DeeKnow’s Grotto

Whilst travelling through Indonesia with Tess and her niece in 1996 we went along to a modern performance of the mighty Hindu tale Ramayana, told in traditional Javanese manner using shadow-puppets. Its common practice for the performance to start late in the evening and run until day-break the next day. Thank God we chose a night they performed the condensed version which ran for about 4-hours.

The Ramayana is truely an epic tale, and is of the format ... boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy fights other boys to get girl back, then decides he doesnt want her after all.

The story concerns the adventures of prince Rama (said to be an earthly incarnation of Vishnu) being denied ascendancy to his fathers throne and being banished from the kingdom for 14 years. He seeks a simpler life travelling with his wife and brother south through what we know of as modern-day India.

Along the way Rama is almost seduced by the demoness Surpanakha. Rama's beautiful wife Sita is forecebly taken by Surpanakha's brother Ravana. The brothers enlist the help of Hanuman, the monkey king, to help find Sita.  Rama, Laksmana, Hanuman, and his monkey army lay siege on Ravana's Island Lanka and eventually free Sita.

After all the drama to find and free his wife, Rama spits the dummy and questions her chastity, Sita undergoes a trial-by-fire and comes out unscathed thereby proving her innocence, but by now Rama has lost interest and abandons her.

I've summarised the story in the three paragraphs above but its quite painfully long. More like "Gone with the Wind", or even worse ... "The Bible". No wonder it normally takes all bloody night to perform.

We were the only foreigners in the audience and couldn't understand a word of it being in Javanese but the shadow-puppet delivery was really bloody fascinating, quite dramatic. The were loads of punters there too, young and old, lots of families, neat to see them all smiling and listening attentively like it was the first time they'd heard the story. The truth is Indonesians regularly attend the performance and generally the all-night format, sometimes they'll nod off to sleep, but hey, if you've seen it a dozen times before it doesnt matter if you catch some shut-eye.

The Gamalan music acompanying it was pretty bloody horrible though, imagine if you dare 30 or so symbol players all bashing away at once with little apparent direction and you're pretty close to the mark.

So anyway, why the hell am I boring you with all the details of the Ramayana? Well it turns out that a comic-book format of the tale has recently been made available online in a series apparently "concieved by Anant Pai who was the pioneer in using comics to reintroduce India's mythological and historical treasures to it's alienated youth"

Check it out, the illustrations are cool. Be wicked to get a hard-copy of it.

10:50:56 AM