Chapter 12 - The Problem of Transregional Framing in Asian History : Charmed Knowledge Networks and Moral Geographies of “Greater India”

Summary

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, today's South and Southeast Asia have become part of scholarly and popular geographies that define the region as a single, superior, civilization with Hindu-Buddhist spiritual traits and its origins in India. These moral geographies of “Greater India” are still current in universities, museums, textbooks, and popular culture across the world. This chapter explores, for the period from the 1890s to the 1960s, how associational networks of scholars, intellectuals, and “Asian art” collectors, and of theosophists and Buddhist revivalists, linking Indonesia, mainland Asia, and the West helped shape these moral geographies and enabled the inclusion of predominantly Islamic Indonesia. It contributes to recent debates on the role of religion and affections in Orientalism, by starting from sites zooming in on knowledge exchange, and by analyzing object biographies, exploring the changing taxonomies, violence, and limits of cultural understanding as objects travel from their sites of origin to elsewhere in the world. It warns against pitfalls of transnational, “Oceanic” approaches to Asian history that focus on cultural flows – including the idea of Monsoon Asia itself – as these can exaggerate the region's cultural unity and, in doing so, reify the moral geographies of Greater India that the article interrogates.

Keywords: Greater India; Indonesia; transnational knowledge networks; Asian art; heritage; religion; affections; (post-)colonialism

Let us acknowledge it, let us feel that India is not confined in the Geography of India – and then we shall find our message from our part. India can live and grow by spreading abroad – not the political India, but the ideal India

Rabindranath Tagore, 1920

“Monsoon Asia” is only one of many possible ‘transregional’ frameworks to study South and Southeast Asia, that scholars have proposed in the course of the long twentieth century. Academic reasons these proposals may have had, they were and are all also political, and have political effects. In his Foreword to Revealing India's Past (1939), the famous French Sanskritist and expert on Buddhist iconography Alfred Foucher reflected on the trend of “Pacific Ocean” congresses that archaeologists had been organizing in Asia since the late 1920s.