The India problem

Three hypotheses

Hypothesis A Influences from the west haven't left India enough time to develop gamelan. India couldn't get its breath back, recover its cultural living space. Gamelan is a music having developed, being born, in an already Indianized Asia, outside India, and far enough from those influences of the west. What would be the Indian roots of gamelan ? Dance ? The horizontal cylindrical drums ? It would again be esthetic and even psychological roots that are distinct from music in India. Thus they wouldn't be instrumental, even if they could have shaped the organological development of the instruments locally, in Java, in the course of history. The idea that an Indian artistic expression has developed totally outside India is fascinating. This kind of hypothesis is rarely mentioned in the study of history, because not easily verifiable. Yet this is what makes history worth studying. Let's remember that the finest and largest Hindu temple isn't found in India but at Angkor ; That a Khmer dance of Hanuman is, in a good many respects, more Indian than katak dance of Mughal India ; That Nagarjuna's Buddhism has well developed in Chinese Chan, outside India.

Hypothesis B Dance, sculpture and other rhythmic arts of India reflect an influence from South-East Asia. Music in India is one of the fields having escaped this influence. Hypothesis just as stimulating as the A. It is an idea that, this one too, is rarely proposed because our study of history, perhaps too well adapted to our Western Asia, is based too much on persons, wars and text.

Hypothesis C The influence comes from a third region and has exerted itself on both India and South-East Asia. Hypothesis perhaps insignificant because less realistic, but that would solve the problem just as well as the A and the B would.