India’s Forgotten Civilisational Map

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 expressions often appeared strikingly similar, sometimes nearly identical across what would later become national borders. For centuries, these affinities softened the very meaning of frontiers, which mattered far less to the people who lived within, and moved across, this shared civilisational sphere.

Historical Memory

Perhaps that is why, in the ancient imagination preserved in the Ramayana, Sugriva, standing in the Indian heartland, could dispatch his envoys in search of Sita as far as the islands that today correspond to Sri Lanka and Indonesia. The narrative itself reflects a world in which these regions were conceived not as distant foreign lands but as parts of a broadly connected civilisational geography.

Centuries later, sometime in the sixth century CE, this sense of familiarity appears again in historical memory. A member of a Javanese royal house, exiled from his court, found refuge in India, where he not only secured safe shelter but married a local woman before eventually returning to Java to claim the throne when circumstances permitted. The episode unfolds almost as though the prince had merely spent an extended sojourn among relatives rather than in a distant country.

The pattern repeated itself in the 12th century CE. When Turkic invaders destroyed the great monastic university of Nalanda, its fleeing Buddhist teachers did not wander aimlessly in search of sanctuary. Many headed directly to Sumatra, home to a major centre of Buddhist learning linked to Nalanda, and quietly resumed their scholarly pursuits there. Such movements were possible only within a world where intellectual, religious and cultural networks stretched seamlessly across the eastern seas.

Harmonious Interaction

This background of friction-less interaction among the Indic communities across lands and seas was noticed by curious and ambition-driven European adventurists who came, saw and conquered these territories from the 16^th century onwards. They, too, appear to have taken the eastern stretch beyond India, particularly the Southeast Asian one, as a mere extension of India, prompting them to name or identify locations accordingly. It is indeed interesting to have a look at the chronology of that development - The Dutch East India Company, having ‘East India’ in the name just like its British counterpart, started colonizing the Indonesian archipelago gradually from the 17^th century onwards, and addressed the occupied territory as ‘Netherlands East Indies’ throughout. The British colonial administrator in the region, John Crawfurd, expressed his impression about the Indonesian archipelago by addressing it simply as ‘Indian archipelago’ in 1820. Similarly, the great British anthropologist, Alfred Russel Wallace, addressed the Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore and three Indonesian islands – Sumatra, Java and Kalimantan – as the ‘Indo-Malay Islands’ collectively, in 1869. Wallace, after whom the ‘Wallace Line’ that runs through the Indonesian archipelago dividing it in two distinct biogeographic zones is named, has given accounts of occurrence of identical, and therefore surprising, species of flora and fauna in India and certain parts of Indonesia. Later, during the same century, the name ‘Indonesia’ was coined by the Europeans for the said wide-spread archipelago touching the Indian Ocean on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other, which meant nothing but ‘islands of India’ in Greek.

In 1907, the British nobleman Sir Charles Elliot, after travelling through the region, called the almost entire Southeast Asia as ‘further India’. He justified this nomenclature saying that it was a prolongation of India in many ways. George Coedes, the legendary French historian, chose to identify the region as ‘farther India.’ He went miles further in detailing the multifarious similarities between India and Southeast Asia as well as certain exchanges between some Indian and some Southeast Asian polities, whom he has famously addressed as the ‘Indianized kingdoms’ of Southeast Asia, which became a settled term of reference among global scholarship.

Greater India

The term ‘Greater India’ came into prominence in 1926, when a group of patriotic Indologists, historians and linguists from then Calcutta came together to form a research institution viz. ‘The Greater India Society’, dedicating it to the subject of Southeast Asia, roping in Rabindranath Tagore as its mentor. Unlike the earlier terms ‘further’ and ‘farther’, for India-influenced geographies, which were clearly fathered by non-Indians like Elliot and Coedes, the identity of the creator of ‘Greater India’ cannot be pinpointed. However, the British historian H.G. Quaritch-Wales made use of it extensively in the mid-twentieth century, for expounding his understanding of the division of the Southeast Asian region as ‘Western Greater India’ and ‘Eastern Greater India’ zones, based on the degree of their acculturation with the Indic civilization.

The most significant India-centric identification of most of Southeast Asia however was done by American linguist James Matisoff somewhere close to the mid-twentieth century, when he coined the term ‘Indosphere’. This term had originally excluded quite some part of the mainland sub-region, but after a churn of ideas and refinement provided by later scholars, it finally got back the rest of the earlier excluded part, keeping out northern, (one third of Vietnam) considered part of the competing Sinosphere.

Indosphere simply means sphere of influence of India, and since India was a recently born independent nation at the time the term was coined, this sphere of Indian influence had nothing to do with the that which is generally attributed to independent nations and what their political activities harvest in the realm of dynamic international relations. This sphere of influence was purely cultural in nature, as testified by Matisoff himself.

In that sense, the Indosphere reminds us that India’s widest frontiers were never drawn on maps. They were etched instead across temples and epics, scripts and rituals, across islands and coastlines thousands of miles away.

(The writer is a research scholar in international relations. Views personal.)