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Indonesia The Spread of Indian Civilization
During the early centuries A.D., elements of Indian
civilization, especially Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism,
were
brought to Sumatra and Java and stimulated the emergence
of
centralized states and highly organized societies.
Scholars
disagree on how this cultural transfer took place and who
was
involved. Apparently, traders and shippers, not just
Indian but
Indonesian as well, were primarily responsible. Small
indigenous
states existed in the coastal regions of western Indonesia
at a
time when Indian Ocean trade was flourishing.
But, unlike the Islamic culture that was to come to
Indonesia
nearly 1,000 years later, India in the first centuries
A.D. was
divided into a rigid caste hierarchy that would have
denied many
features of Indian tradition to relatively low-caste
merchants and
sailors. Historians have argued that the principal agents
in
Indianization were priests who were retained by indigenous
rulers
for the purpose of enhancing their power and prestige.
Their role
was largely, although not exclusively, ideological. In
Hindu and
Buddhist thought, the ruler occupied an exalted position
as either
the incarnation of a god or a bodhisattva (future Buddha).
This
position was in marked contrast to the indigenous view of
the local
chief as merely a "first among equals." Elaborate,
Indian-style
ceremonies confirmed the ruler's exalted status. Writing
in
Sanskrit brought literacy to the courts and with it an
extensive
literature on scientific, artistic, political, and
religious
subjects.
Some writers are skeptical about the role of priests
because
high-caste Brahmins would have been prohibited by
Brahmanic codes
from crossing the polluting waters of the ocean to the
archipelago.
Some must have gone, however, probably at the invitation
of
Southeast Asian courts, leading to the hypothesis that
Hinduism may
indeed have been a proselytizing religion. In the early
nineteenth
century, the British faced mutinies by their high-caste
Indian
troops who refused to board ships to fight a war in Burma.
Perhaps
such restrictions were less rigid in earlier times, or the
major
role in cultural diffusion was played by Buddhists, who
would not
have had such inhibitions.
Although the culture of India, largely embodied in
insular
Southeast Asia with the Sanskrit language and the Hindu
and
Buddhist religions, was eagerly grasped by the elite of
the
existing society, typically Indian concepts, such as caste
and the
inferior status of women, appear to have made little or no
headway
against existing Indonesian traditions. Nowhere was Indian
civilization accepted without change; rather, the more
elaborate
Indian religious forms and linguistic terminology were
used to
refine and clothe indigenous concepts. In Java even these
external
forms of Indian origin were transformed into distinctively
Indonesian shapes. The tradition of plays using Javanese
shadow puppets
(wayang--see Glossary),
the origins of which may
date to the neolithic age, was brought to a new level of
sophistication in portraying complex Hindu dramas
(lakon)
during the period of Indianization. Even later Islam which
forsakes
pictorial representations of human brings, brought new
developments
to the wayang tradition through numerous
refinements in the
sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
Data as of November 1992
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