Epik-Epik India dalam Wayang Kulit Era Orde Baru

Abstract

All literatures which have tried to comprehend Indonesian wayang kulit (leather puppet shadow performance art) history and origin conformed that there is closed relationship between the performance art to Indian culture. But, though it has been already absolutely evidenced that wayang repertoires origins from India, there is at least one fundamental problem remains to be discussed that is problem of how Indonesian people use and/or signify precisely the Indian epics in their wayang performance as well as in their every day life. It has been hundreds of year the people perceive the epics as an ideal world in which their feudal elites perform their orderly way of life. In this kind of world common people are commonly only permitted to appear in margin parts of the art performance. Only in one part of it that the common people dominate the performance that is in what is called “goro-goro” scene. It is a crisis scene in which the ideal world is entrapped in a chaos condition. This tradition in which the epics perceive as a symbol of orderly way of life tends to be changed since New Order era until recent one. New Order regime’s politics of art had been making the meaning of the epics in the performance to be disappeared and even exploded. The border between the orderly world of the elites and the chaos way of common people life and even between the art performance and other ones had been being crossed. And it is for this reason that some sacred symbols of the performance can be used for even very mundane interests like commercial songs and advertisements.