Indonesia as part of Greater India?

 If we look to the study of Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (1996), we can see Indonesia, together with Malaysia in one  of the seven civilizations: Islamic. There have been and are different classifications. From its name alone Indonesia means 'Insular India', and the word Insulinde was also for some time used as a name for Indonesia. If we visit the Louvre Museum of Paris, Metropolitan Museum of New York, but also Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: there is no place for Indonesian art in the Islamic section (also not in the new building, the tent-shaped section of the Louvre), but much can be seen  amongst Indian art. 

The Dutch (KITLV) scholar Marijke Bloembergen recently published a long article on The politics Greater India, a moral geography (in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 63 (2021), 170-211), where she starts with the foundation in 1926 in Calcutta of the Greater India Society with Rabindranath Tagore as the great star. The idea has been promoted also by Michael Wood in his famous quote: 'History is full of empires of the sword, but India alone created an empire of the spirit'.  The idea that there was once a 'colonial' empire from India, which caused the spread of Indian religions, Buddhism and Hinduism in Southeast Asia, from Thayland to Indonesia, this idea has proved to be not true. There was, however, in literature, in religious art a very refined and elaborate tradition also in Indonesia, since the 4th-5th centuries (Dieng), culminating in the Buddhist Borobudur and the Hindu Prambanan temples of the 8th century. Visiting the museums mentioned above we can now enjoy master pieces of Indonesian products as well, that can be called fruits of the Greater India. Their arrival in Europe and America nowadays is also called roofkunst or 'robbery, plunder'. Bloembergen has a large number of cases where some 43 out of the 504 great statues of the Buddhha have disappeared, mostly through people connected to the colonial elite. Recently a Dutch report was written: 'Colonial Collection and the Recognition of Injustice', with the promise that much of these should be sent back to the country where they were stolen, with one Von Saher as an intriguing example.

While reading this interesting article on the idea of Greater India, between 1890-1960s, I was also thinking about the decline of wayang theatre, where Muslim also celebrated holidays with the performance of parts of the epic stories of Mahabharata and Ramayana. Much of this was also practised by outspoken Muslim leaders like Diponegoro. Also the first President Soekarno like to mention the heroes of the Indian epic stories for his mostly Muslim audience. Therefore I like to show here an image, given to me in 1983 by my former colleague Dr. Abdurrahman of the UIN Sunan Kalijaga of Yogyakarta. It is the tree of life, painted on buffalo leather, the symbol opening the wayang performances. But here we see the confession faith: Ashhadtu an la ilaha illa Allah, wa ashhadtu anna Muhammadan Rasulu Allahi. This Islamic university tried to stimulate students to read classical Javanese texts where we  can see this Islamic use of Hindu art tradition, like its founder did, Sunan Kalijaga. In 2015 there was a movement trying to strengthen this way of a distinct Indonesian Islamic spirituality, labelled as Islam Nusantara. It has always been my dream that something like this combination shoud be continued and elaborated.