Borders and fringes

ஸ்ரீ போயத விநாயக மூர்த்தி கோவில்

Source: برگل

Melaka is supposed to be creolized and highly diverse, whereas the rest of Malaysia perhaps is not or at least is not so to the same extent. It is impossible to deny the incredibly peculiar character of Melaka. It stares you in the face at almost every street corner. Ai Ling's apartment is in a residential neighbourhood out of the city centre. It is typically nondescript. It looks therefore very different from the historic centre of town. The architecture looks utterly uninteresting and unimaginative even in the case of larger and grander houses. I thought it was a thoroughly Chinese neighbourhood. Not at all. Her neighbour is actually Portuguese. Also, I discovered a Tamil kuil - a very small one - on the way to the main road, as well as a large surau that doubles as a religious school. Next to the road there is a very large tree that looks like a bodhi tree: next to its many roots there is a Tamil grave and some flowers around it. The shade of the tree doubles as an informal bus stop. I notice that very few people take the bus there, however. They all either have cars or motor bikes or use friends or family members with cars or bikes. Indians and Malays often drive motor bikes, whereas the Chinese seem to be behind a wheel more often than not.

Melaka is seen today as a former colonial outpost - Portuguese, Dutch, and English - even though it has a pre-colonial past. It is now in fact just over six hundred years old. That means, in the context of Asia Tenggara, that it is a place of fairly recent origin. If it is creolized, its creolisation must therefore be not only of colonial origin, but also pre-colonial. In that case, it must hark back to other polities in the region that preceded it. In fact, Georges Cœdès tells us a story about Fu-nan - an ancient polity roughly in today's Cambodia and south Vietnam with offshots as far as the Malay Peninsula where Melaka is located. Some time in the seventh century it seems that a Brahmin of Saka origin (namely, an Indo-Scythian from a region in or close to today's Central Asia) married a daughter of Raja Isanavarman I's. The iconography of the pre-Angkorian time shows people dressed in ways more than faintly reminiscent of those of contemporary Zoroastrians, which to Cœdès shows an attempt at imitating Sassanid Persia (i.e. pre-Islamic Iran). In epigraphy during the time of Angkor that Brahmin is described as Sakabrahmana.

In fact, Cœdès says that Vishnu statues from the pre-Angkorean period show Pallava influence for instance in the way the hair is sculpted. Pallava is in fact a Deccan dynasty as from the sixth century (straddling territory of what is today Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh) that thought of itself as being of Pahlavi, and therefore of Parthian origin. The Parthians, just as the Scythians, spoke a language of the Northeastern Iranian branch, and originally inhabited an area that today straddles the territories of both Iran and Turkmenistan. Furthermore, again according to Cœdès (who in turn quotes from several different scholars of the first half of the twentieth century, Indians included), the name Cambodia - the successor of Fu-nan - can be linked to the Kamboja, a people that used to inhabit parts of today's Iran. In fact the Encyclopedia Iranica mentions the Kambojas as a people who were Buddhist, used Aramaic script, and lived on the Indo-Iranian historical border. Just as Parthians and Scythians, they are historically a kind of frontier people poised between Central Asia and India (and Eastern Europe). They have seen Hellenistic influence just as the Parthians and Scythians. They are mentioned in Emperor Asoka's edicts (in an Aramaic version for their sake) and as late as the twelfth century there is still mention of them. As for the Indo-Scythian government in Fu-nan, it would have started as early as the mid-fourth century A.D.

This is a geography and history that almost completely elude me, and not only because it is ancient. No history I have ever read or studied has prepared me to conceive of an Indo-Scythian Hindu-Buddhist Zoroastrian-influenced Cambodia. If anything, today's Melaka in comparison to ancient Fu-nan is only a comparatively lacklustre case of creolisation.

Source: ബരഗുല്

Temple and Royal Palace, Trivandrum

As it turns out, I have had a personal encounter with Pahlavi - not the dynasty, but the script. That was in Kottayam, the Syrian Christian stronghold in south Kerala. There are two sixteenth century churches in town, വലിയപള്ളി   (Valyapalli) and the ചെറിയപള്ളി (Cheriapalli), respectively the Great and Little Churches. Now they belong to different - and rival - Syrian Christian denominations. They are both incredible church buildings. They were built by communities who migrated from the coast to the interior as the Portuguese started their religious persecution of local Christians by forcing people to convert to Catholicism (today two thirds or more of Kerala's Christians are in fact Catholics). The Valiapalli has two stone pillars on each side of the altar. They both have Pahlavi inscriptions and are thought to have been brought from Persia to the coast of Kerala some time in the eighth century (by that time however Persia was already largely Islamic). I remember running my hands over the inscriptions. There was a translation somewhere (they were religious lines). I found it remarkable that those two historic pillars were so readily available to me and any worshipper who came into the church. It was also remarkable that they had come all the way from Persia over a thousand years ago, and then all the way from the coast to Kottayam less than five hundred years ago.

The church was full of people lying on the floor on mats, women and children included. They must have either come for some festival or else they were there as refugees from a flood or another calamity. As I had virtually no Malayalam back then it was impossible to know. No one spoke a word of English.  The inscription was in a script derived from the Aramaic script, and used by Parthians as well as Scythians to write their languages. However, it is not an Indic script as in the case of Pallava, found all over Southeast Asia, which is derived ultimately from Brahmi, the fountain of all Indic scripts in use today. It is intringuing to think however that in Kerala both the Aramaic Pahlavi and Indic scripts (such as grantha, the script that gave origin to the scripts used nowadays to write both Tamil and Malayalam) were present whereas only the Indic script apparently managed to make the crossing to Southeast Asia before modern times (there were Persians in the Ayutthaya court as well as in the Aceh Sultanate, however. In Ayutthaya in particular they were very influential, to the point that the Siamese king - a Buddhist monarch - would stage Shi'ia religious celebrations for them. Charnvit Kasetsiri, a well-known Siamese historian and a specialist in Ayutthaya, says somewhere that Persian sources may still yield new insigts into Ayutthaya's somewhat obscure history. But I reckon no Thai historians know any Persian...and no one in Iran is interested in pre-colonial Siamese history).

In fact Kerala also happens to be one of the last strongholds of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent. It was slowly hinduized and by the ninth century everything seems to have been over: henceforth Buddhism was a religion ensconced in neighbouring Sri Lanka only as well as in the Maldives to the south (in this last only until Islam would eventually take over a few centuries later). Sri Lanka has had many links to Southeast Asia across the centuries, of a religious, political, and military nature.

It is peculiar that a prestigious scholarly reference work such as Encyclopaedia Iranica is not aware of the Kottayam inscriptions. In fact, it claims that Kerala is virtually the only place in India that has remained untouched by Persian inscriptions. That is peculiar, especially considering that there is evidence that Persians in fact inhabited medieval Lanka (it is impossible for me to believe that they went to Lanka - and all the way to Ayutthaya and Nusantara - but entirely bypassed Kerala through the centuries). Of course, the Encyclopedia naturally enough links Persian inscriptions in the Indian subcontinent exclusively to Muslim power. No wonder it has missed the Kottayam inscriptions entirely, even though it mentions a Kollam inscription that is now supposedly lost. There is another scriptural link here. It is a well-known one. Namely, the version of the Syriac script used by Syrian Christians in Kerala - particularly the priestly class - is ultimately derived from the Aramaic script which is also the source for Pahlavi. Aramaic was also the script used by the Kambojas, the Buddhist people living in the Indo-Iranian borderlands. In fact, there is Malayalam written in that kind of script, namely the Eastern version of Syriac script (there are currently at least three versions of that script). There are many texts that have never been studied, most of which remain in private collections. The texts are also not only religious in nature but include much else as well: poetry, for instance. Thrissur is particularly rich in such collections. This is a Malayalam literary heritage that remains almost unknown even among Syrian Christians themselves. Of course, the Syriac script is also related through Aramaic to both the Arabic and Hebrew scripts. Both of those also used to be employed to write Malayalam (there are songs in Malayalam in Hebrew script for instance). Arabi Malayalam - namely, Malayalam in Arabic script - still exists and is employed much in the way that Syriac Malayalam is except that its use seems to be much more widespread.

The Christian link to Persia was severed in the early sixteenth century, also because of the Portuguese intrusion, but continued erratically and sporadically through the centuries when envoys would suddenly arrive from there. Finally, in the early twentieth century a new head of the Chaldean church (one of the offshots of Syrian Christianity that is thought to be one of its oldest denominations) in Thrissur was sent from Persia. I also visited their temple, the Martha Maryam Church, built just over two hundred years ago - on land given by the local Hindu ruler. Hindu rulers were routinely the protectors of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities in Kerala throughout the many centuries in which they have resided there.

That kind of tolerance is far from unknown in Southeast Asia. That must mean that Asia Tenggara is actually part of a larger Indian Ocean world that also includes Kerala.

Sumatra in Melaka    Source: برگل

Georges Cœdès, Asia Tenggara Masa Hindu-Buddha. Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia, École française d'Extrême-Orient, Forum Jakarta-Paris, Pusat Penelitian dan Pengembangan Arkeologi Nasional, 2010, pp. 80-81.

http://www.iranica.com/articles/india-ii-historical-geography

http://www.iranica.com/articles/epigraphy-v