Book contents
- Visions of Greater India
- Visions of Greater India
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Spelling
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Looking for India in Asia
- Part I The Knowledge Networks of Greater India
- 1 Shifting Horizons
- 2 Finding India in Southeast Asia
- 3 Transimperial Knowledge Networks and the Research Paradigm of Greater India
- 4 British India and the Quest for a New Orientalism
- 5 “Colonial Art” and the Reconfiguration of Aesthetic Space
- Conclusion to Part I: The Knowledge Networks of Greater India in the Postcolonial Era
- Part II The Interwar Politics of Greater India
- Bibliography
- Index
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
- Visions of Greater India
- Visions of Greater India
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Spelling
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Looking for India in Asia
- Part I The Knowledge Networks of Greater India
- 1 Shifting Horizons
- 2 Finding India in Southeast Asia
- 3 Transimperial Knowledge Networks and the Research Paradigm of Greater India
- 4 British India and the Quest for a New Orientalism
- 5 “Colonial Art” and the Reconfiguration of Aesthetic Space
- Conclusion to Part I: The Knowledge Networks of Greater India in the Postcolonial Era
- Part II The Interwar Politics of Greater India
- Bibliography
- Index
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.
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- Visions of Greater IndiaTransimperial Knowledge and Anti-Colonial Nationalism, c.1800–1960, pp. 71 - 94Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023