This book brings into focus India's relations with ASEAN and Thailand in particular. In the 1990s, India revived its relations with Southeast Asia. Yet, in comparison to China, India continued to be a distant neighbour. Hence, India has once again, through its 'Look and Act East' policies become intertwined with its immediate neighbours in the East, especially with Thailand. The objective of the book is to contextualise India's relations and influence in Southeast Asia over a period of nearly two thousand years, through culture and religion. The scope of the book extends beyond bilateral issues to include the multilateral, bringing in issues of trade negotiations under the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Indo-Pacific construct. As ASEAN's importance grows in the regional and global landscape, there are ramifications for its relations with its traditional partners. The volatility and suspicion among the major powers, especially USA and China harbour the potential to disunite ASEAN. A rising India seeks a united and strong ASEAN both as a natural partner and in a bid to balance China's growing assertiveness and deep pockets. Based on interviews conducted with experts , diplomats and scholars in the field, this book encompasses a wide range of aspects that pertain to the historical, cultural, economic and strategic international relations of ASEAN and Thailand with India.

This book takes stock of the results of some two decades of intensive archaeological research carried out on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, in combination with renewed approaches to textual sources and to art history. To improve our understanding of the trans-cultural process commonly referred to as Indianisation, it brings together specialists of both India and Southeast Asia, in a fertile inter-disciplinary confrontation. Most of the essays reappraise the millennium-long historiographic no-man's land during which exchanges between the two shores of the Bay of Bengal led, among other processes, to the Indianisation of those parts of the region that straddled the main routes of exchange. Some essays follow up these processes into better known "classical" times or even into modern times, showing that the localisation process of Indian themes has long remained at work, allowing local societies to produce their own social space and express their own ethos.

Sounding the Center is an in-depth look at the power behind classical music and dance in Bangkok, the capital and sacred center of Buddhist Thailand. Focusing on the ritual honoring teachers of music and dance, Deborah Wong reveals a complex network of connections among kings, teachers, knowledge, and performance that underlies the classical court arts. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork, Wong lays out the ritual in detail: the way it is enacted, the foods and objects involved, and the people who perform it, emphasizing the way the performers themselves discuss and construct aspects of the ceremony.