Transcript: Sacred Pixels, Episode Two

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Mahita Valluri: What is lost when a manuscript is digitised? What does it mean to digitally relocate a text? Is the digital colonial archive reinstating colonial hierarchies that determine what is knowledge and who can produce it? Professor Verena Meyer is joining us today from Leiden University to explore the materiality of the manuscript and the idea of a digital return. In today’s episode, we will be focusing on what it means to digitize the colonial archive and the consequences that stem from this process. Thank you so much for accepting the invitation to speak on this podcast, Verena. We are very grateful. We would like to get to know you and your positionality in this field, so over to you now to introduce yourself.

Verena Meyer: Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s a real pleasure to be here and to share some of my research with you. And so, I am a scholar of Islam in Southeast Asia, especially in Java, and I’ve sort of always approached my field both as an anthropologist, as somebody who is really interested in contemporary processes as they are going on on the ground, and in manuscripts and other things that are left over from the past. But not only what these manuscripts say, what texts they transmit to us, but also what kind of meaning, what kind of significance they have as a text, but also as a product, as an artifact, as a material object. So, yeah, I’m kind of approaching this from both an ethnographic and a textual perspective. I think manuscripts are just so rich for this kind of approach because they are, well, both texts and material objects, right? So, this is basically me. This is my approach.

MV: That is such an interesting approach, and I’m really excited to get into this conversation with you. Having digital manuscripts is a very new phenomenon, at least for me. While I was putting this project together, I haven’t seen a manuscript in person. I relied heavily on the digitised manuscripts on the British Library’s website. I think the British Library kind of stood firm on their promise of providing free and global access to knowledge, because that’s exactly how I got to know about these manuscripts, about Java, and what’s written in them as well. What is your understanding of this drive to preserve and make manuscripts available digitally, and how is it received in the scholarly field, especially in history and kindred disciplines?

VM: Yeah, that’s such a good question. I kind of had to chuckle when you said that you never saw a manuscript in real life, you only saw it digitally because that’s exactly my situation too. I think we’re probably the first generation of scholars who had that approach to manuscripts—that we went a pretty long way before we actually saw a physical manuscript. For me, it’s actually the case that when I see the real manuscript, I’m like, How can anybody read this? This is so small. Because of course if you have a digital manuscript, you can just zoom in as far as you want. So yeah, I personally have tremendously benefited from digitisation, and not just me. I mean, as a scholar who works on Indonesia in Southeast Asia, I can’t even count how many times people there have told me, I would really like to access these texts, but they’re all in Europe. They’re all in the Netherlands and in the UK and elsewhere, and I just can’t afford to go there. It’s just too expensive, and then who knows if I’m even going to find the right thing? So, there was a real gap, a real barrier to accessing these sources, which for a lot of people in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, are part of their heritage. So, I mean obviously digitisation is a very good thing for that sort of thing. And I think in the scholarly field, a lot of people are very happy about the fact that they don’t have to travel anymore—very often, that’s very expensive. Many of us are also conscious about our carbon footprint, so being able to access things online just kind of mitigates a lot of these issues. I would say both in Indonesia in the field as I have encountered it and in the scholarly community, there really is broad consensus that digitisation is a very good thing.

Now that being said, there are also some issues, right? And some of them have already been addressed many times. So, for example, let’s say we digitise a text located somewhere in Europe and then it goes on some hard drive on some server and then the question is who owns the data, right? And who gets to decide what goes up, what doesn’t go up, what gets digitised in the first place? All of these questions. So, when you kind of go one step back and look at the processes of digitisation themselves then there are kind of the same problems with power and deciding who gets to access what that we already had beforehand, even though obviously digitisation is a step in the right direction. Then, kind of related to that, the question of who owns the knowledge, right? I mean I know that, for example, a lot of Indonesians would be reluctant to share their knowledge and expertise when they have the sense that really all that does is to reconfirm certain Western institutions as a center of power. Then, a third question that I am especially interested in is, well, when we digitize manuscripts what we see is the text especially or certain other information like the script and maybe the illustrations. Maybe if we are really schooled, we can sort of see what kind of paper is used. But what about the materiality of the manuscript? That’s kind of something that we can’t digitize, right? This is something that I’m very interested in: what are the limits of digitization and how do these limits play out among people?

MV: Yeah, and digital archives kind of work on this assumption that everybody has access to Internet and a device to browse these digitised manuscripts on. And that’s usually not the case. There’s also a language barrier that is active in the form of the transcriptions and the information that is additionally provided along with the manuscript on the websites that feature these digitised manuscripts that most people aren’t able to access. But in this conversation, I would like to focus on the British Library’s digital archive of the Yogyakarta manuscripts. As you know, the collection was accumulated by British officers as loot, after the palace fell in 1812. What kind of manuscripts were they most interested [in] for their collections? And did those manuscripts have a special significance? To what extent does the looted archive inform us of Javanese culture and society before the 19th century, if it does at all?

VM: Yeah, yeah, this is also a really interesting question. So, when it comes to the specific case of the raid of the Yogyakarta Kraton in 1812, it actually looks like the three people who were doing the raiding—Raffles, Crawford, and Mackenzie—they seem to have been pretty indiscriminate. They seem to have been, you know, just taking whatever. I’m sure they were interested in what they were taking, but they only left behind three books as far as we know. Or, after the raid, three books were there. We know that at least one was given to a different ruler, so there may have been more redistribution going on, but at any rate, after the raid, there were three books left at the Yogyakarta Kraton. Those three, one was an illuminated Qur’an manuscript, one was a chronicle type thing, and the third was a version of an old Javanese epic. It’s not really clear why of all the books that they have taken, they would have left behind these three. It’s a bit of a mystery, but I can tell you a little more broadly what the colonial collectors were usually interested in. By and large, when they were raiding libraries or when they were purchasing manuscripts, what they were especially interested in was literary texts, so both Javanese and Malay literary texts. Also things like chronicles, epics, poetry, that sort of thing. What they were not interested in was typically Islamic sources. So, I mean it sort of makes sense that they didn’t take the Qur’an, I guess, though it was beautifully illuminated, that was something they did like again, but it definitely doesn’t make sense that they didn’t take the other two manuscripts. As far as I know, nobody has ever ventured to guess why these three were left behind, but yeah, that’s kind of the situation with the Yogyakarta Palace.

As for your other question, what it tells us about manuscripts and literary production and imagination in the early 19th and 18th century and beforehand. The thing is because the collectors had these preferences that they wanted to take…you know that they kind of marginalized the Islamic sources and really focused on the epics and the literary texts, it kind of gave us the impression for a long time that this was just what was there, right? But now that there are certain programs in Southeast Asia to digitise texts that are still in place, we actually see that most of them are Islamic and that was just not something that the colonial collectors were interested in. So, actually, we get a bit of a skewed picture by these collections.

MV: And what I understand from my research is that some of the things that ended up in the British Library were also copies of original manuscripts that were commissioned by Crawford or Raffles. So, they’re not original manuscripts, most of them, right? What happens when we have copies of illuminated manuscripts to rely on to study about Javanese culture and manuscript tradition?

VM: Well, actually, literary production and textuality, or writing, the idea of what it means to write something, the idea of what it meant to be an author, was a little different in traditional Java than it is for us today. So, you’re right that a lot of the colonial collectors actually commissioned texts, and especially at the end of the 19th century, it was a huge Industry actually because, especially the Dutch, they were so avid to collect manuscripts that a lot of people were working for them and copying manuscripts for them. But I mean, the copying of manuscripts, that was something that happened in the traditional Javanese context as well. Writing a book didn’t necessarily mean that you wrote something from scratch. Sometimes it could mean that you took something that was already there and wrote it, sometimes with some changes, sometimes relatively faithful to the original. The idea that you wrote it, we can’t imagine this being like plagiarism, for example, as we would think of today, but rather as a way to take something that was already there and actualize it again in a new context. So yeah, I wouldn’t worry so much about the copying itself. But, of course, we do have to ask, what did it do to these texts or what did the writers, the scribes, do with the texts when they copied it, specifically for the colonial collectors, where there’s certain things that were changed because they thought this is what the collectors would want? Yeah, I’m not really sure. This is something that I haven’t looked into as much, but maybe somebody else has.

MV: Previously, you mentioned that the colonial collectors did not really seek specific manuscripts, but rather collected those that intrigued them. But in the Yogyakarta collection, there is a pattern because some of the key manuscripts that were looted were the dynastic histories which were richly illuminated with Kraton motifs and they had a cosmological significance for the Javanese, who believed in the devaraja, or the God King ideology. There’s this theory that taking these manuscripts that documented the divine authority destabilised the Kraton and sort of, you know, gave power to the colonial authorities. Can you comment on how the locals reacted to this colonial collecting practice of the Europeans?

VM: Ah, yeah, good question. Yeah, I think there we really have to differentiate between what was going on for the colonisers and what was going on for the Javanese. Now, as for the colonisers, yeah, I think this is a really important question. Why did they take manuscripts in the first place, right? What was it about manuscripts? Why was it that they were so hungry for manuscripts that they would raid libraries over it or sometimes they would buy copies from forgers…there was just such a hunger for these manuscripts. And this was, at the same time, a moment in history when in Europe, in the West, manuscripts or handwritten texts became less important because print was becoming more prominent. So, what was it about manuscripts that made them so desirable in the eyes of the colonisers? And I think, there you are right that it sort of had this destabilising element. Because, okay, if we take all the books, then we kind of can know everything about you. We can study these books and then we can produce this knowledge and then we can say that we are the experts on your history. And if you rewrite the history, then yes, I mean this is most definitely destabilising because history is always written with a particular agenda in mind, and it’s not objective. So the colonial histories—and I think this is well-documented all over the colonised world—were always sort of written with the intent to justify colonisation. I think this definitely happened here as well. I think another thing that was going on too was that—and we can talk about this more in a moment—that books, manuscripts, and many other things weren’t just neutral objects in the eyes of traditional Javanese libraries or librarians, but they had a particular kind of power, right? And of course, the colonisers didn’t quite share that view about what books were and what manuscripts could do. But by taking them and then by just regarding them as a dead object that would provide some sort of information, that was also a kind of epistemic violence where they could say, See we’re taking these objects and we can just do whatever with them. We study them and look nothing happens.

MV: And that brings me to my next question. Like you said, manuscripts have been treated as dead objects in museums and during exhibitions in libraries where they’re stuck on the same page, and none of us are able to access this text or handle the manuscript because they’re frozen behind a glass case. But what digital archives have made possible is they’ve broadened this sight of touch back to the manuscript, where now we can zoom in and read the text. It’s made the manuscript more accessible by providing transcripts, translations, and other tools that enable us to read and understand the contents of the manuscript. So, how significant or relevant is the physicality of the manuscript when its textual function is far easier for researchers to approach on a virtual site?

VM: This is something that is not the same everywhere, and that has also changed a fair amount. By and large, [and] this is not just the case in Java but it’s really the case in Indonesia more broadly and perhaps even all of Southeast Asia, letters and writing texts are not just agents of information. They can actually do things. They have a power, not just in the sense that you read something and then you feel really motivated or you feel really moved and then the text moves you to do something. No. It’s much more direct, this kind of power. I’ll give you an example of a field research experience that I had. One way in which letters become especially powerful is when they are used, for example, in talismans to protect or to bind somebody to something, to make invincible, to make stronger, and so on. They can also be used as a way to attack people or to make them more vulnerable. One thing that happened to me was that a girl shared with me the story that an older, very creepy man slipped into her bag a note that made her attracted to him, right? And the spell only broke at the moment when coincidentally the note fell out of her bag, the spell was broken, and she was free again. This is really something that is still used, that is still very real in contemporary Indonesia. As for manuscripts, manuscripts are often considered to be especially powerful because manuscripts have often a long history. Even if they are copied at some point and maybe even changed in the process, there’s still this textual genealogy that connects you with a past and sort of harnesses this power and knowledge of the past and actualises it in the present. Or the physical object has been copied and then read by all sorts of people and all of their power and knowledge also attaches to their text and then becomes accessible to you. I have a friend, he’s a Western researcher and he was in a Royal Palace library in Java just a few years ago. The librarians were like, So when you read this, do you want somebody to sit with you, just so you don’t get scared or, you know, in case there’s an unsafe situation? And he was completely confused; he was like, why would there be an unsafe situation? This is a library. Are you going to let loose some sort of wild animals or something? Then only later, he understood. Yes, of course, some of these texts are quite potent and who knows? I mean, you have to be quite strong yourself in order to deal with them. Sometimes you even hear stories of people who go crazy because they dealt with manuscripts, other objects, who were stronger than they were. And, if you do that, then yeah, bad things can happen.

MV: That makes sense when you think about the fact that most manuscripts weren’t written to be read, but to be listened to or performed like wayang or a song performance or a poetry recital. During my research, I kind of came across this term pusaka being associated with royal manuscripts. Can you explain briefly what this designation means and what becomes of a manuscript when it is termed or associated with the word pusaka? And what do we, as researchers, make of the fact that most of these manuscripts were not meant to be accessed by everyone because they were a part of the Kraton’s pusaka and they were meant to be exclusive not just for non-native researchers like us, but also for a lot of local Javanese people who weren’t allowed to access these manuscripts?

VM: So, manuscripts that were pusaka weren’t really read by anybody. They really, really weren’t written to be read. If they were read by anybody, it was the king and only on very special occasions, and only under the strictest ceremonial protocol. But yeah, so pusaka generally, not just manuscripts, but they can be all sorts of things. Weapons like daggers or spears are very often pusaka or musical instruments at the court in in Solo, in Surakarta, there has been an albino water buffalo who was a pusaka. So all sorts of different objects, and their function is precisely what a lot of manuscripts are already thought to be doing, namely to sort of transport the power and knowledge of the past and also the legitimacy of previous rulers into the present, to connect past and present with each other, and to sort of project it into the future is something that this physical object is going to be here. We’re going to care for it and it’s going to last into the future. And in doing so, it’s going to protect our dynasty. These are objects that are usually locked away, and that would only be taken out under very particular circumstances, only by very particular people. And so, the question is, are we allowed to digitise these pusaka that weren’t really supposed to be read by anybody? A lot of people think, No, and I think this is actually also a question that a lot of librarians are very aware of. There are two conflicting goods, right? On the one hand, there is this idea that we want to make this heritage accessible, that we want to make it accessible to people whose heritage it is, who consider it theirs. And then there’s the other side that, well, this is not really how they were intended to be treated in the first place. So, I think, this is a discussion that for many librarians is going on, and I don’t want to say that this is not something that they think about because I think a lot of them really are. When we see the final product—that it’s either digitized or not—a lot of thought has gone into that. But yeah, this is definitely a debate that’s going on right now. The question of what to do with pusaka manuscripts. On the one hand, you have the fact that even for pusaka manuscripts, there’s a lot of broad support in Indonesia or elsewhere that they should be digitised, that they should be made accessible, but then you also have critics. One other problem is that when you digitise these manuscripts, isn’t this participating in a kind of epistemic violence? Just kind of imposing that view that these are texts to be read—isn’t that a kind of epistemic violence to these texts, whether there’s broad support or not?

MV: I think there’s a lot of ethical consideration that goes into this and I don’t think, you know, we’re focused on finding an answer yet. I think it’s a long process, but I feel like, at least for me, having that in mind goes a long way. You’re more sensitive to what you put out in the world and how you treat the object and the text. So, I think it’s good that librarians and scholars are asking these questions as well. I also want to talk about the crux of our podcast: looking at, you know, repatriation or return, digital returns of these manuscripts. The Yogyakarta manuscripts were completely digitized in 2019 by the British Library, as you know, and the master copy of these manuscripts were presented by the British Ambassador for Indonesia to the Sultan of Yogyakarta in 2019. A lot of Indonesian local news sources termed this process as a return of their culture. What are your thoughts on digital returns and what is actually being returned?

VM: So, if you follow the logic of what I just said earlier to its conclusion, that what matters is not so much the text, but what matters is just the materiality of the manuscript itself, then, of course, there wouldn’t be a return, right? But it’s not as easy as that either because, of course, the materiality was important, but for a lot of manuscripts it also mattered what was written in it. Not every manuscript was the kind of pusaka that was always stored away, and that was never allowed to be touched. I think that we shouldn’t think of pusaka or non-pusaka as so much of a binary as a spectrum. Many texts are kind of a grey zone. I mean, some are most definitely not a pusaka, and they have no particular power attached to them, otherwise you could never throw away a newspaper. But there’s a grey zone of a lot of texts that have information in them that is important, but that are also maybe considered to have a power, [though] maybe not quite as powerful as some other texts, or that are considered pusaka by some, but not necessarily by everybody. So, there’s sort of a broad spectrum, right? But at any rate, there’s also a big range of texts that are read with particular information in mind. So when this digital return occurred, one of the things that happened in the context of these celebrations was a symposium that was framed specifically as an occasion where some of the knowledge that had been lost in Yogyakarta Kraton was going to be recovered by people giving papers or analyzing these manuscripts that have been away and that were now accessible again. If you look at it from the viewpoint of accessing knowledge and being able to revive this intellectual tradition that was completely ruptured at the time when all of these manuscripts were taken, then yes, I think the language of the digital return makes sense. I also don’t want to say that when the Indonesian media talk about a digital return, it’s just wrong because in one sense, yes, it is a return. This knowledge is being made accessible again, and this intellectual tradition is being revived. So yes, it is a return in one sense. But then on the other hand, when we look at the materiality, we also do know that a lot of the people in the environment of the Royal Court have the sense that, yes, the intellectual tradition is revived, but the materiality is still missing and so would still probably be very interested in getting the manuscripts back.

MV: This last question that I wanted to ask you comes from a very personal place. As somebody who’s newly getting into this field, what I wanted to ask you was what kind of questions you ask yourself when you’re working with textual material? What do you think are some questions that aren’t asked often or some questions that you wish that people who are newly getting into the field ask themselves?

VM: So, this is a question based on an observation which is that I think we shouldn’t think of the materiality of manuscripts as something that, in my case, is only important to Indonesians, and for us, it’s just a matter of, Well, as long as we have the text and as long as we have the information, that’s really all we need. Because I mean, if that were the case, once the manuscripts are digitized, we could say, Well, now that we have it, we can just return it. But by and large, this isn’t happening. Of course this has a lot of reasons, but I think one of the reasons is that for us too, there’s something about the materiality that is just kind of bigger and more important than just having access to the information. I’ll tell you a person story…I was in London last May and I went to the British Library and the Yogyakarta manuscripts were on display. This is the collection that was already completely digitized. I saw it there in the glass case. I was completely awed. I was like, Wow, this is the real thing. So, there was almost this, this moment of religious awe like, I can’t believe that I’m finally seeing them in real life. And then the funny thing is, what did I do? I took out my phone and started to take pictures, which is, of course, completely silly because all of the texts have already been digitized. If I wanted a digital print, which is what I was producing with my phone, I could just go to the website and access it from there. It’s a lot better quality than whatever I can come up with with my phone, but I didn’t. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. I just took a few pictures of it, and I still have them. So, I think one question that we need to ask ourselves going forward is what the materiality of manuscripts actually means for us. And I think we have to be honest about that, and we have to really think about that because we cannot just reduce this question to a matter of, Oh, you know, look at these people who are so interested in the materiality and don’t they understand that it doesn’t matter. I think we just shouldn’t be making a binary where perhaps there is none. I think the idea that there is something really important about the original manuscript, that’s something that’s very close to us as well. We need to ask ourselves what exactly that is. It’s probably not the same as it is in Southeast Asia, but it is also there, it’s also important. I think if we have clarity about that and if we’re transparent about that, that would also open a way to a much fairer exchange and debate about what possibilities there are.

And the second thing is, one thing that I would really like to do research on going forward is whether it really is the case that the digital copy has none of that material magic than the original has. I mean, take my example, you know, I see the manuscript and I take out my phone and take a picture. I still have those pictures and somehow cherish it—saving it, cherishing it, sometimes looking at it and being like, This is where I was, and this is what I saw. I’m wondering to what extent this is happening more broadly that when people all over, Indonesians or others, access these digital copies, is it really just a matter of, There’s a text that I can read or is it something else? I’ve been told by librarians, for example, who were involved in digitization projects that sometimes at the end, before they upload it, if it’s a religious text, a practitioner of the religious tradition comes in and blesses the hard drive. So, there we see that there is some re-enchantment event going on, perhaps. And I’d be really interested in seeing what other processes of re-enchantment are perhaps going on the ground, how these digital images are used by people in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

MV: Thank you so much. I think those are some great questions and they help in paving the way and making space for new multidisciplinary collaborations and research in this field. And I’m really looking forward to that and looking forward to what is further explored as we look at digital archives and measure their impact on people around the world who are trying to access them. On that note, I would like to end our conversation here. Thank you so much for the great valuable insights and good luck with your research. Thank you so much.

VM: Thank you so much for all your great questions and I’m really looking forward to the next episodes as well. Thank you.