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ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1
The Ramayana or, as we know it
in Kelantan, Hikayat
Maharaja Wana, is really the
story of Ravana and is quite distinct
from its counterparts in neighbouring
regions such as Java and Bali. In order
to understand this we have to
understand how Islam arrived in
Southeast Asia. It arrived in a series of
waves, with traders rather than
conquerors. They belonged to the
Shafi’i school of Sunni Islam or else
were Sufis; this is crucial to our
understanding of the close relationship
between performance and notions of
the self and nature (I like the word that
most traditional artists use for nature:
Alam). Clifford Geertz introduced the
terms abangan and santri, nominal and
pious Muslims, to illustrate categories
of ‘Muslim-ness’, and Southeast Asians
were mostly abangan; rituals and
animism accompanied their beliefs, and
this was crucial to the worldview in
which the Hikayat evolved. The Malay
Peninsula in particular had a cultural
landscape that was extremely open to
external influences.
Java was the last country in Southeast
Asia to be fully converted to Islam,
almost as late as the eighteenth
century; its cultural base was so
strongly rooted in animism, Hinduism
and Buddhism that the conversion of