How Cremation Practices from India Reshaped State Rituals in Southeast Asia

What is it about?

Why did so many Southeast Asian kingdoms choose cremation as a royal rite? Fire rituals weren’t simply imported from India. This paper examines how the rituals were reshaped by already established local beliefs that valued cremation. Sites like Sa Huỳnh and Ban Non Wat show that fire burials were current long before Indian religions arrived in the region. Later, Hindu and Buddhist cremation rites were not blindly copied but put to use by monarchs in Funan, Champa, Srivijaya, and Majapahit to broadcast the rulers’ sacred kingship. Religious specialists like Brahmins and monks helped introduce these ideas, but local people made them their own. Meanwhile, regions like northern Vietnam kept their Confucian burial traditions. This paper argues that cremation became part of a political and spiritual language, not because of cultural domination, but because it resonated with existing ways of thinking about death, power, and ancestry.

Featured Image

Photo by SERGEI BEZZUBOV on Unsplash

Photo by SERGEI BEZZUBOV on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study is important because it shows that royal cremation in Southeast Asia was not simply borrowed from India, but developed through the interaction of Indian religious ideas with long-standing local beliefs about death and power. By highlighting regional choices—such as the adoption of cremation in Indianized kingdoms and its rejection in Confucian northern Vietnam—it explains how rituals became tools of political legitimacy rather than signs of cultural domination.

Perspectives