Dhanyawadi (CIRCA Mid 4th to Early 6th Century AD)
Narinjara News
9/9/2001
Dhanyawadi (Pali Dhannavati, "grain-blessed") was a city typical of the earliest phase of urbanization in Southeast Asia during the first centuries of the Christian era. While elements of its culture undoubtedly derived from India, it shares many characteristics with other centres in mainland Southeast Asia linked by the sea, the Pyu polities of present-day Burma, and the Mon of Dvaravati in Thailand and Oc-Eo in southern Vietnam.
Located in country with the capacity to produce three crops of paddy rice a year, Dhanyawadi had access to the hills and the products of the hill tribes such as beeswax and stick-lac, as well as to the sea via the Tharechaung, a tributary of the Kaladan River. During the early centuries of the present era maritime trade between China, India and Europe was stimulated by the interruption of the central Asian overland trade routes. India''s demand for gold, and the Roman empire''s demand for the exotic products of the Orient, led traders from India and the Middle East - often Arabs - to explore alternative sources. This brought Arakan into new trading networks. Contact with India brought new ideas. Later inscriptions and local historical traditions remember ancestors who were probably local chiefs, who adopted Indian religion and statecraft to increase their power and become kings.
This process, generally referred to as "Indianization" was an extension of the spread of certain aspects of south Asian civilization which had been taking place for over a millennium in India itself, diffusing eastward and southward from its centre in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent until it finally reached western Southeast Asia: what is now Burma, Thailand, Southern Vietnam, Cambodia and the western sectors of Indonesia. The concept of divine kingship, which had been implicit in the Indian tradition, became explicit in Southeast Asia where the rulers sought to validate their hold over different ethnic groups and to control the means of production in a context wider than the traditional village.
Professor Paul Wheatley has described the transformation of village culture to the civilization of the city-state in terms of the changes in society which this "Indianization" brought about. The maintenance of a state appropriate to kingship required the ministrations of increasing numbers of craftsmen and artisans, the most skilled of whom were often accommodated within the royal compound. It required the labour of a peasantry who contributed the surplus produce of their fields as a tax in kind for the support of the court, and a band of armed retainers who acted as household guards, organised the peasantry as militia and enforced the authority of the ruler. Material defences - walls and moats protecting the palace and the city - were constructed and the city-state, the nagara, evolved. These transformations saw the tribal chieftain replaced by a divine king, shaman by brahmin priest, tribesmen as cultivators by peasants, tribesmen as warriors by an army, and favoured the development of occupational specialisation. They were reflected in the conversion of the chief''s hut into a palace, the spirit house into a temple, the object of the spirit cult into the palladium of the state, and the boundary spirits which previously had protected the village into Indianized Lokapalas presiding over the cardinal directions.
This process can clearly be traced in Arakan, which received Indian culture by land from Bengal and by sea from other parts of India. The Anandacandra inscription on the Shit-thaung stele, after listing the ancestral monarchs, says that a king called Dvan Candra, possessed of righteousness and fortune, conquered 101 kings and built a city "which laughed with heavenly beauty" surrounded by walls and a moat. From the inscription we can deduce that Dvan Candra ruled from around 370-425AD, and that he was the founder of the Dhanyawadi of the chronicles.
Lying, west of the ridge between the Kaladan and Lc-mro rivers, Dhanyawadi could be reached by small ships from the Kaladan Via the its tributary, the Tharechaung. Its city walls were made of brick, and form an irregular circle with a perimeter of about 9.6 kilometres, enclosing an area of about 4.42 square kilometres. Beyond the walls, the remains of a wide moat, now silted over and covered by paddy fields, are still visible in places. The remains of brick fortifications can be seen along the hilly ridge which provided protection from the west. Within the city, a similar wall and moat enclose the palace site, which has an area of 0.26 square kilometres, and another wall surrounds the palace itself.
As was the case in the contemporary Pyu cities of central Burma, the majority of the population would have lived within the outer city, whose walls also enclosed the fields in which they worked. At times of insecurity, when the city was subject to raids from the hill tribes or attempted invasions from neighbouring powers, there would have been an assured food supply enabling the population to withstand a siege. The city would have controlled the valley and the lower ridges, supporting a mixed wet-rice and taungya (slash and burn) economy, with local chiefs paying allegiance to the king.
From aerial photographs we can discern Dhanyawadi''s irrigation channels and storage tanks, centred at the palace site. Throughout the history of Arakan, and indeed the rest of early Southeast Asia, the king''s power stemmed from his control of irrigation and water storage systems to conserve the monsoon rains and therefore to maintain the fertility and prosperity of the land. In ceremonies conducted by Indian Brahmins the king was given the magic power to regulate the celestial and terrestrial forces in order to control the coming of the rains which would ensure the continuing prosperity of the kingdom.
The renowned Mahamuni shrine is situated on a hill northeast of the palace site. This may have been the location of an earlier fertility cult, controlled by local chiefs and absorbed into Buddhism as Indian influence strengthened. The shrine was to become the centre of a Buddhist cult but would incorporate earlier beliefs surrounding the spirits of the earth and the protectors of the land. While the shrine was attacked, destroyed and rebuilt many times over the centuries, and its holy image finally transported to the Burmese capital of Mandalay after the conquest of Arakan in 1784, many ancient and now badly dam- Sculptures still remain. Traditionally regarded as deities protecting the central image, they are stylistically comparable to the art of the late Gupta period in India, from around the fifth and sixth centuries AD. There are indications that the deities they represent belong to the Mahayana Buddhist pantheon.
Source: Narinjara News - www.narinjara.com
Title: Dhanyawadi (CIRCA Mid 4th to Early 6th Century AD)
Author: Narinjara News
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Date: 9/9/2001
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