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Wayang Kulit – Eddin Khoo
the Javanese to Islam had to take on
traditional cultural forms. The stories
of Krishna, of Ravana, Rama and Sita,
the stories of the nine saints of Java
called the Wali Songo and so on were
used to draw people into the Muslim
faith. But while Bali (which, of course,
is Hindu) and Java have powerful
textual references to the Ramayana,
Kelantan has none. The idea of a
hegemonic text determining the
course of storytelling does not exist in
the Kelantan tradition, and so the
Ramayana here is a generic story that
encapsulates the sensibilities of the
community. Therefore I will speak not
from any kind of textual authority but
from the authority of one single
individual, a man by the name of
Abdullah Ibrahim otherwise known as
Dollah Baju Merah or Uncle Red Shirt
who was, until five years ago when he
passed away, Malaysia’s leading dalang
or traditional puppeteer, a vast
reservoir of knowledge and a keeper of
the oral tradition that, in his case,
stretched back some nine generations.
Malaysia is a country on the periphery,
and the notion of marginality is
something that I have had to deal with
in the course of my 20-year
engagement with traditional theatre,
particularly puppetry, in Kelantan. Our
region has a totally bastardised culture.
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Seri Rama (left), one of the principal characters of the Wayang
Kulit Siam, in consultation with Hanuman inside the Istana (Palace).