Preserving nation's literary past

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