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This introductory chapter begins with a description of The Mahotsavavidhi, or “Procedures for the Great Festival,” of the Śaiva preceptor Aghoraśiva, which offers a particularly rich depiction of south Indian temple festival practice from the Chola period. Composed by an eminent south Indian teacher of the mid-12th century, this work aims to convey clear and authoritative guidance for the Śaiva priests who would officiate at temple rites. It is argued that the Mahotsavavidhi is more than just a procedural guide for practicing priests. The text presents a vision of the mahotsava as a congregative event that brings together masses of human devotees and multitudes of gods. Some of the central categories and key themes in Aghoraśiva's prescriptions for the nine-day festival are discussed, as an orientation to the translation of his text.

This chapters and the next turn to the eleventh‐century Vīracōliyam and its commentary, both of which construct a technology or theoretical vision of a multilingual literary culture that is claimed for Buddhism. It is argued in this chapter that the Vīracōliyam self‐consciously combines Tamil and Sanskrit grammar and poetic theory in unprecedented ways, for the first time formalizing a relationship between two literary languages that had existed side by side for many centuries. In raising Tamil to the level of a translocal prestige language of learning, the Vīracōliyam traces the origin of this Tamil‐Sanskrit literary language to the teachings of a great Buddha‐to‐be, Avalokiteśvara, thereby carving out a place for Buddhism in the Tamil religious and literary landscape of competing sectarian communities. Named for its heroic royal Cōla (also Chola) dynasty patron, the Vīracōliyam, like the Maṇimēkalai before it, also participates in wider currents within the Buddhist literary world, as South Indian Theravāda monks writing in Pāli in the tenth to the twelfth centuries increasingly identify themselves and the monasteries in which they write as tied to a ‘Coḷiya’ order.

The area of cultivable land used by megalithic people was very limited, and they generally did not settle on the plains or lowlands. The southern end of the Indian peninsula situated south of the Krishna River was divided into Chola, Pandya, and Chera or Kerala kingdoms. These kingdoms greatly benefitted from their natural resources and foreign trade. The state and society that were formed in the Tamil state developed under the impact of Brahmanism. The kings performed Vedic sacrifices; the brahmanas conducted disputations. The Sangam literature is divided into narrative and didactic texts. The first texts are called Melkannakku or Eighteen Major Works, while the latter is called Kilkanakku or Eighteen Minor Works. These texts indicate several stages of social evolution. Many of the Sangam texts were written by the brahmana scholars of Prakrit or Sanskrit.

Mindful of a scholarly trend gaining ground in the 1980s to essentialize a coherent Southeast Asian identity, we are concerned in this chapter to test such assumptions against the evidence provided by newer waves of research and reconsiderations of bounded areas (and area studies) now stimulated by renewed interest in civilizational and other macro exchanges. We should also be careful to note in discussions on Indianization that the elitism and relative exclusivity of the courtly world, with its cast of Brahmans and ritual practitioners along with inner circles of devotees, possibly little touched surrounding village life, at least on the mainland, until the reception of Theravada Buddhism and the creation of monastic communities. First, this chapter offers a summary of Indian civilizational influences as they touched the Southeast Asia area. A second section examines deeper patterns from prehistory. A third section links the civilizational transfer with Indian trade activities, while a final section surveys the archaeological record as it pertains to Southeast Asia.

Javier Garcia Liendo analyzes how the comic book, La Chola Power, functions as a repository of memory, safeguarding the history of Peru’s violent past as well as redeploying Indigenous epistemologies and linguistic codes (untranslated Quechua) to critique current contexts of exploitation and oppression.