The Kelantan shadow-play (wayang kulit
Anker Rentse, a Danish ethnographer working in northern Kelantan, published this detailed ethnographic account of the Kelantan wayang kulit (shadow-play) in 1936, documenting the ritual, musical, and performative dimensions of a tradition he observed to be in rapid decline under the pressure of cinema and Western modernity. The article argues that the Kelantan shadow-play represents a distinctive local synthesis—neither purely Javanese nor Siamese—rooted in the Ramayana cycle but heavily intermixed with ancient Indonesian animist beliefs that persist beneath the surface of Malay Islam.
Summary
Rentse establishes that two types of wayang kulit exist in Kelantan: a rare Javanese form, traditionally said to have arrived from Java only about a century before his writing, and a far more common Siamese-derived form so thoroughly adapted to local legend and aesthetics that he prefers to call it simply the Kelantan Wayang-kulit. Only the Ramayana cycle is performed, but centuries of oral transmission have corrupted and enriched the text with local folklore bearing traces of pre-Islamic Indonesian belief. Islam has penetrated the tradition only at the level of incantation, where the names of the four Archangels and certain prophets have replaced the names of ancient guardian deities of the four quarters of the world, while the underlying cosmology remains essentially Hindu-animist.
The bulk of the article is devoted to the ritual architecture of a performance. Rentse describes in meticulous detail the buka panggong (opening ceremony), in which the To’ Dalang (puppeteer) propitiates a vast pantheon of spirits—Hindu deities, local ghosts, dragons, and Muslim figures—by dividing a propitiatory offering among them according to species and locality. He then documents the physical stage, the orchestra, the specific items of the offering, and the sequence of invocations, before providing the full text of nine opening incantations and three closing incantations as dictated to him by illiterate local performers. The closing ceremony (lepas permainan) mirrors the opening in its logic: the spirits are formally dismissed to their respective masters—King Solomon, Shiva, Vishnu, the Spectre Huntsman, and the Dragon at the navel of the sea.
Rentse situates the Kelantan tradition within the broader Javanese shadow-play heritage, drawing on Juynboll’s summary in the Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indie to argue that the technical vocabulary and the religious significance of the play point to a Javanese origin that predates both Brahmanism and Buddhism. He notes that no figure in the Kelantan repertoire carries a kris, distinguishing it from the later Javanese wayang gedog of Majapahit origin, and that the puppet style shows strong Mon-Khmer influence consistent with Dr. van Stein Callenfels’s thesis on the transmission of the Ramayana shadow-play to Siam and Cambodia.
Key Findings
- The performance runs for seven consecutive nights (commencing approximately 9 p.m. and ending at midnight, except the final night which continues until morning), during which a single continuous Ramayana narrative is staged (p. 285).
- The stage (panggong) is a primitive hut measuring approximately 10 by 12 feet, raised 3–4 feet from the ground, with a front height of 9 feet sloping to 3–4 feet at the back; the screen is a white cloth stretched over two banana stems (p. 286).
- The orchestra comprises two large gongs, two small gongs (chanang) in wooden frames, one clarionet (serunai), and six drums of three types (gendang, geduk, gedombok); Rentse identifies it as possibly the only Malay orchestra that has avoided foreign instrumental influence (p. 286).
- The special offering (pengan guru) for the deity Batara Guru consists of old Kelantan tin coins valued at 10 keneri (33 cents), placed on unboiled rice with a raw egg erect in the centre, surrounded by raw cotton thread (benang mentah) (pp. 286–287).
- Rentse possessed a handwritten copy of the Ramayana dated 1896 (484 pages) of unknown origin; he could find no old records of the Ramayana in Kelantan predating this, though Munshi Abdullah’s 1838 account mentions a manuscript titled Cherita dewa-dewa, dan mambang indera dan jin in the possession of the Raja Bendahara (p. 284).
- A complete Kelantan wayang kulit theatre had been deposited in the Raffles Museum, Singapore, by the time of publication (p. 289).
Conclusion
Rentse’s definitive historical takeaway is that the Kelantan wayang kulit is a living fossil of pre-Islamic Indonesian religious practice, preserved in a form that resists easy classification as either Javanese or Siamese. Its survival depends on a small number of To’ Dalangs and village communities, and Rentse records with evident urgency that the tradition is “dying, killed by western ideas and, especially, by the Cinemas,” surviving in Kota Bahru only on special occasions such as the Sultan’s birthday, while persisting more robustly in rural villages at harvest, marriage, and circumcision festivals.
Context
- Rentse was a Danish ethnographer conducting fieldwork in Kelantan; the article is a product of colonial-era ethnographic documentation, and his framing of the tradition as “primitive” and “dying” reflects the salvage-ethnography sensibility of the 1930s.
- The incantation texts were transcribed from illiterate informants speaking a local dialect; Rentse acknowledges the difficulty of rendering them intelligibly and credits Tengku Khalid bin Tengku Bendahara, the late Che’ Ahmad, and Sir Richard Winstedt for linguistic assistance (p. 288).