Javanese shadow puppetry has been drawing audiences for over a thousand years, in performances that can run from night until morning. This Public Domain Review collection (text by Erica X Eisen) centres on the 1919 Darah Bharata, an illustrated encyclopedia of main characters from the wayang kulit repertoire, with plates by Raden Soelardi.

Wayang kulit is a physical medium, not an ethereal one — the “shadow” in the name misleads:

  • Puppets are cut and tooled from tanned buffalo hide
  • The screen was traditionally greased with coconut oil
  • Gamelan accompaniment registers as much on the skin as in the ear
  • Soelardi’s plates capture T-shaped torsos, long slender arms, hand-tooled jewellery and patterned cloth — and, unusually, reproduce the vivid colour and gilding visible to spectators seated behind the screen rather than in front of it

Soelardi himself was a polymath of the Javanese courts: palace painter, puppet-maker, court musician who made an important early attempt to transcribe gamelan pieces, and author of Serat Riyanta (1920), often called the first “true” Javanese novel.

The encyclopedia’s publisher is where the story turns political. Darah Bharata was issued by the Commissie voor de Volkslectuur, a Dutch East Indies government office built to disseminate and control vernacular literature. In the 1920s its officials debated using wayang theatre to counter growing support for communism and self-governance. Earlier European scholarship had already altered its object: historian Miguel Escobar Varela documents how the colonial notion of a single authoritative version of each story displaced variant tellings, pushing the repertoire toward homogeneity.

The pattern recurs under other flags. During the Japanese occupation (1942–45), authorities pressured puppeteers to give a bigger role to Surya, the sun god — a nod to Japan’s self-image as the “land of the rising sun” and to the imperial family’s mythic descent from the Shintō sun goddess.

An encyclopedia in Bahasa Indonesia did not appear until 1949, the year the Dutch finally relinquished colonial rule. The form was then taken up as a national symbol of cultural achievement — the same art that had been catalogued, standardised, and aimed at restive colonial subjects.