By Bhogtoram Mawroh
The death of the two Khasi boys in Karnataka because of food poisoning brought out some reaction from certain sections of the civil society and certain individuals, not from Seng Khasi or Sein Raij. Not long ago, Sein Raij had opposed the State Government’s decision to consecrate the state’s first university, Captain Williamson Sangma State University, through a massive Christian prayer service by holding a press conference. But this time around, when the death of an indigenous faith practitioner has taken place far from home, neither Sein Raij nor Seng Khasi have had a press conference or sent any press release about the incident. If official statements of condolence or condemnation have been released, I sincerely apologize for not being aware of them. I don’t want to create fake controversy for publicity. But as things stand, it is mostly the non-indigenous faith practitioners who have expressed sadness, anger, and frustration over the deaths, as the boys who died were Khasis first, regardless of their religious affiliation. This raises an important question: Does the indigenous identity of the Khasis derive from their adherence to indigenous faiths, or from solidarity that transcends religious affiliation? To answer this question, one must turn away the gaze from Meghalaya and look further east where the brethren of the Khasis had built one of the most powerful Empires in South East Asia, the Khmer Empire. In his 2024 book ‘The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World’ William Dalrymple devotes a great deal of effort in demonstrating ancient India’s influence on an important region that sometimes does not get a lot of attention, South East Asia, known as Suvarnabhumi, or the ‘Lands of Gold’. Following the severe curtailment of trade with the Roman Empire because of political shifts in Egypt and Southwest Asia, Indian traders sailed east, exchanging manufactured goods for spices, gold, camphor, resin, and other raw materials of the region. This region today comprises modern nation states of Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. Of these, people of Vietnam and Cambodia are genetically, linguistically and culturally related to the Khasis who were part of the earlier wave of migration from South China bringing agriculture to South East Asia and then South Asia. While northern Vietnam, Korea, and Japan were part of the ‘Sinosphere’, i.e., adoption of Chinese, language, literature and civilization, Cambodia and South East Asia was part of a larger ‘Indosphere’ where indic ideas of kingship, religion, literature, mythology, and music was predominant. In this regard, the achievements of the Khmers (identified with present day Cambodians) are very noteworthy.
In 802 CE, “just two years after Charlemagne had declared the birth of the Holy Roman Empire in Italy, another young warrior, the Khmer Prince Jayavarman II, performed a similar ceremony on Phnom Kulen (a mountain range in Cambodia), initiating another world-changing empire”. According to William Dalrymple, by the 12th Century, this Khmer empire was probably the richest and most powerful state on earth. It ruled over most of Mainland South East Asia and stretched as far as Southern China. The young warrior who created this colossal empire was a hostage in Java (Indonesia) which was steeped in Buddhism. After his escape and return to Cambodia, he rejected the Buddhism of his neighbours and enemies, declaring himself independent. But he accepted another foreign faith from South Asia, Hinduism, and considered Shiva as his personal deity.
After building his empire which came to be known as Kambujadesa or Cambodia, Jayavarman II marked the occasion by the installation of a sacred symbol of power known as the Devaraja dedicated to Shiva making it a national symbol, a state religion and an emblem of sacred protection. He also declared himself as Shiva’s representative on earth and supreme sovereign. The process of conversion of Cambodia from the traditional animist cults to Puranic Hinduism was already an ongoing process since the 3rd century CE. But it was the conquests of Jayavarman II that accelerated the process. The influence was so great that, in time, a myth became widespread claiming that a South Indian Brahmin named Kaundinya founded the Khmer state (known as Funan by Chinese). This, according to William Dalrymple, appears to be based on a south Indian myth.
Most probably, this myth must have been a fabrication by the Brahmins who held important positions in the Khmer royal court. This is a common modus operandi used by Brahmins to convert royalty to Hinduism. Arup Kumar Dutta also mentions this in his 2016 book, ‘The Ahoms: A Reimagined History’. The story of the 600 rule of Ahom is told by a Deodhai, an Ahom priest, who during his narration lamented at the increasing influence of the Brahmins brought from North India and how they converted the Ahom rulers by claiming that their gods are the same. So, it’s not military conquest which converted the ethnic communities of South East Asia to the religions of South Asia, Buddhism and Hinduism, but it was nevertheless a missionary activity laced with intention and subterfuge.
Over time, the ever-widening ‘Indosphere’ encompassed the peoples of Southeast Asia, who discussed, appreciated, adopted, adapted, and improved upon ideas from South Asia. It is from an inscription in Cambodia that a dot representing the world’s oldest surviving dateable zero was found, predating the oldest such inscription from South Asia (fort of Gwalior) by 200 years. The world’s largest religious complex in the world, Angkor Wat, is a temple dedicated to Vishnu. This temple is based entirely on architectural forms pioneered in South Asia, but it was never an Indian city. And this is where the originality of the Khmers and the adaptation of the foreign faiths with their local practises become very important.
The Laws of Manu (a treatise on Hindu Law) strictly insists on the avoidance of fish and sternly forbade the eating of either pigs or hens, on pain of losing caste. However, on the walls of the Bayon Temple, originally a Hindu temple, there “is a sculpture of a kitchen in which the cooks are about to drop a whole suckling pig head first into a bubbling cauldron as a cook blows on the kindling to fan the flames. There are also images of men fishing with nets”. Another Khmer inscription mentions of a feast that required ‘two thousand bowls, two pigs, eight hundred large fish, meat gravy and a quantity of beer’. Another aspect of Khmer society which the foreign religions could not influence was the high status of women: women remained owners and disposers of property. In contrast, the Laws of Manu and Indian Brahmanical tradition excluded them. A Khasi friend of mine who has Khmer friends told me that women still own the most agricultural land in Cambodia. There are even references to women priests officiating at Cambodian temples, and evidence that these roles passed by matrilineal descent, which hints an earlier more expansive matrilineal tradition which the Khasis have still kept intact. But maybe most importantly, the caste hierarchy “never crystallized … and ideas of ritual impurity and elaborate bans on eating with members of different castes completely failed to take root”. In short, though a great deal of influence came from India, which transformed the society and polity of Cambodia, the Khmers were never Indian but remained Khmer throughout all this process.
The difficulty in understanding this nuance irks modern scholars in South East Asia. Just like the colonials who use the trope of purveyors of civilization to justify their colonisation of South Asia, R. C. Majumdar, an Indian historian and professor known for promoting Hindu nationalist views, claimed in his book published in 1944 that Hindu princes had conquered, settled and ruled South-east Asia comparing it to an ‘an inferior civilization’ being overwhelmed and colonised by ‘a superior one’. However, in the post-colonial period, scholars from South East Asia pushed back against this idea of Indian colonialism and claims that “their ancestors were savages, brought to civilisation by sword-wielding Indian adventurers and zealous missionaries of the Brahmin priestly caste”. They are also not happy with their homeland being claimed as being part of ‘Greater India’ or Akhand Bharat. The whole concept of ‘Indianisation’ became almost a dirty word in South-east Asian university departments and looked down upon. Instead, they stress on the reciprocal relationship of ‘acculturation’ and cultural ‘convergence’ and exchange between South Asia and South-east Asia.
Scholars consider Khmer and other Austroasiatic speakers indigenous to Southeast Asia, the first peoples after the initial African migration, to inhabit the region. One group kept moving west and in time became the Khasis who, after the Dravidians, are the second oldest community in South Asia. Over time, culture went into transformation and the Khmer and Khasi culture (which includes religion) has changed irrevocably from what it was thousands of years ago when they first left South China. But it is also to be accepted that some vestiges have lingered which connect the past and the present. In this scenario, where almost all Khmers now follow Theravada Buddhism, a foreign religion, are they indigenous? What about the Taiwanese aborigines, many of whom are Christians, but were the first people to settle in Taiwan (the birthplace of the Austronesian language)? Can they be called indigenous? The answer is straightforward – yes. Because they are the first settlers. It doesn’t matter if their faith has changed, their indigeneity has not changed. The attempt to equate indigenous faith with indigenous identity is fraught with many problems. The death of the two Khasi boys, one of whom belonged to the indigenous faith, eliciting no reaction from the Seng Khasi and Sein Raij, is an excellent example that it is not religion but solidarity that defines the indigenous identity of a community. That has been the case in the past and it will always be the case in the future as well.
(The views expressed in the article are those of the author and do not reflect in any way his affiliation to any organisation or institution)