Traces of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in Javanese and Malay Literature, by Ding Choo Ming and Willem van der Molen (eds.)

Abstract

This collection of essays emerged from a conference on the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata held in Singapore in 2014, and represents an overview of recent European and Australian scholarship on how these two epic traditions evolved in Indonesia and Malaysia. According to one of the volume's editors, Willem van der Molen, the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata have been a "constant element amidst change, resisting the threat of oblivion" (p. 1) in the region's cultures for over a millennium. These narratives continue to serve as a resource of images, ideas, and values for the peoples of the archipelago, even as their societies have been transformed by religious conversion and modernization. The key to this longevity is the profound adaptability and translatability of the Rāmāy-aṇa and Mahābhārata, the traces of which are explored in this collection. Six contributions are collected in this book. Stuart Robson gives a historical account of how Javanese-language versions of the Rāmāyaṇa have evolved since the ninth century. This account is informed by theoretical reflections on the idea of translation, which is considered from a range of angles throughout the collection. Harry Aveling offers a comparative study of four renditions of the Death of Abhimanyu episode of the Mahābhārata: the canonical Sanskrit version, a twelfth-century Javanese version, a classical Malay telling, and a twentieth-century Indonesian adaptation by the novelist Danarto. Aveling shows how each retelling draws out different values and themes from the episode: the moral duties of the warrior class in the first case, the beauty of love and warfare in the second, the dignity of public service in the third, and a mystical perspective on death in the fourth. Bernard Arps explores the intriguing notion of 'javanaiserie' in classical Malay literature, which he defines as a representational strategy for Malay-speakers to imagine a Java that "functioned as a zone, both other and the same, onto which certain aspects of Malay culture could be projected" (p. 86, original emphasis). Arps productively applies this concept to a Malay version of the Nawaruci story, and his approach has the potential to offer new insights into many other Malay texts in which Javaneseness is depicted. Gijs Koster traces the intertextual allusions to the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhā-rata epics in a Malay text from another tradition, the Panji story-cycle. According to Koster, these allusions self-consciously draw attention to the artifice of Downloaded from Brill.