Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (25 page)

Post-Mao China formed links with over seas Chinese businessmen and they in turn became a critical part of China’s own economic rise, investing in their ancestral home land and facilitating contacts abroad. A southeast Asia so dominated by ethnic Chinese business gravitated naturally towards the rapidly expanding Chinese economy; since the early 1990s, nearly 60 per cent of all the foreign investments made in China have been by overseas Chinese (including from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore). By the 2000s, the economies of the region were strongly tied to China’s success. Component parts for products, from cars to iPods, could be manufactured in several different countries before being assembled in China and then shipped to Western and other markets. Political as well as business elites visited Shanghai and the big Chinese industrial cities and were impressed with what they saw. As the global recession rolled around, the West appeared in crisis and the Chinese way of doing things seemed to be shining more brightly than ever. Twenty years into India’s Look East policy, ties between southeast Asia and India were on firm and friendly footing, but it was the Chinese model that was clearly in the ascendancy.

It was not always this way. It is important to remember that for most of the past 2,000 years it was India, not China, that enjoyed the closest connections with southeast Asia and was by far the premier source of outside cultural and religious inspiration. And the effects of centuries of interaction with India in southeast Asia remain deep and enduring. There was a time, not long ago, when the countries of the region, from Burma to Bali, were known to Europeans as ‘Farther India’ and scholars referred to the ‘Indianized states of southeast Asia’. The reasons were plain to see. For centuries this vast area was profoundly influenced by its connections with Indian civilizations, from notions of kingship to cosmology to literature.

Even today, the sway of these ancient interactions is everywhere apparent. The overwhelming majority of people in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia profess an Indian religion, Buddhism, and more than 90 per cent of people on the island of Bali, in Indonesia, are Hindu. Islam arrived in southeast Asia via India, as well as from the Arab world and Persia. Court Brahmans officiate at the royal courts in Bangkok and Phnom Penh, as they did before in palaces from Mandalay to Jogjakarta. The major languages of the region are still written in scripts derived from Indian alphabets, and nearly all have incorporated a vast Indian vocabulary. Words from the Indian liturgical languages, Sanskrit and Pali, are used to express everything from political ideas to modern inventions, and Indian classics such as the
Ramayana
are still seen as integral parts of local tradition. Southeast Asian art and architecture draw heavily from earlier Indian models, and it is impossible to visit the great archaeological sites of Pagan, Angkor or Borobadur and not appreciate the immense impact of the region’s contacts with India.

No one knows how this influence originally developed. The older theory imagined Indian colonists sailing across the Bay of Bengal in ancient times to civilize a barbarian wilderness and establish the earliest kingdoms. It was a reasonable assumption. The rulers of the first recorded kingdoms of southeast Asia bore Sanskrit names and titles and often traced their ancestries back to semi-mythical Indian dynasties. They named their cities after Indian ones (the Siamese capital Ayuthaya, for example, was named after the legendary capital of the god Rama) and performed kingly rituals according to Indian Brahmanic tradition.

It is possible that Indians were first driven to southeast Asia in significant numbers by the ambition to find new sources of gold. From the late centuries
BC
to the first century
AD
trade between India and southeast Asia was largely restricted to the Bay of Bengal and the few scattered ports and peoples along the opposite shores. India’s main trade in these ancient times was westward to Persia and the Red Sea. South Indian ports were thriving trading centres and Roman ships were using the monsoon winds to sail regularly from Aden to India. In all this India enjoyed a massive trade surplus, draining the Romans of their gold, and this led to a Roman response. The Emperor Nero first tried to reduce the gold content of Roman coins and in the late first century
AD
the Emperor Vespasian banned gold exports altogether. About a hundred years before, India had lost its principal source of gold in Siberia due to nomadic movements in Central Asia. After Vespasian’s prohibition, the gold shortage in India became acute. Southeast Asia would become the answer. Before it became known as the land of spices, camphor and aromatic woods, the region was known to Indians for centuries as Suvarnabhumi or the ‘Land of Gold’. It was India’s earliest Look East policy.

Recent scholarship, though, also suggests that southeast Asia prior to its Indian contacts, far from being a barbarian wilderness, was already a dynamic place, with settled agriculture, complex systems of irrigation, and ships able to undertake long-distance voyages. Desires for trade were not just a one-way street. Ancient southeast Asian sailors doubtless roamed far and wide. The main language today of Madagascar, for example, off the east African coast, is Malagasy, a language closely related to the languages of Indonesia, a testament to these now forgotten but epic voyages.

What seems likely is not that Indians colonized southeast Asia, in search of gold or anything else, but that southeast Asians and Indians established mutually beneficial contacts, and that the peoples of southeast Asia, in particular their chiefs and ruling classes, were awed by what they came to know of the great nations across the bay. There was at the time also a degree of contact with China. India displaced this, in what the French scholar George Coedes in the last century called ‘one of the outstanding events in the history of the world’. The first kingdoms of southeast Asia–for example in what is now Burma and Cambodia–emerged in the early centuries
AD
, during the time of the Guptas in India, and it is easy to understand why India became the place to look for ideas and inspiration.

The Guptas were then the ruling family of northern India at what was a time of great intellectual, religious and artistic ferment. Gupta society included astronomers like the fifth- and sixth-century Aryabhata, who penned numerous works on algebra and trigonometry and who for the first time calculated the earth’s circumference with extreme precision, coming to within 0.2 per cent of what we know today. The system of numbers we use in the West, including the concept of ‘zero’, is derived from the Indian numerical system developed at this time, by Aryabhata and others. It would be exported to Europe, together with much other knowledge, via the Islamic world. This same system was exported eastward to southeast Asia, and this common ancestry is the reason why, with some imagination, one can see the similarities still between the ‘Arabic’ numerals used in Europe and the numerals used in, say, Burma and Thailand. There were many other achievements. A near contemporary of Aryabhata was the philosopher Vatsyayana who authored the
Kama Sutra
, the definitive treatise on human sexual behaviour. Even the game of chess is believed to have been first devised and played in the courts of the Gupta kings.

The Guptas patronized and revived Hinduism, but they also tolerated a Buddhist tradition that was then still vigorous, a millennium after the first teachings of its founder. Buddhism and Hinduism drew closer to each other. Within the Hindu fold, the new Saivite and Vaishnavite faiths and the Bhakti movement incorporated Buddhist elements, and many began to see the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu. India, then as now, offered up an eclectic and exciting mix of spiritual ideas and practices.

Buddhism itself was undergoing many changes and adopting new forms. The northern parts of the Gupta domains were a strong hold of the new Mahayana school of Buddhism, which spread from there to Afghanistan, Central Asia, and along the Silk Routes to China and beyond. The Chinese pilgrim and monk Faxian travelled to India in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, visiting the Buddha’s birthplace and then going on to Ceylon before returning to China by sea. At almost exactly the same time, the Indian monk Kumarajiva, travelling in the opposite direction, arrived in China and launched a project to translate Buddhist works. He had been born in the Central Asian oasis town of Kucha and educated in Kashmir, then a fabled centre of Buddhist learning. Together with his Kashmiri colleagues Yasa and Vimlaksha, and at the urging of the Chinese emperor himself, he would translate over 300 Buddhist works into the entirely dissimilar Chinese language, making Buddhism accessible for generations to come to the peoples of China, Korea and Japan.

One of the more important points of contact for southeast Asia, though, was the eastern coast of India, along the Bay of Bengal. Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, who ushered in the Look East policy in the early 1990s, was born in a village called Vangara, in what is today Andhra Pradesh, and in precisely the same area that 1,500 years before was southeast Asia’s gateway to Indian civilization. The Satavahana dynasty were the early rulers of this region and were patrons of Buddhism as well as Hinduism. Burma’s earliest Buddhist ties were probably to Satavahana-sponsored monasteries. And some say that Bodhidarma, the founder of what would be called the Chan school of Buddhism in China (called Zen in Japan), was a prince of the Pallava dynasty, another and slightly later regional dynasty in this part of India.

The connections were almost endless. What we need to remember is the relative position of these two lands. On the one side was India, with an estimated population even then of over a hundred million people, with cities that were amongst the biggest in the world, a towering economic and intellectual power. And then on the other side of the Bay of Bengal was south east Asia, still heavily forested and with a population that was only a tiny fraction of India’s. The little states there were advanced in their own ways, but the pull of Indian exemplars must have been strong. In Burma, the very first known kings along the Irrawaddy valley styled themselves ‘Vikram’ and ‘Varman’.
Vikram
, meaning ‘valour’, was a title used by many contemporary Indian rulers, including the Guptas. And
Varman
, meaning ‘protector’, was the preferred title of the Pallavas, used not only in Burma, but by the kings of Cambodia as well. It was an epic effort at imitation and adaptation, designed not so much to flatter the Indian originals as to awe their countrymen and perhaps satisfy their own desire to feel a part of what was arguably the world’s most impressive civilization.

Many in India have long been proud of this ancient link. ‘To know my country,’ wrote the great scholar and poet Rabindranath Tagore,

one has to travel to that age when she realized her soul and thus transcended her physical boundaries, when she revealed her being in a radiant magnanimity which illuminated the eastern horizon, making her recognized as their own by those in alien shores who were awakened into a surprise of life…

In Delhi, I stayed with a friend who lived in a gorgeously restored British-era home, one that had belonged before independence to a leading Indian barrister. There was a square central courtyard with a water fountain and an immense garden behind the house. The heat outside was oppressive, but inside the rooms were all quietly air-conditioned. My friend was the perfect host and his guests, charming and articulate, were from a mix of backgrounds–politicians, journalists, scholars, both Indian and foreign.

During the several days I was there, I gave talks on Burma, met old friends, made new ones, and engaged in discussions over many meals. I went to book launches and attended panel debates. Delhi’s was an elite whose nature and orientation were fundamentally different from those further to the east. Many had studied in the UK or US and travelled there often. Some were only back in India for a holiday. Burma seemed far away. It was also a small elite. I felt I was socializing in a very small circle. People I met would mention a friend who turned out to be someone I had encountered at a lunch or dinner the day before. At Khan Market, I started seeing people I knew, in the bookshops or running an errand. I was in a leafy, expensive part of south Delhi, but it was as if I were in a small town, not the capital city of a nation of more than a billion people.

It was at a restaurant in Khan Market–the Side Wok–that I arranged to see an analyst of the region. We had met a few times before at academic conferences abroad and he had suggested the Side Wok, which offered dishes from across the Far East. It was a modern and stylish place, with lots of dark wood and dim lighting, an exposed brick wall, and a menu that identified different dishes as being Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai or Indonesian. Little drawings of a chilli marked which dishes were especially hot.

We talked about India–China relations and he said he was moderately optimistic and that fears of a ‘China threat’ were understandable but overblown:

The media on both sides like to hype up the problems, which are there, but there is enough common sense as well. 1962 won’t happen again. A problem is that there are not enough scholars of China, and the very few Indians who speak Mandarin go into the private sector, not into government or media. There’s not much understanding of China today, the complexities. There’s a huge contrast with India’s ties with the US. There are challenges there too, but there is much more people-to-people interaction. There are hundreds of thousands of Indians living in America; many have relatives living there, children going to school. Everyone hears the success stories of Indian-Americans and can easily follow American politics. There is nothing like that with China.

There was also nothing like that with Burma. Many people I met in Delhi were curious about Burma. But Delhi was a city, once Turkish, Mughal and British, whose ruling classes were eager to assume a long-denied place on the world stage. Burma had no real place in the emerging narrative of India as a twenty-first-century power. Almost no one I knew in Delhi had even been to Burma and whereas in China I encountered several scholars who spoke at least some Burmese, I was told there were no Burmese-speaking experts in India. Instead, there were hints of a slightly forlorn connection: a relative who had been born in Burma, a recipe that had been kept in the family after a time spent long ago in Rangoon, a sense of an old religious or cultural affinity, an interest, but otherwise little knowledge, and little focus on the changes taking place.