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.

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.

This chapter explores how anxieties about ‘loss’ influenced cultural heritage dynamics in post-colonial Indonesia. Following the perspective of various interested parties inside and outside Indonesia, it reveals how and why these parties, at different locations, developed different attitudes to the difficult pasts they all have been part of in various ways. Returning to Borobudur, the chapter revisits Dutch, Indonesian, Indian, Japanese, and international heritage engagements and appropriations of sites located in Indonesia in the period from the late 1920s well into the 1980s. It scrutinises the impact of post-war UNESCO politics and the Save Borobudur campaign in President Soeharto’s New Order Indonesia of the 1970s and 1980s on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at location. Numerous dynamic processes reveal the fragility of ownership of sites transforming into heritage across war and regime changes. Decolonisation stimulated strong emotional and moral passions for restoration, but Dutch post-colonial, inter-Asian, and international interests inflect Borobudur’s national Indonesian character.

This chapter explores biographies of Borobudur and other Hindu–Buddhist material remains of the past in Java in the context of widening knowledge networks, religious revivalism, and tourism from within and outside Java, which also stimulated the colonial state to institutionalise archaeological care and protection. Via the visit of King Chulalongkorn of Siam to Borobudur in 1896, and via the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900, it analyses the exchanges of knowledge and objects taking place there. It follows Borobudur’s Buddha statues and other Javanese Hindu–Buddhist objects travelling as gifts along with the king to Siam, where they transformed into objects of popular Buddhism and legitimation of Siam’s Buddhist dynasty. And it follows plaster casts of Borobudur reliefs to France and Britain, exploring parallel heritage dynamics, in Greater Dutch and Greater British Indian geographies. Thanks to the uncovered treasure of a guestbook of Borobudur (1888–1898), and the diary of a Javanese nobleman, they, moreover, broaden the social scope of Borobudur with site impressions of a growing number of visitors to Borobudur, from as far away as the United States and Australia, but also – and mostly – from Java.