An inheritance from the friends of God: The Southern shadow puppet theater of West Java, Indonesia

Wayang kulit (shadow puppet theater), as practiced in Java, Indonesia, has long been understood to be primarily a "classical" or "high" art form. The story-episodes performed, depicting the actions of Hindu gods and heroes, are typically conceived as signs of the "syncretism" of Java, and the refusal of the people of Java to become "real" Muslims, even after centuries of Islamization. This dissertation explores a school of wayang kulit known as the Kidulan or "Southern" shadow puppet theater which developed in the first decades of the twentieth-century in the primarily industrial area around Palimanan, north West Java, that overturns these normative expectations and stereotypes. Southern wayang kulit is popular in orientation and actively shunned by the noble elite. In performance, puppeteers deploy the inherited or residual cultural forms and ideas to address contemporary themes, explicitly Islamic in nature. After outlining how wayang kulit was used by the noble elite as an instrument of symbolic domination until the beginning of the twentieth-century, the dissertation traces the inception of the Southern school of shadow puppet theater as an oppositional cultural formation. The theatrical form's emergence is understood to co-articulate with the formation of a class of Islamic entrepreneurs and the penetration of print literacy into Javanese society. It is suggested that the school's characteristic use of a gong-chime ensemble tuned to the pelog or heptatonic scale is related to the prominence of the female vocalist and social dancing by audience members in Southern shadow puppet theater performances. The work of four Southern puppeteers is then discussed at length. In contrast to previous generations of puppeteers, who only obliquely alluded to Islam and tended to eschew references to contemporary events in performances, the Southern puppeteers have created story-episodes that centralize Islam and are entirely contemporary in focus. Characters are depicted as building mosques, going on the ritual pilgrimage to the holy cites of the Arabian peninsula, and quoting Arabic texts. In such a way, wayang kulit is a medium for the exploration of Islamic Javanese identity, bringing meaning and form to the vagaries of modernity.