![]() ![]() While wayang kulit Jawa and wayang kulit Melayu refer to the Javanese shadow puppets, wayang kulit Gedek and wayang kulit Siam refer to the shadow puppetry of southern Thailand. ![]() They are the wayang kulit Jawa (the Javanese leather shadow puppets), the wayang kulit Gedek (the Gedek leather shadow puppets), the wayang kulit Melayu (the Malayu leather shadow puppets) and the wayang kulit Siam (the Siamese leather shadow puppets). In Malaysia, four main types of shadow puppetry traditions have existed in various regions of the peninsula. Batara Guru is also known with the name Manik Maya. When the wind blows over empty bamboo cylinders it is like flutes playing for the wayang performance” Shadow puppet Purwa Surakarta depicting Batara Guru, the ruler of the worlds of gods, mystical, and mortals. These people are like men who, thirsting for sensuous pleasures, live in a world of illusion they do not realize the magic hallucinations they see are not real.” In 1157 CE, the court poet Mpu Sedah wrote in the Bratajada (“Great War”), that “The sound of frogs in the river sounds like xylophones accompanying the wayang play. The reference says “There are people who weep, become sad and excited watching the puppets, though they know they are merely carved pieces of leather manipulated and made to speak. Ardjuna Wiwaha was composed by a court poet of King Airlangga who ruled from 1035 to 1049 CE. A famous reference of the shadow play appears in Ardjuna Wiwaha (“The Meditation of Arjuna”), curiously echoing Plato’s discourse on illusion. ![]() The word wayang is also mentioned several times in court literatures written between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries at various kingdoms in east Java. The second copper plate, from 907 CE, describes dances, epic recitations, and a shadow play performance. The first copper plate, dated 840 CE, mentions the names of six officials who were either performers themselves or who supervised musicians, clowns, and possibly wayang performers. The earliest surviving records of wayang (Indonesian shadow puppetry) on copper plates dated 840 and 907 CE referred to shadow plays and performers. Arjuna and Buto Cakil in a Wayang performance in Semarang, Central Java Another difference between the Indonesian shadow puppetry we know today and its older forms is that, while the Chinese shadow plays are considered a form of opera in China, the Indonesian shadow puppetry has become its own art form, separate from the theater in Java. One example of this is that although the Indian shadow puppet performances either have very few or no musical instruments at all, shadow plays in Indonesia are accompanied by extensive ensembles of gamelan music. ![]() However, the present Indonesian shadow puppetry is so much more elaborate than the ancient traces of this art in India, leading many to maintain that it was an autochthonous Indonesian tradition. The Andhra Sarwaswamu states that Indian kings who invaded Java (now part of Indonesia) in the sixth century introduced shadow puppetry to the island. Shadow puppetry is so embraced by many different cultures that each culture seems to have their own history and legend of the first shadow play performance- therefore claiming it, or at least different versions of it, as their own. It has a long history in China, India, Nepal, and Southeast Asia, as well as in Turkey and Greece, surviving everything from war and famine to cultural revolutions. The art of shadow puppetry, or shadow play, is an ancient form of storytelling which utilizes flat figures (shadow puppets) to create cut-out figures which are then held between a source of light and a translucent screen. In fact, picture recitations might have been performed in Buddhist temples during the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE). However, Buddhism may have played a big role in the introduction of shadow puppetry in China. Although this theory is feasible and intriguing, the popularity of the Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana in Southeast Asia suggests that it was the Hindu culture, instead of the Buddhist culture, that accompanied the shadow puppetry from India. At the 1999 Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, a paper was presented which states that missionary Buddhist priests took the art of shadow puppetry from India to both Indonesia and China during the Buddhist expansion from the sixth through ninth centuries. ![]()
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