Early Southeast Asia viewed from India: An anthology of articles from the Journal of the Greater India Society

摘要

This eclectic collection of essays from the eighteen volumes of the Journal of the Greater India Society invites us to revisit the historical pursuits of the Greater India Society and see how its history-writing projects shaped the nature of 'Indian thinking towards Southeast Asia' (p. ⅹⅱ). It is a delight to note that in this book, Kwa Chong-Guan, who has been engaged in the understanding of the long cycles of Southeast Asian history and the editor of the volume under review here, has selected and put together 31 articles by leading historians and philologists of the society showing critically how the society painted the image of Greater India through its journal. Though these scholars used the image of Greater India with details of Indic influence across the Indian Ocean to show a brighter phase of the subcontinent's past against the backdrop of its colonial domination by the British, Kwa goes beyond the frame of their mentality and shows how this image became 'a way of thinking' and 'part of a social memory of India' that influenced its outlook towards the East. The publication is timely given the profound transformation of the object of study, and consequent changes in the field.