“Monsoon Asia” is only one of many possible ‘transregional’ frameworks to study South and Southeast Asia, that scholars have proposed in the course of the long twentieth century. Academic reasons these proposals may have had, they were and are all also political, and have political effects. In his Foreword to Revealing India's Past (1939), the famous French Sanskritist and expert on Buddhist iconography Alfred Foucher reflected on the trend of “Pacific Ocean” congresses that archaeologists had been organizing in Asia since the late 1920s.

This chapter focuses on the various encounters of people, objects, texts and stories relating to the (thirteenth–fifteenth century) Majapahit site in East Java, during the long nineteenth century. What makes this site distinct from others discussed in this book is that in the twentieth century it transformed into a central heritage site of the post-colonial Indonesian state. The chapter focuses, however, on an understudied early phase in the politics, local heritage practices, and knowledge exchange at Majapahit as a material site and spiritual symbol. It shows how, despite early efforts at site appropriation and heritage control, war, modernising infrastructural interventions, and the epistemic violence of archaeological and philological ‘pushes’ at the end of the nineteenth century, the Majapahit site remained relatively open for many different memories, stories, engagements, and forms of knowledge seeking.

This introduction discusses the benefits of a mobile approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia. Starting at Hindu–Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, colonial, and prehistoric sites of heritage in Indonesia, the monograph will focus on people’s encounters and knowledge exchange taking place there, across colonial and post-colonial regimes. It follows site-related objects travelling, like the famous Buddhist statues from Borobudur temple, gifted to King Chulalongkorn of Siam, to gauge how and why these objects have transformed in meaning and play a role in parallel processes of heritage formation inside and outside Indonesia. With this site-centred and mobile approach, we can explain the relationships between heritage formation and religion, violence, and regime change over time, and show the concerns of local subjects and elites, of scholars, pilgrims, and tourists, entering colonial and post-colonial Indonesia and moving out of state-centred archaeology and transnational cultural associations, and of global (UNESCO) politics.

This chapter explores how anxieties about ‘loss’ influenced cultural heritage dynamics in post-colonial Indonesia. Following the perspective of various interested parties inside and outside Indonesia, it reveals how and why these parties, at different locations, developed different attitudes to the difficult pasts they all have been part of in various ways. Returning to Borobudur, the chapter revisits Dutch, Indonesian, Indian, Japanese, and international heritage engagements and appropriations of sites located in Indonesia in the period from the late 1920s well into the 1980s. It scrutinises the impact of post-war UNESCO politics and the Save Borobudur campaign in President Soeharto’s New Order Indonesia of the 1970s and 1980s on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at location. Numerous dynamic processes reveal the fragility of ownership of sites transforming into heritage across war and regime changes. Decolonisation stimulated strong emotional and moral passions for restoration, but Dutch post-colonial, inter-Asian, and international interests inflect Borobudur’s national Indonesian character.

This chapter, set in the first half of the nineteenth century, and starting from Hindu–Buddhist and Islamic sites in Java, focuses on site visits and encounters, between European antiquarian-collectors and Javanese elites in search of knowledge, as they miscommunicate or exchange knowledge at Hindu–Buddhist sites that were being rediscovered, cleaned, and documented between 1800 and the 1850s. The second part of the chapter focuses on the huge restoration of the mosque of Demak in the years 1842–1848, the first to be officially supported by the colonial government. It reveals how various networks of knowledge, interests, and administrative and military power came together at one site, and kept the balance in fragile post-(Java) War times. Throughout, the chapter shows how the hierarchies of knowledge were not fixed, and how heritage and knowledge exchange helped alter old loyalties or forge new ones in the context of the violent regime changes of the early nineteenth century.

This chapter explores biographies of Borobudur and other Hindu–Buddhist material remains of the past in Java in the context of widening knowledge networks, religious revivalism, and tourism from within and outside Java, which also stimulated the colonial state to institutionalise archaeological care and protection. Via the visit of King Chulalongkorn of Siam to Borobudur in 1896, and via the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900, it analyses the exchanges of knowledge and objects taking place there. It follows Borobudur’s Buddha statues and other Javanese Hindu–Buddhist objects travelling as gifts along with the king to Siam, where they transformed into objects of popular Buddhism and legitimation of Siam’s Buddhist dynasty. And it follows plaster casts of Borobudur reliefs to France and Britain, exploring parallel heritage dynamics, in Greater Dutch and Greater British Indian geographies. Thanks to the uncovered treasure of a guestbook of Borobudur (1888–1898), and the diary of a Javanese nobleman, they, moreover, broaden the social scope of Borobudur with site impressions of a growing number of visitors to Borobudur, from as far away as the United States and Australia, but also – and mostly – from Java.

This chapter broadens the scope of the Java-centric politics of archaeology and heritage towards Sumatra. The first archaeological activities on Sumatra, performed in the context of the colonial state, dated from the start of the nineteenth century. But it was during the second half of the nineteenth century that the now ‘archaeological’ sites of South Sumatra were more systematically inventoried and appropriated in the context of historical and ethnographic descriptions, geographical expeditions, military conquest, and the establishment of governmental structures. This chapter examines how South Sumatra, in particular Palembang, the Pasemah area, and Jambi, became gradually incorporated in the colonial archaeological infrastructure, as it was developed in Batavia, the administrative centre of the expanding colony. It focuses on interactions between state-supported ‘modern’ heritage concepts, local and regional appropriations of certain archaeological sites and objects, and the development of nationalist history writing by Sumatra-born Indonesians who also included the early past of Sumatra.

This chapter explores the transformations of Chinese and Balinese sacred objects into heritage, against the background of centralisation efforts and the state-supported reconstruction of the Siva temple at Prambanan (Central Java) across regime changes. It explains the relation between stronger centralisation and the strengthening of local heritage dynamics. Next, it discusses the impact of the Pacific War and decolonisation on local and centralised heritage practices, as well as on long-term foreign engagements with sites located in Indonesia. Gauging the colonial nature of post-colonial heritage politics, it shows how in colonial times professional and state-supported archaeology led to the consolidation of certain structures and methods of heritage formation in such a way that subsequent regimes could easily take over. An important related topic is the way in which research, collecting, conservation, and reconstruction activities were intimately connected to the development of social hierarchies and processes of (racial) marginalisation.

This chapter, situated in the twentieth century, returns to Majapahit and analyses how and why it became a proto-national site, despite the lack of evidence of its greatness, and despite criticism from philological, Islamic, and communist voices. Both local and centralising colonial state-supported and Indonesian nationalist site interventions played a role in the makings of this site. At the site, Javanese nobleman and administrator Kromodjojo Adinegoro, who was born and raised in the region, and the Indies-born architect and self-taught archaeologist Henri Maclaine Pont stimulated long-term local engagement with the site. Meanwhile, for Indonesian nationalists active in Batavia, Majapahit shifted from a Greater Javanese site into a Java-centred proto-Indonesian one. Yet, this development does not mean that the interests of the different parties engaging with the site stopped, nor that alternative engagements (of religious or spiritual character) faded away.

The epilogue re-evaluates two related problems central in the monograph: the relationships between heritage and violence and between heritage and religion. It does so, first, by focusing on case studies that reveal the relation between sites, heritage dynamics, and the taboos and silences concerning the massacres of 1965 in Indonesia. Secondly, it reassesses the question of Indonesian Islam and its implicit absence in heritage politics, both at a global level and in the Indonesian context. In light of violent heritage conflicts concerning religious-cum-heritage sites in colonial and contemporary India, it may seem remarkable that, in predominantly Islamic Indonesia, a Buddhist and a Hindu shrine remain the most important national monuments. However, the mobile approach to heritage has made clear how and why Borobudur and Prambanan as national monuments are not necessarily what they look like from canonical art-historical perspectives or tourist guides. They were and are being (re-)made in exchanges of knowledge, and exchanges of partial ownership at different levels (religious, economic, scholarly, spiritual, universalising).