The Ancient Champa Kingdom
Anyone who reads the Hindu Epic, The Mahabharata, will be aware of the Champa Kingdom. It is referred to towards the end of the book but there is no mention of its location. So it is understandable that many ordinary Indian people wouldn’t know where it is. From our understanding we have no knowledge of a kingdom of that name has ever existed anywhere in ancient India.
Champa was a Hindu kingdom in a land outside India inhabited by people of non-Indian origin. Hinduism spread to South-East Asia, along the sea route to Malay, Java, Sumatra, Bali, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, probably in the 5th century AD.
The countries Java, Sumatra and Bali that belonged to present day Indonesia until 9th 10th centuries AD, were Hindu countries, now all converted to Islamism except for Bali; the last Hindu bastion in an Islamic country. Hinduism is still strong in Bali and practiced ardently. From about the 8th century AD until the present day, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam took to Buddhism. Interestingly though, in some villages Hindus do still exist but the form of Hinduism practiced is very blurred with hardly any clear distinction between it and Buddhism.
Cambodia was and is still inhabited by people called the Khmer. Their kingdom during the 5th and 6th century AD extended from Cambodia to central Vietnam and to the coast of the China Sea in the east. Rajyya Verma was the Hindu Khmer king known to have ruled in the Khmer kingdom during early to mid 5th century AD.
The kingdom grew and prospered under successive dynasty kings and attained its pinnacle during the time of Suryya Verma in the 8th century AD. During that time the country was economically and culturally, one of the most advanced in the world.
Towards the end of Surrya Verma’s rule, the popularity of Hinduism began to decline and soon was overtaken by Buddhism. The east of the kingdom of Champa, in present day Vietnam, situated in the region of Da-Nang to My-Son, Hinduism survived for a while but was eventually replaced by Buddhism. How the Champa kingdom declined and fell is still unknown
The kingdom perished with time and with it the palaces, temples and all other remains of its past glory and splendour. The descendants of the Champa Kingdom forgot their ancestry and civilisation even though some may have lived nearby the remains of the ancient buildings. Over time the ancient monuments became insignificant and remained unnoticed eventually engulfed and hidden by the dense tropical jungle. Centuries later, French archaeologists discovered the sites during the latter part of French colonial rule in the 1940’s.
During my recent visit to Vietnam and Cambodia I was astonished and immensely proud to find Hinduism had spread so far abroad. If we rely on the reference in the Mahabharata about Champa it goes back as far as 4000AD, maybe even earlier than that. Most Indian scholars now believe that the Mahabharta was not written during one single era by one single author (Rishi Byasdev in as our legend said.)
The materials used in the temples of the Khmer kingdom are dressed stone blocks cut with precision, very similar to the stone works found in the Inca kingdom in Peru and the Egyptian pyramids but in a smaller scale of stone sizes.
The building blocks used in the temples of Champa were flat brick like materials, no more than about 2cm thick. Again, no mortar was used to bind the building blocks together. Also, there is a remarkable absence of moss growth on the ruined walls of the temples. I was informed that the ancient Champa builders did not use mortar they apparently stacked the thin building blocks one on top of another. They followed the design of the temple, wrapping up the entire building in special leaves and finally glazing it by lighting a fire on top of the leaf cover. The heat sapped the juice from the leaves that went through the gaps between the building blocks acting as glue and cementing them together.
All the temples in Champa kingdom were dedicated to the Gods Brahma, Vishnu or Shiva. Shiva was depicted as a Lingam with ubiquitous stone carvings of yoni and phallus. No Nataraj figure is to be seen. We know that the god Brahma went out of favour in later Hinduism after several reformations.
There is an absence of other gods and goddesses in the temple. Architecture indicates that the Hinduism practiced in the Champa kingdom was quite early Hinduism before the emergence of further gods and goddesses as Hindu pantheons. However statues of Apsaras in the temple walls were and are abundant.
Some of the Hindu temples found in Cambodia and Vietnam’s Champa kingdom appear contemporary, dating from the 5th to the 8th century AD, but there are noticeable difference in the building materials and the techniques used.
The question is, is the Champa kingdom, discovered by the French archaeologists in the Da-Nang and My-Son areas of Vietnam, the same Champa kingdom referred to in the Mahabharata? Until proven, it remains a legend.
At the same time to include the Khmer kingdoms of Rajya Verma and Surya Verma as the possible ancient kingdom of Champa cannot be totally dismissed.
Fact remains, it was a thrilling experience for me to find a Hindu kingdom in such a faraway place.
Probir Brahma November 2009
