Rainbows of Malay Literature and Beyond: Festshrift in Honour of Professor Md. Salleh Yaapar by Lalita Sinha;

Author:Lalita, Sinha;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4306380
Publisher: Penerbit USM
Published: 2014-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Plays

Noordin Hassan. Mana Setangginya? Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2000.

______. Anak Tanjung. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1971.

Solehah Ishak (trans.). Children of This Land. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1992.

Chapter 9

Humour among Indonesian Muslims: A Neglected Genre in Malayo-Indonesian Studies

Arndt Graf

Introduction

Most studies on humour that are generated in Western universities focus on humour in Western societies, often constructing a lineage from Greek and Roman Antiquity, over the carnival in the European Middle-Ages, to the present day.1 This imagined ancestry is then often used as a theoretical point of departure for research on humour in non-Western societies. Historically, this has included the field of so-called ‘Oriental Humour’.2

Since the 1970s, such essentialist, and at the same time often very narrow renditions of non-European and non-Christian humour have been revised in many fields of Asian studies. Research on humour in Indian literature, for instance, has discussed the fact that European Orientalists of the 19th century censured and dismissed many traditional humorous genres from India, such as farces etc., as without merit. A frequent example in this debate is the Indologist Georg Buehler who collected many Sanskrit farces but did not want to publish them because he found them too obsceneb (Zoller 1999, 15–16; Siegel 1989, 69). This Orientalist censoring resulted in a distorted image of Indian literature and culture:

The puritanical scholarship of the pioneers of Indian studies created an impression that, while there was ample truth and beauty, elegance or wisdom in Sanskrit literature, there was little humour or satire (Zoller 1999, 16).

As a consequence, Orientalist distinctions between folk literature and classical literature are now being revised in many fields of Asian studies. In Indian literary studies at least, humour is no longer dismissed as mere ‘folk literature’, but rather seen as an important part of a traditional system of genres that needs to be reconstructed in a postcolonial endeavour. The study of the neglected genre of Islamic humour in Indonesia can similarly be seen as part of what Muhammad Haji Salleh (2000) has called the “reconstruction of the system of Malay literature.”

For our inquiry into ‘Islamic humour in Indonesia’, the definition of categories of literary humour by Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi (1999) in her research on modern Tamil literature seems to be useful. She distinguishes the following categories of humour: (1) humour and irony on the part of the narrator, and (2) characters who joke and laugh. Islamic humour in Indonesia comprises both categories: Islamic religious messages conveyed through humorous means of narration (including word-level and sentence-level jokes), and joking and laughing characters that can be identified as Islamic, such as the kyai, the haji, or the santri. I would also agree with Wenzel (1989) that another major characteristic of the humorous narrative is the funny pun-line (Pointe). This is why principally in research on Indonesian Islamic humour, funny short stories, satires, and other longer narratives should also be considered. In the following discussion, however, I concentrate for practical reasons, on humorous anecdotes and jokes.

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