India Outside of India

ചീനകല   Chinese fishing nets, Kerala  Source: ബരഗുല്

Cœdès apart, what is today seen as the Indian heritage in Southeast Asia is beyond intricate, also because there are comparatively few sources that are not either archaeological or inscriptional. The written sources are therefore often Chinese as the Chinese would keep records in their annals and chronicles of all the lands they knew and kept relations with it. In fact, in comparison to the Chinese - and to a lesser degree to Arabs and other Muslims - Indians and their Southeast Asian brethren have kept comparatively few records. These are also often in various different languages - which basically means in several different scripts as well. Only a man such as Cœdès could face such a large variety of scripts and languages with considerable success. He was in fact originally a Latin and Greek specialist who started reading - and publishing - records in both languages related to Asia when he was still very young. At 32 he would be charged by the Siamese monarch with the care of the National Library of Siam, a post he would keep for almost a decade. He is therefore someone with a very solid philological background in Europe who then turned his attention to Southeast Asia and its Indic past with an amazing degree of success.

Side Entrance to Puttan Malika, the Kuda Palace, Trivandrum   Source: ബരഗുല്

It is now going to be impossible, I believe, to find someone with his range of languages: he delved into Mon, Khmer, Old Malay, Old Javanese, Sanskrit, Thai, Pali, Cham and other manuscripts and inscriptional material from all over Asia Tenggara. That kind of wide-ranging philological knowledge was rare in his lifetime (he died in 1969 in Paris) and is nowadays beyond rare. Also, there is no political power that requires that kind of knowledge or even has much room for it at all. It is peculiar to think that a man who was still alive when I was born now belongs to an academic and political dispensation that is no more. He was therefore exceptional in his time; now he would be an impossibly rare bird. An interesting fact is that he was from Jewish Hungarian origin. His family apparently changed the family name from Kados to Cœdès to frenchify it. He seems to have been quite particular about the ligature between the 'o' and the 'e' in his name. In fact, it makes for a very chic-sounding name in French. Therefore, he was a man who must have grown up in-between languages and cultures. His grandparents were immigrants from Austria-Hungary and he himself became an immigrant in Southeast Asia, including a long stint in Siam under royal patronage (he therefore ended up living under a monarch for a time just as his grandparents had done). The Siamese king of course not only wanted him to organise the national library; he must also have wanted the Orientalist power that Cœdès represented (a power, we should note, based ultimately on European philological knowledge as he was originally a Latin and Greek specialist). Siamese kings were historically very shrewd in their confrontations with the West: they imported and used anything that they thought could be useful. An Oriental kingdom with a well-organised library of Oriental manuscripts is a force to be reckoned with. After all, it would be only as late as the end of the 1930s that the United States - and very reluctantly England - would recognise Siamese laws as civilised and modern. Therefore, it woud only be in the very eve of the Second World War that Siam would shed off its unequal treaties with the West. In 1938 the Dutch in colonial Indonesia decided to upgrade Siamese citizens to European legal status (that is, the most privileged status in colonial society).

It is more than a little ironic - and more than a little significant - that over four decades after his death and over seventy-five years after he published one of his major works we are still not only reading him but are also largely dependent on the knowledge he excavated with so much effort and labour and also the insights he gained from his unstinting efforts. I wonder whether we will ever be rid of him in our lifetime. I doubt it. One of the most interesting facts about him is that his work seems to fall largely outside any critiques of Orientalism. It is not read as gospel truth any more, of course, but the authority and prestige attached to it is still nothing short of enormous. No wonder the king of Siam wanted him as head of his national library even though he was only 32 at the time.

He states by the way that Cham is the Austronesian language with the oldest written material - fourth century A.D. It therefore predates both Malay and Javanese inscriptions (the next Austronesian languages to acquire a written form) by a couple of centuries. Today the Cham are a little known ethnic minority in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia, most of whom are probably Muslim. In fact, the Cham were historically the easternmost Indic polity in the continent living right next to the Sino-Vietnamese border for centuries until they were eventually swallowed up by a southwardly expanding Vietnam. They were therefore geographically in a similar position but at the opposite end of the Indic world to that of the ancient Kambojas in today's Iran and Afghanistan. Of course the Philippines have had Indic influence too, though I don't think they ever had an Indic polity as such. East Kalimantan, and Lombok and Sumbawa (and possibly South Sulawesi), remain the islands where Indic polities reached their easternmost expansion.That is in fact an enormous stretch of territory, going all the way from today's Middle East and Central Asia to Eastern Indonesia and Central Vietnam. 

It is this long and complex though highly fragmented history that Cœdès invites us to revisit again and again. If the Bujjanga Valley in Kedah, north Peninsular Malaysia, is anything to go by, that history was already well over a thousand years old when Islam first took root in the region. Parts of Eastern Indonesia, parts of the Philippines, and north Vietnam excluded, that history has also reached practically every nook and corner of Asia Tenggara at one point or another. It remains glaringly visible in places as varied as Bali, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand/Siam not to mention East and Central Jawa. Yet it is a history that was rediscovered/reshaped through colonial knowledge and that now inhabits somewhat uneasily the postcolonial memory, with Indonesia quite aware of it, Malaysia trying to shun it because it is not Islamic, and Thailand/Siam practically celebrating it all the time.

Wondering what lies behind...  Source: ബരഗുല്

The Indic heritage is so complex because it has so many facets to it. There is also the movement of people from India to Asia Tenggara which is both old and recent. Today I finally visited the Kampung Chetty in Melaka. The temple has a museum attached to it. A community museum where some times newspaper clippings about the kampung are framed and exhibited on the walls. There is a map at the entrance - a French colonial map, as a matter of fact, with some routes marked on it with a pen. The routes show the migration of the original traders who are supposed to be the ancestors of the community. They came from both what is today the coast of Andhra Pradesh and that of Tamil Nadu to the south. My masseur near the Geographer's Café in town however tells me that the Chetties look mostly like people from Andhra, not Tamils as such. The lady at the reception pointed out to me that the route they took to arrive in Melaka from India did not go via the strait. On the contrary, they disembarked in Sumatra, somewhere in or near today's Padang on the west coast. Then they would travel overland across the island and then cross the strait to Melaka. That is in fact a well-known old route to Melaka from India. Abdur-razzaq Lubis, an historian in Penang, tells me that until about two hundred years ago the whole of Sumatra was in fact turned towards the Indian Ocean, not the straits. That is a more recent, colonial orientation. The story goes that the traders did not come with their wives, and that therefore they took local wives. That is the origin of the community, already present in Melaka in pre-Portuguese times. It is an old Indian Ocean tale, namely, of male outsiders marrying female locals and starting a lineage and even a whole community as in the case of the Chetties.

They are a very small community, probably hardly about one thousand and five hundred people, though of course nowadays there are Chetties also in Singapore and other places (the lady at the reception desk however tells me they still come back to the Kampung for the religious festivities such as Deepavali). They don't speak any Indian languages any more. Funnily enough, apparently some families now make their children go to Tamil school so as to learn that language, as if that was indeed the language of their ancestors (and not, say, Telugu, the main language in Andhra). The community is in fact Malay-speaking, though their Malay is different to Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Malay and is also different to the Malay of local Malays. They are the only entirely Malay-speaking community of Indian origin in the whole of Malaysia. They keep their Hindu religion, however, and the temple on Jalan Tukang Emas - from the eighteenth century - is obviously important to them. They now live in their own Kampung, but as I suspected in previous centuries they used to live near their temple. In fact, the whole area there seems to have been Indian somehow: the Masjid Kampung Kling was a South Indian mosque, and it is almost right next door to the temple. The whole neighbourhood there nowadays is however Chinese without a single exception. Rather than an ethnic enclave, the historic centre of Melaka is today therefore a Chinese town lock, stock, and barrel. Until the times of the Dutch it was not so, however. The Chetties, being tradesmen, were strictly controlled by the Dutch who disliked having any competition - after all, the Dutch were there as representatives of a trading company that eventually started doubling as a colonial power some time during the eighteenth century in Melaka as elsewhere in Asia.

The Chetties therefore had to move away from the town proper into areas that used to be well out of town though they are now part and parcel of the urban fabric of Melaka (Kampung Chetty lies in fact just less than a half an hour's walk from the old Stadthuys which was the centre of Dutch power). Also, they apparently had to switch from trade to agriculture in order to survive the onslaught of the Dutch East India Company. The Kampung is nowadays very modest: about sixty-odd houses. I notice that a couple of them are in fact inhabited by Chinese, not by Chetties. No house looks grand, and some look definitely poor and shabby. They are made of planks though they are usually not raised on stilts like traditional Malay houses around Melaka (say in Pengkalan Batu). Josephine Chua has told me that the Kampung was flooded last December. This did not use to happen before but only now because of the extensive and on-going reclamation that is changing the natural water flow and drainage all over the city. There is a large stage and also a reading hall (Bilik Bacaan) at the end. Next door there is some very modern and posh-looking houses just being built. I wonder whether any Chetties are meant to inhabit it. I doubt it. They look like places only the well-to-do can afford. I eavesdrop two ladies talking in a front yard and they are talking in English. So here too perhaps Anglicisation has arrived with a vengeance. The Chinese ladies next door are chatting in what I take to be Hokkien. I notice they have a very large porcelain Ganesha in the living room. The windows and doors are often open so it is easy to catch a glimpse of the interior of some houses. 

One of the many interesting details about the Chetties is that their use of kebaya for instance is different to that of either the Peranakan or the Malays (their spoken Malay however is closer to that of the Peranakan according to what I read in the museum). Therefore, even when they use traditional clothing this marks them out as a different group from other groups in town. I also notice two photographs without any captions or explanations tucked away in the back room: they show people in transe and putting their hands in live coals. It all looks very Indian to me. To say this is slightly funny, however. Everybody in town knows that the Chetties have kept no connections to India in terms of relatives or places of origin. The lady in charge of the museum has confirmed that: the Chetties are local. However, if at least some families want their children to learn Tamil, then that is because a connection is thought to be desirable or even necessary. Tamil is the majority Indian language in Malaysia today. It eclipses all other Indian languages. That does not mean however there are not many Malaysian Indians who have non-Tamil origins and even used to speak - or still do - languages other than Tamil. Also, of course, there are different varieties of Tamil. There are Malaysians who were nurtured in Jaffna Tamil, which is spoken in the northern tip of Sri Lanka and is nothing like Tamil in Tamil Nadu let alone in Malaysia.

I guess however Cœdès must have been unaware of the existence of the Chetties. After all, they did not have any manuscripts or inscriptions. Also they came comparatively late onto the historical stage of Southeast Asia and information about them seems to be exclusively of colonial origin or at least from colonial times. However, they are an example of how complex the Indic connection actually is in Southeast Asia, Malaysia included. Namely, it is full of unexpected nooks and corners.

 Trivandrum  Source: ബരഗുല്

Back in my charming bare room in the decaying eighteenth century house that is now a guest house I have hung two charts on my wall: one is Belajar Bahasa Tamil, printed in Penang (I also bought it there last year, in a Tamil bookshop in Little India); the other is an Aksara Jawa chart that I bought from a street vendor whose goods were spread out on the pavement in the night market on the alun-alun of the Kraton in Yogya. The aksara stare at me. There are many more Tamil aksara than there are Jawa ones. In fact, there are 299 possibilities for Tamil letters, including all possible conjuncts in my chart, plus about thirteen letters for vowels. In basa Jawi, there are only twenty main aksara, about twenty conjuncts only plus a dozen other signs for vowels and diacritics. In fact, island Southeast Asian scripts, even when they have followed closely on the steps of Indic scripts as in the case of aksara Jawa or Hånåcåråkå, are simplified scripts compared to scripts from India itself: there are always fewer diactrics and fewer letters too. In the five-odd closely related scripts of the Batak languages, that simplicity becomes almost minimalist, also because the aksara have been simplified into a couple of strokes only. In this domain at least indicisation has meant simplification to some degree. I like Hånåcåråkå better than I do the Tamil writing: it flows more. Then I learn from a web document I have downloaded that Jawa Kuno or Old Javanese in fact used a letter for 'ka' that is almost identical to க in today's Tamil. As Madhava Prasad has suggested to me, when you look into the folds of a language, you only find part of it; the rest is elsewhere. Cœdès in fact understood well that in order to piece together the whole picture of Asia Tenggara Masa Hindu-Buddha the only way was looking into the folds of all the languages of the region that had left inscriptions and manuscripts through the ages. He was amazingly successful in that endeavour of a lifetime. Now we remain captive to his work.

Contemplating the Indic Past in Ratu Boko, Yogya  Source: Sri Margono