By HOWARD ISENSTEIN
Walter Koenig has 130 roommates and is fascinated with each and every one. Some are apes, some are monsters and others are gods.
Mr. Koenig shares his home with Wayang Golek puppets made in Indonesia. The puppets, one set carved in the last few years, the other set more than 50 years old, are used by Dalangs, or Indonesian puppeteers, to re-enact scenes of plays from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, two Indian epics written around 2,000 years ago.
Mr. Koenig, an independent scholar, is researching a book at the Library of Congress on how the epics made the long journey from India to Indonesia and how they were later adapted to Indonesian puppet theater.
The colorful, 3-D Wayang Golek puppets are not to be mistaken for the two-dimensional Wayang Kulit puppets favored by the Indonesian aristocracy. Many Westerners are familiar with Wayang Kulit, which uses puppets whose shadows are silhouetted on a screen to recount the exploits of Rama and other characters of the two epics. Wayang Kulit has been extensively studied by Eastern and Western scholars.
By contrast, a Wayang Golek performance features puppets which appear directly before the audience and are enjoyed largely by the middle and lower classes of West Java. During a performance, audience members are free to come and go, eat, drink tea, smoke and cheer for their favorite characters.
"I think it's an art form that's been neglected," Mr. Koenig says. "There's only one dissertation and only a handful of books on this subject."
Like most epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata recount how the characters confront and resolve moral, ethical, religious, community, family and other issues that present physical or spiritual challenges. While there are thousands of scenes and stories contained within the epics, the Wayang repertoire consists of about 180 plays from the Mahabharata, of which about 90 are actively performed. Regional differences, variations in puppeteer styles, local events and other factors can change the way a play is performed. Puppeteers often weave in current events, such as a comment about a road-building project, to update the play.
Mr. Koenig became interested in Wayang Golek in the early 1970s when he was living in Indonesia. With his father stationed in Java for eight years, Mr. Koenig had a chance to learn the language. After receiving his B.A. in history and German literature at Mt. Union College, Mr. Koenig continued to pursue his interest in Wayang Golek while working for American, German and British industrial companies. While on business in Indonesia, he took days off to visit a puppet museum and puppet makers to research the origins of Wayang Golek.
Mr. Koenig now collects the puppets and displays his collection in the United States to spur interest in Wayang and Indonesian history and culture. He also gives lectures on the subject and imports Wayang Golek and Wayang Kulit puppets for collectors, enthusiasts and friends in hopes of preserving the unique theatrical art form.
Puppet makers "are not being replaced by younger people. I don't think they're going to be around much longer," Mr. Koenig says.
To foster interest in the puppets, Mr. Koenig is researching the iconography of Wayang Golek and how the core stories of the Wayang were transmitted to Indonesia. He hopes to be published in both subject areas. Mr. Koenig intends to perform extensive fieldwork in Indonesia to determine how the carving, painting and clothing of Wayang Golek puppets have changed over time.
At the same time, Mr. Koenig wants to discover how the Mahabharata was incorporated into the Wayang. Although scholars haven't come to firm agreement, it is likely that Indian Hindu traders brought the epic to Indonesia by the fourth century A.D. Mr. Koenig admires the way Indonesian puppeteers have adapted and continually reinterpreted the plays of the Mahabharata.
The Mahabharata is a massive tome, spanning 4,800 pages in the English prose translation. It has been translated only twice into English, once in 1896 and again in 1905. According to one passage in the Mahabharata, "What is here may be elsewhere but what is not here is nowhere else."
While Mr. Koenig researches how the Mahabharata was transmitted to Indonesia, he is also compiling a bibliography on both the Mahabharata and Wayang. Finding books on those topics is difficult, Mr. Koenig says.
"I found a lot of them in the Library that were probably not available elsewhere," Mr. Koenig says.
Among the rare books he found at the Library were: Seine Form (The Mahabharata: Its Origins, Its Contact and Its Form) by Hermann Oldenbert; and Vier Philosophische Texte des Mahabharatm: Sanastsujata-Paravan-Bhagavadgita-Mokshadharma-Anugita (Four Philosophical Texts of the Mahabharata: Sanastsujata-Paravan- Bhagavadgita-Mokshadharma-Anugita) by Paul Deussen.
They were all written around the turn of the century when European scholarship on Sanskrit literature was at its zenith. Mr. Koenig is incorporating these titles into what he hopes will be a definitive bibliography on Wayang.
Mr. Koenig says that given the vast material available to Wayang puppeteers and their ability to constantly reinterpret it, researching Wayang's history and evolution is daunting.
But Mr. Koenig continues to work steadily at the Library in the hope of sharing the richness of Wayang Golek with more people.
Howard Isenstein is a Washington free-lance writer.