Transcript: Sacred Pixels, Episode One

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Mahita Valluri: Hello, I’m Mahita Valluri, a research intern at Circumambulating Objects: Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art—or, for short, the CO-OP project, based in the School of Arts, at SOAS, University of London.  

Welcome to our podcast, “Sacred Pixels” a four-part series that aims to uncover the complexities of the British Library’s digitisation of the Yogyakarta Kraton Manuscripts. This podcast has been supported by the CO-OP team, which aims to explore the paradigms of restitution of Southeast Asian Art, exploring questions of ownership, collecting, replication and curatorial processes. Stay tuned, as we’ll soon be joined by the principal investigator, Professor Ashley Thompson and one of our core academic team members, doctoral candidate, Panggah Ardiyansyah, providing valuable insights into the heart of our compelling project.  

To give you some context before diving into the conversations with scholars and philologists, the British Library holds over 500 Indonesian manuscripts, of which 260 are from the island of Java, which is where the palace of Yogyakarta is located. These are a mix of palm-leaf and illuminated paper manuscripts that contain Javanese literature, dynastic histories and important diplomatic and political records. Some of these manuscripts in the British Library are commissioned copies of original manuscripts and gifts that were received by the colonial administrators stationed in Java, namely, Stamford Raffles, John Crawford and Thomas Mackenzie. However, a large portion of the collection came into the possession of the British colonial administration after their assault on the palace of Yogyakarta in the 19^th century, as spoils of war. The collection of this fragile and rich material has been inaccessible for the most part of the 20^th century.  

Amidst ongoing conversations of repatriation and decolonisation at the turn of the new century, the British Library pledged to make use of the new digital technology to democratise its collection. As of 2023, nearly 200 Javanese manuscripts have been meticulously digitised and these ancient manuscripts, which have always been out of reach for ordinary civilians like us, can now be accessed online almost effortlessly. In 2019, the British Library ceremoniously handed over the master copy of these newly digitised manuscripts to the Sultan of Yogyakarta, and, in the same year, the palace conducted a symposium to present how access to the manuscripts has enabled the restoration of old performance traditions and the development of a new chapter in the country’s historiography. However, it is important to note that the British Library is still in possession of the physical copies of these coveted manuscripts. Indonesian news sources have dubbed this transfer as a “digital return”, but the question of restitution remains. The lack of access to their own history is one of the primary reasons behind demands of restitution. Can digitisation, which makes ancient Javanese manuscripts virtually available to the contemporary Indonesian audience, then be seen as a means of restitution? What is the significance of the physicality of these manuscripts? What does it truly mean to digitally relocate a text? What is being revived when manuscripts are freed from their glass cases and dark archives? What is lost in this process? 

I ask these questions as a South Asian student of art history who deeply cares about liberating cultural artefacts from the grips of the memory of colonial violence. While repatriation of the object is an obvious and necessary start to the process of healing, it cannot be the end goal. It is our responsibility to prolong this conversation and look beyond the object and nation-state borders. This podcast is a carefully curated attempt at understand the British Library’s digitisation project and questioning the capacity of digital media tools to restitute not just culture, but also knowledge. This attempt is possible because of CO-OP’s initiative to make space for these important conversations.  

Thank you so much, Professor Ashley and Panggah, for this incredible opportunity. I am sure those tuning in to listen would love to hear more from you about CO-OP and its conception. What inspired this project and what are some goals you wish to achieve through it? 

Ashley Thompson: Thank you so much Mahita. I should first say that, and I think I speak for Panggah as well, that we are both honoured to have been able to take you on board. I’m, really impressed with the work you have done here and with the way that you took this small opportunity that we offered with CO-OP to make it your own. And to engage the thoughts and voices of so many people and really, really draw from that the sort of complex weave of restitution as a dynamic process today. It’s really, really interesting and really great to see you doing that on your own initiative. So thank you, thank you so much.  

I thought I could just say a little bit about what CO-OP is to sort of set this podcast and your interest here in the context of the larger project that we’re running. So, CO-OP stands for Circumambulating Objects: on Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art. It’s a project which is funded by the Getty Foundation through their Connecting Art Histories initiative. We are comprised of 15 people: academics, artists, museum professionals. We all share a research interest and for many a professional engagement with restitution in Southeast Asia. Our main activity are 10-day meetings that we hold annually for a period of three years. And we’ve just come out of our first year, our first ten-day meeting in Isan in northeast Thailand and our next session will be in Java. So your podcast is very, very informative for all of us, I think, as we begin to conceive the work we will be doing in Java. And then the following year, we will be working in Cambodia. And each year we focus on a particular theme. So, this year it was on the theme of circulation, circumambulation. We’ll then be looking at practises and perceptions of object replication, obviously related in some way to the digital restitution question, looking at questions of ownership and authenticity. And then our final year, we’ll be looking at practices of display. The overarching bid being that we are looking at what we’ve deemed rather problematically, but nonetheless we’ve done it, local epistemologies underpinning restitution, around those particular themes. So I hope you can see, and I hope that your listeners will be able to see, how the very deep questions that you’ve been asking about this particular project with the British Library and digital restitution of manuscripts, often sacred manuscripts, how that really opens out onto many of the larger themes that we’re asking. So, each year we spend a few days discussing the selection of publications or discussing other types of interventions in and on these themes, and then we spend a few days working with colleagues and other professionals in the field, visiting sites that are pertinent to the topic. So, this can be archaeological sites, this can be museums, it can be libraries, various contemporary religious communities, artist studios, this sort of thing.  

We just concluded our recent 10-day session in Thailand, and I wanted to just sort of reflect on a key point that I took away from our Thailand trips. Many interesting things were there, but one key point I thought might be a bit pertinent to thinking the specificity of your project here. And that was that the very term restitution can take on a very different meaning in a Thai context from the way in which I generally use the term and the way in which I have generally understood it. And that is for me the term restitution conjures up international relations, right? And that’s certainly at the heart of your project here. So, restitution conjures up these international relations where objects which have left a home—in scare quotes, perhaps—but which have left a home nation, have been illegally or unethically whisked across international borders, and then they’re restituted back home again, again crossing international borders. In many quarters in Thailand today, the term restitution—the term is kun or tan kun, “to seek restitution”—it doesn’t evoke for many people international dislocation or international relocation, but instead it evokes dislocation prevention from provincial sites to central ones, and then, of course, return from the central sites to provincial sites. So these can be provincial archaeological sites in relationship to Bangkok or it can be from local Buddhist temples in relationship to provincial museums. So that international, what I think of as a colonial or even a neocolonial, tension that the term restitution evokes generally, for me, operates otherwise in Thailand on very different scales. So it operates between different centres and their peripheries. So, of course, Thailand wasn’t colonised, and we see the centre in Thailand, Bangkok or its emanations, and provincial sort of national museums, effectively takes the place of the coloniser in this context, where you have these peripheral voices within the nation state calling for restitution home. And for me that was really a lesson that the consideration of object circulation can take on radically different meanings, not just in different religious context, but due to the very specificities in the emergence of collecting in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is playing out still today.  

So I was really pleased in listening to the podcast to see how you brought out the specificities of the Javanese case and the Javanese case in relationship to the British Library and the British Library has its own specificities in this relationship to this case. So, it brings out the complexities and it points to shared concerns across the sort of larger horizon of restitution, but really sort of pulls us down to the ground and says this is what’s going on here with this case. I was really pleased…I’m sure this is due not only to your brilliance, Mahita, and to your energy, your determination, your capacity to learn, but also to Panggah, to Panggah Ardiyansyah who you introduced a moment ago, who was clearly he was our point person from the CO-OP team on this internship and he really, I think, paved the way for you and supported you throughout. And I feel like the two of you have really pulled together a range of Indonesian voices here. I feel like it speaks to that case, and it speaks to restitution writ large. I feel like that play between materiality and immateriality, which is already operating in a manuscript text, right? It’s both object and content. That play becomes amplified in what has been termed digital restitution and the two of you…it just resonates out into all that we’re doing with CO-OP, and your participants have really demonstrated how restitution is not about objects, per se, and it’s not even only about knowledge. If you think, OK, it’s not just about the material object and it’s not just about the knowledge, you’ve really demonstrated that it’s about a dynamic process that allows for the constituting of critical communities, and that seems really wonderful to me. I feel like your podcast is has contributed to that building of a critical community. So really hats off to you all, and I really, really thank you for your work on this. I’d like to ask Panggah to speak a little bit about the work from his point of view as both someone engaged with it, but also someone who just facilitated it and let you take his lead. 

Panggah Ardiyansyah: Thank you, Ashley, and also thank you, Mahita, for doing the hard work, the great work in publishing the podcast. So, I guess I just want to highlight that when he came to us in CO-OP with this project, proposes this project. I guess what we try to develop together with her is that the main idea or the main objective would be to shape the purpose of the discourse by recentering the conversation around the British Library’s digitisation of Yogyakarta manuscripts, recentering that on Indonesian voices, as you said, or, in the sense, also engagement with local epistemologies, which is the primary aim of the CO-OP project as well. And also around the question around the locality of conversations. How we define localities, how we define local values, indigenous values and more and to see how this digitisation project that happened in London has affected people on the other side of the world, on the crown in Yogyakarta, also more importantly, the dialogue between the two localities here between London and Yogyakarta in and around the ideas of digital repatriation. So, we hope that these aims are being reflected through the selection of the guests that we have in the podcast, and also the conversation that Mahita had with each of them in the episodes. And hopefully they can also engender new conversations from these issues and that most important of all is that hopefully the audience will enjoy the podcast, hearing it, and by hearing it, can produce new networks, new engagements with the manuscript in question, but also with issues in and around object restitutions, whether it is digitally or physically. So yeah, I guess that’s something that is hopefully projected through the podcast that’s been produced. 

MV: Thank you so much Ashley and Panggah. And I completely agree with you, I hope that these episodes become part of a larger network on this conversation and on the idea of restitution as well. I hope that it keeps building over and over because for us to put this together, we relied on the work that was made by other researchers before. So that is the aim that all of us have, and I hope that our audience enjoy these episodes and take something from them. Thank you so much. 

AT: Thank you.