Suvarnabhumi's legacies

It’s not often that current news echoes one’s reading of events of more than 800 years ago. Yet, that’s exactly how it appeared when my driver reported in anguish that Cyclone Amphan had blown away his mother’s house in Kakdwip at the mouth of the Ganga. I had just read in George Coedès’s The Indianized States of Southeast Asia  of another Bay of Bengal storm in 1180 that blew one of the boats escorting a Ceylonese princess to Cambodia off course so that it “landed at Kakadipa, ‘island of the crows’”.
 
Coedès weaves the mishap into a rich tapestry of cultural expansion, power politics, royal intrigue and religious syncretism in a detailed account that originally appeared in French in Hanoi in 1944 as Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d’Extreme-Orient.  The East-West Centre in Honolulu published Sue Brown Cowing’s English translation long before I went there as editor-in-residence. Reading it at this time of national distress shows up the incompetence, deceit, corruption and pettiness of India’s present-day rulers when compared to the grand vision and dynamism of the creators of a fabled empire of the mind whose territorial manifestation the Ramayana called Suvarnabhumi, Land of Gold.

 
I would never have been able to spend the lockdown aggravated by Cyclone Amphan so pleasurably engrossed in a glorious past if Teh Joo Lin’s gift of Coedès’s book had not reached me just before India pulled up the drawbridge and went into quarantine. I had always meant to buy it when we lived in Singapore but there were more pressing demands on my reading time (and purse!) and I kept putting it off from month to month until reading tastes changed, and Select Stores, the specialist bookshop tucked away in Tanglin Mall that had a copy, closed down. On my recent visit to Singapore even the massive Japanese-owned Kinokuniya bookshop in busy Orchard Road where my three-year-old grandson delightedly clapped his hands and shrieked “Libraree!” no longer stocked The Indianized States. Presumably, Joo Lin ordered it from Amazon.

 

There’s nothing of the antiquarian about the young Chinese Singaporean. He was a journalist, as good in sports as in studies, the brightest student in my class when I taught at what is now the Wee Kim Wee School of Journalism at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Obviously, however, my teaching wasn’t inspired enough to create a lifelong interest. After a stint with my old paper, the Straits Times, Joo Lin retrained in law and is now an up-and-coming arbitration lawyer who would have extended his practice to Delhi if this dreadful pandemic hadn’t intervened. Waiting for him to resume that project, I am comforted by the knowledge that my teaching wasn’t quite wasted: Joo Lin’s wife is still with the paper.

 
Sadly, the Southeast Asian linkage means little to today’s Indians. Time was when the wives of two senior diplomats, A P Venkateswaran and Sudhir Devare, choreographed dance-dramas titled Bali Yatra, voyages to a Hindu island that, says Coedès, stands in relation to Java, like Buddhist Tibet to India. Odisha’s swashbuckling Biju Patnaik once told me as we bowled along the marine highway in his jeep — Biju driving from the aeroplane pilot’s seat he had installed — about the festival when Oriya women launch symbolic boats, hollowed-out plantain trunks with twinkling oil lamps, wishing their menfolk safe voyage to Bali and reminding them to bring back gold ornaments for their hair from Suvarnabhumi. But when I mentioned Bali Yatra to a smart young Oriya, he shot back “Yes, it’s always performed in the  bali (sand)!”

 
As a child of 19th century migrants, Joo Lin lies outside the direct scope of Coedès’s study. But 1,500 years of Indian influence at its best has left a profound imprint on the region’s subconscious thinking beyond the disciplines of literature, art, language and ritual where India’s legacy is easily discernible. Coedès contrasts tribal peasants in Southeast Asian pockets whose lives India did not touch with highly sophisticated Cambodia, the foremost Indianised state with a devoutly Buddhist monarch but where “the Bako, or court Brahmans, still officiate in royal ceremonies”. The least advanced Cambodian in a hierarchical state “is subject to courts that judge according to a written code …”. Other Asians share his coherent views of the world and the hereafter while his system of writing gives him access to a vast literature and enables him to communicate with his fellow men. The author concludes, “All this he owes to India.”

 
It would be an interesting quirk of history if roles were reversed and the region that Coedès calls “Farther India” sends us the protocols and procedures of arbitration and mediation. Of course, many in this country will insist that these legal devices were part of the “Make in India” package that also included the first inter-planetary aircraft that Rama flew and the divine hybrids our plastic surgeons created by grafting animal hea­ds on human bodies. But there are some Indians with wisdom enough to know what they don’t know. Their ancestors founded Suvarnabhumi; they might welcome and make use of new ideas.

 
Pandemic Perusing is an occasional freewheeling column on books and reading by our writers and reviewers