Chapter 15 - Epics in Worlds of Performance : A South/Southeast Asian Narrativity

Summary

Abstract

From Mahabharata and Ramayana to stories of Amir Hamza, Jesus, and Gesar: across a spectrum of locally and historically peculiar inflections, epics in South and Southeast Asia embody a typical epicality. The author examines seven of its characteristics. South and Southeast Asian epics are fashioned by kinship; they revolve around love, leadership, and land; the dramatis personae exhibit complex patterns of idiosyncrasy versus genericness; the heroes’ adventures tend to be instigated by others; storyworlds and forms of narration highlight feeling (affect); the narration is lavish and organized modularly; the resulting epic realism is heightened, alternate, and mediagenic. Epics are stories, but their critical characteristics are projected on lived experience, yielding understandings of past and present and paradigms for the future.

Keywords: epic narration; epic performance; epic media; epicality; comparative religion

Cultural life in the South/Southeast Asian region, from Afghanistan to the Philippines and Indonesia, favours a certain kind of “story-hood” or “story-ness”: preferred personalities and roles, motivations, courses of events, times, and locations, as well as ways of combining them and understanding them. This narrativity does not reside in stories alone. It is also present in ideas about how things in the world would or should happen. But it is in the telling, enactment, and depiction of stories that narrativity manifests itself most comprehensively and palpably. I propose that it is especially pronounced in the grand and complex hero- and heroine-focused stories often styled epics. Across a dynamic spectrum of locally and historically peculiar inflections, epics in South/Southeast Asia exhibit the features of an epicality (as I shall call it) that is typical for the region. Tellings of the famous Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa partake of this epicality, but so do, among others, the stories of Amir Hamza, champion of Islam avant la lettre, and his offspring, which used to be popular in all of Muslim Asia; the narrative of the successive prophets of Islam in numerous vernaculars across the region; the jātakas, the accounts of earlier lives of the Buddha told and performed in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia; the ever-mutating tale of the courtly exploits of medieval Javanese prince Panji and his relatives, once known in an area from Burma to Bali; and the Tibetan stories of Buddhist king Gesar, also told in Mongolia and Central Asia.