The Theatre of Krishen Jit

The Theatre of Krishen Jit The Politics of Staging Difference in Multicultural Malaysia Charlene Rajendran and C.J.W.-L. Wee I actually believe that in the case of plural societies such as Malaysia and Singapore, and even certain parts of India, multiculturalism is in one body. We tend to think of it as a negotiation between one body and another, but I actually think it is in one body and in many ways I have been trying to excavate that in one way or another. —Krishen Jit (2004) Krishen Jit, the acknowledged doyen of Malaysian theatre, sadly, passed away on 28 April 2005. His death leaves a huge gap in Malaysian cultural life that inevitably will take a while for all to come to grips with: he was one of the few public and cultural intellectuals engaged in work so critically analytical about cultural difference and its relation to the state of being Malaysian and the politics of staging Malaysian identity in its postcolonial and multicultural context. A strong historical perspective was also a crucial part of Jit’s work—not surprising, perhaps, given that he was also a former university history teacher. TDR: The Drama Review 51:2 (T194) Summer 2007. ©2007 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 11 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 By and large, the politics of theatre in Malaysia are overshadowed by the theatre of Malaysian politics. Although Malaysian theatre makes political comments through its engagement with culture and identity issues, little public attention is drawn to the arts in general, and thus theatre is marginalized in the media and public discourse.1 In Malaysia’s postcolonial, multiracial, multireligious, and multilingual society, issues of identity, political ideology, and the economy occupy public attention as political leaders often dwell on con- cerns of national security in relation to the need for racial tolerance. Although “race,” with its implication of essentialized identity, is an increasingly contested term, it is still used officially in Malaysia to refer to the main ethnic groups that consist of Malays (50 percent), Chinese (25 percent), Indians (7 percent), and other groups that are either indigenous (Kadazan, Dusun, Iban) or “Eurasian.”2 Malay-Muslims (the hyphen is strongly present) are styled as bumiputera (Malay: sons of the soil). The postindependence state’s chosen mode of multiculturalism polarizes society along ethnoreligious lines and reinforces the pattern of communal politics left behind by the British colonial government.3 There is little critical discourse on issues of cultural sensitivity because the state seeks to curb “cultural activities that are consid- ered ‘subversive’ or ‘retrograde’” (Tan 1992:285), engendering superficial notions of national unity and ethnic harmony. While theatre is an acknowledged site for the critical analysis of culture and identity, few theatre makers have actually forged work that is deeply revealing about the politics of staging Malaysian culture. Jit forged what might be described as a simultaneously “intranational-intercultural” theatre,4 one with a further intracultural dimension. In Malaysian society members of plural cultures interact with each other as (not-entirely-equal) citizens of a Malaysia whose national culture needed to be defined after independence in 1957. Jit’s work 1. For a discussion of how some Malaysian artists negotiate and resist state control see Tan (1992:282–306). 2. Such ethnic categorizations inform a national quota system and policies of affirmative action. 3. Malaysia’s main political coalition, the Barisan Nasional (Malay: National Front) is made up of communally defined parties that are meant to represent the interests of each group accordingly. Being Malaysian has thus come to mean being Indian-Malaysian, or Malay-Malaysian, and never simply “Malaysian.” 4. Jit’s realizations of cross-cultural theatre do not fit neatly into any of the categories in Patrice Pavis’s categories of theatrical interculturalism (1996). Unlike the interculturalism of, say, Peter Brook or Robert Wilson, who engage international artists and draw on cultural traditions from different countries, Jit worked mainly with local artists from diverse cultural traditions that, as a result of British colonial immigration policy, ranged Indian, Chinese, Malay, and Anglo-European. Unlike Suzuki Tadashi or Ninagawa Yukio, he did not direct foreign canonical texts using local traditional forms. Jit’s theatre thus spans the intra- and intercultural while remaining intranational. He had reservations about a politics of interculturalism (Jit 2003b:114–20) that accepted neat identities that could become representative “pure” existences interacting with other such pure identities defined ethnically, linguistically or nationally. Such reservations are close to Rustom Bharucha’s (2001:25–56). Figure 1. (previous page) Krishen Jit, 1997. (Courtesy of Five Arts Centre) Charlene Rajendran teaches theatre at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is involved in the Malaysian performing arts as a director, performer, facilitator, writer, and producer. C.J.W.-L. Wee teaches literature and cultural theory at the Nanyang Technological University. He is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (Lexington Books, 2003) and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming). He is also coediting, with Jon McKenzie and Heike Roms, an anthology presently titled Contesting Performance: Global Genealogies of Research. Rajendran/Wee 12 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 offered symbolic representations of the conflicts that occur within a pluralist society, itself functioning within a national framework, without resorting to simplistic narratives or unified categories that essentialize and standardize culture and cultural identities in accordance with nationalistic dictates. But Jit also confronted the idea that any ethnically defined person was singular in his/her cultural identity: this is the intracultural dimension that implied “other- ness” existed even within the same body. This could refer to the cultural negotiation (or conflict) between, say, traditional and modern Malay-Malaysians, or educated and illiterate Chinese-Malaysians. In general, Jit gestured toward the putative existence of a larger body that could be performed into existence by connecting forms and ideas that stemmed from local culture and indigenous cultural resources. His practical strategy here involved unearthing—or “excavating,” using Jit’s own archaeological metaphor—stories that confronted the slippages but also found commonalities among the dimensions of race, religion, and language. This generated empowering enactments of a “Malaysian-ness” willing to celebrate the richness of particularity and plurality. The nationalist agenda, in contrast, denies the many fusions, crossovers, intermarriages, and acculturations that go beyond how food is prepared and outfits designed (the way Malaysian multiculturalism is usually presented). The late director’s politics of cultural intervention thus sought to represent and reenact cultural flux without having to resolve difference, reflecting a reality denied in official discourse. One consequence was that Jit’s own personal politico-cultural positioning could (and did) dramatically change, as the circumstances of national life changed—laying him open to the charge of serious inconsistency. Despite losing his struggle with heart disease, Jit maintained to the end his resolve to make investigative and exigent theatre. From his hospital bed, he gave thorough directorial notes for a production he sadly never saw onstage.5 Jit eventually succumbed to a massive stroke, ironically the subject of a play he had directed only months before he suffered its devastation.6 This essay reflects upon his legacy for us, as his politics of theatre remain relevant to current conflicts of identity in a globalizing world which struggles with plurality while resisting homogeneity. Examining Intracultural Theatre On Language and Identity Krishen Jit’s persona in the theatre was one that was constantly reinvented; his shifting cultural position and positionality were part of an ongoing reconsideration of changing national sociopolitical moods and mores, and therefore of what might constitute a more inclusive national culture resistant to the hegemonic norm. His journey in theatre commences in the 1950s and ’60s with monolingual English-language theatre and then in the 1970s to the early ’80s moves to Malay-language theatre, before proceeding to more pluralistic, multilingual theatre from the mid-1980s onward. This journey took Jit from single cultural and theatrical vocabularies to a theatre practice that negotiated and at points attempted to integrate the different cultural and theatre vocabularies he had encountered, investigated, and acquired. 5. This was Monkey Business (2005), a production conceived and directed in collaboration with Malaysians Sunetra Fernando and Jillian Ooi. It was produced by Five Arts Centre and staged in Kuala Lumpur in April 2005. It was a reworking of a Gamelan performance that combined dance, theatre, and music in an unusual staging of Malaysian culture. For a review of Monkey Business see Antares (2005). Krishen Jit 6. This play was Everything but the Brain (2005), written by

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