The History of the Sea

‘Policy can’t kill culture, because culture is something people actually need. However much you tell a sixty-year-old Kelantese man that he shouldn’t do a wayang kulit, he needs it and he longs for it.’

Eddin Khoo leant forward through a thick fog of cigarette smoke. This urbane, immensely civilised Malaysian, a self-described half-Chinese, half-Indian bastard mix, translator of Moby Dick, expert on Islamic art, and hopeless political junkie, was telling me why he believes the tradition of wayang kulit, Malaysian shadow puppetry, expresses nothing less than ‘the history of the world, the secret of civilisation’. And why it has been banned in its home state of Kelantan by PAS, the Islamic Party of Malaysia.

We were talking in the Renaissance Hotel. Its creaking air-conditioning system and maroon-liveried doormen make it Kelantan’s most earnest attempt at five-star luxury. Outside were the broiling pavements of Kota Bharu, built high off the roads to avoid the floodwaters that inundate the Kelantanese capital each wet season. Women in gorgeously coloured headscarves darted in and out of the shops and the mosques, and men on motorcycles careered about below.

The laws against wayang were introduced in 1990. Khoo had just returned from studies in England and was working as a journalist in Kuala Lumpur. He went to Kelantan, in the north-west of the Malay Peninsula, to write a piece on the bans and fell in love with the place and the art form, and later studying it himself under the last of the great old-style puppeteers, Pak Dollah Baju Merah or, as he was known to audiences, ‘Abdullah of the Red Shirt’.

Kelantan is a world away from the frenetic pace of Kuala Lumpur, with its high-rises and full-speed embrace of modernisation. Things are still different on the west coast. The steamy sociability, invoked by one-time colonial officer Anthony Burgess in The Malayan Trilogy, continues. Life is languid, good-humoured, and overwhelmingly Malay and Muslim—the large Chinese and Indian populations that characterise the rest of the country are notably absent.

I had first met Khoo over dinner in Sydney’s Chinatown. He leads a peripatetic life, moving about the globe from Penang to Singapore to Dublin to Amsterdam to Lisbon to Bali. Luckily, we live in the age of email, an instrument perfectly calibrated to building friendships with nomads. Even if, guided by the literary principles of an earlier age, Khoo insists on writing his electronic messages first in longhand.

Khoo has a tremendous passion for eating—not the refined passion of a gourmand, more the peasant’s hunger for fat and sinew—and that night as he worked his way through Peking Duck and most of an exorbitantly priced steamed fish, he regaled us with descriptions of the shadow plays and what he believed they meant for Malaysian history and identity. Two years or so later his stories brought me to Kelantan to see a ritual performance of wayang kulit.

For three nights at dusk Khoo drove us an hour from Kota Bharu, along roads lined with noodle stalls and mechanics’ workshops many flying the distinctive PAS flag—a perfect white moon on a green background—through the remanent of tropical rainforest, to a tiny village called Tiger. Amid the wooden houses, under a clump of palm trees, perched on rickety stilts, was a stage no bigger than the average Australian living room, perched on rickety stilts.

A crowd grew around the stage long before the show started. There were stalls selling corn and soft drink, teenage boys riding back and forth on motorbikes, kids everywhere, and everyone under thirty spent as much time texting as they did watching the stage. There was a definite energy in the air, and although men congregated on one side of the grass and women on the other, I don’t think it was just my corrupted Western sensibility that felt the charge as a flirtation.

What might happen when men and women get together in the balmy night air filled with music is one of the things that make the PAS ulama (religious scholars) anxious about shadow puppetry. But I found it hard to see this crowd of happily chatting villagers as much of a threat. Mostly the night felt like a celebration, a chance for these families to put aside their day jobs as rubber tappers, construction workers and farmers and to just enjoy.

A much greater responsibility lay with the puppeteer and his musicians. The puppeteer, Dalang Saupi bin Isa, sat behind a white screen illuminated by a single suspended light bulb. On either side of him, and hanging from the rafters above, were hundreds of brightly painted leather puppets. This dalang had inherited many of these at the end of his apprenticeship to the master, Abdullah of the Red Shirt. The years it takes to assemble a full set of puppets is about equivalent to the time needed to master the shadow movements and to learn by heart the stories of the traditional shadow repertoire.

The musicians packed tightly behind the puppeteer started to play in earnest, and Dalang Saupi bin Isa moved the puppets back and forth across the screen, sometimes four or five at once. He animated each with its own voice—comic, tragic, war-like. His range was astonishing, and a steady stream of onlookers crowded around the side of the stage to check that it really was one man producing all that sound and movement. He told a story of the ladies-in-waiting of Sita Devi bringing a message to Rama, and he used the singsong Kelantanese dialect even Malay speakers are unable to understand. But the imagery of his story was universal—the big-nosed fool with a slow drawl; the slithery hip shake of a woman with high, round buttocks and a mass of bangles.

During a break in the first night’s performance, the dalang explained to me that his art was something sacred and ancestral. If he didn’t perform, he said, the spirits of the puppets would haunt him and he would fall sick. The show was as much for his own wellbeing as for the audience’s pleasure. He was wet with sweat and faced many more hours of work over the nights ahead, but insisted that his spirit was strong and that he was drawing more and more energy as he performed. When I asked him why he had wanted to work with the shadow puppets in the first place, his answer was immediate: ‘Our blood is the blood of art.’

*

‘Tsars, emperors, and dictators, right or left, are apt to distrust ports,’ notes Robert Hughes. ‘Port cities were too open to the influence of foreigners, to strange and non-native ideas—shifting, labile places, offering an ease of entry and exit that a landlocked capital does not. The port is where the ‘essence’ of a country as centralising power imagines it, begins to fray.’ When a revamped PAS won the state of Kelantan in 1990 elections, it envisioned the creation of a model Islamic society. This demanded that Islam be cleansed of the cultural barnacles that had accrued to the faith in its centuries in the Malay Peninsula.

By the time Islam appeared in South-East Asia in the ninth century, the region’s indigenous animist practices had already melded with Hindu and Buddhist beliefs introduced by earlier waves of Indian seafarers. Sufi missionaries, arriving in the Malay Peninsula from Yemen and China, encouraged Islam’s incorporation into the culture that had emerged from this mix of religious influences, including the art form of wayang kulit. The willingness of the Sufi scholars to accommodate Islam with existing beliefs and traditions was part of the reason they were so successful in spreading Islam outside the Middle East, all the way from North Africa to Indonesia.

The desire of modern Islamic authorities in Kelantan to control the promiscuity of the sea grew from the wider Islamic revival of the 1970s. Around the Muslim world, nationalist movements that had originated in anti-colonial struggles were transformed into a new kind of religious politics. Most significantly, Wahhabist theology spread far from its birthplace of Saudi Arabia, embraced partly as a Sunni reaction to the sudden success of Iran’s Shia revolution, and made possible by the deep well of oil money that financed the construction of Saudi-style mosques and madrassas around the world.

In South-East Asia, Wahhabism’s strict legalist interpretation of Islam was promoted by visiting Saudi ulama, but also brought back home by young Malay men of promise who had been sent abroad to study in England. With its own efforts at ‘soft power’, Malaysia’s former colonial master had intended to mould the next generation of Asian leaders in its image but, instead, exposed them to radical political Islamists expelled from their own countries in the Middle East. Their brand of Islamic revivalism had a wide impact on Malaysian society but its most direct influence was on the Islamic Party of Malaysia, transforming it from a nationalist party promoting Malay rights to one that called for the creation of an Islamic state governed by Shariah law.

Theologically, Wahhabism can be understood as the inverse of the traditions of Sufism that had characterised Malaysian Islam for so long. When Wahhabism developed in the eighteenth century, as a movement for reform within Islam, one of its targets was the emotional intensity of Sufi practices, including its veneration of saints, which to the reformers smacked dangerously of polytheism. The preacher Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab insisted that a strict return to Quranic law was the only way to reverse Islam’s flailing fortunes before Europe’s ascendency. In place of Sufism’s emphasis on personal devotion to God, the Wahhabists ordered obedience to Shariah.

When Eddin Khoo first arrived in Kelantan, the enforcement of the bans was at its strictest. He feared that the tradition of wayang kulit and, even more significantly, the centuries of cultural openness and interchange it represented were in danger of disappearing. With characteristic verve, and equally characteristic disregard for his own limits, Khoo established Pusaka—an organisation dedicated to documenting and promoting traditional performance arts in Malaysia. Like arts organisations around the world, Pusaka progresses in fits and starts. It survives on irregular grants, mostly from overseas donors, and requires the slog of loyal but ill-rewarded workers.

Most of all it requires time and energy on the part of Khoo. Alongside the eight books he has commissions for, the various regular newspaper columns, the occasional reviews, and the doctorate in history at Cambridge he is about to embark upon, Khoo regularly flies up to Kelantan to work with the performers, outsiders like me in tow, who want to see wayang in situ. On our visit, he travelled with two mobile phones, one or the other of which rang late into the night, and a briefcase overflowing with work for a Dutch newspaper, the deadline for which had passed the week before.

Khoo’s workload is not helped by his sociability, especially his insatiable appetite for political talk. In this, the intrigues—comic and tragic by turns—of the Malaysian scene offer him constant distraction. In the world of modern politics, Khoo’s erudition and range of interests make him a rare man. Taking the longer view, he vividly resembles the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge—so many brilliant projects, such a vision of the Great Work before him, all constantly disrupted by the moveable feast of party politics.

On our second day in Kelantan, Khoo rushed off to the airport to collect his friend Khalid Jaafar, who had unexpectedly arrived from the capital to see wayang. For many years Khalid had been press secretary to Anwar Ibrahim when he was deputy prime minister, and is now an advisor to Anwar’s Justice Party. The son of a rubber tapper, Khalid is a passionate autodidact, occupying himself outside politics by translating The Iliad. He endured his own Odyssean adventures when forced to flee Malaysia in a leaky boat, captained by a rum-drinking Indonesian, during the political crisis following Anwar’s arrest in 1998. With Khalid’s arrival in Kota Bharu, Khoo’s deadlines were abandoned and the two retired for a long lunch of lamb stew, fried chicken and political gossip.

Back in the village that night, I spoke again to Dalang Saupi bin Isa. He told me he began training with Abdullah of the Red Shirt as an eight-year-old and was now one of only a few dalangs left. The bans meant that troupes of musicians and puppeteers who had earned their living through itinerant performances were forced to disband. In Kelantan there had been thirty wayang kulit troupes before 1990, but now there are only three which perform irregularly and mostly in Kuala Lumpur. In the 1990s even Abdullah of the Red Shirt had to abandon his troupe and travel to Singapore to work illegally as a menial labourer. On his return to Kelantan and until his death in 2005, the master dalang cultivated rubber for a living from a small rented patch of rubber plants.

In an effort to keep wayang a viable livelihood for the performers that remain, Pusaka has brought Dalang Saupi’s troupe to theatres in Kuala Lumpur, and Khoo recently travelled with thirty Kelantanese performers to Paris’s Festival de l’Imaginaire, which opened with a performance of wayang. Many of the musicians, puppeteers and dancers had been no further than Kota Bharu, and they enjoyed their taste of European life, buying Eiffel Tower key rings and matching ‘I Love Paris’ T-shirts.

One elderly musician almost didn’t make it after he wandered off into the Prayer Room of Kuala Lumpur airport, oblivious to the requirements of departure times. Pak Che was eventually located by a frantic Christine Yong, the good-natured but long-suffering organisational powerhouse of Pusaka, who sends the emails and makes the calls to ensure that at least some of Khoo’s firework of schemes actually happen. The grey-haired Pak Che is the coolest of the wayang troupe and during the performance, as the frenzy of drumming and Malay oboe-playing reached a crescendo around him, he swung nonchalantly at his gongs, nodding his head in time to an inner tempo, like some jazz musician in a 52nd Street bar.

Sitting at the back of the little palm wood stage for part of the wayang performance in Tiger village, I watched as the dalang and his musicians moved seamlessly between good-humoured banter and sudden, focused intensity. In Kelantan, the depth and complexity of artistic vision is simply part of the everyday. The artist is your next-door neighbour, but also a man who communes with spirits and brings them to life. The living artistic culture of wayang is part of what drew Khoo into this community. He saw in it a contrast to urban Malaysians, who, he says, have become very ‘crude’ when it comes to culture. In their own way, their views on art are as distant as the PAS fundamentalists’ from the tradition of wayang kulit.

‘Liberal, middle-class Malaysians are very sentimental,’ Khoo complained. ‘They have no real commitment to the worth of culture and what it imparts. They have become essentially Westernised. As my shadow-puppet teacher said, “What is wayang? Wayang is complexity!” It’s about love, it’s about war, it’s about faith. It’s everything an epic encapsulates. And once you interfere, you lose that epic imagination and with it the ability to appreciate the complexity and difficulty of everyday life.’

The art of shadow puppetry is thought to have originated in India then travelled to Thailand, Indonesia and north-eastern Malaysia. The stories these puppet plays tell also come from India, drawing on its great storehouse of mythological adventures, the Ramayana. The Indian origins of Malaysia’s shadow puppetry may be part of its allure for Khoo, who sets much more psychological store on his mother’s background than on that of his father.

His mother’s grandfather, a Tamil dressed in Edwardian coat and dhoti, arrived in Malaysia from Ceylon to continue his work with the British Railways. The traditions of Indian culture remained strong among his descendants, and in his late twenties Khoo returned to his mother’s Hinduism and became a committed devotee of Kali. Besides, he scolded me, ‘Atheists are just so dull, lah!’

Khoo’s father, in contrast, stood fast by the principle of a modern Malaysian national identity, transcendent of racial background. An esteemed historian, Khoo Kay Kim was an author of the Rukunegara, the Malaysian Pledge of Allegiance, designed to promote national unity and drawn up in response to the devastating race riots of 1969. Professor Khoo forbade his sons to learn Mandarin and, in tribute to the religion of their adopted country, bestowed on his first-born a name derived from the Islamic ‘Addim’, meaning ‘way of life’. What could be more legitimating for a young man of confused background than to discover, in the most Malay of states, a cultural tradition drawn from his very own India?

*

In practice, while the bans have made it difficult for performers to earn a living from wayang kulit, they have not stopped the art form. Indeed, the tradition is so deeply embedded in Kelantanese life that the state’s Islamic authorities sought to counter its influence by recasting wayang in their own image. A few years ago they announced that shadow plays could go ahead as long as dalangs put aside the traditional puppets representing Hindu divinities, and used ones shaped as human figures instead. A list of themes deemed suitable for wayang to address was also issued; ones not encountered in the Indian epics such as, ‘beware of dengue’ and ‘drugs kill’. It was as though religious fanaticism had been replaced by the very worst kind of Theatre in Education. Abdullah of the Red Shirt responded by making a puppet of a religious scholar, dressed in the traditional white Muslim smock and cap. And with a giant erection.

PAS has been surprisingly tolerant of such rebellion. Khoo has now been involved with performers in Kelantan for seventeen years, and during that time PAS has never intruded on his work. Partly, he says, this is a result of his approach of ‘neutralisation’ rather than ‘confrontation’. For a number of years he based himself in Kota Bharu, committed to discovering how, as he puts it, this society worked beyond politics. Early on he realised that kinship networks remain very important and so, for example, if the chief of police of a particular area happens to be a cousin of the dalang, well, then the show can go ahead. The ad hoc nature of Malaysian administration, the source of so much frustration for British colonial officers such as Anthony Burgess, becomes a great advantage. The theatre director Jo Kukathas reminisced about the time police in Kuala Lumpur arrived to shut down one of her political satire revues, but did so on its closing night.

Nevertheless, the official religious condemnation of traditional performance arts has had a social impact. Historically, women held prominent roles in Kelantan. Economically they were central, commonly running businesses and overseeing trade, and polyandry was not unknown. Their status was reflected in traditional theatre, most notably the dance-drama tradition of Mak Yong, performed primarily by women, who take male and female roles. Mak Yong is another traditional performance art outlawed by PAS.

‘If you watch Mak Yong you see the power of femininity,’ Khoo contended. ‘Imagine for the past seventeen years, banning that and indoctrinating young men that women do not have power but are made to serve them. It is very violent to the individual and to society.’ When Khoo gives talks on traditional Kelantanese culture elsewhere in Malaysia, he says young women are keen to hear of the social and cultural power held by women in earlier generations. ‘They see this change in their own families. Many tell me, “We go to university, but our grandmothers seem a lot more autonomous and free, independent and powerful than us!” ’

Self-described Muslim feminist Zainah Anwar is founder of the Kuala Lumpur–based NGO Sisters in Islam, which lobbies for women’s rights and freedom of religion. She is of the generation that has firsthand experience of the changes Wahhabi Islam brought to Malaysian women. Her coiffed auburn hair defiantly free of a headscarf, Anwar remembered growing up in a religious climate that was, as she put it, ‘open, kind, tolerant, progressive. And then when this whole new political Islam came to Malaysia, beginning in the 1970s: suddenly we’re being told that this is all un-Islamic, that this is Jahiliyyah Islam—ignorant Islam.’ Her voice rose as we sat beneath the slow whir of the ceiling fan:

I mean, you’re telling me my mother is going to burn in hell because she did not cover her head? It’s just unacceptable and unbelievable to me, but suddenly everything must be held up to an Islam as defined by these intolerant people influenced by the culture of the Middle East which is really not our culture and not our experience. That is not the Islam I grew up with and that is not the God I grew up with and that is not the God that I understand and I believe in.

For those of us living in societies where the dynamic of modernism has resulted in increasing secularisation and cultural syncretism, encountering a place like Malaysia is like Alice going through the looking glass. There it is a modern intellectual and political movement that is advocating theological purity and legal literalism. Eddin Khoo remarked that in Kelantan, people over fifty generally have no argument with wayang. The difficulties he encounters are with those under thirty who went to school under the new Wahhabist-style Islam. He believes that those who have grown up under the ulama’s vision of a purified Islam are suffering a widespread crisis of identity, inevitable when people are ideologically severed from the complexity of their cultural past. ‘All cultures are bastardised,’ Khoo told me, grinning. ‘And in Malaysia this is our greatest strength. But over the last thirty years or so we’ve come up with very rigid ways of defining culture and religion and identity, preferring categories to chaos.’ ’ Eloquence is never a challenge for Khoo, but he is particularly happy with this maxim. He leans back to light a cigarette in celebration.

In the village the mixing of traditions seemed to continue unremarked. In the rambling wooden house of Dalang Saupi bin Isa, as his family brought out plates of spicy fish and rice for the visitors, a woman veiled in white silently performed her evening prayers in the corner of the kitchen. Although this village had stopped voting for PAS in protest at the bans, many in the audience were visiting from villages that remain PAS strongholds. Malaysia is not a secular society, and many believe religion should shape politics, just as it should culture. The tradition of wayang kulit has always been a religious, as much as an artistic and a social, activity. But these people are also proudly Kelantanese and the Islam they practise is a Kelantanese Islam. They might vote for PAS but they do what they want.

Muslim prayers began each night of the wayang, as well as invocations to various spirits unknown to the Quran. On the third night, the shadow performance was followed by an extraordinary shamanistic ritual, designed to strengthen and replenish the dalang.

After the story ended, the village’s two shamans moved about preparing the stage and directing the arrangement of a table of offerings. The elder shaman was stately, with carefully slicked-back hair and a neatly pressed checked shirt. The younger was tall, rangy, with an enormous cigarette of uncertain contents constantly hanging from his lips. On the nights of wayang he loped around the crowd shaking hands and letting loose great bursts of a machine-gun cackle from his skinny belly. Under the supervision of the shamans, the shadow curtain was taken down and the dalang, bare-chested now but with long pieces of cloth tied around his waist, was revealed to the audience. It was as if we had left the altar and entered the tabernacle.

But nothing happens quickly in Kelantan. Eventually, three large men positioned themselves behind the dalang. The drummer began a rapid beat and the younger shaman knelt down low beside the puppeteer. Within moments, the dalang shut his eyes and kicked back inside himself. Slowly he reached for a puppet. First he took one shaped like a Hindu god. They danced delicately together, so smoothly and with such grace that the puppet seemed to be moving the man.

The dalang then reached for the largest of the demon puppets. He flung himself back and forth. Each of the men stationed behind him grabed a cloth tie to hold the dalang back as he reared and spun, doing battle with the puppet. The younger shaman kept up a steady stream of talk to the puppeteer, placing an arm around his shoulders, and relighting his cigarette. The crowd pressed around, surging backwards and forwards with the movements on the stage.

The dalang met his puppets one by one, and the trance session continued for more than two hours. Then abruptly it was over. The dalang was led down from the stage and onto his knees by the shaman, who stood above him pouring water over the puppeteer’s head. Saupi bin Isa rose and dried himself with a towel handed to him by his young daughter. The two chatted for a moment, he patting her hair affectionately.

As I stood there dazed, the younger shaman bounded up, laughing. His giant rollie hanging from his lips, he presented me with one of the fabric ties that had restrained the puppeteer and, from the table of offerings, a pink plastic rose and a boiled egg wrapped in tulle. He then astounded Khoo by whispering, ‘This ritual we do, you know, it all comes from the Jews!’

PAS’s success in the federal elections of March 2008 resulted from their membership of Anwar Ibrahim’s new political alliance. As the Islamic Party becomes increasingly engaged with the national democratic scene in Malaysia, pressure may be brought on it to remove the bans against wayang kulit in Kelantan. The long-dominant UMNO is, however, refusing to leave quietly and Anwar’s political future is again in doubt following new accusations of sodomy; he rejects the charges as the latest manifestation of the old political conspiracy to keep him from power.

Khoo believes that the tide of Wahhabist Islam is turning, and people are returning with new respect to the Islam of Malaysia’s past. He was adamant that this alone will allow the bans to be overturned. ‘The point is a greater awareness, not of the art forms necessarily, but what the art forms encapsulate. The broader experience for all Malaysians that goes beyond the song and dance of a performance. The way that wayang encapsulates a particular sensibility, a sensibility of a culture.’

Even if the bans are lifted, I wonder, will this be enough to keep wayang alive for future generations? Or will the creep of TV and the lure of city jobs on the east coast succeed where the Islamic Party failed? Will the young men who rode about the wayang performance on their motorbikes, earphones hanging out of one ear, long for this art in the same way as their fathers and grandfathers did?

For the moment, none of this mattered to Khoo. The conclusion of the performance and the explosive energy of the ritual left him on a high. He was buoyed by the experience and thrilled to be sharing it. It was two in the morning, and driving back to Kota Bharu he convinced us all to stop for Tom Yum at a roadside soup stall. He commanded a table, slurping soup, laughing, smoking, demanding more salt from the waitress; and chatted on his phone to friends in London. It was three a.m., three-thirty. The articles he had promised to finish, the never-ending scrounging for funds, the appointments waiting for him back in Kuala Lumpur were all put aside. He was beaming.