The notion of changelessness dissolves, however, when we discuss the first set of revolutionary changes that swept Cambodia at the beginning of the Christian ear. This was the phenomenon known as Indianization, whereby elements of Indian culture were absorbed or chosen by the Cambodian people in a process that lasted more than a thousand years. No one knows precisely when the process began or how it worked at different times. All-inclusive theories about it advanced by French and Dutch scholars usually put too little emphasis on the element of local choice; a few writers, on the other hand, have tended to exaggerate it. Generally, as George Coedes has remarked, scholars with training in Indian culture emphasize India's "civilizing mission"; those trained in the social sciences stress the indigenous response.
Historians must deal with both sides of the exchange. The process by which a culture changes is complex. When and why did Indian cultural elements come to be preferred to local ones? Which ones were absorbed, revised, or rejected? In discussing kIndianization, we encounter the categories that some anthropologists have called "Great" and "Little" traditions, the first connected with India, Sanskrit, the courts, and Hinduism, and the other with "Cambodia,"Khmer, villages, and folk-religion. In the Cambodian case, the categories are not especially useful. We cannot play down the Great Tradition in Cambodian village life; where does monastic Buddhism fit in, for example, or Little Tradition activites, like ancestor worship and forlk stories, at the court? village wisdom always penetrated the court, and princely values, enshrined in Hindu epics and Buddhist legeds, or jataka tales, penetrated village life. the two aspects of society were complementary and antagonistic ate different times.
Nevertheless, the process of Indianization made Cambodia an Indian seeming place. In the nineteenth century, for example, Cambodian peasants still wore recognizably Indian costumes, and in many ways they behaved more like Indians than they did like their closest neighbors, the Vietnamese. Cambodians ate with spoons and fingers, for example, and carried goods on their heads; they wore turbans rather than straw hats and skirts rather than trousers. Musical instruments, jewelry,and manuscripts were also Indian in style. It is possible also that cattle-raising in Cambodia had been introduced by Indians at a relatively early date; it is unknown, to a great extent, in the rest of mainland Southeast Asia.
Trade between prehistoric Indian and Cambodia probably began long before India itself was Sanskritized. In fact, as Paul Mus has suggested, Cambodia and southern India, as well as what is now Bengal, probably shared the culture of "monsoon Asia," which emphasized the role played by ancestral, tutelary deities in the agricultural cycle. these were often located for ritual purposes in stones that naturally resembled phallus's or were carved to look like them. Sacrifices to the stones, it was thought, ensured the fertility of the soil. Cults like this were not confined to Asia, nut it is useful to see, as Mus has, that an Indian traveler coming across them in Cambodia would "recognize" them as Indian cults honoring the god Siva or one of his consorts. similarly, a Cambodian visiting India, or hearing about it, would see some of his own cults in those that honored the Indian god.
During the first five hundred years or so of the Christian ear, India provide Cambodia with a writing system, a pantheon, later for poetry, a language (Sanskrit) to write it in, a vocabulary of social hierarchies (not the same as a caste system), Buddhism, the idea of universal kingship, and new ways of looking at politics, sociology, architecture, in iconography, astronomy, and aesthetics. Without India, Angkor would never have been built; yet Angkor was never an Indian city, any more than medieval Paris was a Roman one.
