State Building in India and South East Asia—1200-1450 [AP World History Review]

Hi and welcome back to Heimler’s History. In this video we’re going to be exploring state-building and culture making in South and South East Asia. And if you have no idea what I mean when I say South Asia and South East Asia, I mean this place and these places.

Let’s get to it. Okay let’s start in India, or what the AP folks like to call South Asia. Even though Muslims ruled in the north and Buddhism was a major player, Hindu kingdoms continued to have the most dominant influence in India.

So if you’ll recall from the last video, Muslims had established the Delhi Sultanate in northern India, but didn’t make much progress converting the Indian population to Islam. Well, not being content to rule ONLY northern India, two brothers were sent from the Delhi Sultanate to south India to see what kind of prospects they would have for extending the kingdom. Well as it turns out, these two brothers were some of the few folks that had converted from Hinduism to Islam, but they did so for the sake of power and upward social mobility.

Once they left the sultanate and were surrounded by the Hindu faith once again, they converted back to Hinduism. And instead of extending Muslim rule to southern India, they went ahead and set up a new Hindu kingdom called the Vijayanagara Empire in 1336. Now let’s talk religion for a minute.

AS I mentioned, the dominant religion in India during this time was Hinduism. There was also a small Buddhist minority, but we’ll focus on them in another video. For now, let’s try to understand what it is that a Hindu believes.

Here’s a pretty tidy summary of the Hindu faith: “Through samsara, the atman seeks moksha to escape from the material world and become one with Brahman, but the pace of this process depends on karma. ” Boy you better start talking American cuz I don’t understand a word yer saying. Fine, let’s take it one phrase at a time.

Through samsara. Samsara is the Hindu conception of the great repeating circle of life and death. A person is born, lives, dies, and then is reincarnated to start all over again.

Through samsara, the atman. The atman is sort of the equivalent to what we westerners would call the soul. It’s the divine principle that is resident within each person.

Through samsara, the atman seeks moksha. So the atman is stuck in this cycle of death and rebirth, but the ultimate goal is to escape from that cycle, and that is called moksha. Through samsara, the atman seeks moksha to escape from the material world and become one with Brahman.

So, atman is the divine principle that lives within every person, but the Brahman is the divine being that undergirds all of reality. And so the point of moksha (escape) is for the atman to dissolve back into the Brahman. And finally: the pace of this process depends on karma.

Karma is like the sum total of a person’s life and actions. If they were good, they have accumulated good karma and will therefore be closer to moksha. If they were bad, the opposite is true.

This was the main belief, but as you can imagine, there were countless manifestations of this belief. One example is the Bhakti Movement in the 12th century. The Bhaktis were Hindu believers that emphasized the emotional side of devotion.

Moreover, they emphasized devotion to one god within the pantheon of Hindu gods. And this should sound somewhat familiar. They were a lot like the Muslim Sufis in that they emphasized religious experience and direct relationship with the gods over rigid, ritualistic behavior.

So this idea was woven deeply into the Indian culture, and the natural by product of such thinking was the caste system. The caste system was a hierarchical structuring of society that divided people into five groups, each one better than the one below. And the only way to move up into better castes was to get good karma, and the only way to determine how much good karma you had was to die.

That means whatever caste you were born into, you’d better get comfortable, because that’s where you’d remain, because, after all, you earned it. Now this sounds very unequal, and you’d be right in thinking that. On the other hand, a structure this rigid certainly led to a remarkable and lasting cultural stability.

And speaking of culture, Indians influenced and were influenced by other cultures as well. Indians shared significant intellectual capital with folks in the Middle East, for example. Arabs build on advances in astronomy begun by Indians.

And the Arabs translated Indian work on Algebra and Geometry and spread them all throughout Dar al-Islam. So if you love algebra and geometry, go find yourself an Indian and hug them. Alright, that’s India, let’s move over to SE Asia, which is basically today’s nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Loas, and Vietnam.

Religiously, these lands were full of Hindus and Buddhists, and they had merchants to thank for bringing such faiths to bear on the population. Now this region was perfectly situated to rule over sea-based trade routes. And as such several major kingdoms emerged.

One example of a sea-based power was the Majapahit Kingdom established in 1293. It was based on the Island of Java and largely sustained its power and wealth by controlling sea routes. And it’s probably important for you to know that they were Buddhists.

An example of a land-based empire was the Khmer Empire which was established in 802 and lasted till 1431. This empire flourished because of their complex irrigation and drainage systems going to and from the Mekong River. This kind of technology led to huge agricultural progress and therefore significant prosperity.

And these folks were Hindus but later converted to Buddhism. But let’s not forget about the Muslims. Because this was a significant trading route and because Muslims were significant merchants in the region, Islam came to live here too—not in as big of numbers as Hinduism and Buddhism, but it was respectable.

Okay, that’s what you need to know about India and SE Asia. You’re such a genius.