The book, a meticulously crafted scholarly work, is divided into four chapters, with an introduction and a conclusion. It navigates the intricate historical and mythological journey from the nineteenth century to the present (as detailed in Chapter 3), although it does not strictly adhere to a chronological order. It transforms literary archives into knowledge, with a focus on Wayang as a performing art. It introduces a duality that unveils the promises and contradictions of this art form.
Open with a recitation of dalang Ki Warnoto, the Introduction is a compelling chapter, setting this book as a contemporary study. The epigraph is powerful as a set of narratives, descriptive of time, place and context; it is also an open invitation to chart in parallel as a cartography of the book. The chapter in the opening is strategically humble, a hermeneutics marker of marginality in assessing the large field of performing arts of Indonesia, especially Wayang that encompasses dalang, Puppet, sindhen, gamelan, tembang (song), stories and also context; the author claims as signal social hierarchy, and yet the Wayang enable paradox, symbolical and preserve cultural marker specifically the author pay the detail strict court rule, strata, language and class (pp. x–xi).
The author, drawing on Soedjadmoko’s historical discourse, embarks on a nonchronological analysis of cases. in Chapter 1, page 2, where the role of myth as a symbolic historical reference and spiritual guide. The book, captures the essence of text and story, time markers, spatiality, messages and context. The historicity of Kakawin, Ramayana and Mahabharata is explored in this chapter, with citations and notes presented in various literary forms.
Sumarsam argues about the role of time in Indonesian Islam and Sunan as a leading figure of the two cultural encounters. To support, he presented Dewa Ruci (from poem pre-Islam: Nawa Ruci to sufi text in the style Yasadipura). Like this poetics rendition assessment, the book also conveys a method the author calls dialectic dualism. It is a key analytical tool used by the author to explore the complexities of Wayang historicity (i.e., paradoxical standard, role because of Islamic context both as challenges but also creativity responses). Dialectic dualism allows the author to engage into the cosmology of Wayang. While seemingly in favour of early transition, the author also marks a specific time of the rise of Islam in the current cultural and political context of Indonesia (Java), such as the modality of preaching, ritual, and levity in Wayang as textuality and its change (Chapter 3 with specific example Gus Muwafiq, Cak Nun from Nahdatul Ulama); but also signal centre [palace]-periphery relation and specificity of the story (text) in Chapter 2. He tries to neutralise the critique of Wayang and its cultural language.
In Chapter 1, the author focuses on the root, Indian, and Javanese connections as literary notes on Hinduisation (p. 3), relies on Kakawin and its epic that he argues through literature and reliefs in Javanese temples, but also Islamisation as tracing court culture in Kalimasada.
The chapter’s structure can be traced to the author’s clarity with his positionality. He acknowledges that he is not from an established social context, yet there is also complicity because of artistic embodiment, a step to achieve a signal elite education. This is like the book’s opening, where the livelihood of performing arts is centralised to the circulation of a constituent in which class politics, court arts patronage, and the empire of knowledge production include Claire Holt in the closing chapter and Zoetmulder in the opening. All scholars being cited have a specific archive research and Euro-American historicity and its vision in studying arts.
There is a wording ‘decolonializing’ (p. 187), for example, and I am still feeling vague; what is decolonial here? The author tracing ‘the strange name’ sounds Dutch, but as Wayang already signals, it embodied many characters: itinerant comedian, widu, shaman and many more. Is it because Petruk is wearing Dutch clothing/uniform that I can engage with this writing and its authorship? But with many other performance scholarships in the Asian American context, as the author’s citation practice circles toward this established constituent, perhaps decolonial in that context, a post-colonial time, the author closed off a conversation that is touching political time, where Wayang, dalang becoming a part of the unwanted by the State, including the voice of ‘in-between’ singer, a sindhen woman also rarely mentioned, between the dalang and the Wayang and its messages. The term ‘decolonializing’ here refers to the author’s attempt to reclaim and reinterpret aspects of Wayang that have been influenced by colonial powers, and to present a more authentic and culturally significant understanding of the art form. Also, reading symbols and performing arts as a method enables the authors to expand the limits of the archives that materialised through the documents, and the performance itself is also an archive that lived.
The author’s positionality as an Indonesian scholar and practitioner of the art form significantly influences the book’s content and potential biases. His engagement with established scholarship and his critique of knowledge and sources are crucial for understanding the work and book’s content. In Chapter 4, the author also cited a new wording of decolonisation toward Petruk. It provides a comprehensive and enlightening exploration of the transition of Wayang and the staging, while also critically analysing decolonial notes on Wayang, including tracing Balai Pustaka (in this book mistranslated as a State agency), it is a crucial literary, political publisher, at early independent time, real decolonial as many post-colonial authors and signal on Petruk figure of The four punakawan figures in Javanese Wayang are mythologised through their roles as servants and messengers.
They signify a critique of class order, serving as vehicles for knowledge production and the language of wisdom. Many dalang, the storyteller and narrator in Javanese tradition, was killed during Indonesia’s New Order. The dalang (puppet master), responsible for directing the plot of Wayang performance but does the dalang’s role also have other realities? Like a wanderer, a character representing a responsible thinker, and also the sindhen, the traditional female singer who voices the songs and text, appear in the performance, do these roles — dalang, who is killed, and sindhen, who is always (un) present — embody gendered roles in the plot? Is it acceptable for them to be forgotten as part of Wayang’s historiography in this book?
As an Indonesian scholar, I am captivated by the book’s distinctive perspective on Wayang’s socio-historical and current role as a cultural form. The insights presented here, particularly those not commonly found in English writing on Wayang, are a rich source of knowledge, mainly when authored by Indonesian scholars practicing the art form as a dalang. The book’s exploration of socio-historical contexts enriches our understanding of Wayang and sheds light on the intricate cultural narrative it embodies. The author’s ability to place both geopolitics of his relation to Wayang as a villager and then highly educated captured the complexity and longing for the genealogy of cultural class, utilising the method of scholar (archive) and ethnography and aesthetic imagination.
