The ‘Lord of Life’ and the ‘Trunk King’: The bestowment of a Ganesha statue from Candi Singasari to King Chulalongkorn and its entangled contexts, 1896-2023

This research traces the provenance of the Ganesha statue (Phra Phi Ganet) from Candi Singasari in Java that can be found in the Bangkok National Museum (Phiphitthaphanthasathan Haeng Chat Phra Nakhon) today. Collected by King Chulalongkorn in 1896 and since then overshadowed by another Ganesha statue from the same temple found in the National Ethnographic Museum (Museum Volkenkunde), the Netherlands, until its return to Indonesia in 2023, both statues have played crucial roles in their respective countries through the (re)constructions of multiple contexts and entanglements. This research reflects on how these statues have been mediators in Siam/Thailand and the Netherlands by tracing the provenance of the Ganesha statue in the Bangkok National Museum specifically: it reconstructs the historical and religious significance of the Candi Singasari and the statue, the development of colonial collecting practices of Javanese antiquities since the 19th century, the motivations behind the trip and collecting practices of Chulalongkorn in Java in 1896, and how the statues both have played a vastly different role in their respective settings since. Based on the travel account of King Chulalongkorn and archival sources in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Netherlands, it argues that both statues have been subjected to vastly different contexts, specifically the colonial imagination in the Netherlands and the sanctification of the King and Ganesha in Siam/Thailand, troubled by the inability of Dutch archaeologists to retrieve the statue in the 1920s, and both reappraised through the process of decolonization and increased religious significance in their respective museum settings.