Episode
Panggah Ardiyansyah: 'Kramat' and the Politics of Indonesian History
- Podcast
- Talking Indonesia
- Published
- Apr 10, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2536
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Summary
If you studied Indonesian history in school in the 1990s, you learned to divide the archipelago's past into neat chapters: Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, then Islamic sultanates, with a brief “transitional period” somewhere in between. Colonial archaeologists created these categories in the nineteenth century, and they've structured Indonesian historiography ever since — shaping not just how we study ancient sites, but what counts as history in the first place and what we archive and remember for the future. But visit Sendang Duwur, a sixteenth-century Islamic compound in East Java, and these categories start to fracture. Here, soaring temple gates with Hindu iconography guard an active mosque. Pilgrims climb stairs designed like pathways to heaven, passing through spaces that refuse singular religious meanings. The site has been continuously inhabited, renovated, and reinterpreted for five centuries, yet archaeological scholarship tends to freeze it in time. What if this framework blinds us to how Javanese communities actually understand sacred space? What recourse do scholars have to resist these inherited categories and imagine decolonial futures for Indonesian archaeology? In this week's episode, Tito chats with Panggah Ardiyansyah, a Research Associate at the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield, whose research challenges us to read Indonesian antiquities through Indonesian epistemologies. Drawing on his paper Fragment and Evocation: Hindu-Buddhist Hauntings in the Islamic Complex of Sendang Duwur published in the journal Art History in 2025 as part of a special edition on decoloniality, Panggah argues that the concept of kramat — sacred sites imbued with ancestral power — offers better tools for understanding sites like Sendang Duwur than the bin…