Pulind Samant

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...

From Malacca to Bangladesh, a Sinic–Islamic alignment forged over centuries now reasserts itself with India squarely in its path. American political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his 1996 book had theorized of a ‘clash of civilizations’ as the root cause of future global conflicts, emerging basically out of three factors - Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance and Sinic/Confusion/Chinese aggression. The history of conflicts unfolded thereafter stands to largely corroborate Huntington’s...

The famed Chola expeditions into Southeast Asia were less about conquest or cultural dominance and more about trade, prestige and unintended civilisational consequences. The Chola kings undoubtedly ruled the seas, for almost over a century, between the end of the first and beginning of the second millennium CE. Domestically, that meant supremacy over the entire ‘Coromandel’ or actually the ‘Chola-mandala’ Coast, accomplishing victories over all the littoral kingdoms in the Bay of Bengal in...