Balinese hulu

[A. G. Maisey]

Very probably interesting Jean, but I cannot read Dutch, and I cannot see the pictures particularly well.

I do not consider that all Balinese hilts , or for that matter, all figural hilts, are unable to be aligned to known characters, but personal experience involving several very well known and respected carvers in Bali has caused me to rather unwillingly accept that hilt carvers are not usually possessed of the type of knowledge that would permit them to unerringly depict folk characters and religious characters in a way that always will permit a person other than the carver to identify that character.

Then there is the widely acknowledged fact that Balinese folk & religious characters are frequently interpreted by artists in ways and forms that make them unrecognizable if they are compared to the established forms from Hindu belief and in the case of folk characters, from generally accepted belief.

Where this matter of keris hilt characters is concerned I think we just need to accept that some questions cannot be answered.

Might it not be reasonable to assume that somebody as knowledgeable and as respected in the field of Balinese art as Pande Wayan Suteja Neka would have not the slightest difficulty in naming hilt characters?

Most especially so when Pak Neka is in a position where he can easily call upon many other knowledgeable Balinese art authorities, keris enthusiasts and craftsmen & artists.

But if we thumb through his Bali keris book, and then carefully read the exhibit tags in his keris museum, I feel that we might be excused for believing that even somebody in such a fortunate position as Pak Neka is sometimes at a loss for a name, and at other times perhaps a little confused.

Maybe the only way one can really know the identity of some keris hilt characters is to make the appropriate offerings and then go to sleep with a hilt under one's pillow. The correct answer will come in a dream.

Going back a few years I raised this question of identities of the characters represented in keris hilts with a well known Balinese hilt carver. Stripped of the fifteen minutes or so of verbal padding his answer came down to this:-

"when we carve a figure we do not always try to make that figure look like a person from a story, mostly we carve a figure that is intended to generate an idea, but this can change when we carve a figure that is so well known that people expect it to look like who it is supposed to be"

Nobody seems to be in doubt about Nawasari when he appears, but when we meet with a broadly generic figure the carver might have been doing what I was told:- he was attempting to carve a figure that would cause an idea to be formed.