Chapter 1Ç
Popular Drama: Wajang Wong, Ketoprak, and Ludrug
Beginning in the nineteenth century and increasingly in the twentieth, a new art form has taken hold among the Javanese masses—the popular seriocomic staged drama. There are many versions of this form of art—the ketoprak of central Java (“invented” as late as 1923); the ludrug of Surabaja; the farce-plays of West Java; and the most popularized forms of the wajang wong. Although each tends to dramatize a different sort of story,1 they nevertheless have similarities: the half-hour prologue featuring a comedy act of low clowns and/or some alus dancing; a main story, always a serio-comic farce, which, whatever the mythic nature of its content, is realistically acted; the playing (usually) of female parts by male transvestites; and, lastly, a commercial form of production with professional traveling troupes, paid admissions, and a “theater” setting.
These plays are composed of items from old, sometimes extinct, art-forms—masked dancers, peripatetic rural comedians, outmoded rituals, alus court art—all poured into a new mold, a theatrical convention certainly heavily influenced by Western forms of drama, most especially the moving pictures. As Modjokuto lies on the edge of the wajang wong and ketoprak areas, and within the ludrug area, I shall deal only with these and give most attention to the last, which, in Modjokuto, is by far the most popular indigenous art-entertainment.
Wajang wongs, ketopraks, and ludrugs are presented either in the wooden theater at the south edge of town, which is owned by a Chinese, or at the pasar malam (“night market”) traveling carnivals. These carnivals, which are very much like our own, with various types of gambling games, skill tests, side-shows, and so forth, although perhaps not quite so raucous, come to town (under Chinese sponsorship) once or twice a year. In general, since the level of performance is very low, with the exception of the ludnig company, which is quite skilled, they attract mostly peasants and lower class townsmen. They are usually dominated by their clowns, as the following synopsis of a wajang wong I saw will demonstrate, for here the alus satrija heroes are pushed into the background by the slapstick antics of Semar and his cohorts.
“Semar, Pétruk, Garèng, and Magic”
. . . Curtain up after the gamelan (all such plays being accompanied by a gamelan) had been going for a while. Five srimpi dancers who sang and danced at the same time—the seediest group I’ve ever seen, one being a dwarf. They were crude, mechanical, ill-trained. Solo style.
After this the story began. The King of Madura announces to a group of people that his daughter has been stolen by Duratmuka, a giant, and that whoever gets her back for him can marry her. Ardjuna takes the challenge, and he and Semar go off to look for her.
They meet the two other daughters of the King of Madura, one of whom is attracted to Ardjuna and tries to persuade him to give up his quest and stay with her. When he refuses, she curses him, saying that if he is hungry later he won’t get food; if he is thirsty, he won’t get drink.
The next scene is a fight with a giant who is guarding the forest where the missing girl is kept. The giant is very ferocious looking but rather stupid. The clowns approach him first, one at a time, singing to him, and he sings back and dances with them. Pétruk engages him in conversation, talking about how much the giant has traveled and how many languages he knows, with much play on words. While he is talking, Garèng creeps up and steals the giant’s dagger and goes off into the wings to sell it. He comes back a little later saying the market women won’t give a good price. Pétruk whispers to him to try again, while still engaging the giant in conversation. This occurs several times and finally Garèng, who is quite stupid, comes back and says that all the market women have gone home. At that point the giant discovers his dagger is missing and starts to search the clowns. As they bend over, he lifts up their shirts to look under them. With much clowning, they hand the dagger to one another, until finally they drop it and he finds it. Semar and the giant also act like clowns, Semar being chased by the giant and sticking out his posterior at the giant in ridicule. Later Semar tries the old trick of telling the giant to “look there on the ground” and hits the giant on the head. Finally Ardjuna comes in and kills the giant, but then Ardjuna faints for lack of food, a result of the earlier curse.
Semar has an idea of how to get food. Having no money, he will hold a magic show and get paid in rice. He goes to a girl who lives in the forest and performs his act. He turns a stone into a tortoise, which Pétruk throws in disgust at the girl, who promptly faints, and he turns coconut leaves into an eel, which Pétruk is also frightened of and throws at the girl. They grab the
rice and run off, frightened of their own magic. Semar brings the rice back to Ardjuna, and they go off again in search of the girl. . . .
They go back to guard the two other sisters because they fear another kidnapping. The three clowns go to sleep on the mat, while Kakrasana, another satrija who has joined Ardjuna, sits up. In the middle of the night, the son of Duratmuka comes by. Kakrasana knows that he is a girl-kidnaper and tries to catch him but fails. He then wakens Ardjuna, and there follows a long chase with more clownish humor. Finally, the kidnaper escapes. Ardjuna and Kakrasana decide to go to the enemy castle invisibly, which they do. Pétruk, also invisible, accompanies them and goes up to Duratmuka and smears his face and the faces of two of his henchmen with white paint—a great joke; and they all laugh at each other’s white-smeared faces. Then there is a general war, the giants lose, and the girl is taken home. The end.
In this performance, obviously, the clowns predominate the whole play, and the story, such as it is, is just a frame within which to display their antics rather than having much point in itself. Even the alus Ardjuna, who in the original wajangs never loses his sense of proportion for an instant, is made to engage in a clownish chase. As one informant said, in the wajangs the lakon is the important thing but in the farce-plays, the story isn’t much of anything; it is only the jokes that count.
The ketopraks are very similar except that they have, in Modjokuto, a Hindu-Javanese background (although the stories may be dated in the time of the post-Islamic Mataram kingdom). The one I saw was concerned with stealing from a rebellious lord the spear which was the magical source of his power, this deed being accomplished by the sultan’s daughter marrying him incognito and flattering him and persuading him to leave it behind when he goes out. (“It’s just like Delilah cutting off Sampson’s hair,” said my informant, who had just seen “Sampson and Delilah” in the movies.) Although the story was more important than that of the wajang wong just related the play was again clown-dominated.
In the ludrug, the form most often produced in Modjokuto, the story and humor balance one another off more and the aim to entertain (and make a profit) is fused with an aim to instruct. The ludrug, whatever it was before the war, now approaches the form of modern Western drama. It is played in ngoko, low-Javanese, except where krama or Indonesian are necessary for realism (e.g., in the speech of a high official or at a sophisticated big-city party), and has plots set in the present or the immediate past, with characters from “everyday life.” The female parts are played by men who dress and act the part well enough to deceive most observers. (Every informant with whom I attended a ludrug pointed out to me about a dozen times during the evening that the “girls” were really “boys,” evidently unconvinced that I believed them.) These female impersonators (who, from some casual observation of them off stage, seem often if not typically to be overt homosexuals) also sing “educational” songs between the acts.
The songs are modem in form, something like the krontjongs we shall discuss below, except that they are more distinctly Javanese in style and their subject matter is supposed to be “useful.” One actor will sing a song urging the men in the audience to take good care of their families, another will insist on the necessity for education, a third will argue for the advantages of honesty. Sometimes even political content will be inserted—usually of a general type such as “Down with corruption,” or “We must build up the country.”
The major litdrug troupe which came to Modjokuto, evidently the smallest town to which it toured, grew out of a leftist youth group active in the Revolution. It was called Marhaen (roughly, “common people,” “proletariat”) but apparently had no specific connection with the leftist religio-political party, Permai (Persatuan Rakjat Marhaen Indonesia) even though it shared a similar orientation and was identified in part of the public mind with it. Before the war the Dutch forbade popular plays of this sort, unless licensed, on the ground that the plays were “communist” (a label applied to nationalist agitation generally); and the Japanese forbade them altogether. Even now, some litdrug troupes are restrained from being even more explicitly political only by the weather-eye of the government, the rumor being that companies have had their licenses suspended for referring too directly, albeit in song, to the disadvantages of the Marshall Plan.
Although its prices were high (Rp 4.00 for a first-class seat; Rp 1.00 for a fourth-class), the Marhaen ludrug was very popular in Modjokuto. I never attended one of its performances when the house was not packed or nearly so, and the company was a prime topic of conversation from about a week before it came until a week after it left, the general opinion being that it was excellent. (It came three times for a total of about thirty days during the fifteen months I was in Modjokuto.)
The litdrug always began with a solo Madurese dance, the dancer singing the audience a welcome in high-Javanese. Next followed a long prologue with no apparent connection to the plot except that the clowns who were introduced in it later played leading roles, as the same characters, in the play proper. The following describes a typical prologue:
A clown whose name turned out to be Rukun (literally: “cooperation,” “mutual help”) enters and gives a short monologue (punctuated by what for the audience is a series of hilarious hiccups) on people who drink and gamble and the evils that flow therefrom. Later he is joined by a second clown, Bawa (literally: “beginner,” “undertaker,” in the sense of “entrepreneur,” Bawa being the most important character in all the plays and acted by the director-leader of the troupe), who turns out to be the central character not as hero or protagonist but, in the manner of all such clowns, as a kind of catalyst for the rest, the thread which ties the whole together. After the two clowns have joked and chattered a while, Rukun starts talking about urip, which means “life” but is also the name of the third clown, who has now entered. Rukun is talking about how hard his life is, repeatedly using the word urip. Rukun does not see the third clown but the third clown thinks Rukun is talking about him and becomes angry at some of the things Rukun says about him. During all of this exchange Bawa tries to tell Rukun that
Urip is there, making various signals and gestures, making faces, and so on.
The three clowns then go on to talk about a fourth man who is conceited and whom they want to swindle. They have a discussion of "persatuan (Literally, persatuan means “unity,” but it is used to designate an organization in the way we use “brotherhood.” Since it is a very common word in the modern nationalist political vocabulary, and is an Indonesian, not a Javanese, word, this dialogue was a political satire in part.) They talk about the pitfalls of organization and how everyone tries to get the best things for himself under the pretext of mutual help. The next scene shows a fourth man in his home. There comes a knock on the door. He goes, but Bawa comes in another door, and sits down, and when the fourth man returns Bawa pretends that he owns the house and says he is going to sell it. After some twenty minutes of talk in this vein, Bawa goes off and Rukun comes on. Rukun says that he wants to borrow some money and tells a long story of his hard luck. When the fourth man refuses to give him money, Rukun grabs himself around the neck and ostensibly chokes himself to death. Bawa now re-enters to extort money from the now terrified fourth man as the price of his silence. (Bawa accepts the money with a very humorous gesture of unwillingness, raising his left arm and receiving the money with his right under it while backing away—as though the money were tainted—precisely as the host at a slametan often receives, although less exaggeratedly, a guest’s contribution.) Bawa then carries Rukun away—and Rukun stands up to put his arm around Bawa’s shoulder, somewhat mystifying the fourth man. When they have gone, Urip enters, shakes hands with the fourth man, and promptly falls across the table as though dead. Bawa re-enters and repeats the business of accepting money as the price of silence, using similar pantomime, and carries Urip away, grabbing him gingerly by the folds of his coat. Urip really walks under his own power. There follows a scene in which the three argue about the division of money while the fourth man comes upon them unseen. Rukun and Urip finally see him and steal away, leaving Bawa to face him and give him back the money.
It should be apparent from this description that the clowns are not without skill. In the stories proper they almost always play servants, a continuation of the Semar tradition, and carry on the same kind of joking and horseplay. The stories are usually of the “soap-opera” type. Everyone concerned has many troubles of a common, recognizable sort, but all works out happily in the end—although sometimes with a peculiarly Javanese twist. In one story a boy is forced to choose between the servant he loves (and has married secretly) and the girl his Assistant District Officer father has chosen to be his bride, she being the daughter of a pensioned District Officer. After much soul-searching (while Bawa keeps packing and unpacking his master’s suitcase), the boy decides to accept his father’s decision and casts off his present wife, who, unbeknownst to him, is three months pregnant. Twenty years later, the boy, now a middle-aged man, is marrying off a daughter by his prijaji wife against the girl’s will. (She wants to continue her schooling.) The daughter suddenly falls over, dead, the examining doctor says, of a broken heart. The grief-stricken father wanders around, meeting, of all people, the now grown daughter by his first servant-wife.
The girl, who looks exactly like his second daughter who has just died, has been raised by Rukun and Bawa in such sheltered circumstances that she is unaware that the great majority of people have one parent of each sex. The father, having just lost his daughter, has a happy reunion with her, and all is forgiven on all sides. So all comes out right in the end—at least for those who survive.
In another story, a girl’s foster father (the clowns being his servants) dies, and his brother, actually a thief, is appointed executor and tries to deprive the girl of her inheritance. He gives her a pill which will put her to sleep for ten days and which, if she is not treated by a doctor in that time, will kill her. Bawa and Urip, who have been sent on a vacation to get them out of the way, return unexpectedly, discover the plot in the nick of time and turn the evil brother over to the police. (They bury the girl first, thinking she is dead, but dig her up again, and she recovers.)
In a third story, a boy leaves home because his father wishes him to marry a girl he doesn’t love. In another house, the daughter of a widowed mother leaves her house in tears because her mother wants her to marry a man she doesn’t love. After she leaves, the exiled boy comes to the house of the widowed mother and asks to stay there. The widow agrees on the condition that he marry her. Although she is no longer young and pretty, he does so because, the housing shortage being what it is, he has no other place to go. Meanwhile, at the boy’s home, his father is lonely without him, and, when the exiled girl appears there the father marries her. Then the two newly formed families meet, and there is much confusion about correct kin terminology, for the wife of the son is the mother of the father’s wife. The young man wants to exchange wives, but the father refuses, advising his son to be satisfied with an old wife, for as long as there is mutual understanding between husband and wife they will have a good life.
In yet another plot, things are even less alus. A middle-aged man sees a young girl in a restaurant and is attracted by her. He requests her in marriage from her parents, but her parents, being modern, leave the decision to her, and, seeing how old he is, she refuses him. He returns to his own city, where he is a merchant, and resumes his business, vowing to himself to get the girl as his wife somehow. Meanwhile his adopted son falls in love with the girl, marries her, and brings her home. The merchant falsely accuses his adopted son of embezzlement, and the boy is put in prison. The father then rapes the girl and, to conceal the crime, kills her. When the son gets out of prison, the father tells him the girl has left and returned, home. Shortly thereafter, the ghost of the girl begins appearing, shaking the father’s confidence. Then the parents of the girl come to pay a visit to see her, and, with the aid of the ghost and a servant who witnessed the murder, the story comes out. This is perhaps the most popular story of all, and is said to be based on a real case which occurred in Surabaja before the war.
The nuclear conflict in the ludrug seems to be the conflict of generations, the conflict between the attachment to tradition of the older generation, particularly concerning arranged marriages, and the wishes of the younger. In the first play, the father forces the son to divorce the girl he has already married in order to accept the father’s choice, and then the son, twenty years later, destroys his daughter in a similar manner; in the third, both a mother and a father exile their children—or the children exile themselves rather than give in—because the latter will not marry the spouses they are supposed to; in the last, a father and an adopted son compete for the same girl. In this conflict it is the younger generation which is always right; the rights of the heart and of self-determination are being asserted against the rights of tradition and of parental authority. If the older generation is not raping the younger, it is cheating it out of its inheritance, forcing it to marry rather than continue school, breaking up its love affairs, or marrying the young women and leaving the old ones for the young men. All in all, the plays lend force to the common complaint of Modjokuto’s chastened older generation. “We used to have a proverb, ‘The buffalo sueldes the buffalo-calf,’ but now we have to say, ‘The buffalo’s calf suckles the buffalo.’ ”
There are other themes, of course, notably that of the “adopted child-problem,” but all in all it is clear that, with its didactic character, its special type of comedy, and its concern with social and moral problems characteristic of a changing society, the ludnig is very much the child of the present. But it is also a child of the past, for if it were not it would hardly draw such crowds in a town like Modjokuto, where such problems as it dramatizes are as yet real only to the most urbanized fraction of the audience. The clowns, the female impersonators (who are never humorous objects as such, tranvestitism evidently being funny to the Javanese only in the sense of “peculiar,” not in the sense of “amusing”), the dancers, and the gamelan all tie the play to familiar cultural forms, so that a peasant who is really only half-clear as to what the plot is all about can laugh at the clowns, wonder at the transvestites, and enjoy the dancers.
The attitude towards the homosexual aspects of the ludrug is, in fact, quite ambivalent. Most people say that the ludrugs break up many homes because the homosexuals attract the men away from their wives; and the general opinion is that there is much homosexual activity among the various members of the troupe. It is said—whether truthfully or not, I do not know— that ludrugs are banned in some areas because of their deleterious moral influence. Sautris stay away from the ludrug almost entirely, and when I took a santri boy with me to see one he was distinctly uncomfortable. Prijaji parents regard the ludrug as too kasar. Although the parents often attend themselves, they frequently prohibit their children from attending, saying that it is bad for them to see such things at an impressionable age.2 A mixture of leftist politics (somewhat dampened at the moment), simple melodrama, low comedy, and forbidden forms of sexuality, the ludrug’s hold on its predominantly abangan audience would seem nearly unbreakable.
Street Dancers: Klèdèk, Djaranan, and Djanggrung
the next element of the kasar art complex is the klèdèk, sometimes called also tandak: female street-dancers and singers performing both as hired entertainers and, more commonly, from door to door along the streets of the town, in the market, or even in the villages. In this last capacity they are often hardly more than beggars and are viewed as such. They stand in front of a house or a store—their faces usually painted with thick white make-up, an outgrowth of the old masked dancers pattern—and wail out a song for a few moments until someone gives them ten cents to move on. Some of them are somewhat more skilled and, accompanied by one or two men playing gamelan instruments, dance poor imitations of the srimpi and the bedaja with elements from folic sources mixed in. They also sing a kind of tembcing-monologue of somewhat off-color sort and engage in some double-entendre repartee with their accompanists. The small procession, sometimes as many as two or three girls and a half-dozen accompanists (occasionally with a male dancer), but more often just a single girl and a single accompanist, moves through the streets, stopping at each house to sing. Sometimes people give them ten cents or a quarter to move on; often, however, they are ignored and move on of their own accord. Sometimes, however, people will “hire” them, paying anywhere from Rp 1.00 to Rp 2.50, in which case they put on their whole act for about a half-hour, great crowds gathering to watch. As the girls are as often as not professional prostitutes, this art is at the bottom of the kasar-alus ladder and is consequently almost wholly confined to abangan circles.
Somewhat similar to the klèdèk is the djaranan, also a street-show of dancers. In the klèdèk the dancers ride papier-mâchè horses (djaran means “horse”) and become possessed so as to act as though they were themselves horses, prancing, neighing, eating rice husks (as well as hot peppers, broken glass, etc.), being whipped, and so on. They too are itinerant troupes wandering around from town to town playing in the streets and markets. The following is a description from my notes:
In the afternoon a troupe of wandering performers of the horse-dance came by, and I hired them to perform. There were five people in the troupe. One man carried on his shoulders a set of instruments, drums, gambang (gamelan xylophone), angklung (a musical instrument made of bamboo tubes which is played by shaking it), and another man carried a big drum. As they went along the street they beat the drums to attract attention. The other three, one in a clown costume of burlap bags and a mask and the other two astride hobby horses painted white and black, pranced along in front of the people, weaving back and forth among them while wearing odd smirks on their faces, collecting dimes here and there as they passed by. To hire them cost Rp 2.50. . . . The horse-dance began with a beating of the drums and a playing of very simple, not very exciting music. Two of the players, who were astride horses, began to prance slowly around like horses, weaving in and out past each other. Meanwhile the third man was getting ready a bowl of water and rice husks—which is considered proper horse-food—which we supplied. After a while the horses began to get more frisky and began a real prancing dance. Then one stopped and took a whip and began directing the first one with the whip, not hitting him at first, but just laying it on him from time to time. The first one was now in a trance and beginning to imitate a horse in great detail. While in this state he slopped up water like a horse and ate, with apparent pleasure, the dry rice husks, keeping up this action for some time—smelling the food, prancing away from it, eating it, savoring it, and so on. At the end of this time he did another prancing dance and ended with the hobby horse lifted above his head. This was the climax. He was brought out of the trance, the helper going behind him and holding him while whipping his hands loose from the hobby horse, whipping his two feet together so that he would stand straight, the man in the trance rather leaning against the man in back of him. Then the hobby horse was taken and laid lengthwise along the front of the man, symbolically covering him, then the helper hitting the tranced one a sharp crack with the whip. When the tranced one was finally touched with a black rubber ball on the chest, he came out of the trance. He seemed bewildered. Dazed, he sat down and slowly came around to himself while the helper hovered around him to keep him from wandering off or running amok.
The trance is evidently real enough, although evidently its intensity varies, for some dancers are whipped harder than others, eat glass (one I saw ate a light-bulb), and red-hot peppers, and go on longer and more vigorously than others, some of whom barely trance at all and are rather colorless. Before the performance the dancers usually burn incense to call the spirits who are supposed to enter the dancer, and the owner of the house often prepares a sadjén offering to protect himself against the spirits thus called. People, although sometimes a little apprehensive of these tranced dancers, are not afraid of them. They crowd around, adults and children, to watch them; and I have never heard any story of their going amok or hurting anyone while in a trance.
The djarcman is not the only trance dance of this kind, merely the most common. A dance called gendruwon (from gendruwo, “spirit”) is often seen, and the troupe described above also danced a gendruwon for us, for another Rp 2.50. It went as follows:
The single dancer was dressed in a burlap suit and wore a wooden goblin mask. The drums began to beat, and he began to dance, moving his hand and his head primarily, hands in some of the srimpi or wajang wong motions, head in the “horizontal nod” motion. He also went into a trance. I don’t know how the helpers knew when it had happened, but when it had, they removed the mask and gave him a plate of rice with some red peppers and a piece of soy-bean cake. The rest of the dance was a comedy built around his eating the food. He received it, examined it, ate it. He made a play on the hotness of the pepper, on taking too much in his mouth at one time— belching, breaking wind, and so- on. (He just stuffed the rice in his mouth until he couldn’t shut it and had to keep his hand stuffing it back in as he chewed and kept gagging.) The crowd was convulsed by this. After eating, he ran water on his plate, drank off the water, and took a mouthful of water and spit it out almost on the spectators in a big stream. There also was a long routine in which the helper offered him the food and then took it away from him, teasing him, and the dancer was very angry. The end of the trance came when, finished with eating, he danced a little, and the helper brought back the mask. As the helper came near him, from behind, the dancer reached back his hand and grabbed suddenly at the helper, at what I think was the helper’s penis, just gripping it and not letting go. They made a comic scene of this. The actual release from the trance came when the mask was put on his head again, and the whip was snapped, and the little black ball was rubbed on the man’s chest.
Perhaps it is doubtful that all the trances are genuine. I have seen the same dancer have two or three trances within the space of an hour. But the spectators believe they are, and the performers say they are. There are various other roving dances of this sort. (Klèdèks and djaranans may, of course, both be combined in the same troupe.) Another dance acts out an old legend of the Hindu-Javanese period in which a lion eats 144 soldiers and then is killed by the king’s son. The lion dances. Girls riding horses attack him and one by one are eaten by him. (Girls sometimes are the trance subjects in the djaranan as well, although men are more common. In this play there are four girls to represent the 144 soldiers.) Finally a masked dancer representing the king’s son dances to the tune of a flute and dispatches the lion. There is usually no trance involved in this.
In addition, one sometimes sees the djanggrung dances. These are roughly the same as the klèdèk except that the “dancing girl” involved is a transvestite man. Both female klèdèk and homosexual male klèdèks are accused of “ruining the morals” of the villagers and of being hated by village women for making off with their men. (The djaranan and gendruwon, as can be seen from the above descriptions, also show explicitly homosexual elements along with their sado-masochistic and oral themes.)
The wandering dance troupes—sometimes called amén as a group—are almost wholly an abangan concern. Prijajis regard them as coarse and obscene; and the troupes do not even bother to go to santri villages where they might be set upon by the pious if they did. But, connected with begging, prostitution, and homosexuality as they are, they are nevertheless (or consequently) still very popular with the mass of the peasants and lower townsmen. Almost every day one sees one sort or another of these amén performing in the market in the midst of a great crowd; and one would come by our house at the edge of town nearly every week. (They did not appear at all regularly; sometimes five or six would come within a few days, and then weeks would pass without one.)
All of these groups are said to originate outside of Modjokuto, mostly in Tulungagung and Ponorogo, where this form of art is said to be at its strongest. (The latter town is noted all over Java for the violence of its inhabitants, for the radicalism of its politics, and for the great amount of male homosexuality which is said to occur there.) Whether this is so or simply indicates an unwillingness on the part of Modjokuto people to admit that they would sink to such a level is difficult to say. Certainly some of the klèdèks, at least, were Modjokuto girls, but I never heard of a locally based djaranan, gendruwon, or djanggrung.
there is also another form of “art” in which the klèdèk plays a major role and which still has some popularity in Modjokuto. This is the tajuban, a combination drinking and dancing party given usually on the occasion of rites-of-passage celebrations and so forth. A description of the pattern by a Modjokuto informant follows:
There is usually one klèdèk (almost always a prostitute), but at fancy tajubans there could be two or three. The klèdèk dances for a while at the beginning. When the tajuban itself is about to begin, the host appoints a man pramugari (“leader”). Now it is the pramugari’s job to point out to the klèdèk whom she is to choose to dance with her. This man must be clever in gauging the status of people because the order in which people participate is very important and must be right. If the occasion is a wedding, the groom, if a circumcision, the host, must be first. (The women are out behind and don’t like the tajubans at all. Organizations like Perwari, the main prijaji women’s club, hate the tajuban and are dead set against it.) After this the order is strictly according to status. If the subdistrict officer is there, he is obviously first, then the' village chief, and so on; and the pramugari has to be careful not to offend anyone. The pramugari is in front and starts off dancing, djogéd style, over toward the guests, the klèdèk following him with a tray in her hands which has a dance sash on it. The pramugari points out each time the guest whose turn it is and then goes off and sits down. The klèdèk kneels and holds the tray up to the chosen one, who takes the sash and drapes it around his neck. He then places on the tray some money, which the pramugari then takes from her and puts in the bowl on the table. How much money the guest puts on the tray is strictly dependent upon his rank and what the host put on his tray when he gave such an affair. If the host gave 10 rupiahs, and both are about the same rank, the guest gives 10; if higher a little more, and so on. The klèdèk starts dancing backwards toward the other end of the space, and the guest dances about two feet in front of her (facing her), following her, dancing a male-type djogéd. Now two people come forth to “honor” the man who is dancing. Usually they are the same rank or slightly lower than the man dancing. For instance, a village chief or an office clerk will come forth if the sub-district officer is dancing; but sometimes, if, say the sub-district officer is very friendly with the village chief he may come forward for the village chief. One of these men takes two glasses, the other one glass and the gin jug, and they start dancing in the other direction, from the table toward the guests.
Two glasses are for the helpers, the other for the main guest dancer. They dance this way until they pass each other and the positions are reversed (i.e., the helpers are down by the guests, the klèdèk and dancer up by the table). Then they reverse and meet in the middle as the gamelan music stops.
At this point the man with the jug pours drinks in all the glasses and the three men drink. Then the two men take the main guest dancer by the elbows and push him up to the klèdèk and malee him kiss her. (This evidently is not always necessary, for I did not see it in any of the tajubans I witnessed.) The helpers then retire, but the guest dancer may continue dancing, depending on the number of people who are there. If two other helpers come forth immediately he may go on; if not, the pramugari will choose another man. Usually in the beginning a man will only have to go through the routine once or twice, but toward morning, when people have started dropping out or becoming drunk and going home, and there are fewer people, one man may go on six or seven times. As the night wears on, all the formal order tends to be forgotten, and everybody is just dancing around, kissing the klèdèk, and drinking gin (and presumably tossing money in the dish) with gay abandon. . . .
In view of the remarkable sobriety of the Javanese in general, the tajuban seems anything but a typical occurrence.* Although at one time it was apparently fairly popular among the prijajis, it has become more and more the property of highly urbanized abcmgans—chauffeurs, small craftsmen, and others who see in die tajuban an attractive combination of Eastern and Western vices—and of certain of the richer village abangan peasants for whom it evidently represents the delights of urban wickedness. In Modjokuto there were several groups of generally rowdy loafers who formed a kind of circle of tajuban-givers, each inviting the others in turn, sometimes getting to the point where the dancing was skipped altogether and people just sat around and drank while the klèdèk sang songs to them to gamelan accompaniment, a form of “art” known as klenèngan.
But prijajis evidently still give tajubans from time to time. The district officer gave one late in the evening on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage—collecting Rp 1500.00 from it in the process; and a nearby village gave one for its bersih désa ceremony to which only town prijajis were invited, giving a ivajang separately for the local folk.
In general, the tajuban, too expensive for the abangans and too kasar for many prijajis, is dying out.
Her husband (one of the more active tajuban givers and attenders) said that tajubans are rather few and far between now. There were more before the war but they have degenerated into a fairly crass money-making proposition since the war, and now people don’t like them very much. Few are given; few of those which are given draw much of a crowd. He said that one reason people don’t like to go is that since the money has to be given in view of all the guests some people always try to give a lot so that other people will be embarrassed. Before the war everyone at a tajuban gave the same amount, say fifty cents or one rupiah, and no one was embarrassed. People at any rate much prefer wajangs and the like, for there they can give money by the secret handshake method and no one knows what they give. . . .
* Except at a tajuban I have never seen a Javanese drunk. In any case, only a very small percentage of the population drinks anything stronger than fruit wine, partly because they cannot afford it, partly because of their intense dislike of the “confused" or “disoriented” feeling it gives diem.
The term ketoprak, for example, seems to be applied to dramas which have plots with either a Persian or a Hindu-Javanese kingdom background, ludrug to those with a contemporary background, and wajang wong to those with a Mahabharata-Ramayana background.
“It is kasar, I admit,” said one woman in her defense when I taxed her with her attendance at a ludrug, “but it is very educational and good for building up the country.” She suggested that the Ministry of Information might profitably employ the ludrug to get their less objectionable political message across to the uneducated masses, who are bored with and confused by the usual propaganda meeting.