The Open Ends of The Ducth Empire and The Indonesian Past

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past: Sites,
Scholarly Networks, and Moral Geographies of Greater India across

Decolonization
Oxford Handbooks Online

The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian
Past: Sites, Scholarly Networks, and Moral Geographies
of Greater India across Decolonization
Marieke Bloembergen
The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire
Edited by Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson
Subject: History, European History Online Publication Date: Jan 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198713197.013.9
Abstract and Keywords
Focusing on the practices of knowledge exchange within Dutch colonial heritage politics,
and the related transnational scholarly networks, in the years immediately before, during
and after decolonization, this chapter re-examines the impact of the ends of empire on
Indonesia and elsewhere, including their cultural resonances in the post-colonial period.
Starting from sites in the Netherlands Indies/ Indonesia, this chapter links up with
transnational approaches to imperial and Asian history thriving in the past two decades,
often with a focus on the ‘connecting’ Indian Ocean. It engages with the related scholarly
queries to look for ways of studying the region beyond empire- and state-centred
approaches and beyond the artificial boundaries between South Asian and Southeast
Asian studies. It discusses why and how people identify with worlds of ideas, beliefs, and
related histories that differ from or compete with official, state-centred histories. Finally,
it warns against pitfalls of the new transnational approaches that focus on cultural flows.
These run the risk of exaggerating the region’s cultural unity, of constructing idealized
and elitist worlds of unified cosmopolitans, and of obfuscating mechanism of inclusion
and exclusion at work at state and transnational levels.
Keywords: Netherlands, Dutch East Indies, Indonesia, decolonization, transnational history, cultural approaches,
scholarly knowledge networks, heritage politics
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Decolonization
Sites or the material remains of Asia’s ancient history provided strong reference points
during the decolonizing process in Asia, albeit to many parties.1 In the 1950s, ancient
sites like Borobudur, Indonesia’s eighth-century Buddhist shrine, or Cambodia’s Angkor
Wat, a twelfth-century Hindu-Buddhist temple complex, both re-discovered, explored and
restored under colonial regimes and then left behind by receding empires, became
powerful symbols in the language and politics of nation building of the newly independent
states. Yet these sites are the centre of multiple histories, geographies, and moral spaces
that do not necessarily overlap with the political boundaries in which these sites became
re-appreciated. Alongside their re-discovery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
they became nodal points of new transnational networks of scholars, religious revivalists,
and spiritual seekers who moved between the various sites, and related them to other
chronologies, world views, or communal ways of thinking.2
This chapter shows that, for Indonesia, decolonization—its chronologies, its processes,
and its supposed finality—looks very different when such sites are used as primary
reference points, and we view political developments through a transnational and cultural
lens. Present-day Indonesia covers a region that more or less overlaps with the domain of
the late colonial state of the Dutch East Indies, and that, since at least the sixteenth
century, has the largest Muslim population of the world. However, it also hosts pre-
Islamic Hindu-Buddhist sites, as well as a so-called ‘Indic’ past that point to earlier
connections to what is now India. These connections are pivotal to academic and popular
views on Indonesia as being part of—what I refer to as—moral geographies of Greater
India.3 I use this to refer to a transnational form of moral thinking in terms of place and
civilization, or geographical imaginations, projected on today’s South and Southeast Asia
as a single, spiritual, Hindu-Buddhist ‘civilization’ with Indian origins. This civilizational
idea of ‘Greater Indian’ is moral, as it is often perceived as superior to other (Christian-
Western materialist, or Islamic) imaginary constructs of civilizations, and, like the nation
or the state, entails mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.4 Long-running scholarly
debates over Indonesia’s Indic cultural heritage and the way it connected to
‘foreign’ (Indian) civilizational influences, were, indeed, affected by decolonization and
the consequent rise of a more assertive Indonesian readings of the country’s cultural past
as national. Yet, at the same time, these debates—and the scholarly networks at their
heart—transcended decolonization and helped maintain moral geographies of Greater
(Hindu-Buddhist) India, which included (predominantly Islamic) Indonesia. Additionally,
in some ways certain individual scholars and their cultural production thrived in an
independent Indonesia. In other ways, both the networks and their scholarship responded
to quite different currents of cultural interchange that did not all together overlap with
nationalist aims in the independence struggle and the historiography that covered these.
By focusing on sites in the Netherlands Indies/ Indonesia, and transnational networks of

academic culture across decolonization, this chapter engages with transnational
approaches to imperial and Asian history thriving in the past two decades, often with a
focus on the ‘connecting’ Indian Ocean. These new approaches grew out of a double
discomfort: about a dominant state- and nation-centred approached to imperial history,
and about the artificial boundaries between South Asian and Southeast Asian studies. The
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Decolonization
recent focus on transnational mobilities and identities has yielded fresh insights into why
and how people identify with worlds of ideas, beliefs, and related histories that differ
from or compete with official, state-centred histories.5 However, the chapter also warns
against pitfalls of the new transnational approaches that focus on cultural flows, as these
may exaggerate the region’s cultural unity, reifying the very moral geographies of
Greater India it interrogates.6
Interestingly, within the historiography on Dutch empire and Indonesian (post-) colonial
history, transnational and so-called New Imperial approaches towards cultural political
history are being embraced in the past decades as well.7 However, this research has
hardly covered the period of decolonization.8 The recently revived interest in violence and
atrocities during the decolonization war of 1945–1949, and the discussions they have
raised, are framed by the interests of state and society in the Netherlands and Indonesia.9
Noteworthy, however, is the 1990s trend in the field to study decolonization from a
longer-term perspective.10 That researched has yielded important insight in the ways
economic enterprises and social institutions developed across decolonization.
Additionally, it has generated a new interest in the 1950s as a transformative period.11
But overall, for the history of Dutch-Indonesian decolonization, the field of political
culture and cultural institutions still deserves systematic scrutiny.12
This chapter examines how the sites and networks of heritage and academic culture
provide a tool to explore how ‘open’ the ends of empire were for academic knowledge
production and heritage formation across decolonization. This method allows us to see
how transnational connections did—or did not—work, and thus helps to explore, in the
case of Dutch-Indonesian decolonization, the main questions in this volume. The chapter
thereby provides methodological tools for an alternative transnational approach to study
the impact of decolonization on various, larger, competing imaginations of the region that
developed in local, inter-Asian and global contexts, or competing moral geographies: the
moral geographies of the decolonizing empire, of the Indonesian nation, of the post-
colonial state, and of a Greater India. At various levels of understanding, each of these
took shape in people’s minds in this period. If we start from ‘sites of heritage and
knowledge exchange’, this chapter shows how we can study the experience of
decolonization of transnational ‘Indic’ scholarly knowledge production and heritage
formation. At the same time, such a sites-centred approach helps to understand, in
Frederick Cooper’s formulation, the various, multiple hierarchies that made connections
work or not.13 These ancient sites, whether representing the region’s heritage or hosting
knowledge production, connect to many histories and loyalties. They have discreet
political, cultural-economic, and religious geographies that have other boundaries than
those of the state.
The chapter starts from Indonesia-based sites of heritage and research, and the site-
related ‘Indic’ scholarly knowledge networks which connected these sites to powerful
sites of learning in the Indies/Indonesia, the Netherlands, France, and India. Then it
explores the development of these networks over time and attempts to explain their role
in shaping moral geographies, whether the nation, the postcolonial state, or Greater
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Decolonization
India, to discover how these were related to each other. It asks what the impact was of
regime change on knowledge production, exchange, and identification with various moral
geographies, as well as when, where and how local, state, and institutional power
problematized global and transnational connections in cultural reform, knowledge
production, and heritage politics. These queries will lead us to multiple sites and various
key players who built upon the knowledge networks on Indonesia’s ancient past. To
understand limits and identify changing hierarchies within the networks, the chapter
follows multiple perspectives. It does so, by loosely following the perspective of French
epigrapher Louis Charles Damais (1911–1966), who, before the war, worked for the
Dutch colonial Archaeological Service. After the war, meanwhile married to an
Indonesian, he continued his scholarly career in Indonesia on behalf of the Ecole
française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO). As an outsider inside, he connected the various
histories of colonial and postcolonial knowledge production about Indonesia’s ancient
past.
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Decolonization
Dutch-Indonesian Decolonization and the Open

Ends of Heritage
A four-year period of colonial military attacks, civil war, and intensive international
diplomacy in the Dutch Indies unfolded after Japan’s 1945 surrender and the subsequent
declaration of Indonesian Independence on 17 August by Soekarno and Mohammed
Hatta. This decolonization conflict formally ended with the Dutch recognition of the
Indonesian Republic in December 1949. These four years of violence wrought profound
changes in the relationship between the Netherlands and the Indonesian Republic, within
Indonesian state and society, and in the manning of government, administration, security
tools, and education. However, post-independence reform and cultural politics also built
on multiple older structures of power and interdependency, of institutions, institutional
knowledge, and networks with local, inter-Asian and global reach, and on individual
people’s expertise, which the new independent state inherited from the past. These older
connections were particularly apparent in the fields of culture, heritage politics, and
scholarship.
In December 1953, Louis-Charles Damais, an acknowledged epigrapher with strong

connections to independent Indonesia’s influential elites, attended the festive
inauguration of the reconstruction of the Siva temple at Prambanan in Central Java. He
was the only non-Dutch foreign scholar and special invitee of the young Indonesian
Republic’s Archaeological Service (founded in 1946). The Siva temple is the largest of the
ninth-century Hindu temple complex Prambanan, which stands today, together with the
nearby eighth-century giant Buddhist shrine Borobudur, as one of Indonesia’s most
important national monuments. Both temples gained UNESCO-world heritage status in
1991. In forms of scholarly learning, heritage politics, religious pilgrimages, and mass
tourism, they connect local and global interests of elite and popular character. Damais
personified colonial and postcolonial academic connections to the temple. Before and
after the War, he was briefly affiliated with the Dutch Colonial Archaeological Service.
Later, he represented France and the EFEO (founded in Saigon in 1898), and, with his
later-acquired title of ‘Conseiller Culturel’, the French embassy in Jakarta. But most
importantly, he recorded a moment of postcolonial nation-building. At Prambanan,
Damais observed how Indonesia’s president Soekarno’s inaugural speech (to a
predominantly Muslim audience, and ‘as a Muslim’ himself) managed to give ‘an official
character’ to the Hindu temple’s restoration: it was not meant to ‘adore Siva’, but it
served as a proof of the capacities of the Indonesian people of the past, and offered a
great promise for independent Indonesia’s future.14
Damais thus witnessed how Soekarno, three years after the Dutch formally recognized
Indonesian independence, transformed a ninth-century Hindu temple ruin into the first
national monument of a young state that had the largest Muslim population of the
world.15 Ironically, while the temple served as a tool to stress the power of Indonesia’s
‘local genius’—a scholarly term of that time—in the same period, during the 1950s and
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Decolonization
1960s, Prambanan-based objects and other Indonesian Hindu or Buddhist art objects
appeared in temporary and permanent Asia-exhibits as ‘Arts of Greater India’ all over the
world. These exhibitions offered views of older traditions as well as inter-Asian, inter-
colonial, and global networks of research and collecting that built on alternative views of
the region, the ‘Greater India’ of which Indonesia was considered a part. This region
covered today’s South and Southeast Asia, and was imagined as united by one superior
Hindu-Buddhist ‘civilization’ with its origin in India, and in which Indonesia is being
portrayed as the passive receiver of a benign, foreign civilizer and its superior religious
art.16 This was not Soekarno’s message at Prambanan in 1953.
The presence of Damais at the inauguration of the Siva temple, and at the Greater India
exhibitions worldwide, illustrates how not only Indonesia’s past, but also ‘empire’—in this
case a (former) Dutch empire—and the politics of scholarly knowledge production and
heritage within empire had open ends. While the inauguration of the Siva temple was a
quintessential ceremony of decolonization designed to serve the aim of nation building,
Damais’ presence also pointed to abiding continuities in local and international
collaboration and power, some of which went beyond state-centred interests.17
Largest among the temples of the Prambanan complex dedicated to Hindu deities, the
Siva temple was a professional archaeological reconstruction dating from the colonial
period. It had previously been a ruin which, although partly uncovered and cleaned, had
been further damaged by nineteenth-century colonial interventions. By the early 1920s,
however, the Siva temple became the object of a prestigious reconstruction project
initiated by the Colonial Archaeological Service of the Netherlands Indies. During Japan’s
occupation (1942–1945), the Japanese military regime took over the running of heritage
politics and continued the reconstruction of the Siva temple, even temporarily
transforming it into a memorial dedicated to the souls of Japanese victims in the Pacific
War. Following the Japanese surrender and the 1946 establishment of an Indonesian
Archaeological Service, the Indonesian Republic took over the temple’s reconstruction
amidst a decolonization-cum-civil war. After Dutch recognition of Indonesia’s
independence in 1949, the Indonesian Archaeological Service completed the monument
working alongside the Dutch under the direction of the Dutch engineer Vincent van
Romondt (1903–1974), who had supervised the earlier reconstruction in the 1930s.18
While the reconstruction of the Siva temple may thus have been the product of a colonial
mindset, when the Siva temple was presented on 20 December 1953 in all its splendour,
it was celebrated as the first official national monument of Indonesia. Damais, and the
(former) staff of the Dutch and Indonesian Archaeological Services attested to this. Heavy
with nationalistic symbolism, with hundreds of Indonesian children waving their red-
white flags, the inauguration of the Siva temple was enacted exactly five years after
Dutch troops occupied Yogya, the then-centre of the Indonesian Republic. In his speech
tracing the nation back to ancient times, the newly appointed minister of Culture and
Education, Muhammad Yamin (1903–1962), recognized the red and white colours of the
Indonesian flag in the Ramayana reliefs of the temple, and applauded the reconstruction
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Decolonization
as the most significant national achievement since the declaration of independence in
1945.19
Attesting to all of this, and present from the Netherlands, were several senior personnel
from the former Colonial Archaeological Service: A. J. Bernet Kempers (1906–1992), the
last head of the Dutch East Indies Archaeological Service after the Japanese occupation,
architect Van Romondt, and the Dutch philologist J. G. de Casparis (1916–2002).
Physically absent, but remembered with respect, was the Dutch archaeologist Willem F.
Stutterheim (1892–1942), the last head of the Netherlands Indies’ Archaeological Service
before the Japanese occupation, who, attacked by a brain tumour, had died in September
1942.
From the new Indonesian scholarly world, a prominent figure who also spoke at the
inauguration was the Dutch-trained archaeologist Soekmono (1922–1974), a recent
archaeology graduate of Bernet Kempers at the newly founded University of Indonesia in
Jakarta. Prior to his archaeology training, he worked for the Japanese propaganda service
during the occupation, and had already recognized the cultural significance and immense
political value of the Great Hindu and Buddhist monuments in Central Java. In 1946, in
the nationalist cultural journal Pantja Raja, he declared Borobudur ‘heirloom of
Indonesia, heirloom of our fatherland’.20 Now, in 1953, having successfully finished his
studies, he had succeeded his teacher as head of the Indonesian Archaeological Service,
and was proudly in charge of Indonesia’s ancient Hindu-Buddhist temples, formerly
jewels of the Dutch empire.
Ostensibly, while the inauguration of the Siva temple thus served the aims of nation
building, the presence of various other parties—a foreign scholar, former colonial
personnel, and Indonesian subjects—reveals the continuity of alternative, multiple
engagements with the monument. These neither necessarily overlapped with the interests
of the new independent nation state, nor with Dutch attempts at harmonious postcolonial
collaboration. When night fell, for example, priests from the predominantly Hindu island
of Bali, together with Balinese students from the recently established University Gadjah
Mada in Yogyakarta, gathered to pay tribute to the temple according to Balinese-Hindu
rituals. To them, it was a sacred site.21 Next to these local religious engagements with the
Siva-temple, Damais personified the external, archaeological-cum-diplomatic interests of
foreign parties that built on pre-war international and inter-Asian intellectual and cultural
knowledge networks.
Greater Indian Horizons, Local Colonial

Restrictions
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Decolonization
Since the early twentieth century, an international group of scholars, collectors, pilgrims,
and Asian elites representing various local and international institutions, associations,
and concerns would engage with Indonesia-based sites like the Siva temple or Borobudur
by following non-Indonesia centred, ‘Indic’ scholarly preoccupations. What bound them
was the question of the external, Indian, Hindu-Buddhist civilizational origin and its
influences within Indonesia’s cultural history and prehistory. Whether they were
nationalist by principle, a scholar, or a Hindu or a Buddhist revivalist, their framework of
thought, research, or pilgrimage was, by definition, transnational. This kind of ‘Greater
India’ thinking had multiple expressions, and it developed inside and outside ‘Indic’
scholarly and religious knowledge networks, in academia as well as in popular culture. Its
legacies remain evident today.22
One influential example of Greater Indian thinking concerns the group of scholars and
nationalists who, in 1924 Calcutta in British India, founded the Greater India Society. As
Susan Bayly has shown, this society of Bengal-born intellectuals, inspired by the works of
the French sanskritist Sylvain Lévi (1863–1936) and other French Indologists, heralded
the vision of a benign, spiritual Indian civilization that had once spread across Asia.23
Scholars like Kalidas Nag (1892–1966), Sunit Kumar Chatterjee (1890–1977), Ordhendra
Coomar Gangoly (1881–1974), Himansu Bhusan Sarkar (1905–1990) and R. C. Majumdar
(1888–1980) propagated the contemporary revival of this civilization through their
research, exhibition activities, seminars, and journal publications. Their work also
attracted international scholars well into the 1960s. From the start, they not only
maintained good relations with French scholars, but also actively sought contact with
scholars of the Archaeological Service and the Batavian Society in the Indies, visited
Java’s ancient Hindu-Buddhist sites and modern Hindu Bali, and exchanged ideas and
publications. In this same framework, the internationally recognized, Calcutta-born Nobel
Prize winner and poet Rabindranath Tagore visited the Dutch East Indies in 1927, who
called it part of an eastward-bound ‘pilgrimage to India beyond its modern political
boundaries’. When confronted with the sight of Borobudur he ‘recognized India’.24
Looking back, he wrote to a friend that his visit to Java and Bali filled him with the wish
that Indian scholars would be sent there to study and to help recover these ‘neglected
and forgotten outposts of Indian civilization […] for our own enrichment and for the
benefit of the inhabitants.’25
In comparison to these Indian scholars and spiritual superstars, the situation for
Indonesian intellectual elites in the Dutch East Indies was somewhat different. In British
India, Greater Indian Scholars like the more senior Majumdar or his student Sarkar (both
then at Dacca University) held official positions at universities, or at the Archaeological
Survey of British-India, and actively networked in the international academic world of
Indologists. From 1918, they organized international ‘All-India’ Orientalist conferences in
India to which they invited foreign colonial scholars. In the Dutch East Indies, on the
other hand, there were no universities. Two high schools, both in Batavia, provided the
needed doctors and lawyers: the School tot Opleiding van Inlandsche Artsen (School for
the education of native physicians, STOVIA) was founded in 1899, and the
Rechtshoogeschool (Law School) was founded in 1924. Only in 1940, were two academic
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Decolonization
institutes founded: a Faculty of Law, and a Faculty of Arts, both also in Batavia. Moreover,
only a tiny, privileged minority of Indonesian elites had official positions at the colonial
scholarly institutions and contributed to scholarly debates that were, moreover, restricted
to Javanese (and subsequently Balinese) culture, history, or language. At the Colonial
Archaeological Service, modern educated lower elites filled intermediate ranks like
draughtsmen, or secured work at the library of the Batavian Society. One such was Raden
Roro Soejatoen Poespokoesoemo (191326–2005), Damais’s future wife. While intrinsically
important, these more junior positions were hardly visible in the colonial and
international academic world.
The pre-eminent Indonesian professional scholars in the field of Indology are the
Javanese Hoesein Djajadiningrat (1886–1960; a pupil of the famous Islamic scholar and
colonial Advisor of Native affairs Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje) and Ngabehi
Poerbatjaraka (1886–1966; mentored by archaeologist and Indologist N. J. Krom—head of
the Indies Archaeological Service—and who did his doctorate under the guidance of
Javanologist G. A. J. Hazeu). Djajadiningrat and Poerbatjaraka were the first Indonesians
trained as Indologists who also defended a PhD thesis at Leiden University during the
colonial period. They would pursue rather exceptional successful careers in the relevant
scholarly institutions in the Indies—and, subsequently, in post-Independence Indonesia.
As Director of the Department of Education and Religion, Djajadiningrat reached the
highest position ever held by an Indonesian during the Dutch colonial period, via the
Archaeological Service (1913), a professorship at the Law School (1924), a membership
of the Raad van Indie (Indian Council, 1934), a directorship of the prestigious Batavian
Society of Arts and Sciences (1938).27 Poerbatjaraka became curator of the Javanese
manuscripts at the Museum of the Batavian Society, and published in relevant Dutch
academic journals.28 It is noteworthy that neither of the two moved within the
international ‘Indic’ networks of scholars interested in Indianized Asia, or Greater India, a
privilege reserved for the senior Dutch colonial scholars working at the higher echelons
of the Archaeological Service.
In the 1930s, a younger generation of Indonesians—but again only a few—would follow a

comparable trajectory in the field of Indology writing PhD-theses in Leiden—e.g., the
Surakarta-born Chinese Javanologist and Islam expert Tjan Tjoe Siem (1909–1978), and
the Yogya-born Javanologist R. Prijono (1905–1969). Like Damais, who befriended them,
they would start what seemed the beginning of a serious—Java-based—scholarly colonial
career in the late 1930s, but who instead became well known and esteemed for their role
in academic life in early independent, nation-building Indonesia, both holding a
professorship at Universitas Indonesia. Prijono, the first Dean of the Faculty of Letters,
was even appointed Minister of Education and Culture (in 1957), in which year Tjan Tjoe
Siem succeeded him as Dean. Because of their (presumed) leftist inclinations, their
careers were enfeebled, and in Prijono’s case, ended violently after the pre-empted
communist coup of 1965 and the subsequent anti-communist purges under the new
regime of general Suharto.29
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Decolonization
Outside the official scholarly institutions there were more Indonesian, often nationalist,
elites who, in the 1920s and 1930s, played an active role in knowledge production about
Javanese or Indonesian culture, both past and present; e.g., Muhammad Yamin, the
Minister of Education and Culture and speaker at the inauguration of the Siva temple.
They set up journals, and founded cultural-nationalist and political associations.30 Some
of them, together with Dutch and the few Indonesian ‘official’ scholars, co-organized the
congress for the Javanese cultural development (held in Surakarta 1918), which hosted
Dutch scholars and Indonesian intellectual elites. On the momentum of the Surakarta
congress, in 1919 they founded, along with the same colonial scholarly elites, the Java
Institute in Surakarta, whose journal Djawa was dedicated to the study of Javanese
culture, and soon included Bali and Sumatra.
Some of the more privileged Indonesian elites also moved within inter-Asian and
international knowledge networks.31 For instance, Prince Mangkunagara VII in Solo,
honorary chair of the Java Institute and honorary member of the India Society in London
(founded in 1911), corresponded with and hosted visitors from India. The Sumatran-born
writer Sanusi Pane, co-founder of Timboel (another cultural journal), travelled to India in
1929. Some Javanese nationalists, notably the poet Noto Soeroto (1880–1951) who was
born in the Pakualaman palace of Yogyakarta, supported the visit of Tagore to Java in
1927. Javanese cultural nationalist journals, like Timboel, extensively reported on
Tagore’s visit, and on Visva Bharati, the site of learning that Tagore had founded in
Santiniketan—a location that attracted famous Indologists seekers of spiritual learning
from Europe as well.32 After Tagore’s visit to the Indies, the art school at Santiniketan
would host the Sumatran artists Soetan Harahap and Roesli. It was Harahap who
provided the drawings for the 1933 Malay translation by Muhammad Yamin of Tagore’s
The Home and the World Yamin, on his turn, as early as 1928, took great interest in
Tagore’s work.33 Other Indonesian students also visited Santiniketan in the context of
longer travels in India. These included the Javanese medical doctor and nationalist
Soetomo (1888–1938).34 In the early independence years, famous Balinese intellectuals
like Ida Bagus Mantra (1928–1995), the later governor of Bali, and Javanese artists like
Afandi (1907–1990), followed. They arrived with scholarships provided by the newly
founded Indian Council for Cultural relations (ICCR) in Delhi (1950), with a branch Office
in Jakarta from 1955 onwards, through which the Indian government aimed to foster
closer relations between Independent India and Indonesia.35
During and shortly after decolonization, India’s connections to ancient Hindu-Buddhist

sites in Indonesia were emphasized in meaningful diplomatic ways at the initiative of both
Indonesian and Indian parties. In 1948, during the hot years of decolonization war and
revolution, the Indonesian Archaeological Service, based in Yogyakarta, and competing
with the Dutch colonial Archaeological Service in Batavia, invited Indian archaeologists to
Java.36 This Indian mission consisted of the Greater India Society’s member C.
Sivaramamurti (superintendent of the Indian Museum of Calcutta) and K. R. Srinivasan
(superintendent at the Indian Archaeological Service’s Central Circle). Sivaramamurti
later on published a book (translated into French with the support of the Musée Guimet
in Paris) in which, with a peculiar India-centric interest in connections, he compared the
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Decolonization
details of the Borobudur reliefs to old Indian art.37 This perfectly fitted the way that the
Musée Guimet in Paris displayed Hindu and Buddhist sculptures from South and
Southeast Asia, including a Buddha head from Borobudur, as Indianized high art.38
India’s prime minister Nehru solidified India’s cultural political connections to the site via
his 1950 visit to the young Indonesian Republic. He referred to the two nations’ shared
cultural past while visiting these civilizations’ beautiful collaborations, Borobudur and
Prambanan, in Tagore’s footsteps. Among Nehru’s retinue were the archaeologist Neogy
and the director of the Indian Archaeological Service, N. P. Chakravarti.39 In this way,
Indonesia-based sites, like the Siva-temple and Borobudur, continued to be pivotal sites of
knowledge exchange between various parties that sometimes represented (new) states,
but that were also part of the knowledge networks which bound scholars, collectors, and
pilgrims to other moral geographies than those of the nation state.
The chapter now explores the relevant sites of learning in the Netherlands in the 1920s–
1930s to gauge continuities and discontinuities in international and empires’ institutions,
alliances, and ideas. It was there that most of the scholars present at the Siva temple in
1953 met, and where Greater Indian scholars like Majumdar gathered, as well as some of
the few Leiden-trained Indonesian scholars, during what we may call an ‘Indic summer’ in
Dutch academia. It was there, also, that different worlds of Greater India thinking
developed in parallel, in exchange and misunderstanding.
Leiden in the 1920s–1930s: the Indic Summer

and Re-Indianizing Indonesia
In 1935, the talented, twenty-four-year-old Damais, with diplomas from L’Ecole nationale
des langues Orientales vivantes and the Faculty of Languages and Literature of the
University of Paris, arrived in Leiden on a fellowship from the French Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. His objective was to deepen his knowledge of the languages and culture of the
Indonesian archipelago—for which he also planned to learn Dutch.40 His choice was not
surprising, but his timing seemed fortunate. As the centre for the training of colonial
administrators, as host of important Orientalist collections, and of an internationally
esteemed National Ethnographic Museum, Leiden had since long been a magnet for
scholars interested in Asiatic languages, cultures, and histories. Orientalism in Leiden
has been studied as such, although mainly from a Dutch national perspective.41 But in the
late 1920s, this provincial town with its prestigious academic centre seemed to
experience an international ‘Indic Summer’ that attracted a self proclaimed beau monde
of influential indologists in the making from across Europe, and from British India itself .
This was their finest hour, for the importance of their mission, nor its colonial dimension,
was not questioned—not by themselves, not by a growing number of Indian art
aficionados outside academia.
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Decolonization
After his experience of a three-month research visit to Leiden in 1928, Ramesh Chandra
Majumdar (1888–1980), the Greater Indian historian, said, ‘I can say from my personal
experience that anyone who wants to study the Dutch sources of the history of Greater
India cannot select a better place than the Kern Institute, Leyden.’42 When he visited the
Institute, named after the famous Dutch multi-linguist and Sanskritist J. H. C. Kern, it was
just three years old. It was a creation of the Sanskritist Jean-Philippe Vogel who, in 1913,
had returned from a successful career at the Indian Archaeological Survey to become
professor of Sanskrit and Indian archaeology at the University of Leiden. He would
become the teacher of Stutterheim, Damais, Bernet Kempers, and De Casparis. The Kern
Institute won the strong support of Vogel’s first PhD student, Frederik D. K. Bosch, who
was, by then, director of the Archaeological Service in the Dutch East Indies. It would
become an important, internationalizing centre for the study of Indian archaeology in its
broadest sense. Not accidentally, Majumdar remarked that the object of research at the
Institute included
‘not only India proper, but also what we call to-day Further India and the Dutch
East Indies. In short Burma and the vast territory to the east together with the
islands like Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo etc., where ancient Indian Culture and
civilization was spread in ancient times is included in the subject of the study …
the Kern Institute is in a way pursuing the same ideals as the Greater India
Society in Calcutta’.43
Vogel, the mastermind behind the Kern Institute, personified important Leiden-Indian-
Indies’ and French Indochina connections through his international network. It included
the French indologists Lévi and Alfred Foucher, as well as, thanks to his own ‘Indian’
career, both English and Indian colleagues and friends. After finishing his studies with
Sanskritist Jan Speyer (1849–1913), Vogel, like his predecessor Kern, worked extensively
in British India, and in 1901, Vogel became Archaeological Surveyor of the Circle of the
Punjab—a region of the size of France and Germany together—to which soon the
northern ‘United Provinces’ Circle would be added.44 Vogel’s nomination occurred just
one year after Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, in his famous speech made the
safeguard of ‘Indian’ antiquities a top priority.45 In the wake of what Benedict Anderson
has famously referred to as an Asia-based, imperial ‘Archaeological push’, this more or
less coincided with the installation of the EFEO in French Indo China (1898), and of the
Archaeological Commission in the Netherlands Indies (1901). These institutions shared
comparable aims and took the organization of archaeology in each other’s and in
neighbouring empires in the region as a model.46
Uniquely at the time, the Kern Institute, due to converging Dutch colonial Indies’ and
classic Indian interests developing at Leiden University, would support both a chair for
Sanskrit, literary sources and archaeology in British India (Vogel, from 1914), and one for
archaeology in the Dutch East Indies, created in 1919, and occupied by N. J. Krom (1883–
1945). Krom was the first director of the Dutch East Indies’ Archaeological Service from
1913 to 1916, and was the supervisor of Stutterheim’s PhD thesis. The Institute collected
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research and teaching material for these fields (books, photographs, lantern slides,
plaster casts), and hosted teaching staff working on the Dutch East Indies or on the
‘Greater Indian region’, one of whom was the Javanese philologist Poerbatjaraka.47
The Greater Indian historian Majumdar visited the Kern Institute in 1928, as part of a
touring through Europe and preparing a subsequent visit to ‘Further India’ in the Dutch
East Indies and French Indochina. In Oxford, he had represented the Greater India
Society at the Orientalists’ Conference, in Paris he had visited the Societé Asiatique, and
he ended his European tour with a three-month research visit to the Kern Institute. Vogel
revered Majumdar as a great expert in Hindu-Javanese archaeology, so it was
unsurprising that Majumdar felt ‘well received’ by Vogel and Krom, calling them ‘leading
authorities on Indian cultural relations with Indonesia’.48 From Europe, and carrying
introductions from Vogel and Krom, Majumdar travelled to Java to visit ‘the remarkable
monuments of Borobudur and Prambanan, etc.’, crossed over to Bali to study ‘the living
relics of Hinduism’, and then continued via Indochina (where French archaeologists
hosted him at the ‘splendid’ temple ruins of Angkor) to Bangkok to study ‘the relics of
Hindu culture’ in the Royal Palace’s museum collection and the Vajrayana library.
Reporting on his trip to the members of the Greater India Society, Majumdar found ‘that
scholars everywhere were eager to help the Greater India movement started in India, and
expressed the desire that Indian scholars would visit these centres systematically, with a
view to reconstructing the forgotten chapter of our glorious past history’.49
All this served the ambitious project Majumdar pursued—to write what he considered the
first scholarly history of ‘the Indian Colonisation in the Far East’. In the second volume of
this grand series dedicated to the Indonesian archipelago, and published in 1937, he
thanked the Dutch scholars for their support:
To
the Dutch savants
whose labours have unfolded
a new and glorious chapter of the History of Ancient Culture and Civilization
of India
this volume is dedicated
in token of
the respect, admiration, and gratitude
of the author.50
Majumdar’s brief report of his grand tour to Europe and Further India, as well as his
impressions of the Kern Institute, were published in the Calcutta-based Modern Review,
which was run by Ramananda Chatterjee, a strong supporter of the Greater India
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Society.51 In another issue of the Modern Review that year, Majumdar’s colleague and
Greater Indian scholar Bijan Raj Chatterjee, a student from Lévi in Paris, published an
overview entitled ‘Greater India—Some Landmarks in its History’, in which he traced the
textual and material sources of information proving ‘the spread of Indian culture in Indo-
China and the Malay Archipelago (Java, Sumatra, Bali, Borneo)’. He concluded—‘justly’
according to the journal’s editor—that ‘India […] should be taking her share in the matter
of reconstructing the history of Greater India’.52
Following decolonization, Majumdar and his like-minded colleagues were criticized by a

new generation of international scholars (who identified themselves as Indonesianists) for
the India-centred bias in their work. This bias, they insisted, amounted to a form of Indian
cultural ‘colonization’. However, Greater Indian scholars’ interests did not all together
overlap either with those of the scholars working in Leiden and the Dutch East Indies in
the 1920s and 1930s. For all these divergences, their preoccupations came together on
occasion. It is in that context that the Leiden-trained scholars like Bernet Kempers and W.
F. Stutterheim, while endeavouring to understand local agency behind Javanese Hindu-
Buddhist civilizational history, nonetheless travelled to India for comparative research.53
After decolonization, Damais and De Casparis further distanced themselves from both
Dutch and Indian colonial perspectives,54 but their more senior colleagues, Bernet
Kempers and the older Bosch and Stutterheim, would sometime criticize the Greater
Indian mindset, too.55 This generation, although still formed by the Leiden Sanskrit
tradition, were also fundamentally shaped by the long-term practice of site-centred
research in the Dutch East Indies, and, in Stutterheim’s case, by an anthropological
approach conducted there, in situ, seeking traces of the past via the historical landscape
and cultural practices of the present.56
On the other hand, the queries of Leiden’s new, ‘Indonesia’-oriented colonial scholars
were ambiguous. This ambiguity was, for example, evident in the title of Bernet Kempers’
inaugural speech for his lectureship in Leiden: Indische cultuurstroom (Indian Cultural
flow, Italics MB)—which still implied an Indian-centred framework of thinking.
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The Outsider Inside: Made by Empires?

As French, Indian, and Dutch East Indies’ scholarly alliances were coming together in
Leiden, it was not surprising that the talented Damais also turned up there as one of the
young students of—among others—Vogel. In Leiden he became acquainted with the Dutch
Indologists, as well as with Prijono and Tjan, who would both defend their PhD theses in
Indology in 1938.57 In addition to his new Dutch and Indonesian connections, Damais,
when leaving Leiden for Java in 1937, also could exploit older French-Dutch orientalist
connections that went back to the first official French EFEO missions to the Dutch East
Indies around 1900. These included Louis Finot and others in 1899, Henri Parmentier
(1871–1949) in 1904, Foucher in 1907, the 1920s, and 1930s: Paul Mus Lévi (1902–1969)
and Suzanne Karpelès (1890–1969) in 1928, and Henri Marchall (1876–1970) in 1930.
These scholars all investigated Hindu-Buddhist civilizational influences through the study
of ancient history, inscriptions and texts, archaeology, and/or conservation politics. What
distinguished Damais’ experience from those of his predecessors was that he came to the
Indies not via Indochina, but through Leiden. Subsequently, thanks in part to his Javanese
wife, and in part through their network of local cultural elites, he could incorporate
perspectives from the inside. In comparison to most of his older French colleagues,
Damais’ approach to the study of the Archipelago’s pasts became much more Indonesia-,
than India- or Indochina-centred. At the same time, Damais’ career, like those of his
colleagues, was to a large extent facilitated by empire—indeed multiple empires. Partly
through his institutional affiliations, he thus became a mediator in so many of the local
and international knowledge networks that facilitated the movement and moulding of
ideas on Indonesian culture and Greater India.
Like the Siva temple, Damais personified the formative aspects and continuities of
empires and decolonization.58 Once referred to by a colonial administrator in Indochina
as a ‘French Lawrence of Arabia in Asia’,59 in 1953 at the Siva temple Damais was half on
the Indonesian and half on the French side. Despite his explicit expression of anti-colonial
sentiments,60 to a certain extent both the French and Dutch empires in Asia made him.61
As a linguist studying in Paris, as a military servant in Syria (1932–1933), and as
secretary of a UN commission for the demarcation of the border between Syria and Iraq,
the polyglot Damais had mastered Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Malay, Chinese, Sanskrit,
Russian, and a bit of Kurdish. To these he added, during his studies in Leiden (1935–
1937), old and new Javanese under C. C. Berg, and Dutch, while improving his knowledge
of Malay under Philippus Samuel van Ronkel (1870–1954), Arabic under Islamologist and
Semiticist A. J. Wensinck 1882–1930, Sanskrit under Vogel, and Russian (nder Slavist
Nicolas van Wijk 1880–1941. He also took lessons at the home of the famous Arabist and
Islamologist Snouck Hurgronje. Thus, when he secured a research-fellowship to Java in
1937, heading towards the self-proclaimed centre of Javanese culture, Surakarta, he was
well connected, and well equipped, reading and speaking Dutch, Javanese, Malay, and
Arabic. However, due to financial circumstances, he soon had to swap his research post in
Surakarta for a diplomatic one as vice-consul at the French Consulate in Batavia. Thanks
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to Stutterheim, with whom he became well acquainted during some of Stutterheim’s
official archaeological inspection trips to sites in Java and Bali, he resumed his research
in 1941. In March of that year, Stutterheim assigned him as epigrapher of the Dutch
colonial Archaeological Service. In June 1942, in the wake of the Japanese occupation,
Damais married R.A. Soejatoen Poespokoesoemo, a Javanese intellectual, who was the
assistant-librarian at the Batavian Society and a pupil from Stutterheim at the ‘Eastern
section’ of the Algemeene Middelbare School (general High School, AMS) in Surakarta.62
Damais and Soejatoen had three children and he converted to Islam in a ceremony guided
by the prominent intellectual and Islamic scholar Agus Salim.63
The Pacific War and the Japanese occupation of the Indies (1942–1945) placed Damais in
an ambiguous position: as a national of Vichy France, he did not face internment, and he
did not explicitly support the French resistance movement.64 However, Damais did try to
avoid working for the Japanese regime, and during the war Damais’ scholarly activity
remained restricted to the study of the Indonesian language, which under a Japanese
regime that prohibited the use of Dutch, quickly ‘progressed’ as a new nationalist,
formalized language based on local Malay.65 In 1943, when Damais, again as a result of
Japanese archaeological politics, was asked to translate Dutch publications into English,
he refused. This forced him to earn a living as an informal school teacher to Indonesian
youths and in January 1945, he, his wife, and some of their Indonesian friends were
arrested and interrogated by the police, for listening to clandestine news broadcasts
about the movement of the allied forces. These were at least feats of arms on his
curriculum vitae of 1959, when Damais was made the new chair of Indonesian civilization
and languages at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris, a post created
specifically for him.66 After the war, Damais, while strongly on the side of the Indonesian
Republicans, half-heartedly resumed his work on a corpus of Javanese inscriptions for the
Dutch colonial Archaeological Service. In 1947, he left for Europe, partly driven out by
the military clashes and chronic insecurity in Batavia. From 1951 to 1953 he was
affiliated to the EFEO in Saigon, after which he returned permanently to Indonesia.67
In the early 1950s, with his strong foothold within Indonesian intellectual elite and
scholarly circles, Damais played an ambiguous role as mediator between French cultural
diplomatic, Indonesian nationalist, and Greater Indian scholarly interests, and provided
an entrance into Indonesian high society to the new French ambassador. Damais’
alliances with Indonesian scholars were confirmed at the end of 1953, partly by his
nomination to the ethnographic and linguistic section of the Lembaga Kebudyaan
(Cultural Institute, the successor of the Batavian Society), and partly as a member of that
Institute’s advisory council.68 One of his advisory council assignments was to produce ‘a
popular but sufficiently academic’ overview of the historical problems regarding
Indonesia and her relationships with India.69 Damais’ nomination thus seems to invoke
the poignant dilemmas facing the Lembaga Kebudyaan: how to reconcile longstanding
Greater Indian views that were now competing with nationalist scholarly views on
Indonesia and its history.
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Damais also received an invitation to become a member of the ‘India-Indonesia Cultural
Society’, which supported the line of Greater Indian versus nationalist thinking, but with
an Islam based twist. The society was founded in December 1953 under the auspices of
Damis’ friend Prijono and Poerbatjaraka, the idea materializing during the one-year visit
of Syed Mohamed Hoessain Nainar, the Indian linguist and Islamic civilization specialist
from the University of Madras.70
Above all, by representing, and, ultimately, helping to found an EFEO office in Jakarta,
Damais secured the continuities of French scholarly interests in Indonesia’s ancient
‘Indic’ civilizations dating back to the first of several missions archaéologiques by EFEO-
members to Java in 1899.
The Indonesian Moment: Closed Doors and

Open Ends of Colonial Heritage Networks
That the Greater Indian mindset conflicted with postwar Indonesian nation building—and
scholarship—can be inferred from one of the educational tools published by Soekmono,
shortly after he had become head of the Indonesian Archaeological Service. In his
Pengantar Sedjarah Kebudajaan Indonesia (Guide to the Cultural History of Indonesia), a
textbook for use in Indonesian high schools, he broke with the tradition of generations of
foreign scholars who started the history of Indonesia in India: ‘the history of the
Indonesian people does not begin with the arrival of the people and influences of India ….
Whether it has Hindu, Islamic or Western influences, from the beginning until the end,
Indonesian cultural history is Indonesian cultural history.’71
On the other hand, the old transnational Indic scholarly networks would continue to
challenge such Indonesia-centred views on ancient Asian history with alternative views,
enhanced by interdependent relationships of scholarly knowledge exchange. Thus, in late
1955, Damais ran across the young archaeologist Satyawati Suleiman, whom he knew
from before the war when she was still at high school in Batavia, now a staff member
under Soekmono at the Archaeological Service. Damais presented Suleiman with a copy
of George Coedès’s (French Sanskritist and former director of the EFEO) latest
monograph, Les États hindouisés d’Indochine et Indonesie (1948). This work, later
translated into The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, is a classic in the tradition of
Greater Indian views on the region. To Suleiman, the book, and the connection, was a
treasure, as she would develop over the next decades into an internationally esteemed
specialist of the Sumatran remains of the Srivijaya Kingdom. Perhaps in exchange, she
rather excitedly told Damais about the vice president Muhammed Hatta’s plans for an
Indonesian archaeological mission to sites in India in 1956, and invited Damais to come
along. Such an invitation to a foreigner was quite exceptional at the time; due to
deteriorating relationships between Indonesia and the Netherlands, Suleiman had
notably snubbed the epigrapher De Casparis, who was fiercely anti-colonial, but Dutch.
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Damais explained the situation to his boss, as well as his excitement of finally viewing the
archaeological remains of India’s ancient past. Sadly, the Indonesian archaeological
mission never materialized. Instead, and probably as an outcome of these preparatory
plans, in 1958 Suleiman was sent to India as an ideal knowledgeable cultural attaché to
the Indonesian Embassy.
Conclusion
Like Nehru’s visit to Borobudur with his archaeological missionaries, the meeting
between Suleiman and Damais was one of a number of exchanges taking place in the
years of early Indonesian independence, which showed that, in spite of post-
independence politics of nation building, the long-term scholarly networks of Greater
India still influenced a mindset that prioritized a transnational view on the region that
excluded Indonesian (Islamic) realities of past and present. Indonesian, Dutch, French,
and Indian scholars studying the ancient world in Asia, often in affective and
interdependent relationships, could be stimulated and enhanced in their position
precisely through enduring Greater Indian interests in connections between Indonesia
and India. However, others were restricted by negative experiences and politics of
empire, decolonization, and postcolonial nation building. Before, during, and after the
war, as well as across the decolonization divide, the idea of ‘local genius’ and related
plans for heritage safeguarding were, despite the urgency of Indonesian nation building,
subordinated to the interests of international and inter-Asian collaborations.
For all these actors who were privileged by birth and education, empire (or several
empires) provided a formative experience. Empire enabled some of them, Dutch, French,
but also Indian, to enjoy successful careers that developed further within and beyond the
borders of empire. They played active roles and exercised influence within Indian-,
Southeast Asian-, and European-based scholarly networks of Greater India. Empire, on
the other hand, also restricted others, in particular, the Indonesian scholar-intellectuals
during the colonial period. These moved strictly within the Dutch imperial space, whereas
their Indian colleagues travelled the world and played visible roles in international
academic forums. But regardless of whether these scholars wrote against the Greater
Indian mindset or not, each helped to shape the moral geographies of Greater India that
still exercise influence on the way many people, including academics, in Asia, Europe and
the US look at the world and consider her in spatially and morally defined hierarchies of
civilization. In that sense, the scholars central in this chapter helped, whether
purposefully or not, empowering forms of cultural imperialism that alternated, but also
partly overlapped, with those of empire. Ideas of Greater India as the superior solution to
problems of the ‘self’ or the world at large, not only linger on in museums, studies and
coffee table books of Asian art and archaeology, but also in the worldwide embracing of
Yoga as the pertinent good, or the Hollywood Blockbuster Eat, Pray, Love (2010) which
triggered a new generation in the West to go on pilgrimage to ashrams in India and gurus
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in Bali. These academic and popular practices dwell on ideas of Greater India and related
mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, that we, whether as scholars, pilgrims or both,
need to recognize as well, if we want to open up to the world.
Notes:
(1) This chapter is a pilot of my research project, ‘Indonesia and Greater India. Scholarly
and spiritual knowledge networks and moral geographies’, supported by KITLV, 2016–
2020. It builds on my previous joint research-project, 2009–2014, with Martijn Eickhoff,
on archaeology and heritage politics in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, within the
Sites, Bodies, Stories Programme supported by the Dutch Scientific Council (NWO).
(2) Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Exchange and the protection of Java’s
antiquities; A transnational approach to the problem of heritage in colonial Java”, Journal
of Asian Studies 72, no. 4 (2013): 1–24. Compare on sites in India: Alan Trevithick, The
revival of Buddhist pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811-1949). Anagarika Dharmapala and the
Mahabodhi temple (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2006); Upinder Singh, “Exile and return.
The reinvention of Buddhism and Buddhist sites in Modern India”, Journal of South Asian
Studies (2010) 26, no. 2: 193–217; David Geary, “Rebuilding the Navel of the Earth.
Buddhist pilgrimage and transnational religious networks”, MAS 48, no. 3 (2014): 645–
692.
(3) Tim Creswell, “Moral Geographies”, in D. Atkinson, et al., eds., Cultural Geography: A
Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2005), 128–134. For a
transnational elaboration of this concept, see M. Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of
Asia: Scholars, Pilgrims and Knowledge Networks of Greater India, ca. 1900-1970”, in
Michael Laffan, ed., Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial
Migrations, National Rights (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
(4) Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”’. Compare on India-centred forms of

Greater India thinking and Asianism Susan Bayly, “Imaging ‘Greater India’; French and
Indian visions of colonialism in the Indic mode”, MAS 38, no. 3 (2004): 703–744; Carolien
Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and
Internationionalism (ca. 1905-1940)”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no.
1 (2012): 65–92; C.M. Stolte, Orienting India: Interwar Internationalism in an Asian
Inflection, 1917–1937, PhD-thesis, Leiden University, 2013.
(5) Of the many possible examples two influential ones, with impact on research on Asia
in the late colonial period: Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons. The Indian Ocean in the
Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Engseng Ho, The
Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2006). See also: Tim Harper and Sunil Amrith, “Sites of
Asian interaction: An introduction”, MAS, 46, no. 2 (2012): 249–257; Sunil Amrith,
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Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
(6) For a recent discussion on transnational history, see Matthew Pratt Guterl, “Comment:
The Futures of Transnational History”, American Historical Review, 118, no. 1, (2013),
130–139.
(7) For the New Imperial History in the context of Dutch colonial history, see Remco
Raben, “A new Dutch imperial history? Perambulations in a prospective field”, Low
Countries Historical Review/BMGN, 128, no. 1 (2013): 5–30, and other essays in this
special issue at http://www.bmgn-lchr.nl/492/volume/128/issue/1/.
(8) For some important recent or ongoing exceptions: Ethan Mark, “Asia’s Transwar
Lineage; Nationalism, Marxism, and ‘Greater Asia’ in an Indonesian Inflection”, Journal of
Asian Studies 65, no. 3 (2006): 461–493; Yulianti, “Producing Buddhism in modern
Indonesia (ca. 1930s–1950s): South and Southeast Asian networks and local agencies”,
forthcoming PhD dissertation at Leiden University and Universitas Gajah Mada.
(9) Bart Luttikhus and A. Dirk Moses, eds., Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass
Violence. The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2014); Rémy
Limpach, De brandende kampongs van generaal Spoor (Amsterdam: Boom, 2016); Gert
Oostindie, Soldaat in Indonesië 1945-1950. Getuigenissen van een oorlog aan de
verkeerde kant van de geschiedenis (Amsterdam: Boom, 2016). 2017 sees a new large
research programme conducted by Netherlands- and Indonesian-based institutions and
scholars, funded by the Dutch government: ‘Decolonization, Violence and War in
Indonesia, 1945–1950’, see: http://www.ind45-50.org/en/home.
(10) In the Netherlands and Indonesia, this started at a grand scale with the NWO-funded
program “Indonesia across Orders. Rearrangements of Indonesian Society”, running
2002–2008; it was initiated by Remco Raben, coördinated by NIOD (Amsterdam), and
entailed collaboration with various universities and historians in Indonesia; for the
resulting publications, see http://www.niod.nl/en/projects/indonesia-across-orders. For
recent studies by Indonesian historians on institutional histories across regime changes,
see Agus Suwignyo, “The Breach in the Dyke: Regime Change and the Standardization of
Public Primary School Training in Indonesia, 1893–1969”, PhD dissertation, Leiden
University, 2012; Farabi Fakih, “The Rise of the Managerial State of Indonesia:
Institutional Transition During the Early Independence Period, 1950-1965”, PhD
dissertation, Leiden University, 2014.
(11) On Indonesia in the 1950s, see the special issue of BKI, Journal of the Humanities and
Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 167, no. 4 (December 2011); see also Jennifer Lindsay
and Maya Liem, eds., Heirs of World Culture: Being Indonesian 1950-1965 (Leiden: KITLV
Press, 2012), who study this period as a ‘beginning’ to counter the historiography on
Indonesian history that either lays a watershed in 1940–1945, or in 1965.
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(12) See, however, Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, “Decolonizing Borobudur:
Moral engagements and the fear of loss. The Netherlands, Japan and (post-) colonial
heritage politics in Indonesia”, in S. Legêne, B. Purwanto, and H. Schulte Nordholt, eds.,
Sites, Bodies and Stories. Imagining Indonesian History. (Singapore: National University
of Singapore Press, 2015), 33–66; Mathew Cohen, Inventing the Performative Tradition in
Colonial Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016) includes the Japanese
occupation and independent Indonesia.
(13) Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2005).
(14) “Rapport sur une mission effectuée à Jogyakarta (ou Djokja) par L.C. Damais, pour
representer l’[Efeo] à la Céremonie marquant la fin des travaux de restauration du
Temple principal de Complexe de PRAMBANAN (souvent appelé Lara Djonggrang) dédié
à Siwa Mahadewa, le 20 Decembre 1954” [hereafter Report Prambanan, Damais,
20-12-1954]. EFEO Paris, Archives EFEO, (hereafter EFEO), Dossiers de Personnels
(hereafter DP), IV-D-P P/33, Louis Charles Damais, 1953_0003-0006.
(15) For an extensive analysis of the inauguration of the Siva temple in the context of
Indonesian nation building in the 1950s, see Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff,
“Conserving the past, mobilizing the future. Archaeological sites, regime change and
heritage politics in Indonesia in the 1950s”, BKI/ Journal of the Humanities and Social
Sciences of Southeast Asia, 167, no. 4 (2011): 405–426. See also Bloembergen and
Eickhoff, “Decolonizing Borobudur”.
(16) Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”.
(17) This paragraph builds on Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Conserving the Past”.
(18) Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Conserving the Past”, 405–418.
(19) Muhammad Yamin, “Tjandi Loro Djonggrang”, Budaya, 12 (1953): 5–10; see also
Muhammad Yamin, 6000 Tahun Sang Merah-Putih (Jakarta 1953).
(20) Edi Sedyawati, “Sekapur Sirih”, in Edi Sedyawati, Ingrid E. H. Pojoh, and Supratikno
Rahardo, eds., Monumen. Karya persambuhan untuk prof. dr. R. Soekmono (Depok,
1990), vii–ix, here vii–viii; Soekmono, ‘Kepentingan leloehoer nenek moyang kita’, in
Pantja Raja 1, no. 6 (1946): 149–150.
(21) Report Prambanan, Damais, 20-12-1954, EFEO, DP, IV-D-P P/33, Louis Charles
Damais, 1953_0003-0006.
(22) Compare, for India-centred forms: Susan Bayly, “Imagining ‘Greater India’”; Stolte
and Fischer-Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India”; Mark Ravinder Frost, “‘That Great Ocean of
Idealism’: Calcutta, the Tagore Circle, and the Idea of Asia, 1900-1920”, in S. Moorthy
and A. Jamal, eds., Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural Social and Political Perspectives
(London: Routledge, 2010), 251–279; on their impact regarding (post)-colonial Indonesia,
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see Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”; Marieke Bloembergen, “Sites of
Learning, New Spiritual Movements and Scholarly Seekers in Indonesia and ‘Greater
India’, 1920s–1970s: Local and Global Connections to Modernity”, in Susi Protschky and
Tom van den Berge, eds., Modern Times in Southeast Asia, 1920s-1970s (Leiden: Brill
forthcoming).
(23) Bayly, “Imaging ‘Greater India’”; Stolte, Orienting India, Chapter 3; Kwa Chong-Guan,
“Introduction: Visions of early Southeast Asia as Greater India”, in Early Southeast Asia
Viewed from India: An Anthology of Articles from the Journal of the Greater India Society
(Singapore: ISEAS, 2013), xv–xlvii.
(24) See for the visit of Kalidas Nag to the Dutch East Indies in 1924, see Bloembergen,
“Borobudur”; on the visit of Tagore to Java in 1927, see Arun Das Gupta, “Rabindranath
Tagore in Indonesia: An Experience in Bridge-Building”, BKI/ Journal of the Humanities
and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania, 158, no. 3 (2002): 451–477; Bose, A
Hundred Horizons, 245–260; Martin Ramstedt, “Colonial Encounters between India and
Indonesia”, South Asian History and Culture, 2, no. 4 (2011): 522–539; Bloembergen and
Eickhoff, “Save Borobudur! The Moral Dynamics of Heritage Formation in Indonesia
across Orders and Borders, 1930s–1980s”, in Michael Falser, ed., Cultural Heritage as
Civilizing Mission (London: Springer, 2015), 96–97.
(25) R. Tagore, 16-9-1928, [probably to T. K. Birla]. Santiniketan, Rabindra Bhavan,

Correspondence Tagore, ‘Java-tour’, 179, 1.
(26) In 1913, according to a 1952-CV of Damais (see footnote 40); In 1912 according to
the website http://www.geni.com/people/Rr-Soejatoen-Poespokoesoemo/
6000000012966920530, consulted 7-4-2015, which learns that she was born in East Java,
Situbundo, and the daughter of a priyayi, R. Abdoelharif Poespokoesoemo, and Samini
Binti poespowardojo.
(27) For Dutch and Indonesian biographical sketches of Djajadiningrat, see, among others,
Soetanto Soetopo, Prof. Dr. Hoesein Djajadiningrat. Karya dan pengabdianya (Jakarta:
Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1982); G. Pijper, “Professor. dr. pangeran Ario
Hoesein Djajadiningrat, 8 december 1886-12 november 1960”, BKI/ Journal of the
Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 117, no. 4 (1961): 401–409.
(28) For an obituary of Poerbatjaraka, see Th. Pigeaud, ‘In memoriam professor
Poerbatjaraka’, BKI 122, 4 (1966), 405–412. Damais reviewed Poerbatjaraka’s Riwajat
Indonesia (History of Indonesia) (Djakarta: Yayasan Pembangunan, 1952), in BEFEO, 48,
no. 2 (1957): 607. For a personal memory on Poerbatjaraka, see Benedict Anderson,
“Sembah-sempuh: The politics of Language and Javanese culture”, in Language and
Politics: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1990), 194–239, at 214.
Page 22 of 26

Decolonization
(29) On Prijono, see Lee Kam Hing, Education and Politics in Indonesia (Kuala Lumpur:
University of Malaya Press, 1995) 182–185; Harry Poeze, Verguisd en vergeten. Tan
Malaka en de linkse beweging in Indonesië, 1945-1949. Part 3 (Leiden: KITLV Press,
2007), 1716. On Tjan Tjoe Siem, see Leo Suryadinata, Southeast Asian Personalities of
Chinese Descent, Vol I (Singapore: ISEAS, 2012), 1184.
(30) Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion. Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912-1926 (Ithaca
NY: Columbia University Press, 1990); Hans van Miert, Een koel hoofd en een warm hart.
Nationalisme, javanisme en jeugdbeweging in Nederlands-Indië, 1918-1930. (Amsterdam:
De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1995).
(31) For analyses of Indonesian colonial elites interactions with India, see Ramstedt,
“Colonial Encounters”; for postcolonial times, see Martin Ramstedt, “Hindu bonds at
work, Spiritual and commercial ties between India and Bali”, Journal of Asian Studies, 67,
no. 4 (2008): 1227–1250; see also Yadav Somvir, “Cultural and religious interaction
between modern India and Indonesia”, in Martin Ramstedt, ed., Hinduism in Modern
Indonesia (London: Routledge, 2003), 255–263.
(32) On Santiniketan and visiting European-born Indologists, in particular, the Italian

Sanskritist Tucci (1894–1984), see. Stolte, Orienting India, 83–102.
(33) Republished in the 1950s, Muhammad Yamin, Di Dalam lingkungan rumah tangga
(Jakarta, Perpustakaan Perguruan Kementerian P.P. dan K, 1955); From the same author,
another translation of Tagore’s works: Muhammad Jamin, Menantikan soerat dari raja
(Batavia, 1928). Soetan Harahap made frescoes for the buildings of the art school at
Santiniketan, and also contributed drawings to the work of the Bengal writer Buddhadeva
Bose, The Land Where I Found It All, translated by Nandini Gupta, see http://
www.parabaas.com/BB/articles/pNandini_SPDCh10.html, accessed 12-2-2017.
(34) Soetomo, Towards a Glorious Indonesia: Reminiscences and Observations (Athen, OH:
Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1987), edited, annotated and introduced
by Paul W. van der Veur, at 162–170.
(35) Somvir, “Cultural and religious interaction”, 257. Martin Ramstedt, “Hindu bonds at
work”, 1230.
(36) See Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Decolonizing Borobudur”, 101.
(37) S. Sivaramamurti, Le stupa du Barabadur (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1961).
(38) Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”.
(39) Laporan Tahunan. Dinas Purbakala Republik Indonesia (Jakarta, 1952), 13.
(40) CV Charles Louis Damais, 1951, EFEO, DP, IV-D-P P/33, Louis Charles Damais,
Activités 1950-1951-0060-CVDAMAIS.
Page 23 of 26

Decolonization
(41) Willem Otterspeer, ed., Leiden Oriental Connections, 1850-1940 (Leiden: Brill, 1989);
Cees Fasseur, De Indologen. Ambtenaren voor de Oost 1825-1950 (Amsterdam: B. Bakker,
1993).; Maarten Kuitenbrouwer, Tussen oriëntalisme en wetenschap (Leiden: KITLV
Press, 2001).
(42) R. C. Majumdar, ‘The Kern Institute of Leyden’, Modern Review XLV (1929): 601–603,
at 602.
(43) ibid.
(44) F. D. K. Bosch. ‘In memoriam Jean Philippe Vogel, 1871-1951’, De Gids, 122 (1959): 1–
12, at 2, 5.
(45) Upinder Singh, The Discovery of Ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the
Beginning of Archaeology (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 349; Bosch, “In memoriam”, 2.
(46) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); on the history of archaeology and politics in India, see
Upinder Singh, The Discovery; Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories:
Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004). On international competition in archaeology in Southeast Asia, involving
king Chulalongkorn of Siam, see Maurizio Peleggi, Lords of Things. The Fashioning of the
Siamese Monarchy’s modern Image. (Honolulo: University of Hawaii Press, 2002); From a
Dutch East-indies’ perspective, see Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Exchange”.
(47) Jean-Philippe Vogel, De arbeid van het Instituut Kern, 1925-1935. (Leiden: Brill,
1935), 7, 12.
(48) Vogel, Instituut Kern, 12; “Dr R. C. Majumdar in Europe and Indonesia’, Modern
Review XLV (1929): 131.
(49) “Dr R. C. Majumdar”, 131.
(50) Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Suvarnadvipa. Describing Hindu Culture and Political
History in Malaya and Indonesia (Dacca, 1937), frontispiece. Compare Ramstedt,
“Colonial Encounters”, 8.
(51) “Dr R. C. Majumdar”, 131.
(52) B. R. Chatterjee, ‘Greater India—Some Landmarks in its History’, Modern Review XLV
(1929): 337–338, at 338. See also, from the same author: “Fall of the last kingdom in
Java”, Modern Review XLV (1929): 536–539.
(53) For more details on this generation, see Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of
Asia”.
Page 24 of 26

Decolonization
(54) For De Casparis, see Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”; For Damais, see
L. Ch. Damais, “Pre-Seventeenth-Century Indonesian History: Sources and Directions”, in
M. A. Soedjatmoko, G. J. Resink and G. McT. Kahin, eds., An Introduction to Indonesian
Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), 24–35, at 31.
(55) On Stutterheim and Bosch, ambiguously in action against Greater Indian thinking,
see Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the light of Asia”.
(56) Characteristic for Indology students from the Dutch Philologist W. H. Rassers (1877–
1973) at Leiden University. See C. C. Berg, ‘Javaansche geschiedschrijving’, in F. W.
Stapel, ed., Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1938), 9.
(57) Interview with Damais’s son, Adji Damais, Jakarta, 10 March, 2017.
(58) Compare to Damais: Harry J. Benda, “Louis Charles Damais”, Indonesia, 3 (1967):
217–221; G. J. Resink, “Six rencontre mémorables avec Charles-Louis Damais”, Archipel,
41 (1991): 19–21; Jean-Pascal Elbaz, “Louis-Charles Damais, un humaniste en Indonésie.
Détails d’une vie à Java à travers sa correspondence”, Archipel, 54 (1997): 243–252.
(59) “Haut Commissariat de France pour l’Indochine in Saigon, Conseiller Diplomatique to

Minister of Foreign Affairs (Sous-direction Asie-Océanie), 29-5-1946”, in Centre des
Archives d’ Outre-Mer (CAOM), Aix-en-Provence, Archives du Haut-Commissariat de
France à Saigon (HC) (1946-1954), Conseiller diplomatique (CD) (1945-1952), Indo 4.
(60) Jean-Pascal Elbaz, “Damais”, 245, quoting a letter of Damais dating 20 February
1946.
(61) Compare Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai
(London: Penguin, 2004).
(62) She passed her exams 13 May 1934. ANRI, KBG, inv. DIR 1098 (1941–1941),
overview of personnel at the Museum of the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences.
(63) Interview with Adji Damais, Jakarta, 10 March 2017. The Haute Commissaire in
Saigon, reporting about Damais’ pro-republican activities, tried to spread the gossip that
Damais had converted to Islam when he was in Syria. Haut Commissariat de France pour
l’Indochine, Conseiller Diplomatique to Minister of Foreign Affairs (Sous-direction Asie-
Océanie), 29-5-1946, in: CAOM, HC (1946-1954), CD (1945-1952), Indo 4.
(64) Benda, “Louis Charles Damais”, 220.
(65) Damais to Claire Holt, 17 December 1945, EFEO Jakarta, Letters of L. C. Damais.
With thanks to Jean Pascal Elbaz and Henri Chambert-Loir for the access to study this
collection.
(66) CV Louis Charles Damais, 1951, EFEO DP, IV D P-P-33, Louis Charles Damais,
Activités 1950-1951-0060-CVDAMAIS.
Page 25 of 26

Decolonization
(67) Catherine Clémentine-Ojha and Pierre-Yves Manguin, A Century in Asia: The History
of the École française d’Extrême Orient, 1896–1996 (Singapore: Didier-Millet, 2007), 130.
(68) Damais to director EFEO, 26 December 1953, in: EFEO, DP, IV D-P/P-33, Louis
Charles Damais, LO-SD-12-Poste de Djakarta-1953-0011.
(69) “Une revue de vulgarisation, mais de bonne tenue scientifique, sur les problèmes
historiques de l’Indonésie et de ses rapports avec l’Inde”, Damais to director EFEO, 26
December 1953, in EFEO DP, IV D-P/P-33, Louis Charles Damais, LO-SD-12-Poste de
Djakarta-1953-0011.
(70) See Nainar’s lecture “Islam, civilization and culture”, held at the Jajasan Wakaf
Perguruan Tinggi Islam in Jakarta in 1953 (Leiden University Library, Collection KITLV,
Collection R. Roolvinck), and his Java as Noticed by Arab Geographers (Madras:
University of Madras, 1953).
(71) R. Soekmono, Pengantar Sedjarah Kebudajaan Indonesia; Djilid 1. (Djakarta: Penerbit

Nasional Trikarya, 1955), 5 (translation MB).
Marieke Bloembergen
Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
Page 26 of 26

The Open Ends of The Ducth Empire and The Indonesian Past

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The Open Ends of the Dutch Empire and the Indonesian Past: Sites,

Scholarly Networks, and Moral Geographies of Greater India across

Oxford Handbooks Online

Subject: History, European History Online Publication Date: Jan 2018

Abstract and Keywords

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By focusing on sites in the Netherlands Indies/ Indonesia, and transnational networks of

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Dutch-Indonesian Decolonization and the Open

In December 1953, Louis-Charles Damais, an acknowledged epigrapher with strong

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Greater Indian Horizons, Local Colonial

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In the 1930s, a younger generation of Indonesians—but again only a few—would follow a

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During and shortly after decolonization, India’s connections to ancient Hindu-Buddhist

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Leiden in the 1920s–1930s: the Indic Summer

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the Dutch savants

whose labours have unfolded

this volume is dedicated

the respect, admiration, and gratitude

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Following decolonization, Majumdar and his like-minded colleagues were criticized by a

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The Outsider Inside: Made by Empires?

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The Indonesian Moment: Closed Doors and

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(4) Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”’. Compare on India-centred forms of

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(16) Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”.

(18) Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Conserving the Past”, 405–418.

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(25) R. Tagore, 16-9-1928, [probably to T. K. Birla]. Santiniketan, Rabindra Bhavan,

Subscriber: University College London; date: 15 June 2018

(32) On Santiniketan and visiting European-born Indologists, in particular, the Italian

(36) See Bloembergen and Eickhoff, “Decolonizing Borobudur”, 101.

(37) S. Sivaramamurti, Le stupa du Barabadur (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

(38) Bloembergen, “Borobudur in the Light of Asia”.

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(49) “Dr R. C. Majumdar”, 131.

(51) “Dr R. C. Majumdar”, 131.

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(59) “Haut Commissariat de France pour l’Indochine in Saigon, Conseiller Diplomatique to

(64) Benda, “Louis Charles Damais”, 220.

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(71) R. Soekmono, Pengantar Sedjarah Kebudajaan Indonesia; Djilid 1. (Djakarta: Penerbit

Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies

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