Story so far: “The winds here carry a scent of culture, a scent which connects us and we feel every moment on the soil of India,” waxed Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday (July 8, 2026) when he visited the 1200-year-old Prambanan Temple complex in Indonesia’s Yogyakarta. The visit was preceded by the announcement of India-Indonesia’s joint conservation project to restore the shrine. 

Located 17 km northeast of Yogyakarta city, the 10th-century shrine has three temples dedicated to the divine Hindu trinity – Lord Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, as well as three temples to their ‘vahanas’ – hamsa (swan) for Brahma, the garuda (eagle) for Vishnu and the nandi (bull) for Shiva. With reliefs depicting scenes from the Ramayana. Recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the complex houses two groups of buildings – Hindu temples including Prambanan and Buddhist temples including Sewu with its four pairs of Dwarapala giant statues.  

Totaling 508 stone temples of various shapes and sizes in either complete condition or in ruins, the complex is home to both the largest Hindu and Buddhist temple in Indonesia. Immediately after Indonesia became independent in 1945, restoration of the temples, ravaged by earthquakes, began and was completed only in 1953.

Cultural significance of Prambanan temple to India

Built by King Rakai Pikatan to reportedly rival the adjacent Buddhist temple complex Borobudur, built by King Shailendra in the 8^th century, Prambanan temple has survived several volcanic eruptions over the years from the nearby Mount Merapi. Expanded by Rakai Pikatan’s successors, King Lokapala and Balitung MahaSambu of the Mataram kingdom, Prambanan served as the royal temple and most of the state’s religious ceremonies were conducted there. 

Apart from the main Shiva shrine, other temples dedicated to Goddess Durga as Mahishasura Mardhini, Dakshinamurti too have been restored through the years. Bas-relief depictions of episodes from the Hindu puranas (Ramayana and Bhagawata), creatures like kinnaras, kolamakara, asuras and scenes of social life adorn galleries around the central chamber and the symmetry and structures of the temples resemble to Pallava dynasty’s architecture. 

Inscriptions at the Shiva temple show that a public water project to change the course of a river was undertaken during the construction of the temple. These are similar to the engineering style of temple builders of South-east Asia spanning the Chola and Gupta dynasties and Cambodia’s Angkor Wat complex. Moreover, the well dug in the middle of the complex is said to go down to the foundations of the temple, where King Erlangga’s ashes (who died in 1014 AD) are believed to have been deposited in a stone case – a custom also found in the Matrubhuteswara Temple at Tiruvanamala. 

Victim to Mount Merapi’s volcanic fury, the rulers shifted away from the complex, leaving the temples to decay. As the Dutch East India Company came to rule the country, several pieces from the temples were transported to the officers’ gardens and homes. However, the temple and most of the original structures still remain as efforts to restore it began as early as 1918.

India-Indonesia links

On December 14, 1958, India’s President Dr. Rajendra Prasad drove down to Prambanan temple on his official visit to Indonesia – becoming the first Indian head of state to visit the complex. After the May 2006 earthquake, the temple complex sustained severe damage and Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh offered help to conserve the shrine. Officials of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) visited the site and worked with Indonesian counterparts in assessing the damage and providing technological help or manpower in restoring it.  

Prior to Prambanan, the ASI team was involved in restoring Angkor Wat temple between 1986 and 1993, in collaboration with the Cambodian government. Later, under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government, India signed an agreement with Cambodia in 2002 to restore Ta Prohm temple (part of Angkor Wat) – built by Khmer King Jayavarman VII and by 2012 ASI had finished the restoration. 

In Laos, the ASI began its restoration work of the 11th-century Vat Phou temple, built by the Khmer royal family as a Shiva temple, in 2007. In the first phase, ASI spent 17 crores and unearthed evidence that the structure, which had been converted into a Buddhist temple, was originally a Shiva temple. The second phase of the restoration began in 2018 and has spent ₹24 crores as of 2024. 

Under the Modi government, the ASI has expanded its restoration projects for Southeast Asian structures, including Angkor Wat. In 2014, India and Vietnam signed an agreement to restore ruined Shaiva temples in Mỹ Sơn, built by Champa Kings. ASI’s work on the site started in 2017 and was completed in 2013. During the process, ASI discovered a monolithic sandstone Shiva linga from the 9th century at the site. In 2016, India offered its help to restore the earthquake-damaged pagodas and the Ananda temple at Bagan, Myanmar.

(With inputs from The Hindu Archives)

Published – July 10, 2026 11:38 am IST

The story so far: Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the historic Prambanan Temple near Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Standing alongside Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, he offered prayers at the 9th-century UNESCO World Heritage Site, the largest Hindu temple complex in the country, which houses the trimurti of Vedic Hinduism — Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.

The temple signifies the assertion of Hinduism as a monotheistic religion to meet the legal standard in the country for official recognition, which it secured in 1962, after a period of turmoil and uncertainty following the country’s independence in 1945. The trimurti is presented as the manifestation of one supreme god. Incidentally, the Christian concept of the trinity is also premised on one supreme god. The temple combines the antiquity of the faith and traditions with the modern, innovative repurposing of the inherent polytheism of Hinduism as monotheistic.

How does Indonesia balance state-mandated monotheism and religious freedom?

In Indonesia’s legal system, two concepts are in tension — mandatory monotheism and the guarantee of religious freedom. The country’s national identity itself is deeply tied to adherence to religion. The country has a national identity card with a mandatory column on religion, which is of considerable consequence for civic life. Marriage registration, birth certificates, school religious education tracking, civil service promotion, and even burial rights are tied to a person’s declared religion. To date, Indonesia does not recognise agnosticism or atheism, and blasphemy remains illegal. Indonesia also guarantees religious freedom. To reconcile this, the state recognised six religions — Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism — as agama, formalised in 1965.

Hinduism’s evolution within Indonesia’s monotheistic mandate

The founding principle of the modern Indonesian state has five components (Pancasila), and the first is monotheism, or faith in one supreme god. When this was mandated as state policy, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism were considered legitimate by default. Hinduism could not meet the three criteria set in 1952 for a community to be recognised as a religion — it had to be strictly monotheistic, possess a recognised holy scripture, and be founded by a prophet.

The application for Hindu recognition was formally turned down by the Indonesian Ministry of Religion in 1952. Reformers organised under the banner of the Parisada Hindu Dharma (later Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia, PHDI), founded in Bali in 1959, and reframed Balinese practice around a single supreme deity, Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, recasting a richly polytheistic tradition into something that could satisfy the monotheistic test. PHDI is the body that holds this together — the principal representative body for Hindus in Indonesia, defining theology, issuing religious guidance, and standardising ritual practice for the whole category.

What is the concept of Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa?

To satisfy the state’s monotheism requirement, Balinese reformers took the Hindu monistic concept of Brahman (the impersonal ultimate reality) and personified it as a single supreme god-concept, Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa — sometimes equated with the Trimurti (Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva) fused into one, sometimes identified with the abstract Acintya (”the inconceivable”). The concept evolved across three distinct phases to become Indonesia’s definitive monotheistic deity. It began with ancient Austronesian and Sanskrit roots, where “Sang Hyang” signified divine forces and “Widhi” cosmic law, represented conceptually as the formless Acintya. In the 1930s, Protestant missionaries coined the term “Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa” to translate “God Almighty” for Christian use; Hindu reformers later adopted it to mirror the non-dualistic Brahman. Finally, during the 1950s political crisis, Hindu scholars formally articulated this entity as a single Supreme Godhead, aligning Hinduism with Indonesia’s monotheistic legal mandate. Hinduism secured official state recognition in 1962.

How is Hinduism in Indonesia instructive of the broader evolution of faith-state-society interaction?

Essentialisation, standardisation and documentation are outcomes and drivers of identities, religious and national across places and time. This entire process looks more dramatic in Indonesia mainly because it was compressed, recent, and administratively engineered in full view, while the broader evolution of Hinduism follows this same pattern over centuries and millennia elsewhere. Indonesian Hinduism is hence revelatory.

As it exists today in the country, it is an adaptation of the faith to modern legal architecture. Islam and Christianity arrived with pre-existing global institutional scaffolding – scriptures, clergy hierarchies, and centuries-old doctrines. Hinduism in Indonesia had to build its scaffolding specifically to satisfy state monotheism rules and qualify as one of the recognised agamas. But internally it is closer to a federation of distinct traditions unified under a shared nomenclature. In Indonesia there is a bureaucracy associated with it, but otherwise this follows the pattern of how Hinduism evolved in India as well.

Once Hinduism secured official recognition, it became something other indigenous groups could deliberately import wholesale as a legal shelter. The linkage between Hinduism and Indonesia’s indigenous groups is a shared abstract supreme-being concept plus a shared certifying institution (PHDI), laid over communities whose actual ritual life — deities, ancestor practice, and funerary rites — remain substantially indigenous and pre-Hindu in origin.

Three common features continue from the older traditions, which recognised religions including Catholicism, Protestantism and Hinduism, shared in Indonesia — ancestral worship, animal sacrifice and nature worship. Islam and Christianity too are diverse and pluralistic in Indonesia, though their plurality accumulated over four to five centuries and is now often perceived as organic cultural depth.

Separation of religion and state is so often mentioned as a feature of modernity that the mutual interaction between the two is often ignored. In reality, religion and state shape each other. Hinduism, Christianity and Islam have all been shaped by state policy around the world, in modern and premodern periods alike. All three monotheistic religions continue to carry traces of these practices to date in Indonesia. All this is far from a settled debate. There are tensions among Christian and Islamic sects obsessed with purifying the practice of local accretions, but the broader scaffolding of religion continues to be in place.

Published – July 10, 2026 07:57 am IST