Pulind Samant

It was seen in the last article as to how the Southeast Asian region or its parts were perceived as ‘further’ or ‘farther’ or ‘greater’ India by various European scholars and travelers, based on their observations of those territories’ cultural congruence with India. The most significant coinage in that journey of insights and nomenclatures was ‘Indosphere’, which not only did away with the possibility of allegations of Indians harbouring expansionist or revisionist ideas of ‘Greater India’...

Long before modern geopolitics, scholars and travellers recognised a vast cultural world stretching from India to Southeast Asia. Prambanan Temple, Java The impact of Indic civilisation, radiating far beyond the frontiers of modern India or even the vast contours of pre-independence British India, is widely acknowledged. Yet the force of that influence has been most pronounced in the eastern direction. There, its imprint became so deep and pervasive that landscapes, customs and cultural...

Across Southeast Asia, Hinduism and Buddhism did not clash for supremacy but intertwined across empires and scriptures to forge a uniquely unified civilisational ethos. Troluwan: Ruins of Majapahit Kingdom. History knows for sure as to when the Buddhist thought entered Southeast Asia, which was when the great Mauryan Emperor Ashoka sent messengers Sona and Uttara into then known ‘Suvarnabhumi’ consisting of Burma and Thailand, to preach Buddha’s message there. Ashoka’s effort did certainly...