 Welcome everybody. Good morning from London and good evening from Singapore. Welcome to the final lecture in the Decolonizing Curating in the Museum in Southeast Asia series jointly run by the ACM and the Southeast Asian Academic Art Program at SOS University of London. My name is Stephen Murphy. I'm your moderator tonight. I'm the Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology at SOS. And my co-organizer on the ACM side is Conan Chung, curator for Southeast Asia and the ACM. Just on a quick note, we started today's Zoom. We opened the Zoom room at three minutes past 11 just in recognition that it is armistice day here in the UK where we recognize on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month the cessation of World War I in 1918. So that is marked by a two-minute silence here. So just in recognition of that in case you were wondering why we opened at five past 11. But today we have a double bill. We have two lectures. There'll be like 20 minutes each. They'll be given by Professor Marika Blombergen and Dr. Matilda Mechling. And then the discussion will be moderated by Panga Ardianza. And today's talk is called The Politics of Greater India and Indonesian Collections in Museums of Asian Art. Just before I get on to today's final lecture, I just wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of the events that are coming up at both ACM and SOS respectively. First of all, of course, all of the lectures in this series have been recorded and are available on the Center for Southeast Asian Studies website at SOAS. So there's the link to that. If you're interested in either watching this again or if you've missed some of the others in the series. Coming up in the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the SOAS Asian Art Academic Program, we run a yearly lecture series that's actually run by Panga. It will be the discussion, discussed it later. And so that starts on December 2 with a lecture on Khmer historiography and their French colonial rule by Taraton from Kyoto University. So yeah, do look out for that if you're interested. Also at the Asian Civilizations Museum, they have an ACM Talks series sponsored by the Chris Foundation. And there is an upcoming lecture on 18th of November. The ambassador is spoiling us, gives a material diplomacy at the courts of CM and France at the end of the 17th century. So do look out for that as well. Conan is moderating that one. And George Urielo is the speaker. And then last, but definitely not least, this is the Raffles Revisited publication that is the collection of essays from the conference we held at ACM in 2019. It is literally going to print in the next week or so, I hope. And we're hoping to have then a virtual book launch, a roundtable discussion with all of the, or as many of the contributors as we can get into one Zoom room. So look out for that. We haven't got a date confirmed yet, but hopefully it will be just before Christmas or sometime early in the new year. And again, it addresses, I think, a lot of issues that we're discussing in this lecture series as well, but to a very specific lens in this case. So on that note, I will just introduce today's two speakers. Let me stop sharing. Oh, actually, let me go back to them. So we have first to speak for the first 20 minutes is Professor Marika Blumbergen. She's a senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies and a professor in archival and post-colonial studies at Leiden University. Her most recent monograph, co-authored with Marcin Nekov, is the Politics of Heritage in Indonesia, a cultural history that's with Cambridge. In her lecture, she dwells on her current book Project in Progress entitled, Indonesia and the Politics of Greater India, A Moral Geography, 1880s to 1990s. So we're very lucky that we're going to get a preview today of that. The second speaker, Matilde Mechling, she received her PhD in 2020 from the University of Sarban Nouvelle and Leiden University. Her thesis, which she is currently adapting into a book publication, focuses on Hindu and Buddhist bronze statuary from the Indonesian archipelago. And she quickly engages with the legacies of colonial scholarship and developing an interdisciplinary methodology to study the bronzes. So without any further ado, I will hand the floor over to Marika. Let me stop here. OK. Thank you, Stevan. Thank you, Professor, to you and to Kona and to Matilde actually to get me in and to invite me to join this important lecture series and to Panga for taking the time to react to both of us. So let me start. In December, 1947, and that was four months after Indian independence, the new consul general of India in Batavia, then a recolonised city in the midst of the heated war between the Indonesian Republic and the Dutch, visited the Museum of the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences together with his wife and consulate staff. They came to see the archaeological collection. Notably, this museum is the predecessor of what is now the National Museum in Jakarta in the same building. The consulate party was deeply impressed as the consul wrote to the Dutch archaeologists that had hosted him and are quoting, the museum unfolded itself as a pageant of a glorious civilization in stone and metal and in clothing canvas. We discerned and realised the cultural, philosophical and artistic bonds between India and the people of these islands. In other words, the Indian consulate party had recognised greater India in Java and this moreover in the good care of a colonial institution. Along the same lines, but three years later, now in the formerly independent Republic of Indonesia, Prime Minister Nero of India, in his first official diplomatic visit to Indonesia, climbed the famous 8th century Buddhist shrine Borobudur in central Java and thereby fulfilling a strong personal wish. Nero considered Borobudur proof of an ancient, greater Indian, Hindu Buddhist civilization that as he had learned from reading Indian poets Dagor and the Indian nationalists, members of the Greater India Society, once had embraced the wider region of Asia, including Indonesia, and that emphasised the greatness of Indian culture. To Nero, Borobudur served thus as an essentialised idea of Indian culture, which could now be of use of an anti-Western non-alignment policy. Talking about epistemic violence here might be an exaggeration, but it is clear that an Indonesian perspective did not interest Nero very much. The visits of the Indian consulate and Indian Prime Minister Nero, to Java and recognising the remains of Java's Hindu Buddhist past as Indian, reveal how and why sites transforming into heritage in colonial and post-colonial times, and the related museums that were formed worldwide in around the same period, are political. Important to note, what these visits also reveal, such sites connect to many histories and to moral geographies that have other boundaries than those of the state in which these sites since the 19th century became object of study and heritage formation. Not neutral, therefore, such visits to heritage sites are, especially when they take place during regime change. Now, this was all around 1950, but how should we understand a jubilant review of two blockbuster exhibitions taking place in a metropolitan museum in New York in the 21st century, less than a decade ago, Buddhism along the Silk Road and lost kingdoms Hindu Buddhist sculpture of Southeast Asia. Notably, in the prestigious journal, New York Review of Books, William Dalrymple, contemplating these shows, expressed his deep admiration in words that almost exactly mirror those of the Indian consulate in 1947. For it is now increasingly clear India during this period radiated its philosophies, political ideas and architecture over an entire continent, not by conquest, but by sheer cultural sophistication and summarized in the words, history is full of empire of the sword, but India alone created an empire of the spirit. The views of the Indian consul Neelal and Dalrymple points to a continuity in the kind of greater India thinking that politically was most clearly embodied by this greater India society founded in Calcutta in 1926. Members of the society who would become influential in post-colonial India's cultural politics were at the time much inspired by their reading of the work of French and later on Dutch colonial archaeologists. They enrolled at the division of a benign spiritual Indian civilization, disseminating over Asia in the past and they propagated the study and revival of this civilization in the present. As such explicit politicized greater Indian visions are part of a wider phenomenon with long lasting legacies worldwide that forms the central problem of my lecture today. Museums and galleries of Asian art, I argue, have done a great deal in shaping, disseminating and strengthening moral geographies of greater India. The question is not only how and why so, but also what are the implications of inclusion and exclusion of this way of looking at the world still today? And what is it that may make us all as scholars of Asia, aficionados of Asian art, pilgrims or tourists in Asia, or as readers of the New York Review of Books for that matter, complicit in viewing the Hindu-Buddhist remains from Asia in that way and ignoring the political and the political effects of that view. In this lecture, I dwell on the findings for my present book project in progress on Indonesia and the politics of greater India thinking. In that book, I focus on a problem more widely. I look at the role of scholarly and spiritual knowledge networks from the Theosophical Society to the hippie trail and including ourselves in enabling the development of what I refer to as moral geographies of greater India. People's projections of moral ideas on the region that is today South and Southeast Asia, which they identify as one superior spiritual civilization with Hindu-Buddhist characteristics and its origin in India, ignoring a predominant Islamic population, the largest of the worlds, namely in Indonesia, but actually also in other parts of Asia. The image of greater India and a greater Hindu-Buddhist India lingers on worldwide. Not only do we find it in popular culture and the yoga popularity, but also in movies in which, sorry, Indonesia figures as a predominantly Hindu-Buddhist country, but notably also and relevant for my lecture today in the world's most prestigious museums of Asian art. There we see how Indonesia again and again performs as the receiving part of an Indian Hindu-Buddhist civilization and is absent in galleries of Islamic art. From the Metropolitan Museum in New York to Musee Guine in Paris and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, well choreographed exhibitions strategically use light and space to emphasize the spiritual power and inner beauty of Hindu and Buddhist statues evoking ideas of greater India. In this way, they obfuscate the violence underlying how objects were collected and they depict Southeast Asia as the passive recipients of a superior Indian civilization. So the question again is why do these moral geographies of greater India seem to dominate? How did they develop? And why do they endure? Today, as a begin of explaining and as food for debate on the question whether and how we can decolonize that multi-centered world of greater India thinking, I will focus on what I call the charmed Norwich networks and friendships between Asia and the West in the world of museums and trades of Asian art that helped shaping these moral geographies. And inspired by the work of Leila Gandhi, I argue that we should focus on the role of love or affections across decolonization if we want to understand the appeal and strength of greater India thinking in the world. In this slide, in a recently published article I explored the social political life of some antiquities of Indonesia's Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic past traveling around 1900 from colonial Indonesia to museums and private collections in Europe and the US. My first example is a set of Islamic steels of Sumatra, now on display in the Indonesian section of the Museum of Asian Art in Paris. Islamic, I hear you thinking, is that not contradicting my arguments? No, my answer is it is the exception that proves the rule. Let us start at their side of origin and in a moment, later moment of their life in 1884 when in the midst of an ongoing war of conquest waged by the Dutch colonial army in Aceh, on Sumatra and the Netherlands Indies, the French adventurer, geographer Paul Vogue, visited an old and he apparently presumed abandoned Islamic graveyard near Kota Raja and took away three 14th century steels that he thought were wonderfully sculpted. He sent them to France as a gift to the Musée de Trocadero which was just founded by the Ministry of Public Education accentuating the conventional self-image of the colonial archeologist as a great discoverer of unknown and neglected ancient civilizations. Vogue pictured himself at the graveyard but provided no information as to the conditions under which he took hold of the Islamic steels. What had impressed him most was not necessarily their function but rather their beauty or the aesthetic characteristics with which he could identify. He recognized in them a mix of and I quote him Hindu and Arab arts which he thought exemplified the high level of taste among the ancient population living in Aceh during and I quote him again the invasion of the Muslims in the Malay archipelago which he situated in the 14th century. Thus a selective aesthetic sensation of a French scholar adventurer generating his love for the objects and his abducting them from their original sites signed the curious fate of three ancient Islamic steels from Sumatra. They were transferred a number of times between various ethnographic museums in Paris and on the way they were elevated from the category of ethnographic artifacts to that of religious art. Since 1930, as such, they have been held by Paris Museum of Asian Arts, Musaiki Men. There, due to their mixed Hindu Arab style, the Islamic steels were subjected to the dominant interest among scholars and collectors around 1900 in the external Indian civilizational influences in local Asian histories as they still do today. At Gimhe in the Indonesian section located between those of Burma and Vietnam, they are understood within the framework of Indianized Buddhist art from Southeast Asia. You see them in the background of this picture. My second example concerns some of the heads of the 504 Buddhist statues that once overlooked Japanese rice fields from what was once their base and is that site of belonging, Borobudur. I looked into five Borobudur Buddha heads that like the Islamic steels turned up around 90 or just after 1900 in France just before and in the midst of the high tide of Buddhist art trade. Some of them also ended up in Musaiki Men. One of them traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's not the one on display in this picture. That one did so with the rise in market price of around $1,700 within seven years. The social life of these Buddha heads provides insight into how changing taxonomies and valuation of the material remains of Asia's Hindu Buddhist past transformed these objects into arts of greater India and vice versa. For from around 1910, greater India thinking became pivotal to the inception of a new category of and theorizing Asian art and the emergence of the friends of Asian art movements and markets. Two theosophists whom art critics of that time were crucial to that new appreciation of the Hindu Buddhist material remains of Asia for their aesthetic and Indian merits. Ananda Komaraswamy born from Sri Lankan and English parents in Sri Lanka who would become the first curator of the prestigious Indian section of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And the other one was Ernest Havel until 1906, the superintendent of the Kolkata Government Art School. Both looked at artistic expressions in Asia under the label of Indian art to be appreciated as high art in its own right and not as a derivative of Western, Greek and Roman standards. Asian art was superior to European art because in their eyes, it showed the Indian artists capacity to conceptualizing the divine. In Havel's publications, one of Borobudur Buddha statues from the North sites served as a superb example. While this statue was located in Java, the art is Indian concluded Havel. Now the ideas of Komaraswamy in Havel have been extremely influential in the way the material remains of the Hindu and Buddhist past of Asia are put on display in the world's most influential museums. But in the context of this inventive moments around 1910 and the celebration of greater Indian art, as well as of Asia-based nationalism, from the 1910 onwards, cultural and economic elites in Asia, Europe and the US began to engage with the new academic and private associational activities while self-idiot identifying as friends of Asian art or friends of Asia. These associations reflected a globally connected powerful movement of greater Indian thinking that fed into colonial and inter-Asian and inter-colonial networks of knowledge. I put some examples enlisted on these slides. What matters here is how these associations firmly share the belief that the collection, study and united display of Asia, an Asian red Indianized art and the contemplation of the civilization in which they could flourish would benefit the West and the East. It would be good both for empire and Asian nationalist self-esteem. The friends of Asian art were charmed and connected via their esteemed modern museums and associations in the US, Europe and Asia and they built on the trending theorization of Asian art as art of greater India. Their imagination became useful again after World War II and the formal independence of the formerly colonized countries in Asia. Thus, in the 1950s, the newly independent Republic of Indonesia once again became part and parcel of art of greater India exhibits supported by Indian embassies in several places in the world. To all indications, for their curators, the categorization remained unproblematic. One such exhibit was held at the LA Continent Museum in 1950. Indonesia was represented as Java and exclusively by ancient Buddhist objects from American collections. This exhibition and its cataloging and its catalog are enlightening for how moral geographies of greater India can become etched in people's minds. First, the map that I already showed you, it was from this exhibition, which frames all objects on display. And next, the way curator Trudner defended the initiative and I quote him, Today, sincere efforts are being made to bring about closer relations between the East and the West. It is important that we attain knowledge of India's great cultural past and realize the tremendous role that country has played in the history of far Eastern art. The immediate purpose of the exhibition is to bring about an unbiased and true appreciation of Indian art and a deeper understanding of India's great heritage. So much for the heritage of the other new independent nation states, the borders of which were obfuscated on the map of greater India and whose people were working at home in parallel on nation buildings through cultural politics. Ironic here is President Sukarno's December 1953 inauguration of the reconstruction of the ninth century Shiva temple at Parmanon, also in central Java, as Indonesia's first national monuments. In the country's national museum, which you already saw, the Hindu Buddhist antiquities there emphatically tell the history not of India, but of Indonesia. Nonetheless, in museums outside of Indonesia, from LA to Kolkata, Amsterdam to Paris, Hindu Buddhist temple remains from Java still serve narratives of a greater India. And to stick to Indonesia, even the national museum in Jakarta does not escape this fate. If we think of the example of the Indian consul general with whom I started my talk. So what has love got to do with all of this? The study and collection of Indonesian antiquities by the secret central in my paper was driven by love, inclusiveness or motives of peace through cultural understanding. But their search also reveals the potential that love has to spawn epistemic violence and appropriation. The French adventurer, geographer, folk informed by Western theories of civilizational progress recognized a transformative civilizational moment in the Islamic steels in RJ as beauty. The friends of Asian art, captivated by Komarazwami's and her false theories identified the Indian artist's capacity to visualize the divine in what were to them self-familiar images of a meditative man. Through this kind of self-understanding and through their networks, their texts and object-based interpretations, sales and exhibitions, the friends of Asian art contributed to the global spread of moral geographies of greater India. These moral geographies entailed exclusion, a steadfast blindness regarding Indonesia's predominantly Muslim population or those in other countries in Asia, which had so many other paths to identify with beyond those of Hindu Buddhist kingdoms labeled as Indianized or Indic. All these cases should warn us of the dangers and distortions that transpire from transnational, civilizational, conspacial framings of Asia or any other region as a homogenized and exclusive field of study. It also alerts us that grounding research and the collection of knowledge or objects as knowledge or art in sympathy or affection will not guarantee true understanding of other people's cultures, histories and memories. And I thank you for your attention. Oh, sorry. Thank you, Marika. I'm going to continue this lecture. Let me show my slides here. So as a complementary perspective to Marika's lecture, I'm going to focus on the impact of the greater India theory on the interpretation of Hindu and Buddhist bronze statues from the Indonesian Archipelago. I started my research on bronze statuary when I was doing my PhD. And I did not start my project in the colonial perspective, but I progressively became aware of and during ideas elaborated during the colonial period and in post-war study, but still constrained the way we interpret these materials today. For this lecture, I would like to reflect on a question that Marika asked in one of the latest article, which is why we must ask, is it still so hard to write about Southeast Asia or its sub-region without starting with India? One of the most problematic way of interpreting Hindu and Buddhist archaeological remains in Southeast Asia since the 19th century is to constantly see India as the source of artistic styles and iconographies, which in a unidirectional cultural flow would have reached Southeast Asia. And even if other big steps in decolonizing museums are undertaken, introducing Southeast Asia in terms of its contact with India still persists in many museum displays and catalogs. And bronze statues have always participated to this idea of India as a source. They are said to be lighter and more portable than stone sculpture. So they are traditionally being regarded as one of the main means through which Hinduism and Buddhism styles and iconographies originally spread from India to Southeast Asia. And this is especially true for bronze statues found in the Indonesian archipelago and the Taimanaya Peninsula because we show various styles that are also found in bronze statues found in India. I'm going to trace the diverse interpretation of a group of four bronze Buddha statues to show you how in some cases the nature of a relationship with India can be reassessed. These statues were discovered across what is today Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam in the 1910s and 20s. And the distinctive style of the monastic robe of these images with regular pleats and right shoulder uncovered was immediately associated with that of the Amariti School of Sculpture located in the Andhra region of India. Scholars assumed that these bronze statues found in Southeast Asia had been made in Amariti between the second and fourth century before having been exported to Southeast Asia. And these bronze statues were considered one of the earliest pieces of evidence for the greater India theory proving an Indian colonization of Southeast Asia. And even when the concept of a political Indian colonization of Southeast Asia was abandoned after World War II, the idea of a cultural colonization endured. And for instance, this is palpable throughout the several editions of George Sedes' Indian States of Southeast Asia. In his 1968 English translation, the so-called Amariti Buddhas found in Southeast Asia continue to be considered of Indian origin and showing the farthest limits of Indian colonization in Southeast Asia. We see a shift in the interpretation of the so-called Amariti Buddha found in Southeast Asia in an exhibition catalog published in 1971. They were then considered to have been carried by missionaries and pilgrims to spread Buddhism. And this interpretation reflected ongoing scholarly debates which for three decades focused on the Indian agents involved in what was then named the Indianization process. These new theories put a greater emphasis on the role of Indian religious masters traveling on the maritime routes with traders. So that is why these bronzes were interpreted as having traveled with missionary Buddhists from India. When I saw the Buddha found in Sulawesi at the National Museum in Jakarta in 2014, the caption mentioned the possibility that this statue had been made in Amariti and then brought to Indonesia. And Pongar mentioned to me that in 2017, the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture recognized this Buddha as the oldest bronze Buddha from Indonesia. And the statue acquired the national cultural heritage status. An article posted on the block of the Ministry explains that this Buddha is an evidence of Indian traders passing in the region. And it is dated to the second to fifth century based on the Indian Amariti style. So we see that the interpretation of this statue has not changed much since its discovery in 1921. Yet other interpretations have been proposed. For instance, Kierit Mangan has identified the so-called Amariti bronze Buddha as one of the pan-South-East Asian families of religious statuary, which show the spread of a common artistic vocabulary and shared belief in Southeast Asia between the 5th and 7th, 8th centuries. The strength of this concept is to allow for an analysis of trans-regional production of religion statuary within Southeast Asia and independent of trends with India. However, the pan-South-East Asian family are considered the Southeast Asian responses to Indian impacts. And the names used for them are still both borrowed from Indian dynasties or sites. So I still see this concept as somewhat problematic because it still perpetuates the misleading idea that the Indian influence was the stimulus without which there would have been no response and it thereby undermined the Southeast Asian specificities and developments. So no matter how much emphasis we put on localization and Southeast Asian specificities, we continue to think of India as the source. And I think there is a need to address the nature of the relationship with India. And the so-called Amariti Buddha are a great example to show you how this can be done. So for the various interpretations that I summarized, the assumption that Amariti would be the source for these bronzes has never been questioned. The possible role of Sri Lanka, where a similar type of Buddha images has been found, you have two examples here on the right, has sometimes been mentioned. But Sri Lanka too has been integrated into the greater India paradigm. And for a long time, it's simply been seen as an extension of the Indian Amariti school. So while there was undoubtedly a school of stone sculpture at Amariti and in the nearby region between the second to fourth century, there is no evidence that a school of bronze sculpture ever existed at this site during the same period or even later. Only a single fragmentary bronze Buddha was found at Amariti and in the whole of India. Other bronze Buddhas were found at Amariti, but they are in a style that is different and is not specific from the Amra region. So we may have come from elsewhere. And it is interesting because the portability of metal images found in Southeast Asia has consistently been stressed to remind one that their place of discovery was not necessarily their place of production. But surprisingly, this is rarely the case for metal statues found in India. So while Henny, Hindu, and Buddhist object found in India is always assumed to be Indian and never to have come from elsewhere, this need not be the case, and especially for mobile objects. Since the 19th century, more standing bronze Buddha with pleated robes have been found in Southeast Asia. And if we plot them on a map like here, together with the 13 bronze Buddhas known from Sri Lanka and the single Buddha discovered at Amariti, we see that there is a larger number of these Buddha images found in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. So I really do not see why the single Buddha found at Amariti could not have come from Southeast Asia or Sri Lanka. And while the cultural flow is overwhelmingly seen as one way from India to Southeast Asia, it seems that it is also because of the way we interpret materials. While mobile objects such as bronze, with mobile objects such as bronzes, it is very difficult to give definitive answers about the direction of travel of objects or ideas. In addition to turning to India to trace artistic sources, art historians have traditionally relied on Indian materials to date Indonesian bronze images. However, Indian bronzes do not bear absolute dates but would be inscribed on them, for example. And the dating is often based on their style and others quite variable. So for instance, the so-called Amariti bronze Buddhas have been dated between the 2nd to 4th century originally based on the Amariti sculpture. But nowadays, they are more commonly dated to between the 6th to 8th century based on materials from India, from Sri Lanka, sorry. And in the 1988 Divine Bronze catalog, which is one of the only publications that attempted to understand the production of Indonesian metal images as a whole, this catalog has become the reference book for Indonesian bronze images because it provided for the first time a chronology. And a great deal of emphasis was put on local innovations and developments, which was innovative and placed the relationship with India in a more positive framework. However, the process of interaction was still seen as happening in two phases with a first phase of imports from India and local copies and a second phase when local adaptations developed more independently. So for the last part of this lecture, I will explain how we can depart from this idea of a production in two phase. One way to reassess all theories is to stop looking at bronze images simply as work of art. It is the stages that these objects acquired when they entered museum collections, but bronze statues were originally conceived as religious images attached to specific cults. So instead of seeing connection between India and Southeast Asia in terms of artistic influences connecting sites, I prefer to see them as evidence of connections between people within religious networks. For instance, I interpret the similar standing rulers with pleaded rope found in Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and Amarati as evidence of shared religious concept and common cause between communities of worship in these regions. I propose in my research that the bronze Buddha with pleaded ropes were associated with images representing a specific type of ascetic bodhisattva, which had been found in the same region when they are mapped. And these ascetic bodhisattvas share a similar style and fabrication technique in all three region. And the Buddha and ascetic bodhisattva may have originally functioned within triads, but were worshiped for the protection of marathons. Such a cult associating these two type of images is attested in Sri Lanka, that's the image here on the left, through extant stone triads. And a Nepalese manuscript also illustrates such a triad which would have been worshipped on the island of Java. So if we see the bronze statues in the context of different networks, it also becomes apparent that different groups of metal images have different production contexts, depending on the artisans who made them and the donors who participated in distinct networks. Therefore, different groups of bronze statues result from different processes of interaction. And one can imagine that there is no linear evolution from Indian models to local adaptation. Instead, some groups of images were perhaps made in cosmopolitan workshops, while others were not, but groups were nonetheless contemporaneous and local creations. An example of this is a group of around 80 bronze images and put here only three examples. So this group of images were found in the Western islands of the Indonesian archipelago. And they are made in a style that is not found elsewhere. Let me just quickly point out some of the stylistic element that together make these images unique to Indonesia. And in my research, I explained that this style can be connected to central Java. Through some stylistic connection that are visible with Pogduo, there is an image here on the right through the shape of the throne with the strangular macrest, which is also visible on the bronze. And while we always see connections with India, interestingly, these bronze images also show connection with clay tablets found in China and Japan. Here it is an example from Japan. So here it is not a question of whether this style would have come from China or Japan because these clay tablets were also mobile objects, so we actually don't know where they came from. But they are interesting to show that this group of bronze images in a local style was also connected to materials found in other region. And based on different evidence, it is possible to place these bronze images in the mid eighth century, which would be partly overlapping with the Buddha's depleted ropes that I have introduced earlier. So we see that these two groups of images, we see with these two groups of images that bronze statues were part of different networks and developments did not happen in two phases with Indian import first and local developments only afterwards. So I'm going to conclude this lecture with this and I hope you have enjoyed this presentation of art historical issues, which may eventually help in interpreting museum collection differently to depart from colonial legacies. Our present knowledge of bronze statues in the Indonesian archipelago has largely been shaped by studies conducted in a museum context because the vast majority of publication dedicated to the topic are collection or exhibition catalogs. And we all know that museum professionals sometimes have little time to consecrate to researching the museum collection. So archaeologists and art historians also have a role to play to help the colonized museum. Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you to Matilde and Marike for two. Yeah, fascinating and complimentary lectures. Okay, I'm going to hand over to our discussant, Panga Ardianza, who is probably no stranger to most of you. He's a PhD candidate at the history of art and archeology at SOAS, University of London. His main interest is on the afterlives and knowledge production of Hindu Buddhist materials in Indonesia. And he has recently co-edited Returning Certificates of Asia's Past, Objects, Museums and Restitution with Louise Tethicock that was published by NUS Press in 2021. Panga, I can think of no better person than you to respond to this. So over to you. All right, thank you, Stephen, and also thank you, Marike and Matilde for such interesting lectures. In giving a response to these two presentations, I'm going to start with an Indonesian context. Then I will circle back to the museum in the West. My sincere apology if it feels already at times. Nonetheless, it is my attempt to connect the discussion, to connect into the discussion, these two contexts. Or shall I say the words of East and West and I put that in quotation. And to make my response more tangible, I will share a couple of images with you. So how I can do this, you see the image fine. If not, please let me know. So I'll start with this display at the Radia Pustaka Museum in Solo Indonesia. And as you can read from the label on the slide, these are the replica of bronze arms of which the original have been reconnected with the body now at the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta. The statue was found in Wanogeery, around 50 kilometers south of Solo in 1855, upon which the body was brought to Batavia, then the name of for Jakarta. Even though I'm not really sure whether the body and arms were recovered at the same time. They were reconnected in 1990 at the National Museum, hence the production and this display of replica in Radia Pustaka. My question then, why the needs to reconnect and display in the more complete statue at the National Museum and not say Radia Pustaka, which is arguably closer to the found side. Putting security consideration aside, what we witness here is the lingering impact of greater India conceptions and the exaltation of Indian art in European and not American museums. In Indonesia, it has been generally accepted and presented without further consideration that the archeology of Indonesia is evolutionary divided into prehistorical, Hindu-Buddhism, Islamic and colonial periods. Each periods represents different and separate sets of material culture within which Indonesian culture is rooted and has developed over time. In particular, the periodization implies a clear division between ancient Hindu-Buddhist period produced between 4th and 15th century and the early modern Islamic period between 16th and 18th centuries. The period of Hindu-Buddha is understood as an often used interchangeably with the term classical. In particular, based on the perceived imagination of this period as the golden age. When the highly regarded classical is put as the opposite of Islamic period, this process implicitly yet almost automatically renders Islam as medieval. It imagines Islam as the period of decline and thus lower down the historical hierarchy with assume that medieval represents a dark age. And it is by using this context of Hindu-Buddhist art that we can better understand the conceptual development of local genius in the archeology of Indonesia. Developed from probably in 1970s and arguably crystallized in the 1980s. With local genius, Indonesian argue that it was the locals that actively seeks and selects appropriate element from Indic cultures to be adapted with the already thriving indigenous cultures in the regions that now become Indonesia. And this is where the archeology of Indonesia become a useful tool to support the construction of national history. In a nutshell, this history with the routing of Indonesian nation in the golden age period of Hindu-Buddha does the need to give more prominent agency to the past Indonesian community and away from drive of creator India close to the concept of local genius. Amritsha Targa was the director of the National Museum of Indonesia in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, he wrote a preface to the exhibition of Japanese sculptures in Asia Society, New York which is the same exhibition catalog shown in Matilda's presentation earlier. So Targa said, and I quote, it is hoped that the exhibition will help to develop a lively regard for the arts of Indonesia and especially for those that existed before the colonial period. These beautiful works are in the creation of a free people. Only a free people has the capacity to unveil his creative ability, skills and talents and can enjoy and hinder the right to express and interpret his highest principle. He then further stated, and then I quote him again, it is a mistake to say that Indonesian culture was based only on foreign cultural influences. On the contrary, the Indonesian people developed their own culture building on a foundation that has existed as early as the Neolithic period on the prehistoric period. This culture was not the result of a colonial process but was the Indonesia's own achievement. So going back at the replica on the slide, what I have discussed is the meta-narrative justifying the display of a more complete Avalokiteswara statue from Monogiri in the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta. Standing just less than a meter tall, the statue can be regarded as the masterpiece of Indonesian Hindu-Buddhist art. This process shows the modern appropriations of an ancient Hindu, an ancient Buddhist image of which the local perspective countering the greater India paradigm is conceived using a nationalist sentiment. It is the appropriation of the, of which the so-called East or West in terms of knowledge production is not really clear. And in that sense, knowledge ultimately comes out of interactions between multiple agencies and approaches. Next, I would like to divert our attention to the VNA in London. Here we have the plaster cast of Boroguro Reliefs made in 1930s, and it has been discussed vastly by in the Marikus books, in one of the Marikus as well. Now on display at the Buddhism Gallery at the VNA. It is accompanied by this fancy label, A Catchingly in Dual Scripts, English and Japanese. You can see the Japanese script on the right side of the label. It seems to me that this curatorial intervention is an effort to move away from greater India paradigm and is set up to re-situate the objects in its spatial origin, spatial origin. It is a laudable act and needs to be appreciated. Nonetheless, my problem with this labeling is that at the same time, it also feels like a grand gesturing, but meaningless beyond that. Almost no one in London can actually read or even recognize that this label is written in Japanese scripts, or maybe there's a casing that the script may be Japanese by association. It is also not lost that the script used in the label, and the Japanese script used in the label is a modern one, conceived in the early 20th century. Boroguro was built in the 9th century. And Java arguably had a different script at that point in time. Of its, it was carved into some of the stone in the temple of Boroguro. So this brings me to two broader questions about ways to move forwards. But I would like to ask to Marika and Matille as they also relates to the lecture as well. First, it has been said frequently that to decolonize is to foreground the local voice. Marika mentioned in her recent article about local memories. And Matille talked about local creation and variation in her presentations. So to you both, how should we approach this local voice? Well, at the same time being aware that there are multiple local voices, even for an object. That in the local, there are different agencies in different temporalities which were or are also at play. That local may not be country specific whose boundaries are delineated in modern time. And that in the end, we do not end up essentializing the local. And my second questions, which is also related to my first question is that within a museum context, how should we define the local, national, regional, transnational interactions both in the production of the object itself and its knowledge today? Marika has warned us that we should couple affections with critical engagement. And Matille has moved away to see the branches not only as a work of art. So in other words, I'm asking about what kinds of knowledge co-productions or what kind of new term probably that could transcend the modern hierarchies of the type of knowledge and use which structures the interpretation of an objects as well as to move beyond the false binary of peace and west as than other. And I'm not sure we're gonna start first. So maybe Marika, you wanna start first? Yeah, thank you. Oh, these are, I think the core of the problem. One moment. Okay, sorry, there was something on my screen from the host of the seminar. Yeah, so thank you for the interesting perspective you give by connecting to what is happening in Indonesia and where you see also these politics of a centralization of a story preventing local engagements with objects found in the local area, which actually also goes back to colonial times where you see a similar debate going on. So I would like to say more on that but I first try to answer your questions. Indeed, like I didn't do it that much in my lecture but in my article I reflect on the idea of local memories being silenced in museums. But emphatically I talk about memories and the whole idea of the article is that not only greater India is an essential, greater India thinking has an essentializing effect but the way we think of a local perspective is also problematic. You see it in the Friends of Asian Art Museum but as I discussed in my article there is a long debate going on, going back to the colonial times against greater Indian thinking where you see this notion of local genius coming up. And which is for some archaeologists like the Dutch archaeologist Stutterheim much inspired by historians criticizes of the thinking about the Middle Ages in the West. So at that time you had a famous book by Huisingha on the waning of the Middle Ages which describes, tries to look in a different way as the Middle Ages as a period of regression. And precisely that notion of local genius you see indeed come up again in the work of, in recent archaeology, like you say in the 1970s and 1980s. So it is a very good point. Actually, we should start by problematizing this thinking of a local perspective. And if we want to make a difference in museums, I also think Matilda gave some very good examples is at least try to say it's tell many different stories that could be about the life of these objects in the time Matilda discusses, but also it is not only about their history, their, we should also tell the stories, their experience in the trajectories they had when they traveled from wherever they were made, if we know where they were made to other places in the world and try to tell both the painful stories they experienced and don't, I think art historical categorization. I think Matilda can better take over from here, but there is a problem of essentializing in itself just by naming a period, give it in the name of a region, there we already have a problem. That's what you see in Indian museums. The history of India is actually taught by progressive styles of art, which are actually very, what is this? Bilekurek, a very, selective, so maybe I should just first stick to your first question and give the word to Matilda, otherwise I talk too long. Is it okay? Yes, it's okay. Yeah, I think you already introduced, I mean, about these categories, but I don't know what you're talking about, but I think it's okay to say it's okay to say it's okay. I think it's okay to say it's okay to say it's okay. But I think there are two categories that are essentializing. And I think in what I've discussed, the Amaravati, I mean, the fact that this single Buddha from Amaravati was actually classified in this larger school of sculpture from Avarati between the second to fourth century is quite typical of the kind of categories that have been created during the colonial period we have been trying to fit all this material in these very strict categories, which were often based on dynasties, actually even though the objects were not necessarily commissioned by kings or rulers, but we have put these objects into dynastic categories. And I think today there is a need to reassess that and to reassess what we really know about the objects because sometimes I feel like we are trying to tell too much. I mean, you know, use the objects to tell too much and the stories we are creating are very speculative. And there is definitely a problem in, I mean, South East Asian art, I've mentioned it, but there is this view of two phases of development with first things coming from India and then local developments to try to counter this greater India thinking. But this is also very essentializing. And I think one way to depart from that is if, because museums try to present broad narratives so that the audience can understand historical development. But this is also what was done during the colonial period. The point of museum was to present these broad stories about human developments. I think today museums can try to be more specific to present case studies, for example, of objects and to try to tell more diverse stories and not these broader narratives. And I think, I mean, that's what I've been trying to show in the lecture with this group of bronzes that we have been put in this like very strict chronology. But actually, if you look at the material, it's very hard to date them. It's very hard to know where they have been made. And the boundaries of modern nation states don't really apply to these materials. They were found in multiple regions. And so the idea of foreign and local, does it really apply? Because we don't really, it's hard to define, I think, and that's something to think about maybe a bit more. Right, thanks. I realize, Pange, do you mind if, have you got a response to it or will we go to, there's quite a few questions that are in the Q&A, but Pange, if you wanna respond first, that's fine. Yeah, Jermaine, I would agree to quote answer and I just want to add, yeah, I mean, the museum or even the field of archeology, well, I'm speaking in the context of Indonesia, is also would actually focus on well-interpreting object would focus on the original time of constructionals. And they don't see that meaning changes that are so recreated with objects over time, after life, after the production as well. And yeah, I think some of the answer relies on the approach that has been taken by Maraika, especially the object biography, we could especially do that. But again, I don't know if that will be tangible in the future because even with the bronze image or bronze objects, even from one side, one phone side, we found images scattered around them, different museum, different countries, different location and sometimes the origin, the information about the origin got lost in the transfers and the curator or the scholar would interpret that maybe differently from when we know that they came from the same phone side. So, yeah, I think that's my response to that. Maybe even so, you want to take a question from the audience? Yeah, I think, yeah, we've got quite a few coming in. Actually, first of all, Imran was the first to pose a question to all of us in a moment, but Himanshu Prabhure has made more of a comment, but actually it ties in with what you've all said. So again, she thinks that there's a need to decolonize knowledge production through art styles. So I think again, what we're getting at as well is of course it's not just museums, but it's the discipline of our history that museums in our history of course go hand in hand, we can't separate them. So yeah, I think there's again, these changes or these reformulations need to take place within how we teach again, because obviously if we teach in this certain way, then of course, the next generation of curators will also curate in that way as well. So I think that's probably, yeah, it's a larger picture. Imran has quite a, actually about two or three questions, but maybe I'll try and summarize them more for Marika. He wants, he asks if you could enlighten us as to whether any Indonesian scholars have challenged the greater Indian narrative and what have they said about Java's position in the wider Pan-Asian circuits of Indic, Buddhist and Hindu art. And then he also asked how you would position the work of French, of Dumarse and also the Japanese scholar, Chihara, in their narration of the Indic art of Java. And then finally he asks, might there be a preferable alternative term? Do you think Indic is a better term? But anyway, he looks forward to your book. So there's lots there too. So maybe you could just sort of talk, if you wanna answer the first part of it maybe. Yeah. Yeah, well, well, in the field of archaeology, I think we have a great Indonesian scholar amongst us who shows a very critical and nuanced reaction to this greater Indian narrative in itself. During my research for the previous book with Martijn Eikhoff and also actually for my present project, I had several discussions with older generations of archaeologists, some of them were trained in colonial times and were also aware of this discussion. So they may have also played a role in why this local genius idea became so popular again in the 1970s and 1980s. But I also know that they were part and parcel of this world of South and Southeast Asian archaeological art and archaeology conferences often organized in Indian context. And there, even if they would tell that local genius perspective on Indonesia's ancient history, it would end up in an edited volume that tells a greater Indian perspective. And I don't know if you remember, I had one final slide in my presentation and I decided, well, I skipped that part. But one of the archaeologists I spoke with was Moundardito. He was on a picture and he was a very young archaeologist who when Indian archaeologists in the 1950s visited the sites and they would have this kind of discussions. And when I asked him about, well, don't you have a problem with that? And he loved and he said, well, we always would answer, we had our own culture before you came. And then he said to me, and they, the Indians didn't colonize us with the law. So obviously there is, but there is also a higher being power relations in the way of academic production that you see reflected here and also see changing right now. So that is good. Yeah, and about the Japanese archaeologists, they are actually in the book I wrote about with Martijn Eikhoff. Chiara. Yeah, it's an interesting figure for several reasons, but he follows the perspective and he was also enamored by Southeast Asia's Hindu Buddhist culture and trying to seek the Japanese connections with it. So there are, of course, there are various moral geographies of a greater Asian Buddhist Hindu Buddhist culture which have different centers. There's also a sign center, a Buddhist revivalist way of looking at it. So that maybe we don't have much time. Is it okay or do you want more? Yeah, no, I think that's fine, yeah, no, absolutely. He can read your book anyways, that's fine. But yeah, that's great. I wanna go on to the next question from Azam Cesar. The National Museum of Indonesia is currently doing a massive refurbishment of one of which is to create an Islamic art gallery, strategically positioned to be near the museum's courtyard that have Hindu and Buddhist art. How should a museum display their Indonesian religious art to try to detach themselves from the greater Indian narrative to display Islamic Hindu and Buddhist art together to show their geographical similarity or to display them in separate galleries according to the religious traditions that produce them? Yeah, very good question about actual, which I think you both talked about anyway, about this false dichotomy actually between Hindu Buddhist Java or Hindu Buddhist Indonesia and Islamic Indonesia, which gets reinforced and perpetuated in not just how museums narrate the story, but actually how museums are structured, right? How the actual layouts and where the objects are, which departments these objects fall into. So yeah, I don't know, do one of you wanna take that question? It's quite a museological one. Matilde, you want to? Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that the Hindu and Buddhist images and sculptures or other archaeological remains, they are always used to talk about the Hindu Buddhist period. But actually in case of the bronzes, some of them were found in family heirlooms when they were found during the colonial period. So they were still worshipped by families who were Muslim, even though these images were originally Hindu and Buddhist. So in the weather, the context into which these images had been created didn't matter. These objects were still considered sacred and were still worshipped. And that is something that is not, I mean, I've never seen in a museum. So I think Hindu and Buddhist images could also be discussed in the context of Islamic belief to show how in a way, religion, I mean, this separation between religions or periods are not always relevant to the life of the objects because I don't take that multiple types. May I add? Absolutely. In addition to that, I think that indeed, the problem is larger like Stephen says about the way museums categorize and fix certain ideas. Not only what national history is about, but also what culture is about and so I wonder if it's a good idea in principle to organize it according to religion. Actually, there's a follow-up question really by Sujata who asks, I think again, she's asking about objects of the indigenous cultures of various Indonesian islands. So again, how are they framed in Asian art museums both local and overseas because there's those different cultural groups as well. So it's not just Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic, there's also, so yeah, we haven't discussed that today, but does anyone want to respond to that as well? Yeah, I'd like to respond to that. I would argue that, I mean, it is true. They are often in a separate gallery in museums. They are often part of the Oceanic world, but not always. And there are examples of museums and definitely exhibitions from the 1950s. The group of Heine Gelderne, the degeneration who organized exhibitions right after Indonesian independence, also selected these corvars and objects from other cultures or older cultures. And I would say they were moved by these objects for quite the same reasons as they were moved by Buddhaheads because of the spiritual value or the divine they sense or projected on these kinds of objects. So they were, and are, if you go to Musei Kebronli, Musei Kebronli still situated in this idea of a spiritual Asian culture. But maybe indeed it is hard to connect it to India for some of the, so it's another moral geography that overlaps with the greater Indian idea. Oh, can I add to that? Yeah, sure. Yeah. I don't know if you mean, I mean, I don't know by indigenous culture, you mean also tribal arts from the archipelago of Indonesia outside Zalba or Sumatra. And to answer that, then in the Ephesus Museum, I don't know if they would be, they would enter the art museum because they will be presented in the ethnography museum more into ethnographic collection and display as well. International Museum, which is in Jakarta, International Museum of Indonesia, this is also very interesting changing of interpretation of this indigenous arts. In the corner, Katharine McGregor already wrote about this, I think 10 or 10 years ago, that they were collected in the colonial periods by the Dutch to show the collection of the outer islands of the colony and then the flydiation in the colony. But then when the Indonesia got their independence in the 1940s, the National Museum gens narrative to show that this ethnographic collections shows the unity and indiversity where the Indonesia consists of diverse community, but we are united under the banner of Indonesia. So we see the appropriation of that ethnographic collection in the National Museum as well. Thanks. If you don't mind, we'll keep going. We're almost out of time, but I'd like to keep going for at least another maybe 10 minutes just to get the last few questions answered. And I just want to jump down to a question by Shubham Biswas. I'll get back to you in a minute because I think it still relates to this, what we're talking about. And it's something I think that we all maybe to keep in mind that of course, both presentations rightfully highlight how the greater India society is crucial to form the backbone of the Indo-centric views for Southeast Asian past disregarding like the Muslim presence in the region. But can the Indian influence be totally disregarded? Surely not. And I think, I mean, this is where it does get a bit. This has always been the debate, right? The sort of push and pull between the colonial narratives that I guess over emphasize the importance of India, the greater India. And then there's maybe with the post-independence movements at East Asia sort of and rise of nationalism then sort of maybe overemphasis on the local genius. And so, yeah, I just wonder where you all position yourself on that. How do we get the sort of the balance right? Because of course we can't disregard India as well, right? But yeah, or maybe we can. I don't know. So that's a question for the two of you. Well, first of all, India wasn't India before it became a colonial construction. Sorry, I'm sorry too. So that's already for one reason makes it highly problematic to stick. Thank you for closing me, Matteo, on this question. Why should we? Why can we not get rid of it? I mean, with one solution also in terms of history writing and the problems of sources we have, how we can get away from a Western-centered framework of writing history. At least start where the story in your eyes starts. You jump in. The moment you start reflecting on surely there must be influences from that region that we call now India because maybe there were most traveling and et cetera. You take away, you can always start there, but why would you start in the circles of knowledge production that Matteo is talking about, the smaller. So yeah, I don't see any necessity to reflect on that question anymore. We have had enough of that. Hi, Matteo, do you want to add or not, okay. No, I agree with Marika. And yeah, India wasn't India at the time. So if we see, I mean, first of all, I wouldn't speak about the Indian influence because the influence means that there was one region that was superior to the other. So I think I would speak more in terms of relationship, maybe. And then if we see connections with what is to the India, we have to see exactly which region in India and try to understand this relationship, not see it simply as an influence or any thought from India to Southeast Asia. So that's one way of problem. I mean, yeah, to let you look at things a bit differently. Sure, we're sort of out of time, but I just want to get to Maylien's question as the last, I'm sorry, Faisal, we won't be able to get to yours today. But so again, for Matilde, she says, I would like to ask if archeometric analysis would help with the bronzes apart from stylistic ways. I presume she means in terms of where they're being produced. Yes, I mean, in my PhD research, I have been integrating some archeometallurgical technical analysis on the bronzes. So to study more about fabrication techniques and also about the materials, especially the different metal alloys. And this does not give definitive answer. I mean, I haven't been studying a lot of images. I have been studying the collection of the Musée d'Innée, which is around 40 pieces. And then I have included some more at the Museum in Leiden. So I think in total, I studied 100 pieces but where the metal was analyzed. And I also looked at the fabrication techniques. And it is possible to see interesting results but always in combination with stylistic elements and iconographies. And I think in the future, if we conduct more research, we could be able to have more answers. But about where exactly the pieces were made, that is very difficult to answer these questions because we cannot always trace the materials where they were taken. And also we don't have any bronze casting workshops that has been found in archeological excavation. So we also cannot try to identify remains from a casting workshop to try to see if the composition is the same as some statues. So to identify where a statue exactly would have been made. So it is a work in progress. And maybe in the future, we can try to have more answers about that. Thank you. Yeah, important question. I think on that note, I'll bring this to a close. I'm sorry, there's one or two other questions that we in comments coming up that we didn't get a chance to answer. But yeah, I just want to thank, obviously our two speakers today, Professor Marika Blombergen and Dr. Matilda Mechling and of course, Panga for his very thoughtful and thought provoking response. I also, because this is the last lecture in the series myself and Conan would just like to give a, express our gratitude and thanks to all of the speakers who can't discuss since you contributed to this, to making this series, I think really thought provoking and interesting debates that we've had over the past six weeks. I think that really tried to get to answer questions of what it means to colonize the museum, safety station, history or historiographies in general. So and of course, last but not least to everybody in the audience has been really great audience turn out every week and the questions have been really stimulating and helped to not just encourage the debate but challenge it at times as well and challenge our own thinking. So thank you for that. So yeah, on that note, I'll draw this to a close and just say thank you once again. Night. Thank you. Thank you.