Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

closest to the audience is the most
distant to me, and the world is like
that—complex. It is in a constant state
of play, and so there are no warscenes—the
dalang insists that the
great war-scene between the armies of
Hanuman and Ravana is a dance scene.
They are creating balance, the balance
between good and evil, the balance
between desires.
The dalang will lift off stories from the
generic cult stories according to the
stronger aspects of his personality. And
the characters will get completely
different names. For instance the
character of Sita will be given a
localised name like Bunga Mawar, ‘rose’,
and the stories develop from there.
These characters have firm points of
origin but they become very eccentric.
Many of them may have been the
fancies of the dalang’s teacher that the
dalang inherited.
I’ll give you the story of Hanuman in
the Kelantan Wayang. The first
character to come on stage is someone
called the Maharisi. He is a shaman
but he’s the incarnation of Shiva. He is
also the father of Sita and was once her
lover. Now, he is basically the wise man
of the story. This is the story of the
birth of Hanuman. Once, Sita is
wracked by fever and Rama, Sita and
Wayang Kulit – Eddin Khoo
Lakshmana are advised to go into the
forests and find a particular kind of
leaf—a neem leaf, basically—and as
they depart the Maharisi says, you will
have to travel for ten or fourteen days
but during all of that time, do not
drink water, not even a drop. They
proceed, and after seven or eight days
Rama and Sita get very thirsty, and so
does Lakshmana but he has self
control. They come across a lake and
immediately Rama and Sita rush to it.
Lakshmana holds them back and says,
“Remember what the Maharisi said?
So don’t drink.” But they drink
anyway and immediately both are
transformed into monkeys. It’s a curse.
And what the monkeys do, of course, is
frolic, run up trees, and fornicate.
Lakshmana finds some device in which
he can trap them and bring them down
from the tree, and then he utters a
mantra (in Malay too it’s called a
‘mantra’) which returns them to human
form. Then they proceed and finally get
back home. But at the moment of
communion up on the trees, she was
impregnated. Rama being very glorious
and egotistical cannot bear the thought
of having a monkey son. Therefore he
summons a handmaiden of Sita’s and
they reach Sita’s chamber where he tells
her, “Please abort the child.” The child
comes out of her in the form of a betel
nut. He is overcome by regret. He
Dalang Saupi bin Isa wields his puppet.
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