In the previous post (Srivijaya in Inscriptions), I tried to explain how George Coedès made the argument in 1918 that the term “Srivijaya” should be understood to refer to a country or kingdom.
It’s not easy to explain because in addition to having to demonstrate the ways in which Coedès’s ideas influenced the way that he read inscriptions, it also requires that one talk about Sanskrit grammar, as Coedès based his argument on Sanskrit grammatical principles.
I don’t feel like I entirely succeeded in making these points clear in the previous post. So I want to try again here by looking at how Coedès examined a different Sanskrit inscription. In this example, I think we will be able to see clearly how Coedès thought and how he read (and manipulated) Sanskrit inscriptions to get the information that he wanted to find.
To do this we are going to look at a Cambodian inscription that Coedès referred to as the Prasat Kok (Sud) inscription (K.887, in IC IV, 153-55).
Coedès says that this is a Buddhist text that is dated 983 AD, during the reign of Jayavarman V. Coedès states further that it talks about how a man named Rajendravaidya erected an image of Jina (which as far as I know is an epithet for the Buddha), and that precious objects and a palace were offered as well.
As for this man named Rajendravaidya, Coedès states that he was “a grandson in the maternal line of Vijayakesari and in the paternal line of Rajavalya” (petit-fils en ligne maternelle de Vijayakesari et en ligne paternelle de Rajavalya).
Ok, so according to Coedès, this inscription mentions two lineages, the Vijayakesaris and the Rajavalyas.
Let us now look at the passage in the inscription were Coedès got that information.
It is, according to Coedès, as follows:
matamaho yasya rane vi – –
vividgajendrantaka – – – –
yo nama sa crivijayadi vibhrat
tan [tadyate] kesaris – – – –
Coedès has a footnote indicating that he can’t see the word “tadyate” clearly, but he thinks that’s what it is, and then he translates these lines as follows:
“His maternal grandfather, causing in battle the destruction of the kings of enemy elephants. . . had a name beginning with Sri Vijaya (and ending with) kesari.”
[Son grand-père maternel, causant dans la bataille la destruction des rois des éléphants ennemis …….. portait un nom commençant par Cri Vijaya (et se terminant par) kesari.]
So the first thing that we can see is that this name of the maternal line, Vijayakesari, that Coedès mentions with confidence in his introduction, doesn’t actually appear in the text. Instead, we have something that begins with “Srivijaya,” but then Coedès can’t read clearly what comes next, and then that unclear part is followed by “kesari.”
So Coedès dropped the “Sri,” combined the parts that he could make out (Vijaya and kesari), skipped the parts that he didn’t understand, and created a name: Vijayakesari.
Voilà!! Isn’t reading Sanskrit inscriptions easy?!!
But wait, why is the “Sri” not important in the “Srivijaya” here? In 1918 Coedès rejected Kern’s translation of “Srivijaya” in the Kota Kapur inscription as “His Majesty Vijaya.” But here we see Coedès totally ok with leaving “Sri” out and manipulating a text to come up with an imagined name.
Hmmmm. . . Why am I starting to think that maybe Georgie-boy came up with ideas that aren’t actually in the inscriptions he read?
One reason why he did this was, as I mentioned in the previous post because he was looking for kings and names of kings. In doing this, Coedès applied a very secular reading to the inscriptions.
Sanskrit inscriptions are filled with sacred or divine terminology. However, Coedès tended to ignore those terms and to “translate” them into secular equivalents. This is something that we saw in the previous post when we saw that Coedès understood terms like “Ishvara” to simply mean “king” (roi) rather than something more sacred, like “lord.”
He does that in this text as well. In his translation, Coedès mentions “the kings of enemy elephants.” That’s an odd expression. Where does it come from?
Coedès came up with that concept by (loosely) translating the term “gajendra.” This is a compound that combines together “gaja” (elephant) and Indra (the god Indra). When the final “a” of gaja is next to the “i” of Indra, these two letters combine into “e,” so “gaja + indra” becomes “gajendra.”
When these two words combine, what do they mean? As we saw in the previous post, there are different kinds of word compounds. In karmadharaya compounds, the first word acts like an adjective and modifies the second (“elephant king”), while in tatparusa compounds the second word is more important and “rules over” the first (“king of elephants).
Coedès reads “gajendra” as a tatparusa compound, and therefore translated it as “the kings of [enemy] elephants.” Further, he removes any sacred or divine meaning from “Indra” and translates that word in secular terms as “king” (roi).
Why does he read this compound in this way? He reads it as a tatparusa compound because, as we saw in the previous post, for some reason Coedès believed that “In Indochinese epigraphy, Indra and Ishvara are never used as the second term in a karmadharaya compound with the sense of ‘king.’”
(Dans l’épigraphie indochinoise, indra ou ïçvara ne sont jamais employés comme second terme d’un composé karmadhâraya, avec le sens de « roi-».)
In other words, Coedès believed that “gajendra” had to be read as “king of elephants” (tatparusa), and that it could not be read as “elephant king” (karmadharaya).
I’m not sure why he thought that way. He must have had a copy of the famous Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English dictionary that was first published in 1899.
That dictionary has a few different definitions of “gajendra,” one of which is “a very princely elephant.”
How does “gaja” + “Indra” become “a very princely elephant”?
It can be read that way because there are other types of compounds than the two Coedès mentioned in his 1918 article. There are, for instance, “dvandva” compounds. In these compounds, the two words are considered more or less equal.
So if we read “gaja” + “Indra” as a dvandva compound, then it means something like “the elephant that is Indra” or “the elephant that is like Indra.” It is from this sense that Monier-Williams translated it as “a very princely elephant.”
“Princely,” however, is a lot less “divine” than the term “Indra” implies. As such, Monier-Williams was like Coedès. Both of these men removed the sacredness from Sanskrit and rendered divine words into secular terms.
So to return to Coedès’s “translation,” there is nothing here about “kings of elephants.” Instead, there are “elephants like Indra,” and one of those elephants had a name that began with the words “Sri Vijaya,” the “Great Victorious One.”
My guess would be that naming a war elephant “Sri Vijaya” in tenth-century Cambodia was probably about as common as naming your son “Jacques” in France during Coedès’s lifetime.
There is at least one other inscription (K.956) that gives the name of an elephant. That inscription is in Khmer, and not surprisingly, the elephant is called Srijaiyasiksadharma. The “Srijaiya” here has the same meaning as “Srivijaya.”
Why didn’t Coedès see any of this? Why, instead, did he see “kings of elephants” and imagine a family name called the Vijayakesaris?
This happened because Coedès “found” what he wanted to see in this inscription rather than “understand” what is actually there.
Coedès wanted to find a king (Où est le roi?) and the name of that king’s family (Quel est le nom de sa famille?). However, this inscription talks about an “elephant like Indra” named “the Great Victorious One.”
So what do you do?
Easy! You do the same thing you did with the “Kingdom of Srivijaya.”
You make stuff up.
