Localvs.Trans-regional Perspectives on Southeast Asian ‘Indianness’

This article is an attempt to define the concept ‘(Southeast Asian) Indianness’ through a comparative approach based on a local vs. trans-regional perspective. I shall analyse the complex relationships that develop between a translocal, urban and literate Indo-Aryan Great Tradition and a local, rural and oral Little Tradition. First, I shall tackle the question of whether literacy has any socio-religious relevance and endeavour to identify its relationship to orality. I will subsequently analyse the (re-) Indianisation process as a socio-political construct and will finally propose some re-readings of ‘Aryapheresis’ (i.e. ‘Indian [Ārya] Transplant’ [phérein]), which I believe has been applied wrongly in some cases, to some Southeast Asian Indian-based socio-cultural realities.