Compiled by London swaminathan
Post No. 1781; Date 6th April 2015
Uploaded from London at 20-15
Over 1250 inscriptions are discovered so far in South East Asian countries. Majority of them are in Sanskrit language. Ancient Cambodia, known as Kingdom of Khmer covered most of the area in South East Asia. Champa, what is now known as Vietnam, has the oldest Sanskrit inscription. Since the name on the inscription is Sri Mara, I have interpreted it as the name of a Pandyan king in my research article “A Tamil king who ruled Vietnam” — posted here on Sept 13 , 2011. This is what I wrote,
“The inscription is known as Vo-Chanh Inscription. It was inscribed on a rock as two parts. This is about the donation made by the family of the king Sri Maran. We have fifteen lines on one part of the rock and seven more lines on the other side. Of these only nine lines are readable. Scholars who took a copy of the inscription say the poetry part is in Vasantha Thilaka metre in Sanskrit and rest is in prose.
The king donated all his property to the people who were close to him and ordered that it should be honoured by the future kings. The inscription ends abruptly. But we could read the words ‘Sri Mara raja kula’ very clearly. Though we couldn’t get much information about this king from other sources, Chinese historians confirmed that the Hindu empire that existed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia started with Sri Maran”.
Over 800 Sanskrit inscriptions were found in S.E.Asia until fifty years ago. Now more and more inscriptions are discovered. Even a new underground city is discovered in 2013.
Saivite Sanskrit Inscription
Cambodia has made unique contributions to Sanskrit literature especially in poetry according to Dr M K Charan. He says, “The writers demonstrated full knowledge of various Indian sects. They mastered the rhetorical and literary conventions like puns, alliterations, similes etc. and virtually employed all the varied metres of Sanskrit poetics.
Cambodian epigraphy used both Sanskrit and old Khmer languages. They considered Sanskrit as a sacred language and so used it to record royal genealogies, panegyrics of the founders of monuments and donors, while old Khmer and Cambodian were used for the details which followed. Even in South India writers used Sanskrit and Tamil in the same way. Sanskrit verses praised the king and his Vamsavali (genealogy) whereas the Tamil section gave minute details of the donation, the extension of the land or the gifts to temples or the Brahmins.
298 verses in one inscription!
Since the Cambodian inscriptions covers a vast area covering several modern S. E. Asian countries and period of 800 years from 7th century to 14th century CE, we can’t expect uniformity in the language of the inscriptions.
“We have positive evidence about the flourishing state of Sanskrit language during a span of more than 800 years. Verses composed during the period of Jayavarman and Yasovarman conform to Panini’s rules because the composers had a thorough knowledge of grammar”, says DR MK Charan. Many of the Sanskrit verses are so beautiful that we do not find their parallel in India. A new Kavya style named Manohara has been referred to in the Pre rup inscription.
Inscriptions are in beautiful and flawless Kavya style. They exhibit a thorough knowledge of different metres and most developed rues and conventions of rhetoric and prosody.
Buddhist Inscription
The oldest inscription found in Cambodia is of fifth century CE. Out of the five verses contained in this inscription, four are in sardulavikridita metre and one shows familiarity with Hindu mythology. Some of the inscriptions are very big compositions. The Prasusti of Rajendravarman which contains 298 verses excess all others in size.
J F Stall says, “The Vocañh inscription is written in regular Sanskrit prose, and most of the inscriptions from Cambodia are written in a more correct form of Sanskrit than that which is used in some of the inscriptions from India. The reason for this may be that the Cambodians learned Sanskrit from grammar books and not from native speakers. The Indian grammarian Panini is in fact honoured by being mentioned in these inscriptions; other linguistic works are referred to as well”.
Jean-Michel Filippi, Professor of Linguistics at Royal Phnom Penh University wrote in June 2013, “Cambodian inscriptions make you feel dizzy: new inscriptions are still regularly found and they are very far from having been translated and commented upon.
The implications of this fact are obvious: Cambodian general history may well be known, but there remains very many obscure points which will only be made clear when the inscriptions are deciphered. Thus there is a strong chance that a book about pre-Angkor or Angkor Cambodia written 20 years ago may be simply refuted by the discovery or the deciphering of an inscription”.
Pallava Grantha Script
Lakshminarayana dasa and Bhaktin Kaunteya of Iskcon, Cambodia, are writing about research in this area and add
“In the beginning of Christian era, Khmer language was only a spoken language. In other terms, at that time, the Khmer did not know how to write. The ancient Khmers borrowed the Indic script to record their own language. So the modern Khmer language is written in a script, which is borrowed from India. It is precisely the Grantha Brahmi script, which is the mother of modern Khmer script. Cambodia has also adopted the Devanagari script and Pallava Grantha script in order to develop its actual alphabets. In the present day Cambodian, about seventy percent words are borrowed from Sanskrit. Such common words as dhanagara (bank), durasabda (telephone),bhasa (language), etc are derived from Sanskrit.
Sanskrit was the court language of the Khmer Empire for more than thousand years. All the royal orders, land transactions, temple administration were recorded in Sanskrit. Slowly the Khmer language shared this role in course of centuries. So after seventh century we find inscriptions partly written in Sanskrit and partly in Khmer.
About 1250 inscriptions have been discovered from the Ancient Angkor Empire. The majority is written in Sanskrit. The aim of the present research is to explore various aspects of cultural relations between India and Cambodia as presented in the epigraphic literature of this country”
Sources:–
Studies in Sanskrit Inscriptions of Ancient Cambodia by M K Charan, 1974
Articles by J F Stall, Jean-Michel Filiippi and Iskcon, Cambodia.
Vo Canh Inscription in Vietnam (Champa)
Tamil and Vedas 
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