Narrating animals on the screen of the world

In many academic endeavors, textual evidence is decidedly and somewhat understandably privileged. Yet in historical studies that yield little or no extant textual material, we must turn to visual evidence. The careful "reading" of details can be especially helpful in these cases. For example, the history of early Java has been mostly stitched together from smatterings of Chinese, Arabic, and Indian accounts from maritime merchants and traveling scholars. Pre-second-millennium inscriptions found in Java are primarily legal in nature; they describe royal tax decrees, gifts for alliances, and an occasional consecration of a spiritual structure. Therefore, analysis of the extant art and architecture may deepen our understanding of local views. In this study of ninth-century Javanese pictorial narratives new revelations surface, in spite of the lack of specific texts, when animal characters and natural settings are interpreted.

The material analyzed here belongs to a series of Ramayana narratives, ostensibly illustrating the ancient Sanskrit epic of Rama, the ideal king archetype, the earliest extant depiction of this story in Southeast Asia. The reliefs, carved from the same volcanic stone as the architectonic structures, form part of the overall ornamentation of the tallest temples of Java, in the ninth-century complex of Candi Loro Jonggrang (Fig. 1). (1) Explicitly suggestive of a sophisticated local literary tradition, these narratives predate the earliest Old Javanese textual version of the Ramayana, which has been dated to the tenth century. (2) Because of this, past scholars have focused on identifying these narrative panels in attempts to match them to a particular Indian version of the text. (3) Such an approach has proved to be somewhat frustrating since it appears that the artists did not "follow" exactly any known version of a South or Southeast Asian Ramayana text written before or after the ninth century.

Instead, interpolations of fauna and flora transform this visual epic into a more complex commentary on kingship, politics, and justice. My research breaks away from the efforts to reconcile the Loro Jonggrang images with a single Ramayana text by considering the details of these narratives that have previously been glossed over by many scholars as merely charming settings and amusing asides. In fact, a close reading of all the characters depicted, counter to the usual favoring of human or divine-human actors, reveals that these visual artists created an intricate symbiosis of at least three levels of actors that draws from another well-known (imported) text, as well as uses of regional symbolism and indigenous pictorial conventions. Such complications appear to reflect local tastes in theatrical performances that can be seen even today. Moreover, rather than depicting a single story line, the artists educed these other stories and local teachings, evidently to personalize these narratives, in order to better emphasize the political ambitions and/or accomplishments of their royal patron, Rakai Pikatan. (4)

Java, a lush island situated between the Indian Ocean and Pacific Rim, had to be won back from its foreign occupiers by this ninth-century Javanese patron-king. Although the history is difficult to sort out, the Malay Sailendras were the apparent dynastic rulers of Srivijaya, the great maritime empire that managed the busy shipping lanes between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea (Fig. 2). Chinese records cite Srivijaya as a double kingdom in the mid-eighth century. (5) While the main Srivijayan entrepot was located somewhere in the Malay region of Southern Sumatra, a second center was apparently established in Central Java. (6) Their rule over Java presumably gave the Sailendras the advantage of more direct access to the spices, resins, and wildlife brought to Java from the islands to the east. Control over Java granted these Malay royals not only greater suzerainty over insular trade inventories but also direct access to Java's rich rice fields. Moreover, Java's reputation as a land of spiritual powers ev oked a spiritual legitimacy for the Sailendras.

Thus, Java's political situation was fraught with both spiritual and commercial concerns. Although cosmopolitan is not a word many people would think to apply to this region, early Java had intense contacts with the greater world. Trade was conducted with the Chinese Tang court as well as with other merchants, including Arabs, Indians, and Southeast Asians, from far-off places during this period. (7) The commodities that brought great wealth to this island's elite were the unique forest products of the islands so desired by foreign courts. Part of this wealth apparently funded the construction of numerous sacred sites, mostly built during the period that the Malay Sailendras occupied Central Java. Between the late eighth and mid-ninth centuries, Sailendra rulers authored inscriptions dedicating many large sacred structures--now generally termed candi--including the largest Buddhist stupa of the world, Candi Borobudur. The Sailendra powers were ejected from Java in 855 by the Javanese king Rakai Pikatan, who s ubsequently called himself maharaja, and the Loro Jonggrang was consecrated one year later by his decree. (8) The building spree in Central Java evidently halted with the Loro Jonggrang, and the Javanese powers soon moved east. (9)