Sri Ksetra, 3rd Century BCE to 6th Century CE: Indianization, Synergies, Creation

Janice Stargardt

George Cœdès, the celebrated epigrapher of Sanskrit and Old Khmer, developed a theory of the Indianization of Southeast Asia in a colonial context in the 1930s, as a parallel to contemporary research on the Romanization of Europe. Qualified in the Asian case as a cultural, not a military, colonization, Cœdès wrote: “In the majority of cases [in Southeast Asia], one passes without transition from a late Neolithic to the first traces of Hinduism [my translation and emphasis].”1 He pro- posed processes of intensifying cultural colonization in the 2nd and 3rd centuries with enduring results by the 4th century. This view permeated the work of many scholars, e.g. K. N. Chaudhuri, up to 1990.2 It is an undeniable fact that, at different times in the 1st millennium CE, societies throughout most of Southeast Asia that previously lacked systems of writing – and had therefore been widely assumed by scholars of Indianization to lack organized social structures, religions, art, and architecture – adopted Indian scripts and bodies of Indian sacred texts and adapted Indian religious thought, architecture, and art.

The exact nature of this much-invoked Indianization of Southeast Asia, its human agencies, its driving forces, and its timing, all demand constant reinter- rogation through research. This chapter is such an attempt, justified by the fact that the valuable archaeological publications since c. 1990 to have addressed this problem3 include little up-to-date research on the Pyu sites of Myanmar, which covered the most extensive geographical area of any culture in mainland Southeast Asia up to ca. 700 CE (Figure 1) and provide much evidence relevant to this problem. The largest Pyu site, Sri Ksetra (near Pyay), forms the central study of this chapter.

I wish here, as well, to challenge the view that the possession of a system of Indic writing a) exemplifies Indianization, and b) that writing is the criterion for the emergence of a complex society. Cœdès famously regarded Sanskritization and Indianization as interchangeable terms, thus privileging texts over artifacts.4 In Burma, too, studies on inscriptions on stone and metal were published on a greater scale than those on archaeology and conservation.5 Evidently the written sources of any ancient society provide precious evidence on which to construct some aspects of its history; in South and Southeast Asia, these are aspects of civil and religious power. The Pyu produced a cluster of inscribed texts – some of them long and of great importance for South and Southeast Asia. Those from ca. 4th–6th centuries CE will be discussed below. On the other hand, it can be noted here that, as far as is known, those written sources provide no information about the growth of irrigation works and their impact on harvests, population growth, and social complexity: the factors, in short, which underpinned Pyu – and many other – civilizations.

1. George Cœdès, Les états hindouisés de l’Indochine et d’Indonésie (Paris: Boccard, 1964), 44; quoted in Janice Stargardt, The Ancient Pyu of Burma, vol. 1, Early Pyu Cities in a Man-Made Landscape (Cambridge: PACSEA; Singapore: ISEAS, 1990), 41; on Greater India and Further India, see e.g. R. C. Majumdar, Hindu Colonies in the Far East (Dhaka: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963) and other Southeast Asian “colonies” books by this author.
2. K. N. Chaudhuri, “Indian Ocean Trade and Southeast Asia.” (Lecture to the Asian Studies Centre, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, Spring 1990).
3. I. C. Glover, Early Trade between India and Southeast Asia: A Link in the Development of a World Trading System, Occasional Paper 16 (Hull: University of Hull Centre for South-East Asian Studies, 1989; repr., 1990); I. C. Glover and P. Bellwood, eds., Southeast Asia, from Prehistory to History (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); see also Elizabeth Moore, “Space and Place in Early Burma: A New Look at ‘Pyu Culture,’” Journal of the Siam Society 97 (2008): 1–27.
4. Cœdès, Les Etats hindouisés, 55; George Cœdès, Articles sur le Pays Khmer, ed. Claude Jacques (Paris: Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, 1989).
5. Inscriptions of Pagan, Pinya and Ava. Based on the Mahamuni Marble Slabs, collected by Emil Forchhammer, eds. Taw Sein Ko and Charles Duroiselle (Rangoon: Office of the Government Printer, 1899); Epigraphia Birmanica; Being Lithic and Other Inscriptions of Burma, 3 vols. (Rangoon: Government Printing Office, 1919–21); G. H. Luce and Pe Maung Tin, eds., Inscriptions of Burma, 493–599 B.E. (AD 1131–1237) (Rangoon: University of Rangoon, Oriental Studies Publications, 1933–56), 5 portfolio volumes printed by Oxford University Press.