In this chapter, I analyze the Balinese reception of a major exhibition featuring Balinese royal regalia obtained during the Dutch colonial conquest. This analysis allows me to tease out the correlations that my interlocutors make between the looted objects and their own Balinese presence in contemporary Dutch society. I argue that Balinese interpretative understandings of Balinese-Dutch historical connectivities generate specific knowledge production about ‘shared cultural heritage’. The heritage I talk about here is one that differs from that of Dutch policymakers’ conception of ‘shared heritage’ but also from interpretations that might be found in an exclusively Balinese context. In other words, I argue that Balinese subaltern citizens take on colonial dynamics and notions of heritage developed by the Dutch to create their own positionality in post-colonial Dutch society.

The exhibition entitled Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past held in De Nieuwe Kerk (the New Church) in Amsterdam from December 2005 to April 2006 was the result of a co-operative endeavour between the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden (RMV) and the National Museum in Jakarta (MNI) as part of a broader project entitled Shared Cultural Heritage. Most of the material displayed had initially been in the possession of the Batavian Society Museum (located in present-day Jakarta), but it was divided in the early twentieth century – one part stayed in Indonesia while the other was sent to the Leiden Museum of Ethnology. The 2005-2006 exhibition was the first time since the colonial period that the collection, featuring predominantly Hindu-Buddhist objects, had been brought together. The exhibition organizers insisted on the importance of the ‘shared cultural heritage’ as an identity that needed to be safeguarded. In so insisting, however, they problematically presumed that the array of cultural forms that existed in the colonial empire were harmonious and used this presumption to try to promote that diversity as a model for facilitating cultural tolerance in the Netherlands (something that has been dramatically eroding in recent times). Interestingly, unlike previous exhibitions about Indonesia in the Netherlands (most of which had focused primarily on the artistic or ethnographic value of the objects collected during colonial times), this exhibition offered a detailed explanation of the predominately violent context in which the objects were collected, using the term ‘colonial wars’ (Ter Keurs 2005: 35).