In 1812, the royal palace of Yogyakarta (Central Java) fell to British forces, resulting in the raid of the royal library’s manuscripts. Over the last decade, the manuscripts raided in 1812 that ended up in the British Library were digitized and ‘returned’ to the royal house of Yogyakarta in the form of a hard drive containing 30,000 digital images.
Courtesy authors
In this paper, Panggah Ardiyansyah and Verena Meyer explore ideas underpinning the returns of manuscripts in digital form as part of broader decolonial and heritage discourses and practices.
It is not a critique of digitization. Nor are the authors critiquing the digital return, of which the Javanese public is largely supportive.
Based on our findings, we would, however, like to call attention to the fact the digital return is embedded in and enacts the powers of both Western and Javanese institutions that complicate any notion of a straightforward reparation of the violence of nineteenth and twentieth century colonial power.
Moreover, we would like to call for an increased awareness of the fact that when the conditions under which a text is accessible are being changed, the process also changes what it means to be a text in the first place.
If the very materiality of a text has a power of its own, we may need to reckon with what our responsibilities as scholars, whether Javanese or non-Javanese, to these objects themselves are.
And this will, at the very least, require that unacknowledged understandings of the materiality of manuscripts be made more explicit.
