Asia's Cauldron (2 page)

Witness the medieval Chola Empire of the Hindu Tamils, based in southern India, which sent its fleets throughout this seaboard as far north as China; even as ancient Chinese pottery has been found as far south as Java, and Chinese ships under the medieval Tang and Yuan dynasties ventured as far as Odisha in northeastern India. Long before the North and South Vietnams of the Cold War era, there were northern and southern Vietnams that had existed across this civilizational fault line and across the chasm of the centuries between antiquity and modern times: Dai Viet being a young and insecure kingdom in the north after having been a province of the Chinese Empire for over a thousand years; while to the south lay the Khmer Empire and Champa. Champa, in particular, was the enemy of Dai Viet, preventing
the latter's expansion to the south, until Champa was finally reduced to near ashes by the majority Kinh in the north, with an underlying sense of guilt felt by northern Vietnam toward southern Vietnam ever since. Champa, as the historical and cultural representation of southern Vietnam, was always more closely connected to the Khmer and Malay worlds than to Sinicized Dai Viet to the north.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were, again, effectively two Vietnams: Tonkin in the north ruled by the Le dynasty, and Cochin China in the south ruled by the Nguyen dynasty. All this, ultimately, because Vietnam's nearly one-thousand-mile-long coast lay astride two great civilizations: those of India and China.

Champa entered my consciousness through an illustrated book I had come upon in a shop in Hanoi years back:
The Art of Champa
by Jean-François Hubert. Because of its beauty, it was a volume I instantly wanted to own. Champa, writes Hubert, exists “in defiance of time,” its legacy rescued by French archaeologists from the École Française d'Extrême-Orient in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who studied and excavated at My Son and other sites, providing concrete evidence of what is only written about in the Chinese Dynastic Annals and Embassy Reports. Hubert's text, as elegant as the accompanying photography, exposed me to this Sanskrit culture, with its delicious Hindu-Buddhist syncretism (though weighted heavily in favor of Hinduism). “In the eighth century,” says Hubert, “Champa stretched from the Gate of Annam in the north to the Donnai basin in the south,” that is, from just north of the former demilitarized zone (DMZ) southward to Saigon. So Hubert's medieval map suggests a Cold War one. After a Grand Guignol of wars and invasions, the wages of being located on a civilizational fault line, Hindu Champa finally disappeared under the shadow of the Viets.
¹
Vietnam as we think of it was thus created, even though it is the legacy of this conquered Hindu world that provides Vietnam with its uniquely non-Chinese cultural identity.

Hubert's book led me to Da Nang, near the old DMZ, the busiest
air base during the Vietnam War. That world is dead, buried under the reality of American-style gated communities, celebrity-brand golf courses, and half-finished five-star resorts and casino complexes that fly the American flag at their entrances stretched along China Beach, south of the city. There are eco-retreats, too. The GIs' jungly hell has become a backpacker's paradise—the country that symbolized war to a generation now has a smile and an intoxicating beat to it.

Situated in downtown Da Nang is the Museum of Cham Sculpture, a 1915 mustard yellow French colonial building where hundreds of statuary recovered by the archaeologists Henri Parmentier and Charles Carpeaux during excavations in 1903 and 1904 at My Son and elsewhere are warehoused in crowded, badly lit, and sweltering conditions, with windows open to the soot and traffic. My obsession with ancient Champa deepened here. Alongside the statuary were coppery black-and-white photographs, taken by these same archaeologists, that represented their subjects better than any color photos could.
²
For the sculptures themselves bear that indeterminate milk-gray hue in some cases, and pale ocher in others, that are more beautiful than any primary color, and are best rendered as a lightened earthen contrast with the darkness all around. Each statue came alive for me, as though it were posing for a photographer in his studio. The Indian world deifies dance, and many of these pieces looked caught in freeze-frame movement.

There was Gajasimha, the mount of Shiva, with an elephant's head and a lion's body, the embodiment of the intelligence of gods and the strength of kings. And Shiva the deity itself, with a gigantic head whose nose was completely broken off, and whose eyes were mightily accepting of all the creations and destructions of the universe. There was a small Vishnu, the Protector, its features so worn away by time that there was only the hint of an eye, which, nevertheless, was frightening in its gaze. Brahma, the god of creation, had three heads rather than the usual four, representing the different directions of the universe, and, with its four arms, holding the various volumes of the Vedas. Yaksa, the nature spirit; Balarama, Vishnu's avatar; Kala, a god of death: the entire Hindu pantheon is here in Da Nang—a place
where these Indian gods ruled for close to a thousand years. The most vivid bas-reliefs from a temple at My Son, moved here by the French, recall the German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin's famous vision of history as a vast heap of wreckage of incidents and events that keeps piling higher and higher into infinity, with progress signifying merely more wreckage waiting to happen.

I was not done. The History Museum in Saigon, where there was a room full of Champa sculpture, required a visit. Here amid the dioramas and other exhibits of Song, Yuan, and Ming depredations—in other words, the struggle against China as the thematic core of Vietnamese history—I found Cham remains from as far back as the second century and as far forward as the seventeenth: more evidence of how, despite its overwhelming cultural similarities with China, Vietnam was nevertheless distinct. And it was, to a significant extent, Indian influence that made it so. Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense. I turn my head to café au lait dancing stone goddesses with four arms—with full breasts and narrow-yet-fleshy waists: they match exactly the sculptures I once saw in the caves of Ellora east of Mumbai. Lakshmi, a tenth-century statue, an invitation to wealth and sensuality; Shiva, fifteenth century, an iconic stylization that overtakes realism, so that artistic abstraction reigns. Though this Shiva is half carved, such a force of character emerges out of the stone!

I compare the Cham sculptures with the twelfth-century Khmer ones in an adjoining room, themselves confections of Buddhist-Brahminist styles. The beige brown Khmer faces come alive with their mystical acceptance of fate—nothing I have ever seen is so suggestive of being at peace—the shallow brows, the flattish noses, the wide and full lips, the eyes open, even as they seem closed. Khmer, like Champa, is another variant of the confluence of Indian and Chinese civilizations. And yet sometimes so close to one civilization one finds a piece that manifests the other civilization in its entirety: for example, a tenth-century Devi, the female form of the Supreme Lord, from Huong Que in central Vietnam, with the sharpest Aryan features, cast
in stunning chocolate orange. This statue is purely of India. It is the only one I saw suited for color rather than black-and-white rendering.

How odd that I begin a geopolitical study of the South China Sea with the delectable, mythic legacy of India. But that is the point. Champa is the lesson I must keep in mind in the course of this report about China's growing influence. My description of the art of Champa is lavish by necessity: for I must never lose sight of the vividness of India's presence in this part of the world at a time when China's gaze seems so overpowering. Yes, as I write, China's advancing presence continues to be
the story
in the South China Sea region, testimony to Beijing's demographic and economic heft. If I do not confront China's rise—if I do not confront the signal trends of recent decades—then there can be no relevance to my observations. Because the future is unknowable, all one can do is write about the present. But the fact that the future is unknowable also means it is open to all manner of possibilities—such as, perhaps, the dramatic weakening or even collapse of the Communist Party (and China, too) from internal economic and social stresses. Thus, Champa offers a lesson in humility: an awareness that because the present is ephemeral, even at its best my analysis can only constitute a period piece. Though I will refer only rarely to Champa again, I hope that my brief albeit intense allusion to it will rescue what follows from mere topicality. Champa represents the long view: for by going back in time we look forward over the horizon. The shadow of China presently looms large, but if at some point very soon China dramatically falters the South China Sea may once again live up to its French colonial description of
Indochina
, where China competes on an equal—rather than a dominant—footing with India and other powers and civilizations.

Moreover, while my study points to a military rivalry between the United States and China, the future—in military as well as economic terms—may be distinctly multipolar, with a country like Vietnam—or Malaysia, Australia, or Singapore—playing off a host of powers
against each other. The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa, because it tells of the centrality of one power at a time when another is now still ascendant, is a symbol of surprises and possibilities yet unseen to the conventional analyst.

The American GIs' Saigon of loud bars and strip joints is gone: entombed in memory under gleaming, backlit facades of
Gucci, Lacoste, Versace
. But these wondrously enigmatic statues in the dusty godown of a museum live on.

To view a full-size version of this image, click
HERE
.