Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T20:49:40.532Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Śaiva Religious Iconography: Dancing Śiva in Multi-Polity Medieval Campā

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2023

Andrea Acri
Affiliation:
École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris
Peter Sharrock
Affiliation:
University of London
Get access

Summary

As early as the 5th century CE, Śaivism had risen to eminence on the Indian subcontinent as an established religious institution. Prosperous maritime trade routes between India and China brought Śaivism to the new lands of Southeast Asia, including Campā, a chain of small coastal polities that developed during the first millennium CE in present-day central and southern Vietnam. The name ‘Campapura’ first appeared in a local Cam inscription, the Mỹ Sơn Stele of Prakāśadharma (C. 96), which is dated to 658 CE. A few years later, in the Khmer Kdei Ang inscription (K. 53), the name ‘Campeśvara’ is mentioned as well (Coedès and Parmentier 1923: 46; Schweyer 2010). But Campā did not exist throughout its history under the same name, as it was referred to in several Chinese sources under different names such as Linyi 林邑 (Viet. Lâm Ấp) from 192 to 758, Huanwangguo 環王國 (Viet. Hoàn Vương quốc) from 758 to 886 and Zhancheng 占城 (Viet. Chiêm Thành) from 886–1471 (Vickery 2011: 369). In addition, if early French scholarship often described Campā as a unified kingdom, the last few decades have seen a wave of new studies concerning Campā not as a single entity, but as a multi-polity Cam ‘network state’ comprised of five regions or principalities located from North to South in present-day Vietnam: Indrapura, Amarāvatī, Vijaya, Kauthara, and Pāṇḍuraṅga. Keith Taylor (1999: 153) defined Campā as ‘a generic term for the polities organized by Austronesian-speaking peoples along what is now the central coast of Vietnam’, while Vickery (2011: 378) asserts that there was no single kingdom named ‘Campā’, and that the regions as distinguished in epigraphy corresponded to distinct geographical, and even rival, polities. This prompts the question as to what kind of political relationships and connections there existed between different parts/regions of Campā, and whether these regions can be conceptualized as polities, states, or principalities. There are of course differences between these terms but for the time being, as my chapter focuses more on artistic rather than political aspects, I will use these terms interchangeably. And for the sake of convenience, I will use the term Campā to include all Cam polities.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Creative South
Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia
, pp. 289 - 304
Publisher: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
First published in: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×