The notion of changelessness dissolves ,however, when we discuss the first set of revolutionary changes that swept Cambodia at the beginning of the Christian era. this was the phenomenon known as Indianization,where by elements of Indian culture were absorbed or chosen by the Cambodian people in a process that lasted more than a thousand years,no one knows precisely when the process began or how it worked at different time .all inclusive theories about it advanced by French and Dutch scholars usually put too little emphasis on the element of local choice, afew writer, on the other hand, have tended to exaggerate it,generally ,as Geodes has remarked ,scholars with training in Indian culture emphasize Indian's "civilizing mission" those trained in the social sciences stress the indigenous response.
Historians must deal with both side of the exchange , the process by which a culture changes is complex,when and why did Indian culture elements come to be preferred to local ones ? which ones were absorbed ,revised , or rejected ? in discussing Indianization, we encounter the categories that some anthropologists have called "Great"and Little "traditions ,the first connected with India, Sanskrit ,the courts, and Hinduism ,and the other with "Cambodia " Khmer Villages, and folk religion, in the Cambodia,case, these categories are not especially useful. we can not play down the Great Tradition in Cambodian village life, where does monastic Buddhism fit in, for example,or little tradition activities,like ancestor worship and folk story, at the court?Village wisdom always penetrated the court,and princely values,enshrined in Hindu epics and Buddhist legends,or Jataka tales,penetrated village life, the two aspects of society were complementary and antagonistic at different time.
nevertheless, the process of Indianization made Cambodian an Indian seeming place, in the nineteenth century ,for example, Cambodian peasants still wore recognizably Indian costumes,and in many ways they behaved more like Indians then they did like their closest neighbors,the vietnamese .Cambodian ate with spoons and fingers,for example, and carried goods on their heads,they wore turbans rather than straw hats and skirts rather than trousers. musical instruments, jewelry ,and manuscripts were also Indian in style .it is possible also that cattle raising in Cambodia had been introduced ,by Indian at a relatively early date,it is unknown ,to a great extent, in the rest of mainland Southeast Asia .
Trade between prehistoric India and Cambodia probably began long before Indian itself was Sanskritized ,in fact,as Paul Mus has suggested ,Cambodia and Southeast India, as well as what is now Bengal, probably by share the culture of "Monsoon Asia"which emphasized the role played by ancestral ,tutelary deities in agricultural cycle these were often located for ritual purposes in stones that naturally resemble phalluses or were carved to look like them.Sacrifices to the stones, it was thought,ensured the fertility of the soil ,cults like this were not confined to Asia,but it is useful to see ,as Mus has ,that an Indian traveler coming across them in Cambodia would "Recognize" them s Indian cults honoring the God Siva or someone of his consorts .Similarly , a Cambodian visiting India, or hearing about it,wold see some of his own cults in those that honored the Indian god .
During the first five hundred years or so of the Christian era, India provided Cambodia with a writing system
a pantheon, metres of poetry,a language [ Sanskrit] to write it in,a vocabulary of social hierarchies (not the same as a castle system ) ,Buddhism, the idea of universal kingship,and new ways of looking at politics,sociology,architecture,iconography, astrology, and aesthetics,without India,Angkor would never have been Built yet ,Angkor was never an Indian City ,any more than medieval Paris was a Roman one,,
Like many Southeast Asia countries,Cambodia has a legend that traces its origin back to the married of a foreigner and a dragon princess ,or Nagi, whose father was the king of of waterlogged country.According to one version of the myth, a brahman name --Kaundinya,armed with a magical bow, appeared one day off the shore of Cambodia, a dragon princess paddled out to meet him.Kaundinya shot an arrow to her boat,this action frightened the princess into marrying him,before married, Kaundinya gave her clothes to wear,and in exchange her father, the dragon- king ,enlarged the possession of his son in law by drinking up the water that covered the country,he later built them a capital,and changed the name of the country to " Kambuja "
this myth is of Indian origin,as is the name "Kambuja " and perhaps it describes some obscure confrontation that had occurred in the Aryanization of southeast India rather than an event in southeast Asia.but if it useless as a Fact". it is an interesting starting point for Cambodian history. in the myth,Cambodia see themselves as the offspring of marriage between "Culture and Nature " Kaundinya's acceptance by his father in law,who drains the Kingdom of him is crucial to his success,this idea would have been familiar to Cambodia,for a prospective bridegroom often had to gain his in law's approval by living with them before his married ,in the myth, the local people ( ie the dragons) respect the brahman and his honor give the Kingdom and India name (which first appears in a Cambodia inscription in the ninth century AD. Later on, monarchs would trace their ancestry to this mythical pair , who represented, among other thing, a"Marriage" the sun and the moon ,to be a legitimate king ,it seems,one had to be a Cambodia and an Indian at the same time
