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5 - “Colonial Art” and the Reconfiguration of Aesthetic Space

from Part I - The Knowledge Networks of Greater India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Yorim Spoelder
Affiliation:
Freie Universität Berlin
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Summary

Greater India projections had a strong bearing on the study of Southeast Asia’s Hindu-Buddhist cultural heritage. The scholarly quest for ‘origins’ and stylistic resemblances gave rise to the notion of Indian ‘colonial art’. This chapter explores different theories of ‘Indianization’, and their concomitant politics, which informed the French/Dutch/Indian scholarly engagement with the Cambodian and Javanese templescapes. It also pays attention to the work of Angkor-conservator Henri Marchal and the Dutch Indologist W.F. Stutterheim. Stressing local agency and ‘adaptation’ over diffusionist theories, they gradually paved the way for a more nuanced evaluation of the ‘Indic factor’ in Southeast Asia’s cultural heritage. All the same, in the Indian context, Angkor, Borobudur and Prambanan became visual simulacra of an ancient cultural empire evoked as Greater India and were often claimed as Indian masterpieces superior to anything sculpted or built in India. According to the GIS, Indian aesthetic impulses had temporarily uplifted the arts in Southeast Asia, until degeneration set in with the withering of this ‘classical’ influence.

Type
Chapter
Information
Visions of Greater India
Transimperial Knowledge and Anti-Colonial Nationalism, c.1800–1960
, pp. 154 - 174
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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