The circulations of knowledge -- The routes, networks, and objects of circulation -- The imperial connections -- Pan-Asianism and the (re)new(ed) connections -- The geopolitical disconnect -- Conclusion

Connected Histories of India and Southeast Asia unravels the fascinating history of cultural interactions, of outstanding and universal significance, between India and Southeast Asia, with special emphasis on artistic expressions. India's connections with Southeast Asian countries, namely, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam are seen not only in trade and commerce but also in cultural and religious exchanges. Such histories are well-documented in their monuments, icons, narratives, inscribed artefacts, texts, and ritual paraphernalia. The first part of the book offers an overview of the nature of cultural and artistic interactions and the trade routes that facilitated an exchange of ideas, objects, people, and knowledge systems since ancient times. The second part addresses issues relating to architectural forms, motifs, and mobility across long distances and time periods. The final segment includes essays that discuss narratives and iconographies arising from cross-cultural artistic exchanges. With contributions by eminent scholars and over 170 colour photographs, maps, and illustrations, this book is an invaluable resource for understanding connected histories, which play a key role in revitalizing cultural connectivity and people-to-people contacts between India and Southeast Asia.

Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia draws on newly available archival documentation from both Western and Asian countries to explore decolonization, the Cold War, and the establishment of a new international order in post-World War II Southeast Asia. Major historical forces intersected here--of power, politics, economics, and culture--on trajectories East to West, North to South, across the South itself, and along less defined tracks. Especially important, democratic-communist competitions sought the loyalties of Southeast Asian nationalists, even as some colonial powers sought to resume their prewar dominance. These intersections are the focus of the contributions to this book, which use new sources and approaches to examine some of the most important historical trajectories of the twentieth century in Burma, Vietnam, Malaysia, and a number of other countries.

The books presents the study undertaken by the ASEAN-India Centre (AIC) at Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) on India’s cultural links with Southeast Asia, with particular reference to historical and contemporary dimensions. The book traces ancient trade and maritime links, Chola Empire and Southeast Asia, religious exchanges (the Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic heritage), language, scripts and folklore, performing arts, painting and sculpture, architecture, role of the Indian Diaspora, contemporary cultural interaction, etc.

Traces the story of India's expansion that is woven into the culture of Southeast Asia.

The centuries-old interactions between the different regions of Asia took various forms including the migration of people, trade in raw materials and goods, and the exchange of religious, literary, and aesthetic ideas and forms. Covering diverse aspects of these interactions, this volume studies the connections between India and other parts of Asia including China and Southeast Asia. It, therefore, approaches the subject of Asian cultural interactions during the pre-modern and early modern periods through the prism of politics, art, religion, and trade. By bringing together these inter-related aspects of cultural encounters, it explores the complex connected histories of the Asian people in a comprehensive manner. The diversities of cultural interactions addressed in this book range from issues of war and diplomacy to trade, trade routes and ship-wrecks; from the making of grand monumental edifices to the circulation of tiny terracottas and coveted carpets, and from the religious to the secular domains in the exchange of cultural ideas and forms. Crucial for a comprehensive understanding of contemporary networks between the Indian subcontinent and various other parts of Asia, this work shows that interactions across cultures in pre-modern Asia were motivated not only by commercial but also cultural ties and explores the historical context in which they took place.

A collection of essays that span many regions and cultures, by an award-winning historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam is becoming well known for the same sort of reasons that attach to Fernand Braudel and Carlo Ginzburg, as the proponent of a new kind of history - in his case, not longue durée or micro-history, but 'connected history': connected cross-culturally, and spanning regions, subjects and archives that are conventionally treated alone. Not a research paradigm, he insists, it is more of an oppositionswissenschaft, a way of trying to constantly break the moulds of historical objects. The essays collected here, some quite polemical - as in the lead text on the notion of India-as-civilization, or another, assessing such a literary totem as V. S. Naipaul - illustrate the breadth of Subrahmanyam's concerns, as well as the quality of his writing. Connected History considers what, exactly, is an empire, the rise of 'the West' (less of a place than an idea or ideology, he insists), Churchill and the Great Man theory of history, the reception of world literature and the itinerary of subaltern studies, in addition to personal recollections of life and work in Delhi, Paris and Lisbon, and concluding remarks on the practice of early-modern history and the framing of historical enquiry.