183. The Poet Kings: Taking Hinduism to Southeast Asia

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Drimple. You're on a roll, aren't you? It's all just glorious. And we're just rolling along with William Durham Paul because his new book, The Golden Road, is out and we are traveling this golden road with him. And in the last episodes, we were talking about the export of Buddhism and Buddhist monks to China who helped this extraordinary female character from history, Empress Wu Zetian, take over China, ostensibly. She's vile to her children, may have smothered one at birth. But, you know, she rises and rises. And with her rise, all these extraordinary monuments in China, all exports, if you like, from India.

1:12And we've been talking about the industry, the spread of Indian ideas. We're going to India today, William, and we're going to the south of India. And maybe we should just focus in on one place, which I know you love very, very much, which I don't know many people listening in India will be familiar with. with Mammalipuram. Tell us where it is and what it is. So Mammalipuram is one of my all-time favorite places in India. When I first went there in the 1980s, I went there in 1984 when I was 18 and just absolutely loved it. In those days, it was a tiny village on the ocean filled with amazing ancient monuments.

1:52And you come at it from the interior. And as you near the coast, you can see the blue of the sea in the distance. and the palm trees get thicker, and it gets very fertile. And as you approach Mammalapurum, which was the great port of southern India for the early Middle Ages, from the kind of 6th, 7th, 8th centuries, you begin to see these extraordinary boulders erupting out of the landscape, like sort of giant beads of mercury, slightly shiny in the sun, in strange shapes, like a sort of Henry Moore sculpture. And many of these have been sculpted. And when you go to the centre of the town, there's this famous sculpted hillside where the story of Arjuna's penance, one of the great stories of the Mahabharata, is sculpted in life-size with elephants and preaching cats and flying deities and sort of Bollywood trailers full of sort of dancers.

2:46And it's a wonderful, wonderful monument. Over the years since then, Madras has expanded into one of the great metropolises of Asia, Chennai. And Mammalapuram is now slightly in danger of being engulfed by its suburbs, but it's still an extraordinary spot. And there's so many monuments there that, you know, I must have been there 10 or 15 times over the last 20 years. And it's only on my most recent visit that I came across the Adi Varaha cave, this extraordinary cave temple, slightly apart from the other monuments in Mammalapuram. And it's not part of the sort of main cultural park, which you buy tickets for.

3:27You know, there are bus parks outside and everyone's going around. It's still a living temple. And you have to find the man who's got the key to the interior and track him down and make an arrangement for him to show you. But inside this cave temple, hidden away, and I only finally got to see it in the last couple of years, are portrait sculptures of the rulers of South India at this period, the Pallava dynasty, and particularly the extraordinary character who we'll be talking about mainly today, Mahendra Vaman Pallava, who lived from about 571 to 630 and was the man who really began a lot of the things that we regard as the high culture of South India now.

4:08He brought back devotional Hinduism after a long period of Buddhist dominance. He began probably the casting of bronze images of Hindu gods that rose to its peak under the Cholus, the famous image of the dancing Shiva. He also was a great playwright. And amazingly, we have two of his plays still surviving and still performed in South India. One of them is called The Farce of the Drunkard's Games. And it's like a Beckett play or Waiting for God or something. There's two people in a bar when the play opens. There's one guy who is a drunken worshipper of the god Shiva, and he's there with his girlfriend, who's a courtesan.

4:50And they get into an argument with a Buddhist monk who's also in the bar. And the Buddhist monk has got a skull, which he's using both as a drinking cup and a begging bowl. Oh, it's very good. Already hooked. And the monk is reminiscing about the many luxuries of his monastery and the splendid food and drink. And this is, you know, it's got the same sort of vibe as the Reformation in Britain, where everyone thought the monks were too fat and too prosperous and not living ascetic lives. This is the same criticism being made about Buddhist monks at this period. Well, he's in a bar to start with.

5:24It's not exactly where you want to find your Buddhist monks, is it necessarily? Anyway, eventually a dog comes along, grabs the skull and runs off with it. And that's the end of the play. But it still performed. It still performed. Then there's another play, which is a very similar sort of thing, where, again, this sort of sense of the absurd. There's a holy man who's a celebrated saint and ascetic. And he exchanges souls with a beautiful courtesan due to a mix-up by the god of death, Yama. And each character speaks out of the mouth of the other. So the saint speaks out of the mouth of the courtesan, and the courtesan speaks with the voice of the saint.

6:01Right. Right. It's all about sort of identity mix-ups and lots of poking fun at Buddhists. Basically, your original Victor Victoria. It's very good. Yeah, no, it's extraordinary. And this is written by the king. He's the man that also started the tradition of stone temple building in South India, which is what, in a sense, South India is best known for. I know him from that very famous statue, which is sort of him standing next to two hardly clad beauties. And he looks like this sort of great regal figure, fully clothed. and these two almost naked. Are they bare-breasted or do they have some kind of jewellery thing on?

6:33That doesn't have quite the same resonance at the time, I think, that it would do to us in that no one wore clothes. No one did, I know. We said that in Koh-i-Noor, they wore strings of jewels instead. But he's sort of gripping the wrist of one of them and pointing in one direction and he looks sort of broad. He's not a handsome chap. No, he's jowly, I would say. He's jowly. He enjoys his food, I think. And he's telling a story and he's got his hand up and he's in mid-anecdote. He's in mid-anecdote. So he's gripping the poor woman by the wrist. So she's literally a captive audience. And this is captured in stone.

7:04But both of these have their heads sort of inclined towards it. So this is the statue inside the Adivaraha cave in Mahamanpuram. Right. And what's important about this is that South India is slightly off the cultural map for a while. You have most of the action in early India taking place in the north. The Buddha is from the north. The Guptas, who bring about the Hindu revival in the 4th and 5th centuries, are from the north. And South India is somewhere that has very few monuments dating from before the 5th or 6th century, certainly that are still standing. There are lost Buddhist monasteries that we know of that are no longer there.

7:44But the beginning of the Hindu temple tradition in South India, which was the thing that South India is going to become very, very famous for, begins with this man. Right, okay. And what we see at this period in the 6th century is South India having a major cultural revival. Beautiful statues are being carved, beautiful bronzes are being cast, amazing works of literature are being written and performed. And as always, great moments of cultural effervescence tend to come along with major economic revivals. And the story we're going to be telling in this episode is the story of how the beginning of massive international trade between India across the Bay of Bengal to places like Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Mekong Delta, Cambodia, and ultimately China produces huge prosperity.

8:41with Indians going out to Southeast Asia to buy raw materials, coming back, and in the process, transmitting their culture across the Bay of Bengal. When you say South India has a tradition which will become world famous of building temples, I mean, you're not kidding. Even among Indian temples, which are ornate, to say the least, the ones that dot South India are massive. They are gargantuan, just the scale and size of these things. How do you describe them? Like pyramids with the tops lopped off. Exactly, yeah. Square topped, but ornate balconies leading up and every single inch of it carved or with some kind of depiction from Holy Scripture.

9:20They are extraordinary outside, but also extraordinary inside. And even to this day, even those ancient sites, you will have queues and queues of people. They are active sites of worship. It's a living classical tradition, yeah. Exactly right. You're reaching back hundreds and hundreds of years and worshipping in exactly the same way that people would have done. So this tradition begins with this man, with our man Mahendra Valman Pallava. And what's important is that not only does he begin this tradition in South India, he transmits it across the Bay of Bengal. So for the first time, you begin to get Hindu and Buddhist monuments coming up miles and miles outside the borders of India in Southeast Asia.

9:59Well, you know what I'm going to ask you, don't you? I need an origin story. Who was he? And where does he come from? So the Pallavas first appear, there are references to them from about the 3rd, 4th century. But Mahendra Vaman Pallava is the person who is the first sort of substantial character. We have a picture of him. We know what he looks like. The Palavers were locked in a rivalry with another dynasty in South India called the Chalukyas, who live slightly further inland towards Goa. Badami is where they were based. And these two dynasties knock against each other as great rivals. And there are moments when the Palavers attack the Chalukyas and there are moments when the Chalukyas attack the Palavers.

10:40Mahendra Vaman Palaver comes to power just after a moment when this rivalry is at its peak. And the story that we're telling today, the story of the Palavas, is sort of bookmarked by Palava triumphs over the Chalukis. But in the middle, there's one moment when the Chalukis come and burn Mamalapuram, and they burn the great capital of Kachipuram. And it's this moment of revival and the Pallava recovery from that that begins this projection of power and culture across the Bay of Bengal. And it's one of the great sort of turning points of history. What we've got to remember is that before this point, the trade and the direction of focus in South India was very much, as we said in an earlier episode, towards the Red Sea and the Romans.

11:28But this is the same period that the Goths and the Huns are beginning to take over great chunks of the Roman Empire. Alaric sacks Rome in the 5th century, and there is a blockade by the Persians. People called the Blemis, who are nomads, take over the ports of the Red Sea. And suddenly, the guys in South India are not getting the huge amounts of gold that they've been used to, coming for 400 years from the Roman Empire. And there's this moment of crisis that just precedes this period, where people are wondering where they're going to find their gold from, where they're going to get the money to build all the things they want to build, and the trade to keep them in business.

12:05And what you see at this period is this sort of creaking of cogs and levers and the changing of gears, when India begins to look from the west coast, trading with Rome, to face eastwards to trade with Southeast Asia. It's a modern story, that one, isn't it? Really, a little bit. It's sort of what's happening economically now even. Absolutely. And it is the lands known in ancient Hindu scriptures and texts as Svarna Bhumi, the lands of gold, and Svarna Dvipa, the islands of gold. And in the great Indian epics, the Ramayana and so on, the monkey king, Sugriva, talks about these lands where gold can just be picked up as easily as mud.

12:51And this whole area gets the reputation of being the source of gold. And what you find at this period, under both the Chalukyas and the Palavers, and spanning both, is the creation of these merchant guilds. And they're very important, the South Indian Merchant Guilds. And they are a bit like a kind of Indian version of the East India Company. They set up their own militarized trading fleets with archers to protect them from pirates. There are some hints that they have settlements which they defend themselves with their own military forces in Thailand and in Malaysia, little enclaves. There's never at this period any suggestion of an Indian military conquest of Southeast Asia.

13:32These are merchants going out to protect themselves with their own bodyguards and their own soldiers. But it is a militarized trade and it's coming out of the ports of the Palavers and looking eastwards at these very, very rich lands in Southeast Asia, which are at that moment untapped markets. So that, I mean, that's the Palaver background. That's the background into which he is born. I mean, apart from being a playwright, do we know anything about his sensibility and what he's like? And is he a laugh? Is he stern? Is he, you know, what is he like? He is a laugh. And I think you get that in this sculpture, this life-size sculpture in the Adivaraha with him, with his two wives.

14:07You get very much the fact that he's got a smile on his face. He's telling a story. Both the women's heads are inclined towards him as if listening. And he takes all these titles. I mean, this was a normal thing for Hindu rulers. Oh, I like this. Yeah. Let's go through some of them because let's not skip this because it's quite wonderful. Okay. So the first one is The Curious Minded. And then you've got The Tiger. He toys with that for a bit. Then he toys with Drunk with Pleasure, which I quite love. You can see where he's coming from. He should have said Drunk with Pleasure. Yeah, no, he sounds all right.

14:40And He of Drunken Revelry. He of Drunken Revelry. So of all of those titles, which one does he choose? He chooses the lot. Why not? Very king. And his monuments are ringed with inscriptions, which give all these different titles. So he's not, I don't think he's a modest man. I think it's fair to say, but he knows his own worth. But he's an extremely important character because I think he was born at a time when the Jain faith was most closely associated with his dynasty. You've got to remember there are many different forms of religion circulating in South India at this time. There are hero stones, for example, all over South India where the kind of worship of warrior heroes seems to be the case.

15:21You even get still at the beginning of this period megalithic sites where people are worshipping stone circles and great megaliths. The Buddhists have been building a lot of monasteries in Andhra Pradesh. The Jains are around, and there is the different forms of early Hinduism. But what you see at the beginning of Mahendra Pallava's reign is the great rise of devotional Hinduism and the beginning of building of stone temples. This was the new thing, the fact that they were stone to the great Hindu gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. And I've had lovely trips going all over South India and looking at Mahendra Pallava's different cave temples, which are the earliest in the region.

16:02And they're often carved into rocks in the middle of fields or boulders are hollowed up at the top of mountains. And he carves these guardian figures with clubs. And then you see these tiny angel shrines. And these are literally the first surviving Hindu shrines in South India that we have. I adore anyone who builds things like a builder or a carver. But I just wonder if there's a slight dichotomy. Is he a spiritual man because of all the titles that he took all of them? None of them mention God. I mean, no, seriously, they don't mention God. They talk about the mind. They talk about the flesh.

16:36They don't talk about something bigger than himself. So is it possible that he was somebody who knew about power and projection of power, and that meant more than perhaps the tenets of Hinduism did? I think that the sheer fact that he built so many temples is a very, very important mark. And it's during his reign that we get the rise of these popular Tamil saints who are leading crowds of ecstatic Tamil devotees from shrine to shrines, singing these gorgeous, passionate Tamil songs about their longing for Vishnu or Shiva. And I think there's some sense in which Buddhism was a bit abstract. It was all about asceticism, about searching inwards.

17:17This sort of Hinduism was about falling in love with a god, finding a divine partner almost. Oh, gosh. I mean, you know, Hinduism is all about putting human foibles and characteristics on the supernatural. You know, they fall in love, they fall out, they have wars, they are naughty children, they grow up. You know, the stories are so relatable, which is why Hinduism, you know, sort of transcends literacy a lot of the time. But at this period under Mahendra Pallava, you get these songs of strong devotion, these bhakti songs beginning to be composed by the Tamil saints. And they're transmuting their deep yearning for the divine into the language of a human lover, eternally suspended between union and separation, pain and unfulfilled longing.

18:02And out of this well of devotionalism and spiritualism, which is happening at the same time as our King Mahendra is writing his plays and carving his sculptures and building his first temples, you get figures like this young woman, Saint Andal, who's still warmly remembered by women in South India. I've met old women who were following her footsteps from temple to temple. She ends up in Srirangam, where she's sort of swallowed up by the gods. I'll just read you a translation of some of her lines. This is Andal, and it's quite sort of startlingly frank, even by today's standards. This is her writing her love song to her divine lover.

18:45My life will be spared only if he will come to stay with me for one night. If he will enter me so as to leave the imprint of his saffron paste upon my breasts. mixing, churning, maddening me inside, gathering my swollen ripeness, spilling nectar as my body and blood burst into flower. Hello? What? 7th century India. I mean, that's quite a lot, isn't it? But you know what it reminds me of? Sort of this sort of likening of passion, human passion to divine passion. The Sufis do something similar, don't they? When they do that too, about being bowled over and ravished by love, divine love. And some of this poetry is so beautiful.

19:32My favourite translations are by the modern Tamil poet, A.K. Ramanujan, who died, I think, in the 70s, but was writing in the 60s and 70s. Here's another of his poems from this period, translated by Ramanujan. Our Lord is here. He lives within me. And we're done with growing and perishing, Waxing and waning like the moon Done with knowing and unknowing Like sunshine and night dark That's beautiful It's good stuff, I love that Powerful, potent stuff Yeah Okay, so this is the time of Would you call it a renaissance of art of some sort? Oh, definitely And then there's one character who emerges from this world Who is arguably one of the two or three greatest And most admired writers in Sanskrit And this is a guy we know by his nickname, Dandin, the stick wielder.

20:26And he's about one generation after Mahendrapalav, but very much part of this renaissance. His dates are 665 to 720. So again, this is the same period that Wu Zetian is on the throne in China. Who's her Chinese empress, just in case you needed reminding. Same period that Mahendrapalav and his son are busy in Kachipuram and Mamalipuram. And Danden is, I suppose you could call him the Jack Kerouac of Sanskrit poetry. He writes this sort of road novel, like on the road, called Dasa Kumara Charita, which is what 10 young men did. And it's made up of 10 fictional autobiographies written in gorgeous prose with what one critic has called words that seem to be dancing.

21:13I think that's Sheldon Pollock. Oh, that's beautiful. And again, it's quite sort of racy. Yeah. It tells these stories of youthful wanderlust, like Jet Kerouac's On the Road, going from girlfriend to girlfriend, bar to bar. This is comparable. And it talks about wanderlust, adventures, riots, thievery, murder, seduction, love bites, and every imaginable variety of sexual and amorous experimentation. I think many people in the day don't realise quite how racy their classical poetry is from this period. I don't know why they're surprised. it's got a very large population. Just saying. Just saying.

21:52But you know what is another interesting thing is that North Indians don't know much about South Indian history. It's true. They really don't. And what's lovely about Dandan is we know quite a lot about his life. He was one of these people who was made homeless and an orphan by the Cholukyas attacking the Palava capital of Kanchipuram. The capital is burnt down and Dandan, along with his two orphan sisters wander the roads. And the stories in his road novel, Daskumaracharata, are the sort of adventures we imagine he must have got up to as an orphan, as a clever, talented, literary jack of all trades on the road between court to court until he comes back to Kachipuram when there's a revival of the Pallavas.

22:35They defeat the Chalukyas and they come back. And this is the golden age. It's now the time of Mahendra Pallava's son, Mamala, after whom Mamala Pallava is named. And he rebuilds Mamala Purim as the great port. The Pallavas are now the supreme power in South India. And Dandan is the kind of court poet. He's the poet laureate. He writes plays, he writes works of prose, and he also writes works of criticism. His book on Sanskrit poetry and on the appreciation of literature is one of the great sort of classics. It's called the Kavya Dasha or the Mirror of Poetry. And what we see is that as Pallava trade and Pallava power cross the ocean, as ships and fleets begin to leave Mammalapuram and cross the Bay of Bengal to Burma, the Mekong Delta and China, Dandin's poetry and the Pallava script go with it.

23:35And the result of all this is that every single script in Southeast Asia, every pre-Islamic script in Southeast Asia derives from the Pallava Brahmi, that the kind of cursive round script that you see in South India is transmitted and becomes the origin for every Southeast Asian script. And this is happening at this period. Wait a minute, you're missing out the best, best bit of that, which you pointed out on a previous this episode not so long ago, was that the reason it looks so different to the normal Sanskrit, which is spiky and has edges, the reason it's so rounded, and if you've seen Thai writing, it's much the same, Tamil has written the same, and the Southeast Asian languages all written the same, is because they were writing on palm leaves.

24:16Exactly. And you couldn't do jagged, because it would go through the leaf. It's lovely, that isn't it? That just blew my brain, that detail. I loved it so much. So he's writing this new South Indian script, but his work is going to spread far beyond South India, isn't it? And what we see is that in a couple of generations, you have even Chinese tongue poetry in far away Xi 'an and Luoyang on the Chinese coast, taking in his criticism of poetry. And the Kavya Dasher, his Mirror of Poetry, his extraordinary book about the beauty of literature and critiquing the poetry of the time, is read all over Southeast Asia and in China.

24:58So this is a moment when everything is beginning to revive. Trade is reviving, fleets of ships are crossing the oceans, temples are beginning to come up, sculpture is being sculpted, bronzes are being cast, Danden is writing these masterworks, and it's like sort of pulsing outwards. Imagine a sort of waves of ideas, of forms of building, ways of constructing temples and cities, plans for cities. All these ideas, the rudiments of South Indian civilization are being shared with peoples from very different worlds in the jungles of Southeast Asia. So that beautiful description of this pulsing of Indian culture that is being thrown out far and away.

25:42Join us after the break where we find out where it reaches and the effect that it has. See you after the break.

25:54Welcome back. So, William, we were talking about all of this amazing richness of culture and art and spirituality and religion, poetry and all of this stuff pulsing its way across the Bay of Bengal. How far does it pulse and where does it reach? So, what you're seeing at this period on the far side of the Bay of Bengal is very similar to what you've just seen happening in South India a generation before. You're finding new towns springing up along the coast and up the major river systems. The difference is that in Southeast Asia, there had been no literate culture before. There were small tribal chieftains with small pre-literate worlds, but you're beginning to get the arrival of many different sorts of Indian ideas on the far side of the Bay of Bengal.

26:49And what you're seeing is, first of all, a series of non-religious ideas which are passing over. How do you build a city? How do you smelt different sorts of iron? How do you build a moat? So William, I've got a question. What exactly is there in Southeast Asia? Because, you know, as we say, these new ideas aren't exported to a wilderness and desert. There must be belief systems, there must be poetry and music of their own. So is something being displaced or is something going to merge with the Hinduism that's coming? So because there's no literature and writing before the Palaver script is imported into Southeast Asia, we don't have any writings from the pre-Indic period, if you like.