Author: Rimli Sengupta
Publication: Open
Date: August 29, 2011
URL: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/arts-letters/indonesia-s-uncle-pai
Introduction: His comics bear an uncanny resemblance
to the signature Amar Chitra Katha style. And yet, Raden Ahmed Kosasih, the
father of the Indonesian comic, was doing this many years before Pai began
his own epic effort.
I knew nothing about Indonesian comics until
a chance meeting about a year ago in an unlikely place. I was travelling in
the Mekong delta and discovered that I had something remarkable in common
with the man sitting next to me on the bus. Aditya Santosa was from Sulawesi,
of Chinese ancestry, a practising Christian and a practising surgeon. So what
did we have in common? In our respective homes in Makassar and Kolkata, he
and I were both fondly holding on to dusty piles of crumbling comics based
on stories from the Mahabharata. Aditya had never heard of Amar Chitra Katha
or of Anant Pai, and I had never heard of Raden Ahmed Kosasih. There we were:
middle-aged strangers, from neighbouring countries that were once close but
long estranged, animated about our shared stash and the attached nimbus of
childhood.
Later, when travelling in Indonesia, I got
a sense of Kosasih's reach in the vast archipelago. Aditya was certainly no
exception. There was Jane Ardaneshwari, the half-Javanese half-Chinese editor-publisher
from Jakarta's Chinatown, who I met at a glittering evening gala. There was
Nanang Wibisono, the Batak man from north Sumatra I chatted with at a juice
stall. There was Beelong from Bali, of a Balinese-Hindu father and a Javanese-Muslim
mother, who was my cab driver in the central highlands of Java. They had all
grown up reading Kosasih's comics, as had countless others. Getting yourself
lodged in the headspace of an 11-year-old is a powerful thing, because you
never leave. Kosasih had done exactly that for several generations of Indonesians.
Which is why they call him the 'father of Indonesian comics'.
RA Kosasih was born in 1919 in Bogor, a historic
city in the rainy hills south of Jakarta. As a child he liked to watch wayang
golek-wooden puppets in resplendent costumes acting out stories from the Mahabharata
and Ramayana. In his twenties, he did illustrations for books published by
the Bogor Agriculture Department, an unlikely but evidently effective crucible
for what was to be his life's work. Kosasih's first comic-Sri Asih, based
on the exploits of a mythical super-heroine-was published on 1 January 1954
and was an instant runaway hit. He had done both the artwork and text, as
he would continue to do for the next four decades. Between 1957 and 1959,
he produced a series of 40 comics based on the Mahabharata. These, and a later
series on the Ramayana, were wildly popular and had numerous reprint runs
until the late 1980s, when they were finally deposed by Japanese manga comics.
Kosasih continued to produce his comics till 1993 when Parkinson's disease
prised the pen from his hand.
Pai didn't start his Amar Chitra Katha (ACK)
till 1967. I had found some scans of Kosasih's early comics, and the artwork
had left me astounded: it was the all-familiar ACK style. Yet, ACK was then
over a dozen years from birth.
How did this happen? In the midst of my attempts
to find out more about Kosasih and his comics, Pai passed away at 81. ACK
had been a big part of my childhood, but I had never written to Pai to tell
him that. Just as Aditya had never written to Kosasih. Most people don't write
letters to God. And for me to try to meet Pai would have been unthinkable.
But in a convoluted response to his death, I felt I had to meet Kosasih, who
had just turned 92.
The man who would take me to Kosasih is a
die-hard comic-head and a Mahabharata lover. Andy Wijaya quit a successful
infotech career in Singapore and returned to Jakarta to see if he could turn
his passion into a living. On a muggy day this April, I met Andy at his bookstore
in one of Jakarta's teeming supermalls. Squeezed between cheap Chinese clothes
and sleek model airplanes, his bookstore is small but deadly serious in its
focus on comics: there were sealed first editions, old collectibles, and new
releases by authors both local and foreign, both classic and fresh. And, of
course, there was Kosasih.
Andy has recently published Kosasih's 40 Mahabharata
titles in a single volume. That the size of the print run is just 1,000 confirms
that Kosasih's heyday is decidedly over. But Andy grew up reading Kosasih
and wears his love on his sleeve. Indeed, that day he wore a T-shirt emblazoned
with the cover of Kosasih's Mahabharata volume.
We left the bookstore and submitted to Jakarta's
early evening rush hour. Outside, the traffic was pure horror, but in the
quiet of the cab, Andy seemed less frantic than at his bookstore. He told
me how he tells his two little daughters stories from the Mahabharata every
night. And he told me about Sunan Kalijaga, one of Indonesia's nine 'walis'(Sufi
saints), who had apparently incorporated the Mahabharata into his teachings.
We talked about how surprising it was that he had never heard of ACK and I
hadn't heard of Kosasih till recently. During the lulls in the conversation,
I tried to stay present to the reality that I was in fact going to meet Kosasih-a
household name in a country of nearly a quarter-billion people.
Hobbled by traffic, we reached Kosasih's home
in a deep southern suburb of Jakarta way past our appointed time. As we sheepishly
entered his living room, Kosasih, a picture of Javanese grace, rose from his
chair to greet us and I was immediately infected by his ease. He looked like
a frail Yoda, but his bright eyes sparkled with an impish wit. And as he spoke,
his long, bony fingers traced invisible figures in the air. Looking around
I could see that his legendary fame had not translated into material comfort;
the house was modest and in need of urgent repair. With Andy's help, I spent
the next several hours chatting with Kosasih.
His reasons for starting the comics based
on the great epics are rather pedestrian. Unlike Pai, who, when asked about
the origins of ACK, mentioned the epiphanic quiz show in which school kids
could not name Rama's mother, Kosasih had simply responded to an ad in the
paper in 1953. Indonesia had just emerged from 250 years of Dutch colonial
rule in 1949. There was an effort to forge a popular culture that was overtly
indigenous. Indonesian or Bahasa Indonesia (which is mainly Malay, with a
generous sprinkling of Sanskrit, Arabic and Dutch) had been adopted as the
official language in 1945. Popular literature in this new language would be
a powerful tool to unify this archipelago of over 17,000 islands. And what
better content than the great epics-a prominent presence in the Javanese cultural
firmament for nearly a millennium? Much of Kosasih's early work had been commissioned.
His success naturally inspired others, notably
Teguh Santosa (1942-2000), whose Mahabharata comics enjoyed enormous popularity
in the 1980s. Santosa's art is more explicitly Javanese in its iconography
and much more stylised, hence more sought after by comic enthusiasts and collectors
in Indonesia today. He swerved away from Kosasih's world of inked outlines
filled in with flat colour to a visual bonanza, where moonlight actually looks
moonlit. Santosa might have been an accidental disciple, but Kosasih explicitly
mentored others, such as Jan Mintaraga.
By now I was itching to ask Kosasih the obvious
question. No, he had never heard of ACK, or of Anant Pai. When told that Pai's
comics, started 13 years after his, look very similar, he turned on the sweetest
buck-toothed grin. But what about his characters? What about the curvaceous,
lotus-eyed women and stocky men with extravagant moustaches? They didn't look
Indonesian in the slightest. Where did those images come from? "Ah, that,"
said Kosasih, "that was Bollywood." So there it was, our blockbuster
volcano, which continues to spew fertile ash that settles across the globe:
from Vladivostok to Istanbul to Cairo to Jakarta. In 1950s Indonesia, Bollywood
was all the rage. Kosasih still cannot forget Awara, and when he talks of
Nargis, I can see the ancient embers kindle his creased face.
Kosasih is a practising Muslim. His daily
prayers are not in conflict with his other daily habit of reading the Gita,
which he described using the word "sempurna". The meaning of this
Indonesian version of 'sampurna' is not 'complete' but 'perfect'. "The
perfect text," said Kosasih. "It should be required reading for
every literate human being, irrespective of creed." Welling up within
me I felt the need to notice that a practising Muslim had just praised the
Gita, and with a leaden heart recognised it as a Subcontinental tic. Indonesia
has placed the Mahabharata squarely within its secular inheritance, of which
the Gita happens to be a chapter. Here in India, we have placed the Gita on
the Holy Book pedestal, partitioned by impregnable walls, and by contagion
stuffed the Mahabharata in the saffron cubbyhole.
It had now been several hours and I could
tell Kosasih was tiring. As I rose to take my leave, he said he has had visitors
from Japan and some from Europe, but no one had visited him from India before.
Then he hastened to add that he'd never been to India and never had to learn
about India in school. Like every Javanese child, the Mahabharata stories
were mother's milk, but he had found out about the India connection much later.
We stood there, silently acknowledging the surprising lack of curiosity our
two countries have for each other. Neighbours by geography, neighbours on
the alphabetical list of nations because of history, and yet gripped by severe
amnesia, barely a blip on each other's collective consciousness.
At parting, when I held Kosasih's shrivelled
hands to thank him, I was also thanking him on behalf of Aditya, Jane, Wibisono,
Beelong and innumerable others whose childhood Sundays he dominated for 40
years. And I was finally thanking Pai for my childhood Sundays. In surrogate.
