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2 - Finding India in Southeast Asia

Early Indocentric Approaches

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

This chapter zooms in on the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century quest to find India in Southeast Asia. Following a brief discussion of early European cartographic labels that anticipated the Greater India concept, the chapter examines the oeuvres of pioneering figures who energized the quest for the ancient past in Java/Cambodia, including the British amateur scholars-cum-administrators Stamford Raffles, Colin Mackenzie and John Crawfurd, the architectural historian James Fergusson, and the French explorers Henri Mouhot and Louis Delaporte. The early study of the Hindu-Buddhist templescapes of Angkor, Borobudur and Prambanan was characterized by a strong Indocentric approach which postulated an ‘Indic’ Golden Age of cultural and artistic sophistication. This argument denied or downplayed Javanese and Khmer artistic agency and fed into a broader civilizational critique which framed the remainder of Javanese/Khmer history as a long story of decline, and the departure from classical ‘Indic’ standards as artistic degeneration.

Type
Chapter
Information
Visions of Greater India
Transimperial Knowledge and Anti-Colonial Nationalism, c.1800–1960
, pp. 71 - 94
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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