William Dalrymple’s wonderful piece in the New York
Review of Books:
Dalrymple notes:
“… from about 400
AD to 1200 AD, India was a large-scale and confident exporter of its own
diverse civilization in all its forms, and the rest of Asia was the willing and
eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian culture,
religion, art, music, technology, astronomy, mythology, language, and
literature. Out of India came not just artists, sculptors, traders, scientists,
astronomers, and the occasional fleets of warships, but also missionaries of
three Indic forms of religion: Buddhism and two rival branches of Hinduism:
Shaivism, in which Lord Shiva is revered as the Supreme Being; and Vaishnavism,
which venerates Lord Vishnu.
…
Sanskrit became
throughout Southeast Asia the language of court, government, and literacy, and
while it remained an elite tongue—like Latin in medieval Europe—it left a
permanent mark on the map: the name Java, for example, derives from the
Sanskrit Yadadweepa—the island is shaped like a yawa, or barley corn. Indeed so deeply immersed in Sanskritic
culture did the elites of the region become, and so central was Indian thought
to the conceptual world of the scholars, rulers, and administrators of the
region, that they began renaming both themselves and their landscape after
people and places in Indian mythology.”