Southeast Asian Scripts and Sanskrit

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Southeast Asian Scripts and Sanskrit

West's Meditations
alwestmeditates.blogspot.com
Sunday, February 24, 2013

Everyone on the net seems to be talking about Napoleon
Chagnon.� I have nothing to add to this debate and it has
descended into name-calling.� A lot of the same
accusations are flying again - Chagnon hates the
Yanomami, Neel and Chagnon had Yanomami people kill one
another in exchange for axes and money, etc. - despite
their having been debunked repeatedly.� It's boring and
annoying, so I'm going to focus on something else:
southeast Asia inscriptions and Sanskrit.

The earliest inscriptions in southeast Asia are in
Sanskrit.� Actually, that's only sort of true - the
earliest inscriptions are definitely in Sanskrit, but
they were followed so closely by native languages
(specifically, Cham) that to emphasise the Sanskrit
epigraphy would be misguided.� Nonetheless, from Myanmar
through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and out to Java and
Bali, Sanskrit appears to have served as a liturgical
language, if not something more, for at least a few
hundred years.� Sanskrit and, eventually, Pali, have had
such clear impacts on modern southeast Asian languages
that they must also have carried some weight as
vernaculars as well, although clearly not in the same way
as Latin did.

If you look at Malay, you'll see a huge Sanskrit
influence, especially in the Indonesian dialects of it
(including standard Indonesian).� Commonly-used words
like bisa (meaning 'to be able to, can') from Sanskrit
bhisa ('power') inflect daily spoken language in
southeast Asia with an Indic superstrate.� So Sanskrit
wasn't just as a religious language; it had, and
continues to have, a broader impact (Sanskrit is still
used to form new words in Indonesian today, just as Latin
and Greek are in English and other European languages).
Tamil is also represented in inscriptions from the same
period, and had a similar impact on southeast Asian
languages, which is not surprising given the significant
interest of Tamil traders in the region, and given the
fact that Indic culture appears to have been introduced
to Indonesia and beyond by south Indians.

Georges Coedes, an early twentieth century scholar of
southeast Asia, noted that Sanskrit was first written
down in southeast Asia almost as early as it was in south
Asia itself.� There was very little time lag between
Sanskrit's written use in India and its use in epigraphy
in Borneo and Vietnam.� It also seems likely that there
was a lag of less than a century between Gautama Buddha
teaching in Magadha (c.4th century BCE) and the
introduction of Buddhism to southeast Asia (indicated by
the presence of lion figures carved from Indian carnelian
in Thailand, specifically Ba Don Tha Phet, at a time when
the lion represented Gautama himself).� At this early
stage, parts of south and southeast Asia appear to have
formed a continuum of overlapping cultural groups united
at the upper echelons by the spread of Indian religious
traditions from centres in north India, and perhaps by
the use of Sanskrit.

More recently, the Indologist Sheldon Pollock, of
Columbia University, has claimed that Sanskrit used to
serve as the 'cosmopolitan language' of the area from
Kashmir to Vietnam and Indonesia among populations who
spoke diverse languages.� He sees Sanskrit as a unifying
influence within this sphere prior to the arrival of
Timur in India in the fifteenth century.� I find this
troubling for a number of reasons, the foremost of which
is that while at the beginning of the period (early mid-
first millennium CE, roughly c.300-400) the script used
in all of southeast Asia was the same (the Pallava
script, written with variations both on the mainland and
in the maritime regions), after the first century or two
there was a sudden diversification and regionalisation in
scripts.� It is also clear that the original script for
Sanskrit in southeast Asia came from south India, and was
actually very different from scripts used in north India
and Afghanistan in the same period.� This means that at
no point in the history of Sanskrit would a text written
in Borneo or Cambodia have been immediately legible to
somebody in Kashmir, and vice versa.

Continues at:

http://alwestmeditates.blogspot.com/2013/02/southeast-asian-scripts-and-sanskrit.html

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

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