• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2845 0

today not much has changed, because people in power and politicians go and visit holy people, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. But in the painting that we’re talking about faith is far above power and politics. A prince who has other priorities as a young man is conditioned to think that if you get the blessings of holy people then all will be well in your reign. And the fact that he is not coerced, he just visits a Sufi saint and bends his neck, that, I think, is the key thing in the painting: a man of greater wealth, power, ambition, sits on the ground and kneels before a man who has sacrificed everything. Less is more in India, and just as well, because there’s so much poverty that that ‘less than’ gets related to the divine and it becomes a form of compensation to say that holy men want nothing, it’s only foolish men and greedy people who seek everything.

In spite of all the political upheavals in India since the time of Jahangir, this tradition of the state accommodating all religions with equal respect has endured and became one of the founding ideals of modern India.

83

Shadow Puppet of Bima

Shadow puppet, from Java, Indonesia

AD 1600–1800

When the young Barack Obama was taken to Java to live with his new Indonesian stepfather, he was astonished to see, standing astride the road, a giant statue with the body of a man and the head of an ape. He was told that it was Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god. The reason why a huge Hindu god was being portrayed in the streets of modern Muslim Indonesia is a fascinating story of tolerance and absorption, a relaxed compromise between religions unlike any of the other solutions to the problems of multi-faith societies that we have been looking at. And it is a story that can in some ways be summed up by a puppet from the Indonesian shadow theatre, a celebrated art form that is living but ancient, utterly traditional but also full of contemporary politics. Through this puppet and his companions, we can explore a great expanse of religious and political transformation which began in south-east Asia 500 years ago and which still affects the region today.

The puppet shown here, one of several hundred that we have in the collection, dating from over 200 years ago to the present day, is from the Indonesian island of Java. It stands about 70 centimetres (30 inches) high, and represents a male character in stark dramatic profile. His name is Bima. Bima has very distinctive, almost caricature facial features – a very long nose, for example – and long thin arms, each ending in a single large claw. Over his body are delicate lace-like perforations that would have made his shadow even more dramatic during performance. Bima’s face is black, but he is wearing gold clothes and brightly coloured decorations. Although he is lifeless and fragile now, once he would have enthralled audiences in all-night performances at a Javanese court. This kind of performance was known then, and still is known, as the Theatre of Shadows.

The puppet’s actual shape is the product of one of the most dramatic religious changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While Spain was converting the New World to Catholicism, Islam spread across what is today Malaysia, Indonesia and the southern Philippines, and by 1600 most Javanese people were Muslim. But the Theatre of Shadows had been a feature of life in Java long before the arrival of Islam. Bima himself is a character known not just in Java but across the whole of India, because he figures in the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata. In Java, though, this Hindu character came to be operated by Muslim puppeteers and performed in front of audiences who were also Muslim. Nobody seems to have minded, and the Indonesian Theatre of Shadows has continued to combine pagan, Hindu and Muslim elements right up to the present day.

Making a puppet like our Bima was, and still is, an immensely skilled job, requiring several different craftsmen. It is made out of carefully prepared buffalo hide, which has been scraped and stretched until it has become thin