Dr. Ario Bimo Utomo | Paradiplomacy Specialist | Head of the International Relations Department at UPN Veteran Jawa Timur, Surabaya, Indonesia |
When India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi lands in Jakarta this week – on July 8 and 9, on the first leg of a six-day Indo-Pacific tour, most commentators will talk, write and think about the bilateral ties, diplomacy, and strategic prospects. There will be talk of nickel, since Indonesia holds some of the world’s largest reserves and India’s electric vehicle industry badly wants access to it. There will be talk of the Malacca Strait, maritime security, and the five pillars of cooperation that Indian officials have already flagged: defence, trade, food security, energy, and capacity building. This is how the visit has been framed officially, and it is a fair framing. However, it is just not the only picture. The big picture is beyond all these.
Tucked into the second half of the itinerary is something that is easier to overlook: a visit to Yogyakarta city, to see the Prambanan temple complex where India’s Archaeological Survey (ASI) has quietly started helping restore a ninth-century Hindu monument that most Indonesian schoolchildren know from a textbook, not a foreign ministry memo. It is fair to ask why a prime minister with eleven days’ worth of trade deals on his desk would spend a full day of a six-day trip standing among broken stones in Central Java. The answer, I argue, tells us something that gets lost too easily in this kind of coverage: that cultural affairs, and the cities where they live, can end up being another diplomatic pathway.
A civilisational hook, revisited
The Prambanan cooperation did not start with PM Modi’s visit. It began in March, when Indonesia’s Culture Minister Fadli Zon met an ASI restoration team to discuss the temple’s preservation using anastylosis, a technique that rebuilds a structure from its own original stones rather than replacing them, a method India has already applied at Angkor Wat in Cambodia and other sites in the region. Indonesian officials have been clear that this is not meant to stop at one monument. Zon has described Prambanan as part of a larger cultural landscape that also includes the nearby Sewu and Plaosan complexes, which means the project is really about rebuilding a historical ecosystem, not patching up a single tourist site.
This connects to something far older than any trade figure can capture. The name Yogyakarta itself derives from Ayodhya, Rama’s kingdom in the Ramayana, as the epic remains alive in the city today through the Sendratari Ramayana ballet, still performed regularly against the backdrop of Prambanan itself. The same is true across Java and Bali more broadly, where the Ramayana and Mahabharata were absorbed into Old Javanese literature as the Kakawin Ramayana centuries ago, and continue to live on through wayang kulit shadow puppetry, whose poetic language is still layered with Sanskrit-derived vocabulary. None of this needed a bilateral memorandum to take root. It simply never left.
Why cities and culture matter more than they get credit for
This is exactly why the cultural leg of the visit deserves to be read as more than a photo opportunity. In the study of international relations, there is a whole field built around the idea that national capitals are not the only ones doing diplomacy. Scholars call it paradiplomacy, a term first developed by Ivo Duchacek and Panayotis Soldatos in the 1980s to describe how provinces, regions, and cities build their own international relationships alongside, not instead of, their national governments. More recent work on so-called city diplomacy has shown how urban and cultural actors can pursue technical, low-conflict cooperation even when relations at the national level are more cautious or slow-moving. Culture and heritage are, in fact, some of the easiest entry points for this kind of cooperation, because they rarely trigger the security anxieties that trade or defence deals often do.
Yogyakarta, as a Special Region with its own cultural authority, is well placed to be exactly this kind of actor. A living, sustained restoration partnership gives the city a genuine stake in the bilateral relationship that a Jakarta-Delhi communique never quite manages to offer. If both governments treat Prambanan as a platform rather than a mere curiosity, they open a channel of cooperation that can move forward even when trade negotiations or defence talks get complicated, precisely because it does not depend on either.
A small community, a deep footprint
It is true that the resident Indian community in Indonesia is small. Official figures put it at around 15,000 Indian nationals, plus a wider diaspora of roughly 120,000 people of Indian descent, a fraction of what India can draw on in Singapore or the Gulf. But judging the relationship by diaspora size alone misses the point. India’s cultural footprint in Indonesia was laid down over a thousand years before either country existed as a modern state, and it never really needed a resident community to sustain it. It survives in wayang performances, in Balinese kecak dance retelling the story of Rama and Ravana, and in the fact that ordinary Indonesians can usually recognise a character from the Mahabharata before they can name a single Indian state.
Obviously, none of this guarantees success. Heritage diplomacy has a familiar failure mode: a big launch, a good photograph, and then years of silence once the delegation leaves. For Prambanan to become something more permanent, it will need planning beyond a single pilot phase, especially a closer partnership with Yogyakarta’s own institutions rather than a purely national arrangement. But the underlying material is already there, waiting to be used properly. When Modi stands among the towers of Prambanan this week, Indian and Indonesian audiences alike would do well to remember that their two countries are, in some quiet but very real sense, closer than the trade statistics and defence briefings usually let on.
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