movements. There was diversion in the theater of shadow puppets, the wayang kulit, created by the court puppeteer, the dalang. There was the making of the mystical dagger (the keris), as well as literary composition, sewing, and gilding.
And, of course, there was the making of batik—regarded as one of the highest arts. More than a fine art, in fact, batik came to have an inner meaning for some people. As the twentieth-century classicist K.R.T. Hadjonagoro explained:
[Batik] was a vehicle for meditation, a process which gave birth to an uncommonly elevated sublimity in man. Truly realized beings in the social fabric of the Javanese community all made batik—from queens to commoners . . . it is almost inconceivable that in those days batik had any commercial objective. People batiked for family and ceremonial purposes, in devotion to God Almighty, in each man's endeavor to know God and draw near his spirit.
At the kraton of Yogyakarta in central Java, courtiers bring the Sultan his tea twice a day from a pavilion especially built for this purpose
Wooden puppets, wayang golek, involve no shadows contrary to leather puppets, although their stories are similar.
MYSTERIES
OF CENTRAL JAVA
The batik of central Java has always had a style of its own: orderly, controlled, usually geometric. Its colors run to somber tones of indigo blue and soga brown, often combined with black on a background of cream or white. Although a natural red dye was available on the coast as early as 1817, the batik artisans of central Java did not use it. Isolated as they were from goods streaming into the northern ports from overseas, they were probably unaware of the new tint; or perhaps they were forbidden by the strict feudal court to introduce so radical a color.
To this day members of the sultan's court of Yogyakarta are forbidden to wear north-coast batik to court functions. But for all the restrictions, and despite the rather critical view the central Javanese took of their cosmopolitan brethren to the north, there was no stopping the influence of the coast and its lusty approach to life. Intermarriage was not uncommon among the people of the two areas—and so it was in their arts as well. Often the brighter colors and freer designs of north-coast batik would be reworked in central Java and then brought back to the north in altered forms.
Two hundred years ago, most central Javanese batik was made for family use. On three separate occasions—in 1769, 1784, and 1790—the ruler of Surakarta reserved specific patterns for his family. The sultan and his family, of course, were the most important personages, and for them, aristocratic women in the kraton traditionally made the finest batik—much as the noble young ladies of the middle ages in Europe used to stitch exquisite embroidery for their families and their lords.
There were economic as well as aesthetic reasons for these Javanese women of noble birth to make batik. Among their men there was fierce competition for positions as courtiers to the sultan. These jobs, however, paid badly, and other members of the family—wives in particular—were forced to find additional sources of income, usually from the sale of homemade batik. In this way, the sultan was served and the courtiers' families were able to survive.
The full panoply of royal life in Yogyakarta's court, ca. 1900. The Dutch commissioner, resplendent in gold braid and buttons, offers his arm to the Sultan, fashionably dressed in a velvet morning coat and dodot. Symbols of Java's courtly life (umbrellas and retainers) and Dutch colonialism (police with swords) characterize the tenuous relationship between the ruled and the rulers.
Hinduism and Buddhism were central to the philosophical and religious life of the ancient courts of central Java; they also left their imprint on all the arts. The temple of Borobudur is one striking example. Built on a plateau overlooking the surrounding hills not far from Yogyakarta, Borobudur contains 2 million cubic feet of stone, more than five hundred images of Buddha, and represents the "mountain of the accumulation of virtue." On Borobudur's six ascending square terraces, reliefs depict the life of Buddha as he rises from the delights and damnation of the physical world to the higher sphere of total enlightenment and detachment.
Rivaling Borobudur, and not far away, is the colossal monument of Prambanan, also known as Lara Jonggrang, which was built to honor the Hindu trinity of Siva, Visnu (Vishnu), and Brahma, This tenth-century shrine, designed on a huge square plane and surrounded by four walls with four gates, is a cosmic mountain. Stone reliefs and panels illustrate Hindu classics, especially the Ramayana. Here the ruler and his followers were expected to practice asceticism, the form of worship most acceptable to Siva.
A relief found at Borobudur resembles the kawung, later found as a motif in batik design.
Borobudur was built in the ninth A relief found at Borobudur century. Its six ascending terraces and reliefs depict the life of Buddha and his rise from the physical world to enlightenment.
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