Jolita Zabarskaitė
Bandung, Greater India, Indonesia: Incompatible Visions of (Afro-)Asia?
When the Bandung Conference was held, in 1955, ideas of Afro-Asian solidarity were placed in direct competition with a long-standing Indian nationalist fantasy that had shaped the history of South-East Asia for over several hundred years: the idea of Greater India. Indian nationalist ideologues explicitly compared this civilizing process to a Roman idea of empire, which had colonized its possessions by virtue of possessing a superior civilization. This Indocentric and expansionist imaginary was not conducive to an idea of a collaboration of Afro-Asian equals, and consequently had to be muted in the interests of solidarity. Indonesian public interventions at the time were uncomfortable with the inferior status of South-East Asia generated by the Greater India lens, as the new republic was building its own conceptions of state and nation. Competing ideas of Asian solidarity attempting to incorporate African and other ex-colonial or soon-to-be-independent countries were thus placed in conflict and conversation.
Jolita Zabarskaitė studied Indology with a focus on Sanskrit and modern Indian languages at Vilnius University and the University of Halle-Wittenberg, holds an MA in South and South-East Asian History from Humboldt University, Berlin, and was awarded her PhD from Heidelberg University. She also has a background in art history and museum studies, and was awarded a one-year fellowship by the Indonesian government to further her study of Bahasa Indonesia at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia. She is the author of ‘Greater India’ and the Indian Expansionist Imagination, c. 1885–1965: The Rise and Decline of the Idea of a Lost Hindu Empire (2022), which is the first monograph on the subject. She was a Residency Fellow at the Alice Boner Institute in Varanasi, India, a Tandem Scholar of the German Historical Institute London and the Max Weber Forum Delhi’s fellowship programme, and is affiliated with the South-East Asian Studies department of the University of Bonn.