Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

I could explain what Malaysia is,
culturally, by speaking of myself. I was
raised by a Malay nanny till I was
fourteen. My mother is Tamil and
my father belongs to a community of
Chinese known as the Peranakan,
people who migrated to the Malay
Peninsula very early in the sixteenth
century and adopted all Malay ways
except their religion, Islam. My
father was an important historian, one
of the nation builders; he drafted the
national policy and the pledge to the
nation. It was interesting growing up in
his household because we were not
allowed to learn Chinese. It was
believed that we needed to shed our
immigrant experience and adopt the
language and ways of the dominant
culture.
Malaysia is highly racialised; political
parties are delineated according to race.
It is difficult for modern Malaysians to
remember what preceded racial
consciousness. I am grappling with and
living through James Joyce’s wonderful
line: “History is a nightmare from
which I am trying to wake, over and
over again.”
Wayang Kulit – Eddin Khoo
Dalang Abdullah was a master of
Wayang Kulit, the shadow puppetry
form of the Hikayat Maharaja Wana,
of which Wayang Kulit Siam is specific
to Kelantan. Story does not have as
crucial a function in puppetry as does
the notion of performance—the
individual’s place in it and community’s
support for it. The genealogies of some
of the principal characters can be very
problematic because they come from
the wellsprings of the dalang’s
imagination. There can be characters
with no past or future, or with an
eccentric past and future. Essentially
the performance space is what you
would call, for want of a better word,
a ‘healing space’. And the function of
performance is to bring about the
restitution of the ‘self ’.
There are two major concepts that
operate in Kelantanese theatre:
Semangat or ‘spirit’, the life force that
motivates you, and Angin or ‘wind’,
which determines the temperament
and sensibility of every single
individual. There are ninety-nine
winds. Your well-being depends on
how well you engage with every spirit
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The renowned Dalang Saupi bin Isa of the Wayang Kulit Siam
receives a blessing at the culmination of the Berjamu ritual.