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Dear list members,
The AABS, Sydney Southeast Asian Centre, and the University of Sydney
Asian Studies Program will host a seminar by Arlo Griffiths at
5:00-6:30pm on Monday November 24 in the Rogers Room (N397) of the
John Woolley Building, University of Sydney.
We hope you can attend.
Kind regards,
AABS Executive
The Sanskrit Inscriptions of Arakan (Myanmar)
The earliest phase of the history of Arakan (or Rakhine, in Myanmar),
between about the sixth and the tenth centuries, has to be written on the
basis of inscriptions and related material such as coins, bearing texts
in Sanskrit language. These show Arakan to be a part of the Buddhist
world with strong ties to Southeastern Bengal (the Samataṭa and Harikela
regions) and beyond this with the Buddhist communities of Northeastern
India using Sanskrit as preferential medium of expression. A first batch
of Arakan Sanskrit inscriptions was studied by E.H. Johnston and
published posthumously in 1943. Since then, this field has been further
explored mainly by P. Gutman in her unpublished doctoral thesis (1976),
and during visits to Arakan over the following decades. In collaboration
with this scholar, I am engaged in a comprehensive study of the Arakan
Sanskrit corpus. The material is often in deplorable state of
preservation, so that hardly any well-preserved text (other than short ye dharmāḥ
inscriptions) can be added to the record compiled by Johnston. But even
fragmentary material can throw new light on the past, especially when
studied in combination with epigraphical and numismatic discoveries made
in Southeast Bengal over the past half-century. The paper will present
some the ‘new’ inscriptions, and discuss their salient features. The
overall problem that I will attempt to address is the extent to which the
Arakan corpus may be regarded as integral to the epigraphical and
Buddhist culture of northeastern South Asia, or can be said to represent
a specifically Arakanese cultural identity.
Arlo Griffiths held the chair of
Sanskrit at Leiden University from 2005 through 2008, before joining the
École française d’Extrême-Orient as Professor of Southeast Asian History
and being posted at its Jakarta branch from 2009 to the present. His main
fields of academic interest are ancient South and Southeast Asian history
on the basis of inscriptions, and Sanskrit philology at large. After
publishing mainly on topics related to the tradition of the Atharvaveda
in Orissa (India), he has for the last several years concentrated on the
epigraphy of Campā (Vietnam) and Indonesia.
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