Greater India: Difference between revisions

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'''Greater India''', also known as 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 [[Culture of India|Indian culture]], which itself formed from the various distinct indigenous cultures of [[South Asia]].<ref>{{Cite book|last1=Lévi|first1=Sylvain|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dx5dzJGGBg0C&q=austroasiatic+influence+on+india&pg=PR15|title=Pre-Aryan and Pre-Dravidian in India|last2=Przyluski|first2=Jean|last3=Bloch|first3=Jules|date=1993|publisher=Asian Educational Services|isbn=978-81-206-0772-9|access-date=26 March 2023|archive-date=26 March 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230326195030/https://books.google.com/books?id=dx5dzJGGBg0C&q=austroasiatic+influence+on+india&pg=PR15|url-status=live}}</ref> It is an umbrella term encompassing the [[Indian subcontinent]] and surrounding countries, which are culturally linked through a diverse cultural cline. These countries have been transformed to varying degrees by the acceptance and introduction of [[Culture|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.

By the early centuries of the [[Common Era|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 [[Epigraphy|epigraphic]] systems were declared [[official script|official]], like those of the south Indian [[Pallava dynasty]] and [[Chalukya dynasty]].<ref name="Lavy-2003">{{citation |last=Lavy |first=Paul |title=As in Heaven, So on Earth: The Politics of Visnu Siva and Harihara Images in Preangkorian Khmer Civilisation |journal=Journal of Southeast Asian Studies |volume=34 |pages=21–39 |number=1 |year=2003 |url=https://www.academia.edu/2635407 |access-date=23 December 2015 |doi=10.1017/S002246340300002X |s2cid=154819912 |archive-date=12 August 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210812222402/https://www.academia.edu/2635407 |url-status=live }}</ref><ref name="Stark-1999"/> These [[Indianization of Southeast Asia|Indianized]] kingdoms, a term coined by [[George Cœdès]] in his work ''Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d'Extrême-Orient'',{{sfnp|Coedès|1968|pp=14–}} were characterized by resilience, political integrity, and administrative stability.<ref>{{citation |first=Pierre-Yves |last=Manguin |chapter=From Funan to Sriwijaya: Cultural continuities and discontinuities in the Early Historical maritime states of Southeast Asia |title=25 tahun kerjasama Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi dan Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient |location=Jakarta |publisher=Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi / EFEO |year=2002 |pages=59–82 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NJBwAAAAMAAJ |access-date=26 March 2023 |archive-date=26 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230326195002/https://books.google.com/books?id=NJBwAAAAMAAJ |url-status=live }}</ref>

 

 

==Evolution of the concept==

{{Further|Indies|Geography (Ptolemy)}}

[[File:1864 Mitchell Map of India, Tibet, China and Southeast Asia - Geographicus - India-mitchell-1864.jpg|thumb|300px|[[Hindoostan]] and [[Farther India]] in a 1864 map by [[Samuel Augustus Mitchell]]]]

 

However, in some accounts of European nautical voyages, Greater India (or ''India Major'') extended from the [[Malabar Coast]] (present-day [[Kerala]]) to ''India extra Gangem''<ref>{{Harv|Wheatley|1982|p=13}} Quote: "Subsequently the whole area came to be identified with one of the "Three Indies," though whether ''India Major'' or ''Minor, Greater'' or ''Lesser, Superior'' or ''Inferior'', seems often to have been a personal preference of the author concerned. When Europeans began to penetrate into Southeast Asia in earnest, they continued this tradition, attaching to various of the constituent territories such labels as Further India or Hinterindien, the East Indies, the Indian Archipelago, Insulinde, and, in acknowledgment of the presence of a competing culture, Indochina."</ref> (lit. "India, beyond the Ganges," but usually the [[East Indies]], i.e. present-day [[Malay Archipelago]]) and ''India Minor'', from Malabar to [[Sindh|Sind]].<ref>{{Harv|Caverhill|1767}}</ref> ''[[Farther India]]'' was sometimes used to cover all of modern Southeast Asia.<ref name="Lewis-1997"/> 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 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]").<ref>{{cite book |last=Uhlig |first=Siegbert |date=2003 |title=Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: He-N |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=l4WUdKWGcYsC |publisher=Isd |page=145 |isbn=978-3-447-05607-6}}</ref>

 

===Expansionist and political concept===

The term ''Greater India'' and the notion of an explicit Hindu expansion of ancient Southeast Asia have been linked to both [[Indian nationalism]]<ref>{{harvtxt|Keenleyside|1982|pp=213–214}} Quote: "Starting in the 1920s under the leadership of Kalidas Nag – and continuing even after independence – a number of Indian scholars wrote extensively and rapturously about the ancient Hindu cultural expansion into and colonisation of South and Southeast Asia. They called this vast region "Greater India" – a dubious appellation for a region which to a limited degree, but with little permanence, had been influenced by Indian religion, art, architecture, literature and administrative customs. As a consequence of this renewed and extensive interest in Greater India, many Indians came to believe that the entire South and Southeast Asian region formed the cultural progeny of India; now that the sub-continent was reawakening, they felt, India would once again assert its non-political ascendancy over the area... While the idea of reviving the ancient Greater India was never officially endorsed by the Indian National Congress, it enjoyed considerable popularity in nationalist Indian circles. Indeed, Congress leaders made occasional references to Greater India while the organisation's abiding interest in the problems of overseas Indians lent indirect support to the Indian hope of restoring the alleged cultural and spiritual unity of South and Southeast Asia."</ref> and [[Hindu nationalism]].<ref>{{harvtxt|Thapar|1968|pp=326–330}} Quote: "At another level, it was believed that the dynamics of many Asian cultures, particularly those of Southeast Asia, arose from Hindu culture, and the theory of Greater India derived sustenance from Pan-Hinduism. A curious pride was taken in the supposed imperialist past of India, as expressed in sentiments such as these: "The art of Java and Kambuja was no doubt derived from India and fostered by the Indian rulers of these colonies." (Majumdar, R. C. et al. (1950), ''An Advanced History of India'', London: Macmillan, p. 221) This form of historical interpretation, which can perhaps best be described as being inspired by Hindu nationalism, remains an influential school of thinking in present historical writings."</ref> 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.<ref name="Zabarskaitė-2022"/> However, many Indian nationalists, like [[Jawaharlal Nehru]] and [[Rabindranath Tagore]], although receptive to "an idealisation of India as a benign and uncoercive world civiliser and font of global enlightenment,"<ref>{{harvtxt|Bayley|2004|pp=735–736}} Quote:"The Greater India visions which Calcutta thinkers derived from French and other sources are still known to educated anglophone Indians, especially but not exclusively Bengalis from the generation brought up in the traditions of post-Independence Nehruvian secular nationalism. One key source of this knowledge is a warm tribute paid to [[Sylvain Lévi]] and his ideas of an expansive, civilising India by Jawaharlal Nehru himself, in his celebrated book, ''The Discovery of India'', which was written during one of Nehru's periods of imprisonment by the British authorities, first published in 1946, and reprinted many times since.... The ideas of both Lévi and the Greater India scholars were known to Nehru through his close intellectual links with Tagore. Thus Lévi's notion of ancient Indian voyagers leaving their invisible 'imprints' throughout east and southeast Asia was for Nehru a recapitulation of Tagore's vision of nationhood, that is an idealisation of India as a benign and uncoercive world civiliser and font of global enlightenment. This was clearly a perspective which defined the Greater India phenomenon as a process of religious and spiritual tutelage, but it was not a Hindu supremacist idea of India's mission to the lands of the Trans-Gangetic ''Sarvabhumi'' or ''Bharat Varsha''."</ref> stayed away from explicit "Greater India" formulations.<ref>{{harvtxt|Narasimhaiah|1986}} Quote: "To him (Nehru), the so-called practical approach meant, in practice, shameless expediency, and so he would say, "the sooner we are not practical, the better". He rebuked a Member of Indian Parliament who sought to revive the concept of ''Greater India'' by saying that 'the honorable Member lived in the days of Bismarck; Bismarck is dead, and his politics more dead!' He would consistently plead for an idealistic approach and such power as the language wields is the creation of idealism—politics' arch enemy—which, however, liberates the leader of a national movement from narrow nationalism, thus igniting in the process a dead fact of history, in the sneer, "For him the Bastille has not fallen!" Though Nehru was not to the language born, his utterances show a remarkable capacity for introspection and sense of moral responsibility in commenting on political processes."</ref> 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."<ref>{{harvtxt|Wheatley|1982|pp=27–28}} Quote: "The tide of revisionism that is currently sweeping through Southeast Asian historiography has in effect taken us back almost to the point where we have to consider reevaluating almost every text bearing on the protohistoric period and many from later times. Although this may seem a daunting proposition, it is nonetheless supremely worth attempting, for the process by which the peoples of western Southeast Asia came to think of themselves as part of ''Bharatavarsa'' (even though they had no conception of "India" as we know it) represents one of the most impressive instances of large-scale acculturation in the history of the world. [[Sylvain Levi]] was perhaps overenthusiastic when he claimed that India produced her definitive masterpieces – he was thinking of Angkor and the Borobudur – through the efforts of foreigners or on foreign soil. Those masterpieces were not strictly Indian achievements: rather were they the outcome of a Eutychian fusion of natures so melded together as to constitute a single cultural process in which Southeast Asia was the matrix and South Asia the mediatrix."</ref> In the field of art history, especially in American writings, the term survived due to the influence of art theorist [[Ananda Coomaraswamy]]. Coomaraswamy's view of pan-Indian art history was influenced by the "Calcutta cultural nationalists."<ref>{{harvtxt|Guha-Thakurta|1992|pp=159–167}}</ref>

 

Its modern meanings often invoke images of soft power.<ref name="Zabarskaitė-2022">{{Citation |last=Zabarskaitė |first=Jolita |title='Greater India' and the Indian Expansionist Imagination, c. 1885–1965: The Rise and Decline of the Idea of a Lost Hindu Empire |date=2022-11-07 |work=‘Greater India’ and the Indian Expansionist Imagination, c. 1885–1965 |url=https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110986068/html?lang=en |access-date=2024-05-14 |publisher=De Gruyter Oldenbourg |language=en |doi=10.1515/9783110986068 |isbn=978-3-11-098606-8}}</ref> 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 the "[[Look East policy (India)|Look East]]" policy, and more recently has involved deepening military ties as well.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Dhand |first=Aamiya |date=2022-12-06 |title=India's Extended Neighborhood and Implications for India's Act East Policy |url=https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2022/12/06/indias-extended-neighborhood-and-implications-for-indias-act-east-policy/ |access-date=2024-05-14 |website=Modern Diplomacy |language=en-US}}</ref>

 

 

==Indian cultural influence==

====Architecture and monuments====

[[File:Prambanan Complex 1.jpg|thumb|The 9th-century Shivaistic temple of [[Prambanan]] in [[Central Java]] near [[Yogyakarta]], the largest Hindu temple in [[Indonesia]]]]

* [[Borobudur]] in Central Java, Indonesia, is the world's largest Buddhist monument. It took shape of a giant stone [[mandala]] crowned with [[stupa]]s and believed to be the combination of Indian-origin Buddhist ideas with the previous [[megalithic]] tradition of native [[Austronesian people|Austronesian]] [[step pyramid]].

* The minarets of 15th- to 16th-century mosques in Indonesia, such as the [[Masjid Agung Demak|Great Mosque of Demak]] and [[Menara Kudus Mosque|Kudus mosque]] resemble those of [[Majapahit]] Hindu temples.

 

===Linguistic commonalities===

|last=Khatnani

|first=Sunita

 

===Toponyms===

* [[Suvarnabhumi]] is a toponym that has been historically associated with Southeast Asia. In Sanskrit, it means "The Land of Gold". Thailand's [[Suvarnabhumi Airport]] is named after this toponym.

* Siamese ancient city of [[Ayutthaya (city)|Ayutthaya]] also derived from Ramayana's Ayodhya.

* Names of places could simply render their Sanskrit origin, such as [[Singapore]], from Singapura (''Singha-pura'' the "lion city"), [[Jakarta]] from ''Jaya'' and ''kreta'' ("complete victory").

* Malaysia named their new government seat as [[Putrajaya]] ("prince of glory") in 1999.

 

{{Further|Austronesian maritime trade network|Maritime silk road|Indian maritime history|Indian Ocean trade|Hinduism in Southeast Asia | Buddhism in Southeast Asia|Balinese Hinduism|History of Indian influence on Southeast Asia}}

[[File:Austronesian maritime trade network in the Indian Ocean.png|300px|thumb|[[Austronesian peoples|Austronesian]] [[Spice trade|proto-historic]] and [[Maritime Silk Road|historic]] maritime trade network in the Indian Ocean<ref name="Manguin-2016">{{cite book|first1 =Pierre-Yves|last1 =Manguin|editor1-first =Gwyn|editor1-last =Campbell|title =Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World|chapter =Austronesian Shipping in the Indian Ocean: From Outrigger Boats to Trading Ships|publisher =Palgrave Macmillan|year =2016|pages =51–76|isbn =9783319338224|chapter-url =https://books.google.com/books?id=XsvDDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA50|access-date =26 March 2023|archive-date =26 March 2023|archive-url =https://web.archive.org/web/20230326195021/https://books.google.com/books?id=XsvDDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA50|url-status =live}}</ref>]]

 

====Khmer Kingdom====

 

====Rise of Islam====

 

{{Further|List of Hindu empires and dynasties}}

 

* '''[[Sunda Kingdom|Sunda]]''': The Kingdom of Sunda was a Hindu kingdom located in western Java from 669 CE to around 1579 CE, covering the area of present-day Banten, Jakarta, West Java, and the western part of Central Java. According to primary historical records, the Bujangga Manik manuscript, the eastern border of the Sunda Kingdom was the Pamali River (Ci Pamali, the present day Brebes River) and the Serayu River (Ci Sarayu) in Central Java.

 

{{see also|Hindu and Buddhist heritage of Afghanistan|Muslim conquests of Afghanistan}}

[[File:Corinthian Capital with Sun God Surya Riding a Chariot (Quadriga) Gandhara 100-200 CE.jpg|thumb|[[Surya]] sitting on a Corinthian chariot from [[Gandhara|ancient Afghanistan]]]]

 

==See also==

* [[Indocentrism]]

* [[Indo-Mediterranean]]

* Language variation: Papers on variation and change in the Sinosphere and in the Indosphere in honour of James A. Matisoff, David Bradley, Randy J. LaPolla and Boyd Michailovsky eds., pp.&nbsp;113–144. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

* {{citation|author=Bijan Raj Chatterjee|title=Indian Cultural Influence in Cambodia|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jLZAAAAAMAAJ|year=1964|publisher=University of Calcutta}}

* Lokesh, Chandra, & International Academy of Indian Culture. (2000). Society and culture of Southeast Asia: Continuities and changes. New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture and Aditya Prakashan.

* R. C. Majumdar, Study of Sanskrit in South-East Asia