3 - Transimperial Knowledge Networks and the Research Paradigm of Greater India

Summary

The Indic orientation that informed the nineteenth-century scholarly engagement with the ancient cultural heritage of the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina translated, under the impetus of colonial archaeology and Indology, in a more coordinated and systematic approach to the study of Southeast Asia’s past. This chapter explores the French-Dutch transimperial knowledge network of ‘Greater India’. It discusses the Indological study-trips undertaken by French and Dutch scholars to India, maps the institutional cooperation and exchanges that synchronized research agendas in Hanoi and Batavia, and critically probes the role of the Leiden school inaugurated by Hendrik Kern and the French strand of indianisme epitomized in Sylvain Lévi’s academic oeuvre, in energizing visions of Greater India. In the French and Dutch sphere, Indology came to imply a much broader research agenda, both in geographical scope and interdisciplinary content, than in Germany and Britain. European Indology was a highly differentiated field of studies, and colonial trajectories and a nation’s cultural politics vis-à-vis India translated in different research priorities.