Is most of South East Asia influenced greatly by India? I read a short part on Asoka which led me to ask this question. Also, I noticed a lot of similarities in some South East Asian cultures with that of South Asia. Is it mainly due to Buddhism?

I guess so. It's evident esp. in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia. The Philippines is a different case though. Philippine culture in general has imbibed many elements of Indian culture (as seen in our language, bathala (god), etc.) but I remember my professor who is Indonesian saying that probably we are the least influenced by India among SEA nations due to distance (which I agree). Buddhism didn't spread much in the Philippines either.

What country was most influencial to the Phillipines pre-spanish? Would it be neighboring countries or China?

^The problem with the Philippines is that only few are interested in pre-colonial stuff because many documents were alledgedly burned by the Spaniards when they arrived.

The northern tribes, the Igorots/Cordilleras have been trading with the Chinese even before the Spanish came and were probably influenced by them. I went to a museum in Bontoc, it's in northern Philippines, and I saw several vases the Igorots got from trading with the Chinese. Some Igorot surnames are actually of Chinese origin too like Limawig.
I'm not sure but I think the Igorots got their musical instrument gangsa from the Chinese.

The Moros in Southern Philippines were influenced by Arab and Indian traders and missionaries.

To make things short, we were mostly influenced by China and India but not as heavily influenced compared to other SEA countries.

edit... People in the Malay archipelago have similiar and shared culture so I didn't consider it as anexternal influence.

Thailand, Laos?

All of SE Asia was influenced by India to some degree. I'd say Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, and Laos were influenced the most. Vietnam, not so much. That's why ppl always say that Vietnam is culturally more East Asian. The Philippines, not so much either. Although we were apart of some Hindu empires in the past. But I think the influence has been overshadowed by the Chinese & Spanish influence. But yeah, some ppl would argue that SE Asia is more Indian influenced than Chinese influenced. Basically Indian influence is what makes SE Asia different from East Asia.

Ne ways, these maps are helpful:

Indosphere (Indian influenced)


Sinosphere (Chinese influenced)


I'm kinda sad that the Philippines isn't in either one ^

I think it's cool to think that Asia is a mix of Indian & Chinese influences. Most ppl don't seem to think about the Indian influence though.

why are you sad about it? we aren't "culture-less" just because we weren't heavily influenced by both countries.

^ Yeah I know, I just feel kinda left out, lol... But it kinda makes you wonder how our culture was before the Spanish came and what it was like.

Your professor must be wrong cause there's a lot of info on how many Hindus lived in Indonesia over a thousand years ago,same time when Indians had bloody wars with the Chinese for quite a while too,Bali is the last remaining piece of evidence.

^ KristlehI was saying that the Philippines is the least Indian influenced country of SE Asia, not Indonesia

Can u say Bali?
I'd say the philippines are the least influnenced by Indian culture.

^ Yall need to learn how to read...



"We" meaning the Philippines bc KristlehI is Filipino. You would have figured that out had you read all the posts...

Thailand, Laos, Myanamar, and Cambodia owe India alot for their culture.
Indonesia and Malaysia are influenced some by India

Vietnam is mostly influenced by China.

Philippines is influenced by China directly and influenced a litte by India Indirectly

i assume alot.. sanskrit, temple designs, buddhism, language has contributed alot to SEA culture. but this only includes SEA countries on the main land

I think Thailand/Laos got "Indian influence" by way of the Khmer who influenced them.

Thanks Kristle and Graham, good info there. So I take it that the Phillipines got most of its stuff indirectly through its neighboring countries and China.

Did Japan have any influence or was it just during war?

sorry I don't agree with some posters that Philippines was least influenced by India. I think they were influenced equally just like other south-east Asian countries but later Spanish and other western influences overshadowed it to a great extent. Just look at the national language of Philippines, Tagalog. 25% of Tagalog words came from Sanskrit. So you see it is a lot of influence considering that Philippines was dominated by Spanish and American influences continuously for more than 300 years in present times. And of course Islamic influence and Chinese influence is also evident.

That word "hindi" in tagalog always got to me.

That means 'no'. Yes I also wonder sometimes.

Yeah,forget what i said i was stupid to read it wrong,still weird that it had so much influence in south east Asia.

Well, that's your opinion. And as I have said, Buddhism didn't spread in the Philippines even before we were colonized while it did in other SEA countries.

Oh yeah, I agree with Graham, some people need to learn how to read properly.

Wasnt Hinduism prevalent in the Phillipines?

Hinduism surely influenced us but it is hard to say if it was once a dominant religion in the country. The copper plate inscription is one proof of the presence of Hinduism in the country before we were colonized. Some believe that we were under Sri Vijaya but not much books and articles have been written about it. I saw a book about Tamil influences in the Philippines but still haven't read it.

Well, precolonial Philippines is actually a bit of a mystery. We have only a few archaelogists in the country to help in uncovering our quite mysterious past. When you study Philippine history in elementary and high school, books just dedicate several pages on pre-Spanish era and the rest is about friars, Americans, Japanese. It's quite embarrasing actually.

I thought this was interesting. Laguna Copperplate Inscription





^That looks nothing like Tagalog.

Translation

And this too. Baybayin



So yeah, we have some Indian influence (via Indonesia & Malaysia) but it's not as evident as in some other countries, so we have to go back in our history to find it.

^Wanna pursue a career in archaelogy?

I hope people in other SEA countries will share some insights as well.

Interesting thread!
I never knew how much influence India had over our SE Asian nations until I read about VS Naipaul's books on his journey into converted muslim lands like Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia... it seems that Indic culture was brought by their traders and dynastic rulers like Rajendra I of Cholas (southern Tamil India c.1030), SE Asian states were probably considered as part of the Cholas empire. But northern India had begun to see the wave of islamic invaders like Muhammad of Ghor from 1192 and successive waves that finally led to the establishment of the Mughal empire that basically changed the dynamic of Indic culture influence over Southeast Asia. Muslim traders and clerics won the support and conversion of Hindu followers wanting to get out of the stifling feudal and caste structure. This revolution in a way spread all across India and Southeast asia, where ancient fuedal hierarchic structures were challenged by the Islamic notions of universal brotherhood and egalitarian status. That's why we see so many Hindu monuments that are suddenly abandoned and left to rot in the jungles until they were discovered by the colonial explorers of late (Borobodur, Angkor Wat..) the natives of Southeast Asia just turned their backs on their Hindu civilization and embraced Islam wholeheartedly because it was a way of life thats possibly more egalitarian than the old Hindu kingship/caste governing structure.

Sorry @tangawizi but I don't like VS Naipaul's most of the writings. Some of his writings are good but mostly his writings carry a very biased view about the eastern cultures, which mostly European or American people can appreciate. He is an Indian with a western upbringing with a mind of a white man, he is an outsider.


If you think that Muslim culture is less feudal and more egalitarian then your wrong. Mostly muslims used force and threats to convert people. During the time of muslim rule if there is some dispute between two individuals the one who converts will win the dispute and the favor of the administration. Or they will simply ask people to convert or die, many people had no other alternative but to convert many of them resisted or ran away into Hindu kingdoms. Muslim invaders destroyed temples all over north India. Please read history of the subcontinent and south-east asia properly before making such type of comments.

Secondly Islam was unable to make much progress in mainland South-East Asia it was only able to spread into islands or coastal areas and failed to spread inland.

And for your information the caste system is not a caste system in literal sense. It is called 'Varna' system where people are given categories according to the jobs they do. It has nothing to do with Hinduism, it is a social construct rather than religious. When British came to South Asia they interpret the social orders according to their own point of view which created a lot of confusion.

i don't think that the Philippines have been influenced by Indians that much.
there might be Indian descendants living now in the Philippines, but i don't think there are really culture influences from India.
i speak as an Indian(Malayalee)/Sri Lankan(Tamil) and Filipino(Tagalog).
knowing the Indians, if they had really influenced the Phils. directly then i guess they would have built temples and all those stuff.
wherever Indians went and left their influence, they also left scupltures, religious teachings and books and their influence often leaves some people practising their religion and some traces.
i just don't see any behaviour of Filipinos that can be compared somehow to Indians'(except that we're also eating by hand )

thinking about it now, we say INDIAN mango... and the word mango itself is from a Tamil word.
and i once saw Filipinos on some pics wearing sari and sarong.

about the word hindi, there is also the word "oo" meaning yes, and in Sri lankan spoken Tamil you can hear also o o meaning also yes.
also ano = what , in Tamil enna... i think is just a coincidence
but i didn't know that 25% of tagalog is from Sanskrit...
are you guys sure about that? i'm not a master in Sanscrit but i can recognize a Sanscrit and Hindi sentences, and i just never heard Tagalog words sounding like from Sankrit ones.
damn, i guess i should go back to study the histories of my countries...

anyway i think that India's greatest gift to the world is its religion(s) and putting into this world such exemplary mothers, wives and children.
damn we're the only "people" in the world where we treat our own parent like Gods!!!
Indian women are the only ones to treat their husbands like Gods.
for some that's stupid and idolatry... i guess they won't understand.
still that's something to be proud of.

long live to the Abode of Gods, our Motherland

actually i have never met a single indian who likes VS Naipaul, most of my indian frens deride him as an anglophile who is full of self-loathing for his motherland and peoples. and i mean indians from india all the way to singapore, kenya and san francisco.

fortunately, i recently came one desi blogger from the States who actually wrote something abt Naipaul that made sense as to why so many indians hated his guts... if u are interested at all, here's the link to his thoughts abt Naipaul

http://www.shunya.net/Text/Blog/RereadingNaipaul.htm

it's well worth reading it... even though u might in all your indianness consider the blogger also as an outsider...kid!



Compared with the varna, one would suspect that the notion of the 'muslim brotherhood' surely looks more promising to the lower rung of the varna system, won't u agree? Of course muslim invaders destroyed temples all over northern India, just as the Brahmins ruined the buddhist temples too. I am no buddhist.. btw.



Muslim traders lived off the spice trade of the littoral maritime states, they brought spices from the East to the West. However, inland communities were influenced by Buddhist traders i believe and hence you got these amazing structures like Pagan or Angkor Wat or Borobodur / Dieng Plateau temples dotted inland across SE Asia.



As Mr Naipaul ruthlessly observed, 'varna' may have once been a useful division of labor in a rural society, but it has now divorced function from social obligation, position from duties. It is inefficient and destructive; it has created a psychology which will frustrate all improving plans. It has led to the Indian passion for speech-making, for gestures and for symbolic action ... Symbolic dress, symbolic food, symbolic worship: India deals in symbols, inaction. Inaction arising out of proclaimed function, function out of caste ... It is the system that has to be regenerated, the psychology of caste that has to be destroyed.

India's greatest gift to the world is its continuing stream of brilliant minds and thinkers who have come out of its fold since the dawn of time... just from the Buddha alone, India has influenced the world, and now Buddha's teachings are revolutionizing the west in its search for spirituality. This is a good piece of info abt the origin of India's influence in SE Asia :



Also, by the time Islam came to India, some folks in northwest frontier wrought a more mystical version of Islam known as Sufism which spread successfully in Southeast Asia.

Whatever comes into India becomes a mystical spiritual experience. Why? I think it's because of its Bhakti devotional cults that sprung up from the south (kerala).

If Judaism or christianity had been allowed to take root in India, India may help bring an even more spiritual dimension to their practice in such a way that Judaic and Christian folks could be more accommodating and less confrontational about Islam today.

i think indonesia is the most indian influenced southeast asian nation. 2nd would be burma, then cambodia.

Before the Spanish colonization, Philippine culture had a blend of Chinese, Indian and Islamic influences.


Islam didn't spread to the whole of Southeast Asia, but mainly to the Malay archipelago (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines).


It wouldn't be possible to convert millions simply through force and threats. Most of the conversions were mainly due to Muslims having more priveleges than Hindus in the Islamic Indian states at the time.


Philippine culture did have a strong Indian influence in the past, but much of it was largely replaced by Chinese, Islamic and Spanish influences.

I would consider India's greatest gift to the world to be its vast literature, which contributed to many fields of human knowledge, including the arts, astronomy, economics, mathematics, philosophy, politics, poetry, spirituality, storytelling, technology, theology, etc.


I would include Malaysia and Singapore in that list as well, because of the large Indian presence in those countries.

India's influence is far and wide ---- look even the Transformers are doing Yoga now...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE-cP1DS3uQ

Cambodia has the biggest religious temple in the world which was built for the purpose of Hinduism (Angkor Wat)... Apsara came from India, Hanuman came from India, Buddhism came from India, most of the things that we believe in are mostly from Indians, but has been converted into the Khmer version... Let's just say we were heavily influenced by the Kambojas/Indian Traders/Indian Prince and so on fourth.

I have a question though... do any of you guys know anything about the Kambojas ? they don't have much information about them as much so I need more sources about their culture and all.

India is the nearest early civilization to Southeast Asia, it's only natural that somehow Southeast Asia borrowed lots of Indian ideas and incorporated it into our own realm.

At the early stages, native Southeast Asia already developed social system and native belief.
Some early village has evolved into considerably "cities" leads by native local chieftain.
Then came Indian influences as early as 1st century AD. Unlike Indian imperial thesis (some of ultranationalist Indians always cherish the fictions about Indian rule upon archipelago), this Indianization; the diffussion of Indian civilization to Southeast Asia is not an imperial conquest, it was done by active role of native who deliberately seeks knowledge to India. The kings and rulers of early Indonesian kingdoms (Kutai, Tarumanagara, Kalingga) are native, not Indian. Kutai is built by Kundungga (native Indonesian name), then his son adopt Sankirt names, Mulavarman.

Native already has complex supranatural beliefs in natural deities and natural forces, combined with the worships of ancestral spirits.
Then Hinduism gave them "name" and "shapes" to this deities, including hierarchy of gods. Also the concept of kingdoms is adapted, also written letters (Inscriptions in ancient Indonesia mostly in sanskirt language written with pallava letter).

The Indian influence to Indonesia is written in many aspect of Indonesian culture:

Indonesian coats of Arms is Garuda, the mythical golden bird, vehicle of Vishnu.
Indonesian airlines is Garuda Indonesia
National monument of Indonesia in Jakarta called Monas, actually is a stylized Lingga-Yoni, symbol of fertility (also sexual creativity)
Indian epic such as Mahabharata and Ramayana has been embraced as our own traditional stories and dances. In wayang (shadow puppet) theatre and sacred dance-drama of Java and Bali.

Our cities and places names has sanskirt origin:
Jakarta (Jayakarta, city of glory)
Yogyakarta (Ngayodhyakarta Hadinigrat)
Indrapura
Jayapura
Mataram
Kalingga (ancient kingdom in Java)
Jayawijaya mountains
Svarnadvipa (ancient name for Sumatra)
Semeru (mahameru) mountain in east Java
Bromo (Brahma) mountain

Language
Indian (sanskirt) --------> Indonesian

Stri --------> Istri
Samudra --------> Samudra
Dev --------> Dewa
Devi --------> Dewi
Varna --------> Warna (color)
Surya --------> Surya (sun)
Pur --------> Pura

To be accurate, it wasn't Indian influences that arrived to SEA in the 1st century AD, but rather Buddhist influence mixed with whatever Brahmanic Vedic folklore that already existed pre-Buddhist times. India as a concept didn't exist until the colonial times.

Mojo, when you say the elites of SEA deliberately seek knowledge from India, i think u need to elaborate that there was already an established Buddhist diaspora in that period where monks and traders were actively exchanging philosophies and goods from India-China-SEA.

I read that the largest monastic order in Nalanda (Bihar?) had been for centuries actively sending and receiving scholars and monks from all over SEA, and China (there's a few famous monks who brought the buddhist scriptures from India to Tang Dynasty China in the 700sAD). I think yoga was brought by these monks to China and evolved as kung fu over the centuries. There were alot of influence from Ceylon too in SEA I am sure..

Up until the 13th century Khmers were Hindu but that is not to say that we aren't Hindu because we're mostly Buddhist. The infusion of native religions + Hindu + Buddhism = Cambodian Buddhism. As for the Kambojas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamboja

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kambuja

^ that kambuja article is only a stub so don't quote me on it.

Old filipino script, does it look indianish to you indian folks?

hindi pare, not at all.

it looks related to the Cham script

I don't know if we are the most Indianized people in South East Asia, but yes, most Indonesians in the past adored Indian culture maybe as much as we adore American pop culture nowadays Of course, we spread our spicy sauce all over our french fries today, as we celebrate our own deities in Hindu/Buddhism sphere in the past, because that's what we are, we loooove syncretyzing!

Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are all part of our history, if you look in our history book, usually it divide chapters as the early days, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, colonial, and independence. We got Hinduism and Buddhism through an intense exchange of ideas with India, and Islam were brought to our shores (partly) by Gujarati (Indian) traders. So, naturally we love our Indian friends and we still do! Indian movies enjoy great popularity in Indonesia

Before the arrival of western colonialism in our archipelago, we enjoy religious harmony. An empress of Majapahit had a Buddhist nun as her grandmother. Another empress had a Muslim husband who would eventually became an important person in Malaysia's history. So it was a perfect society back then

@tangawizi: If I got my history right, Buddhism arrived in Indonesia later than Hinduism.

I knew it, wonder you mofs look indians. Well some, most filipinos i know and met looked paki.

some loanwords

There is so much BS in this thread...Philippines was never heavily influenced by India.
It was lightly influenced indirectly through contact with Malaysian and Indonesian traders.

The religion of Pre-spanish Philippines was animisim and Islam. Philippines was by far the least influenced...because we had a more Native culture back then. ANd the Philippines wasn't even a country back then..but just a collection of different tribes with different cultures according to region.

If u want to know of a culture that was heavily influenced by India...look at Bangladesh, Nepal, Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand

I've read somewhere that there were already settlers from India in the Philippines even before the spanish arrived. Tgalog even has alot of loan words from sankrit(sp) than the chinese.

I always wondered why east asians looked like a cross b/w indians and chinese. Now I know. Thanks guys.

^ You mean Southeast Asians? Ne ways, I think SE Asians are genetically more related to East Asians. I'm not sure if there was a whole lot of mixing going on w/ the South Asians. I think it was more of a cultural exchange. We don't really look South Asian, of course there are a few exceptions.

Your skin is definitely indian while your facial features are a of east asians but more defined (i.e. not as flat).

SE Asians can not have indian skin cause they're not Indians.