Preserving nation's literary past

Illuminations, The Writing Traditions of Indonesia; Edited by Ann Kumar and John H. McGlynn; The Lontar Foundation, Jakarta, 1996; 298 pages

JAKARTA (JP): Here's an age-old question: If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?

The quiet vanishing of the world's natural resources shapes the battle-cry of environmentalists. But the sentiment pertains not only to the Green movement. For every century-old tree cleared by loggers, there are timeworn manuscripts, and the cultures they represent, slowly wasting in the humidity. If a tradition perishes in the forest, does anybody hear?

Some are listening. The Lontar Foundation, a non-profit patron of the arts, is working hard at documenting disappearing traditions as well as revitalizing ailing ones -- efforts Lontar refers to as a "race against time".

Lontar realizes that as Indonesia speeds up its modernization, ancient and marginal customs will be increasingly left behind in the rubble of development. "A poem at one point has to be put into print, and the same goes with the performing arts. They need our support, or else they will be dead," said Adila Suwarno, a director at Lontar. While acknowledging that Indonesia should not stand still and be a living museum of the exotic, Lontar also reminds us that a nation's future is forged through its past, and that the neglect of history and its legacy serves only to rob the future of its identity.

With this aim of cultural revitalization in mind, Lontar has published Illuminations: the Writing Traditions of Indonesia, an imposing coffee-table book illustrating Indonesia's wealth of manuscripts. Edited by historian Ann Kumar and John McGlynn, the editor-in-chief of the Lontar Foundation, this exhausting tome to cultural history is as eye-opening in text as it is in photographs. Page after page of well-researched historiography accompany the richly illustrated manuscripts, which disprove the myth that oral communication dominated the cultures of the archipelago.

The book was formally launched with much fanfare by President Soeharto last June, and launched again in New York City by the Ford Foundation, one of its sponsors, and publisher Weatherhill Inc. The National Library played a key role in the project: During its four years of production, 50 percent of the manuscripts came from the National Library, which stores almost 10,000 original manuscripts.

But the problem, and the point of the book, was that many of the library's manuscripts, some hundreds of years old, were in bad condition. Made from organic materials such as paper, bamboo, bark and rattan, the manuscripts have suffered, and are suffering, from the inconstant temperatures of their storage environments and poor handling. Manuscript collections outside the library are in an even more precarious state, vulnerable to the average person's disregard for the manuscripts' delicacy.

Delicate is an apt description for the diverse collection of manuscripts, whether they are primbon (a family mini-encyclopedia of relevant family information), kakawin (religious or moralistic-didactic Javanese poems), kitab (student copies of the Koran used as reference works), or jimat (a single sheet often containing a blessing and worn on the body as an amulet). As revered as some manuscripts can be -- in Malay society, the arrival of a royal letter was greeted as ceremoniously as the sender -- the text was its most important aspect.

Hence, most manuscripts were recopied every few generations: Of key importance was preserving the words, not the book. In some cases, the most important thing was the act of writing the words. For example, making copies of the Koran was compulsory for pesantren students.

But while copying meant a constantly evolving text, a vibrant living tradition and a high degree of literacy (largely due to the Moslems' campaign of bringing books and literacy to rural areas), it also meant little care in saving existing manuscripts.

Raffles

The practice of copying, however, proved its usefulness. The plunder of cultural treasures was a colonial pastime, and British Governor Raffles was no exception to the game. In 1808, he began buying manuscripts from Malacca, eventually amassing more than 300 Malay prose works. Raffles then sent the loot off on a ship, which later shipwrecked off Sumatra. But the Malays did not begrudge his negligence -- the lost manuscripts were apparently not originals, but new copies.

This tradition of copying defies the fantasy of illiterate, isolated Indonesia. Illuminations documents that Indonesia's writing traditions date back 2000 years ago, to the findings in Bali of pottery shards containing Brahmanic script dated 100 - 400 A.D. The discovery infers not only a literate culture, but one in active contact with overseas societies.

An indigenous literary tradition, however, dates back to an Old Javanese script, circa 856 A.D. Many of the transcripts concerned India's Mahabharata and Ramayana epics, although the Javanese versions were not mere translations but revisions according to Javanese specifications.

Antiquity is a key aspect of Javanese literary history; another is its evolving dynamics with other traditions. As Ann Kumar wrote, the evidence shows that the writing traditions were, "constantly evolving, revealing and giving rise to major social and intellectual transformations".

In time, the interaction between Malay and Arabic literary traditions intensified, and many Malay works show the influence of the Javanese panji stories. The relationship was two-way: As Malay became the lingua franca of the trade network, Javanese used Malay to communicate outside of their circle. Interestingly, Malay was written in Arabic script (and not the Kawi script of Old Javanese), but in both Arabic and older Malay, the Malay script was called Jawi (a derivative of "Javanese").

But the diversity of the archipelago's manuscript traditions would soon be homogenized by a 19th-century phenomenon: the printing revolution. The Islamic community began turning to lithography to copy their manuscripts. This copyist tradition is now all but extinct. What academics mourn are not only the lost texts, but the traditional method of preserving the texts.

The printing revolution emptied out not only the pesantren (Islamic school), but also the national libraries, while filling up colonial libraries, whose "manuscript cabinets were filled with the corpses of dead texts". Printing meant buying a book costed the same as borrowing a manuscript. Manuscript libraries eventually emptied their shelves to European collectors.

And who should care? The nation should, argues Lontar. Lontar maintains that despite the high costs of preserving cultural artifacts, it is a vital step in cultural continuation. Lontar adds that taking care of the manuscripts is part of their efforts in taking care of cultural continuation. "We are starting with written literature, then we will follow with oral traditions," said Lontar director Adila Suwarno. The oral traditions which accompany the literary traditions are as fragile, if not more so, than the manuscripts, explained Suwarno.

Thus, technical efforts to improve manuscript restoration, by keeping the air-conditioning at an even temperature, upgrading archival materials and training conservators may be futile without parallel efforts in promotion and education. As conservationist Alan Feinstein wrote, "If no one cares about reading (the manuscripts), there is little point in conserving them." What is at stake here are not only pretty pictures on antique books, but the important history and knowledge the texts impart. It's time to listen to the trees falling in the forest, and not just the clamor of building construction.

-- Dini S. Djalal