I am in the ‘Indian’ section of Strange Parallels and the author contends that Southeast Asian and South India were ‘Indianized’ at about the same time. By Indianized he means the suite of cultural characteristics which issued out of the Gangetic plain during the first millennium, after the Sangam period but before Mahmud of Ghanzi. Please note that the author is Burma specialist, but though I can’t discount this assertion at first blush, I have an urge to find it to be implausible. That is, I presume that there must be a deeper cultural connection between North and South India which predates the expansion of the Indic cultural zone to Southeast Asia, dating back to the Maurya Empire. What say you? I suspect my urge is rooted emotionally in the fact that India obvious coheres as a cultural whole today, and has since the rise of the Indo-Islamic societies, as well as my knowledge of the deep time genetic connections. But the latter doesn’t speak to connections and distinction which characterize Indic thought during the Axial Age.
‘Indianization’ in the first 1,000 years after Christ