Wayang Beber: Das widerentdeckte Bildrollen-Drama Zentral Javas.

• Author: Gerow, Edwin

Occasionally, scholarship rises to the status of an art-form. This gorgeous publication is not only the last, and, obviously, very complete, word on the remarkable survival named in its title, but succeeds in representing that nearly lost art visually and dramatically, thanks to sumptuous illustrations from the rolls that are themselves (almost) worth the price of the book. The book is evidently intended also for the coffee-table, being in suitably large format, and printed on heavy, glossy paper. Despite this, it is also a work of first-rate ethnographic scholarship, documenting, and accounting for, in almost fanatical detail, the two performances of wayang beber that the lead author had witnessed in the mid-60s.

Indologists will find this account doubly fascinating, the art being another instance of pre-Islamic cultural survival in Indonesia. The great six-foot-high painted scrolls, unrolled seriatim, much like the Torah in a synagogue, and also accompanied by a singer-narrator who evokes the scenes depicted, have analogues in contemporary Rajasthan and Nepal (p. 20), and perhaps even a common content (the hero of the Rajasthani form, called ki par, is usually Pabu[ji], of the Javanese, Panji). There are no explicit links, it seems, as in the case of other Javanese dramatic forms, with Ramayana or Mahabharata. The authors stress also the quasi-religious significance these scrolls have retained, themselves objects of...