Tradition · shadow puppet theatre
Wayang kulit
Also known as Wayang Kulit, Javanese shadow play, wayang, ꦮꦪꦁꦏꦸꦭꦶꦠ꧀
The leather shadow theatre of Java and Bali, in which a dalang works carved buffalo-hide figures against a lit screen, in Java through an all-night play with gamelan. Its main repertoire is the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and an inscription of 903 records a performer telling a Bhima story for the gods. Its best-loved figures, Semar and his clown sons, come from no Indian epic. UNESCO listed wayang in 2003.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
Semar, the fat, flat-nosed servant who is really a god and the guardian spirit of Java, is the only character who dares to protest to the gods, even Batara Guru, the Javanese Shiva, and he can compel them to act or desist.
Its origin is disputed: James Brandon and others argue it is indigenous to Java, while others derive it from Indian leather-puppet traditions of the east coast, such as tholpavakoothu and ravana chhaya.
Connections (5)
- TransmissionHikayat Seri Rama
The Malay Rama story was probably carried to the peninsula by Javanese traders together with their shadow play, and in Malaysia it lives on in wayang kulit as well as in writing. The shadow-play version, the Hikayat Maharaja Wana, shifts sympathy towards Ravana and away from an arrogant Seri Rama. In strongly Islamic Kelantan, the main base of Malay shadow theatre, the puppeteers were all Muslims, while conservative Muslims objected to the rituals surrounding the performances.
- Ramayana traditionRamayana
Wayang kulit plays are drawn mainly from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and the freer second half of the Javanese Ramayana is said to be the part most popular in wayang. Wayang also added what no Indian telling has: the panakawan, Semar and his sons Gareng, Petruk and Bagong, clown-servants who advise whichever hero is on the screen. Semar first appears in fourteenth-century Majapahit reliefs, centuries after the Old Javanese Ramayana was written.
- Devotional corpus onMahabharata
The earliest dated performance of a story in Javanese puppet theatre is from the Mahabharata. The Mantyasih inscription issued by King Balitung of Mataram in 903 records that one Galigi held a puppet show for the gods, telling the story of Bhima Kumara. Earlier Jaha inscriptions of about 840 already list puppet-show performers, and in 1035 the poet Mpu Kanwa compared the world's mover to a dalang behind the screen.
- AnalogueTolpavakkuttu, Palakkad
Kerala's tholpavakoothu and Java's wayang kulit both throw the shadows of perforated leather figures on a lit screen to tell Rama's story at length, the Kerala puppeteers over as many as twenty-one nights. The leather-puppet traditions of India's east coast, tholpavakoothu, tholu bommalata and ravana chhaya, share many elements with wayang, and Jivan Pani derives wayang from Odisha's ravana chhaya; James Brandon and others hold that wayang is indigenous to Java, so this is a likeness with a disputed history.
- Craft tradition ofBali
Wayang kulit belongs to Bali as much as to Java, and differs by island: in Muslim-majority Java the puppets are elongated, the play runs all night and the lamp is now almost always electric, while Balinese ceremonial wayang is highly improvisatory and adapted to the occasion. Balinese performing arts in general draw on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and Bali kept the Old Javanese literature in which Java had first told them, long after Java itself became mostly Muslim.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, "Wayang kulit", "Semar" and "Panakawan". James R. Brandon, On Thrones of Gold (1970), as cited there; UNESCO, Wayang puppet theatre (2003/2008).
Open Wayang kulit in the repository →