Revisionist endeavours are tricky business. The work to rescue history from nations, cultural groups and other schemes can ensnare area specialists in contradictions that seem to offer no escape. The small niche of Cham studies offers a fascinating example of this problem. Revisionists in the 1980s and 1990s began to dismantle the idea of a singular ‘Kingdom of Champa’ that had spawned and legitimised their very discipline of study, in favour of the idea of a multicultural, multicentred ‘federation of chiefdoms’. It did not take long for the revisionist impulse to reject the existence of a Cham-dominated political system, or even a Cham cultural core in the territory formerly known as ‘Champa’. In the case of Cham ethnicity, regional, cultural, linguistic as well as historical continuities have similarly suffered rejection. Given all this difference, does enough commonality remain to justify ‘Cham studies’ as a singular object study? If so, what new scheme(s) should replace it? This volume, borne of a 2004 symposium at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, confirms the legitimacy of the revisionist enterprise in Cham studies, and helps make the first difficult steps to address this uncomfortable question that anyone involved in Cham studies must address.
The editors have united the book's articles around a number of themes; discrediting the dominant ‘Maspero Narrative’ of Cham history (p. 9), however, appears to be job number one. Published in 1926, Henri Maspero's Royaume de Champa established the axioms of a classical Champa that remained unchallenged for decades: a single, hierarchical kingdom, predominantly Cham, Indianised in its sociopolitical form, whose birth, life and death could be verified, and whose legacy survives in relics and vanishing descendants pushed to the margins by inexorable Vietnamese expansion. The first and last essays of this book by Lockhart and Vickery together clarify the artifice of Maspero's thesis, and justify the need for new models. Vickery goes further by subordinating his criticism of past scholarship to a proposed alternative history of ‘Champa Revised’. If read first, readers may find that the book's other essays add useful substance, nuance and challenges to Vickery's basic framework. Among the historians, Wade, Whitmore, Shiro and Wong delve further into the Chinese and Vietnamese historical sources that shaped early French standard-bearers. Whitmore and Shiro step back from Vickery's vision of truly separate polities, preferring to see ‘Champa’ as a mandala-shaped system made of smaller polities who competed and co-operated in the interest of attracting commercial traffic sailing off its shores. These sources certainly placed great emphasis on trade and other matters that concerned them; other scholars with a similarly fine grasp of Sanskrit and Chamic may offer complementary insights into the internal mechanisms that drove this system's economy, power structure and culture. Such insights could explain the lack of evidence for factionalism that produced alliances between Cham and non-Cham rivals against other Cham, or the system's success at operating in trading and political cultures as diverse as China, Java and the Philippines.
These internal dynamics matter to Diem, who explains the episodic Bình Định ceramic industry of the sixteenth century as the consequence of a complex, heterarchical sociopolitical system capable of reconfiguring itself in order to produce flexible responses to changing regional exigencies. The other archaeologists confirm this decentralised system. Southworth, drawing from his brilliant 2001 reinterpretation of Lâm Âp (Linyi) — no longer thought to be synonymous with Champa — anchors this heterarchy in an ‘archipelagic’ structure of river valleys along the Central Vietnamese coast where the Cham system once lay. Glover, Nguyễn and Yamagata, observing a decade of excavations in one of these river systems, perceive an evolutionary continuity between the Austronesian-speaking colonists from the sea and an identifiably Cham culture. As it evolved, it drew non-Chamic speakers into it, and reached both inland and overseas. The evident cross-cultural exchange of objects and technologies that resulted clearly influenced this evolution, and were well defined by the time Buddhism arrived, as John Guy's placement of the region into wider networks of the Boddhisattva cult shows. Cultural links grew and endured, as Tran's placement of pedestal motifs into the context of the wider Hindu cultural world demonstrates. Even as these macroregional links dissolved in recent centuries, one detects in Thành and Yoshimoto's anthropological fieldwork signs that a heterodox approach to social organisation has persisted to this day.
Lockhart, an admirable master of Vietnamese scholarly literature, notes the important revisionist trend that developed inside Vietnam thanks to the late Trân Quõć Vủợng, featured in this book, as well as Trần Kỳ Phuờng, Trịnh Cao Tủởng and others. Their work on Champa asserted a cultural complexity that challenged the sacrosanct idea that all Vietnamese descended in pristine fashion from Red River ancestors. Thus, Cham studies exert a profound influence beyond its little niche. Perhaps that influence will expand as future studies draw more regional connections and comparisons. Whatever happens, the old ‘Kingdom of Champa’ is dead. The work of constructing new models has only begun.
