Greater India in Asia
We start with the outflow of these influences to the north, east, and south into the rest of Asia. That impact was primarily Buddhist, but also included Hindu and Islamic stages, especially in Southeast Asia.
By at least the time of the Kusanas (first century ce) and, no doubt earlier, Buddhist monks and traders were making their way through the Khyber Pass and the Silk Route, establishing centers of Buddhist culture in Afghanistan and much of Central Asia. By late in the first century of the Common Era, Buddhism had reached Western china as monasteries and Buddhist art were to be found in centers near Loyang, the eventual capital of the Northern Wei dynasty. This Buddhism was primarily of the Mahasafighika variety, though later migrations brought elements of the Yogacara, Madhyamika, and Vajrayana sects.1 Buddhism came relatively late into Tibet, around the eighth century, when forms of Vajrayana (tantric) Buddhism were grafted onto the indigenous Bon religion, spawning in Tibet a school peculiar to that region.2 Buddhas were grafted onto the numerous spirits of Bon which populated the universe. Indigenous shamanism came to inform the stages of Tibetan Buddhist meditation and of death. The convictions of the Indian personalists (pudgalas) provided the seeds for the belief in reincarnation found in Tibet, but also in later schools of China.The Buddhism that spread into Sri Lanka and eventually into Southeast Asia was Theravadin. Once King Tissa of Ceylon was converted by Asoka’s emissary, the island became a Buddhist stronghold. Thereafter monks migrated there, and stored, wrote, and copied Theravadin texts. From Sri Lanka in turn, Theravada Buddhism spread into Burma, the Indonesian Islands, Cambodia, and Thailand. In addition one of the Indian centers that influenced Buddhist art and thought in Southeast Asia was the Buddhist monastic community of Amaravatl now in Andhra Pradesh.
Hindu influences in Southeast Asia in the medieval period were significant, if largely temporary and focused on royalty. These influences were of several kinds. On the one hand, there were Indian travelers who married indigenous women and occasionally assumed the role of king or advisers to the kings. This was the case with such dynasties as Funan in Vietnam in the early centuries ce; certain of the Srlvijayas of Sumatra; and apparently, the early Khmers of Cambodia as well.3 In addition, there were Hindu merchants who settled and occasionally constructed temples to Visnu or Slva - for example, a Visnu temple was built near Pagan, Myanmar, by the eleventh century.4 Then there were those Buddhist kings - for example, of Pagan - who used brahman advisers to help in the development of a royal cult and the construction of their cities, temples, and palaces. The model for these royal centers - from Polonnaravu, Sri Lanka, to Pagan; Angkor, Cambodia; and Ayuthia, Thailand - was significantly Hindu, mingled with Buddhist and indigenous motifs. Thanks to the influence of the Guptas prior to the fifth century, and, later, of the Palas of Bengal, and the Pallavas and Colas of Tamil Nadu, much of the art and architecture of the city, palace, and temple reflected Indian cosmology and Saiva or Vaisnava forms. The temples built at Angkor, for example, often mirrored the architecture of the Pallavas,5 while Saiva expressions, generally incorporating the canons of the Saivagamas, carried orally by Saivite advisers could be detected in the architecture of Pagan and Ayuthia.6 The model of the king was that of the Hindu devaputra (son of the divine) coupled with the Buddhist notion of the cakravartin. Palace and city were microcosms, embodying the multilayered cosmology of India, wherein Mt. Meru stood at the center of the world and the numerology of five, thirty-three, etc. reflected Indian cosmography.7 In time, forms of dance and shadow-puppet theater made their way into Southeast Asia as well where to this day one can see renditions of the Ramayana in Islamic Indonesia and Buddhist Thailand, modified, to be sure, to reflect indigenous sensitivities.
The Islam that made its way into Southeast Asia was also heavily influenced by Indian sources (as well as Persian ones). Muslim merchants from Gujarat, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu were trading and settling by at least the thirteenth century in the coastal towns of Indonesia and Malaysia. Sufis filtered into these communities by invitation of settled merchants and local rulers. As sultanates developed, along the Malay Straits, the Mughal court became the model for kingship and Sufis often became ministers in the courts by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The more recent influx of Indians into “Greater India” is a story in itself. When the British empire ruled in 1835 that slavery would no longer be legal, plantation owners, British and French, sought cheap labor to replace their slaves. Within a few years, boatloads of lower-caste and outcaste workers were recruited, especially from Bengal and Tamil Nadu, but also from Bihar and the northwest. While the Bengali traffic in human cargo slowed, it increased out of the Tamil ports of Madras and Nagapattinam. Plantation owners appointed two kinds of assistants - one “assistant,” drawn from the castes of workers recruited, would attend festivals and villages of Tamil Nadu (or other areas), recruiting young workers for “three-year” stretches. The other type of assistant was of a higher class and knew both English and the vernacular (e.g., Tamil) and could serve as clerks, accountants, and liaison between the British and the laborers.8 Into various parts of the British empire (and to a certain extent the French empire), indentured South Asians were sent: to Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, East Africa, Sri Lanka, the Malay Straits, and the French-controlled islands of Mauritius and Reunion. By the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to unemployment and underemployment exacerbated by floods and droughts, the number of workers leaving Tamil Nadu alone was in the tens of thousands a year.9 Many of these never returned to India.
On the tea plantations of Sri Lanka and the rubber and the palm plantations of Malaysia (where most of the laborers were Tamil), these workers were offered limited amenities - known in Malaysia pejoratively as the “three t’s”.
Toddy shops became one of the few forms of entertainment; elementary schools in the Tamil medium, usually led by under-trained teachers, succeeded in providing minimal literacy in Tamil, but none in either English or Malay, thereby inhibiting the mobility and assimilability of the workers. Finally, temples began to dot the landscape of the plantations, usually in small plots of land made available to the foreman or clerk (that higher-caste figure). Makeshift icons of protector deities such as Maturai Viran or Manmath were implanted. Also common were shrines to Mariamman, the goddess of smallpox, rain, and fertility. Those workers who were not farmers - those who worked in husbandry, construction, clearing of land, etc. - preferred shrines to Kaliyamman, the goddess who protected and presided over the work of hewing and shepherding (and who had been part of the Tamil pantheon since the thirteenth century).These laborers and their bosses were joined by the start of the twentieth century by Indians who came voluntarily seeking better work opportunities - Sikhs often working in security positions, Sindhis or Gujaratis usually in business, Ceylon Tamils who worked in civil service and the professions, Tamil Chettiars who were the bankers and money lenders. Many of these Indians or their descendants stayed, so that in Singapore today some 6 percent of the population is Indian (primarily Tamil) and in Malaysia some 10 percent is Indian (roughly 90 percent of them Tamil). Similarly, this combination of indentured and voluntary migration of South Asians has meant that a significant percentage of the population in several countries around the world today is of South Asian descent, especially those of Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Myanmar, Fiji, and South Africa. The voluntary eastern migration of Indians throughout the twentieth century has led to pockets of Indian settlers in areas where they believed they could make a better life for themselves - Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, as well as Malaysia, and Singapore.
Nonetheless, in Malaysia especially, the vast majority of the Indian population is descended from the indentured servants brought originally to the plantations. Indeed, Indians in Malaysia own slightly more than 1 percent of Malaysia’s wealth, and 90 percent of that is in the hands of the top 10 percent of the Indian Malaysian population. The other 90 percent live at a level below a hypothetical poverty line.10The religious life of these communities is as diverse as their cultural roots. Generally speaking, however, many of them have found religion to be one of the ways to express their ethnic identity. They are engaged in various forms of reinterpretation of their own heritage - following gurus who are perceived to represent their values; meeting together for study, orations, or song fests; and sharing family traditions with one another. Not least important, they are engaged in building or upgrading temples, gurdwaras, or mosques which become social-cultural spaces where they can present to their children and themselves a sense of their heritage. These shrines help provide a sense of place and permanence to those who have migrated into new societies quite removed from their homeland. And, as with their counterparts who remain in India, ritual forms a significant dimension of their religious expression insofar as ritual enacts and embodies the sense of one’s lineage. Many of the temples will host festivals, some modest, some quite elaborate indeed.
One of the most colorful of these festivals of Southeast Asia is Tai PUcam held in January-February. While it occurs at a number of Hindu shrines throughout Malaysia and Singapore, nowhere is it more popular or dramatic than in the Kuala Lumpur area. The festival appears to have been brought to Malaysia by the Chettiars who were worshipers of the Tamil god Murukan as he is enshrined at Palani, where the Chettiars traded in the seventeenth century and were given a special role in the festival. However, for at least the last century, other Indian groups have participated in the festival to the point that it has become virtually the “national” festival of Malaysian Indians.
On Tai Pucam day, the icons of Murukan and his consorts, which had been paraded from Kuala Lumpur some 12 km away, have been set up near a limestone bluff known as Batu Caves; within the cave itself, svayambhu (selfmanifest) representations of Murukan are the center of devotion this day. People come bringing gifts of various kinds - pots of milk, kavatis (shoulder poles bearing peacock feathers or other paraphernalia), and other offerings. Most have taken a vow that they will come to Batu Caves in exchange for a favor the deity has granted. All will climb over 300 steps to the shrine in the cave on the side of the bluff.
The most dramatic of the pilgrims (some several hundred in any given year) are those who go into a trance and subject their bodies to various forms of “sacred wounding,” especially piercing the cheeks or tongue with a lance (the symbol of the deity) or placing hooks throughout the body. It is believed by such pilgrims that they are receiving the grace (arul) of the divine while fulfilling a vow. Many other Hindus, especially those who are Anglicized and upper class, tend to view such activity as an aberration of Hinduism and seek to reduce or eliminate the practice. Yet Batu Caves attracts several hundred thousand pilgrims on Tai Pucam day acting out their sense of what it means to be Indian Malaysian, Tamil, and/or Hindu - through pilgrimage, taking of vows, darsan (viewing the deity), and, occasionally, undergoing more extreme forms of devotion.11