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THE
SHADOW-PLAY Perhaps poetry and the drama were born in Bali with the introduction of the great epics of the Hindus, the famous Ramayana and Mahabharata. They came by way of Java as propaganda for the ancient Hindus and as part of their religious teachings. The semi-divine protagonists of the poems, the princes Rama and Ardjuna, gods reincarnated to save the world, soon captured the popular imagination with their romantic adventures and their fantastic wars against evil. They not only became the idols, the heroes, models of conduct for the Balinese, but were accepted as the ancestors and ideal of the race. The early religious teachers of Java rewrote the great Indian works into the local literary language, the Kawi, archaic Javanese, in which nine out of every ten words are Sanskrit. The rich and flowery Kawi is today the classical language of poetry (kawi means " poet ") used by Balinese intellectuals, who have continued to practise it, keeping it as alive as it was in Java during the golden age of Hinduism before it fell into neglect at the advent of Islamism. It was not without reason that Raffles wrote in his History of Java: " The ancient mythological poems are preserved in Bali in more correct form than in Java." The poems are written in stanzas based on the Sanskrit metre (sloka), which the Balinese have developed into as many as fortyseven different poetical measures that are particularly well suited to singing. These are given out to the masses by story-tellers who chant the Kawi texts while an interpreter explains them in ordinary Balinese. The people soon learned the Kawi poems by heart, although they do not understand the actual words and chant them purely for the sake of their musical metre. Today even boys of the common classes gather at night for hours to sing in Kawi, though the meaning of the songs may be obscure to them. Musical accompaniments were eventually added to the epic songs, and story-telling developed into a fine art in the form called kekawin, in which a large orchestra plays interludes between the episodes and dialogues recited and translated by two story-tellers. The episodes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata remain the most important literary works that the Balinese have appropriated for their own literature, and they have influenced the theatre to a great extent. But there are countless other stories, Javanese, native, even Chinese, that make the bulk of the literature of Bali, now being compiled by the Kawi scholars of Bali, Java, and Holland. links
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