Amad-Muhammad

Amad's acquisition of the magic abilities, and his fight with the forces of Siti Bregdab.

A painting by a Balinese Buddhist Hindu, depicting a Muslim story of a warrior queen of Mocca and her fight with the hero Amad, who has gained magic powers from the 'musk' tree.

One of Bali's foremost artists since the 1930s, Ida Bagus Togog came from the village of Batuan, in central Bali, where he was a leading member of the family of Buddhist brahmans who are the major group of the village. He began painting in the 1930's, using his knowledge of death cloths (kajang) as the basis for painting showing the mystical symbols which represent the whole cosmos.1 He developed as a painter at the same time as dozens of his contemporaries in the village, using the dynamic black and white style of the 1930's, with its emphasis on rich foliage in the backgrounds. He was one of the few members of the older generation to continue working after World War II, and he painted until his death in 1989, still continuing in the use of background foliage which is the hall-mark of the Batuan style.

An example of Ida Bagus Togog's interest in choosing narratives not usually depicted by Balinese painters, this painting was executed in the late 1970s. It comes from the store of stories used in the classic dance-drama form of Bali, gambuh, for which Batuan is justly famous. Ida Bagus Togog himself learnt his range of narratives from one of his step-mothers, who married into the extended family of the priest's house (geria) from Gianyar, and from the general cultural life of that house, where learning in literature and esoteric knowledge was cultivated. From this background Ida Bagus Togog brought a particularly mystical vision to his art, one which comes to the fore in the powerful symbols presented in this painting and then hidden by the artist. The narrative background to the scenes depicted in this painting (as told by the artist) is a story of how the hero, Amad, has gone off with the princess Siti Bregdab [Bagdad]. In other versions of the story, she is a princess of Egypt.2 Amad took with him his magic coat, his arrow, and his magic endong fruit. The coat gave the ability to fly when worn, the arrow returned after being fired, and the fruit provided limitless supplies of whatever food one wanted. Amad is shown flying in his coat and carrying his magic arrows and fruit in the upper left-hand corner of the painting, which is where the narrative begins. The work as a whole is meant to be 'read' from this point, moving in an anti-clockwise direction. Amad and Siti Bregdab flew to the island of Manjeti (Pulu Manyeti) in the middle of the ocean, and the fruit provided for them a hut, a sleeping mat and pillows. While Amad was asleep the princess flew off with his magic items. Amad, upon waking, found his things gone, and thought he would die from lack of food. He is shown in the painting lying beneath the 'musk' tree (taru kastuba), which, unbeknownst to him, is a mystical tree belonging to the god Indra. There were two 'servant' birds (kedis paksi bayan) in the tree, the birds shown with human heads, one male and one female, and Amad overheard them talking. The female asked the male what the tree was, but he was not game to say. She asked him again, and again, saying that if he did not tell her she would not marry him. Thus, he eventually told her that this was the kastuba tree, which was laden with the weapons representing the different gods, and filled with demonic figures, notably an inverted demonic head. These were manifestations of the mystical glow (teja) emanating from the leaves. 'When the bark is peeled off, it becomes a saddle (kekapa) of gold. When the top of the tree is having heard all this from below, climbed the tree, and when he had climbed up 500 metres he was able to obtain the horse, the saddle and the whip, and could go anywhere.

When I first saw this painting in 1981 the mystical symbols of the gods of the directions were quite prominent, but in 1984, when the painting was exhibited publicly3, they had been covered over by foliage, and a number of extra trees had been added to various parts of the painting. The main explanation for this is that the symbols as a collection of images were too magically powerful for display to the general public, although they can still be discerned underneath the foliage, so their potent contribution to the significance of the work has not been effaced, only concealed. Here is one of the most graphic illustrations of the dilemma of modern Balinese painting; the tourist marketing of art places such work in the role of being decorative, a pleasant set of images of Bali the paradise, but the intentions of major artists and the signs being utilised are still cosmic elements. The manipulation of such signs is still an action which will have effects on other people and on other elements of the manifest and unmanifest worlds. When producing a painting such as this the artist has to cope with the multiple contexts the painting will be placed in when it is finished, with the result that some works tend towards the purely decorative, while others such as this have a great degree of depth. The added trees over the rest of the painting were part of the artist's overpainting of the whole work which served both to highlight the major characters in the story through shading, and to make the decorative animals dotted throughout the work less prominent.

So, the painted narrative continues. Amad flew off to the land of Ambara, and his meeting there with the princess Sojo occupies the main part of the painting. The composition of the work is such that the movement of the majority of the figures makes Amad, flying on his horse, into a focal point of the painting, with a resulting tension between the conflict inherent in the centre and right-hand side of the work, and the tranquility and sacred power of the tree and the island to the left. At the land of Ambara the horse Uncaisrawa refused to go any further, and so they paused near the palace of the land of Sulaiman (gumi Selemen) or Moksalam [Mocca], where the queen Dewi Sojo resided. Her palace is shown as a blue brick enclosure towards the upper right of the painting. The horse landed in the dynastic temple of the palace, and defecated there, an act of great impurity. At seeing this, Dewi Sojo ordered her forces to attack. First came her male magician warriors who flew up at Amad, but were immediately defeated by his magic whip, and those who were carrying weapons dropped them as they fell head over heels. These are shown in the foreground of the painting. The queen, when told of this defeat, ran amok and ordered her female warriors to attack, as shown in the upper centre of the work. She ordered the magical nagapasa, the arrow which turns into a dragon, fired at Amad, and this is how Amad is shown in the top central part of the painting, riding his horse, wrestling with the snake arrow entwined about him, as other women warriors fire at him. At this point of his defeat a great cry of triumph arose, and the warriors of Sojo danced. Just then the divine priest Bagawan Narada (in other versions actually her father, the Prophet or Nabi Suleiman) dancing of the revived men merges with the depiction of their earlier attack on Amad in the composition. The painting's narrative ends at the point where Amad and Sojo are about to be married. In later stories of the cycle their son, Termayor or Er Mayor, becomes a hero. The clearest theme of this work is sexual conflict. Amad has been robbed by one disillusioned lover, and is then shown fighting (and being defeated) by his future wife, backed by an army of women.

Males are shown as wild (the male soldiers), gifted (Amad), and wise (Bagawan Narada), but these first two aspects of masculinity are undermined by women or shown to be fallible. Even the conversation of the birds contains this tension of male and female, since the female bird has to use her sexual relations with the male in order to force him to reveal the mystical knowledge of the tree. As in other Balinese painting and sculpture, such as the work of I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, the relationship between male and female is one of continual conflict which can break out into open warfare. In the narrative of this painting only the holy wisdom claimed by men in the role of priests is capable of controlling the basic conflict of the sexes, and even this temporary resolution has a far less prominent role in the painting than the conflict, which is visually dominant. Women and men are presented as basically different, but with overlapping roles in terms of their access to sources of magical power. Dewi Sojo, as queen, shows that women can take over the kind of state power otherwise held by men. As a woman warrior she also demonstrates access to magical powers superior to the magic that Amad has -- just as Amad's other magical gifts were earlier lost to another woman.

There is another element of complexity in the work, and that is the foreign nature of the story. The story is Islamic in origin, and Balinese are aware of this and see it as part of Bali's continued connection with the outside world, the idea that Balinese culture contains an inherent foreign element.4 Women warriors are not normally part of Balinese stories, so it is possible to see the heightened nature of the gender conflict presented here as something arising from the foreign element.5 Tourism, as the latest manifestation of foreign influence in Bali, springs readily to mind as a force which acts to heighten existing tensions in society, to take the already strained relations of men and women and turn them into competition and conflict. If this is so, then the magical forces in the painting are also set in motion by this foreign disturbance, and again it is only priestly intercession which can control these energies.

1. As illustrated in Miguel Covarrubias; Island of Bali, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937, facing p. 6. For other published works on Ida Bagus Togog, see Th. Galestin and R. Bonnet, Hedendaagse Kunst van Bali [exhibition catalogue], Utrecht: Centraal Museum Utrecht, 1962, pp. 85-6; G. M. Sudarta, Seni Lukis Bali dalam Tiga Generasi, Jakarta: Gramedia, 1975, pp. 54-5; and Wim Bakker, Bali Verbeeld, Delft: Volkenkundig Museum Nusantara, 1986, pp. 17-21, 51 & 85.

2. Beryl de Zoete and Walter Spies, Dance and Drama in Bali, London: Faber & Faber, 1938, pp. 391-2.

3. See: A. A. M. Djelantik, Balinese Paintings, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1986, plate 8, photographed at an exhibition at the Puri Lukisan, Ubud.

4. See A. Vickers, 'Hinduism and Islam in Indonesia: Bali and the Pasisir World', Indonesia 44, 1987: 30-58.

5. The one exception to this is Srikandi, one of the warriors of the Mahabharata, but whereas Srikandi is clearly a woman in Javanese tradition, in Bali Srikandi is known as either a male in women's dress or a hermaphrodite. See Angela Hobart, Dancing Shadows of Bali, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987,.p. 66n. In any case Srikandi is not as well known in Bali as in Java.

Painting was changed extensively after 1981, when first photographed by A. Vickers, and before it was exhibited in the Art Centre at Denpasar (as illustrated in Djelantik). Also exhibited in the Australian Museum to accompany the Australian showing of Images of Power.