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has ascendancy over good; where wrong is right; where the loved are hated; where everything
is upside down and backwards. It is also the present age.
In Sukarno’s Indonesia, in wartime Vietnam, in Cambodia under the approaching
spectre of the Khmer Rouge, even in the artificiality of modern Singapore and among the
expatriate Australians in Kuala-Lumpur, the workings of Kali-Yuga is unmistakably evident in
the Asian images of Christopher Koch and Blanche d’Alpuget. Despite the convictions of such
as Billy Kwan, it hardly even matters which side is prevailing. Guy Hamilton notices after the
end of the communist putsch, with the rightist forces of General Suharto in control, how all of
the political signs on the avenues have been altered. The messages of konfrontasi are still
there; only the objects of the attacks have changed, like shadows whose light/dark contrast has
been reversed, or like a mirrored image which is itself reflected back into the glass:
Jakarta’s violent children had been unleashed against their heroes: and the
vehemence was the same and the terms were the same as those they had used
against their former bogies. It was like a dream in which things became their
opposites, and the city no longer seemed real (YLD, 291).
The period of Kali-Yuga has, after all, not reached its conclusion, and demons defeated are
replaced by more, and more powerful, demons.
What better metaphor could be found for a writer who sees society in degeneration,
whose very country was founded on penal policies of the mother country which can only be
described as wicked, whose nation then embarked on a campaign of genocide and forced
assimilation of the aboriginal people, whose region has been swept by a holocaust of such
vehemence that it seemed to crown the evil achievements of the 20th century? Koch is
working closely with a world which the modernists demonise as lost and headed for oblivion,
though, searching for a way out of this despondency, he finds in such Eastern concepts as that
of the four World Ages a response to the fatalistic modernist outlook. For the final period of
cosmic extinction, Kali-Yuga, will ultimately be followed up by a return to Krita Yuga, the first
era of creation and renewal.
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