colonizing country who became interested in antiquities as a socially accepted
and prestigious way to understand the present, and who also looked to
position themselves as the holders of the true knowledge. As in the West, in
Indonesia the main institutions involved in the study of antiquities were the
societies and the museum. They emulated in structure, and even in physical
appearance (in the case of the museum fac ̧ade), those of Europe and through-
out the nineteenth century went through a similar period of specialization.
Also, as in Europe, the attention focused on the monuments of the ancient
Great Civilizations, which in Dutch Indonesia had been produced by Hindus
(Prambanan) and Buddhists (Borobudur). Finally, The Netherlands were also
touched by one of the great instigators of institutionalism: imperialist com-
petition, which mainly aVected the organization of antiquities in the early
twentieth century. Local scholars such as Raden Saleh, or local politicians
such as King Rama V, were able to challenge this imposition of knowledge,
but the extent to which they did this is an area that will beneWt from further
study.
ANCIENT MONUMENTS AND RACE IN BRITISH INDIABritain’s arrival in Southeast Asia can be traced back to 1600, when the English
East India Company was formed. The transition from a mercantile power to a
territorial one was propitiated in 1765 by the appointment of the company as
revenue manager by the Mughal emperor. After the Indian mutiny in 1858,
almost a century after the East India Company had established itself as a
territorial power, the subcontinent became a formal colony of the British
Empire. Britain would rule India for one more century until 1947. From the
eighteenth century, therefore, knowledge of the subjects of British India
was deemed essential, and it is in this context that Britain’s sponsorship of the
study of the culture, history and language of India should be understood.
However, despite a certain degree of hybridization (Dalrymple 2002) and
the use of pandits (Dodson 2002), historical knowledge did not include
the indigenous traditions among its avenues for studying the past (Paddayya
1995: 112–19). The study of Hindustani and Bengali, the two most common
languages spoken in British India during the eighteenth century, took
scholars to their ancient source, Sanskrit (Trautmann 1997: 31). Mastering
Sanskrit also became imperative in order for the colonizers to become
proWcient in the legal customs and laws of the country. In India British Sans-
kritists learned Sanskrit with the pandits, being in this way inXuenced by
Indian scholarship (ibid. 32). They were also able to read the mytho-historical
222 Colonial Archaeology