Among the Believers (58 page)

The trouble then was that they didn’t know what they should do as Hindus. They had no priests and no idea of the rituals they should perform. They sent for Balinese Hindu priests, and the Balinese came over with a Balinese gamelan orchestra to instruct them. But it didn’t work. The past couldn’t be reconstructed; the old rituals and theology couldn’t take again. And so the people of Prambanam had returned to being what they had been, people of a composite religion.

On Thursday, at that time of late afternoon which Prasojo had said was the most beautiful time of the Javanese day, a woman sat outside her little shop in one of the main streets of Yogya, making up little banana-leaf sachets of rose petals, jasmine, and the sweet-smelling lime-green flowers of the ylang-ylang. She was pregnant and she sat with her legs apart. The banana-leaf pieces were in a basket; the petals and blossoms and other things were in separate dishes. She worked fast, taking two strips of banana leaf, pinning them together at the bottom in a pocket with a piece of coconut-leaf rib, throwing red and white petals into this pocket, adding jasmine, sometimes perfume from a bottle, and then pinning the pocket at the top. Sometimes she added a yellow paste or a piece of a brown stick—it depended on what the customer wanted. The waiting customers were girls and women. The sachets cost fifteen rupiah, under three cents. They were flower offerings to be made to the spirits of the dead; they were to be used in houses or placed in graveyards; and Thursday evening was the time to buy, because Friday, the Muslim sabbath, had become the holy day.

Umar Kayam lived opposite a Chinese cemetery. It made for openness and quiet, but some of his relations didn’t want to visit him. He told them that the Chinese were industrious and successful and Chinese graveyard spirits were likely to be good spirits. But some people didn’t want to hear.

The religion which at one end was the religion of unfettered awe was at the other end a religion of extraordinary refinement. The people who lived close to the spirits of the dead also possessed living epics that had become moral texts. The rituals and difficult theology of Hinduism couldn’t be re-established. But Hinduism had left Java its most human and literary side, its epics, the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata;
and the epics lived in the puppet plays, the
wayang
.

The
Mahabharata
was longer. It took nine hours and was “heavy” for a puppet-master, who had to do all the characters, all the different voices. The
Ramayana
was done more often; and everywhere in Central Java the word
Ramayana
appeared—on the backs of buses, on shop signs. The stories, reworked and added to over the centuries, had become part of the common imagination. The characters were at once divine and human. Even in the programme notes for the abbreviated tourist
wayang
across the road from the Sheraton Hotel, the characters were referred to as R. Rama, R. Lesmana, R. Hanoman—R. for
raden
, a noble, as some people still liked to label themselves—so that the archaic, stylized puppet shadows on the white screen, while connecting people to a heroic past, remained related to the present.

The stories were more than stories. They were not flat. They offered ambiguities. Here, from
Human Character in the Wayang
, a book of reprinted newspaper articles by Sri Mulyono, a puppet-master, is one little part of the
Ramayana
story. King Rahwana of Alengka has abducted Sinta, the beautiful wife of King Rama of Mangliawan. King Rama invades Alengka to rescue his wife. Wibisana, the younger brother of King Rahwana, rebukes Rahwana for abducting the beautiful Sinta and pleads with him to return Sinta to her husband. Rahwana pays no attention, and Wibisana joins the invading army. Was Wibisana right to serve what he saw as the good cause? Or was Wibisana’s act an act of betrayal? Need he have acted at all?

The invading army begins to win. King Rahwana in despair turns to his other brother, Kumbakarna. He tells Kumbakarna, “You are my last resource. My generals are dead. Our country is being destroyed. Help me.” Kumbakarna says, “Return Sinta to her husband. You still have time.” Rahwana refuses. He tells Kumbakarna, “Your sons have been killed by the invaders.” Kumbakarna, in a frenzy then, goes out to fight the invaders and dies horribly. What cause has he served?

The good puppet-master, whatever his interpretation of the story, political, mystical, leaves the issues open. Everyone watching responds according to his character and circumstances. And the story is denser than appears in this account. Because every character trails his own ancestry and dilemmas, even the wicked Rahwana, even the beautiful Sinta. Everyone is engaged in his own search, and at his appearance in the story is in a crisis; so that, as in the profoundest drama or fiction, every encounter is charged with meaning. The epics are endless.
The puppet plays bear any number of repetitions, because the more the audience knows the more it understands; and interpretations of motive, of what is right and wrong or expedient, will constantly change.

Salvation is the ultimate good, nirvana; it is to be achieved by the conquest of the senses—a way that is full of self-deceptions. And the Islamic idea of paradise fits easily into the Buddhist-Hindu dream of the life without worldly entanglement and stress. The Islamic idea of the omnipotent God merges into the more mystical Hindu concept of Wisnu, Vishnu, who, as Sri Mulyono says, is “Truth … Reality, the source of all things and all life.”

The open-and-shut morality of Islam, always with its answers in the book or in the doings of the Prophet, gives way in the puppet theatre to something else. Hinduism and Buddhism shed their complexity. It is as if, at this far end of the world, the people of Java had taken what was most human and liberating from the religions that had come their way, to make their own. Umar Kayam saw the
wayang
and the epics as the core of Javanese religion and civilization. They explained the ritual, the courtesies, the constant preoccupation with human behaviour.

There was another side to this concern with beauty and correct behaviour. In 1965, when Sukarno and his communistic government had been deposed, between half a million to a million people were slaughtered in Indonesia. All the frustrations of overrefinement came out then; every kind of private feud was settled. In Hindu Bali, which the tourists now visit, the killing was as fierce as anywhere else. But there, to give a touch of ritual to the butchery, the village gangs took out the gamelan orchestras when they went killing.

I
SLAM
was part of the composite religion. And the questions raised by the Australian academic in his letter to Taufiq remained. What did the new missionary Islam, the Islam of the
pesantren
, have to offer these villages? What new ideas of land tenure, what kind of debate did it offer to these villages which were not as enchanted as they looked, where the balance was broken?

There were too many people. But the government family-planning programme was threatening the extended-family system, the protection
that system gave. More food was needed. But the new rice that gave two crops a year destroyed the old rhythm of village life, interfered with the festivals, didn’t give people the time for the puppet plays, and in this way was undermining the old civilization, breaking up the bonds between men. The farmers were in debt. The two crops a year made them borrow from the bank for fertilizer and seed. The extension of rural banking was meant to help, but borrowing from the bank was not like borrowing from the village moneylender, whom everyone in the village knew. To borrow from the bank was to become the puppet or victim of an impersonal institution.

The
koum
of Linus’s village said that young people were learning more about Islam at school and for that reason were becoming more interested in the faith. But the
koum’s
Islam was the old Islam of the village; and the
koum
, with his fees for his religious services, his acre of land, and his knowledge of the past, saw himself living in the good time. There were many people now who knew nothing of the Japanese or the Dutch, many people for whom there was no longer room in the village, people who were being ejected or banished from the only way of life they knew. They lived in a bad time; and the Islam that spoke to them was not the
koum’s
Islam, but an Islam that sanctified their sense of wrongness.

At Pabelan I had been given a copy of an article from an unnamed magazine. It was an interview, by “a Christian lay person,” with a Muslim
kiyai
or
pesantren
leader. “You ask me the situation of the farmers today and how the
kiyai
can change this unjust society? The farmers today do not receive justice. Most of them are poor because they have no land. There are more farmers now who have no job. The landlords use machines, instead of the farmers, in their farms. The farmers receive very low prices for their products. Meanwhile, the rich in our society are so rich. They get their wealth from the money that is given or lent to our country by very rich nations. Now, how can a
kiyai
help in the changing of this kind of society? How can he make the landlords and the rich give up their properties which, according to Islam, belong to Allah and must be given back to the people who are creatures of Allah?”

But who were the creatures of Allah and who were not? What land was there to give back in overpeopled Java? Java was not Malaysia. Most of the people in Linus’s village farmed half an acre. Were these people
rich? The
koum
, with his acre, considered himself well off. What land did he have to give back?

The Islam that was coming to the villages—brushed with new and borrowed ideas about the wickedness of the machine, the misuse of foreign aid—was the Islam that in the late twentieth century had rediscovered its political roots. The Prophet had founded a state. He had given men the idea of equality and union. The dynastic quarrels that had come early to this state had entered the theology of the religion; so that this religion, which filled men’s days with rituals and ceremonies of worship, which preached the afterlife, at the same time gave men the sharpest sense of worldly injustice and made that part of religion.

This late-twentieth-century Islam appeared to raise political issues. But it had the flaw of its origins—the flaw that ran right through Islamic history: to the political issues it raised it offered no political or practical solution. It offered only the faith. It offered only the Prophet, who would settle everything—but who had ceased to exist. This political Islam was rage, anarchy.

S
UDDENLY
in Yogyakarta there were tourists, tours from Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and Australia; and the Sheraton began to fill up. What was there for them in Yogya? What did the Australians do? Where did they go? The visitors I saw at the temples of Borobudur and Prambanam were Indonesians, and a few Germans. The gamelan orchestra played in the Sheraton lobby for an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon; but no one seemed to listen. In the restaurant on the seventh floor there was classical Javanese dancing of a high order for an hour in the evening; but there were always empty tables there. Yogya, in fact, was only a halt for the tours, something thrown in. The true goal was Bali, of the enchanted name: Bali for Christmas.

I wondered about the Australians. But I knew what one of them was doing. He was preparing a scholarly paper on the charcoal-burners of Java. It had been discovered that they were a disappearing species, with the cutting down of the forests of Java; and apparently there were people in Jakarta who, though selling tomatoes or repairing shoes or pushing food carts, insisted that they were charcoal-burners. I had heard about this sad idiosyncrasy from a pretty woman sociologist who had contracted typhoid from being in the field, padding about a
Javanese village. And I had thought that that was all that could be said.

But the Australian I had then met had already spent two months researching that very matter. Two months! He laughed at my exclamation. Two months were nothing. A scholarly paper required interviews, questionnaires, tables. The academic life might appear leisurely, but it had its severities!

He telephoned the evening before I left Yogya. He had actually seen a man in the street that afternoon carrying a load of wood on his back. He had felt like running after the wood-carrier, clearly a charcoal-burner, someone with charcoal to burn, and interviewing him. But he hadn’t. He was with Javanese friends—at that pleasant time of day; he had let the moment slip. He had watched his rare quarry—who knows, perhaps the last charcoal-burner in Central Java—walk away below his load in the dusk, disappearing in the black exhaust of the Yogya buses and scooters.

But the Australian had made his arrangements. In Yogya he had a kind of tenure. I hadn’t. On Christmas Eve the Sheraton threw me out and I had to go back to Jakarta, to the Borobudur Intercontinental. So the royal palace of Yogyakarta remained unknown to me; its Buddhist mandala unexplored; the nine gateways that matched the nine orifices of the human body; the rooms that symbolized so many things, the trees that held such varied meanings; all the mingled Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim mysteries of kingship in Java, matching the wonder of the unique civilization.

  5
The Loss of Personality