Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Seasons and Civilizations
- Chapter 2 Revisiting the Monsoon Asia Idea: Old Problems and New Directions
- Chapter 3 Space and Time in the Making of Monsoon Asia
- Chapter 4 New Paradigms for the Early Relationship between South and Southeast Asia : The Contribution of Southeast Asian Archaeology
- Chapter 5 Contacts, Cosmopoleis, Colonial Legacies: Interconnected Language Histories
- Chapter 6 Indianization Reconsidered: India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia
- Chapter 7 Local Projects and Transregional Modalities: The Pali Arena
- Chapter 8 Muslim Circulations and Islamic Conversion in Monsoon Asia
- Chapter 9 Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia
- Chapter 10 Languages of Law : Islamic Legal Cosmopolis and its Arabic and Malay Microcosmoi
- Chapter 11 Human Traffic: Asian Migration in the Age of Steam
- Chapter 12 The Problem of Transregional Framing in Asian History : Charmed Knowledge Networks and Moral Geographies of “Greater India”
- Chapter 13 Pragmatic Asianism: International Socialists in South and Southeast Asia
- Chapter 14 The Informality Trap : Politics, Governance and Informal Institutions in South and Southeast Asia
- Chapter 15 Epics in Worlds of Performance : A South/Southeast Asian Narrativity
- Chapter 16 Postscript: The Many Worlds of Monsoon Asia
- Bibliography
- About the authors
- Index
Chapter 15 - Epics in Worlds of Performance : A South/Southeast Asian Narrativity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2025
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Seasons and Civilizations
- Chapter 2 Revisiting the Monsoon Asia Idea: Old Problems and New Directions
- Chapter 3 Space and Time in the Making of Monsoon Asia
- Chapter 4 New Paradigms for the Early Relationship between South and Southeast Asia : The Contribution of Southeast Asian Archaeology
- Chapter 5 Contacts, Cosmopoleis, Colonial Legacies: Interconnected Language Histories
- Chapter 6 Indianization Reconsidered: India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia
- Chapter 7 Local Projects and Transregional Modalities: The Pali Arena
- Chapter 8 Muslim Circulations and Islamic Conversion in Monsoon Asia
- Chapter 9 Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia
- Chapter 10 Languages of Law : Islamic Legal Cosmopolis and its Arabic and Malay Microcosmoi
- Chapter 11 Human Traffic: Asian Migration in the Age of Steam
- Chapter 12 The Problem of Transregional Framing in Asian History : Charmed Knowledge Networks and Moral Geographies of “Greater India”
- Chapter 13 Pragmatic Asianism: International Socialists in South and Southeast Asia
- Chapter 14 The Informality Trap : Politics, Governance and Informal Institutions in South and Southeast Asia
- Chapter 15 Epics in Worlds of Performance : A South/Southeast Asian Narrativity
- Chapter 16 Postscript: The Many Worlds of Monsoon Asia
- Bibliography
- About the authors
- Index
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.
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- Information
- Monsoon AsiaA Reader on South and Southeast Asia, pp. 351 - 376Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2023