What is the relationship between the templebuilding traditions of India and Southeast Asia? Ostensibly, the links are obvious. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)-protected world heritage sites at Borobudur, Prambanan, in central Java and Angkor Wat in present-day Cambodia, for example, are monumental temple complexes of extraordinary scale and architectural character, in which the fullflowering of rich and powerful regimes of manifest Buddhist and/or Hindu belief is writ large. Moreover, though largely surrendered to neglect and slow decay over the past millennium with the successive cultural and political taking-over of Southeast Asia by Islamic and Christian colonial hegemonies, the mouldering ruins of countless minor temples, stupas and shrines attest to a profound historical and cultural substrate of “Indic” origin across the vast archipelago and subcontinental peninsula that defines the region.

Yet, as Sambit Datta and David Beynon elucidate in their innovative contribution to the long and highly specialised tradition of scholarship on the Indian temple, historical evidence for the putative pan-Asian imperialism of Indian civilisation in an earlier golden age is surprisingly scarce and inconsistent. If the surviving monuments and traces of the pre- Islamic building world of Southeast Asia offer a substantive body of alternative evidence that might redress the gaps and absences in the written record however, their study reveals that this is a more enigmatic and consequently intriguing corpus, upon closer examination, than one might have assumed. In short, the analysis and interpretation of the evidence explored in this book suggests that there was a much less prescriptive, more elective, contingent and ultimately inventive relationship between rules and design practices than has previously been supposed, which was rarely, if ever, coerced by direct colonial contact. Explanation therefore resides in a better appreciation of the multilateral modes of reception, diffusion and exchange that evidently occurred across the region over a number of centuries.