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Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South And The University of Michigan Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies MICHIGAN PAPERS ON SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA Ann Arbor, Michigan BOUNDARIES OF THE TEXT Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia Edited by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger and Laurie J. Sears Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies The University of Michigan Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia Number 35 Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Library of Congress catalog card number: 90-85739 ISBN: 0-89148-062-5 (cloth) ISBN: 0-89148-063-3 (paper) Copyright © 1991 Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies The University of Michigan Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-89148-062-4 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-89148-063-1 (paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12775-7 (ebook) ISBN 978-0-472-90171-5 (open access) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ IV CONTENTS Note on Transliteration vii List of Contributors ix Introduction Laurie J. Sears and Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger . 1 Literacy and the Epic in the Malay World Amin Sweeney 17 Fluid and Fixed Texts in India Wendy Doniger 31 Literacy and the Changing Concept of Text: Women's Ramayana Mandali in Central India Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger 43 Javanese Mahabharata Stories: Oral Performances and Written Texts Laurie J, Sears 61 Words Made Flesh: The Banaras Rdmlild as Epic Commentar}' Philip Lutgendorf 83 Epic Transmission and Adaptation: A Folk Ramayana in South India Stuart H. Blackburn 105 Contents Palm Leaf and Performance: The Epics in Balinese Theater Mary S. Zurbuchen 127 Epic Purpose in Malay Oral Tradition and the Effects of Literacy Amin Sweeney 141 NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION The editors have chosen not to italicize the terms Ramayana and Mahabharata in order to emphasize that they are flexible traditions rather than simply printed texts. The names of printed texts are italicized. Regional performance genres of these traditions are italicized as non-English words, but not capitalized unless they contain the name of an epic character. In the essays on South Asian epic traditions, the names of the epics and their characters are spelled in English, approximating their pronun- ciation without diacritical marks (thus, Lakshmana, rather than Laksmana). For consistency among essays, the two essays discussing Hindi traditions spell the names of the epics and characters according to their pan-Indian forms (Ramayana rather than Ramayan; Rama rather than Ram). Following Indonesian and Malaysian governmental practice, diacritical marks are not used for Malay, Indonesian, and Javanese italicized words. vn LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Stuart H. Blackburn is the author of Singing of Birth and Death: Texts in Performance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) and coeditor of two books on Indian folklore. He currently teaches at the University High School in San Francisco and is completing a book on the Kerala shadow puppet play. Wendy Doniger (formerly O'Flaherty) is the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Among her recent publications are Other People's Myths (New York: Macmillan, 1988) and Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger is an independent research scholar and the publications editor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Univer- sity of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a coeditor of Oral Epics in India (Berkele}^ University of California Press, 1989) and the author of several articles on genre, folklore systems, and performance in central India. Philip Lutgendorf teaches Hindi and modern Indian studies at the University of Iowa, in the Department of Asian Languages and Litera- ture. His research interests include medieval Hindu devotional litera- ture and contemporary culture and performance. He is the author of The Life of a Text: Performing the Rdmcaritmdnas of Tulsidds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Laurie J. Sears is an assistant professor of history at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her article entitled "Aesthetic Displacement in Javanese Shadow Theatre: Three Contemporary Performance Styles" recently appeared in The Drama Review (Fall 1989). IX List of Contributors Amin Sweeney is professor of Malay and Indonesian in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. His recent publications include A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Mary S. Zurbuchen is currently a program officer for the Ford Founda- tion in New Delhi. Her research interests include Balinese textual and performance studies, and contemporary cultural change in South and Southeast Asia. She taught Indonesian language and literature at the University of California-Berkeley and is the author of The Language of Balinese Shadow Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). INTRODUCTION Laurie J. Sears and Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger Audiences can witness performances of the Mahabharata and Ramayana in South and Southeast Asia in an array of styles that range from two-hour recitations by a single performer and informal women's singing groups to all-night shadow puppet plays and profes- sional theatrical productions performed for thirty consecutive nights. Performances of the epics in these regions often celebrate ritual passages: births, deaths, marriages, and religious observances. Although written versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana have existed in both South and Southeast Asia for hundreds of years, the texts were rarely intended to be read privately. The stories live and are transmitted through performance; their characters are well known and well loved. This volume examines several performance traditions of the Maha- bharata and Ramayana in South and Southeast Asia and, more specifi- cally, the relationship between these performances and the written texts that record the epic traditions.1 Further, the contributors are interested in indigenous conceptions of the relationships between oral performance and written text. What do performers and audiences mean when they identify something as "Ramayana" or "Mahabha- rata?" How do they conceive of texts? What are the boundaries of the texts? We use the term "text" in its broadest sense, as "marked words," making possible texts which exist in both written and oral 1. This volume grew out of a double panej presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies held in Chicago in 1986, entitled "Oral Performance and Written Text: The Epics in South and Southeast Asia." We would like to thank the chair of the panel, Barbara Stoler Miller (Columbia University), and panel discussants Benedict Anderson (Cornell University) and Susan S. Wadley (Syracuse University) for their comments and participation. Introduction forms.2 The indigenous terminology for some of the traditions examined in this volume may not distinguish between performed and written versions, although the performers have specific ideas about what performance "does" to the written text. Other traditions maintain more rigid, marked boundaries between performed and written genres. Given the common associations between performance and orality and between written texts and literacy, the examination of the interac- tion between text and performance has been overshadowed by the broader scholarly discourse on orality and literacy.3 Before Milman Parry and Albert Lord's work on Yugoslav oral epic was published in 1960, European epic traditions were most often associated with written literature rather than oral performance because the performance tradi- tions of many of the European epics had been lost (cf. Bakhtin 1981, 3-40). Influenced by the concerns of traditional philology, European scholars in the colonial period were likewise most interested in the written Ramayana and Mahabharata traditions of South and Southeast Asia. When Dutch scholars in Java encountered the performance tradi- tion of the Javanese shadow theater in the latter part of the nineteenth century, for example, they tried to reconstruct the "pure" Indie tradi- tion that they believed had been "corrupted" by the village puppeteers over the centuries (cf. Rassers [1931] 1959, 111; Serrurier 1896, 28- 31). The Dutch scholars discounted the ability of the Javanese puppet- eers to manipulate old and new materials in performance, seeking instead to establish "correct" versions of well-known stories. Several epic repertoires are onry now receiving attention from scholars who focus on the performance traditions in addition to the written texts.4 The dynamics of the interaction between written texts and perfor- mance are of particular interest in South and Southeast Asia where oral performance and written traditions share a long and interwoven history. Their continuing interactions challenge early studies of orality and literacy which assumed a clear distinction between the two. Lord's study of Yugoslav and Homeric epics ([I960] 1976) is an example of this assumption. Building on the foundations laid by Parry, Lord 2. Western scholarship has in modern times associated the word "text" with written words. However, as Walter Ong (1982, 13) points out, its root meaning, "to weave," is compatible with oral utterance. Dennis Tedlock
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