From raids to digital returns: The (im-)materiality of manuscripts in decolonializing heritage practices

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. In this paper, we seek to explore ideas underpinning the returns of manuscripts in digital form as part of broader decolonial and heritage discourses and practices. We investigate the political and cultural grounds in disseminating manuscripts’ digital copies and ask what kinds of shifting assumptions about the nature of textuality and manuscripts are indicated by digital returns. This is especially relevant given that some manuscripts in traditional Java, those designated as pusaka, are not merely media transmitting textual information. Rather, their materiality contains a power of its own. We conclude with some reflections on how the meanings assigned to the materiality of manuscripts and textuality might affect our scholarly ways of approaching Javanese manuscripts; what ethical implications there may be, especially when the democratization of access through digitization is framed as part of a decolonial movement; and what this entails for future research.