In discussing non-santri art in Modjokuto it seems profitable to differentiate between three somewhat separate clusters, three art complexes the component forms of which not only bear an intrinsic relation to one another but also enter into the social and cultural structure I have been describing in roughly similar ways:
Cluster I: The “Alus Art” Complex
1. wajang—the shadow-play, which uses leather or wooden puppets to dramatize stories from the Javanese versions of the Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, or mythological versions of the history of the kingdoms of pre-colonial Java.
2. gamelan—the percussion orchestra which can either be played alone or can accompany the wajang or various other art forms.
3. lakon—literally “plot” or “scenario.” A myth which may be dramatized in the wajang but is often merely related orally as myths normally are.
4. djogèd—Javanese court dancing, which may be autonomous or which may “dance out” lakons from the wajang.
5. tembangs—poems, written in various rigid forms, which may be either read or sung, with gamelan accompaniment if one wishes.
6. batik—the wax and dye method of textile decoration.
Cluster H: The “Kasar Art” Complex
1. ludrug—popular farce, involving as major features male transvestitism and low clowns.
2. klèdèks—female street dancers, who dance both “from door to door” and as hired performers at weddings, circumcisions, and the like.
3. djaranan—popular dance, in which the dancers “ride” paper horses and become possessed, behaving as though they themselves were horses.
4. dongèngs—folktales, legends, animal stories, and so on; the main difference from lakons lies in the fact that dongèngs are always told orally and never dramatized in the wajang.
Cluster III: The “National Art” Complex
1. orkès—popular “dance bands” (although no one ever dances to them) consisting almost entirely of plucked instruments—banjos, .guitars, etc.
2. lagus—popular songs, played almost continuously over the radio and sung at circumcisions, weddings, and other such occasions by vocalists attached to the orkès. Originally patterned on Portuguese-inspired folk models from various parts of Indonesia, they are now more and more approaching modern Western (i.e., American) models.
3. kesusastraan Indonesia—modern, Western-style novels, poems, short-stories, and plays, written in Indonesian, the national language.
4. bioskops—movies, Western and Indonesian (or Malayan).
With the exception of the “National Art” complex, which has not yet been widely discussed, the content, the technical analysis, and the distribution within the Javanese-Sundanese-Madurese culture area of these various art forms— as well as others not found in Modjolcuto—have been thoroughly and systematically handled by generations of Dutch scholars, and so little of that need be repeated here.*
of the three art clusters, the first—the “Alus Art” complex—is at once the most widely spread throughout the culture, the most deeply ingrained, and the most philosophically and religiously elaborated, this last largely by the prijajis. The center of the complex is the wajang, the world-famous Javanese shadow-play. The shadow play is called so because the puppets, which are fiat cutouts of leather, painted in gold, reds, blues, and blacks, are made to cast large shadows on a white screen. The dalang, as the puppeteer is called, sits on a mat in front of the screen. A gamelan orchestra is behind him, and an oil lamp hangs above his head (traditionally: nowadays, in the towns at least, an electric lamp is used). The puppets are fastened to a tortoise-shell stick,
* For the reader interested in further detail, in either technical, historical, or distributional terms, the following two books, the first, unfortunately, still untranslated are indispensable: Th. Pigeaud, Javaanse Volksvertoningen: Bijdrage tot de Beschrijving van Land en Volk, ’s-Gravenhage and Batavia, 1938; J. Kunst, Music in Java, Its History, Its Theory and Its Technique, 2 vol. (The Hague, 1949).
running from head to below their joined feet, at which point the dalang grasps the stick as a sort of handle, The movable arms, the only movable parts, also have short sticks attached to them which the dalang holds in the same hand and manipulates with his fingers. He holds the puppets up in either hand over his head and interposes them between the light and the screen. If they are nobles, as most are, he must be doubly careful never to let them get lower than his head. From the dalang’s side of the screen one thus sees the puppets themselves and their shadows rising up dominant on the screen behind them. From the reverse side of the wajang screen, one sees the shadows of the puppets only.
Along the base of the screen, in front of the dalang, there is a banana tree-trunk into which are stuck the puppets not immediately in use. As the play, which usually lasts all night progresses, the dalang takes and replaces characters from the tree-trunk as he needs them and manipulates the puppets immediately in play. (Mostly they are either engaged in very formal conversation, in war—in which case he knocks them against one another—or, in the case of the clowns, in some kind of burlesque.) He imitates all the voices called for, sings when singing is appropriate, kicks an iron clapper with his foot to keep the rhythm and to symbolize the sounds of war, and, as he has only the bare outline of the story given to him by tradition, makes up most of the details of the plot as he goes along, particularly in the comic scenes, which often contain elements of contemporary social criticism. He does this the whole night long, sitting until the dawn with his feet folded inwards in the formal Javanese sitting posture, performing with a dexterity, a fertility of invention, and a physical endurance which are altogether remarkable.
almost entirely, the stories (lakons) dramatized in the wajangs are from the Mahabharata. Ramayana stories—often referred to contemptuously as “monkey stories” because of the prominence in them of the half-monkey hero Ano-man and other similar figures—are not liked in Modjokuto. I never saw one performed there (although I did in Djokjakarta) and never met anyone who had anything favorable to say for them in comparison with the Mahabharata stories. My dalang informant said that although he knew the Ramayana stories he almost never got a contract to perform them. As for the stories of Madja-pahit, ICediri, and other early kingdoms, they evidently are almost never performed either in the leather-puppet or in the wooden-puppet form around Modjokuto, although one old man who lived near me sometimes performed with wooden-puppets for the casual amusement of the abangans in his quarter as an avocation, and the lakons seem still to be popular as oral traditions. There are in Java as a whole various different kinds of wajangs, classified according to the type of puppets used and the stories dramatized. In Modjokuto, in any case, almost all wajangs performed dramatize Mahabharata stories.
In the Mahabharata stories there are three major groups of characters:
1. Déwa-déwi—the gods and goddesses, headed by Batara Guru (Siva) and his wife, Batari Durga, and including Batara Narada, Sang Hjang Brama, and Batara Kala. As in the Greek epics, the gods are far from uniformity righteous: Batara Kala, for example, eats only-children, unless they have been protected from him by a performance of a special wajang depicting his birth.
2. Satrijas—the kings and nobles of the Javanese kingdoms of olden days. Supposedly, the “Ramayana Time” (in India) was succeeded by the “Mahabharata Time,” then by the “Buddhist Time” (i.e., the Hindu-Javanese period of Kediri, Singosari, Madjapahit, etc.), and finally by the present. Thus, in theory, the satrijas are the ancestors of the present-day Javanese, a circumstance which has led several scholars to view the wajang as an ancestor cult, originally connected with dual organization initiation rites in which young men learned the secrets of the tribe. Whatever the merits of this rather speculative theory, there is no apparent trace of such a view in Modjokuto today. There are several groups of satrija and various mythical kingdoms involved in the wajang. Among the most important characters are:
a) The Pendawas: the five brothers who rule the country of Amaría— Judistira, Bima, Ardjuna, Nakula, and Sadéwa (the last two identical twins). The Pendawas are usually accompanied by Kresna, king of the neighboring country of nDarawati, who is an incarnation of Wisnu and general advisor to the Pendawas. The two other famous figures in this camp are Gututkatja, the powerful son of Bima, who can fly, and Angkawidaja, the son of Ardjuna.
b) The Korawas: the hundred satrijas of Ngastina, led by Sujudana, Sengkuni, Durna, and Kama, the dissident half-brother to the Pendawas. Although cousins of the Pendawas, the Korawas have usurped the country of Ngastina from them, and it is the struggle over this disputed country which provides the major theme of the wajang, a struggle which culminates in the great Bratajuda war in which the Korawas are defeated.
3. Punakawans—Semar, Pétruk, and Gareng, the great Javanese low-clowns, servants and constant companions of the Pendawas. Semar, the father of the other two, is actually a god in all too human form, a brother to Batara Guru, the king of the gods. The guardian spirit of all the Javanese from their first appearance until the end of time, he is perhaps the most important figure in the whole wajang mythology.
The iakon as the dalang learns it is hardly more than an outline, consisting of a bare description of what happens in each of a half-dozen to a dozen major scenes, which scenes are in fact a series of encounters in which the ruling lord of one kingdom meet those of another and either talk or fight.
He (a dalang who lived just outside of Modjokuto) said that in the wajang the same pattem recurs over and over. First the people face each other, then they talk, then they leave, then they talk again, and then they fight. He said that it is the same as now: when two countries can’t get together they talk; then the talk breaks down and they fight. He said that wajang has meaning for today too. The thing one has to do is talk and talk; and slowly the people come to agree (t jot jog) and then there is peace. Otherwise, if the talk breaks off, there is war. He said: “That is the way it is with people too. If you come to me to study, we talle with each other, slowly begin to
tjotjog, and after a while I learn from you about American art and you learn from me about Javanese art.”
A sample story presented in the form in which it was dictated to me by this Modjokuto dalang, and in the form in which he had learned it. follows:
The Marriage of Angkawidjaja
Scene (bob) I. Present (djèdjèr—literally, “standing up”) in the Kingdom of nDarawati: King Kresna, his son Prince Samba, his brother-in-law Prince Sentjaki, and various courtiers.
Subject of Discussion (ingkang dipun rembag): The request by Prince Ardjuna of Ngamarta for the hand of King Kresna’s daughter, Siti Sundali. Kresna agrees on the condition that Prince Ardjuna provide the girl with two female servants who are identical twins.
A Visit (kasowan) : The Prime Minister of Ngastina. He also asks for the hand of Kresna’s daughter and is also told to provide two female servants who are identical twins.
Scene II: Present at the Place of Meditation, Kembangsoré: The Holy Man Sempati with his disciples.
A Visit: His granddaughters, Pregiwa and Pregiwati, who are identical twins. They tell him they are looking for their father. Sempati tells them to go to Ngamarta and look for Prince Ardjuna. They leave.
The holy man tells his disciples to follow the girls and watch over them.
The disciples meet the girls and tell them they have been instructed to guide them to Ngamarta. They walk with them to the edge of the forest.
A Hostile Meeting (kepapagan [whenever two groups of satrijas meet in the woods—i.e., outside of the protected compounds of each other’s cleared kingdoms—they seem inevitably to fight]): Various Korawas from Ngastina: Prime Minister Sengkuni, Prince Kartamarma, Prince Tjitraksa, and others. The Korawas ask the girls to come to Ngamarta as servants. They refuse. The Korawas attempt to force them. The disciples defend the girls and are killed. The girls run away into the forest. The Korawas hunt and hunt for them.
Scene HI: Present in the Castle in Ngamarta: Ardjuna, with two of his wives, Sembadra and Srikandri, his son Angkawidjaja, and his nephew Gatutkatja. Also the three clowns: Semar, Pétruk, Garèng.
Subject of Discussion: The proposed marriage of Angkawidjaja.
A Visit: Samba, Prince of nDarawati. He tells them of his father’s decision that they must find twin servants for his daughter in order for the marriage to occur.
Angkawidjaja, Gatutkatja, and the three clowns are ordered by Ardjuna to search for two such identical twin girls. They leave.
They go into the forest. In tfie middle of the forest they meet the two granddaughters of Sempati, Pregiwa and Pregiwati. Angkawidjaja asks them where they are from and they say, “From file Place of Meditation, Kembangsoré. We are seeking our father, Prince Ardjuna.” Angkawidjaja then says
that he is the son of Ardjuna, and if what they say is so they are his younger sisters. He offers to take them to their father.
Not long after, they meet the Korawas of Ngastina still searching for the girls. A great battle ensues. The Korawas lose, and run away to their home country, Ngastina. Anglcawidjaja and his company return to Ngamarta.
Scene IV: Present in the country of Ngamarta: The five Pendawas—King Judistira, Prince Bima, Ardjuna, Nangkula, Sadéwa.
Subject of Discussion: The prospective marriage of Anglcawidjaja and Siti Sundali, and the necessity of finding two identical twin servants.
A Visit: Anglcawidjaja, Gatutlcatja, the three clowns, Pregiwa, Pregiwati. They announce that they have found the twin servants and that the girls are in fact daughters of Ardjuna. [Ardjuna, the masculine ideal, has many wives and countless offspring.] Everyone is very happy.
The entire company then goes in a procession to nDarawati for the wedding.
Scene V: Present in the country of Ngastina: King Sujudana.
A Visit: Prime Minister Sengkuni, Prince Kartamarma, Prince Tjitralcsa, and others of the Korawas, who are fleeing the scene of battle with the satrijas from Ngamarta. They tell the king they have been beaten by Ang-kawidjaja. The king calls his son, Prince Lesmana, and instructs him to put on his wedding clothes.
The entire company then goes in a procession to nDarawati for the wedding.
Scene VI: Present in the country of nDarawati: King Kresna, his son Prince Samba, and his brother-in-law Prince Sentjaki.
A Visit: The Pendawa company, including the twin-girl servants.
Anglcawidjaja and Siti Sundali are then married in the castle.
A Visit: The Korawas from Ngastina arrive. They request that Siti Sundali be married to Prince Lesmana. They are informed that she has already been married to Prince Angkawidjaja. They do not accept this.
There ensues a great war between the Pendawa camp and the Korawas. The Korawas are beaten and flee home to Ngastina.
Scene VII: Present in nDarawati: King Kresna, King Judistira, Prince Bima, Prince Ardjuna, Prince Nangkula, and Prince Sadéwa.
They all eat together.
Into this general schematic outline the dalang weaves noble speeches, humorous episodes, and noisy wars until he stretches a story which takes only a few minutes to tell (and is usually but a very minute part of the whole Mahabharata cycle) into a performance lasting the whole night. The wajang is like a sonata, Western-educated Javanese intellectuals sometimes say, since it opens with an exposition of a theme, follows with a development and variations of this theme, and concludes with a resolution and recapitulation of it. From nine until midnight the political leaders of the various kingdoms confront one another and state the terms of the story: a wajang hero wishes to marry the daughter of a neighboring king, a colonialized country wants its freedom, or whatever. From midnight until three o’clock or so difficulties of some sort set in: someone else is bidding for the daughter’s hand, the imperialist country refuses freedom to its colony. And, finally, these difficulties are resolved in the last section ending at sun-up—inevitably by a war in which the heroes triumph, after which there is a brief celebration of the accomplished marriage or the achieved freedom.
One informant had a more down-to-earth theory of why the wajang is subdivided so. He said that the alus but rather boring speeches of the great lords and diplomats are placed early in the evening before people are tired enough to be put to sleep by them; at midnight, just as some of the audience are beginning to feel drowsy, the clowns come on and initiate the development-and-complications period and liven things up with their crude humor (one of their chief functions, evidently, being to cheer up the heroes in their time of troubles); and finally, toward morning, when people are really about to drop off, the great wars begin, waking people with their great clatter and vigorous dramatics.
Prijaji versus A ban g an Views of the Wajang
a wajang performance is at once a kind of elaborated abangan slametan and a refined art form subtly symbolic of the prijaji outlook and ethic. It is literally viewed from two angles. In the old days the women and children sat on the side of the screen where only the shadows of the puppets were visible and the men sat on the other side. But now the situation has changed, and the man giving the wajang (now usually a prijaji, not so much because the peasant interest in the form has weakened as because the cost has grown too great for most peasants to bear) along with his guests of both sexes—separated from one another—sit on the shadow side; while out in the yard, on the dalang side, great crowds of uninvited peasants and lower-class townsmen gather to watch. The arrangement indicated below is typical.
Key
l.Inside room of the house —female' guests
2. Porch of the house — male guests
3. Wajanq screen
4. Dalang
5. Gomelan
6. Uninvited onlookers «
X*
The wajang, rooted as it is so deeply in Javanese culture that even the most hard-bitten santri modernist will admit that one ought to see one once, is a prime case in point of the futility of attempting to determine whether gentry patterns are rationalizations of peasant ones or peasant patterns corruptions of gentry ones. On the one hand, the wajang is part of the abangan ritualistic-polytheistic-magical religious pattern, although this is decreasing; and on the other hand it is part of the prijaji mystical-pantheistic-speculative religious pattern. This last, too, is decreasing, but perhaps less rapidly. The decrease in popularity of a once widespread art-form tends, initially, to increase its cost as lesser practitioners drop out to leave the field to the more highly trained, throwing the burden of its support more and more on those who are willing and financially able intentionally and self-consciously to cultivate it as a professional art. They may cultivate it, of course, more for reasons of prestige than of appreciation or for both. In any case, all the wajangs I saw while I was in Modjokuto were sponsored by prijajis and all the dalangs were imported from the larger towns elsewhere,1 although I do not doubt that richer abangans still give them from time to time. The average fee for a competent dalang seems to run about Rp 500.00.
On the abangan side, the wajang is a popular drama of legendary heroes, a drama the appeal of which is, perhaps, not so very different from that of the other less pretentious popular dramas we shall consider presently; but it is also a part of the slametan complex. In general, a wajang may be given on any day on which a slametan may be given and for the same reasons for which a slametan would be appropriate. Weddings, circumcisions, births are fit occasions for wajangs, as is the Prophet’s birthday. For weddings and births (but not for circumcisions, a non-Hindu custom) there are specially appropriate lakons, such as “The Marriage of Angkawidjaja” (or of Bima or Ardjuna, there being such a marriage lakon for nearly every major hero), related above, for a wedding, or “The Birth of Gatutkatja” (perhaps the most popular lakon of all) for a birth. I have mentioned the necessity of giving a special wajang to protect an only-child from being devoured by Batara Kala. One can also give one to prevent or cure illness. Contrariwise, some particular lakons are considered likely to bring misfortune and so are almost never played.
In addition, the presentation of a wajang is itself set in a slametan context:
He (a dalang) said that before one gives a wajang one must burn incense for the spirits to eat and pray—just as at a slametan. Then there is a sadjèn (offering), which is prepared by the man who contracts for the wajang and includes a banana, a coconut, incense, and 18Vi cents. Also, food is prepared —cooked chicken, coconut, etc., which the dalang takes home afterwards and eats. The sadjèn is placed next to the dalang where everyone can see it, and it remains there through the performance.
As in a slametan, anyone attending a wajang is safe from all harm at least as long as it is going on and probably longer. Thus the giving or attending of a wajang is in part the same kind of a ritual defensive act as a slametan; and one often sees a wajang going on but no one really paying much attention to it, the point being not the content of the story but the ritual efficacy of the performance. Sometimes people regard the puppets themselves as being entered by spirits during the performance; and good dalangs are often said to be entranced, which is why they have such powers of concentration and strength. As one has possessed curers (diikun tiban) as well as those whose skill comes through learning, so one also has possessed dalangs (dalang tiban) as well as the more common type who learn their skill from other dalangs.
The groom-to-be came by again and said that there was a dalang tiban not so long ago near Kediri. Evidently a spirit came and entered him; for, although he had never dalange.d in his life, he was then able to do so without study and did so for thirty-five days without stopping and then lost his spirit and didn’t know how to do it any more.
For the prijaji some of this ritualistic aspect of the wajang may still be of importance (incense being burned at court wajangs too) although, as he has turned the slametan into a nearly secular feast, in his hands the wajang becomes a fairly secularized art-form. But this secularization on the ritualistic side actually tends to liberate speculation about the “meaning” of the wajang, to encourage—its formal ritual meaning gone—interpretation of its content. And this tends to bring the shadow-play into even closer integration with the prijaji religion than with the abangan. Art, like etiquette, is seen as providing a material form for an essentially spiritual content, an outward symbolization of an inward rasa:
I talked to Pak Wiro (a prijaji draughtsman), the head of Budi Setia, the theosophical club. (We were watching a wajang.) He said that the wajang was originally a propaganda device of the Hindus to spread their religion. (Just about as often one hears that it was originally a propaganda device of the Moslems to spread their religion.) He said that the people would accept it more easily than in thick books which they couldn’t or wouldn’t read, and that Jesus, Muhammad, and Kresna were all the same really since all ascend to heaven and all are messengers of God. . . . All religions are at base the same. One of the two younger men next to me, who were listening attentively and approvingly, said, “Yes, many are the roads.” Wiro said that from the dalang side the wajang figures show their bodies, their outside, but from the shadow side they show their souls, their inside. The boy next to me said, “Yes, but their souls have different characters, just like people. Some are refined, some rough.”
what, then, is the meaning of the wajang for the prijaji?
In essence, the Mahabharata is the story of a struggle between cousins, the Pendawas and the Korawas, a struggle which culminates in the great war of kinsmen, the Bratajuda, during which the champions from each side face one another. Ardjuna kills his older half-brother Kama, Bima dispatches Sujudana, and so on. The immediate impulse is to call the Pendawas, who are certainly heroes, the “good” men and Korawas, who are not quite so clearly villains, the “bad” men; but to identify the figures in the drama as though they were characters in a medieval morality play would be a serious misunderstanding. (The Pendawas are always on the right in a wajang, the Korawas on the left— another reminder of those allegoric dramas of our own religious tradition.) The absolutistic dichotomous morality of Western thought is generally foreign to the pantheistic prijaji outlook which sees God in everything, the good as well as the bad, in pain as well as pleasure.
The struggle between the Pendawas and the Korawas is an endless one— despite its seeming ending in the Bratajuda war (an episode almost never actually played in Java, in any case). The time-bound realities of good and evil, pleasure and pain, love and hate are dwarfed and rendered meaningless by the timeless and ultimately amoral background against which they are fought out. The feudal virtues of courage and duty are resolved with the seemingly antithetical religious virtues of renunciation and compassion by an invocation of the cosmic-comic inevitability of human actions given the divine context in which they are set. One does what one has to do only because the gods expect one to. Only through action unmarred by passion, a detached performance of inevitable duty, does one reach peace.
In keeping with their tendency to find ultimate reality in their own feelings, to turn objective metaphysical meaning into subjective emotional experience, the prijajis give the Mahabharata as it appears in the wajang, a psychological, almost psychoanalytic, interpretation.
He (a schoolteacher) said that the main purpose of the wajang was to draw a picture of inner thought and feeling, to give an external form to internal feeling. More specifically, it pictured the eternal conflict in the individual between what he wanted to do and what he felt he ought to do. Suppose one wants to steal something, and at the same time something inside tells you not to do it, restrains one, controls one. That which wants to do it is called the will; that which restrains is called the ego (literally, the word is aku— “I,” “me,” “myself”). All such wishes and tendencies threaten every day to ruin the individual, to destroy his thought and upset his behavior. These tendencies are called goda, which means something which plagues or teases (someone or something). He then gave another example. “You go to a coffee-shop and people are eating, and they invite you to join them. You have already just eaten at home and so are full; yet you want to eat with them, and so you have a struggle within. Should I eat with them? No, I’ve already eaten and I will be overfull. But the food looks so good. . . .”
This second, so very, very Javanese example, concerning food, points up that the struggle is not between good and evil, as the first example might lead one to believe, but between the old opposites of ¡casar and alus feelings, between base animal passion and detached, effortless self-control, like Ardjuna calmly dispatching his half-brother in the Bratajuda war.
In the wajang the various plagues, wishes, and so on, the godas, are represented by the Korawas, of whom there are 100, and the ability to control oneself is represented by their cousins the five Pendawas and by Kresna, the incarnation of Wisnu. The stories are ostensibly about a struggle over land, as the abstract elements in the rasa can be represented in concrete external elements which will attract the audience and seem real to them and still communicate its inner message. . . . For example, the wajang is full of wars which are supposed to represent the inner war which goes on continually in every person’s batin between his base and his refined impulses. In every lakon Ardjuna and the other Pendawas are continually fighting the giants and ogres, and, oddly, they have to keep killing them over and over again. They kill them once and then a couple of hours later they are killing them all over again. Why is this? It is because the giants and ogres represent the passions. They represent a person’s inner desires to amuse oneself instead of study, to play instead of work, to wander here and there rather than sticking to a fixed course; and, since these lusts and passions keep arising again and again, one has to keep fighting them off with good impulses, represented by the Pendawas. (The Pendawas are usually held to symbolize the five senses also, the correct ordering of them.) But one can’t ever defeat them once and for all. They always keep coming back and one has to keep killing them again and again.
The metaphysical doctrine of the Indian Mahabharata is here stated in a psychological rather than a socio-political vocabulary, but it remains essentially unchanged. As the king’s castle becomes a symbol for the inner heart and the height of political status becomes a sign of inward refinement, so here the conflict in the Bhagavad Gita between the feudal obligation to fight and the inner compassion for other mere humans is resolved by projecting both duty and compassion against the all-encompassing background of an ever-present God. It is transformed into a conflict between the grosser sensory necessities of natural existence and the polite ideal of refined feeling which is resolved in turn by projecting both kasar and alus feelings against the all-encompassing background of the ultimate “feeling-meaning,” or rasa.
I asked them (a prijaji couple, members of a mystic sect) : “What do you think of when you meditate?” They said: “You don’t think of anything. What you try to do is clear your mind of any thoughts at all, so you can have direct contact with God. You have to get complete emptiness without thought; a pure, clear, serene insight.” I asked them if they felt anything when this happened; and they said, “Yes and no. There is a tremendous feeling but it is not like regular feeling, and you can’t explain it to anyone else. It is a purely private thing.”
And the result of this kind of ultimate emotional understanding is the same as the result of the understanding Ardjuna got from Krishna—an inward serenity in the midst of an outward reality.
I went to the market and bought some cloth from Pak Lamidjan and his wife, he being one of the ten gurus (teachers) of Sumarah (a mystic sect). He said that Sumarah was concerned with making one so that one does not pay too much attention to worldly things; so that you do not care too much about the things of everyday life. He said that this is very difficult to do. His wife,
he said, was not yet able to do it much, and she agreed with him. She still likes to ride in motorcars, but he doesn’t care whether he does or not. It takes much long study and meditation. For example, one must get so that if someone comes to buy cloth one doesn’t care whether he buys it or not. One must not get one’s emotions really involved in the problems of commerce, but just think of God. He said that Sumarah wants to turn people toward God and avoids any strong attachments to everyday life.
We shall return to mysticism in greater detail later. The point here is merely to establish that the wajang, and hence those other arts of literature, music, and dance which cluster about it, is, for the sophisticated literati at least, part of the general religious complex constructed around the concepts of kasar—alus, lair—batin, and rasa; and that the wajang states in an emotionalist vocabulary the same formulation of what is perhaps the basic dilemma of Indian religious thought as it is presented in the Mahabharata—how is action possible, given compassion?
Sudjono (the school teacher) went on to say that each of the three main Pendawas has a different character. The oldest, Judistira, is very good; in fact he is too good, too free of evil. The result is that in his extreme sense of compassion he is not a very effective king, being completely unable to rule the country for himself. For example, he views all things in the world as belonging to God, and people as unimportant parts of the larger whole. Thus, if a man comes to him and asks for his land, Judistira will just give it to him, the ultimate result being that all the land be given away and the state unable to hold together. Or he will give away all his food, unthinking of himself, and then starve to death. He is compassionate, too compassionate; and so he needs his brothers to help him rule. His main difficulty, said Sudjono in conclusion is that he doesn’t know the word “no.” The second brother, Bima, is just the opposite. If he has an intention he follows it out straight to its conclusion; he doesn’t look aside, doesn’t turn aside or idle along the way. He always advances and never looks back. Once he has an idea and feels that he is capable of carrying it out, he is brave to the end and will not listen to anyone or anything. He is single-minded and fears no one. The third brother, Ardjuna, has the ability to do good and to do evil. His goodness comes from the fact that he opposes evil, that he shelters people from injustice, without caring for himself, and that, also, he is courageous in fighting for the right. His badness is that he can kill in cold blood and that he does not feel compassionate enough, sympathetic enough. He does not feel mercy enough for evil-doers and thus can be brutal in the name of justice.
The three major characters of the wajang (excluding, for the moment Semar) thus state the action-compassion dilemma, presenting dramatic metaphors of the several forms it takes in human experience. Judistira, his ability to act drained by his compassion, is praiseworthy but pallid—a symbol of the beauty and incapabilities of too unworldly a sensitivity. Bima, his will to action interfering with his emotional flexibility, is colorful and attractive, but in part a victim of his own somewhat immature will—a symbol of the vitality and dangers of passionate commitment. The middle brother, Ardjuna (the other two younger brothers, the twins, being minor characters only, notable for their dog-like fidelity to their elder brothers), is able to sustain action by stifling compassion through an invocation of divine order or justice into the human context, but only at the cost of leaving him a figure at once the most coldly capable and the most mercilessly just.
Judistira’s sense for the negating effects of the wider frame of existence upon human actions, tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner; Bima’s sense for the felt realities of injustice viewed in human perspective, rather than under the aspect of eternity, and the consequent need to take resolute action against such injustice; and Ardjuna’s cruel insistence upon the application of a divine code to a human world, are all part of the same dilemma. And for all three the solution is the same—mystical insight. With a genuine comprehension of the realities of human situation, a true perception of the ultimate rasa, comes the ability to combine Judistira’s compassion, Bima’s will to action, and Ardjuna’s sense of justice into a truly alus outlook, an outlook which brings an emotional detachment and an inner peace in the midst of a world of flux but yet permits and demands a struggle for order and justice within such a world. As our Modjokuto poet points out:
Indeed the saints
Know God directly every day
During the time they are in the world.
In sum, the philosophy of the wajang stories is that insofar as one can perceive ultimate reality, which is within oneself as an ultimate feeling, rasa, one will be free of the distracting effects of earthly emotions—not only compassion, but anger, fear, love, hope, despair, and all. This gives one great power—either for good, as in the case of the Pendawas, or for evil, as in the case of the Korawas, who after all are alus too. It is not only the good who can mediate, but the evil as welU for mysticism is an amoral science anyone can employ. It brings knowledge; and, as in science generally, knowledge is power for good or for evil. Good and evil are human values only, and God is in everything—the hate and the cruelty as well as the love and the compassion; and everything is in God. It is a religion arguing that understanding of the self brings power and peace in this world, and the wajang stories often point this up quite sharply.
He told me a wajang story. Someone tells Bima that if he gets a special kind of water and bathes in it he will be invulnerable and thus will certainly win in the Bratajuda war against Sujudana. As he doesn’t know where this water can be found, he goes off to see a guru to find out where to get it. The guru, however, has lately been given lots of gifts by the Korawas, and so the guru aids evil and tries to send Bima to his death. (There are gurus like that, the informant said; some use their knowledge for good, some for bad.) The guru tells Bima to go and get the water at the top of the mountain—although he knows that two very powerful giants are meditating there and that they will be infuriated when they are disturbed by Bima looking for the magic water to make him powerful and invulnerable. Bima goes, and indeed the giants become angry and fight with him. He is nearly beaten, but finally he manages to strike the giants’ heads together, and Io, they turn into gods. Sometimes the gods themselves do evil; and these two had done something wrong and had been incarnated as giants by Batara Guru, from which state Bima removed them by knocking their heads together. Grateful, they tell him that he has been deceived and there is no water there. Angry, he goes back to the guru and says that he has been deceived; but the guru explains by saying that he had sent Bima up the mountain as a test of his bravery and strength to make sure that he was able to undergo the actual journey he must malee. Then he tells Bima that he will find the water in the middle of the sea, hoping that Bima will be drowned there. Bima leaves for the sea, single-mindedly, while his older brother, Judistira, and his younger brother, Ardjuna, plead with him not to go telling him that he is being deceived again. He pays no attention to them but marches straight to the sea. When he reaches the sea, after great struggles with monsters, he finds a god who looks exactly like himself except that he is only as big as his little finger. Bima, astonished at this midget replica of himself, tells him his quest. The little god says “Enter me”; and Bima does, through the mouth, the big man entering the little. Inside, he sees that the whole world is there, contained inside the little god. Then he emerges again, the god telling him that there is no water, that his power is within himself, and that he must look into himself, for that is the source of his strength. “If God is everywhere in the world, then he is in you too, and you must look into yourself and see the world there, and then you will have the power you seek.” And so Bima goes off to meditate. Sudjono (the informant) was quite conscious of the symbolism of all this and kept saying that the midget-god replica of Bima represented his inner self.
Bima’s meditation brings him the knowledge he seeks, and the very form of the wajang puppet which represents him serves as a reminder to the audience of the main “message” of the wajang, the need for mystical meditation.
(The informant is a clerk in the hospital.) According to “Javanese science” (iltnu djawi), there are seven levels below the earth and seven levels in the sky, the earth being in between the two sets. People whose minds are clear can see down all seven and up all seven. All this is further explained in the wajang. In the wajang, Brataséna (another, far more common name for Bima) can see down all seven and up all seven. . . . His name, in fact, means to finish (brata) meditation (séna)\ and so this means that if people finish meditation—that is, attain mystical union—they can see all seven levels up and all seven down. Only very few people can do this, and those who can are called gurus, mystical teachers. One can go further into all this and look at the appearance of Brataséna in the wajang. First, there is the long thumbnail he has, the pantjanaka (five nails), which symbolizes that all his five senses (pantjaindrija) are sharp and acute. Second, there is the sarong he wears, which is checked in red, white, and black, the red indicating bravery, the white purity, and the black fixity of will, resolution. Next, there is the ear decoration he wears, which is called sumping and described as djinaroting asem endèk arep duwur buri, literally “the root of a tamarind which is low in front and high in back.” But each of these words has a second meaning. Djinarot, “root,” here has the force of “essence,” “core,” etc. Asem, "tamarind,” has the secondary meaning rasa or “feeling.” Endèk arep, “low in front,” indicates the ego, the individual self in its humbleness; and duwur buri, “high in back,” means God, because God is high and walks behind the individual. The meaning of it all then, details aside, is that the lair, the outer aspect of Brataséna, shows that he has already made as one his “ego,” himself, and God. In more explicit terms, a man who has finished meditating has joined the outside and the inside, lair and batin, and made them as one and has also become one with God. Thus, the above aspects of Brataséna—that is, of any man who has meditated—can be summarized as follows: The thumbnail indicates that his five senses are as sharp as possible; the various colors of the squares on his sarong indicate that he is brave, pure, and fixed of will; and the ear-ornament means that he is one with God and that his lair and batin have merged. Theoretically, every man can be Brataséna—can meditate and reach this state.
It is worth noting here that this is not the radical pessimism of later Hinduism and of Buddhism, in which the tendency is to devaluate action except as a necessary evil. Bima, like the other Pendawas, is no hermit and no pacifist; rather, as the Javanese most often describe him and his brothers, he is a “defender of society.” For the Javanese, mystical experience is not a rejection of the world but a temporary retirement from it for purposes of increasing spiritual strength in order to operate more effectively in the mundane sphere, a refinement of the inner life in order to purify the outer. There is a time for the mountain-top (where most really advanced mythical mystics do their meditations) and a time for the city, one of my informants said; and Javanese semi-historical legends repeat the single theme of the dethroned or threatened king or the defrauded heir to the kingship retreating to a lonely mountain-top to meditate, and, having gained spiritual power in this manner, returning to lead a successful military expedition against his enemies. This theme persists. Many Modjokuto people still insist that the leader of the ill-fated revolt against the Japanese in a near-by city who disappeared when it collapsed is alive and meditating on a volcano-top, and will return to lead a crusade of purification against the present state of society. This is the warrior Kshatriya ethic before India’s priestly Brahmans turned it other-worldly; it is not escape from life, but escape in life which is prized.
I asked him (another cloth salesman) about Sumarah. Why did they meditate? He said that it was only to make the heart peaceful; to make one calm inside so that one will not be easily upset. “For example,” he said, “if you’re selling cloth and you are all upset you may sell a cloth for forty rupiah when it cost you sixty, or some such thing. Suppose a person comes here and my.mind is not calm; then I can’t sell him anything.” Why, I asked; but he couldn’t explain very well, for he seemed to take it as self-evident that if one was not calm in the heart, the sale wouldn’t happen. . . . “Anyway,” he said, “that is all there is to Sumarah: a practice to help you calm your inner heart.” I said, “Well, why do you have to have a meeting? Why not just meditate at home?” And he said, “Well, in the first place you are not supposed to get peaceful by withdrawing from society. You are supposed to stay in society and mix with people, only with peace in your heart.”
But what about Semar, the native Javanese figure (who does not appear in the original Indian epics and so must have been introduced into the stories after they arrived in Java) in whom so many oppositions seem to meet, the figure who is both god and clown, man’s guardian spirit and his servant, the most spiritually refined inwardly and the most rough-looking outwardly? Semar is said to be the eldest descendant of “He that is One” (i.e., God), elder brother to Batara Guru. Batara Guru became king of the other gods— Wisnu, Brama, Kala—who followed him, but Semar became a man—a fat, awkward, ugly-looking man, full of rough talk, comic stupidities, and hilarious confusions. At least this is the pure version; but syncretism, the need to account for new actualities, and the vagaries of oral tradition sometimes shift things a little.
The son (of the dalang) said in the beginning Java was all woods and full of spirits. Then the people came and displaced the woods and the spirits, but there are still plenty of the latter. The dalang said that he couldn’t tell me about spirits because he had never seen one and he could not explain that kind of thing to me. Evidently he was thinking of the scorn he had received from Westerners before on tin's point. When I said, “No, you can’t see them, but you can see people who have been entered by them and you can feel them,” he said, “If you have an opinion like that, then I can explain them to you. If you have a sceptical attitude, then you can’t learn anything about them; you just won’t understand what I am talking about.” His son said that all people are descended from just two people and so they are all the same and shouldn’t fight, but they forget this sometimes. The dalang agreed and gave me the following genealogy:
Nabi (i.e., Prophet) Adam married Babu Kawa (Eve) and had children
Nabi Sis and Sajang Sis (Semar)
Nabi Sis then gave birth to all the Prophets, such as Nabi Ibrahim, (Abraham), Nabi Nur (Noah), Nabi Muhammad, and Nabi Isa (Jesus); and the various Western peoples descended from their nabis (The Arabs from Muhammad, the Dutch from Jesus, and so on). Semar gave birth to the Hindus and the Javanese. Thus all people are the same and all religions are the same.
In any case, Semar, the lowliest of the low, upon whom the Pendawas look, as one Javanese writer puts it, as they look upon the bottoms of their feet, is at the same time the father of us aÜ. Here is an explanation from a schoolteacher:
Everywhere Ardjuna goes he is accompanied by Semar Garèng-Pétruk, his “parents” (metaphorically, since he has a literal father, the defrauded King of Ngastina) and servants; and even though Ardjuna is a satrija he still listens to the advice of these comical old servants. Why? Because even though Ardjuna has killed many giants, he must not be proud and think he had conquered all. Even though he is higher than his “parents” and far more brave, far more clever, far more successful than they, he must still listen to them; for they have more experience than he, more wisdom even if they appear stupid and he clever. Thus, no matter how high above them he gets, he must still honor his “parents,” still ask and take their advice. For instance, young people are often extravagant and take ill-considered actions, and Ardjuna is also; and old people can hold them back from actions they would later regret the way the three clowns keep Ardjuna in tow and keep him from rash behavior. Also, the satrijas must be always accompanied by Semar, because he is a representative of God. The satrijas guard and defend society, and they remain safe and unharmed because they are accompanied by Semar until the end of time.
A full analysis of Semar’s role in the wajang could in itself fill a book, but it seems clear that in some sense he represents the realistic view of life as opposed to the idealistic. He calls Ardjuna back to everyday humdrum existence, cheers him up in his despair, and blunts the edge of his pride in his triumph. He tries to moderate the satrija's rigid sense of cosmic justice in terms of comic reality. All in all, the closest parallel in Western art to the wajangs seems to be Shakespeare’s chronicle plays. In considering the relationship between Ardjuna and Semar, one thinks immediately of the relationship between Prince Hal and his symbolic father, who was also fat, ugly and not a little wise. Even the form of the wajang—the long formal scenes in the courts with messengers coming and going, interspersed with short breathless transitional scenes in the woods or along the roads; the double plot, the clowns speaking a rough common language and full of a practical worldly-wise ethics, caricaturing the forms of action of the great nobles, who speak an elevated language full of apostrophes to honor, justice, and duty; the final war, which, like those at Shrewsbury and Agincourt, leaves the vanquished beaten but still noble—even the form of the wajang suggests Shakespeare’s historical drama.
The world-view the wajang expresses is, however, hardly Elizabethan at base, although there seems a peculiar similarity between Semar and his English counterparts in the relationship in which, as clowns, they stand to the two different traditions which dominate and motivate the two separate theaters. Both Semar and Falstaff provide a rather general criticism of the very values the dramas in which they are enclosed affirm. They furnish a reminder that, despite over-proud assertions to the contrary, no completely adequate human world-view is possible; and that, behind all the pretense to absolute and ultimate knowledge, the sense for the irrationality of human life, for the fact that it is unenclosable, remains. Whether or not Semar is, as has been suggested, a master-symbol of the peasantry, a criticism of gentry values in terms of the more earthy sense of life of the villagers (and the increasingly important role the clowns play in the more popular forms of drama, until they nearly swallow the héros entirely, leaving the latter rather overbred fools than descendants of satrijas, would tend to support this), he does, in his kasar human form, remind the alus Ardjuna of his own humble animal origins and, most crucially, resists any attempt to make humans into gods and end the world of kasar contingency by a flight to the alus world of absolute order, a final stilling of the eternal psychological-metaphysical struggle.
He said that in that story (I had been relating a wajang I had seen and been largely unable to follow) Siva comes down to earth in the form of a mystical teacher in an attempt to bring the Pendawas and the Korawas together, and that he is succeeding quite well except that Semar stands in the way; for Semar is really a god even though he seems to be only a servant. Ardjuna is bewitched by Siva in his earthly incarnation as a mystical teacher and told that if he kills Semar the Pendawas and the Koravvas will be able to make peace and the eternal struggle will end. Ardjuna does not want to kill Semar, whom he loves, but he is bewitched, and so he goes to Semar and is about to kill him. Semar then says, “So this is how you treat me after I have followed you around and served you and loved you.” This is the most poignant point in the play. Ardjuna is very ashamed, but he has given his word. Semar then says, “Well, all right, I will burn myself”; and he builds a bonfire and stands in it. But instead of dying he turns into his godly form and then defeats the magician. Then the war between the Korawas and the Pendawas begins again.
Including, in one instance, one of the first female dalangs in Java, who, I suspect, was more of an oddity than a portent.