Projects
  
     
  Comparative Diasporas  
  This project will focus on the study of mainly Chinese and Indian diasporas in diverse cultural and geographical settings. While past studies have focused on Indian and Chinese diasporas separately, comparative studies on these two important diasporic communities have been lacking. This project will seek to understand the interactions, mutual perceptions, issues of identity, and roles of the Chinese and Indian diasporas in history and in the contemporary world. The project will have four segments: 1) The Indian diaspora in China and the Chinese diaspora in India; 2) Indian and Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia; 3) Indian and Chinese diasporas as global phenomenon; and 4) The Chinese Indian returnees and the Southeast Asian Chinese returnees to China.
  
     
  Buddhist History and Archeology in Southeast Asia  
  The early history of Buddhism in Southeast Asia remains enigmatic. This project aims at illuminating diverse aspects of early Southeast Asian Buddhism. Many important Buddhist sites in Southeast Asia, such as the Bagan and Pyu sites in Myanmar, Palembang, Jambi and the northern coastal sites in Sumatra, Sumberawan and Taruma in Java, southern Thai sites on the peninsula, and Dong Duong and other Cham sites in Vietnam, remain to be explored. This project will seek to examine some of these sites in order to understand the impact of Chinese and Indian influences, as well as indigenous developments in regard to Buddhism that took place in Southeast Asia. In addition, it is hoped to employ the skilled archaeologists working in Singapore to conduct joint surveys and excavations of some of these sites in collaboration with archaeologists of the respective countries. This may also be linked with a regional archaeological field school which would bring together archaeological students from the EAS countries to learn as they surveyed and excavated such sites.  
     
  Comparative Study of Religious Networks in Asia  
  This project will undertake a comparative study of the historical spread of Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Christian networks across Asia, the role these religions had in facilitating trading activities, and the ways in which they created cultural links among Asian societies. Both the overland and maritime networks will be examined in order to understand the similarities and differences in the ways in which religious ideas were transmitted, the relationship between traders and missionaries, pilgrimage activities, and the adaptation and domestication of foreign beliefs. It will also analyze the role these religions may have played in facilitating the exchange of scientific and medical knowledge, technologies, and art and literature among Asian societies.  
     
  Perceptions of Asia  
  Asia as both a concept and a reality continues to provoke productive debate. While the concept of Asia as “the other” developed within Europe, there are ongoing studies of how certain Asian ideas and concepts perceived Asians and their interrelationships. Such ideas burgeoned during the period of high European imperialism, when prominent Asian intellectuals strove to define and interlink the various facets of Asia. Rabindranath Tagore, Okakura Kakuzo, Lim Boon Keng, Liang Qichao, and Manhae Benoy had an imagination of Asia as an abstract entity, transcending the imperial and national frontiers being etched by colonial powers, and thereby hoping to provide a prism to refract the light of universal humanity. This project will explore the intellectual, cultural and political conversations across Asia conducted by these various intellectuals. The aim is to make a significant contribution to the modern intellectual history of Asia as well as theories of universalism, cosmopolitanism and internationalism.  
     
  Chinese Commercial Networks  
  In many ways, East Asia as a system was created through Chinese commercial networks. It was Chinese traders who, from the Song period onwards, created the commerce with which the various regions of East Asia have been long tied. Song mercantilism and financial policies were key factors in promoting overseas trade from Chinese coastal ports. Initially Hokkien maritime traders linked Fujian with Korea, and later in the 11th century, with the ports of Vietnam and Champa. These links extended over the succeeding centuries to Taiwan, Japan, the polities in the Mekong and Chao Phraya river basin and the ports of insular Southeast Asia. The 15th-century rutter Shun Feng Xiang Song (顺风相送 ) provides a compendium of routes utilized by Chinese seafarers through much of maritime East Asia, showing how all the major ports were connected by Chinese sea-farers, transshipping goods and ideas throughout the region. The 17th and 18th centuries saw Chinese junk trade to Nagasaki further linking up commercial nodes in East Asia. By the 1780s, it can be said that an entirely new economy had been created in East Asia through Chinese maritime and commercial activities and it is thus that the 18th century in the region is sometimes known as the Chinese century. Asians had created their own capitalist economy in the area and this provided the foundation for the subsequent European colonial economies. The period of high imperialism in the 19th century saw a decline in Chinese shipping activity, but an increase in frequency of European shipping which assisted in maintaining Chinese commercial networks, some of which have remained active even into the 21st century.

The project aims at a textual study of the rise of Chinese commercial networks in East Asia, their development and scope over time and the roles they played in developing regional cultural interactions, commercial links and new economic modes throughout the region.

  
     
  India-China Interactions during the Late-Qing and Republican Periods  
  The interactions between India and China during the colonial period have attracted limited attention. While the links between British colonial administrations and administrations have been examined in some studies, the relations between the people of India and China during this period remains little known. In addition to opium trade between the two regions during this period, there were regular exchange of people and trade in diverse other commodities. Writings of many of the travelers and visitors, such as Kang Youwei and Ma Jianzhong from China and Binoy Kumar Sarkar and Ramnath Sarkar from India ( written in Bengali), have not yet been translated or researched. This project will focus on these and other aspects of cross-cultural interactions between India and China from 1850 to 1949.  
     
  Web Projects  
 

In addition to the website which will bring the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre itself a global profile, the site will be used to mount a range of related materials as a global resource for persons interested in intra-Asian historical interactions. This will include bibliographies, guides, working papers, translations, and integrated projects. One of the first Web projects is related to Rabindranath Tagore, and focuses mainly on his visits to Southeast Asia and East Asia, the local reactions to Tagore and the scholarship related to him in these two regions.