Fluid Crossings: Reimagining Culture Beyond Borders

The relationship between Kalinga and Southeast Asia has long been discussed within frameworks of trade, conquest, or religious transmission. Yet, as Dr. Umakanta Mishra’s recent lecture “Merchants, Mātṛkās & Monks: Three Aspects of Kalinga’s Relations with Southeast Asia” underscored, these categories are inadequate to capture the scale and subtlety of cultural movement across the Indian Ocean. What was often labelled as “influence” was in fact a dynamic process of mutual negotiation. This shared civilisational enterprise cannot be neatly folded into any nation’s claim to past eminence.

Dr. Mishra’s lecture, presented at Bali Unveiled: Stories, Studies and More, provided an incisive framework to reinterpret the complex and multi-directional exchanges between Eastern India and the Southeast Asian archipelago. As one of the participants in this discussion, ParibhaAsha observed that the central argument extended far beyond maritime trade or religious diffusion; it touched the fundamental question of how we understand culture itself.

The lecture emphasised that civilisational history must be understood as a process of circulation rather than transmission, a pattern of cultural evolution shaped by fluid identities, overlapping geographies, and non-linear interactions. To view history through fixed boundaries or unilateral narratives of influence is to misunderstand the very essence of cultural development.

This essay, the first in a three-part Paricharchā series, reflects upon that idea. It explores the principle of cultural fluidity and non-linear exchange, using the Kalinga–Southeast Asia relationship as a lens through which to rethink how ideas, art, and belief systems evolve across time and geography.

Culture as Circulation, Not Transmission

The earlier colonial notion of “Indianisation” implied a one-way transfer of Indian culture into Southeast Asia—a model that modern research now finds insufficient. Scholars such as O.W. Wolters, Hermann Kulke, and Pierre-Yves Manguin have reframed this exchange as a reciprocal process of local adaptation. Civilisations like Srivijaya, Majapahit, and Kediri were not passive recipients of Indic ideas but active re-interpreters.

Dr. Mishra’s interpretation aligns with this perspective, offering inscriptional and iconographic evidence that shows Kalinga’s role not as an imperial exporter of culture, but as one participant among many in a shared maritime system. Inscriptions mentioning banigrama (merchant guilds) and juru kling (leaders of Indian and foreign trading communities) in Java establish the presence of Indian maritime groups long before the rise of later Indian Ocean empires.

These records are not colonial imprints; they are archaeological signatures of connectivity. Kalingan traders, monks, and artisans were part of a cosmopolitan oceanic network that spanned the Bay of Bengal (then Kalinga Sagar) and beyond. Their influence was subtle and embedded in everyday exchange rather than domination.

Non-Linear History and the Myth of Borders

Dr. Mishra’s central caution was methodological: that present-day political boundaries cannot explain pre-modern cultural realities. The Bay of Bengal, far from being a divide, was an integrative space, a “liquid continent,” as historian Sugata Bose describes it. Within this framework, the Odisha–Southeast Asia relationship was defined not by territorial proximity but by shared mobility.

From the 9th to 13th centuries CE, inscriptions from Central and East Java mention communities identified as Kling, Aryya, Singhala, Campa, Remman, and Pandikira. These were not nationalities but maritime identities, fluid labels for groups of merchants, monks, and migrants whose affiliations shifted with trade winds and alliances.

This cultural geography challenges the linear timeline of influence. The evidence, ranging from the Kertanagara inscriptions to the iconography of Candi Jago and Singasari, suggests a circular process of cultural negotiation, where ideas flowed in multiple directions and were redefined in transit.

Iconography as a Shared Cognitive Language

One of the most striking aspects of the lecture was the comparison between the Camunda of Singasari in Java and the Yogini and Matrika traditions of Odisha. These parallels go beyond artistic resemblance; they reveal a shared metaphysical grammar that underpinned both Shakta and Buddhist tantric visualities.

In the Singasari reliefs, Chamunda is depicted seated upon a corpse, flanked by Ganesha, Varahi, and Bhairava, motifs that resonate with the Kaula-tantra iconography of Hirapur and Ratnagiri. Such continuity of symbols suggests the migration of ritual knowledge systems through maritime exchange.

Dr. Mishra connected these representations to the textual traditions of Kaula Tantra and to Kertanagara’s tantric affiliations, as recorded in the Nagarakertagama. His references to rituals like Prayogakriya and Ganachakra highlighted how tantric practice became an essential part of royal statecraft in Java, mirroring parallel developments in medieval Odisha.

These interconnections affirm that material culture and spiritual practice often travelled together, one reinforcing the other.

Ratnagiri and the Route of Knowledge

The movement of tantric thought was not confined to India or Java. The Blue Annals of Tibet (A.D. 1476–78) refer to the search for the Kālacakra Tantra by the ācārya Celuka (Tsi-lu-pa), who reportedly studied the text at Ratnagiri Vihara in Odisha. This monastery, undamaged during the Turushka invasions, remained a hub for Buddhist philosophical transmission across Asia.

From Ratnagiri, scholars and monks travelled to Sumatra, Java, and eventually to China, carrying tantric manuscripts that formed the basis of East Asian esoteric traditions. By the 8th century CE, these texts, Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha and Mahāvairocanābhisambodhi Sūtra, reached the Tang court through monks like Śubhakarasiṃha, Vajrabodhi, and Amoghavajra, who transmitted them further to Japan, influencing the formation of Shingon Buddhism.

Such evidence reveals an unbroken intellectual continuum linking Odisha, Java, and East Asia. Dr. Mishra’s lecture brought attention to this underexplored trajectory, a cultural cartography defined by teachers, translators, and ritual practitioners rather than kings or conquerors.

Reframing Methodology: Embracing Fluidity

What emerges from this discourse is a call for a new historical methodology, one that recognises motion as the essence of civilisation. History is not a sequence of fixed events; it is a process of constant negotiation between local and translocal forces.

Fluidity does not signify the absence of identity, but rather its adaptability. The movement of people and ideas across seas did not dissolve cultural specificity; it enriched it. The spiritual landscape of Odisha and Java evolved through such dynamic hybridity.

Dr. Mishra’s work thus becomes a timely reminder: to study culture is to study transformation, not ownership.

Political borders are irrelevant to the civilisational pulse of the Indian Ocean world, which has always thrived on pluralism, hybridity, and interconnectedness.

Towards a Theory of Cultural Continuum

To study Kalinga’s maritime linkages is not to merely reconstruct trade routes or to trace a catalogue of shared iconographies; it is to engage with a deeper question — how do cultures think across time and tide? The evidence presented by Dr. Mishra, when viewed alongside existing scholarship, compels us to confront an uncomfortable truth: history never moves in a straight line, and identity is never a closed category.

The seas between Odisha and Southeast Asia carried epistemologies beyond goods. Every voyage, every exchange, every inscription on a temple wall or textile border was an act of dialogue between worlds that refused to remain separate. What we often read as diffusion was, in reality, co-authorship — a collective authorship of civilisation where no culture was a passive recipient. The fluid crossings of ideas, symbols, and technologies across the Bay of Bengal reflect a continuum of creativity, not a hierarchy of influence.

To understand such histories demands a departure from cartographic thinking. Ancient networks were never defined by the modern logic of borders; they operated through the relational logic of movement — of merchants who were also pilgrims, of monks who were also translators, of artisans who were also archivists. The maritime world of Kalinga was therefore not an extension of territorial power but an ecosystem of shared imagination.

In this context, fluidity is not a metaphor but a method, a way to read the past without the burden of modern frameworks of ownership and origin. The idea of Kalinga, as evoked in these exchanges, becomes an emblem of continuity, one that flows through art, language, ritual, and trade, constantly reshaping the cultural geography of the Indian Ocean.

ParibhaAsha’s reflection on Dr. Mishra’s lecture thus underscores a larger historiographical proposition: that the study of culture must move from mapping influence to understanding interaction; from tracing lines on land to reading patterns in water. Only then can we begin to see how civilisation itself is a process of translation — continuous, adaptive, and profoundly human.

About the Series

• Essay I: Explores the principle of cultural fluidity and non-linear exchange across the Bay of Bengal.

• Essay II: Traces Odisha’s Maritime Linkages with Southeast Asia and examines the confusion of identity surrounding Bali Jatra, the largest open-air trade fair of Asia.

• Essay III: Revisits the anthropological legacy of L.K. Mohapatra, drawing from a lecture by Vijoy S. Sahay (Former HOD, Anthropology, University of Allahabad), and argues for the role of anthropology in addressing socio-economic and political challenges.

Contribute to Paricharcha

We believe knowledge grows through participation, not only preservation. Paricharchā welcomes contributors who wish to explore how culture interacts with society, technology, policy, and imagination.

You can write with us if you:

• Observe traditions, languages, or community practices and wish to interpret them through reflection or research.

• Study anthropology, sociology, literature, or design and want to connect theory with lived experience.

• Work in governance, academia, media, or creative industries and have insights on how culture shapes daily life.

• Are part of a community initiative or grassroots movement preserving or reinventing heritage.

We accept essays, short commentaries, visual narratives, and field reflections in English, Odia, or bilingual formats. Contributors are credited as Paricharchā Fellows or Guest Authors and become part of an emerging network of cultural thinkers and practitioners.

References

• Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Harvard University Press, 2006.

• Kulke, Hermann, and K. Kesavapany (eds.). Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola Naval Expeditions to Southeast Asia. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009.

• Manguin, Pierre-Yves, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade (eds.). Early Interactions Between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange. ISEAS, 2011.

• Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. University of California Press, 2006.

• Wolters, O.W. History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Cornell University Press, 1999.

• Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Connected History: Essays and Arguments. Verso, 2022.

• Sinclair, Ian. “Revisiting the Maritime Networks of Kalinga and Southeast Asia.” Journal of Asian Maritime Studies, 2018.

• Christie, Jan Wisseman. “Asian Sea Trade between the Tenth and Thirteenth Centuries.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1993.

• Mitra, Debala. Ratnagiri: Excavations on Buddhist Monuments. Archaeological Survey of India, 1981.

• Robson, Stuart. Desawarnana (Nagarakertagama) by Mpu Prapanca: A Translation with Notes. BRILL, 1995.

• Mishra, Umakanta. Merchants, Mātṛkās & Monks: Kalinga’s Relations with Southeast Asia. Lecture, Bali Unveiled, 2025.