Conclusion to Part I: The Knowledge Networks of Greater India in the Postcolonial Era

Summary

As the previous chapters have demonstrated, the notion of Greater India has a long prehistory but is primarily a legacy of the knowledge production momentum that climaxed in the 1920s and early 1930s. In the postwar era, a rapidly shifting geopolitical scenario undermined the transimperial knowledge networks that had energized this field of scholarship. A long-drawn out and atrocious decolonization process saw the Dutch East Indies transformed into Indonesia (adding the Greek suffix “nesia” to make this another version of the “Indian Islands”) and French Indochina birthing the states of Cambodia, Laos and a divided Vietnam. As colonial archaeological surveys were reorganized along national lines, a few Dutch and French scholars continued to play an important role in the process of transition. In the Indonesian case, Bernet Kempers headed the nationalized Djawatan Poerbakala Repoeblik Indonesia Serikat (Archaeological Service of the United States of Indonesia) until he was succeeded, in 1953, by the Javanese archaeologist R. Soekmono.¹ In Cambodia, Henri Marchal remained deeply involved with the research and conservation efforts at Angkor. He eventually retired in the vicinity of Angkor’s archaeological complex where he passed away, in 1970, at the ripe old age of 93.