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Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Vol. 166, no. 2-3 (2012), pp. 337-375 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/btlv URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-101739 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0006-2294 Book reviews � Andrea Acri, Helen Creese, and Arlo Griffiths (eds), From Lankā Eastwards: The Rāmāyan�a in the literature and visual arts of Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011, xviii + 259 pp. [Verhandelingen 247.] ISBN 9789067183848. Price EUR 29.90 (paperback). DICK VAN DER MEIJ Center for the Study of Religion and Culture Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, Jakarta [email protected] The 10 papers published in this book are a selection of the contributions to the workshop ‘The Old Javanese Rāmāyān�a: Text, history, culture’ held in Jakarta from 26 to 28 May 2009. The book is split into two parts, Part I: Old Javanese Kakawin and the Kakawin Rāmāyān�a, followed by Part II: The Rāmāyān�a at Can�d�i Prambanan and Can�d�i Panataran. After an introduction by Andrea Acri, the book starts with a piece by Stuart Robson entitled ‘Hymns of praise in Kakawins: The Rāmāyan�a and other examples’ and is not only about the Kakawin Rāmāyan�a but of a gen- eral nature. It follows Zoetmulder’s idea that composing and writing Old Javanese kakawin poems is a kind of yogi exercise. I have some reservations with this idea. There is a tendency to consider all kakawins in the same way but I wonder whether all kakawin poets in the past (or indeed today) can be called yogis, and if the composition of each kakawin was or is truly an act of religious fervour? When I met the modern kakawin author I Wayan Pamit (also mentioned in the article by Creese in this book), he did not look or act like a yogi and also did not make the impression of being a particularly religious individual. We should be careful not to make overall statements we cannot substantiate. The next article by the hand of Wesley Michel is entitled ‘Poetic conven- tions as opposed to conventional poetry? A place for kavisamaya-ādi in com- parative Kāvya/Kakawin studies’. It concerns poetic conventions used in kakawin composition (as in kāvya composition in India). It is rather technical but makes some illuminating observations – for instance, that the Kakawin Rāmāyan�a does not use the kavisamaya (poetic conventions) as used in India, but rather adds conventions all of its own. The third article by Thomas Hunter, ‘Figures of repetition (yamaka) in the Bhat�t�ikāvya, the Raghuvam�śa, the Śiwagr�a inscription and the Kakawin Rāmāyān�a’ is a well documented masterpiece. It deals with yamaka which, in Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access 338 Book reviews the words of Gerow (1971:25) he quotes here, are figures ‘[...] in which a part of a verse, specified either as to length or position or both, is repeated within the confines of the same verse, usually in such a way that the meaning of the two readings is different.’ There are many different kinds of yamaka. These sometimes misunderstood and ill-appreciated poetical devices are, however, crucial for a balanced evaluation of the poetic qualities of a text. That they are also met with ‘strong displeasure’ may become clear from the quote Hunter presents on page 28. ‘These stanzas are utter doggerel; the Old Javanese is scarcely susceptible of translation into sensible English. This is because in each stanza lines a and b, c and d are the mirror-image of each other, a feat that could only be achieved at the cost of sense’ (Robson 1995:150-1). Happily, Hunter does not fall into a similar trap of his own making. The book continues with ‘More on birds, ascetics and kings in Central Java: Rāmāyān�a, 24.111-115 and 25.19-22’ by Andrea Acri, which is a con- tinuation of his previous article published in the BKI of 2010. It examines the way the Kakawin Rāmāyan�a portrays birds, ascetics, and kings and suggests allegorical readings. He thus looks at the text in a completely different and refreshing way and shows that the Kakawin Rāmāyan�a can be read on a novel level altogether. The spelling of the word kakavin rather than kakawin is intentional and will be dealt with below. As usual, Helen Creese is very detailed and extremely well informed in her contribution, ‘Rāmāyān�a traditions in Bali’. It aptly shows that the tradi- tion of kakawin composition using Rāmāyan�a material has not stopped and is alive in Bali up to this day. She presents a number of Rāmāyan�a-inspired kakawin from Bali (the latest being the Kakawin Rāwan�a by I Wayan Pamit of 2002) and provides synopses and other information on each of them. She introduces the term Rāmāyan�a ‘corpus’ and I am glad that she put the word corpus between quotation marks. I may add however that the Rāmāyan�a in Bali is not at the far end of the chain of transmission (p. 93). The Rāmāyan�a version in macapat verse in modern Javanese from Lombok may be consid- ered to be slightly farther removed to the east. The first part of the book ends with an article by Adrian Vickers, ‘The Old Javanese Kapiparwa and a Recent Balinese Painting’. It again shows that we should not forget to incorporate the many paintings and other visual expres- sions using Rāmāyan�a material into our explorations. As expected, Adrian’s superb knowledge of Balinese paintings and texts and their relations are a welcome addition to philological expertise. The second part of the book starts with an article by Arlo Griffiths, � ‘Imagine Lankapura at Prambanan’. Griffiths tries to make it plausible that � the original name of Prambanan was Lankapura. Despite his presentation of a wealth of detail and sources, I have to confess that I am not wholly convinced of his ideas if only because he makes no effort to explain why this name for Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 339 this temple complex would have been totally forgotten. Cecelia Levin con- tinues the book with her article: ‘The grand final; The Uttarakān�d�a of the Loro Jonggrang temple complex’. In short, Levin tries to explain reliefs on the Brāhma temple of the Loro Jonggrang complex from a variety of sources, most pertinent among them the Uttarakān�d�a, and reiterates the importance of later texts like the Malay Hikayat Sri Rama in order to interpret temple reliefs. At the end of her paper she makes the very important remark that the ‘epics may have been transmitted to Southeast Asia by means of episodic outlines as well as full texts [...]’ (p. 167). Roy Jordaan’s article is entitled ‘The causeway episode of the Prambanan: Rāmāyan�a reexamined’. Interpreting reliefs is hazardous and I fear people are prone to see what they want to see. I agree with Jordaan that we have to be careful not to be selective and arbitrary (p. 186). For instance, the way I look at it, I do not see any of the fish in the relief presented here actually swallowing stones (Jordaan, p. 202). Apart from the difficulty of portraying such a thing, I only see them having the stones in their mouths. We should not forget that the artisans who made the reliefs probably had ideas of their own and did not follow texts one hundred per cent. I also feel that we might consider a situation where two or more texts concur and thus any one of them might have been the basis for the reliefs. Jordaan seems to be not very well informed about Malay texts in general. It’s rather unconvincing, for instance, to con- clude that the ‘narration of the causeway episode was not altogether clear to the redactors of the H[ikayat] S[ri] R[ama] as demonstrated by the exempting endnote that says ‘and Allah knows best (whether) this story ... (is true)’ (p. 202). Many texts in Malay end in the phrase ‘wallāhu ‘alam’ (‘And Allāh knows best’) because in the Muslim tradition Allāh is the source of all knowing. It may even be that this phrase was only put there to add a Muslim hue to the manuscript, much like many manuscripts containing non-Islamic stories in Lombok, which start with the Basmalah to circumvent Muslim criticism. The book concludes with Lydia Kieven’s article entitled ‘The symbolism of the Rāmāyan�a reliefs at the main temple of Can�d�i Panataran’. It presents the plausible thesis that the main character in these reliefs is the monkey Hanuman rather than Rāma and his wife Sītā. It is well written and nicely balances the attention devoted to the Loro Jonggrang temple. Of course, my quibbles above do not address the book’s strengths. It is pro- vocative and original, and shows that interpreting old textual and visual mate- rials is a richly challenging endeavour that’s rewarding, if inherently fraught with uncertainty. I was, however, appalled to read Jordaan’s statement of ‘semi-literate artisans and sculptors’ using ‘a sort of relief scenario, offering an outline of the story in the form of drawings with notes specifying the exact con- tents and sequential arrangements of the Rāma reliefs’ (p. 201). I would have thought that by now we would have left such degrading sentiments behind. Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access 340 Book reviews Spelling My main critique is a practical one and concerns the spelling of Old Javanese which is inconsistent throughout the book.