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EVERY year Indonesia enjoys a national holiday for nyepi, the Hindu day of silence, which this year fell on March 26th. It is not a holiday in India, Hinduism’s homeland. Similarly, in Bayu, once part of one of the last Hindu kingdoms in East Java to be conquered and converted to Islam, villagers welcome the Ramadan fast with a feast, scandalising some of the clerics.
Indonesian religion is “syncretic”, a unique confection, and nowhere more so than in Java, much the most populous island in much the most populous Muslim nation on earth. This fascinating and moving book describes what “syncretism” means in daily life. The author, Andrew Beatty, an anthropologist, spent two periods in Bayu in the 1990s, with his young family. As he documented local customs and rituals, he became drawn into its cultural conflict: between “Javanism” (the pre-Islamic mystical tradition) and orthodox Islam.
Mr Beatty describes the mystics’ ceremonies with sympathy: the interment of the afterbirth of a baby girl by her father, dressed and made up as a woman for the purpose; the night-long dramas finishing with the appearance of a were-tiger, the neighbourhood spirit; the seblang, a “fertility rite at which a nubile girl went into a trance and channelled local spirits”.
The “shadow” of the title is that of encroaching Islamist orthodoxy. A religious teacher seeks out the author as a fellow educated man, assuming he must be on the side of modernisation, since “Islamisation and progress were the same thing”. Politicians in Islamist parties in Jakarta make the same assumption. Women go to university, learn the proper way to do things and start wearing headscarves, chiding their mothers for being backward.
When the first woman in Bayu covers her head, during the author’s first stay, her foster mother “could not bear to look at her”. By the time Mr Beatty returns for a second stay, orthodoxy is on the march. He becomes embroiled in a dispute about the insomnia-inducing amplification of sermons from the local prayer house. One night the speakers blare out a preacher’s rant about the need for holy war.
It is tempting to see this depressing scene as the book’s conclusion: the Javanese idyll smashed by the incursions of alien extremism. But that hints at one of the book’s two frustrations: it is not the conclusion. Well-written, with vivid characters, “A Shadow Falls” is as enthralling as a novel. And like a good novel, it poses the question: what happened next? At the time, 1997, Indonesia was in turmoil, on the brink of economic meltdown and the end of the Suharto dictatorship. East Java suffered a wave of mysterious killings. After Suharto, there was an explosion of Islamist parties. Most have now moved firmly into the mainstream. What the author calls “the ebb and flow of orthodoxy” moves both ways. The reader longs to know what Bayu is like today.
The second frustration is shared by all books on modern Indonesia: its failure to explain a terrible paradox. The author depicts Java as almost an ideal society “of social harmony, empathy and gentleness”. Yet, a generation earlier, as Suharto came to power, Indonesia suffered a terrible peacetime slaughter when at least 500,000 people were killed. The author meets a man who ferried prisoners to their deaths in the back of a lorry. They were tipped over a cliff, and sometimes doused with petrol and set alight. “You could see them twitching in the ravine below.” Bayu was home to both death-squad veterans and the families of their victims. Darker than the shadow of a putative future of Islamic orthodoxy is a bloody past that is both unexpiated and unexplained.
By Andrew Beatty.
Faber and Faber; 336 pages; £12.99
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