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Wayang Kulit during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is a sign of the insecurities that emerge from a nation state that is essentially born out of a bastardised culture. The quest for purity is the great Malaysian affliction of the past thirty years. There are two approaches to addressing cultural insecurity. One is the Mahathir way (former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohammed) of completely forgetting your culture and adopting the notion of a modern Muslim country based on economic progress and nothing else. The other approach is to reconstruct an imagined and glorified past. In 1969 we had major racial riots in Malaysia in which several thousands died. The authorities concluded that the reason for the conflict was that we did not have a hegemonic culture to which the entire nation could aspire. So they convened the National Cultural Congress in 1971, where a dominant culture was to be agreed upon with particular characteristics that the entire nation would have to aspire to. There were three principles that came out of this Congress: that the Malay culture would be the dominant culture of the Malaysian nation; that Islam would be a key feature of Malaysian culture; and that other cultures may be practised if they A view of the shadow screen. Wayang Kulit – Eddin Khoo 85
86 ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1 do not conflict with the first two principles. But what was meant by Malay culture? The authorities did not take into account that Malay culture is extremely polyglot and pluralist. ‘Malay’ is an anthropological term that extends all the way to people of the Fiji islands and the Philippines. It was a term introduced by British administrators in the 1920s. In fact, an entire study was done by R.J. Wilkinson and R.O. Winstedt called ‘Papers on Malay Subjects’ in an attempt to homogenise the indigenous peoples as they were being confronted by large waves of migrants from China and India, people who worked in tin mines and rubber plantations. And this term Malay or Melayu and the concept of a dominant culture in this heterogeneous landscape were adopted in the 1970s to provide a hegemonic culture for the nation state. The wonderful thing about the Malay Peninsula is that it has a culture with great nuance and subtlety, and not a monumental culture. We have no Borobudur, no Angkor Wat, no Bagan. What we have, in the state of Kedah, is a small but very refined and beautiful enclave called the Bujang Valley, which was a small temple site but in which you can see the eccentricities of an essentially Malay sensibility, lovely little dancing Ganeshas with unique features that you don’t find in the great Jayavarman structures of Cambodia. What we’ve seen in the Malaysian nation over the past several years is an aspiring to that monumental culture. And on realising that it did not exist, we decided to create one. First of all, institutions were constructed: universities and art schools in urban Kuala Lumpur. The authorities began to import traditional musicians from villages in Malaysia and house them in an institution called the National Cultural Complex. Apart from instituting policy, they basically classicised traditions. Ours are folk and community traditions based on improvisation, ritual, and eccentric approaches to storytelling. We remain tied to oral traditions. But in the 1970s there were efforts to codify these traditions, which essentially meant censoring them and cleansing them of anything that did not fit into the archetype of what Malay culture had to be. So ritual vanished, Angin and Semangat vanished, and a story known as the Hikayat Seri Rama, the story of Rama, replaced the story of Ravana as the canonical text! This was done in collaboration with many scholars, and
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Contents EDITORIAL 3 READING VISUAL
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IFA has collaborated with Adishakti
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Reading Visuals: Timeless Voyages o
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The divine messenger (Agnipurusha)
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they sit in mournful contemplation
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upon a blue-gold sky. Or elsewhere
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his daughter in marriage. Dasharath
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Reading Visuals - Gulammohammed She
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It is difficult to summarise the na
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There are numerous other sights tha
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produces a rare form of intimate ye
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Reading Visuals - Gulammohammed She
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set upon a luminous red ground. In
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Myth Retold: Variants of the Story
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32 ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Vo
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Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

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