, these people have got too much influence or just stating as a fact. It's somewhere between the two. So the site that we call Ok-eo today in Vietnam on the Mekong Delta is known to the Chinese as Funan. It's known to India as Vyadipura. And we don't actually know what the locals called it themselves. But the Chinese are very interested in this. Here's a Chinese diplomat called Shui Zong in the third century. He says, this place is famous for precious rarities from afar. Pearls, incense, elephants tusks, rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell, coral, lapis lazuli, parrots, kingfishers, peacocks, rare and abundant treasures enough to satisfy all desires. And you get this impression growing of this very rich trading state, a bit like Singapore today, where all different nationalities

are arriving, they are exchanging goods, but more and more, there are signs that the local kings are taking on the trappings and the culture of the Indian Brahmins who are there to do business initially. And they're using Indian military technology. One of the Chinese chronicles describes how the king of Farnan used troops to attack neighboring kingdoms, which acknowledge themselves as his vassals. Then he ordered the construction of great ships, crossing over the Gulf of Sam, attacking 10 more kingdoms. So these kingdoms, which are taking on ideas of Hindu kingship, believe that they're protected by the Hindu gods, are growing their own Hindu kingdoms that side of the Bay of Bengal. And molding them and personalizing them, because, you know, Hinduism is open to that kind of interpretation.

You don't have that kind of didactic man at the top telling you, exactly what your statues should look like or exactly the way to worship. Hey, I've got a question. You know, we've sort of said this, you know, that Brahmins are coming over in ships or, you know, the export of Hinduism via the seas. What are the ships like at this time? Because we're talking very early on in history. We're talking early on, but this is one of the things that most impresses the Chinese envoys. It's a very good question. The large ones, the Chinese ambassador rights, are more than 50 metres in length. They carry from six to 700 persons and can be filled with 10,000 bushels, which is about 600 tonnes of cargo.

But are we talking about galley slave type situation? Are we talking about sails? Or, I mean, how do they propel? Because these are great distances, aren't they? I think from the images that you're getting on coins and on the walls of Jan to their sailing ships, they're not all. Right. And for the Chinese, this is extraordinary.

Because they've never concerned themselves with the sea, have they particularly? They haven't bothered with the sea yet. They will at a later period of history. But he's also amazed by the ambassadors amazed by the. the cosmopolitan different peoples that are arriving. We talked in the last episode about the Sogdians of Central Asia. They're turning up with horses, heavenly horses, these enormous horses from Central Asia, they're far larger than the ones that are normal in either India or in China. And he gives further descriptions. You get a real picture of what this water world is looking like.

He says, the people of Fonan live in walled cities, palaces, and their houses are built on wooden piles, allowing for the annual monsoon inundation of the waters of the Delta. They devote themselves to agriculture. In one year, they sow and harvest three crops. Taxes are paid in gold, silver, pearls and perfume. There are books and depositories of archives. And then there's this crucial thing. Their characters for writing resemble those of the who.

So what he's saying is that this is the palaver script being cited now in Southeast Asia. All right. So, I mean, you know where I'm headed with this. How quickly do we get the full? scale, Ankle Watt type, you know, megawatt temples being built. So Ankur Wat is in the 12th century. So that's still 600 years away. But very quickly, we see the statues growing from little handheld things that people are worshipping, as you said, at home, to enormous great masterpieces, or particularly in Cambodia,

this beautiful early Khmer sculpture, larger than life-sized images of Vishnu. And what's fascinating is that they are both like and unlike what's being sculpted in India. On one hand, they've got the same iconography, the same rules are being followed. You know, Vishnu has a conch shell and a discus. He wears a sort of mitre, a bit like a fez in the early sculptors. Yeah, no, I'm looking. The headdress is not Indian at all. But what you're getting also, from almost the beginning, he's wearing Khmer costumes. There's very, very slight lungis. We're sort of almost like a sarong kind of thing, isn't it? Yeah, it's a short sarong. Yeah.

And on the hill of Anko Barre, which is on the Khmer, Cambodian side of the Mekong Delta, you get the very first cave temples being excavated, images, familiar images from Indian art, like images of Krishna holding up Mount Govardan. And these are stories which have migrated from North India, first to South India. They've been sculpted in Mamalapurum by the Palibas, and now they're appearing 2,000. miles to the east in the Mekong Delta with the Khmerz. But the figures are, you know, physiognomically like Kamaz. They don't look like Indians. Immediately, they're different. No, they really don't. And you know, one of the things about these statues, which actually is not present in Indian

statues is the length of the ears. And this is something so weird because I always grew up. My mother always told me, if you're going to make a friend, make a friend with long ears. Have you ever come across this? Did you say that? Yeah, no, honestly. Because if they've got long ears, they're going to be lucky in life. And you're not lucky in life. Your ears are. tiny, so you might as well make friends with long-eared people. That's what she used to say. But all of these statues have this long ear. So I wonder if that's a passback. So what they're doing is they're just adopting the local styles of how people are looking. Right. If your God has got stories like you and falls in love and has heartbreak and gets crossed, then he should look like

you as well. Yeah. Yeah. So this is done very intelligently. These are people that understand they've got to fulfill certain rules. Yeah. You know, Vishnu is shown with such and such a vehicle, such and such a thing in his hand. There's some blueprint and everything else is up for grabs. Yeah, but they're composing local portraits of people around. I love this. We begin to get instructions at this period. So the same time that we know that Mahendra Vaman Palava is establishing an endowment

for daily readings of the Ramayana and the Mahabharic in his temples, on the Indian side of the Bay of Bengal, we have references in the earliest Khmer inscriptions to the same thing happening in Southeast Asia. So as well as trade, as well as ideas of what a city should be built like, the shape that a city should be constructed in, technical ideas of hydraulics, you're also getting these great myths, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And pretty quickly you find the landscape of South East days of being renamed after these places, new Kurukshetras, new Ayodias. That's interesting, isn't it? So yes, we should say that Kurukshetra was the battlefield in the Mahabharat. Ayyothia was the place of birth of Lord Rama.

So you have, you know, these things that are so linked to India and Indian soil, which are just, I suppose, like having New Amsterdam or New England in a new country. Exactly. And in sense, we're not surprised that, you know, English emigrants to Jamestown or Virginia would build a church. And sooner or later probably a theatre and perform Shakespeare there. Right. But this is the same thing happening. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are taking root on the far side of the Bay of the Bay of

Bengal. And you find that the earlier holy sites, like there's this wonderful place I went called the Dieng Plateau in Java, where you get this extraordinary volcano belching sulphur out into the air. And in this plateau, amid these clouds of sulphur and belching geysers, you get palava temples, very like Mamalapuram being erected within the rim of the volcano. And you also get the Buddhists turning up. And rather like a modern corporate setting up a franchise in a new company, so, you know, McDonald's opening a branch in Phnom Penh. You get the Sri Lankan Mahayana Monastery of Abir-Gyri founding a branch in Java, giving it the same name with the same sort of meditation platforms, the same plan, and so on. This is just outside modern Yog Jakarta. So what you're

seeing is that this system of the monsoon winds that we talked about last time, these regular sort of breathing in and out of the Indian subcontinent, where the monsoon winds blow out in one season, blow in another. These are bringing the two sides of the Indian Ocean into ever closer contact, drawing them together along this eastern branch of the Golden Road into a single cultural and geographical unit within the Indo-sphere. And the two sides are very similar climates. They've both got similar crops, they've got buffaloes and elephants. the landscape similar. There are similar traditions of worshipping tree spirits and water spirits. And in both sides, you have these traditions becoming, if you like, the hook onto which Hinduism

and Buddhism grow. So you get images of water spirits and tree spirits, yakshis and nagas. But you also get images that you never see in India. For example, there's a wonderful image of the Buddha preaching to Brahma and Shiva in one cave in Southeast Asia in Thailand. That's interesting. You get new iconographies. And these stuff all get slightly muddled together. Do you know what? That's like this sort of Marvel and DC getting together to make a new comic.

I mean, that's amazing, actually. Yeah, yeah, interesting. And so I think, you know, when you're inheriting these traditions secondhand, they are often mixed together. Like, you know, Italians are very fussy how their pastas are made, the different pasta sources. But in America, they're much more free with how to serve a pasta sauce or something. You get new varieties coming away.

So what's happening, just to draw it together, is that in some sense, India no longer ends in Tamil Nad by the end of the 8th or 9th century. But it's now India is somehow extending to the far side of the Bay of Bengal. The two shores of the Bay of Bengal are forming one maritime unit, a common Indosphere sharing a common culture and a sacred language, and both sides of the Bay of Bengal are now undergoing parallel cultural and religious transatlantic. And at this eastern terminus of the Golden Road, the monsoon waters of the Bay of Bengal, are not dividing, but instead they are connecting and uniting. Look, we'll leave it there for this one. But join us next time when we're going to be talking about the marvellous Merlin of the Indusphere. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Durunpool.