When the ruins of religious buildings transform into archaeological sites, they form new spots on new maps that give historical depth to contemporary geographical and political imaginations. These sites convey historical, religious, and moral messages as they are found, but archaeological interventions like the ones that we will discuss in this article added scientific, (art-)historical, and governmental concerns, linking sites to new geographical, moral, and political imaginations—among which are conflicting notions of heritage. This happened to the temple ruins that European civil servants, military, and travelers during the nineteenth century “rediscovered” in South and Southeast Asia. The eighth-century Buddhist temple Borobudur on Central Java in Indonesia—since 1991 listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site—became a colonial archaeological site in 1814, when Lieutenant-General T. S. Raffles ordered its uncovering and cleaning, thereby generating supra-local, academic, and governmental interests.
But precisely because archaeological sites are “localized,” and because of their histories, religious connotations, and moral messages, they are the center of multiple geographies and moral spaces. They therefore do not necessarily overlap with the political boundaries in which they, under changing regimes, were rediscovered, excavated, cleaned, conserved, and reappreciated. Moreover, these temple sites traveled, in time and in space, through images and copies and in “real” pieces, as part of pilgrims' souvenirs, exchanges, national or international exhibitions, as gifts, or as theft. Thus crossing boundaries, they could play a role in alternative heritage politics that were not exclusively based in national or colonial state formations but coexisted in parallel worlds that had centers other than Europe-based empires.
Due to these considerations, in this article, we take “archaeological sites” in Indonesia—in particular the more than thousand-year-old Buddhist and Hindu temple sites in Java—as a methodological starting point to study the dynamics of heritage formation in colonial Indonesia around 1900, at local, trans-Asian, and global levels. These sites, some of which today are World Heritage and national heritage sites at the same time, and located in a country with the world's largest Muslim population, are themselves analytical tools. Since they relate to historical and moral spaces that transgressed the formal state boundaries at the time in which they were rediscovered, these sites complicate the comparable and highly influential analytical tool of lieux-de-mémoire, or sites of memory, introduced by the French historian Pierre Nora (Reference Nora1984–92).Footnote 1
Nora initiated a method to study the emergence and workings of memory in the nineteenth century, by looking at specific lieux to which (groups of) people in the national states-in-progress historically related. Nora and the historians collaborating in his program came to focus on how these lieux have played a role in people's identifications with “the nation” and with national states in Europe. But, as other historians have pointed out, this ignored how groups who do not identify with the national state (while living within its borders) may relate to such sites. What it ignores as well, we argue, is how people outside the state identify with sites that are located inside what is to them a foreign country.Footnote 2 The concept of sites we use is therefore broader than the idea of lieux-de-mémoire, because we recognize these sites as centers of multiple spaces, generating transnational or global identifications. Following the device of the subaltern historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2000), they therefore help us to think beyond the boundaries of empire and national states, without ignoring these boundaries, and to study the dynamics of heritage formation from multiple perspectives.
With this approach we link up with a “transnational” trend in Asian studies, in which scholars investigate the implications of Asian alignments that transgress colonial, national, or regional boundaries.Footnote 3 For that aim, religious sites, as well as burial places, whether ruins or not, can be extremely insightful: they can connect to people and histories outside the national boundaries in which they are located, and, to quote the historian Engseng Ho (Reference Ho2006, xxv), they can “bend diasporic journeys.” Comparably, Susan Bayly (Reference Bayly2004, 704), in her work on the Greater India Society, addresses the heuristic value of religious sites, like the tomb shrine and pilgrimage site of the Islamic saint Shahul Amir in Southern India, because they “bear witness to the capacity of south Asians to forge fluid but enduringly supralocal solidarities which could both exploit and transcend the circumstances of colonialism.” It is precisely this observation that seems to work so well in our analysis of traveling sites and of how, through those sites' journeys, people identify with them, or use them in imaginations related to other geographies and identities—not only in Asia, but also in Europe.
Unlike Bayly or Ho, it is not so much the people and their travels via sites that we follow in our article, but the other way around: we try to understand how as sites travel, they morally and politically connect—or exclude—people. Moreover, we focus on sites that have developed into official heritage: these distinguish themselves in the sense that they not only connect multiple parties, but are in the course of time also sanctified and privileged by the national state and/or by local and global heritage agencies that complicate mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.
Traveling Sites, (Dis)connecting Heritage Awareness
In this article we follow the journeys of a particular collection of statues, reliefs, and ornaments—real parts and plaster casts—from the sites Borobudur, Prambanan, and Candi Sari in Central Java to elsewhere in the world. We do this in order to find out what happens when different formal heritage-relations towards the same sites overlap (or conflict) at local, trans-Asian, and global levels. The parts of this collection are bound by their provenance, the particular interest attached to them by various parties, and one particular stage where they performed: the Dutch colonial pavilion at the world exhibition in Paris in 1900. This was a copy of the ninth-century Buddhist temple Candi Sari, surrounded by samples of other Javanese temple art, including twenty-four relief panels of Borobudur depicting the life of the Buddha, and copies of ornaments of the nearby, slightly younger Hindu temple complex Prambanan—all cast in plaster (see Bloembergen Reference Bloembergen2006, 164–219). This stage and this performance formed a crucial moment in the history of “our” collection, as shall become clear later in this article.
For this article we will follow four trajectories of this collection of objects from Java to different parts of the world and back again to Java, to places where they became integrated with parallel imaginations that enlarged or transgressed formal national boundaries, and that at the same time modernized. The first one leads us, via King Chulalongkorn's visit to Java in 1896, to Siam, where these objects contributed to the idea and legitimation of the royal dynasty and Greater Buddhist Siam. The second one will lead us to the Netherlands and France for the Dutch colonial entry to the world exhibition in Paris in 1900, where they illustrated the idea of Greater Holland. The third one leads us back to Java, where they contributed to a new awareness of Greater Java. The fourth one leads us to England, where they illustrated the idea of Greater India, and thereby Greater England. We should stress that the notions of “Greater” that we use here convey different meanings in different contexts. Except for the cases of Greater Holland and—here yet implicitly—Greater Java, the appropriations of Java's antiquities were moreover not intended as actual territorial claims in Java. With this collection's travels as a starting point, we investigate the growing interest in old Buddhist and Hindu temple sites in colonial Java in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the diverse trajectories this interest took at the local, trans-Asian, and global levels. We focus on the question of what the notion of “heritage” in the Dutch East Indies around 1900 implied, what it entailed for the different actors involved, and to what extent and how “heritage” became a source for conflict in the twentieth century.
Pilgrimage and Diplomacy
On the first day of July 1896, a remarkable company climbed the stairs of the eighth-century Buddhist shrine Borobudur, in the heartland of Java, the center of the Netherlands Indies. Among the visitors were a few Dutch and Javanese officials and the Dutch physician and amateur archaeologist Isaac Groneman, who was the chairman of the Archaeological Society in Yogyakarta (founded in 1885). They accompanied their distinguished guests: King Chulalongkorn of Siam and his wife, who were followed by members of the royal family, among whom were his half-brothers Prince Damrong Rajanubhap and Prince Sommot. They visited the galleries of the multilayered temple, and the king studied many details of the relief panels. Finally he climbed up to the upper terrace, where he brought a floral offering to the Buddha statue in the highest stupa and prayed (Chulalongkorn Reference Kesavadhana[1896] 1993, 114–21; De Locomotief 1896b; National Archives, The Hague 1896).
King Chulalongkorn was touring Java on an unofficial mission. His journey had multiple aims: to explore technological, political, and cultural matters in the Dutch colony, as well as to establish direct political relations, thereby stressing his position as head of an independent kingdom. In his journey, Chulalongkorn does not explicitly phrase it as such, but it seems that by passing through he was also making a pilgrimage to Java's Buddhist sites, as the highest representative of the Buddhist order of Siam (Kesavadhana Reference Kesavadhana1993).Footnote 4
Most of the other men present did not have comparable religious motives. For the Europeans among them, an Asian temple ruin in general might be associated with decadence, despotism, and decay, but this temple manifested to them primarily the grand civilization of a faraway Buddhist past in a nowadays predominantly Islamic island, as well as a unique work of art. They also were aware of the “discovery” by Raffles and of subsequent Dutch-colonial documentation work on the site, and of the lavish publications on Borobudur illustrated with lithographs and collections of photographs. With regard to the dealings with Buddhist shrines by Buddhists elsewhere in Asia, Groneman, moreover, had observed Buddhist praying practices before, at the Kelani temple in Colombo. Expecting a comparable ritual, and in consultation with the highest Dutch civil administrator (present as well), the resident of Kedu, he therefore had arranged that Cambodian flowers were waiting for Chulalongkorn at the highest terrace—to be used as an offering to the Buddha statue in the main stupa (Groneman Reference Groneman1897, 376).
As Buddhist king, and thus by education and experience, Chulalongkorn was familiar with Buddhist and Hindu temple constructions. He had read Raffles's classic The History of Java (1817), but was also well-versed in the more recent production of Buddhist (Pali) knowledge by Western scholars, and was an important supporter of the Pali Text Society (set up in Ceylon in 1881, by the former civil servant-turned-into-Pali scholar T. W. Rhys Davids) that connected these scholars and promoted their work (Jory Reference Jory2002). Moreover, like his father King Mongkut, Chulalongkorn had developed a particular interest in antiquities and ruined religious sites of the past for religious, scholarly, and political reasons. Registering museums and archaeological excavation projects in neighboring colonized regions of South and Southeast Asia, and especially watching the foreign engagements with Angkor and other Khmer antiquities in Siemreap—the province at the border of French Cambodia that was Siamese until 1907—this all must have strengthened Chulalongkorn and his brothers' awareness of the topical values of ruins of the past. As Maurizio Peleggi (Reference Peleggi, Ravi, Rutten and Goh2004) has argued, they became good for legitimizing lineages of the Chakri dynasty and of Greater Siam, at home and abroad. But it should be questioned if this kind of political calculation is what moved Chulalongkorn during his encounter with Borobudur.
Apart from the Buddhist recognition, Borobudur strongly surprised and fascinated Chulalongkorn, inspiring awe as well as intellectual curiosity. The king stayed for two days at the site, during which he carefully inspected the galleries, registered and counted the Buddha statues, and recognized and guessed at figures and tales about Buddha and his (previous) lives on the reliefs. He noticed that the palaces on these reliefs looked like those in Siam, and he noted for himself in his diary “that the people in the past must have known the history [of Buddha] in detail, much better than we do now” (Chulalongkorn Reference Kesavadhana[1896] 1993, 116). Members of his retinue photographed details of the site. While inspecting the temple, King Chulalongkorn held long discussions with Groneman on its meaning and history, deeply impressing his hosts.
To his hosts, the king appeared to be very knowledgeable on the speaking stones of Borobudur. To their great surprise, he even held different interpretations than the ones commonly acknowledged among Dutch and foreign orientalists. This was what impressed Chulalongkorn's audience the most (De Locomotief 1896b; National Archives, The Hague 1896). After some discussion, the king, who was not much impressed by the knowledge displayed by his Dutch companions, convinced Groneman of the righteousness of his viewpoint. He taught Groneman and the rest of the party (mistakenly) that Borobudur could not be a creation of “Mahayanist Buddhism” (“coming from Northern Buddhist regions”), but of “Hinayanist Buddhism” (“coming from Southern Buddhist regions”)—like the temples in Siam; and that the different meditative postures of the Buddha statues of Borobudur represented the historic figure of Buddha, and not, against the conviction of Groneman, a transposition of the sun (Chulalongkorn Reference Kesavadhana[1896] 1993, 108, 118–19; Groneman Reference Groneman1897, 368–69; Reference Groneman1907, 17, 19; De Locomotief 1896b; National Archives, The Hague 1896).
The fact that a learned Buddhist king from Siam, who himself was not sure of all the meanings, overruled a Dutch self-made orientalist in his interpretations of Borobudur indicates that with regard to this temple-site the hierarchies of knowledge were—still—flexible. The exchange of interpretations of Borobudur's meanings between Chulalongkorn and Groneman would be, moreover, one—and not the first—of a series of material and immaterial exchanges related to Buddhist and Hindu temple art on Java, between King Chulalongkorn and Dutch colonial and local Javanese parties. The beginning of these exchanges might be traced back to Chulalongkorn's first visit to Java in 1871, when he offered the citizens of the colonial capital Batavia the statue of a white elephant—from Siam—that still stands in front of the National Museum in Jakarta, formerly the museum of the Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1778, hereafter Batavian Society). Because of the accumulative nature of these and subsequent material and immaterial gifts, they bring to mind Marcel Mauss's (Reference Mauss1954, 1) famous theory that “the obligation to give is explainable because this act causes the obligation to return the gift”—in other words, that gifts create and legitimize interdependent relationships. As King Chulalongkorn's visit to Borobudur made us realize, Mauss's theory can shed additional light on how the political dynamics of heritage formation worked at local, trans-Asian, and global levels. Gifts and exchanges may even be crucial to understanding these dynamics. Also, by the act of giving, it is the person who gives that introduces himself or herself as the owner. And for the men investigating Borobudur in 1896, the question of whose heritage this was would soon matter.
Gifted Gifts
The day before his sojourn at Borobudur, Chulalongkorn had extensively visited the Prambanan temple ruins (also today on the World Heritage list), a few kilometers to the east of Yogyakarta. In a way this Hindu temple, dating from the ninth century, was very topical, since it had only recently been the object of an archaeological intervention. In 1892–93, using the framework of the young Archaeological Society, Groneman had initiated and directed an excavation at the site, a project that also involved members of the court of the sultan of Yogyakarta, including the famous Javanese photographer Cephas. The sultan of Yogya, the Dutch government, and a local scientific society in the Netherlands together provided the funds for these excavation works. The Prambanan excavation team uncovered temple structures, reliefs, and statues in the niches of the three main buildings of the Prambanan site, the Hindu temples dedicated to Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva. Some of the findings, to Groneman's satisfaction, “rivalled the famous statues of the old Greek architects in truth and beauty,” and surpassed what he had seen of Hindu temples elsewhere in Java, Ceylon, and India. The excavation had attracted the curiosity of Javanese Muslim visitors, even traveling from outside Central Java to see the results (Groneman Reference Groneman1893, 3, 8). Now, in 1896, the Archaeological Society, and especially Groneman, who liked to perform as expert-host to foreign statesmen and scholars at Java's Hindu and Buddhist sites, could proudly introduce them to a wise and charming Buddhist king, Chulalongkorn.
It was during Chulalongkorn's inspection of the Prambanan remains that the two leading figures of the Archaeological Society, the head, R. M. E. Raaf, and the honorary head, Groneman, came to be so impressed by the king's knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist monuments. Next to Prambanan they had visited the nearby temples Candi Kalasan and Candi Sari. After this temple tour, during “the second breakfast,” they lionized Chulalongkorn with speeches in English by Raaf and Groneman, and with two gifts: an honorary membership in the Archaeological Society, and the published report on the Prambanan excavations by Groneman and Cephas, which included Cephas's photographic impression of the uncovered ruins, luxuriously folded in a large casing. Chulalongkorn accepted these gestures gratefully, invited anyone who was interested to consult him on the Buddhist tradition in Siam, and donated 200 guilders to the Archaeological Society (Chulalongkorn Reference Kesavadhana[1896] 1993, 108–14; De Locomotief 1896a).
The next day, Chulalongkorn moved to Magelang where, after having visited Borobudur in the evening of June 30, he decided that he needed more time. He spent three days in the area instead of one as planned, during which he also visited other Buddhist and Hindu Javanese temple sites nearby, deeply admired the giant Buddhist images in the Mendut temple (early ninth century), and expressed his worries about their decay (National Archives, The Hague 1896). The king concluded his visit to Borobudur with two gestures, with definite consequences for the temple. After giving another flower offering and praying to the Buddha in the main stupa, he marked his signature in the inner wall of this stupa, with the royal order that this should be engraved in gold (Groneman Reference Groneman1897, 376).Footnote 5 Then, with the formal consent previously given to him by Governor-General C. H. A. van der Wijck, he carefully selected some real tokens of Borobudur to bring home to Bangkok (Chulalongkorn Reference Kesavadhana[1896] 1993, 17, 68; Van Erp Reference Van Erp1917).
It was quite a load: among other things, five Buddha statues; an unclear number of “speaking stones” or fragments of the reliefs of the first gallery (depicting episodes of the Jataka, on the previous lives of Buddha); two lions; a kala head; and a large guardian statue from near the temple, which local lore believed to represent Borobudur's architect (Van Erp Reference Van Erp1931, 18–19). As the story goes, Chulalongkorn returned home with “eight cartloads” of sculpture.Footnote 6 This load, however, included a number of reliefs from Prambanan depicting episodes from the Ramayana, probably selected by Chulalongkorn from the gouvernementsloods (an improvised governmental storage, located at the resident's premises, for stone statues from archaeological sites in the residence of Yogyakarta), again with formal consent of the governor-general (Arsip Nasional Indonesia 1896), and statues from the Singasari temple in Eastern Java, which Chulalongkorn visited later in his journey. There, Chulalongkorn had selected a small and a giant Ganesha statue—the latter larger than the huge Ganesha from Singasari, which the Dutch East Indies' government had shipped to the Netherlands in 1819 (today still on display in the National Museum of Ethnography in Leiden). On the role of the Dutch East Indies' government in the Singasari gifts (now both on display in the National Museum in Bangkok), stories contradict each other.Footnote 7 But surely other antiquarian gifts took place without the formal consent of the central government, gifts from local parties—colonial civil servants, representatives of the Javanese administrative elite, and Javanese princes. Among the latter was Prince Mangkunegara VI in Solo, who offered Chulalongkorn four Buddha statues from his collection, supposedly originating from Candi Plaosan (Chulalongkorn Reference Kesavadhana[1896] 1993, 142–43).Footnote 8
It is beyond the scope of this article to dwell at length upon the number and choice of the individual objects and considerations for the exchanges, but a closer look at the Dutch and Siamese sources, as well as at what we can find out about these “gifts” in Bangkok, reveal some of the possible motives and selection criteria that guided Chulalongkorn at Borobudur. They also disclose the ambiguous role of the Dutch colonials, both officially and informally, in this exchange, and the lack of control of the central government over local diplomatic exchanges and thus power politics. They also reveal the multiple, contradictory, and sometimes overlapping appreciations of the temple by Siamese and Dutch colonial parties. While Chulalongkorn regarded the temple as a sacred Buddhist site, a source of history, and a source of Buddhist learning, Dutch parties, mainly responsible for the exchange at the time, considered the site as a unique artwork from a past Buddhist civilization, a source of (religious) history, and, apparently, a diplomatic tool. Later on, as we shall see below, when all was done, other Dutch caretakers saw the temple as a sacred site as well, since they considered it “desecrated” when it lost “unique” elements to the Siamese king.Footnote 9
The Dutch engineer Theodoor van Erp, who, famously, under the auspices of the Dutch East Indies' government, became responsible for the first overall restoration of Borobudur in 1907–11, investigated this episode during his preparatory work, with growing indignation. He explored the governmental archives and interviewed Javanese eyewitnesses who had helped to carry away the stones from Borobudur. What the governor-general precisely consented to Chulalongkorn, when the king visited him after his arrival in Java, remains unclear. But the correspondence between the Dutch East Indies' government and the local administration in Yogyakarta and Magelang (Kedu) convinced Van Erp that Governor-General Van der Wijck had merely agreed to Chulalongkorn taking only one Buddha image from Borobudur, “if possible” (Van Erp Reference Van Erp1917, 19). But the governor-general tried to withdraw this gesture later on, first with the argument, ignored by Van Erp, to the resident of Kedu, “that it would be very difficult, to transport a statue from this temple ruin.” Van Erp was more charmed with the governor-general's subsequent insistence that the resident of Kedu should take care “not to give a statue [of Borobudur], of which the loss would harm the kunstwaarde (art value) of the temple.”Footnote 10 However, Chulalongkorn had set his eyes on Borobudur, and he had impressed his hosts. The result was that the resident proposed, in a telegram to the governor-general, the following:
The king of Siam wishes from Borobudur five Buddha statues in different postures, two lions, and some ornaments, as well as the only available raksasa [meaning the guardian statue], posting in front of the passangrahan; of all the other objects he wishes, numerous samples are available. By agreeing with this request the art value will not be harmed. Politely request decision.
The governor-general gave in, telegraphing that he had “no objection to agree to the demands of the king regarding Buddha statues.”Footnote 11
This correspondence, interesting for many reasons, indicates that diverse appreciations of uniqueness of the objects connected to Borobudur were at stake, which may partly explain the exchange. The fact that Borobudur had so many Buddha images for each of several different postures may have played a role in Chulalongkorn's choices. It seems to explain the casualness of his selecting Buddha statues at Borobudur, in comparison to how he valued the one and only Buddha statue in the nearby Candi Mendut. That giant seated Buddha, which was accompanied by two similarly giant bodhisattvas, had impressed Chulalongkorn the most of all. According to Groneman, the king observed that there was only one comparable Buddha statue in Siam but it was much more broken. His brother Damrong, who was present as well, called the Mendut Buddha “priceless” (Groneman Reference Groneman1897, 377–78). In his diary, Chulalongkorn remarked that he found the statues in Mendut so beautiful that if he could take them home he would build a temple for them—but that he would not because they were sacred and because they belonged to the Javanese people. Regarding Borobudur, we find on July 2, 1896: “Today I intend to select one Buddha image of each posture. It was very difficult because they were staged so high and we could not see if they were broken or not.”Footnote 12
As we can see them back in Bangkok today: Chulalongkorn chose five of the postures of Buddha, that is five of the six postures that can actually be found at Borobudur; four of them—bumisparsa mudrai (touching the earth), vara mudra (giving), dyana mudra (meditating), and abaya mudra (eliminating fear)—were each represented ninety-two times at the four lower levels on each side of the temple, and the fifth posture, vitarka mudra (preaching), was represented sixty-four times on the highest gallery. Chulalongkorn left untouched the Buddha statues in the stupas on the circular terraces around the central stupa, seated in a preaching posture, as he did with the “unfinished Buddha” in the main stupa. Possibly these were too sacred and too firmly allocated to the most sacred stages of the temple, both in the eyes of the king and of his hosts.
In Siam the Javanese statues, arriving as diplomatic gifts to the king and as pilgrims' souvenirs, embarked on their new status, soon transforming into trophies of the antiquarian interest of the royal Chakri dynasty of Siam, and, as we shall see below, as gifts or objects for popular Buddhist worship, which the king granted to the people, in the way Maurizio Peleggi (Reference Peleggi2002, 9) described, “as the king of the Siamese, rather than the king of Siam.” As such, the Javanese antiquities could play their particular role in the royal elites' conservative-reformist politics of nation building and social control, and thus in legitimizing their vision of Greater Siam.Footnote 13
To celebrate their arrival, King Chulalongkorn first displayed the Javanese antiquities in front of the royal palace in Bangkok and invited hundreds of Buddhist priests (Patijn Reference Patijn1901, 388). Borobudur's Buddha statues then found a new “shelter” in the Wat Phra Keo (the temple of the emerald Buddha and monastery attached to the royal palace) in Bangkok. King Vajiravudh (Rama VI, 1910–25), Chulalongkorn's son and successor (Chulalongkorn died in 1910) transferred them to other important temples in Bangkok. He enshrined four of them in the niches of the new chedi, which he had erected at Wat Rachathiwat, the monastery were King Rama IV (Mongkut) had resided when he was a monk. He had the fifth one placed at the Wat Boworniwet, the site of another important royal monastery (where King Mongkut had stayed as well) and monastic university (Diskul, n.d., 31–32). Other pieces were kept in the park of the royal palace. Some of these objects, including the giant Ganesha of Candi Singasari, and the temple guardian of Borobudur, were moved in 1926 to the Royal National Museum, to be exhibited in modern fashion for the public. This happened after two scholarly men had inventoried and reordered this museum's collection: Chulalongkorn's half-brother Prince Damrong and the French archaeologist George Coedès who, once again, added to the colonial scholarly motive in this multidimensional story of heritage formation.
Restricted Restitution and Missing Links
As gifts, most of the Javanese antiquities today are still enshrined and on display in Thailand. The important exceptions to this rule may illustrate the topical relevance and importance of these Javanese antiquities in Thailand, and explain the diplomatic attitude that the Dutch colonial (heritage) authorities and their postcolonial successors chose to take, despite amazement and sometimes regret about the original gifts, expressed by insiders and outsiders alike.
In 1926, while inventorying the royal collection together with Coedès, Prince Damrong consented to let some of the Javanese antiquities return to their provenance in exchange for others. Three of the Ramayana reliefs of Prambanan temple (out of the four Chulalongkorn had brought home) could travel back to Java, where the Netherlands Indies' Archaeological Service (set up in 1913) could use them for one of the Service's major projects at the time: the reconstruction of the Siva temple at Prambanan, which it seriously started in the late 1920s (see Bloembergen and Eickhoff Reference Bloembergen and Eickhoff2011). Van Erp, still very much engaged with this history of gift giving and return, provided a preliminary interpretation as to what made this restricted restitution possible, which today still sounds plausible. According to Van Erp (Reference Van Erp1927), it was thanks to the (in his eyes fortunate) combination of three people: the charismatic (and immense) Dutch colonial archaeologist P. V. van Stein Callenfels, who visited Bangkok in September 1926 and tried his diplomatic talents; the “powerful co-operation of George Coedès,” who intermediated; and last but not least, Prince Damrong, former minister of interior administration and head of the Royal Council, who provided a strong hand in the self-legitimizing cultural reform politics of the royal Siamese elite.
Prince Damrong, as becomes clear from his official report, agreed with the return of three reliefs of the Prambanan complex, depicting fragments of the Ramayana story (which he referred to as Ramakien, the Siamese derivation of the Ramayana), in exchange for three alternative antiquities, proposed by the Netherlands Indies' Archaeological Service.Footnote 14 What can be added to Van Erp's findings is that archaeologist F. D. K. Bosch, then head of the Netherlands Indies' Archaeological Service, may have diplomatically prepared this restricted restitution. In 1926, during restoration activities at the Singasari temple in East Java, the Archaeological Service encountered a fragment of stone that belonged to the giant Ganesha statue, which Chulalongkorn had brought to Bangkok in 1896. Bosch advised the Dutch East Indies' government to grant the missing fragment of Ganesha to the king of Siam as an acknowledgement of their highest esteem to the Royal House of Siam. While not explicitly referring to the reconstruction plans for Prambanan, Bosch conjectured that this gesture might help to make the king of Siam inclined to show his gratefulness “in a way that could become of use for future archaeological activities in the Dutch East Indies” (Arsip Nasional Indonesia 1926).
And thus most of the Ramayana reliefs of Prambanan could return from their thirty-year “exile,” as Van Erp put it. But the wish even to get the splendid Buddhas and lions of Borobudur back was understandably impossible. Prince Damrong conceded—diplomatically—that for personal and scholarly reasons he would have preferred that those were also to return to their provenance. But he excluded a general restitution of the Javanese objects, explaining that he was powerless against the devotion of the king and the people in Siam to “Chulalongkorn's gifts to the nation” (National Archives, Bangkok 1926; Van Erp Reference Van Erp1927, 503–13).Footnote 15 Van Stein Callenfels, who was impressed by Damrong's story of the new power of the Javanese antiquities, connecting the people to the king of Siam, wrote to Van Erp what he had heard and seen of this in Bangkok:
The old king was already much beloved during his life and is now on his way to become a saint—or rather, he already is. I saw long processions of pilgrims, among them Buddhist monks, moving towards his equestrian statue in front of the throne hall. The [Javanese] statues are considered to be his gifts to the nation, and they share in his sanctity. (quoted in Van Erp Reference Van Erp1927, 512–13)
To convince his readers, and perhaps himself, Van Erp added that Coedès also emphasized that “the holiness of Chulalongkorn's gifts to the nation” should not be taken as a hollow phrase, but as “living reality” (Van Erp Reference Van Erp1927, 513).
In other words, since Chulalongkorn's death in 1910, the Javanese antiquities had officially become part of a popular Buddhist cult that supposedly legitimized the royal elite of the Chakri dynasty, and thereby Greater Buddhist Siam. Recent studies on the royal antiquarian interest in Siam and on the King Chulalongkorn cult in Thailand in the 1990s point to the fact that Prince Damrong, as a much-engaged antiquarian, was one of the architects of this cult (Peleggi Reference Peleggi2002, Reference Peleggi, Ravi, Rutten and Goh2004; Stengs Reference Stengs2009, 84–91). This does not, however, remove the fact that, from royal and popular Siamese perspectives, the Javanese antiquities were in their right place, relocalized as objects of Siamese popular Buddhist cult and heritage.
To Van Erp all this was a painful loss. Two decades earlier, when he was working on his biggest feat of arms, the restoration of Borobudur, and when he investigated this history for the first time, he had to be convinced by his learned colleagues of the Batavian Society that he should see these losses of the temple as gifts to the king and not as “theft,” as he called it. Despite that, in 1923 Van Erp still chose to describe this history as the “kidnapping” of precious pieces from Borobudur (Van Erp Reference Van Erp1923, 429; Reference Van Erp1927, 513).Footnote 16 Now, writing in 1927, and probably also relieved by the restitution of the Prambanan reliefs, Van Erp seemed to empathize with local Siamese engagements with Borobudur's treasures. But he also expressed his continuous regret by speculating that these precious pieces were “once . . . presented to the temple, and in the honour of which once a marvellous consecration took place.” By thus imagining the same Buddha statues as an original popular gift by Javanese people to the temple, and in the distant past, he implicitly obliged the Dutch colonial authorities, who, in his view, had been so careless with their diplomatic antiquarian gestures to Chulalongkorn in 1896, to “return” something to the temples, and to make good (Van Erp Reference Van Erp1927, 513). This was a sign of morally loaded heritage awareness—the wish to keep something of the past for the future as a national obligation—that had strongly developed in the Dutch East Indies, by now also at the level of the colonial state.
A Dutch Moral Obligation
So much for the “official indifference to Borobudur's fate,” as the Southeast Asia archaeologist John Miksic (Reference Miksic1990, 30) summarized this Siamese episode in the travels of the collection under study here. He referred to the apparent absence of modern heritage awareness in the Netherlands Indies at the time.
Indeed, apart from a few cynical reactions in the Dutch East Indies' press, the 1896 Dutch gift from Borobudur to King Chulalongkorn passed by unnoticed (De Locomotief 1896c). But three years later Dutch newspapers, first in the Dutch East Indies and then in the Netherlands, began referring to the “gifts” as aggressive demolition of Borobudur, kindly supported by the generous Dutch government, and thus as an outrageous scandal (Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant 1899; Soerabajasche Courant 1899).Footnote 17 The ambiguity of this moral indignation becomes clear when we look at the three giant statues from Candi Singasari, sent to the Netherlands in 1819 as a gift to King William I, and kept there with the official consent of the Dutch East Indies government. This well-known displacement of unique Javanese statues, which the Dutch civil servant Nicolaas Engelhard had carried away from their original shrines in Singasari's tower temple (and which included the Ganesha statue mentioned above), until then had caused no controversy at all (for more on this history: Bloembergen and Eickhoff Reference Bloembergen and Eickhoff2013).
As to the Javanese antiquarian gifts to the king of Siam, public indignation did arise, albeit delayed. The former Indies' journalist J. F. Scheltema, who had worked for the then critical Indies' dailies De Locomotief and the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, called the whole episode “the most disastrous year for Borobudur.” On discovering that Borobudur and Prambanan reliefs, some of which depicted apes, were kept in Bangkok, he denounced those responsible for the gift giving:
If there be anything in the dogma of Karma, which provides for our sins being visited on us in lives to come, that their least punishment might be their transformation, when called to new birth, into apes abandoned to ceaseless squabbles over their kanari-nuts (honours, dignities, preferment with big salaries, fat pensions, etc.), clawing one another with their sharp nails, to find at last that all the shells are empty. (Scheltema Reference Scheltema1912, 245)
These were all also cynical reactions to the news that the core of the Dutch colonial entry to the world exhibition in Paris would consist of Buddhist and Hindu monumental remains of Java, parading as precious art to be protected. The whole issue contributed to a serious discussion in the Netherlands, focusing on the question of whether the Dutch government should invest in the restoration of the temple.
The discussion of heritage politics in the Dutch East Indies took place in the context of the lobby for monumental care in the Netherlands that proceeded slowly and not really effectively from the 1870s under the guidance of a foreman of the Dutch cultural elite, Victor de Stuers (Perry Reference Perry2004). During the scandal around the gifts to Chulalongkorn, De Stuers worked as head of the newly created governmental department of Arts and Sciences of the Ministry of the Interior. Alarmed by the indignation about Borobudur's losses in the Indies, De Stuers tried to extend his influence to the domain of colonial monumental care, causing, however, slight irritation at the department of the Ministry of Colonies. Another context was provided by the activities of the organizing committee for the Dutch colonial entry to the world exhibition in Paris, which aimed to put the Buddhist and Hindu monumental remains of Java in the spotlight. The director of that project, J. W. IJzerman, used this Dutch colonial mission to Paris also for his archaeological lobby: to establish private and governmental financial support for monumental care in the Indies (see IJzerman Reference IJzerman1899, 391; Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant 1899).
The civil engineer IJzerman, who was responsible for the construction of a modest railway network in Central Java and who as a self-made archaeologist famously detected and uncovered the hidden foot of Borobudur, was one of the founders and a former president of Yogyakarta's Archaeological Society in 1885. At the time of Chulalongkorn's visit, IJzerman was working in Sumatra. IJzerman advised Minister of Colonies J. T. Cremer, whom he knew from the time Cremer was a tobacco entrepreneur in Deli (Sumatra), to let the upheaval around the gifts to Chulalongkorn rest. Although nobody made the arguments explicit, for diplomatic reasons it seemed better not to sour relations between Siam and the Netherlands, and, after all, a gift was a gift. Moreover, considering the Dutch colonial antiquities' parade in Paris, it was not really the right time to attract attention to Dutch blundering in colonial monumental care. Against that background, it seems understandable that IJzerman advised the minister, instead of enquiring further in Siam, to focus on the future maintenance and restoration of Buddhist and Hindu antiquities in the Indies. He added that if some of these Buddhist and Hindu monuments were doomed to disappear or to lose their artistic value, then plaster casts should testify to their eternal value in “our Museums” (National Archives, The Hague 1899b, 1899e). And so Cremer restricted himself to a formal question to the governor-general, whether the Indies' government provided sufficiently for “the maintenance” of Hindu monuments in the Netherlands Indies (National Archives, The Hague 1899a, 1899c, 1899d, 1899e).
There was thus a subtle but meaningful shift in attitudes in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies: from apparent indifference to the state of these monumental remains, to explicit heritage awareness (this was “our” Indies heritage) caused by the combined and conflicting notions of “demolition,” “protection,” and “musealization.” The result was the more focused attention of influential governmental and private parties on the maintenance of these remains and the wish to restore them in order to keep them for the future (Bernet Kempers Reference Kempers and Johan1978; Bloembergen and Eickhoff Reference Bloembergen and Eickhoff2011). At this stage, the temple remains gained a new value that made them fit for imperial propaganda.
Greater Holland
The centerpiece of the Netherlands' entry at the 1900 world exhibition in Paris was a plaster cast replica of the Buddhist temple Candi Sari, surrounded by plaster casts of Borobudur and other temple art from Java.Footnote 18 The molds for this Javanese temple-show were made on location in Java, the casts in Holland. By way of a finishing touch, the organizers also produced a mold and cast of a great treasure in the National Ethnographic Museum in Leiden: the thirteenth-century Singasari statue of Prajnaparamita, which is still referred to as the Mona Lisa of Indonesia. This goddess personified the perfection of wisdom. This particular statue, transported to the Netherlands in 1822 as a gift to King William I and restituted to Indonesia in 1977, was thought to be a portrayal of Ken Dedes, the first queen of the pre-Islamic Singasari dynasty that ruled in East Java in the thirteenth century. In Paris, this Dutch crown jewel awaited her marveling visitors in the core of the Dutch pavilion, Candi Sari.
This was the first Dutch entry to a world exhibition that was officially and financially supported by the Dutch government. The choice to flaunt such a sophisticated colonial spectacle (there was no Dutch national pavilion at the famous Rue de nations) represented a new colonial sense of pride and energy in the Netherlands. This new colonial zest was caused by Dutch military victories in Lombok and Aceh, and the idea of a Dutch ethical mission in the colony, which would be officially launched as the ethical policy in 1901 (Bloembergen Reference Bloembergen2006, 170–73). Both motives were inspired by the successful military, administrative, and technological expansion taking place in the colony since the last decade of the nineteenth century, in which most of the members of the Dutch colonial committee, responsible for this choice, had participated, including IJzerman. Apart from promoting systematic conservation politics in the Netherlands-Indies, and thereby legitimizing the Dutch colonial government as the successor, explorer, and custodian of past high civilizations, the Javanese antiquities had another topical relevance: the push of archaeological interest in Asia, as well as Europe at the time.Footnote 19 In Paris, Candi Sari would ultimately have to withstand comparison with the reproduction of the antique tombs from Carthage in the Tunisian section, and with temples from Indochina in the French colonial section. At least Candi Sari was older than the Pagoda of Phnom-Penh, which, not coincidentally, was also on display in Paris.
With this apotheosis of Buddhist and Hindu Javanese temple art, its organizers meant to teach important lessons about the origin and nature of civilization in general and about the Netherlands in particular: the Netherlands as a sophisticated and modern colonial empire, guardian of an honorable civilization to which, indirectly via India, all great European civilizations could be traced. Because of the novelty of Javanese Hindu and Buddhist art in Europe, as well as the spirit and religious worldview that seemed to permeate it, the Dutch colonial pavilion attracted much admiration from Europe's cultural elite. The organizers presented and sold the plaster casts at the exhibition site, partly, anticipating closure, by auction to private visitors,Footnote 20 and directly to the Museum of Antiquities in the Netherlands (Leiden) and the Musée Indochinois du Trocadéro in Paris.Footnote 21 Implicitly, these antiquities were branded “Made by Dutch Empire.” In this way, the casting and reproduction of this colonized other's past meant defining and representing modern Dutch identity.
In November 1900, the world exhibition closed. The organizers had to demolish most of the Candi Sari reproduction and bring back home to the Netherlands what was left after the auction. With the Dutch state as official owner, the plaster casts and molds remained useful to stress the importance of the Netherlands Indies for the Netherlands, during exhibition tours abroad, and at home for a mainly Dutch public.
An important Dutch “local” stage in the history of this peculiar collection of plaster casts was the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam, the ultimate keeper of the molds. This institute was founded in 1910, at the initiative of some of the organizers of the Dutch colonial entry in Paris, including IJzerman, many of them members of the colonial financial elite in Amsterdam. They aimed “to instill in the world some respect for the small country that embraces such a vast area of activity in East and West and that can maintain itself with honour in that area.”Footnote 22 In 1926 the institute opened in its new location.
In the institute's Ethnographic Museum, the plaster casts of the Buddhist and Hindu-Javanese temple art came to be used in different ways: as eye-catchers next to the main entrance; as part of the ethnographic exhibition, more or less fixed in an evolutionary story; as precious treasures in the so-called temple room; and as ornaments, bricked in the wall of the central hall. In this way the institute reduced this highly esteemed old “civilization” to couleur-locale, thereby contributing to the stereotyping of the Javanese indigenous culture as one mystic Buddhist-Hindu culture, and thus giving an awkward blend to contemporary Indonesian Islam. The casts were, however, also meaningful ornaments in a Dutch and European context: they defined and represented Dutch identity, as a small but esteemed, culture-loving, modern empire.
Interestingly, the collection of molds and plaster casts also put the institute in the position of dealer in Javanese antiquities, coming from the Dutch colony and made by the Dutch empire. And various esteemed parties were very eager to get a copy. We follow two of them, the last two travels of our collection that we trace in this article.
The First Order: To Greater Java and Back to Greater Siam
In February 1938, Prince Mangkunegara VII of Solo (Central Java), a passionate researcher and collector of Buddhist and Hindu Javanese antiquities, ordered a copy of the Prajnaparamita at the Colonial Institute. He had seen a bronze copy of this statue in the Colonial Institute a year before, when he visited the Netherlands for the marriage of Princess Juliana to Bernard von Lippe-Biesterfeld. Originally he had wanted it in bronze (Archives of the Mangkunegara 1937). For unknown but likely economic reasons, he changed his mind and ordered a copy in the much cheaper hartguss, or white cement. The general secretary at the Colonial Institute, J. C. Lamster, replied to the prince that the institute naturally would take care of his request. Moreover, the costs would be restricted to the transport of the cement beauty, since the board of curators of the institute would see it as an honor if Prince Mangkunegara would accept the copy as a gift (Royal Tropical Institute 1938).
There is an irony in this exchange of “wisdom” and honor: by requesting a copy of the statue, Mangkunegara VII seemed to accept the fact that the “real” Prajnaparamita, originating from East Java and from Java's past, remained treasured in the Netherlands. But his eagerness to get hold of a copy instead of the original does not necessarily imply submissiveness. If we look at the use and appreciation of plaster copies of antiquities at that time, in private and public collections both in Europe and in Asia (Haskell and Penny Reference Haskell and Penny1981, 16–22; Hoytink Reference Hoytink2009, 96–124), it might be that he was merely interested in the form and representation of this highly appraised product of Buddhist art, and possibly in its symbolic meaning (either as goddess or as queen mother of a grand precolonial Javanese civilization) and cared less about authenticity, or even more, that having a hartguss copy had the appeal of being modern. The Colonial Institute, on the other hand, by granting the copy of Prajnaparamita, could stress its superior position as colonial curator of Javanese heritage; the gift could also generate a relationship of interdependency between the institute and this princely connoisseur.
If we interpret this colonial deal in antiquities as a form of interdependency, thus as an event by which Mangkunegara VII also enhanced his own status within the Dutch colonial empire, the prince followed a longer tradition of cultural diplomacy conducted by his family at the Mangkunegaran palace in Solo. Through cultural knowledge and gifts, they could confirm formal relations with private and official persons that showed interest in Java's Hindu and Buddhist past and in the temple remains from that past, of which so many were located in the neighborhood of Solo. More than forty years earlier, in July 1896, the father of Mangkunegara VII, Mangkunegara VI, provided such a diplomatic gesture by presenting four antique stone Buddha images (with unclear provenance, but, as stated above, now ascribed to Candi Plaosan) to a very special guest who visited him at his palace that year, King Chulalongkorn. During his tour through Java, King Chulalongkorn had made no secret of his special interest in the Buddhist antiquities in Java, and as we have seen, Mangkunegara VI was one of many who paid the king honor with gifts from their private collections of antiquities and even from actual temple sites in Java. But this particular gift was, as it were, an exchange between peers, or so it was in the eyes of King Chulalongkorn, who in his travel diary described Mangkunegara VI almost as a soul mate, a wise and honorable prince of his age, and a man of the same sensibility and taste (Chulalongkorn Reference Kesavadhana[1896] 1993, 142–43).
For Mangkunegara VI, this gift of the four Buddha images may have been a moment of empowerment. Although the colonial state had reduced his palace, like the ones of the three other principalities in Central Java, to a dependent princedom that functioned as colonial administrator, he still could play a superior role in the context of the growing antiquarian and archaeological curiosity, expressed by different parties in the colony over the course of the nineteenth century. This curiosity was directed to a past to which the local royal families might relate their genealogy and their moral and religious affinities and expertise (compare Tsuchiya Reference Tsuchiya1990; Pemberton Reference Pemberton1994).
The Second Order: Greater India, Greater England
In 1914, Stanley Clarke, deputy keeper of the Indian Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (hereafter V&A), learning that the Colonial Institute kept molds of the relief panels of Borobudur, had to exhibit much more patience than Mankunegara VII when he eagerly ordered copies of six well-chosen relief panels. With this request, Clarke aimed to meet “one of the most pressing needs” of the museum: to fill up the deficiencies in the Indian Section collections. He defended this purchase to the advisory council of the museum with the information that Borobudur, to be regarded as “the Parthenon of Asia,” “was built by Indian Buddhist immigrants from the Saka Kingdom of Sarahstra . . . [and] the great reliefs represent scenes in the life of Gautama Buddha” (Victoria and Albert Museum 1914a). But Clarke came away empty handed. The board of the Colonial Institute informed him that, while they kept the molds and casts, they could not yet dispose of an installation for plasterwork, since they were constructing a new building for their institute. If the V&A could wait for a few years, then the Colonial Institute would be happy to propose a transaction. This answer caused much annoyance at the V&A. In the eyes of its director it was unreasonable that the rest of the world should be deprived of getting casts of existing molds for “a few years (!) merely because the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam has plans for a new building” (Victoria and Albert Museum 1914b, 1914c).
Perhaps the Colonial Institute's board members did not like the idea that the V&A would try to show off with the Borobudur reliefs before they could do so in their own museum. Whatever the reasons, the V&A and Stanley Clarke had to wait eleven years before their request was honored. The Great War had delayed the construction works for the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam, and probably also changed priorities in London. The negotiations started again in 1919, and then, after some further delay, in November 1925 the Colonial Institute was finally ready to supply the casts of the reliefs at the good price of 200 guilders apiece.
In subsequent correspondence, J. C. van Eerde, the curator of the Ethnographic Museum of the Colonial Institute, explained to Clarke that the color of the original stone in which the reliefs were carved “is grey, just as the figures of the ancient Javanese sculptures in the Raffles collection in the British Museum” (Victoria and Albert Museum 1926). Thereby Van Eerde rounded the circle: to learn about the original Borobudur, you did not need to go that far if you were in London. You merely had to visit the Gallery of Indian Religions in the British Museum, where two heads of Borobudur Buddha statues, brought to England by Raffles, showed the real color of Borobudur. The new plaster casts of the Borobudur reliefs, although painted in a different shade of red-grey, gained a similar place in the Victoria and Albert Museum: in the Indian Section, in room 9, dedicated to Buddhism, as examples of the peaceful diffusion of Indian Buddhist religion and temple art to the other regions of Southeast Asia. In that story, and in this British context, they illustrated the greatness of the old Indian Buddhist civilization, and thus contributed to the idea of Greater India, the jewel in the British crown.
Conclusion: Local, Trans-Asian, and Global Heritage Transactions
In this article we have investigated a few of the multiple engagements with archaeological sites in Java around 1900 at the local, trans-Asian, and global levels, thereby wishing to show the heuristic value of these kinds of sites for the study of transnational imagined communities and the complex dynamics of heritage formation in colonial situations. At the same time, we have shown the limits of this approach and the difficulties of looking beyond the national and imperial borders. That is because in the multiple frameworks in which these sites were admired, conserved, transferred, and exhibited, they were made fit for imperial and nationalist propaganda, albeit as legitimizations of different, parallel existing visions of greater entities: Greater Siam, Greater Holland, and Greater England/India.
This coexistence of different relations to Javanese antiquities as heritage around 1900 was only temporarily and superficially unproblematic. The absence of real competing territorial claims among the powers involved can explain this situation only partly. Moreover, the balance would soon change as a result of the development of Indonesian nationalism. After 1900 a group of Indonesian regionalists and nationalists, becoming aware of the imaginary values of local temple remains—partly via the world exhibition, and partly via colonial archaeological knowledge provided in texts, books, maps, and excavations—started to highlight “their own” past and roots, consciously connecting the greatness of a Hindu past civilization to a powerful Indonesian national future. These new involvements with Buddhist and Hindu sites in Java, to which concurring Greater Asian interests deriving from India and Japan were added, go beyond the scope of this article (for this, see Bloembergen and Eickhoff Reference Bloembergen and Eickhoff2011; Bloembergen and Eickoff, forthcoming).
If we go back to Mauss's principle of gift and reciprocal obligation as a driving force behind the local, transnational, and global dynamics of heritage formation, the transfer of Borobudur's plaster casts from Amsterdam to London shows us transnational imperial competition at the institutional level, between an old and a young metropolitan tool of imperial propaganda. By the time of this transfer, the V&A (and thus London) performed as the center of the British Empire (Barringer Reference Barringer, Barringer and Flynn1998); for that reason it may have regarded itself as superior. The Colonial Institute in Amsterdam, in this particular case, may have seen that differently. That institute represented a small empire that could not afford real sweeping political gestures, except in its imaginations, as it did in Paris in 1900. But the Colonial Institute could play a dominant role in this transaction as the permanent keeper (and the Dutch government as the owner) of the molds of the splendid Borobudur that had become of intense interest to so many different parties in Europe, Asia, and beyond.
The interdependency between the Colonial Institute and Mangkunegara VII explains why the Javanese prince could get his hartguss copy for free (but not the bronze, and he had to pay for the transport costs) and the Victoria and Albert Museum could not. It is precisely this difference in the exchange value of the Javanese antiquities that clarifies what made these transactions colonial, and also how they defined the Dutch empire. The different conditions of these transfers show how Dutch entrepreneurs and colonial officials came to see the care for Javanese antiquities as a Dutch ethical responsibility, fitting in the ethical policy that the Dutch government launched around 1900. But they could neither enact nor legitimize this responsibility without the collaboration and antiquarian interests of local Javanese princes or elites that articulated a (historical and moral) liaison to these antiquities as well—like Mangkunegara VII, or Mangkunegara VI in 1896, although this prince may have regarded his gifts to Chulalongkorn as an equal exchange between royal parties.
With the exchange of antiquities against knowledge and honorable symbols, King Chulalongkorn created a new future for the Javanese antiquities as objects of Buddhist culture, royal antiquarian interest, and political legitimization in Siam. On the other hand, the various local and central parties in Java with whom Chulalongkorn had these antiquarian transactions (the colonial government, the Archaeological Society, local colonial civil servants, and princes), by giving the antiquities to the king, took themselves to be the owners. These multiple Javanese and colonial ownerships, and the apparently automatic character of the gifts, also indicate that in colonial Java at the very local level the notions of material heritage and of its ownership were at that time very diffuse and not in the least controlled by the colonial state-in-progress.
This ambiguous situation concerning archaeological heritage politics in the Dutch East Indies would partly change after 1901, with the installation of the Colonial Archaeological Commission, and its follow-up, the Colonial Archaeological Service, respectively in 1901 and in 1913. By setting the terms and objects of heritage policy in the Dutch East Indies, and by creating the means, this prioritized governmental institution would play a significant role in the development of archaeological research and conservation politics in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia. However, state-legitimizing heritage politics never excluded the very local, “foreign,” and global interests, which we have analyzed here for the transformative period around 1900. Although self-evident to some, these diverse interests were not necessarily marked at location. Remarkable archaeological interventions, like the visit of a Siamese Buddhist king, the taking of casts and plasters, or the restoration of a ruined temple in decay, were needed to make them visible.
Acknowledgments
The research for this article, part of a larger project on archaeology and heritage politics in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, took place within the Sites, Bodies, Stories program, financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, 2008–12.
