Anonymous Masters: Angkor Artisans

 

                                      ,by Jim Goodman

 

       Wandering through the ruins of Angkor Thom, Angkor Wat and subsidiary sites in the vicinity, one is constantly consumed by a sense of wonder.  After all, much of its original splendor still stands.  Thai armies from Ayutthaya attacked and ravaged it so badly nearly six centuries ago the government abandoned it for a new capital further east.  Not all the residents left, but their numbers and resources were insufficient to repair or maintain the monuments.

       They were also powerless to prevent private looting of valuable sculptures, which became especially acute under French colonial rule, when authorities permitted their removal.   Some of Angkor’s masterpieces were openly marketed to various museums, especially the Guimet Museum in Paris.  Others were surreptitiously sold to rich private collectors.  Cambodia’s long civil war in the 70s and 80s and its immediate aftermath resulted in further damage and theft.

       Eventually peace and security returned to the area.  Angkor won recognition as a World Heritage Site and destruction and theft have ceased.  Despite the damage and vandalism over the centuries much of Angkor’s heritage remains.  Thai soldiers removed many outstanding religious sculptures when they ransacked Angkor, which were in turn looted by Burmese soldiers attacking Ayutthaya at the end of the 16th century.  But the Ayutthaya forces did not level the city to its foundations.  The temples remained intact, though stripped of their gold embellishments, and so did much of the decorative art, which is so impressive today.

       Thanks to modern research we know a lot about the organization of Angkor, its social divisions, how the people lived, both upper and lower classes, what clothes they wore and what food they ate.  We know how they procured the materials to build the city and how artisans produced their work.  The one big mystery is just who these master craftsmen were.  We can determine when a particular item was created, but not the name of the artisan.  None ever ‘signed’ their work.  Perhaps it was all for the greater glory of the gods, or the state that employed them, but apparently not for the greater glory of their personal reputations.

       While we have the names of the kings who sponsored the construction, extension or renovation of the buildings, the name of only one architect for any part of the work has survived.  An 11^th century inscription congratulates and promotes Gunipativarman upon completion of the Baphuon and the East Baray.  Similar evidence involving other architects or any sculptors does not exist.  The Angkor government kept written records, but on perishable materials like palm-leaf.  Very few of them have survived.  Perhaps some manuscripts mentioned specific artists or their achievements or awards.  We’ll never know.  

       We are not even sure of what social class the artisans came from; Brahmins, commoners, slaves/servants attached to the temples?  Or were they part of a designated, state-sponsored, separate class?  Whatever the case, they were most likely organized in guilds, with an established training program for the novices.  Experienced sculptors would be responsible for major works like the big Standing Vishnu in Angkor Thom, the dancing apsaras, the ‘Leper King’ or the faces of Jayavarman VII over the gates of Angkor Thom.   The decorative reliefs, of floral and vegetative designs, and perhaps the background of the narrative reliefs, would be left for the younger artisans.

       Religion permeated Angkor society and thus its architecture.   Aside from the walls, gates and barays (reservoirs), extant buildings are all religious.  Angkor was viewed as a sacred mandala, laid out as a replica of Mt. Meru, home of the gods.  Indian culture had already made a strong impact on the Khmer during the pre-Angkor states of Funan, 3^rd to 6^th centuries, and Chenla, 6^th to 8^th centuries.  While they did not adopt the Indian caste system, the Khmers took up the religion and Hindu gods became their own, replacing whatever indigenous ones they had before.

       To house these deities they built temples on the Indian model of the Gupta Dynasty of northern India , 4^th to 6^th centuries.  The shikara style of a tower with a tapering top, alone or flanked by a horizontal, columned temple was a popular type.  For the carved imagery, their iconography came from the same source, with precise requirements for how the gods looked, what animal they rode, what they held in their hands and so on.  The rules allowed for some flexibility in the depiction of subsidiary figures, but not of the main image.

       Indra, chief of the gods and also the war deity, always rides a three-headed elephant, often wielding a club.  Shiva’s mount is a bull and he is often accompanied by his wife Parvati.  Vishnu rides the man-bird Garuda, but around Angkor he is usually standing alone or with his two wives at his side (smaller than him) or else as Sleeping Vishnu, on his back within the coils of a protective python.  In general, the gods’ images had to be bigger than those of any people in the carving.  In Angkor that would also apply to its kings, whose bodies had to be much bigger than anyone else.

       Buddhism became part of Angkor culture from the 8^th century, around the time it was all but wiped out in northern India.   Sinhalese missionary monks introduced the Theravada variant, which is still the main religion of Cambodia today.  Certain kings, most notably Jayavarman VII in the 13^th century, promoted Mahayana Buddhism.  He also renovated Angkor Thom and built the entry gates in each direction with a huge portrait of a calm and meditating face in the center of the tower.  It might be his own face, but it could be a depiction of a bodhisattva, with which he identified anyway.

       Other renditions of the Buddha followed the Gupta Era stipulations.  Usually the Angkor Buddha is seated in meditation, sometimes surrounded by, and ignoring, beautiful maidens sent by the evil Mara to tempt and distract him.  Occasionally he is standing with his begging bowl or lying lengthwise as the Reclining Buddha.  The curled hair, large ears and monk’s robes are always part of the depiction.

       Sandstone was the main building material for Angkor and its source was the Kulen Hills, about 30 km north.  At quarries here laborers, probably all slaves, cut huge blocks of sandstone, mounted them on wooden rollers and conveyed them back to the city.  Laterite was an alternative stone in some cases, but that could be found in the immediate area.  Wood was also a common material, especially in the satellite towns and rural areas, but mainly in the late Classic and post-Classic periods.

       Sculptures in sandstone are more impressive.  The work was slow and meticulous, probably using only a bronze chisel and wooden mallet.  The sculptor began by making a rough form of the projected work and gradually shaped the volumes and cut the lines according to the traditional canon.  When the details were all in place the final steps were smoothing and polishing, especially the faces and bodies.  Being a religious image of some kind, its installation was doubtless accompanied by a ritual ceremony.

       Most of the carvings were low and high relief panels on the temple walls, towers, gates and columns.  Some were larger than life, free-standing, three-dimensional statues, usually fixed on platforms or pedestals.  The most outstanding is the eight-armed standing Vishnu in Angkor Wat, with its smooth, perfectly proportioned limbs and torso.  Another is the seated “Leper King” in Angkor Thom, which got its name from its mottled surface upon its discovery, leading to speculation this was the legendary Leper King of Angkor’s past.  But it turned out lichen growth had caused the mottling and after the statue was cleaned up, an inscription was discovered identifying the image as Yama, the Lord of Death. 

       Besides deities, temple imagery included a variety of mythological creatures.  Some of these were guardian lions, others monsters placed at the temple compound entrance; the lion-headed jawless kala with bulging eyes, the hybrid makara and the naga, a big cobra snake with seven or nine heads.  Others were divinities, like the dvarapalas, young men standing guard at the entrance, the apsaras, heavenly dancing girls, and devatas, female denizens of Indra’s paradise.

       In creating the sculptures of mythical animals the artist had to follow prescribed traditional norms, just as with the gods.  That was true of representing the divinities as well, for the apsaras wore tall head-dresses and clothing that was probably the style of ladies in the Angkor Court, while the devatas were often backed by a flaming aureole.  But since these had human forms, one suspects the sculptors used real people around them as the models.  The faces don’t closely resemble their Gupta Era prototypes.  They look more like indigenous Khmer.

      Besides stories about the gods, Indian mythology included two great epics, the Ramayana, a tale of one of Vishnu’s avatars, and the Mahabharata, a semi-historical narrative of a great battle for control of ancient India.  Both epics contain a wealth of battle scenes to inspire Khmer sculptors making narrative reliefs.  Besides the wars in the epics, Khmer artisans also created narrative reliefs of their own battles with Chăm armies from states in what is now south central Vietnam.  One can distinguish between the two armies by the head-covering worn by the Chăm soldiers, whereas the Khmer don’t wear any.  The king commanding the Angkor side sits on an elephant and both he and the animal are disproportionately larger than other figures in the scene.    

       Wall reliefs were not limited to scenes from Heaven and narratives of wars.  Ordinary daily life was a subject, too.  In fact, much of what we know about everyday experience comes from relevant wall reliefs.   We see people using ox carts, preparing an animal for cooking, using a mortar and pestle, drinking from cups, boiling water, tending animals and other vignettes.  Both the humans and the animals—elephants, goats, birds, reptiles—are depicted realistically.

       To supplement our knowledge about life in old Angkor we can read the only surviving contemporary account, of a visit made in 1296-97, when Angkor was still thriving, was by far the largest urban center in Southeast Asia and bigger than almost every Chinese city.  Called A Record of Cambodia:  the Land and its People, the author was a Chinese envoy named Zhou Daguan, who was sent there on a mission for the Yuan Dynasty government.

          No original Yuan Dynasty editions of the book exist.  What we have today is obviously incomplete, some aspects of Angkor society are ignored, some misinterpreted or subject to the author’s Chinese prejudices, yet it contains many valuable first-hand observations.  He found it a dazzling, well-organized and administered city and reported that its residents felt the same way.  He records their agricultural practices, food products, sauces and spices, liquor, flora and fauna, religion, festivals and political system.

       He describes the royal palace, which was built with wood and has not survived, and the Phimeanakas next to it, the royal ancestral temple, still standing, with a steep front staircase similar to Mayan sacrificial altars in Mexico.  Supposedly the king went there every night to sleep with a serpent goddess inside a gold chamber at the top.  Gold plating on towers, bridges, windows and other parts of the royal palace was quite profusely used and on clear days Angkor was literally a shining city.  The big halls, high ceilings, gold furnishings and decorations of the palace were designed to maximize the sense of majesty.

       In this class society people lived according to their rank.  Royal relatives and high officials had big houses, though not anywhere as grand or lavishly furnished as the king’s. They could only have tiled roofs over the bedroom and family ancestral altar, the other roofs thatched.  The lower classes were not permitted tiled roofs at all.  Except for the palace, interiors had little furniture.  People ate on the floor and slept there at night inside mosquito nets. And except for the jewelry, all classes dressed in the same wraparound or tubular skirts.

       Unfortunately, Zhou did not write much about the art of Angkor or anything at all about its creators.  We know how they lived, what they ate, etc, but not about their work or their own attitude to it.  Maybe during the ceremony with the installation of the work they received at least some public acknowledgment of their creations or even some kind of reward.  Certainly they must have felt some professional pride in their accomplishments, something that would be recognized within their peer group.  Would they have taken friends to see their latest sculpture to elicit comments, praise or a favorable evaluation?  Would they have introduced a colleague as the one who carved those wonderful apsaras over that gate?  Who can say?

       At the very minimum, the art works of Angkor had one salutary effect upon the artists who made them.  They made the city an aesthetically positive place to live in.  Art and beauty was everywhere.  A city designed to please the gods pleased the designers as well.  And its artisans were surely conscious of the role they played in making it beautiful.

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More Than Just Entertainment: Myanmar’s Marionettes

  

                                             by Jim Goodman

Mandalay puppeteers in action

       Mandalay was the last capital of the Kingdom of Burma, from 1861-1885, when it was also the center of Burmese culture and its fine arts traditions. When the British swept into Mandalay, they abolished the monarchy and annexed the rest of the state. The country’s arts and crafts, bereft of royal patronage, suffered precipitous decline, particularly its puppet theater.  Even after independence in 1948 the tradition remained weak and its future bleak.  But in recent decades, with a change in both patrons and audience, the puppets are back.  And the most appropriate place to witness this is the Mandalay Marionettes and Culture Show, in the city where they once flourished.

       About an hour long, the show includes performances of classical musical instruments, Burmese and ethnic minority dances and, most of all, skits with stringed puppets—marionettes.  It was to preserve this latter tradition that two women, Ma Ma Naing and Naing Yei Mar, founded this theater in 1986, just over a century after the British takeover eliminated its primary patron.  Finding a couple of surviving puppeteers, they brought them out of retirement to train new ones and supervise the making of the marionettes.

the marionette show's orchestra

       The theater contains a small, elevated stage where the show-opening harp soloist, dancers and marionettes perform.  Between the audience and the stage sits the orchestra.  This comprises mostly percussion instruments, with men on drums and gongs, a xylophone and one on a high-pitched oboe.  To an uninitiated ear this can sound cacophonous, though in the opening puppet skit, depicting the creation of the world, this is intentional.  The percussion also serves to accentuate moods in the different puppet scenes. 

       Traditionally, prior to the show, the puppeteers make a food offering to the Goddess of Performance, which they believe enables their marionettes ‘to breathe.’  Then they spend time grooming and talking to their puppets and invite their spirits into their own bodies for the duration of the performance.

playing the Burmese harp

       The puppeteers stand on stage behind a waist-high painted backdrop and a curtain conceals their upper bodies.  Periodically the curtain rises to reveal their deft manipulation of the marionettes.  In one hand the puppeteer grasps a handle holding at least eleven strings connected to various parts of the marionette’s body.  With the other hand he or she pulls on separate strings to make the body parts move and the marionette walk, turn, crouch, bow, sit, dance or fly through the air.  They also, when the skit requires, sing or speak the dialog of the puppets.

       The first skit always depicts a pair of puppets representing nats--Burmese nature spirits—witnessing the creation of the world out of primeval chaos.  Usually the next scene shows the introduction of animals to the world, especially the white horse, believed to be the first animal ever created.  It concludes with the dance of the magician, wearing red robes and waving a wand.

Ayutthaya-style candle dance

manipulating the magician puppet 

       With this we are now in the world of the humans and the rest of the skits narrate stories from history and mythology, especially the Jataka Tales of previous incarnations of the Buddha and the Indian epic Ramayana.  Kings, queens, gods, ogres, ministers, pages, commoners and clowns dance through these scenes, the crowd favorite usually the duet between the prince and princess.  Often just one to three appear on stage at any given time, but some scenes can involve as many as eight puppets at once, with the curtain lifting and showing the same number of puppeteers visible above them.

nat dance at the Creation of the World

       Because the marionettes are preceded by a harp player and interrupted by solo dance performances and one by an ethnic minority group, usually Karen, they are only on stage about two-thirds of the show.  The lilting music of the harp certainly helps create an atmosphere of bygone times, as do the individual classical dances, but as a result spectators only see a small fraction of the traditional puppet repertoire. 

       According to rules laid down by royal courts in the past, the marionette troupe consisted of 28 characters and the Mandalay show has insufficient time to use them all.  The puppeteers are familiar with all of the characters, though, and anyway don’t run the same skits each night, so find regular opportunities for their use.  Sometimes the troupe performs at festivals in the countryside, when performances start, as in the old days, at sunset and continue until sunrise.  The entire set of 28 classic marionettes, plus maybe a few modern additions, see action then.

scene from the Ramayana epic

       The first historical evidence of the puppet tradition is the recording of a performance on a slab in a 15^th century temple in Sagaing.  It’s not clear how popular it was back then, or how widespread, but from the foundation of the Konbaung Dynasty in 1752 the puppet tradition entered its golden age.  Following their destruction of the Siamese capital Ayutthaya in 1767, the victorious Burmese abducted members of the Siamese elite and its artisans, actors, musicians and the entire royal dance troupe and removed them to their own country.   

        This sudden influx of Siamese artistic influence sparked the blossoming of Burmese fine arts, impacting its sculpture, painting, poetry and especially its drama.  Besides the royal court, provincial governors also patronized the Siamese artisans and performers, who were so much more accomplished and polished than their own.  But eventually they recruited natives to fill their places, prompting more Burmese modifications to the arts and the substitution of Burmese for Thai as the stage language for dramas.

Rama puppet

Hanuman puppet

       Several years after the fall of Ayutthaya the Konbaung Court set up a Ministry of Theater to control and regulate the growing, ever more popular dramatic profession.  Rules formulated for the two kinds of theater—that played by human actors and that staged by marionettes—differed.  The prudery of the times limited how much could be said or acted in love duets.  The Ministry also tabooed costumes of royal regalia, monks’ robes or depiction of the Buddha, as well as any dialog or song containing criticism of the royal court.

 

Jataka Tales skit

      The marionettes had much more leeway.  Some of them were royal characters and dressed in specifically royal costumes.  The most appreciated skit in the repertoire is a duet of a prince and princess, both regally garbed and bejeweled, while other marionettes are of monks, the Buddha and the Hindu god Rama.  The marionettes could also speak or sing about corruption and abuses of authority without fear of subsequent retaliation or arrest for their manipulators.  They were, after all, ‘possessed’ by the spirits of their puppets and thus not responsible for offending words.

       The general populace couldn’t do that and this was one aspect of the puppet theater that helped its burgeoning popularity.  On the other hand, sometimes government ministers arranged for a royal marionette performance precisely because the puppet characters would be able to work lines of dialog somewhere in the skits to bring a certain scandal to the attention of the king.

the comic character U Sheay Yoe and villagers

       Except for the rainy season, puppet troupes did a lot of traveling, staging shows in places far from the capital.  For their hosts, they were the prime source of information on the capital, its politics and intrigues, scandals and shenanigans.  At the same time, their members became aware of local situations, complaints and grievances, which they might very well work into their own skits, to be highlighted next performance back at the Court.  No popular press existed at that time to air such topics, so the marionettes filled the gap.

       Politics was never a dominant concern of the puppet tradition, however.  Its main function was entertainment, but of a sort leaning towards edification as well.  Most skits had religious themes, emphasizing a specific moral precept.  In fact, sometimes a patron would request a performance to include a certain Jataka Tale skit that imparted a moral lesson he wanted conveyed to someone he had invited to watch the show. 

page boy puppet

       The audience for marionette performances in the old days was not the polite, quiet and attentive crowd that watches today.  Since the shows ran for several hours late at night, those attending might take a nap, eat, smoke and converse during the performance, applaud skits they liked and boo those they didn’t.  They could even get carried away and attack a puppet representing a character whose actions aroused their disapproval.

       While the rural masses enjoyed the marionette show for its stories and spectacle, the Burmese elite appreciated it for its combination of different aspects of traditional art.  Aspiring puppeteers spent many years learning these, beginning with making the puppets themselves.  The typical marionette consisted of 18 separate carved wooden parts:  one for the head, one for the neck, two for the torso, six for the arms and eight for the legs, with wires joining the pieces together. Strings connected most, but not all, of these pieces to the puppeteer’s handle, but separate strings might also operate the jaw and eyes. 

       The makers also implanted genuine human hair to the heads for their coiffures, mustaches and beards and strove to make lifelike faces.  With a few exceptions (Rama and other Ramayana characters) the marionettes had white faces, black brows and eyes and red lips.  While the arms of the puppets were abnormally long, the rest of the body they modeled on human bodies, including the sexual organs, though these were concealed by the garments.  When completed, the puppets averaged 65 cm in height.       

duet of puppet and human

       Puppet-makers dressed their marionettes in a variety of costumes.  A few characters wore ordinary traditional outfits of shirts and lungyis or sarongs and the males had turbans with a loose end tucked up behind the head or dangling over the right temple.   The male puppeteers wear these during the show.

       Most characters were royalty, ministers or other members of the elite and wore much fancier garments.  The coats, sashes, vests and dresses, of brocaded silk or cotton, were bright colors, liberally festooned with sequins and little glass jewels.  The puppets also wore elaborate crowns or headdresses and altogether their ensembles replicated those worn at the royal court.  And because commoners rarely, if ever, saw such clothing in those days, the costumes displayed in a marionette show were one of its greatest attractions.

       In the puppet theater’s 19^th century heyday, puppeteers, singers and musicians won high public esteem and the profession attracted a steady supply of talent.  It was even more popular than the dance dramas with human actors.  Audiences also rated human dancers according to how closely they could mimic the movements of the marionettes.  One of the skits in the Mandalay show features a duet of a marionette and a human dancer, while the puppeteer above her pretends to manipulate her with invisible strings.

group scene of puppets and puppeteers

       A very conservative tradition in its days of glory, unlike live drama quite resistant to innovation, the puppet theater had to make changes in the colonial period.  Having lost the prime source of financing for this relatively expensive art form, in terms of training and performance preparation, it now competed for paying customers with the shows staged by live performers. 

       The singers left for its rival theater and so the puppeteers themselves had to take on the singing and speaking parts.  They allowed women to be puppeteers for the first time.  They introduced new skits with lots more action and replaced the plain white backdrops with painted scenery.  Finally, when financing became even more difficult, they dropped the orchestra in favor of gramophone recordings.

       In spite of these adaptations interest continued to wane.  By the time the British left only a few dozen troupes remained in the whole country.  The military government in the 1960s, as part of promoting all things Burmese, tried to revive it, but also wanted to use it for propaganda messages.  Experienced puppeteers began dying and the whole tradition was on the way to extinction with their passing.

Jataka Tales scene

       So it was in the nick of time that Ma Ma Naing and Naing Yei Mar conceived their passion for its revival.  Several old masters were still around and proved ready to impart their skills and knowledge.  After the inauguration of the Mandalay Marionettes Culture Show in 1986 other places in prominent tourist destinations, like Bagan and Yangon, began opening puppet theaters.  High-end restaurants included puppet performances as part of the dinner show. 

       It’s a different audience this time around; not local villagers or a royal court, but foreigners.  They don’t know the stories or recognize the characters.  For most it’s just exotic entertainment, though appreciated at least for its skill and spectacle.  With the growth in this foreign audience, especially with the tourist boom in recent decades, more puppet theaters have opened in Myanmar.  More young people are finding jobs making puppets, playing classical instruments and becoming puppeteers. 

       Whether the puppet theater will again achieve in the countryside the popularity it enjoyed in the Konbaung Dynasty remains to be seen.  Yet the tradition has definitely made its comeback and its future looks positive.  For now it has a new and perhaps permanent patron—the tourist.

a royal duet

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