The dance of the monkeys
By Manohar Malgonkar

I DON’T know how it is now, but when I was in the Army in the last days of the Raj and a few years thereafter, we used to think of the Indian Navy as a "leisure-force", which had nothing to do other than spend their time at seaside depots swanking in their milk-white uniforms which never got soiled because their wearers just didn’t have any work to do.

The Army, on the other hand, was always on the job, in Kashmir or in the Eastern Himalayas, living under campaign conditions and separated from families, in tents, foxholes, bunkers.

And even those who were left behind, in their permanent stations, were for ever being "called out" as the papers put it, to help out with all kinds of "emergency" situations; floods, riots, cyclones, earthquakes, minding refugee campus, shoring up breaches in dams and even digging wells in famine-stricken areas such as Rayalseema. I remember General Thimmaya being criticised for complaining that the Army was being pressed into service as a sort of on-call labour pool to deal with problems that were outside its range of functions.

What the Navy called "work" was to dash off on "flag-showing" voyages to distant shores and these, we believed, were shopping sprees in which the "work" part consisted of entering some port or the other to gun-salutes and the playing of brass bands, and much shipboard entertaining on duty-free gin.

Very occasionally, the Navy allowed one or two "Pongoes" (as they call Army officers), to join these flag-showing jaunts, and needless to say, for any Army officer ordered to join one of these trips, it was like winning a lottery. As a rule, a "Pongo" on a warship was like a stowaway, because it is the boast of fighting ships that they don’t even have a spare inch of unutilised space, so that the ship’s own officers and men lived in severely cramped conditions. As for the "Pongoes", they had to doss down wherever they could find enough room, and dress and shave in cabins while their rightful occupants happened to be on duty. Still, it was a concession for a "Pongo" to allowed to eat in the wardroom at all. Why, the luckier ones even got to see, London and the French Riviera. I, only a little less lucky, was one of the few "Pongoes" on a warship that was showing the flag at Bali.

In those days, the women of Bali went about bare-breasted. But Bali had other attractions too, and in the couple of days we could spend there, we managed to take in most of them. We bought carved statues of turbanned Javanese men and of Bali’s women, for about Rs 10 a piece, paid our courtesy visit to a local celebrity, the Belgian painter Le Mayer in his grass-roofed beach house, bathed at a blindingly sunlit beach which had no other bathers; motored up to an extinct volcano, Kintamani, which had erupted in the twenties and was now black as charcoal, still spitting plumes of smoke.

But by far the most indelible memory of Bali we carried away was of a traditional dance-drama called the Ke-chak. We were taken to a village in the outskirts of Den Pazar where, in what may have been a temple yard they had thrown a dozen or so wooden benches for the audience. It was all rather primitive and there was neither state nor any stage lights. It was an open-air performance. A lone Balinese woman sat under a tree, and on all four sides of her, forming a square of about feet, squatted a hundred or so men packed in four or five rows.

We sat in silence, and soon became aware of a stir, like the sound of a breeze, which set up a swaying motion among the men sitting around the edges. Then the sound, which began as a whisper rose imperceptibly in volume and became identifiable: ke-chak, ke-chak, ke-chak.

It was eerie, and hypnotic; all those squatting figures swaying imperceptibly and saying ke-chak, ke-chak in the dim glow of a few winking lights. For a time the volume rose as did the tempo so that at times it resembled the din of insects and then, suddenly, it stopped. It took me a few seconds to realise why. The centre of the stage was now occupied by a man-figure that had jumped down from an overhanging branch, and he was dancing, hands-folded towards the lady who sat under the tree.

"Why, this is Ramayana!" I said to myself. The woman under the tree was Sita, the wife of Rama who had been abducted by the King of Sri Lanka and Hanuman, the monkeys God, acting as Rama’s messenger, had just jumped down from a tree, and the chattering monkeys who had been guarding Sita had suddenly gone silent.

After that it was easy to follow the story being enacted before us. A scene from the Ramayana as interpreted by a troop of monkeys. That was Ke-Chak, Bali’s own special folk drama. It stayed with us on our drive back across the island, to the harbour where our destroyer had been anchord.

It now seems odd to me that, having identified the origins of ke-chak, I should have left it at that, incurious to know how Ramayana had reached Bali at all, more than 2,000 miles away from its native land. It was not till many years later and I became booked on the study of history that I made an effort to find out.

What goaded me into the effort was my awe and amazement at the feats of navigation and discovery by the Iberian seafarers of the late 15th century. How sad, I kept thinking, that the inbuilt Hindu prohibition against the crossing of the ‘black water’ had kept us chained to our home land, and sapped the spirit of adventure that is a normal trait of humanity.

And then I thought of Bali and its ke-chak. How the Rama story reached that remote island.

The explanation came as a shock; that it had been taken there by our own counterparts of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, as early as the 3rd and 7th centuries A.D., and for nearly 1,000 years after that, trading between South East Asia and India was dominated by Hindus just as firmly as trade between India and Europe was controlled by the Arabs.

"Ships from Kalinga and Andhra crossed the Bay of Bengal, "Hutchinson’s World History tells us, "and sailed to the straits of Malacca where they established a kingdom. They went to Sumatra and Java. In Sumatra there was a powerful Hindu Kingdom in the name of Sri Vaisya."

All this, at least 700 years before the legendary seafarers of Europe set out to cross the oceans.

"The institutions of religion, government and administration became predominantly Indian," the same history says, and a Chinese traveller of those times wrote: "More than a thousand Brahmans from south India reside there (in Sumatra) and the people follow their teachings and give their daughters in marriage."

The most important of these Kingdoms was in Cambodia, "in the fertile alluvial plain of the lower Mekong where a dynasty of kings of Indian origin reigned over a population speaking Khemr."

All of which meant that the Hindu prohibition against the crossing of the ‘black water’ was a later aberration, self-inhibiting. As testimony to our spirit of adventure and successful empire-building, there stand the monuments of Angkor Wat, the ruins of Boru Budur.

And the folk drama of Bali, called Ke-chak.

This feature was published on March 14, 1999