History of Orissa from the Earliest Times to the British Period v1.c14.3

Language: English

v1.c14.3.1

Further records of the colonisation of Further India and the Indian Archipelago by the people of Kalinga is to be found in the History of Burma and Siam. It is now acknowledged universally that the Talaing people of Burma, though of Mon origin, obtained their name from Tri-Kalinga. G. E. Harvey says, "Indeed the name 'Talaing' is probably derived from Telingana, a region on the Madras coast, whence so many of them came." It is further elucidated in a note, "the derivation of Phayre's is still the best. See Halliday, Hobson-Jobson s. v. 'Talaing', J. B. R. S. 1914 Blagden 'Talaing.' The aetiological tale that Alaungpaya christened the people Talaing meaning 'downtrodden' is disproved by the occurrence of the name Talaing in Burmese inscription as early as 1107 (Inscriptions 1913-18)."¹ The term Talaing is phonetically connected with Tri-Kalinga though that form cannot yet be proved to have existed in India in the first century B. C. or A. D. The undoubted origin of the name Talaing from Tri-Kalinga finds a curious corroboration in the fact that the Talaing land itself was divided into the three countries : Pegu, Myaingmya and Bassein. The king Razadarit (1385-1423) divided them into 32 village circles.² The Talaings of Burma were formed by an admixture of the original Indonesian or Negrito population with the Mons, with a small dose of Dravidian-Kalingan blood.

v1.c14.3.2

The structure of their language is undoubtedly Mon but the name which has stuck to them through centuries was first applied to the Indian colonists settled on the coast land. The process of the absorption of the Indian colonists is described graphically by Harvey. The Indians must have settled along the coast lands before the 1st century B. C. and the original settlements from Bengal to Borneo and Tonkin were little trading principalities, such as Prome, Rangoon and Thaton. Like the European invaders of the 17th and 18th centuries the Indian colonists conquered in three different stages : the Missionary, the Trader and the Soldier. Originally they came as peaceful traders and they were welcomed by the original inhabitants as such. In the next stage they came in larger numbers and set up independent communities, for which there was ample room in this sparsely populated country. It was in the next stage that the Indians started conquering and founding new kingdoms under some energetic leader. Perhaps religion did not form a mask to colonisation and conquest as in the case of the European Christian. The question of the religion of the original colonists from India to Further India and the Indian Archipelago is still the subject of a very great controversy. Results of excavations prove that both in Further India and the Indian Archipelago the earliest Indian colonists were Hindus, *i. e.* Brahmanical in faith.

v1.c14.3.3

Buddhism enters the stage at a much later period of the history, while Jainism does not appear at all. The absence of Jain throughout Further India and Indonesia is extremely significant in view of the fact that the province of their origin, Orissa, was a stronghold of Jainism. In fact, not a single Jain image has been recorded to have been discovered in any province of British Burma, Federated Malaya States, Siam, Annam or Cambodia. The case is slightly different in the case of Indonesia. Though Upper Indonesia has been visited from time to time by Dutch or French scholars like Krom, Finot and Vogel the majority of the islands of the South Pacific remain unvisited by any Indologist; yet, from time to time, claims are put forward by sensation-mongers or American scholars to connect the ancient Mayan civilisation with that of India. The connecting link or the route still remains to be discovered and two hypotheses have been put forward. The first of these is the time-honoured theory of the Mongolian origin of the American Indian. It is generally supposed that the Reds crossed from Asia to North America by the land bridge now represented by the Aleutian island or a vanished isthmus which originally joined Siberia to Alaska. The second theory is that some Asiatic Culture was carried across the South Pacific by traders. The islands of the Southern Pacific contain numerous remains of an extinct race.

v1.c14.3.4

It is generally admitted that the Polynesian races were never sufficiently cultured to produce such monuments. Up to this time it has never been the good fortune of any Indian Archæologist or even an European Indologist to examine the ruins of Mayan cities or to explore the Archæological remains in the South Pacific. There is a continuous chain of islands from the south-western end of New Guinea through New Hebrides, Fiji, Friendly islands, Harvey or Cook Island, Pitcairn Island to the Easter Islands, up to which the Melanesian group of Austric languages extend. From the Easter islands it is not a far cry to Juan Fernandez, off the coast of the Argentine Republic. In the Easter Islands there are antiquarian remains of the type to which a certain amount of attention has been paid by Anthropologists.¹ It is not possible in the present state of our knowledge, to aver that these remains of the Southern Pacific belong to the early colonists from Kalinga but such a hypothesis is not, altogether, impossible.