Cultural Transfer in Early Historical Maritime Asia

A number of recent articles have rekindled the debate on agency in the production of Southeast Asia's Indic religious monuments by suggesting, on the basis of specific readings of architecture, that an initial period of Indian involvement must have occurred. Roy E. Jordaan (2006) argues for a dichotomous periodization: that a “foreign, Indian” Central Javanese Mahāyāna Buddhist period preceded a more indigenous East Javanese period. To bolster this claim that Indian agency and tutelage was necessary in eighth-century south Central Java, Jordaan quotes the opinions of Willem F. Stutterheim (1925) and Horace G. Quaritch Wales (1961) that Central and East Javanese art represents, respectively, “Hindu art in Java” and “Hindu-Javanese art”.

Michel Jacq-Hergoualc'h (2002, p. 229) has meanwhile opined that the temples of Kedah were the work of “foreign merchants” who were allowed to build there—a surmise based on an overview of extant masonry remains. Like Jordaan, Jacq-Hergoualc'h's claim rests on a reading of masonry remains that has excluded their larger physical setting and the epigraphic evidence connected with their construction or sociocultural milieu.

This chapter re-evaluates the architectural and art historical evidence from early extant monuments in Central Java, Sumatra and Kedah and their architectural innovation and literary references with a focus on highlighting two aspects. First, architectural or iconographic innovations in the early Indic monuments whose significance can be connected to original syntheses expressed in epigraphic or literary sources have been overlooked in the above claims. Second, the syntheses between Indic and Austronesian form typology occurred not only in masonry structures but in aspects of built form that extend well beyond these and involved not just architectural form but conceptual and literary integration and innovation. In some cases, the sources make it clear that literate Western Malayo-Polynesian (WMP) cultures were consciously refashioning Indic ideas, sometimes through their synthesis with autochthonous conceptions; where concepts of Indian origin were expressed in architectural or iconographic schema these translations into form often had no precedence in India and even occurred earlier than the śāstric canonization of the Indic ideas concerned.