Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- FOREWORD
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I New Archaeological Evidence from South Asia and Southeast Asia
- PART II Localisation in Southeast Asia
- 11 Tamil Merchants and the Hindu-Buddhist Diaspora in Early Southeast Asia
- 12 The Spread of Sanskrit in Southeast Asia
- 13 The Early Inscriptions of Indonesia and the Problem of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis
- 14 Indian Architecture in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’: The Temples of the Dieng Plateau
- 15 The Importance of Gupta-period Sculpture in Southeast Asian Art History
- 16 Individuals under the Glaze: Local Transformations of Indianisation in the Decorative Lintels of Angkor
- 17 Early Musical Exchange between India and Southeast Asia
- 18 Buddhism and the Circulation of Ritual in Early Peninsular Southeast Asia
- 19 Early Buddhism in Myanmar: Ye Dhammā Inscriptions from Arakan
- 20 Hindu Deities in Southern Vietnam: Images on Small Archaeological Artefacts
- 21 ‘The Depositing of the Embryo’ – Temple Consecration Rituals in the Hindu Tradition of South and Southeast Asia: A Study of the Textual and Archaeological Evidence
- 22 Localisation of Indian Infl uences as Refl ected in the Laotian Versions of the Ramayana
- 23 Broken Threads: Contested Histories of Brahminism in Cambodia and Thailand and the Construction of Ritual Authority
- LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
- INDEX
12 - The Spread of Sanskrit in Southeast Asia
from PART II - Localisation in Southeast Asia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- FOREWORD
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I New Archaeological Evidence from South Asia and Southeast Asia
- PART II Localisation in Southeast Asia
- 11 Tamil Merchants and the Hindu-Buddhist Diaspora in Early Southeast Asia
- 12 The Spread of Sanskrit in Southeast Asia
- 13 The Early Inscriptions of Indonesia and the Problem of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis
- 14 Indian Architecture in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’: The Temples of the Dieng Plateau
- 15 The Importance of Gupta-period Sculpture in Southeast Asian Art History
- 16 Individuals under the Glaze: Local Transformations of Indianisation in the Decorative Lintels of Angkor
- 17 Early Musical Exchange between India and Southeast Asia
- 18 Buddhism and the Circulation of Ritual in Early Peninsular Southeast Asia
- 19 Early Buddhism in Myanmar: Ye Dhammā Inscriptions from Arakan
- 20 Hindu Deities in Southern Vietnam: Images on Small Archaeological Artefacts
- 21 ‘The Depositing of the Embryo’ – Temple Consecration Rituals in the Hindu Tradition of South and Southeast Asia: A Study of the Textual and Archaeological Evidence
- 22 Localisation of Indian Infl uences as Refl ected in the Laotian Versions of the Ramayana
- 23 Broken Threads: Contested Histories of Brahminism in Cambodia and Thailand and the Construction of Ritual Authority
- LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
- INDEX
Summary
Sanskrit makes its first appearance in inscriptions in South Asia during the early centuries of the Common Era. It then gradually takes over and becomes the inscriptional language par excellence in the whole of the South Asian subcontinent and much of Southeast Asia. For almost a thousand years Sanskrit ‘rules’ in this enormous domain. Sheldon Pollock (1996, 2006) speaks for this reason of the ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, which he dates approximately between CE 300 and 1300.
How do we explain the strange vicissitudes of the Sanskrit language? Was it a lingua franca for trade, international business and cultural promotion? Is the spread of Sanskrit into Southeast Asia to be explained by the same reasons that also explain its spread within the Indian subcontinent?
Pollock, by using the expression ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, draws attention to the political dimension of the spread of Sanskrit. One defining feature of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, he states (1996: 197), ‘is that Sanskrit became the premiere instrument of political expression in the polities that comprised it, those of most of South and much of Southeast Asia’. He rightly points out that Sanskrit was not a lingua franca:
Sanskrit's spread was effected by traditional intellectuals and religious professionals, often following in the train of scattered groups of traders and adventurers, and carrying with them disparate and decidedly uncanonized texts of a wide variety of competing religious orders, Śaiva, Buddhist, Vai]s]nava, and others. […] There is little to suggest […] that Sanskrit was an everyday medium of communication in South let alone Southeast Asia, or that [it] ever functioned as a language-of-trade, a bridge-, link-, or koiné language or lingua franca (except among those traditional intellectuals) […]
Pollock continues: ‘We have little direct evidence that Sanskrit actually functioned as a language of practical imperium – the medium of chancellery communication or revenue accounting, for example – certainly not in Southeast Asia, almost certainly not in peninsular India or the Deccan […]’
The hypothesis he then goes on to propose (pp. 198-99) is
that Sanskrit articulated politics not as material power – the power embodied in languagesof- state for purposes of boundary regulation or taxation, for example, for which so-called vernacular idioms typically remained the vehicle – but politics as aesthetic power.
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- Information
- Early Interactions between South and Southeast AsiaReflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, pp. 263 - 276Publisher: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak InstitutePrint publication year: 2011