Sonic Liminalities of Faith in Sundanese Vocal Music Sean Williams Evergreen State College
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Yale Journal of Music & Religion Volume 4 Number 1 Voice, Media, and Technologies of the Article 4 Sacred 2018 Sonic Liminalities of Faith in Sundanese Vocal Music Sean Williams Evergreen State College Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr Part of the Ethnomusicology Commons, and the South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Williams, Sean (2018) "Sonic Liminalities of Faith in Sundanese Vocal Music," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 4: No. 1, Article 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1091 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Music & Religion by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sonic Liminalities of Faith in Sundanese Vocal Music Sean Williams Sundanese sung poetry of West Java, Indo- markers, it is no surprise that the national nesia, has long represented a rich set of elite motto “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika” (Unity in values that often reflect Hindu, Buddhist, and diversity) is based on the lived experience of its animist ways of understanding the world. In a citizens. In their introduction to Divine region known for its current adherence to Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia, Islam, the continuing presence of songs that coauthors/editors Anne K. Rasmussen and directly reference Hindu deities and narratives David D. Harnish note that “[some com- from hundreds of years ago seems like both a munities] embrace unique mixes of select startling anachronism and a commentary on Islamic principles with Hindu-Buddhist or the ways in which song can transcend con- indigenous animist practices.”2 Though Islam temporary religious and political identities. came to the Sundanese region hundreds of This article has as its focus the changing years ago, it encountered a foundation of relationship between Hinduism and Islam as Hindu-Buddhism deeply connected with local manifested in the performance of two animism.3 As is often the case in Indonesia, Sundanese songs—Ceurik Rahwana (The tears the practice of Sundanese belief tends to be of Rahwana) and Hamdan (The praised one)— layered, with little separation between religions, over thirty years of study of tembang Sunda, a leading to easy justification for their genre primarily associated with the hereditary coexistence. These codependent systems of aristocracy. In examining a song that reveals an faith allow multiple points of access to the older local connection to Hinduism (Ceurik sacred. Rahwana) and contrasting it with a contem- porary popular song reflective of Muslim Liminal Beliefs among the Sundanese beliefs (Hamdan), the article highlights the The Sundanese are Indonesia’s second most overall changes in a musical genre and the ways populous ethnic group. Inhabiting the island of in which those changes are indicative of Java, just south of the nation’s capital, Jakarta, changes in Sundanese society. 1 Furthermore, they bear some similarities in language and the article reveals the ways in which the singers culture to their neighbors to the east, the who perform the songs reflect a liminal level of Javanese.4 Historically associated with Hindu- engagement with Hindu and Muslim cosmologies, respectively, in both lyrical and musical materials. Because Indonesia is renowned for the 2 David D. Harnish and Anne K. Rasmussen, eds., diversity of its people, its beliefs, its perform- “Introduction: The World of Islam in the Music of ing arts, its bioregions, and other important Indonesia,” in Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7. 3 Robert Wessing, “Sundanese,” in Muslim Peoples: A 1 The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the World Ethnographic Survey, vol. 2, ed. Richard Weekes skills of Viviane Sukanda-Tessier in her translations of (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 730. the songs Ceurik Rahwana and Kulu-Kulu Bem, which 4 The Sundanese number approximately 40 million; appear in the liner notes of the compact disc Tembang the Javanese, on the same island but further east, number Sunda: Sundanese Classical Songs (Nimbus NI 5378, 1993). over 100 million. Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 4, No. 1 (2018) 43 Buddhist practices, 5 the Sundanese became older spirituality that includes ancestor worship adherents to Islam in a gradual process that and reverence for the natural world, including remains somewhat incomplete, based on some animals such as tigers and birds.7 This is the of their folkloric and ritualistic practices. Since Sundanese foundational belief system, overlaid the end of the twentieth century, however, with layers of other religious traditions and much of western Indonesian—and, by practices. Influences from Hinduism began to extension, Sundanese—culture has tended to appear by the first century c.e., and Buddhism emphasize the influences of Islam and de- was established locally by the sixth century. In emphasize the vestiges of Hinduism and general, the influence of Hinduism is part of a Buddhism. As the Sundanese have come to larger syncretic pattern that affected all of Java lean on increasingly outward expressions of by the tenth century.8 Islam is estimated to their Islamic faith—through the use of the have arrived in Sundanese territory by the Islamic headscarf and specific kinaesthetic cues fourteenth century c.e.,9 becoming established to one another, as well as through musical by the eighteenth century. means—it has been Sundanese women who The golden age of Sundanese cultural have consistently provided the most public history is locally believed to have arisen during expressions of West Java’s increasing Islam- the Hindu kingdom of Pajajaran (1333–1579). ization. Among those women who sing, re- This was a time of economic interdependence gardless of the genre, the presentation of and strength for the Sundanese, as the area’s beliefs, priorities, and faith traditions are on full pre-Islamic highland regions developed a rich display through both the lyrics and the musical trading culture. Although the area’s leadership elements of the songs. As Anne Rasmussen was continually in competition and sometimes points out, Indonesian women are significantly conflict with Majapahit, the East Javanese involved in public and popular expressions of Hindu kingdom, the era is seen as a time of Islam;6 as visual signifiers of Islamic identity in considerable health and prosperity, and of both rural and urban regions of West Java, connectedness with both the spirit world and women publicly delineate boundaries of belief. the ancestors. In short, it is the time that Locally sung poetry of various types tends people remember most fondly through the to highlight elements of Sundanese history performance of tembang Sunda songs.10 (animist and Hindu-Buddhist), the natural Javanese rulers colonized the Sundanese world, spirituality, and heartache. With a highlands after a battle (Pasunda Bubat) landscape that features volcanoes, rice fields, bamboo and conifer forests, and significant 7 See Robert Wessing, Robert, The Soul of Ambiguity: rivers and hot springs, it is a small step to The Tiger in Southeast Asia, Monograph Series on South- east Asia, Special Report No. 24 (DeKalb: Northern imagining the ways in which some of these Illinois University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, important natural resources might appear in 1986). songs, and how they might connect with an 8 Richard Tarling, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1: From Early Times to c. 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 178. 5 Wim Van Zanten, Sundanese Music in the Cianjuran 9 M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. Style (Providence, RI: Foris Publications, 1989), 45. 1300, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 6 Anne K. Rasmussen, Women, the Recited Qur’an, and 1993), 4. Islamic Music in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of Calif- 10 Van Zanten, Sundanese Music in the Cianjuran Style, ornia Press, 2010), 16. 71. Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 4, No. 1 (2018) 44 between Majapahit and Pajajaran in 1357. The religious traditions—with deep influences from later collapse of Pajajaran in the sixteenth much older animist beliefs—that work century occurred just as Islamic ideas and specifically in a Sundanese context. For ex- beliefs were becoming established in Central ample, the Sundanese play several types of Java in the kingdom of Mataram. The Dutch gamelan (bronze gong-chime) ensembles, which East India Company gained control over the date from pre-Islamic days. They also play Sundanese highlands in 1677, when the tuned bamboo rattles called angklung, which Javanese ruler of the Mataram kingdom ceded invoke the rice goddess, Nyi Pohaci (or Dewi the region to them as part of a favor he owed. Sri), in order to ensure the continuing fertility That territorial gain provided the company of the rice fields upon which their lives with much-needed plantations for tea, indigo, depend. The rice goddess functions as a liminal coffee, and other trade goods. One of the ways figure between animism and Hinduism; she in which the Dutch (who ultimately national- simultaneously features prominently in the ized the Dutch East India Company in 1800) earliest Sundanese origin myths, while having furthered their aim of colonization in the taken on the name of the more recently region was to support local performing arts imported Hindu goddess of agriculture.12 and the layers of social hierarchies, including in Mainstream Sundanese Muslims are not West Java. 11 This support—financial, social, Hindu, but their history does include Hindu- and political—kept the Sundanese class levels ism, Buddhism, and animism. In understand- in place. The hereditary aristocrats learned to ing contemporary Sundanese usage of tembang speak Dutch as well as Sundanese, and many Sunda and its inclusion of frequent references were able to function fluidly in colonial society to the Hindu kingdom of Pajajaran, however, it as local rulers under colonial law.