175-413: Devaraja ( Sanskrit : देवराज , romanized : Devarāja ) was a religious order of the "god-king," or deified monarch in medieval Southeast Asia . The devarāja order grew out of both Hinduism and separate local traditions depending on the area. It taught that the king was a divine universal ruler, a manifestation of Bhagavan (often attributed to Shiva or Vishnu ). The concept viewed
350-706: A cakravartin , universal monarch, a title never heard of before in Cambodia. Coedes states, "...in southern India, Mount Mahendra was considered the residence of Siva as king of all gods ( devaraja ), including Indra Devaraja, and as sovereign of the country where the mountain stands. The ritual of the Devaraja established by the Brahmana Hiranydama was based on four texts - Vinasikha , Nayottara , Sammoha , and Siraccheda ...the four faces of Tumburu . These Tantras "were supposed to have been uttered by
525-708: A classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages . It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age . Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism , the language of classical Hindu philosophy , and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism . It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in
700-521: A God who battled and defeated the wrong doers that threaten the ethical order of the world. Hinduism does not have a single historical founder, a centralized imperial authority in India proper nor a bureaucratic structure, thus ensuring relative religious independence for the individual ruler. It also allows for multiple forms of divinity, centered upon the Trimurti the triad of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva,
875-536: A benign and uncoercive world civiliser and font of global enlightenment," stayed away from explicit "Greater India" formulations. In addition, some scholars have seen the Hindu/Buddhist acculturation in ancient Southeast Asia as "a single cultural process in which Southeast Asia was the matrix and South Asia the mediatrix." In the field of art history, especially in American writings, the term survived due to
1050-467: A dead king. The image of god inside the garbhagriha (central chamber) of the temple often portrayed the deceased king as a god, as the soul of the dead king finally united with the revered god in Svargaloka . Some archaeologists propose that the statue of Shiva in the garbhagriha of Prambanan 's main temple was modelled after King Balitung , serving as a depiction of his posthumous deified self. It
1225-509: A dead language in the most common usage of the term. Pollock's notion of the "death of Sanskrit" remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says that "most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead." Indianized kingdoms Dark orange : The Indian subcontinent Light orange : Southeast Asia culturally linked to India (except Northern Vietnam , Philippines and Western New Guinea ) Traditional Greater India , also known as
1400-630: A distinctly developed regional culture, style, and expression. Southeast Asia is called Suvarnabhumi or Sovannah Phoum – the golden land and Suvarnadvipa – the golden Islands in Sanskrit. It was frequented by traders from eastern India, particularly Kalinga . Cultural and trading relations between the powerful Chola dynasty of South India and the Southeast Asian Hindu kingdoms led the Bay of Bengal to be called "The Chola Lake", and
1575-581: A diverse cultural cline. These countries have been transformed to varying degrees by the acceptance and introduction of cultural and institutional elements from each other. The term Greater India as a reference to the Indian cultural sphere was popularised by a network of Bengali scholars in the 1920s, but became obsolete in the 1970s. Since around 500 BCE, Asia's expanding land and maritime trade had resulted in prolonged socio-economic and cultural stimulation and diffusion of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs into
1750-433: A focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit. Though written in a number of different scripts, the dominant language of Hindu texts has been Sanskrit. It or a hybrid form of Sanskrit became the preferred language of Mahayana Buddhism scholarship; for example, one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna (~200 CE), used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts. According to Renou, Sanskrit had
1925-572: A game) may involve the use of a Sanskrit phrase. Scholars like Sheldon Pollock have used the term Sanskrit Cosmopolis to describe the region and argued for millennium-long cultural exchanges without necessarily involving migration of peoples or colonisation. Pollock's 2006 book The Language of the Gods in the World of Men makes a case for studying the region as comparable with Latin Europe and argues that
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#17327722936702100-600: A high priest, in which the divine essence of kingship was conferred on the ruler through the agency of the linga. The safeguarding of the linga became bound up with the security of the kingdom, and the great temple architecture of the Khmer period attests to the importance attached to the belief. In Tamil culture , especially during the Sangam period , emperors were known as இறையர் ( Iraiyer ), or "those who spill", and kings were called கோ ( Ko ) or கோன் ( Kon ). During this time, king
2275-538: A language competed with numerous, less exact vernacular Indian languages called Prakritic languages ( prākṛta - ). The term prakrta literally means "original, natural, normal, artless", states Franklin Southworth . The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is found in Indian texts dated to the 1st millennium CE. Patañjali acknowledged that Prakrit is the first language, one instinctively adopted by every child with all its imperfections and later leads to
2450-855: A lesser extent, with a large proportion of words being derived from Arabic . Similarly, Philippine languages such as Tagalog have many Sanskrit loanwords . A Sanskrit loanword encountered in many Southeast Asian languages is the word bhāṣā , or spoken language, which is used to mean language in general, for example bahasa in Malay, Indonesian and Tausug , basa in Javanese, Sundanese , and Balinese , phasa in Thai and Lao, bhasa in Burmese , and phiesa in Khmer . Scripts in Sanskrit discovered during
2625-658: A limited role in the Theravada tradition (formerly known as the Hinayana) but the Prakrit works that have survived are of doubtful authenticity. Some of the canonical fragments of the early Buddhist traditions, discovered in the 20th century, suggest the early Buddhist traditions used an imperfect and reasonably good Sanskrit, sometimes with a Pali syntax, states Renou. The Mahāsāṃghika and Mahavastu, in their late Hinayana forms, used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature. Sanskrit
2800-454: A natural part of the earliest Vedic language, and that these developed in the centuries after the composition had been completed, and as a gradual unconscious process during the oral transmission by generations of reciters. The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion, with the same phrases having sandhi-induced retroflexion in some parts but not other. This
2975-479: A negative evidence to Pollock's hypothesis, but it is not positive evidence. A closer look at Sanskrit in the Indian history after the 12th century suggests that Sanskrit survived despite the odds. According to Hanneder, On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken, written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be
3150-546: A pan-Indo-Aryan accessibility to information and knowledge in the ancient and medieval times, in contrast to the Prakrit languages which were understood just regionally. It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent. As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified, Sanskrit served as the common language. It connected scholars from distant parts of South Asia such as Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, states Deshpande, as well as those from different fields of studies, though there must have been differences in its pronunciation given
3325-522: A refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars, the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini . The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa , wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and
3500-538: A restrained language from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded". The Classical form of the language simplified the sandhi rules but retained various aspects of the Vedic language, while adding rigor and flexibilities, so that it had sufficient means to express thoughts as well as being "capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature", according to Renou. Pāṇini included numerous "optional rules" beyond
3675-597: A selected group of nobles only. Many struggle to date and determine when Indianizaton in Southeast Asia occurred because of the structures and ruins found that were similar to those in India. States such as Srivijaya , Mataram , Majapahit and the Khmer empire had territorial continuity, resilient population and surplus economies that rivaled those in India itself. Borobudur and Prambanan in Java and Angkor in Cambodia are, apart from their grandeur, examples of
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#17327722936703850-439: A similar phonetic structure to Tamil. Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil on Sanskrit. Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived – "that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from
4025-577: A small realm which became at the end of the 9th century the famous Khmer Empire , were responsible for the concept of the Devarāja (kamrateṅ jagat ta rāja). Historians formerly dated his reign as running from 802 CE to 850 CE, but these dates are of very late origin (11th century) and without any historical basis. Some scholars now have tried to identify Jayavarman II with Jayavarman Ibis who is known from his inscriptions from Práḥ Thãt Práḥ Srĕi south of Kompoṅ Čàṃ (K. 103, dated 20 April 770) and from Lobŏ’k Srót in
4200-463: Is akin to that of Latin and Ancient Greek in Europe. Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent , particularly the languages of the northern, western, central and eastern Indian subcontinent. Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century. This coincides with the beginning of Islamic invasions of South Asia to create, and thereafter expand
4375-504: Is believed to have been introduced to Java in 732, when king Sanjaya installed a linga to consecrate a new Mataram Dynasty , as stated in Canggal inscription , thus the king sought Shiva's protection of his rule. In the even older Tarumanagara kingdom, the state religion regarded the king as god incarnated on earth. The Tarumanagara fifth century CE Ciaruteun inscription , inscribed with king's sole print, regarded King Purnawarman as
4550-631: Is called Daulat (which means 'state' in Arabic), and although the notion of divine right is somewhat obsolete, it is still found in the phrase Daulat Tuanku that is used to publicly acclaim the reigning Yang di-Pertuan Agong and the other sultans of Malaysia. The exclamation is similar to the European " Long live the King ", and often accompanies pictures of the reigning monarch and his consort on banners during royal occasions. In Indonesia , especially on
4725-539: Is different from direct colonialism in that these Indianized lands were not inhabited by organizations or state elements from the Indian subcontinent, with exceptions such as the Chola invasions of medieval times. Instead, Indian cultural influence from trade routes and language use slowly permeated through Southeast Asia, making the traditions a part of the region. The interactions between India and Southeast Asia were marked by waves of influence and dominance. At some points,
4900-548: Is documented from geological record of Asia and the Himalaya as up to approximately 2,350 km (1,460 mi) less. The use of Greater India to refer to an Indian cultural sphere was popularised by a network of Bengali scholars in the 1920s who were all members of the Calcutta-based Greater India Society. The movement's early leaders included the historian R. C. Majumdar (1888–1980);
5075-452: Is found in the writing of Bharata Muni , the author of the ancient Natya Shastra text. The early Jain scholar Namisādhu acknowledged the difference, but disagreed that the Prakrit language was a corruption of Sanskrit. Namisādhu stated that the Prakrit language was the pūrvam ('came before, origin') and that it came naturally to children, while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through "purification by grammar". Sanskrit belongs to
5250-553: Is mistakenly said of the King of Thailand . This concept of "god-king" ( Thai : เทวราชา) (or "divine king") was adopted by the Thai kings from the ancient Khmer tradition of devaraja followed in the region, and the Hindu concept of kingship was applied to the status of the Thai king. The concept centered on the idea that the king was an incarnation ( avatar ) of the god Vishnu and that he
5425-532: Is rare in the later version of the language. The Homerian Greek, like Ṛg-vedic Sanskrit, deploys simile extensively, but they are structurally very different. The early Vedic form of the Sanskrit language was far less homogenous compared to the Classical Sanskrit as defined by grammarians by about the mid-1st millennium BCE. According to Richard Gombrich—an Indologist and a scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli and Buddhist Studies—the archaic Vedic Sanskrit found in
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5600-516: Is suggested that the concept was the fusion of Hinduism with native Austronesian ancestor worship . The 11th century great king Airlangga of Kahuripan in East Java, was deified posthumously as Vishnu in Belahan temple. In Java, the tradition of divine king continued well to Kediri , Singhasari , and Majapahit kingdom in the 15th century. After the coming of Islam in the archipelago and
5775-479: Is taken along with evidence of controversy, for example, in passages of the Aitareya-Āraṇyaka (700 BCE), which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases. The Ṛg-veda is a collection of books, created by multiple authors. These authors represented different generations, and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest. Yet,
5950-589: Is the predominant language of one of the largest collection of historic manuscripts. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE, such as the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh) . Though developed and nurtured by scholars of orthodox schools of Hinduism, Sanskrit has been the language for some of the key literary works and theology of heterodox schools of Indian philosophies such as Buddhism and Jainism. The structure and capabilities of
6125-516: Is venerated as representative of God Even in Modern Tamil , the word for temple is 'கோயில்', meaning "king's house". Kings were understood to be the "agents of God", as they protected the world like God did. This may well have been continued till early medieval period in Tamilakam , as the famous Thiruvalangadu inscription states: "Having noticed by the marks (on his body) that Arulmozhi was
6300-540: The Bhagavata Purana , the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language. The Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was thus the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants of it as well as other natural Indian languages. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside
6475-430: The devaraja concept of kingship, and Sanskrit as official writing. Despite the fundamental cultural integration, these kingdoms were autonomous in their own right and functioned independently. Not only did Indianization change many cultural and political aspects, but it also changed the spiritual realm as well, creating a type of Northern Culture which began in the early 14th century, prevalent for its rapid decline in
6650-580: The Dalai Lama , the Sanskrit language is a parent language that is at the foundation of many modern languages of India and the one that promoted Indian thought to other distant countries. In Tibetan Buddhism, states the Dalai Lama, Sanskrit language has been a revered one and called legjar lhai-ka or "elegant language of the gods". It has been the means of transmitting the "profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy" to Tibet. The Sanskrit language created
6825-527: The Indian cultural sphere , or the Indic world , is an area composed of several countries and regions in South Asia , East Asia and Southeast Asia that were historically influenced by Indian culture , which itself formed from the various distinct indigenous cultures of South Asia . It is an umbrella term encompassing the Indian subcontinent and surrounding countries, which are culturally linked through
7000-613: The Indo-European family of languages . It is one of the three earliest ancient documented languages that arose from a common root language now referred to as Proto-Indo-European : Other Indo-European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin ( c. 600 BCE–100 CE, Italic languages ), Gothic (archaic Germanic language , c. 350 CE ), Old Norse ( c. 200 CE and after), Old Avestan ( c. late 2nd millennium BCE ) and Younger Avestan ( c. 900 BCE). The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in
7175-685: The Japanese gassho and Thai wai . Beyond the Himalaya and Hindukush mountains in the north, along the Silk Route, Indian influence was linked with Buddhism. Tibet and Khotan were direct heirs of Gangetic Buddhism, despite the difference in languages. Many Tibetan monks even used to know Sanskrit very well. In Khotan the Ramayana was well cicrulated in Khotanese language, though
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7350-678: The Malabar Coast (present-day Kerala ) to India extra Gangem (lit. "India, beyond the Ganges," but usually the East Indies , i.e. present-day Malay Archipelago ) and India Minor , from Malabar to Sind . Farther India was sometimes used to cover all of modern Southeast Asia. Until the fourteenth century, India could also mean areas along the Red Sea, including Somalia , South Arabia , and Ethiopia (e.g., Diodorus of Sicily of
7525-717: The Philippines . The Ramayana and the Mahabharata have had a large impact on South Asia and Southeast Asia. One of the most tangible evidence of dharmic Hindu traditions is the widespread use of the Añjali Mudrā gesture of greeting and respect. It is seen in the Indian namasté and similar gestures known throughout Southeast Asia; its cognates include the Cambodian sampeah , the Indonesian sembah ,
7700-753: The Rigveda had already evolved in the Vedic period, as evidenced in the later Vedic literature. Gombrich posits that the language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit, while the archaic Vedic Sanskrit had by the Buddha 's time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages. The formalization of the Saṃskṛta language is credited to Pāṇini , along with Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patañjali's work. Panini composed Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight-Chapter Grammar'), which became
7875-532: The Rigveda , a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from the mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax. Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit ,
8050-531: The Rāmāyaṇa , however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language. The hymns of the Rigveda are notably similar to
8225-596: The Sdok Kak Thom temple recounts that at Mahendraparvata, Jayavarman II took part in a ritual by the Brahmana Hiranyadama, and his chief priest Lord Sivakaivalya, known as devaraja ( Khmer : ទេវរាជា ) which placed him as a chakravartin , Lord of the Universe. Today, the tradition of public reverence to the King of Cambodia is said to be the continuation of this ancient concept of devaraja, and
8400-531: The Tanjur ). Buddhism was similarly introduced to China by Mahayanist missionaries mostly through translations of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit texts, and many terms were transliterated directly and added to the Chinese vocabulary. In Southeast Asia, languages such as Thai and Lao contain many loan words from Sanskrit, as does Khmer to a lesser extent. For example, in Thai, Rāvaṇa ,
8575-507: The history of Indian influence on Southeast Asia , the Southeast Asian kingdoms adopted Indian Sanskrit terms and Hindu-Buddhist concepts through the process of Indianisation and adoption of Sanskrit language ; the evolution and spread of the concept of Deveraja is once such example. The Devaraja concept evolved from the earlier Indian concept of " Chakravarti " . Chakravarti refers to an ideal universal ruler, especially in
8750-406: The sandhi rules, both internal and external. Quite many words found in the early Vedic Sanskrit language are never found in late Vedic Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit literature, while some words have different and new meanings in Classical Sanskrit when contextually compared to the early Vedic Sanskrit literature. Arthur Macdonell was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of
8925-500: The verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- is a compound word consisting of sáṃ ('together, good, well, perfected') and kṛta - ('made, formed, work'). It connotes a work that has been "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred". According to Biderman, the perfection contextually being referred to in the etymological origins of the word is its tonal—rather than semantic—qualities. Sound and oral transmission were highly valued qualities in ancient India, and its sages refined
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#17327722936709100-440: The " Look East " policy, and more recently has involved deepening military ties as well. Sri Lanka also continues to have strong political links with South East Asia, asked by ASEAN to be a founding member, and has recently been increasing integration with South East Asia through its own "Look East" policy; politicians view the relationship between Sri Lanka and South East Asia as second only to South Asia. Culture spread via
9275-414: The 13th century, a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared, perhaps in the "fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir" or the "Mongol invasion of 1320" states Pollock. The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century. As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and
9450-429: The 1970s. The concept of "Indianized kingdoms" and "Indianization", coined by George Coedès , originally describes Southeast Asian principalities that flourished from the early common era as a result of centuries of socio-economic interaction having incorporated central aspects of Indian institutions, religion, statecraft, administration, culture, epigraphy, literature and architecture. The term Greater India and
9625-532: The 7th century where he established a major center of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong. By the early 1st millennium CE, Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia, parts of the East Asia and the Central Asia. It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions. According to
9800-547: The Buddhist world including Ceylon , Tibet, Central Asia, and even Japan were held to fall within this web of Indianizing culture colonies " This particular usage – implying cultural "sphere of influence" of India – was promoted by the Greater India Society , formed by a group of Bengali men of letters , and is not found before the 1920s. The term Greater India was used in historical writing in India into
9975-572: The Chola attacks on Srivijaya in the 10th century CE are the sole example of military attacks by Indian rulers against Southeast Asia. The Pala dynasty of Bengal , which controlled the heartland of Buddhist India, maintained close economic, cultural and religious ties, particularly with Srivijaya. The pre-Indic political and social systems in Southeast Asia were marked by a relative indifference towards lineage descent. Hindu God kingship enabled rulers to supersede loyalties, forge cosmopolitan polities and
10150-425: The Classical Sanskrit language launched ancient Indian speculations about "the nature and function of language", what is the relationship between words and their meanings in the context of a community of speakers, whether this relationship is objective or subjective, discovered or is created, how individuals learn and relate to the world around them through language, and about the limits of language? They speculated on
10325-507: The Common Era and eventually settled there. Strong impulse most certainly came from the region's ruling classes who invited Brahmans to serve at their courts as priests, astrologers and advisers. Divinity and royalty were closely connected in these polities as Hindu rituals validated the powers of the monarch. Brahmans and priests from India proper played a key role in supporting ruling dynasties through exact rituals. Dynastic consolidation
10500-532: The Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary, but they have also affected Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, "for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo-Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence". Similarly, Ferenc Ruzca states that all the major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be attributed to the constant influence of a Dravidian language with
10675-521: The Dravidian words and forms, without modifying the word order; but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian or English sentence into a non-Indo-Aryan language. Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called vinaiyeccam in Tamil) shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs (originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic). This particularly salient case of
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#173277229367010850-400: The Hindu and Buddhist cultures there. They introduced the caste system to the region, especially to Java , Bali, Madura , and Sumatra. The adopted caste system was not as strict as in India, tempered to the local context. There are multiple similarities between the two caste systems such that both state that no one is equal within society and that everyone has his own place. It also promoted
11025-590: The Indian culture solely found its way into the region, and at other points, the influence was used to take over. Southeast Asia was now situated in the central area of convergence of the Indian and the East Asian maritime trade routes, the basis for economic and cultural growth. The earliest Hindu kingdoms emerged in Sumatra and Java, followed by mainland polities such as Funan and Champa. Adoption of Indian civilization elements and individual adaptation stimulated
11200-465: The Indian kingdoms. The decline of Hindu kingdoms and spark of Buddhist kingdoms led to the formation of orthodox Sinhalese Buddhism and is a key factor leading to the decline of Indianization. Sukhothai and Ceylon are the prominent characters who formulated the center of Buddhism and thus became more popularized over Hinduism. Not only was the spark of Buddhism the driving force for Indianization coming to an end, but Islamic influence took over as well in
11375-467: The Indian sub-continent was at a deficiency for gold due to extensive control of overland trade routes by the Roman Empire . This made many Vaishya traders look to the seas to acquire new gold, of which Southeast Asia was abundant. However, the conclusion that Indianization was just spread through trade is insufficient, as Indianization permeated through all classes of Southeast Asian society, not just
11550-476: The Indo-Aryan language underwent rapid linguistic change and morphed into the Vedic Sanskrit language. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit . The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda , a Hindu scripture from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive, if any ever existed, but scholars are generally confident that
11725-519: The Indo-European languages are the Nuristani languages found in the remote Hindu Kush region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas, as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian – both are Iranian languages . Sanskrit belongs to the satem group of the Indo-European languages. Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of
11900-416: The Muslim advance for two centuries, with the Kabul Shahi and Zunbils remaining unconquered until the Saffarid and Ghaznavid conquests. The significance of the realm of Zun and its rulers Zunbils had laid in them blocking the path of Arabs in invading the Indus Valley . According to historian André Wink , "In southern and eastern Afghanistan, the regions of Zamindawar (Zamin I Datbar or land of
12075-417: The Muslim rule in the form of Sultanates, and later the Mughal Empire . Sheldon Pollock characterises the decline of Sanskrit as a long-term "cultural, social, and political change". He dismisses the idea that Sanskrit declined due to "struggle with barbarous invaders", and emphasises factors such as the increasing attractiveness of vernacular language for literary expression. With the fall of Kashmir around
12250-433: The Muslim rulers. Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire , reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting their socio-linguistic identity. After Islamic rule disintegrated in South Asia and the colonial rule era began, Sanskrit re-emerged but in the form of a "ghostly existence" in regions such as Bengal. This decline was the result of "political institutions and civic ethos" that did not support
12425-404: The Sanskrit language was its unifying element. Scripts in Sanskrit discovered during the early centuries of the Common Era are the earliest known forms of writing to have extended all the way to Southeast Asia. Its gradual impact ultimately resulted in its widespread domain as a means of dialect which evident in regions, from Bangladesh to Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand and additionally a few of
12600-499: The Saṃskṛta language, both in its vocabulary and grammar, to the classical languages of Europe. In The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World , Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms (with the addition of Old English for further comparison): The correspondences suggest some common root, and historical links between some of
12775-820: The South Asian peninsula and Hinter-Indien as Southeast Asia. Greater India , or Greater India Basin also signifies "the Indian Plate plus a postulated northern extension", the product of the Indian–Asia collision . Although its usage in geology pre-dates Plate tectonic theory, the term has seen increased usage since the 1970s. It is unknown when and where the India–Asia (Indian and Eurasian Plate ) convergence occurred, at or before 52 million years ago. The plates have converged up to 3,600 km (2,200 mi) ± 35 km (22 mi). The upper crustal shortening
12950-638: The South India, such as the great Vijayanagara Empire , so did Sanskrit. There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit, mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar . Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language and scripts found in Persia and Arabia, and the Indians linguistically adapted to this Persianization to gain employment with
13125-447: The Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg-veda "hardly presents any dialectical diversity", states Louis Renou – an Indologist known for his scholarship of the Sanskrit literature and the Ṛg-veda in particular. According to Renou, this implies that the Vedic Sanskrit language had a "set linguistic pattern" by the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Beyond the Ṛg-veda, the ancient literature in Vedic Sanskrit that has survived into
13300-451: The Vedic Sanskrit's bahulam framework, to respect liberty and creativity so that individual writers separated by geography or time would have the choice to express facts and their views in their own way, where tradition followed competitive forms of the Sanskrit language. The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature, are negligible when compared to
13475-486: The Western colonialism of the early 20th century. By some accounts Greater India consists of "lands including Burma, Java , Cambodia, Bali , and the former Champa and Funan polities of present-day Vietnam ," in which Indian and Hindu culture left an "imprint in the form of monuments, inscriptions and other traces of the historic " Indianizing " process." By some other accounts, many Pacific societies and "most of
13650-422: The adoption of many Indian style law codes and architecture into Southeast Asian society It is unknown how immigration, interaction, and settlement took place, whether by key figures from India or through Southeast Asians visiting India who took elements of Indian culture back home. It is likely that Hindu and Buddhist traders, priests, and princes traveled to Southeast Asia from India in the first few centuries of
13825-407: The alphabet, the structure of words, and its exacting grammar into a "collection of sounds, a kind of sublime musical mold" as an integral language they called Saṃskṛta . From the late Vedic period onwards, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted an "exceptionally large amount of linguistic, philosophical and religious literature" in India. Sound
14000-440: The capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages such as Ardhamagadhi . A section of European scholars state that Sanskrit was never a spoken language. However, evidences shows that Sanskrit was a spoken language, essential for oral tradition that preserved the vast number of Sanskrit manuscripts from ancient India. The textual evidence in the works of Yaksa, Panini, and Patanajali affirms that Classical Sanskrit in their era
14175-529: The change of dynasty in Java during Demak , Mataram Sultanate era, well to the succession of the president of Indonesia . In ancient Cambodia, devarāja is recognized as the state's institutionalized religion. The Cambodian the concept of the "god-king" is believed to be established early in the 9th century by Jayavarman II, founder of the Khmer empire of Angkor, with the Brahmana scholar Sivakaivalya as his first chief priest at Mahendraparvata . For centuries,
14350-527: The close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages , vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages , and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna. The pre-history of Indo-Aryan languages which preceded Vedic Sanskrit is unclear and various hypotheses place it over a fairly wide limit. According to Thomas Burrow, based on
14525-410: The concept provided the religious basis of the royal authority of the Khmer kings. In a Khmer context the term was used in the latter sense as "god-king", but occurs only in the Sanskrit portion of the inscription K. 235 from Sdok Kak Thom / Sdok Kăk Thoṃ (in modern Thailand) dated 8 February 1053 CE, referring to the Khmer term kamrateṅ jagat ta rāja ("Lord of the Universe who is King") describing
14700-614: The context of a speech or language, is found in verses 5.28.17–19 of the Ramayana . Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit, vernacular colloquial dialects ( Prakrits ) continued to evolve. Sanskrit co-existed with numerous other Prakrit languages of ancient India. The Prakrit languages of India also have ancient roots and some Sanskrit scholars have called these Apabhramsa , literally 'spoiled'. The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo-European languages but which are found in
14875-653: The crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. As in this period the Indo-Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent, this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India (the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadeśa) who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit. Extant manuscripts in Sanskrit number over 30 million, one hundred times those in Greek and Latin combined, constituting
15050-448: The deities responsible for the creation, preservation, and destruction of the universe. The effects of Hinduism and Buddhism applied a tremendous impact on the many civilizations inhabiting Southeast Asia which significantly provided some structure to the composition of written traditions. An essential factor for the spread and adaptation of these religions originated from trading systems of the third and fourth century. In order to spread
15225-467: The detailed and sophisticated treatise then transmitted it through his students. Modern scholarship generally accepts that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as Lipi ('script') and lipikara ('scribe') in section 3.2 of the Aṣṭādhyāyī . The Classical Sanskrit language formalized by Pāṇini, states Renou, is "not an impoverished language", rather it is "a controlled and
15400-471: The differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. Louis Renou published in 1956, in French, a more extensive discussion of the similarities, the differences and the evolution of the Vedic Sanskrit within the Vedic period and then to the Classical Sanskrit along with his views on the history. This work has been translated by Jagbans Balbir. The earliest known use of the word Saṃskṛta (Sanskrit), in
15575-460: The distant major ancient languages of the world. The Indo-Aryan migrations theory explains the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages by proposing that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in South Asia from a region of common origin, somewhere north-west of the Indus region , during the early 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes
15750-545: The early centuries of the Common Era are the earliest known forms of writing to have extended all the way to Southeast Asia. Its gradual impact ultimately resulted in its widespread domain as a means of dialect which evident in regions, from Bangladesh to Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand and additionally a few of the larger Indonesian islands. In addition, alphabets from languages spoken in Burmese, Thai, Laos, and Cambodia are variations formed off of Indian ideals that have localized
15925-419: The early half of the third century. Indian religion was profoundly absorbed by local cultures that formed their own distinctive variations of these structures in order to reflect their own ideals. Champa , Dvaravati , Funan , Gangga Negara , Kadaram , Kalingga , Kutai , Langkasuka , Pagan , Pan Pan , Po-ni , and Tarumanagara had by the 1st to 4th centuries CE adopted Hinduism's cosmology and rituals,
16100-490: The early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture , and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies. Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in
16275-674: The east. To the west, Indian culture converged with Greater Persia via the Hindu Kush and the Pamir Mountains . The concept of the Three Indias was in common circulation in pre-industrial Europe. Greater India was the southern part of South Asia , Lesser India was the northern part of South Asia , and Middle India was the region near the Middle East . The Portuguese form ( Portuguese : India Maior )
16450-576: The emergence of centralized states and localized caste systems in Southeast Asia. As conclusive evidence is missing, numerous Indianization theories of Southeast Asia have emerged since the early 20th century. The central question usually revolves around the main propagator of Indian institutional and cultural ideas in Southeast Asia. Iron Age trade expansion caused regional geostrategic remodeling. Austronesian sailors from Island Southeast Asia first established contact and trade with Southern India and Sri Lanka as early as 500 BCE. This resulted in
16625-563: The emergence of centralized states and the development of highly organized societies. Ambitious local leaders realized the benefits of Hinduism and Indian methods of administration, culture, literature, etc. Rule in accord with universal moral principles, represented in the concept of the devaraja , was more appealing than the Chinese concept of intermediaries. The earliest Hindu kingdoms emerged in Sumatra and Java, followed by mainland polities such as Funan and Champa. Adoption of Indian civilization elements and individual adaptation stimulated
16800-645: The entire earth. In Buddhist kingship and Jainism , the term generally applies to temporal as well as spiritual kingship and leadership. In Buddhism, the Chakravarti came to be considered the counterpart of a Buddha . Ashoka was an emperor of the Maurya empire, who ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent from c. 268 to 232 BCE. For the spread of Buddhism, he sent Buddhist missions to 9 destinations, including Tibet and China, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Establishment of these early era links led to
16975-429: The exchange of commodities. Another theory of the spread of Indianization that focuses on the caste of Vaishya traders and their role for spreading Indian culture and language into Southeast Asia through trade. There were many trade incentives that brought Vaishya traders to Southeast Asia, the most important of which was gold. During the 4th century C.E., when the first evidence of Indian trader in Southeast Asia,
17150-425: The fall of Majapahit, the concept of God-King were most likely ceased to exist in Java, since Islam rejects the concept of divinity in mortal human being. Yet the concept survived in traditional Javanese mysticism of Kejawen as wahyu , suggesting that every king and ruler in Java was bestowed wahyu , a divine authority and mandate from God. A heavenly mandate that could be revoked and transferred by God, to explain
17325-516: The first century BC says that "the Nile rises in India" and Marco Polo of the fourteenth century says that "Lesser India ... contains ... Abash [Abyssinia]"). In late 19th-century geography, Greater India referred to a region that included: "(a) Himalaya , (b) Punjab , (c) Hindustan , (d) Burma , (e) Indo-China , (f) Sunda Islands , (g) Borneo , (h) Celebes , and (i) Philippines ." German atlases distinguished Vorder-Indien (Anterior India) as
17500-548: The first language of the respective speakers. The Sanskrit language brought Indo-Aryan speaking people together, particularly its elite scholars. Some of these scholars of Indian history regionally produced vernacularized Sanskrit to reach wider audiences, as evidenced by texts discovered in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Once the audience became familiar with the easier to understand vernacularized version of Sanskrit, those interested could graduate from colloquial Sanskrit to
17675-412: The foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedānga . The Aṣṭādhyāyī was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest that has survived in full, and the culmination of a long grammatical tradition that Fortson says, is "one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world". Pāṇini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of the Sanskrit language before him, as well as
17850-462: The four mouths of Siva represented by the gandharva Tumburu." He goes on to state, "In the Indianized kingdoms of Southeast Asia, the Hindu cults...eventually became royal cults. The essence of royalty...was supposed to reside in a linga ...obtained from Siva through a Brahmana who delivered it to the king...the communion between the king and the god through the medium of a priest took place on
18025-537: The gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and Nasatya found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature. O Bṛhaspati, when in giving names they first set forth the beginning of Language, Their most excellent and spotless secret was laid bare through love, When the wise ones formed Language with their mind, purifying it like grain with a winnowing fan, Then friends knew friendships – an auspicious mark placed on their language. — Rigveda 10.71.1–4 Translated by Roger Woodard The Vedic Sanskrit found in
18200-612: The gods". In Hindu pantheon the title of king of gods (devas) is held by Indra . Thus the mortal kingdom on earth mirrored the celestial kingdom of gods, the concept regarded the king as the living god on earth. It is also from influences in Hinduism and separate local traditions. Indian origin religions (also called Dharmic or Indic religions) originated in the Indian subcontinent ; namely Hinduism , Jainism , Buddhism .. Hinduism , Buddhism have many references regarding Southeast Asia such as Suvarnabhumi . As evidenced from
18375-699: The greatest period of cultural, economic, and military growth in Thai History . In the Malay Annals , the Rajas and Sultans of the Malay States (today Malaysia , Brunei and Philippines ) as well as their predecessors, such as the Indonesian kingdom of Majapahit , also claimed divine right to rule. The sultan is mandated by God and thus is expected to lead his country and people in religious matters, ceremonies as well as prayers. This divine right
18550-431: The historic Sanskrit literary culture and the failure of new Sanskrit literature to assimilate into the changing cultural and political environment. Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead ". After the 12th century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with
18725-467: The incarnation of Vishnu on Earth. The Kebon Kopi I inscription, also called Telapak Gajah stone, with an inscription and the engraving of two large elephant footprints, associated king's elephant ride as Airavata (elephant ride of God Indra ), thus associated the king also with Indra. In Mataram kingdom in Central Java, it is customary to erect candi (temple) to honor and sent the soul of
18900-426: The influence of art theorist Ananda Coomaraswamy . Coomaraswamy's view of pan-Indian art history was influenced by the "Calcutta cultural nationalists." Its modern meanings often invoke images of soft power. The region is considered in Indian political circles as part of India's extended neighbourhood, and modern integration was propelled through a multifaceted acceleration of economic and strategic interaction under
19075-486: The intense change that must have occurred in the pre-Vedic period between the Proto-Indo-Aryan language and Vedic Sanskrit. The noticeable differences between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit include the much-expanded grammar and grammatical categories as well as the differences in the accent, the semantics and the syntax. There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end, as well as
19250-601: The introduction of Southeast Asian material culture (including catamarans , outrigger boats , sewn-plank boats, and paan ) and cultigens (like coconuts , sandalwood , bananas , and sugarcane ) to South Asia; as well as connecting the material cultures of India and China . These early Austronesian trade routes linking Island Southeast Asia with India also became the maritime aspect of the wider spice trade network, which were later also used by Tamil and Arab maritime trade. The sustained contact between Southeast Asia and South Asia resulted in cultural exchange, in addition to
19425-400: The island of Java , the sultan's divine right is more commonly known as the wahyu , or 'revelation', but it is not hereditary and can be passed on to distant relatives. Sanskrit language Sanskrit ( / ˈ s æ n s k r ɪ t / ; attributively 𑀲𑀁𑀲𑁆𑀓𑀾𑀢𑀁 , संस्कृत- , saṃskṛta- ; nominally संस्कृतम् , saṃskṛtam , IPA: [ˈsɐ̃skr̩tɐm] ) is
19600-587: The justice giver, the classical Arachosia ) and Zabulistan or Zabul (Jabala, Kapisha , Kia pi shi) and Kabul , the Arabs were effectively opposed for more than two centuries, from 643 to 870 AD, by the indigenous rulers the Zunbils and the related Kabul-Shahs of the dynasty which became known as the Buddhist-Shahi. With Makran and Baluchistan and much of Sindh this area can be reckoned to belong to
19775-608: The king and the ruling dynasty as the rightful ruler of the land. It is also used to maintain social order, exalting the king as a living god definitely demands the utmost service and devotion of his people. Introducing of Hindu , Buddhist religions to Southeast Asia led to adoption of many new customs. The Devaraja religious order also enabled the king to embark on large scale public works and grand projects, by mobilizing their people to create and maintain elaborate hydraulic irrigation systems to support large scale rice agriculture or to construct imposing grand monuments and temples in
19950-566: The king's divine rule on earth. The devaraja concept of divine right of kings was adopted by the Indianised Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Southeast Asia through Indian Hindu Brahmins scholars deployed in the courts. It was first adopted by Javanese kings and through them by various Malay kingdoms, then by the Khmer empire, and subsequently by the Thai monarchies. In Sanskrit the Hindu origin term deva - raja could have different meanings such as "god-king" or "king of
20125-503: The king's honor. The examples of these grand projects are Borobudur , Prambanan , and also temples and barays in Angkor . Example of the Devaraja religious order — such as demonstrated by Jayavarman II — associate the king with the Hindu deity Sri Shiva, whose divine essence was physically embodied by the linga (or lingam ), a phallic idol housed in a mountain temple. The king was deified in an elaborate and mystical ceremony, requiring
20300-403: The language. The utilization of Sanskrit has been prevalent in all aspects of life including legal purposes. Sanskrit terminology and vernacular appears in ancient courts to establish procedures that have been structured by Indian models such as a system composed of a code of laws. The concept of legislation demonstrated through codes of law and organizations particularly the idea of "God King"
20475-509: The larger Indonesian islands. In addition, alphabets from languages spoken in Burmese, Thai, Laos, and Cambodia are variations formed off of Indian ideals that have localized the language. Sanskrit and related languages have also influenced their Tibeto-Burman -speaking neighbors to the north through the spread of Buddhist texts in translation. The spread of Buddhism to Tibet allowed many Sanskrit texts to survive only in Tibetan translation (in
20650-432: The largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press. — Foreword of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics (2009), Gérard Huet, Amba Kulkarni and Peter Scharf Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts, as well as poetry, music, drama , scientific , technical and others. It
20825-526: The legendary emperor of Sri Lanka , is called 'Thosakanth' which is derived from his Sanskrit name 'Daśakaṇṭha' ("having ten necks"). Many Sanskrit loanwords are also found in Austronesian languages , such as Javanese particularly the old form from which nearly half the vocabulary is derived from the language. Other Austronesian languages, such as traditional Malay , modern Indonesian , also derive much of their vocabulary from Sanskrit, albeit to
21000-412: The linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language. Pāṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon. This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta-rules, some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced. Despite differences in the analysis from that of modern linguistics, Pāṇini's work has been found valuable and
21175-514: The literary works. The Indian tradition, states Winternitz , has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times. Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana , the Mahabharata ,
21350-482: The merchant classes. Another theory states that Indianization spread through the warrior class of Kshatriya . This hypothesis effectively explains state formation in Southeast Asia, as these warriors came with the intention of conquering the local peoples and establishing their own political power in the region. However, this theory hasn't attracted much interest from historians as there is very little literary evidence to support it. The most widely accepted theory for
21525-576: The message of these religions Buddhist monks and Hindu priests joined mercantile classes in the quest to share their religious and cultural values and beliefs. Along the Mekong delta, evidence of Indianized religious models can be observed in communities labeled Funan. There can be found the earliest records engraved on a rock in Vocanh. The engravings consist of Buddhist archives and a south Indian scripts are written in Sanskrit that have been dated to belong to
21700-514: The midst of the thirteenth century to trump the Hindu kingdoms. In the process of Islam coming to the traditional Hindu kingdoms, trade was heavily practiced and the now Islamized Indians started becoming merchants all over Southeast Asia. Moreover, as trade became more saturated in the Southeast Asian regions wherein Indianization once persisted, the regions had become more Muslim populated. This so-called Islamic control has spanned to many of
21875-511: The modern age include the Samaveda , Yajurveda , Atharvaveda , along with the embedded and layered Vedic texts such as the Brahmanas , Aranyakas , and the early Upanishads . These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern, northern, and eastern Indian subcontinent. According to Michael Witzel, Vedic Sanskrit was a spoken language of
22050-433: The monarch to possess transcendental quality, the king as the living god on earth. The concept is closely related to the Indian concept of Chakravarti (universal monarch). In politics, it is viewed as the divine justification of a king's rule. The concept was institutionalized and gained its elaborate manifestations in ancient Java and Cambodia , where monuments such as Prambanan and Angkor Wat were erected to celebrate
22225-429: The more advanced Classical Sanskrit. Rituals and the rites-of-passage ceremonies have been and continue to be the other occasions where a wide spectrum of people hear Sanskrit, and occasionally join in to speak some Sanskrit words such as namah . Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini , around the fourth century BCE. Its position in the cultures of Greater India
22400-401: The most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century. Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia. It is unclear whether Pāṇini himself wrote his treatise or he orally created
22575-602: The most archaic poems of the Iranian and Greek language families, the Gathas of old Avestan and Iliad of Homer . As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity, rigour and fidelity, as a single text without variant readings, its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European . Sanskrit does not have an attested native script: from around
22750-646: The narrative is slightly different from the Gangetic version. In Afghanistan , Uzbekistan and Tajikistan many Buddhist monasteries were established. These countries were used as a kind of springboard for the monks who brought Indian Buddhist texts and images to China. Further north, in the Gobi Desert , statues of Ganesha and Kartikeya were found alongside Buddhist imagery in the Mogao Caves . Indians spread their religion to Southeast Asia, beginning
22925-549: The nearby present day nations adopted it from the Javanese kings. Eventually, Thai kings adopted the concept from the nearby Khmer empire. The concept of devaraja or God King was the ancient Cambodian state religion, but it probably originated in Java where the Hindu influence first reached Southeast Asia. Circa 8th century, Sailendras allegedly ruled over Java, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and parts of Cambodia. In ancient Java, since Sailendra dynasty. The devaraja concept
23100-417: The notion of an explicit Hindu expansion of ancient Southeast Asia have been linked to both Indian nationalism and Hindu nationalism . The English term was popularised in the late 19th and the 20th century as a view of an expansionist India within the context of East Asia. However, many Indian nationalists, like Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore , although receptive to "an idealisation of India as
23275-545: The numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language. Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas since ancient times; it is widely taught today at the secondary school level. The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 during East India Company rule . Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants . In Sanskrit,
23450-474: The ongoing transmission of Indian concepts to Southeast Asia. The Devaraja concept has been established through rituals and institutionalized within the Indianized kingdoms of Southeast Asia. It enables the monarch to claim the divine authority which could be used on ensuring political legitimacy, managing social order, economic and religious aspects. In political aspects, it strengthens the justification of
23625-403: The oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they are ceremonial literature, where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition. However some scholars have suggested that the original Ṛg-veda differed in some fundamental ways in phonology compared to the sole surviving version available to us. In particular that retroflex consonants did not exist as
23800-431: The other." Reinöhl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil, with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi, whereas the same relationship is not found for non-Indo-Aryan languages, for example, Persian or English: A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali or Hindi equivalents for
23975-520: The philologists Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1890–1977) and P. C. Bagchi (1898–1956), and the historians Phanindranath Bose and Kalidas Nag (1891–1966). Some of their formulations were inspired by concurrent excavations in Angkor by French archaeologists and by the writings of French Indologist Sylvain Lévi . The scholars of the society postulated a benevolent ancient Indian cultural colonisation of Southeast Asia, in stark contrast – in their view – to
24150-414: The possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once one knows to look for it, can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit". The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and
24325-439: The previous 1,500 years when "great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination" marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit, states Pollock. Scholars maintain that the Sanskrit language did not die, but rather only declined. Jurgen Hanneder disagrees with Pollock, finding his arguments elegant but "often arbitrary". According to Hanneder, a decline or regional absence of creative and innovative literature constitutes
24500-480: The problems of interpretation and misunderstanding. The purifying structure of the Sanskrit language removes these imperfections. The early Sanskrit grammarian Daṇḍin states, for example, that much in the Prakrit languages is etymologically rooted in Sanskrit, but involves "loss of sounds" and corruptions that result from a "disregard of the grammar". Daṇḍin acknowledged that there are words and confusing structures in Prakrit that thrive independent of Sanskrit. This view
24675-582: The protective deity of the Khmer Empire, a distinctly Khmer deity, which was mentioned before in the inscription K. 682 of Chok Gargyar (Kòḥ Ker) dated 921/22 CE. In the Sdok Kăk Thoṃ inscription, a member of a brahmana family claimed that his ancestors since the time of Jayavarman II ( Khmer : ជ័យវរ្ម័នទី២ ), who established around 800 CE by marriage to the daughter of a local king in the Angkor region,
24850-509: The region's cosmology, in particular in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka . In Central Asia, the transmission of ideas was predominantly of a religious nature. By the early centuries of the common era , most of the principalities of Southeast Asia had effectively absorbed defining aspects of Indian culture, religion, and administration. The notion of divine god-kingship was introduced by the concept of Harihara , and Sanskrit and other Indian epigraphic systems were declared official , like those of
25025-609: The regional Prakrit languages, which makes it likely that the interaction, the sharing of words and ideas began early in the Indian history. As the Indian thought diversified and challenged earlier beliefs of Hinduism, particularly in the form of Buddhism and Jainism , the Prakrit languages such as Pali in Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times. However, states Paul Dundas , these ancient Prakrit languages had "roughly
25200-497: The relationship between various Indo-European languages, the origin of all these languages may possibly be in what is now Central or Eastern Europe, while the Indo-Iranian group possibly arose in Central Russia. The Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches separated quite early. It is the Indo-Aryan branch that moved into eastern Iran and then south into South Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Once in ancient India,
25375-562: The role of language, the ontological status of painting word-images through sound, and the need for rules so that it can serve as a means for a community of speakers, separated by geography or time, to share and understand profound ideas from each other. These speculations became particularly important to the Mīmāṃsā and the Nyaya schools of Hindu philosophy, and later to Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, states Frits Staal —a scholar of Linguistics with
25550-526: The sacred mountain." Khmer emperor Jayavarman II is widely regarded as the king that set the foundation of the Angkor period in Cambodian history, beginning with the grandiose consecration ritual conducted by Jayavarman II (reign 790–835) in 802 on sacred Mount Mahendraparvata , now known as Phnom Kulen , to celebrate the independence of Kambuja from Javanese dominion (presumably the "neighboring Chams", or chvea ). At that ceremony Prince Jayavarman II
25725-496: The same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin". The Indian tradition states that the Buddha and the Mahavira preferred the Prakrit language so that everyone could understand it. However, scholars such as Dundas have questioned this hypothesis. They state that there is no evidence for this and whatever evidence is available suggests that by the start of the common era, hardly anybody other than learned monks had
25900-556: The semi-nomadic Aryans . The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo-European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the " Mitanni Treaty" between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people, carved into a rock, in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey. Parts of this treaty, such as the names of the Mitanni princes and technical terms related to horse training, for reasons not understood, are in early forms of Vedic Sanskrit. The treaty also invokes
26075-464: The sense of an imperial ruler of the entire Indian sub-continent (as in the case of the Maurya Empire ). The first references to a Chakravala Chakravartin appear in monuments from the time of the early Maurya Empire, in the 4th to 3rd century BCE, in reference to Chandragupta Maurya and his grandson Ashoka . In Hinduism, the term generally denotes a powerful ruler whose dominion extended to
26250-615: The social structures such as the role of the poet and the priests, the patronage economy, the phrasal equations, and some of the poetic metres. While there are similarities, state Jamison and Brereton, there are also differences between Vedic Sanskrit, the Old Avestan, and the Mycenaean Greek literature. For example, unlike the Sanskrit similes in the Ṛg-veda, the Old Avestan Gathas lack simile entirely, and it
26425-724: The south Indian Pallava dynasty and Chalukya dynasty . These Indianized kingdoms, a term coined by George Cœdès in his work Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d'Extrême-Orient , were characterized by resilience, political integrity, and administrative stability. To the north, Indian religious ideas were assimilated into the cosmology of Himalayan peoples, most profoundly in Tibet and Bhutan, and merged with indigenous traditions. Buddhist monasticism extended into Afghanistan , Uzbekistan , and other parts of Central Asia , and Buddhist texts and ideas were accepted in China and Japan in
26600-514: The south and the Khmer Empire to the north competed for influence in the region. A defining characteristic of the cultural link between Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent was the adoption of ancient Indian Vedic /Hindu and Buddhist culture and philosophy into Myanmar , Tibet , Thailand , Indonesia , Malaya , Laos and Cambodia. Indian scripts are found in Southeast Asian islands ranging from Sumatra, Java, Bali, South Sulawesi and
26775-532: The spread of Indianization into Southeast Asia is through the class of Brahman scholars. These Brahmans brought with them many of the Hindu religious and philosophical traditions and spread them to the elite classes of Southeast Asian polities. Once these traditions were adopted into the elite classes, it disseminated throughout all the lower classes, thus explaining the Indianization present in all classes of Southeast Asian society. Brahmans were also experts in art and architecture, and political affairs, thus explaining
26950-858: The trade routes that linked India with southern Burma , central and southern Siam , the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra to Java , lower Cambodia and Champa . The Pali and Sanskrit languages and the Indian script, together with Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism , Brahmanism and Hinduism , were transmitted from direct contact as well as through sacred texts and Indian literature. Southeast Asia had developed some prosperous and very powerful colonial empires that contributed to Hindu-Buddhist artistic creations and architectural developments. Art and architectural creations that rivaled those built in India, especially in its sheer size, design and aesthetic achievements. The notable examples are Borobudur in Java and Angkor monuments in Cambodia. The Srivijaya Empire to
27125-487: The trading centers across the regions of Southeast Asia, including one of the most dominant centers, Malacca, and has therefore stressed a widespread rise of Islamization. The eastern regions of Afghanistan were considered politically as parts of India. Buddhism and Hinduism held sway over the region until the Muslim conquest. Kabul and Zabulistan which housed Buddhism and other Indian religions , offered stiff resistance to
27300-653: The turn of the 1st-millennium CE, it has been written in various Brahmic scripts , and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari . Sanskrit's status, function, and place in India's cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India 's Eighth Schedule languages . However, despite attempts at revival, there are no first-language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but
27475-484: The upbringing of highly organized central states. Indians were still able to implement their religion, political ideas, literature, mythology, and art. It is conjectured that certain traditional Indian games spread throughout Southeast Asia, as variations of Indian games such as atya-patya and gilli danda can be found throughout the region. Also, the Indonesian hom pim pa (a method of selecting players before
27650-408: The variants in the usage of Sanskrit in different regions of India. The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Āpiśali, Kaśyapa , Gārgya, Gālava, Cakravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja , Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka and Sphoṭāyana. In the Aṣṭādhyāyī , language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians. Pāṇini's grammar, according to Renou and Filliozat, is a classic that defines
27825-564: The vernacular Prakrits. Many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits. The cities of Varanasi , Paithan , Pune and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era. According to Lamotte , Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication. It was, states Lamotte, an ideal instrument for presenting ideas, and as knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied, so did its spread and influence. Sanskrit
28000-660: The very Vishnu" in reference to the Emperor Raja Raja Chola I . Indianised Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Southeast Asia deployed the Indian Hindu and Buddhist traders, monks, priests as scholars in their courts. Under the influence of these scholars these kingdoms adopted the concept of devaraja. It was first adopted by the Indianised Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Java . The Khmer empire which ruled Cambodia and Vietnam and other parts of
28175-470: The vicinity of Kračèḥ close to the ancient town of Śambhupura (K. 134, dated 781 CE). The Sdok Kăk Thoṃ inscription incised c. 250 years after the events (of which their historicity is doubtful) recounts that on the top of the Kulen Hills, Jayavarman II instructed a Brahmana priest named Hiraṇyadāman to conduct a religious ritual known as the concept of the devarāja ( Khmer : ទេវរាជា ) which placed him as
28350-570: The worship of Shiva and Vishnu was combined with ancestor worship, so that Khmer, Javanese, and Cham rulers claimed semi-divine status as descendants of a God. Hindu traditions, especially the relationship to the sacrality of the land and social structures, are inherent in Hinduism's transnational features. The epic traditions of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa further legitimized a ruler identified with
28525-502: The Ṛg-veda is distinctly more archaic than other Vedic texts, and in many respects, the Rigvedic language is notably more similar to those found in the archaic texts of Old Avestan Zoroastrian Gathas and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . According to Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton – Indologists known for their translation of the Ṛg-veda – the Vedic Sanskrit literature "clearly inherited" from Indo-Iranian and Indo-European times
28700-458: Was a Bodhisattva (enlightened one), therefore basing his power on his religious power, his moral power, and his purity of blood. Priests took charge in the royal coronation . The king was treated as a reincarnation of Hindu gods . Ayutthaya historical documents show the official titles of the kings in great variation: Indra , Shiva and Vishnu , or Rama . Seemingly, Rama was the most popular, as in "Ramathibodhi". However, Buddhist influence
28875-408: Was a spoken language ( bhasha ) used by the cultured and educated. Some sutras expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit. Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit, not in the vernacular language of that region. According to Sanskrit linguist professor Madhav Deshpande, Sanskrit
29050-427: Was a spoken language in a colloquial form by the mid-1st millennium BCE which coexisted with a more formal, grammatically correct form of literary Sanskrit. This, states Deshpande, is true for modern languages where colloquial incorrect approximations and dialects of a language are spoken and understood, along with more "refined, sophisticated and grammatically accurate" forms of the same language being found in
29225-472: Was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture, arts, and profound ideas. Pollock disagrees with Lamotte, but concurs that Sanskrit's influence grew into what he terms a "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" over a region that included all of South Asia and much of southeast Asia. The Sanskrit language cosmopolis thrived beyond India between 300 and 1300 CE. Today, it is believed that Kashmiri is the closest language to Sanskrit. Reinöhl mentions that not only have
29400-481: Was also evident, as many times the king's title and "unofficial" name "Dhammaraja", an abbreviation of the Buddhist Dharmaraja . The two former concepts were re-established, with a third, older concept taking hold. The king, portrayed by state interests as a semi-divine figure, then became—through a rigid cultural implementation—an object of worship and veneration to his people. From then on the monarchy
29575-686: Was also the language of some of the oldest surviving, authoritative and much followed philosophical works of Jainism such as the Tattvartha Sutra by Umaswati . The Sanskrit language has been one of the major means for the transmission of knowledge and ideas in Asian history. Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE, carried by the influential Buddhist pilgrim Faxian who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE. Xuanzang , another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, learnt Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in
29750-483: Was embraced by numerous rulers of Southeast Asia. The rulers amid this time, for example, the Lin-I Dynasty of Vietnam once embraced the Sanskrit dialect and devoted sanctuaries to the Indian divinity Shiva. Many rulers following even viewed themselves as "reincarnations or descendants" of the Hindu gods. However once Buddhism began entering the nations, this practiced view was eventually altered. Indianization
29925-553: Was largely removed from the people and continued under a system of absolute rule. Living in palaces designed after Mount Meru ("home of the gods" in Hinduism), the kings turned themselves into a " Chakravartin ", where the king became an absolute and universal lord of his realm. Kings demanded that the universe be envisioned as revolving around them , and expressed their powers through elaborate rituals and ceremonies. For four centuries these kings ruled Ayutthaya, presiding over some of
30100-617: Was proclaimed a universal monarch ( Kamraten jagad ta Raja in Cambodian) or God King ( Deva Raja in Sanskrit). According to some sources, Jayavarman II had resided for some time in Java during the reign of Sailendras , or "The Lords of Mountains", hence the concept of Devaraja or God King was ostensibly imported from Java. At that time, Sailendras allegedly ruled over Java, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and parts of Cambodia. An inscription from
30275-433: Was the basis for more centralized kingdoms that emerged in Java, Sumatra, Cambodia, Burma, and along the central and south coasts of Vietnam from the 4th to 8th centuries. Art, architecture, rituals, and cultural elements such as the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata had been adopted and customized increasingly with a regional character. The caste system, although adopted, was never applied universally and reduced to serve for
30450-439: Was used at least since the mid-15th century. The term, which seems to have been used with variable precision, sometimes meant only the Indian subcontinent; Europeans used a variety of terms related to South Asia to designate the South Asian peninsula, including High India , Greater India , Exterior India and India aquosa . However, in some accounts of European nautical voyages, Greater India (or India Major ) extended from
30625-442: Was visualized as "pervading all creation", another representation of the world itself; the "mysterious magnum" of Hindu thought. The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound, and the common thread that wove all ideas and inspirations together became the quest for what the ancient Indians believed to be a perfect language, the "phonocentric episteme" of Sanskrit. Sanskrit as
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