(Re)Collecting colonial ancient manuscripts to construct the national identity of Indonesia

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Airin Liemanto
Faculty of Law, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta and Faculty of Law, Brawijaya University, Malang City, Indonesia

Moh. Fadli, Afifah Kusumadara
Faculty of Law, Brawijaya University, Malang City, Indonesia

Lalu Muhammad Hayyanul Haq
Faculty of Law, Mataram University, Mataram City, Indonesia

AGATHOS, Volume 15, Issue 2 (29): 125-142, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.13948936
© www.agathos-international-review.com CC BY NC 2024

Abstract: The recollection of ancient manuscripts has been through long and challenging processes since Indonesia gained its independence. There have been different views about repatriating ancient manuscripts in Western countries and the countries of origin from which manuscripts were obtained, while these different views present difficulties when no good faith between the two parties is involved. This research aims to investigate the challenges faced by museums in the Netherlands, and the methods of coping with the issue of ancient manuscripts in Indonesia to allow for maximum access to help improve the national identity. This research shows that Indonesia and Netherlands had successful projects together, both physical cultural object’s repatriation and digitalized manuscript’s cooperation. However, the success of repatriating the manuscripts seems far-fetched. Following the outbreak of the Covid 19, the number of visitors to the museums in the Netherlands has shrunk, followed by financial problems and outcries over justice and moral violations expressed by the state of origin. Therefore, regulations aiming to cope with the problems are paramount by repatriating the ancient manuscripts of Indonesia housed in the Netherlands, improving collaborations in digitization and access to ancient manuscripts, education, and research, improving museum programs, and empowering visitors in accessing ancient manuscripts.

Keywords: repatriation, colonial, ancient manuscript, Dutch museums

Introduction

On 14 June 2023, the Dutch Minister, Mark Rutte, officially issued the recognition of the independence of Indonesia gained on 17 August 1945 comprehensively and unconditionally (Editorial board of the Jakarta Post 2023). Some viewed this recognition as nothing meaningful, considering that it did not come with the recognition of law and tended to avert the responsibility of reparation over war crimes committed by the Dutch Government a long time ago (Yuniar 2023).

 Cultural heritage was looted by the Dutch Government during colonialization, including thousands of ancient manuscripts in Indonesia, collected and displayed in museums and libraries in the Netherlands. These ancient manuscripts were stolen as seized properties during the war by archeologists or enthusiastic missionaries (Scott 2017). The manuscripts were sold under suppressing war conditions (“Naskah Batak Tertua? British Library Ms. 4726.” 2022); they were smuggled or stolen by soldiers or were simply given as a gift to authorities (Karlzén 2010).

 Indonesia, to date, has not elaborated data on the total number of ancient legal manuscripts of Indonesia housed in the Netherlands. When Professor Carel Stolker, a Rector of Leiden University, visited Sri Sultan Hamangkubuwono X, he once said: “There is a large collection of ancient Indonesian documents stored in Leiden. If they are lined up, it is almost the same as 12 kilometers of books”. This collection covers 26,000 ancient manuscripts, music, and 1,500 Indonesian artifacts in the university, and these manuscripts were under the possession of the Dutch and British Kingdoms (UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta 2016).

 The existence of the museums in the western countries shows the presence of colonialism supremacy, indicated by some ethnographic collections in modern museums collected during the time of colonialism especially when it was considered vital to garner the objects of the past to help preserve cultural proof that seems to fade away (Ariese 2019).

 In the 21^st century, museums played a new role in supporting and making contributions to the process of cultural reform, involving serious considerations regarding why these objects needed to be preserved and for whom they were preserved. The request for the return of ancient manuscripts by the country of origin or adat people has often been viewed from diverging perspectives by museums. The countries of origin representing adat people have focused on the preservation of ancient manuscripts related to spiritual bonds and the usefulness of the manuscripts for the knowledge development of adat communities, while these manuscripts should have been passed throughout generations. Museums in Western countries believe that they hold the scientific responsibility for the ancient manuscripts to help preserve, learn, interpret, and disseminate the manuscripts as knowledge to the present generations and the following generations (Kobyliński 2013).

 Varying ways of seeing the preservation of ancient manuscripts in terms of their spiritual purposes compared to other uses and another aspect compared to scientific doctrine are perplexing, indicating that it needs to get museum experts involved to help see through the barriers that they have created and the local communities, to recognize the values and the needs of the communities of the countries of origin, and to comprehensively contribute to the communities. This approach should not only be restricted to the visitors of the museums and academicians, but it should also touch the adat people. What museums are currently facing is facilitating the preservation of objects within wider social and cultural scopes and developing strategies offering the protection and the best utilization of natural resources for the sake of the people as a whole (Simpson 2009).

Methods

The methods of data collection involved library research and interviews, where the former represents a series of activities related to garnering data from the library, the Internet, reading, and note-taking, and research data processing, while interviews involved raising questions to museum experts. The data were processed according to the descriptive analysis technique.

Repatriation and digitization of ancient manuscripts in colonial collections of Dutch museums: Early success

The repatriation of ancient manuscripts is an emotional topic among the communities in Indonesia. Repatriation holds political and legal interests that need to be understood as part of the history and the local/adat community members along with colonization and its consequences (UBC Museum of Anthropology 2008). Indonesia has always attempted to repatriate the objects of cultural heritage of Indonesia, especially the ancient manuscripts housed in the Netherlands.

 Considering that these objects of cultural heritage are not taken as a national priority, their success is considered low. In terms of its portion in the legislation, the repatriation of cultural heritage objects housed abroad is only generally governed in Article 20 of Law Number 11 of 2010 concerning Cultural Heritage (henceforth referred to as Law 11/2020) and Article 26 paragraph (3) of Law Number 5 of 2017 concerning Cultural Development (henceforth referred to as Law 5/2017).

 In addition to the incomplete regulation, other factors may also be caused by weakening diplomacy and negotiation of the government, while there is also no special attention that helps actively claim the cultural heritage of Indonesia in the museums and libraries in the Netherlands. The record of the success of the government in repatriating the ancient manuscripts from the Netherlands to Indonesia is presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Successful repatriation of ancient manuscripts from the museums in the Netherlands to Indonesia

Differently, lengthy negotiation over the repatriation of ancient manuscripts by the Dutch is also related to the future negotiation involving collaborations in cultures that not only set the cultural heritage as objects ‘in the diplomacy’ but also ‘as diplomacy’ (Gaudenzi dan Swenson 2017). The digitization of ancient manuscripts has become one of the strategic projects of cultural collaborations between Indonesia and the Netherlands to protect and utilize the manuscripts. Furthermore, digitization helps ensure that the collection of ancient manuscripts is also available for the coming generations, considering that physical documents are prone to damage. The digitization of ancient manuscripts has also been widely available for more users, allowing them to access the manuscripts anytime without having to take a long trip to access them (Kelly 2013). The success of the digitization of ancient manuscripts of Indonesia is elaborated in Table 2.

Table 2. The Successful Project of the Digitization of Indonesian Ancient Manuscripts in Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Germany. Source: University of Washington Libraries 2023

Unfortunately, the collaborations to digitalize the manuscripts are not as expected because the digitization copyright has shifted to the ownership of museums in Western countries and there are no available data linked to Indonesian websites. This certainly leaves consequences affecting the people of Indonesia who have no clues of how to access those data.

Challenges faced by the museums in the Netherlands

The 2020 data reported that there were 631 museums in the Netherlands. Of the total number, they are categorized according to five different themes of history, art, business, technology, natural history, and anthropology (Het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek 2022). The number and percentage of the museums in the Netherlands are presented in Table 3.

Theme	Number of Museums	Percentage
History	408	65%
Art	122	19%
Business and Technology	63	10%
Natural History	28	4%
Antropology	10	2%
Total	631

Table 3. The Number of Museums in Netherlands.
Source: Het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek 2022

However, the existence of museums in the Netherlands has faced countless challenges especially following the COVID-19 outbreak (Network of European Museum Organisations 2021) and the Russia-Ukraine effects. This research maps four challenges encountered by the museums in the Netherlands amidst attempts to maintain their existence and collection.

Regulation regarding the repatriation of cultural heritage objects

Issues of returning cultural heritage objects from European museums to the countries of origin have been debated for decades. In November 2017, a revolutionary speech by (Macron 2017), the President of France, redirected the political policies of Europe regarding the repatriation of cultural heritage objects (Jiménez 2023). Macron asserted “African heritage cannot be a prisoner of European museums”. This speech marked the beginning of the change in repatriation policy in other European countries, including the Netherlands.

 The Advisory Council of the Dutch Government issued a policy regarding the legal frameworks of the collections of colonial cultural objects, and some steps have been taken. Cited from the report of the Advisory Council of the Dutch Government, Lilian Gonçalves-Ho Kang You once said to the New Independent Committee regarding claims “If it doesn’t belong to you then you must return it” (Boffey 2020). Furthermore, the Minister has the will to heed and act according to the recommendation of the Committee (Tünsmeyer 2022). In 2021, the Dutch Government released Guidance on the way forward for colonial collections, stating the policies and procedures for returning cultural heritage objects under the ownership of the Netherlands to their countries of origin. Their first project was to return some of the objects to Indonesia and Sri Lanka in mid-2023 (Government of the Netherlands 2023).

Depleting visitors

Since 2015, the number of domestic and foreign audiences of museums has been stagnant. In 2020, the number dropped due to the lockdown enforced by the Dutch Government on 12 March and 2 November 2020. In total, there were 14.4 million visitors to the museums in the Netherlands, a 58% decrease compared to the figure in 2019, where only 33.9 million people came to the museums. The number of foreign visitors also dropped to about 82% from 10.29 million in 2019 to 1.89 million visitors in the following year.

Diagram 1. The Number of Museum Audiences in the Netherlands 2015-2020 (CBS Statistics Netherlands 2022)

In 2021, the number of visitors further decreased to 11.8 million visitors. In early 2022, the Association of the Dutch Museums reported that there were 44% of museums taking considerable measures to revive the existence of museums (NL Times 2023). When museums were allowed to reopen after the lockdown, some were aware that the museums would not be the same as those before the outbreak, considering that it was mandatory for museums to restrict the numbers of visitors and visitors were required to reserve the visit before turning up at the museums. It presented a problem, especially for those coming from other countries (Tissen 2021).

Financial upheaval

Most museums in the Netherlands receive financial support from the government. The fund to enable the operation of the museums was earned from exhibitions called ‘blockbuster’, involving the fund coming from visitors or given voluntarily. The data from the Association of the Dutch Museums reported that there was at least one-fifth of the museums in the Netherlands failing to survive until 2020 (Tissen 2021). In 2022, about 25% of the Dutch museums were facing financial issues. Museums are highly prone to financial problems, considering that the fund mainly comes from the municipal government and private sectors without any subsidies.

 The main issue is that the number of visitors is far lower than before the outbreak, forcing people to stay at home (NL Times 2022). Depleting sources from tourists or visitors, educational programs, and finance from the Dutch government have forced the museums to reconsider their policies and change their involvement with visitors (Tissen 2021).

Outcries over injustice and moral violations of the countries of origin where ancient manuscripts were obtained

The collections housed in the museums offer valuable educational resources from which people can gain knowledge of values, practices, beliefs, and cultural traditions of their own and others (Khafidlin 2021). The looting of cultural heritage objects during the colonial era has led further to injustice and moral injury affecting the people of the countries where the ancient manuscripts were taken. Furthermore, Fincham elaborated the taxonomy of how the ancient manuscripts were transferred in the following scopes:

Removing barriers to accessing ancient manuscripts in colonial collections to construct community identity

Repatriating Indonesia’s ancient manuscripts housed in the Netherlands

Returning the ancient manuscripts stored in the Netherlands is considered vital as an attempt to recover Indonesia and its people from “historical trauma” (Colwell 2019), while it also revitalizes culture. This view is based on the thought that colonialism has seized cultural values and practices from intimidated people. Therefore, the recovery following the colonial era should also take into account a redescription of what has gone, a healthy community, solid identity, guaranteed rights, and growing cultures. All this process is required to guarantee the cultural sustainability of Indonesia for all generations. That is, recovering the state from its historical trauma and revitalizing culture should involve the repatriation of ancient manuscripts to ensure that cultural information, spirituality, and religious practices can recuperate (Wilson 2009).

 Museums must be ready to initiate a dialogue of returning the cultural objects to the countries of origin without any tendency to favor certain parties, and it must be done by adhering to scientific, professional, and humane principles and local, national, and international regulations with the priority that lies at government level. Furthermore, when Indonesia or its communities demand the repatriation of ancient manuscripts, after the export or the transfer of the manuscripts as the cultural heritage of a state or its community and the violations of international and national conventions have been proven, the museums will need to take immediate actions to return them. Moreover, the museums should avoid selling them and heed all the rules of import, export, and transfer of cultural heritage objects, including ancient manuscripts (International Council of Museums 2017).

 Overlooking or refusing the request from the countries of origin which the cultural heritage objects were taken from indicates that the museums are concerned with the conservation of the artifacts instead of supporting the communities to preserve varied cultures, beliefs, and practices that are more artifact creation-oriented. The return of cultural heritage objects helps the people of the countries of origin continue and reform the essential values and practices for the sake of their cultures and ceremonies. This measure is expected to contribute to the development of the people in this contemporary purview. That is, the repatriation seems to be the culmination to preserve the culture (Simpson 2009).

Enhancing the collaboration in digitization and access to ancient manuscripts as part of the collections of museums in the Netherlands

The preservation of ancient manuscripts takes into account digitization as an attempt to maintain access to ancient manuscripts in the time to come. However, of thousands of ancient manuscripts stored as the collections of museums in the Netherlands, not all can go digital simply because digitization needs cost to cover, among others, manuscript identification, assessment of the physical manuscripts, qualified human resources and experts (Milligan 2022). In other words, enhancing the collaborations in the digitization of ancient manuscripts between the Indonesian Government, the Dutch Government, and related adat communities, historians, technology experts, visual designers, and universities is considered vital. Such collaborations will allow for a new way of presenting ancient manuscripts, ranging from transcribing, translating, and commenting on the manuscripts to be further distributed across social media (Lied 2019).

 Finally, the digitization is about contemporary access that also works for the future. The collection and preservation of ancient manuscripts are intended to garner value and usefulness for the sake of related parties. So far, digitization is only accessible on the websites of the museums of Western countries such as the British Museum and Leiden Library. This limited access demands extension across other museum websites or libraries in Indonesia. This further access should also be congruous with the attempt of the government to gain, regulate, and provide access to the contents of ancient manuscripts that are useful and understood by Indonesian communities (Owens 2018). This should mark the initial steppingstone to introducing ancient manuscripts of Indonesia to society, while methods and approaches to access keep improving.

Collaborations in education and research

The collaborations in education and research between the Indonesian Government and the Dutch Government represented by the National Museums, libraries, and Archive Bank have taken place repeatedly. From 2007-2010, the Netherlands Culture Fund (HGIS), the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, the Indonesian Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and KLM Cargo initiated a project called ‘Shared Cultural Heritage’, consisting of some activities, primarily information exchange and consultation on Indonesian collections. It also involved several visits of staff from the curatorial and conservational departments (Ter Keurs 2009). On 10 July 2023, the Indonesian and Dutch Governments signed a technical arrangement for the repatriation of 472 Indonesia’s cultural heritage objects. This agreement sets forth the clause concerning sharing knowledge production, including joint research, museum management, and others (Allamanda 2023).

 Furthermore, western museums are obliged to promote knowledge, documentation, and collections of museums and cultural organizations in the countries and communities of origin. The potential of growing partnerships with the museums of the countries or regions that have lost the majority of their cultural heritage must be explored further (International Council of Museums 2017).

Improving museum programs

Museums carry three main functions: collection, research, and communication, all of which should be brought in unity through varying programs that rely on cutting-edge technology (Sola 2004). Museum programs have failed to attract audiences for the last two decades and after the outbreak; museums have also encountered countless obstacles, where the number of visitors has depleted, cultural experiences have changed due to social distancing and information has shifted to a technological basis (Tallant 2020).

 Museums in the future have to focus more on programs that have the potential to attract more visitors, are not restricted, and can sense the differences and changes as something attractive and productive (Grinell 2013). For instance, museums can come up with programs intended to (OECD dan ICOM 2018):

a. Identify socio-economic conditions in the museums and among their audiences to ensure that exhibitions, education, research, and training can be addressed appropriately.

b. Increase staff training and understand strategic approaches intended for the museums and partners in all sectors.

c. Establish continuous dialogues or develop long-term partnerships with the countries of origin where ancient manuscripts were obtained or with adat communities and other strategies appropriately and identify the cost that can be shared.

d. Arrange interdisciplinary research collaborations in museums and promote shared facilities in all departments.

e. Mobilize new financial resources for social well-being through charity foundations and sponsors from the private sector.

f. Identify the cost of the museums that can be shared with other institutions.

 Museums are also expected to provide programs to help develop new information technology as a measure to reach new segments of the museums and position the museums as the agents of social change (Marty dan Buchanan 2022). To ensure that the digital ecosystems of the museums are created, the development of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Digital Twins, Holographic Displays, app guides, and visitor flow technology are considered important in offering social experiences that attract visitors (Shehade dan Stylianou-Lambert 2020). Inclusive and integrative models between the physical and digital reality should properly exist (Giannini dan Bowen 2022).

Empowering visitors for accessing ancient manuscripts

Museums serve as a catalyst of culture and economy in European countries with their varied objects seized during the colonial era, received as donations, legacy, and purchase. Museums increase the added value of the collections of cultural heritage objects through exhibitions and publication of catalogs, education, workshops, research, and tours to former colonial countries, and this condition leaves the consequences, either intentionally or unintentionally, to the information and narration of cultural identity of a state from a global perspective.

 The research conducted by Dodd et al. reported that domestic visitors from Europe see the lack of their museums according to the minimum events held, or limited collections of particular objects, the chunks of narrated history that are misinterpreted or incomplete. European visitors use their knowledge and understanding only to share recommendations and improvements to the museums. This is acceptable, but museums still have to see and consider the existence of audiences from the countries of origin where manuscripts were obtained, while these audiences are seen by European countries as the minority (Dodd et al. 2012).

 The revival of the culture of the countries of origin in this context has set the adat communities or the countries of origin as the primary subjects to create the narration and identity of their cultures, which are mostly performed by museums in Europe. As a consequence, the empowerment of central audiences, especially the adat communities as the owners of the ancient manuscripts, through educational and training programs and exhibitions should be initiated. Museums are also expected to establish consultations, collaborations, and partnerships, welcome curators and program interpreters, set a protocol, raise involvement in several agendas, and recognize the priority of the countries of origin where ancient manuscripts were produced in launching programs, exhibition opening, scientists’ contributions, and many more (Maranda 2021).

Conclusion

Looting ancient manuscripts of Indonesia to be further taken to the Netherlands during the colonial time is unethical and contravenes international law. Therefore, since the independence, the Indonesian Government has attempted to take back the cultural heritage objects, including the ancient manuscripts from the Netherlands, but this attempt to repatriate the objects is too low. Museums in the Netherlands are currently facing challenging issues such as the legal politics of repatriation of cultural heritage objects, depleting visitors to the museums, financial problems, and outcries over justice and moral violations from the countries of origin where ancient manuscripts were taken. With all these challenges, the museums can return the ancient manuscripts to Indonesia and make contributions to help adat people improve their cultural practices. Moreover, increasing partnerships in digitization and access to ancient manuscripts, education, research, enhancement of museum programs, and empowerment of visitors to access ancient manuscripts are essential. Thus, museums are expected to be actively involved in the preservation and development of living legacy and contemporary cultural practices.

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