Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

1. Rasa, Race, Ramayana: Sensing and Censoring the History of Color in Precolonial Java

History affects us. Historical narratives of colonialism and slavery may provoke our anger; tales of freedom and independence can awaken our courage and hope. One may wonder, however, if and how affect affects history. Indeed, when we make visible the underlying emotions that linger in history and shape how history is constructed, how and will the past be understood differently ? My intention is to document the ways in which the circulations of an ideal beauty helped shape discourses of gender, skin color, and “race” during the late ninth and early tenth century in pre-European colonial Java, specifically in the Old Javanese adaptation of the Indian epic poem Ramayana. Focusing on the circulation of beauty ideals from India is important because India was the most prominent influence in the Indonesian archipelago prior to the establishment of Islamic kingdoms and European colonialism. The documentation of this circulation of beauty ideals will demonstrate how our understanding of precolonial and transnational histories of skin color, as they intersect with gender, shift when we employ a theoretical lens of affect and emotion in reading and constructing such histories. As a re-telling of precolonial history that is sensitive to the ways in which emotion shapes history, this chapter argues that skin color already mattered prior to European colonialism and was articulated through affective vocabularies attached to notions of beauty. This argument challenges existing works that view colorism as rooted in European colonialism (Burke 1996; Sahay and Piran 1997; M. Hunter 2005). Arguing that preference for light skin color in Java predates European colonialism is not to argue that the construction of women with Rasa,Race,andRamayana SensingandCensoringtheHistory ofColorinPrecolonialJava 1 16 : Chapter 1 light skin color as beautiful is a “local” or “indigenous” construction (to be pitted againsta“globalized”orWesternizedconstruction)andthatithasforeverexisted in indigenous communities, even without the force of European colonialism. Nor does it suggest that preference for light skin color is inherent in humanity. Far from it. The idea that it is light skin color that is considered beautiful, even in precolonial Java, I argue, is a “transnational” (avant la lettre) construction.1 Because I argue that meanings of skin color are constructed transnationally, itonlymakessensethatthelensthroughwhichIexaminethisissueisalsoatransnational one. To this end, I employ a “transnational” theoretical concept called rasa, which is rooted in precolonial Indian society and adapted to the Javanese context. In its Indian context, rasa is a theory most often used in regard to the audience’s responses to works of performing art. In the Javanese context, rasa can belooselytranslatedas“theunderlyingemotionormoodwhichdefinesaworkof art” (Saran and Khanna 2004, 12). Rasa is also registered in the Javanese spiritual world as a useful concept that could help explain how knowledge is produced both through senses and by sensing the unseen. I develop rasa fully cognizant of its transnational routes and meanings—these meanings include “mood,” “emotional tone,” “sentiment,” or “feeling” (Higgins 2007, 45; Walton 2007, 31). I define rasa as a dominant emotion felt when encountering performative events and characters that provoke what philosopher Kathleen Higgins calls “affective trajectories” and previously “deposited memory elements” (47). By developing and employing rasa, I provide evidence for how we can offer a different history of skin color and gender in precolonial Java when we pay attention to the emotions that curl languidly behind the stories we are reading. Hence I find it useful to provide specific examples of (1) how rasa functions as an apparatus through which we can sense skin color hierarchies within beauty discourse in precolonial Java and (2) how rasa functions as an apparatus of censorship in the production of a history of color in the Indonesian context. I do so by affectively reading the transnational epic poem Ramayana. Ramayana: Literary Text as Historical Source For this chapter, I focus mostly on the island of Java recognizing that there are more than 17,000 islands in Indonesia. I do so because Java has been one of the most developed and populated islands in the archipelago. During the Dutch colonial period, Java’s economy became unquestionably the most developed; in contrast, in some other parts of Indonesia, especially eastern Indonesia, the economy can best be described as a “vacuum” (Dick 1996, 24). Today, the distribution of Indonesian people throughout its thousands of islands continues to be unevenly balanced. More than half of the population, about 130 million people, Rasa, Race, and Ramayana : 17 live on the island of Java. The rest are spread out across Sumatra (46...