IX. Between Empire Building and State Formation. Official Elites in Java and Mughal India

Abstract

The reason to compare the recent histories of India and Indonesia was that they were the scenes of the two most extensive and populous colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The decision to push back the comparison to the pre-colonial era meant loosing track of the vital focus of the enterprise. Moreover, pre-colonial India presents a unity in only some respects whereas Indonesia as a territorial concept did not even exist then. The tendency of Indonesianists to focus, for convenience's sake, on the island of Java seems to become inescapable. This confronts those on the Indian wing of the comparison with the dilemma to what extent they are entitled to give up Indian unity and if they do, what part of India compares best with insular Java. Especially fit for comparison seem the regional states of South India: Vijayanagar, Madurai etc. Both the rice-based economies of the South Indian states and their size suggests this. Although Java became the core region of one of the colonial empires, whereas the South Indian states would stay at the periphery of the other, such a comparison could well be fruitful.