Dangerous Friendships: Making and Unmaking Maritime Buddhist Connection in Eighteenth-Century Southern Asia
Abstract (summary)
This dissertation demonstrates how the creation and breakdown of initially friendly Buddhist monastic connectivity over dangerous Bay of Bengal waters in the mid-eighteenth century became a destabilizing conduit for political and commercial exploitation by the governors and merchants of the Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC), together with the Śrī Laṅkān and Siamese Buddhist monks, courtiers, and monarchs with whom they contended. Between the 1740s and 1760s, Buddhist maritime connectivity gave rise to destabilizing, fraught, and consequential forms of disintegration, rather than networked connectivity as previous scholars of Indian Ocean Buddhism have asserted. Śrī Laṅkān Kandyan and Siamese Ayutthayan Buddhist monks, envoys, courtiers, kings, and princes, together with the VOC’s governors, merchants, soldiers, sailors, and spies engaged one another in complex, tendentious, and ultimately short-lived projects of connected religious diplomacy motivated by each party’s changing economic, political, and religious demands, desires, and projections of power. While they called one another “friend,” they destroyed as much as they built.
Charting new forms of affiliation and belonging, building new templates for merging religious and political power, and occasioning the disintegration of those templates, they created unprecedented opportunities for the Dutch company to experiment with both mollifying, and later attempting to replace, indigenous monarchs precisely because its governors and merchants came to appreciate the centrality of Buddhist monastic lineage to the exercise and legitimacy of political power. I argue that friendship not only necessitated various forms of danger, but created the possibility for a range of dangerous political destabilizations. The forging of friendship across the early modern Bay of Bengal necessitated the danger of putting Buddhist diplomacy in the hands of European intermediaries, facing the many dangers of traveling the open seas, and the dangers of utilizing Buddhist lineage as a tool of economic and political triangulation by self-consciously foreign-derived kings. Friendship also made life more dangerous. With the arrival in Kandy of ordination-granting monks from the heart of Siam came unprecedented opportunities for ambitious courtiers, monks, and Dutch governors to ally themselves in unexpected ways and undermine the templates of political power and sovereignty so critical to the legitimacy of Kandy’s Buddhist monarchs, courtiers, and monks.
Indexing (details)
Asian history;
Religious history
0332: Asian History
0320: Religious history