What immediately popped into my head when I read that was – intermarriage. In the overall section on Zhenla in the History of the Sui, it is obvious that a South Asian community is being described.

So, why would some women have a different skin color and not the men? Because it was a society of “colonizers,” where foreign men had intermarried with local women.

This idea, that is, the idea of “Indian colonies in the East,” is one that some South Asian scholars, such as R. C. Majumdar, wrote a lot about in the first half of the twentieth century. And, there is plenty of evidence to support it, including this entry on Zhenla in the History of the Sui.

Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, a new trend in scholarship developed primarily in the Anglo world that sought to play down external influences on Southeast Asia. The result is that now no one talks about any “Indian colonies,” and no one talks about the scholarship of R. C. Majumdar much except to only make occasional superficial references.

To be fair, that is also in part because in the postcolonial period, Majumdar’s Hindu nationalist views became more well known. However, the evidence for South Asians in the region in the first millennium AD is still obvious and Majumdar documented that evidence. The choice to not talk about this is thus an ideological one. It’s not one based on historical evidence.

I’ll write about what we can see in Chinese sources soon. For now, I’ll share this information from a recent archaeological study at Angkor Borei that examined the DNA of an “ancient individual.”