This chapter zooms in on the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century quest to find India in Southeast Asia. Following a brief discussion of early European cartographic labels that anticipated the Greater India concept, the chapter examines the oeuvres of pioneering figures who energized the quest for the ancient past in Java/Cambodia, including the British amateur scholars-cum-administrators Stamford Raffles, Colin Mackenzie and John Crawfurd, the architectural historian James Fergusson, and the French explorers Henri Mouhot and Louis Delaporte. The early study of the Hindu-Buddhist templescapes of Angkor, Borobudur and Prambanan was characterized by a strong Indocentric approach which postulated an ‘Indic’ Golden Age of cultural and artistic sophistication. This argument denied or downplayed Javanese and Khmer artistic agency and fed into a broader civilizational critique which framed the remainder of Javanese/Khmer history as a long story of decline, and the departure from classical ‘Indic’ standards as artistic degeneration.

Greater India projections had a strong bearing on the study of Southeast Asia’s Hindu-Buddhist cultural heritage. The scholarly quest for ‘origins’ and stylistic resemblances gave rise to the notion of Indian ‘colonial art’. This chapter explores different theories of ‘Indianization’, and their concomitant politics, which informed the French/Dutch/Indian scholarly engagement with the Cambodian and Javanese templescapes. It also pays attention to the work of Angkor-conservator Henri Marchal and the Dutch Indologist W.F. Stutterheim. Stressing local agency and ‘adaptation’ over diffusionist theories, they gradually paved the way for a more nuanced evaluation of the ‘Indic factor’ in Southeast Asia’s cultural heritage. All the same, in the Indian context, Angkor, Borobudur and Prambanan became visual simulacra of an ancient cultural empire evoked as Greater India and were often claimed as Indian masterpieces superior to anything sculpted or built in India. According to the GIS, Indian aesthetic impulses had temporarily uplifted the arts in Southeast Asia, until degeneration set in with the withering of this ‘classical’ influence.

The introduction outlines, in broad brushstrokes, the different dimensions of the scholarly and nationalist quest to find India in Asia. In the 1920s and 1930s, Rabindranath Tagore and Greater India Society (GIS) members such as Kalidas Nag and Suniti Kumar Chatterjee toured Southeast Asia to look for ancient India’s Hindu-Buddhist cultural and artistic legacies abroad. But although this quest focused on Java, Bali and Cambodia, the GIS also charted India’s historical influence and cultural imprints in Central and East Asia, as well as Europe, the Pacific world and Indian Ocean realm. Drawing on the travelogues of GIS members and figures loosely affiliated with the society such as the Bengali sannyasin Swami Sadananda, this introduction explores the interwar politics of Greater India. It is argued that the Greater India movement’s quest to rewrite ancient history reconfigured the “idea of India” and became central to anti-colonial, nationalist and internationalist political agendas. Finally, the introduction reflects on the language dynamics of the knowledge networks of Greater India, and outlines the main methodological and historiographical stakes of the book.

The historiography on politicized ethnicities in Southeast Asia has for a long time gone hand in hand with the story of nationalism. Colonial rule was believed to have introduced the kinds of registers that stemmed from the Enlightenment into non-Western societies. Colonial ethnographers divided up populations by languages and culture, sometimes deciding that one or another embodied the genuine national identity. Benedict Anderson, working with indigenous literature and new research on the Southeast Asian geobody, introduced the notion that nationalism was a socially constructed political community. Like religious communities, it was an imagined community, in that any one member felt they were part of a larger, horizontal group whose full membership transcended their personal acquaintance.

Buddhist nationalism has emerged again as a topic of scholarly and media attention, driven primarily by campaigns of violence and expulsion against Muslims in Myanmar, but also by similar dynamics in Sri Lanka and Thailand. Recent research on the intersections between Buddhism and nationalism not only follows the scholarly critique of methodological nationalism – resisting the urge to naturalize the nation and read it back anachronistically into history – it also questions assumptions of Buddhism as a unitary or even stable object of inquiry. “Buddhist nationalism,” where it exists, does not necessarily follow a set pattern; moreover, it is the conscious and largely intentional creation of actors with the relevant authority and stature to frame the two components as intrinsically connected. In doing so, they construct it through narratives and symbols of legitimation that are recognizably Buddhist and linked to particular cultural, ethnic, or political configurations.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which archival categorization frames the voices of the actors in a historian’s documents. It does so by reconstructing the journey of a young woman from Nagasaki to Thursday Island via Shanghai and Hong Kong, based both on the first-person testimony she gave soon after arriving in Australia and on similar testimonies from many other migrating women. But although the woman, Hashimoto Usa, speaks in the first person, her ‘I’ is also layered with the world views of her British interlocutor and his educated Japanese translators. These bind Hashimoto into a set of discursive assumptions – about labour, gender and ‘civilization’ – that will affect where and how her story is archivally preserved, both in Brisbane and in Tokyo. In a similar way, the author’s own first-person description of ‘finding’ her testimony bleeds into Hashimoto’s voice, once again shaping her storytelling strategies and those of every other man present in her narrative. In short, the question of how we read such archival traces depends very much on who ‘we’ are in the story.

This chapter addresses the relationship between knowledge claims and cartography. It begins by interpreting a world map published by the Nippon Yūsen Kaisha (NYK) company in the mid 1920s, a map which, among other things, depicts the new shipping line established by the NYK between Yokohama and Melbourne in 1896. The chapter traces the Yamashiro-maru’s journeys on this line in order to question the map’s carefully curated claims of peaceful commercial exchange between Japan and Australia. Yet even as the author critiques the map, his own archival itineraries in Australia serve to reinforce its basic worldview. Reflecting on this problem of ‘archival directionality’, the chapter closes by trying to imagine Australia’s historical relationship with Asia through a very different representational form, namely a bark painting from Yolŋu country. As with the NYK map, the chapter examines the cartographic claims made in the bark painting, and the archival basis of those claims, before reflecting on how such sources might reframe a historian’s understanding of the ‘global’ archive.

This article excavates the Philippine nation’s cosmopolitan and transnational Asian intellectual moorings, in order to reconnect Philippine history to that of Southeast Asia, from which it has been historiographically separated. It argues that turn-of-the-twentieth-century Philippine Asianism was crucial to the concept of the Filipino nation that the ilustrados (educated elite) constructed, to the ilustrado-led Propaganda Movement’s political argumentation against Spain, and to the political mobilization and organizing of the Katipunan and the First Philippine Republic. It incorporates the “periphery” into our understanding of Pan-Asianism to correct our exclusively intellectual historical and Northeast-Asia-centric understandings of Pan-Asianism. It shows that the revolutionary First Philippine Republic’s foreign collaboration represents the first instance of fellow Pan-Asianists lending material aid toward anticolonial revolution against a Western power (rather than overthrow of a domestic dynasty) and harnessing transnational Pan-Asian networks of support, activism, and association toward doing so.

Pacific Asia, comprised of Northeast Asia, Greater China, and Southeast Asia, has surpassed the combined production of the United States and Europe, and its intraregional economic cohesiveness exceeds that of either the EU or North America. Pacific Asia has emerged gradually and without major conflict, but it should be taken seriously as a region. China is primarily a regional power, but in a prosperous region deeply interconnected to the rest of the world. The United States tends to view China as a lone global competitor, but its global presence and strength rest on its centrality to Pacific Asia. Understanding China in its region is the first task of this book, followed by the challenge of rethinking the global order in terms of a multinodal matrix rather than a bipolar competition of great powers. This requires background on the evolution of the Pacific Asian configuration, including China’s premodern centrality as well as the splintering of the region by European colonialism. Rethinking is aided by commentaries from four of Asia’s leading thinkers about international relationships.

The 1962 Sino-Indian War was not just a border war over disputed territory (or the outcome of the Sino-Indian spatial rivalry alone) as is generally argued because issues related to their positional rivalry were also at stake. Sino-Indian positional rivalry in the Himalayan states and in Burma was linked with the Tibetan issue, and Tibet itself was at the nexus of Sino-Indian spatial and positional rivalries. Furthermore, the 1962 Sino-Indian War proceeded as wars between positional rivals tend to: with the near multilateralization of the war as India sought help from the United States (and that it was favorably considered). While China’s unilateral ceasefire that was accepted by India precluded overt American participation, India’s massive defeat also had positional consequences as it removed India as a contender for Asian leadership. Although this did not result in Chinese leadership in Asia, China continued to remain more important than India to the wider Asian strategic dynamic in the decades after 1962.

Given China and India’s claims to Asian leadership, the positional dimension of the Sino-Indian rivalry was central to their relationship in the 1940s and the 1950s. This positional contest played out in three venues: (i) in various Asian multilateral fora (such as the 1947 Asian Relations Conference and the 1955 Bandung Conference) and in India’s attempts to mediate in conflicts involving China and other players; (ii) in the Himalayan states (Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim) and in Southeast Asia; and (iii) in Tibet. The Tibet issue was particularly fraught with strategic consequences. As China sought India’s help to consolidate its own rule in Tibet, it gave India an exalted but much-resented position in China’s internal affairs (pertaining to Tibet). Matters related to Tibet also entangled the positional and spatial dimensions of the Sino-Indian rivalry because the territories in dispute between China and India had complex historical links with Tibet.