Fragment and evocation: Hindu-Buddhist hauntings in the Islamic complex of Sendang Duwur

This essay argues for the embedded connectedness between premodern Hindu-Buddhist values and early modern Islamic architecture in Indonesia. It counters the traditional art historiography, whereby the rigid categorisation of archaeological materials ruptures the cultural and social relation between pre-1500 Hindu-Buddhist period and post-1500 Islamic constructions. Using kramat as an operative framework, this essay offers alternative examinations of Sendang Duwur beyond its artistic articulation. By closely looking at ideation and visualisation in and around sacred topography, the essay propounds the notion that the sixteenth-century Islamic constructions at the site were built on top of an older Hindu compound. This close reading of Javanese material culture, belief systems, oral histories, and ethnographies through the prism of kramat provides a clearer vision of the objects of study and their historical context than that passed on to us by European scholars in colonised Indonesia, and indeed by many scholars today — Indonesian or not.