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the aim was to ‘museumise’ this culture. Now, after a while, Malay culture became very problematic for the Malay body politic. They couldn’t deal with its diversity and plurality and it was also a time of Islamic awakening and a strong Wahabi influence. In the 1970s there emerged a group called the Muslim Youth Movement led by Anwar Ibrahim, who has now emerged as the major democratic voice in Malaysia. The movement was rooted in a certain understanding of Malay and Southeast Asian culture—that it was inferior and that it lacked an intellectual tradition. In 1979, Anwar Ibrahim was one of the few people invited to visit Ayatollah Khomeini in Khom, two weeks after the Iranian revolution. The revolution was treated with a great deal of joy in the Muslim world, but it also caused much anxiety among those who were threatened by the rise of Shia Islam. They turned to Saudi Arabia and to the Wahabi school. What you see in Malaysia over the past 30 years is the result of Wahabi conditioning. A very important tract has been written in Malaysia by a well-known Muslim scholar by the name of Sayed Najib al- Attas. It denounces pre-Islamic Malay culture and creates new historical Wayang Kulit – Eddin Khoo points as cultural references for the Malays. So there is no more a sense of continuity but very clear breaks in the Malay Muslim consciousness about how their history has evolved. Before the coming of Islam you had no culture: this is the standard argument now for the Malay Muslim body politic. In Kelantan today, religious pluralism is under threat. In the past five years, segregation of communities has increased. There is a witch-hunt going on of those practising so-called deviant traditions. One doesn’t know what will happen to the Rama and Ravana stories, ritual and puppet traditions, in the next 20 or 30 years. I began by quoting an Irishman and I will end with an Irishman. One is constantly trying to glean an independent history from a history on which the shutters are being drawn. I keep thinking of what Eugene Onegin said, “There is no future. There is only a past happening over and over and over again, now.” Eddin Khoo is a scholar, translator and founder of the PUSAKA Foundation in Malaysia, a non-profit organisation that researches and documents indigenous performance traditions. The Maharisi Kala Api, believed by some Wayang practitioners to be the incarnation of Shiva, is the keeper of secrets and presiding spirit of the Wayang Kulit Siam tradition. 89
Imagining Rama: From Grandma’s Tales to Multiple Texts C.S. Lakshmi The wonderful thing about a text is that it assumes different meanings at different stages of one’s life, says C.S. Lakshmi as she describes her personal encounters with the Ramayana: listening as a child to her mother’s story of Rama’s birth while getting an oil massage, attending grand public narrations by eminent exponents of the epic, watching popular film versions, and finally approaching the text as a lover of Tamil, as a reader and as an author. Each of her experiences has created its own images, memories and meanings, just as it has allowed for multiple interpretations and retellings. What we can discern from this epic text, says Lakshmi, is that a text, like everything else, can be seen from multiple positions of age, gender, language and perspective.
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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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