CHSP Alumni Spotlight: Made Naraya Lasmayuda Sumaniaka
Indonesia, Maastricht University, MA Arts and Heritage: Policy Management and Education
Made Naraya Lasmayuda Sumaniaka (Nara) completed his Master’s in Arts and Heritage: Policy, Management and Education at Maastricht University. Since graduating, life has taken him across several trajectories at once. He currently teaches religious studies at Sekolah Indonesia Den Haag (SIDH), assists Indonesia's Ministry of Culture on several repatriation cases as a researcher, and volunteers as a "caring friend" for Indonesian elderly diasporas in the Netherlands, all while remotely supporting his family business in Bali. Academically, he is working on research projects surrounding Indonesian politics of decolonisation and drafting a PhD proposal.
Made believes that heritage is not something confined to the past. He reflects that his time in the programme fundamentally shifted how he approaches the everyday, particularly the quiet but meaningful act of listening. Volunteering with elderly Indonesian diasporas in the Netherlands is, for him, a direct expression of what the CHSP instilled in him: that heritage lives in the present, in people, and in conversation.
One of his most formative experiences during the programme was a three-month internship at the Colonial Collections Consortium Bureau, where he found himself the only Indonesian citizen working as a civil servant inside a Dutch government body dedicated to colonial collections. The experience was, according to him, disorienting in the most productive sense: constantly positioning himself against the legacy of colonial bureaucrats he had encountered in literature, from Multatuli's Max Havelaar to Pramoedya's Jacques Pangemanan. Beyond the internship, it was the shared trials of student life in Maastricht with fellow scholars Pras, Rebecca, Amos, and Akash that he counts among his most unforgettable memories from the programme.
The CHSP, Made says, gave him the space to step back, observe, and unlearn assumptions he had carried from his undergraduate studies in public policy. It broadened his intellectual horizons in ways that continue to reshape how he thinks about Indonesia's post-colonial identity and the role of cultural heritage within it. For him, the scholarship was not merely an academic milestone: it was, as he puts it, a stepping stone towards his aspiring career as a servant of the civil and intellectual.
Cultural Heritage Scholarship Programme
The Cultural Heritage Scholarship Programme (CHSP) is a Nuffic initiative funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, designed to empower young professionals from Indonesia, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Suriname, and South Africa to pursue a specialised master's programme in cultural heritage management in the Netherlands. The programme aims to foster international collaboration and knowledge exchange, enabling alumni to bring new expertise and perspectives back to their home communities.