Western terms defining regions often stick despite the existence of more relevant, indigenous language. The label “Maritime Southeast Asia,” covering the area shared by Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, fails to take into account shared Austronesian language roots or history including the ancient Majapahit Empire, argues Philip Bowring, journalist and author of Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia's Great Archipelago. Bowring analyzes how longstanding exchanges of culture and trade with extensive maritime activity have shaped the region's ethnic groups. Trade links with India and the Middle East helped introduce Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam and influenced the region's languages. Java-based empires managed to resist subjugation to China’s various advances although European colonists eventually took control of lucrative ports for three centuries. Bowring concludes that liberation and a half century of nation-building may contribute to a stronger regional identity. – YaleGlobal
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| View of Pisang Island: Corocores of Guébé Island by Par L Garneray after A Pellion, engraved by Couton |
“Maritime Southeast Asia” is a recent, western-derived geographical term linked to neither culture nor history. Austronesian Asia on the other hand defines the language group into which all the region’s major languages fall – Malay, Javanese, Tagalog, Visayan and many local variations. Nusantaria is an extension of “Nusantara,” the Sanskrit term used to describe the island realm of the Java-based Majapahit Empire and in modern Malay refers to the Indonesian archipelago. Today it includes the Philippines and has historic links to Taiwan, Vietnam, the Marianas and Madagascar.
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| Frieze of a Nusantarian ship on the 8th-century Borobudur Buddhist stupa in Central Java. C Snoek drawing 1978 |
This region has many characteristics which set it apart from mainland Asia and have provided it with a common identity. Today this identity is more often than not submerged by national focus on recently created modern states, or on religious divides created by the rival, imported Semitic religions, Christianity and Islam, which now predominate. But the identity is never far below the surface.
It is no accident that Indonesians and Filipinos comprise a large proportion of the seamen aboard many of today’s merchant fleets. The sea has defined the region since the melt at the end of the last Ice Age, more than 20,000 years ago, when rising seas created most of its major islands. Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Palawan and Taiwan were previously joined to the Eurasian mainland.
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