Kambuja-desa, or An Ancient Hindu Colony in Cambodia

“I propose to review, in a course of six lectures, the history of the Indian colony of Kambuja-desa (modern Cambodia) and some aspects of the civilisation that the Hindus, using this term in its broadest sense, had introduced in this distant land. I shall try to describe how the small isolated Hindu kingdoms in different parts of Cambodia were welded into a mighty kingdom that stretched from the Bay of Bengal to the sea of China, how the essential spirit of Hindu culture was transplanted to this distant corner of Asia, how the Hindu religion inspired it to build monuments whose massive grandeur still excites the wonder of the world and far surpasses anything known so far in India, how art and institutions, created on Indian models, grew and developed a unique character, how this mighty colonial kingdom flourished for more than a thousand years fed by constant streams of civilisation flowing from the motherland, and at last met with inevitable decline when this perennial source itself decayed and ceased to flow.”

Based on a somewhat biased reading of then available inscriptions, the author’s main thesis is that Southeast Asian polities, Angkor in particular, were basically the work of Indian ​‘colonization’, with this quite provocative historical explanation:

“It is to be noted that the Indian colonisation in the Far West was not an imperialism in any form, political or economic. It transfused new blood, in the shape of the cultural heritage of India, to create new life and spirit on alien soils. It transformed the weakest and the more backward by fresh vitality. and so long as this life giving force was there the people were quickened by new impulses and did not merely imitate but developed healthy lives of their own on the foundations well and truly laid by the Indians. What the Indian element meant in their life and civilisation is best seen when this perennial fountain-source ceased to flow. In proportion to the lack of fresh vitalising forces from India the culture and civilisation of Kambuja showed signs of decline, and then came the inevitable end. It is not perhaps a mere coincidence that the two Indian colonies of Champa and Kambuja were overwhelmed by two branches of the Thais in the 13^th century A.D. when India herself lay prostrate under the foreign invaders. The same phenomena are also noticed in Java. This sudden collapse of the culture and civilisation in these Indian colonies at the very moment when India herself lost her independence and was submerged in darkness constitutes the most important testimony to the influence she excercised over their growth and development.”

The author founds his argument on ethnological assertions that have been contested or refuted: 

“The great German scholar Schmidt who first established the existence of the linguistic family called Austro-Asiatic, has proposed further to connect with it also the Austronesian and establishing a larger linguistic unity which he calls Austric. He also indicates the possibility of an ethnic unity among the peoples whose linguistic unity is thus assumed. In other words, Schmidt regards the peoples of Inda-China and Indonesia such as the Mons, Khmers, Chams and the Malays as belonging to the same race as the Munda and allied tribes of Central India and the Khasis of North-eastern India. He regards India as the original home of all these peoples who, starting from India towards the east, at first spread themselves over the whole length of the Indo-Chlnese Peninsula and then over all the islands of the Pacific Ocean up to its eastern extremity. This theory, we must remember, has not yet found general acceptance among scholars, but we must not lose sight of the possibility that the Aryanised India, in establishing colonies in the Far East, was merely repeating or continuing the work which had been inaugurated long long ago by many other peoples inhabiting the same land before the advent of the Aryans.”

ADB Input: In 1906 the German anthropologist Wilhelm Schmidt classified Austroasiatic together with the Austronesian family (formerly called Malayo-Polynesian) to form a larger family called Austric. Paul K. Benedict, an American scholar, extended the Austric theory to include the Tai-Kadai family of Southeast Asia and the Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien) family of China, together forming an ​“Austro-Tai” superfamily. 

Read The Austronesian Languages Encyclopaedia Britannica article.