Читать книгу Malaysian Batik - Noor Azlina Yunus - Страница 9

Section of a 1960s block-printed cotton sarong from SAMASA Batik Sdn Bhd, one of the earliest workshops in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, made in imitation of Pekalongan batik from Java, the cockerel on the kepala (head) replacing the usual floral bouquet and the typical intricate background detail eliminated.

Telling the story of batik is part of the process of telling the history of Southeast Asia, of the maritime trade that flourished between East and West, of the emergence of mighty trade-based kingdoms and centres of elaborate court culture and statecraft, and of the influence of imported textiles on the manufacture and design repertoire of indigenous cloths. While the study of the world’s textiles reveals an amazing diversity of techniques and styles, it is equally astonishing that cultures separated by vast distances have developed similar techniques, patterns and motifs for both handwoven and surface-decorated cloths.

Telling the story of batik in Malaysia, in particular, is not only linked to the textile traditions of other regions in the Malay World and to their common origins but also to the geography of the Malay Peninsula and its location at the southernmost tip of the Asian mainland, midway along the ancient East–West trade routes. That the more remote northern peninsular states of Kelantan and Terengganu on the east coast have always been the bedrock of traditional arts and crafts, long known for their artistic achievements, including the most sophisticated of local handwoven cloths, is no accident of history. Although crafts have always been practised in the other Malay states, including those on the west coast of the peninsula, it was the comparative isolation of the east coast states, their proximity to neighbouring nation states, but also their role as royal centres of power and patronage that allowed the arts and crafts to flourish. Kelantan and Terengganu had their own cotton industries and later Terengganu was to produce silk thread. A substantial number of the female population was always engaged in the arts, and in the second half of the nineteenth century the ruler of Terengganu actively encouraged foreign artisans to settle there. Furthermore, British colonial interference was minimal up to the twentieth century as the east coast states were not easily accessible from the trade and administrative centres of the west coast, specifically Penang, Melaka and Johor. Although the east coast state of Pahang also had a substantial weaving tradition, it never took to the production of batik the way the more northern states did.

Paths of Trade

The earliest history of the Malay Peninsula, indeed the whole of the area that eventually came to be known as Southeast Asia, was shaped to a large extent by the crosscurrents of maritime trade. The strategic location of Southeast Asia as the nexus of the monsoons that straddled the major East–West maritime trade route greatly contributed to the region’s role as a transshipment point for cargoes from one end of Asia to the other, as well as the wider world.

From time immemorial, trade links had been forged with ports in the Malay Peninsula via coastal shipping and overland routes as well as with trading partners located around the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea—the famed Malay Archipelago—via inter-island shipping. But trade was also forged with the great civilizations of China to the northeast of the peninsula and India, Arabia and Europe to the northwest, for whom products from Southeast Asia were highly desirable commodities.

Maritime trade was largely driven by an insatiable demand for a variety of luxury goods and exotic rarities, what the eminent curator, ceramicist and author John Guy calls ‘the strange and the precious’. The region’s forests were a rich source of perfumed woods such as sandalwood, gharuwood and camphor for incense and aromatics as well as waxes, resins and rattan, while ivory, rhinoceros horn and kingfisher feathers from the forests were coveted for decorative purposes. The earth yielded tin, iron and gold. The seas supplied various kinds of shellfish, pearl oysters, tortoiseshell, cowrie shells and edible seaweeds. Most important of all were the spices, such as nutmegs, cloves, pepper and mace, that were so desirable and necessary for preserving and flavouring food.

This flourishing maritime trade helped to stimulate the emergence of trading kingdoms and royal entrepôts, located mostly along the coastlines. They were mighty cosmopolitan emporiums and centres of culture and statecraft offering luxurious commodities from India, China and the Arab World as well as from the region’s own vast hinterland. Local rulers took advantage of the trade to acquire textiles, porcelain, bronze wares, lacquered items, beads and other rare objects such as silk yarns, gold threads, gold leaf and dyestuffs. All these items served as status symbols and tangibly demonstrated the rulers’ wealth and their access to international trade.

The main trade sea routes from India via the Strait of Malacca to the Malay Archipelago and north to China and Japan.

Textiles as Shared Links

Because of the fragile, perishable nature of cloth, combined with Malaysia’s hot, humid tropical climate, there are no extant examples of handwoven textiles on the Malay Peninsula before the mid-nineteenth century. However, historical accounts point to a very long tradition of weaving with native vegetable fibres such as pineapple, plantain and palm, and locally grown homespun cotton in the peninsula (and Sabah and Sarawak) as part of a broader textile history in Southeast Asia.

Such accounts, especially those penned by European arrivals, also reveal the continual exchange of cloths, artefacts and other cultural phenomena from outside and within the region. The Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires, for instance, tells of how some sixty varieties of Indian cloths of differing styles and qualities were available in 1515 in Melaka, once the greatest commercial centre in Southeast Asia but never a significant centre for the origination of arts and crafts. These cloths were traded by Gujarati merchants from northwest India whose ships also carried luxury cloths such as brocades and gold-embroidered velvets obtained from merchants of the Middle East. In the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), which chronicles the rise and fall of the Melaka empire, it is said that the fourth ruler of Melaka, Sultan Mansur Shah (r. 1458–77), being disappointed with the cloths he had ordered from India, sent his envoys back with specific designs that were then created to his satisfaction.

The foreign textiles imported along the ‘water silk route’, together with silk yarns and gold threads from China and India, undeniably inspired and influenced the evolution of uniquely peninsular Malay textiles, in particular silk kain limar (kain means ‘cloth’), based on the sophisticated double ikat technique employed in Indian patola silks, the intricate gold thread-decorated kain songket and, most prestigious of all, the luxurious combination kain limar songket. Checked woven silk introduced by Bugis traders from the Riau Archipelago or the Celebes also enriched the repertoire of Malay handwoven plaid or checked fabrics.

Indian Patola

Of all the imported textiles, the gossamer-like patola cloths from northwest India were to have the greatest influence on textile construction and decoration in the east coast states of the Malay Peninsula and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Unlike in India where these high-status cloths were usually woven in sari dimensions (1 by 5.5. or 6 metres), patola exported to Southeast Asia were mostly in sizes appropriate to local untailored apparel, including sarongs and breast wrappers, shoulder cloths and shawls, head cloths and waist sashes. Although, as in India, their use was largely confined to those of high social position, their design repertoire was to influence not only the patterning produced by the actual process of constructing woven textiles such as kain limar and kain songket on the wooden frame loom, but also the surface decoration of finished cloth such as batik, which, unlike the exclusive woven cloths mentioned above, was made for rulers and commoners alike and was worn by almost all the communities in the region.

The geometrically patterned double-ikat weaves (patola) traded by Gujarati merchants from northwest India from as early as the thirteenth century had a profound influence on the designs of batik sarongs.

The repeat-patterned centrefields on patola, comprising interlocking stylized floral motifs or eight-rayed rosettes set in a modified circle, square or hexagon framed by borders and end panels—the latter often including the ubiquitous triangular bamboo shoot motif (pucuk rebung)—had a profound effect on the design register of woven and printed textiles of Southeast Asia and was undoubtedly patola ’s greatest legacy. In the course of the eighteenth century, block-printed and painted cotton Indonesian imitations of the expensive, prestigious Indian patola imports provided a cheap alternative for customers. Known locally as kain sembagi, the patterns on these cloths show a close relationship to those appearing on Indonesian and, later, Malaysian batik, especially floral rosettes and lattices and triangular end borders.

Traditional Attire

The earliest visual images we have of Malaysia, dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century, are romanticized, sometimes fanciful watercolours and sketches of panoramic views from hills, picturesque waterfalls, elegant mansions, ordered lawns and gardens, perhaps with a few tiny figures, and the occasional thatched Malay village set in a coconut grove. Human interest was minimal. After the arrival of photography in the Malay Peninsula in the early 1860s, Eurocentric images of street scenes, colonial buildings and Europeans predominated, usually for commercial reasons—they were bought by Europeans. The life of the average Malaysian was rarely captured in those days, apart from commercially driven touristic images taken by professional photographers of ‘posed natives in traditional dress’, among them rubber tappers, tin miners, rickshaw pullers, street hawkers and local beauties. This remained so until well into the twentieth century.

The floral rosettes, lattices and triangular end borders on eighteenth-century block-printed and painted cotton Indonesian imitations of India patola, known locally as kain sembagi, were to influence patterns on Indonesian and later Malaysian batik.

The exception was the Malay ruling class (the sultans and rajas and their families and followers) and well-to-do traders and towkays who could afford to engage a photographer or visit a studio, and the British colonial government who desired a photographic record of their periodic conferences with the local rulers. The photographs of the Malay rulers from the 1860s, whether taken with their families, retainers and followers or with British colonial officers, show how traditional Malay dress documented by early foreign travellers such as Ma Huan, Tomé Pires and Duarte Barbosa had survived with few alterations. The nobles are clad in a variety of loose and fitted tunics, loose trousers, long and short sarongs, shoulder cloths and headdresses fashioned from locally handwoven silk kain limar and kain songket and cotton plaids, as well as imported patola. Unlike in Indonesia, batik was never a central element in Malay court dress and so batik clothing is almost always absent in these photographs.

Up until the 1890s when the Sultan of Johor deemed such attire immodest, women would wear the full-length sarong with a separate cloth, called a kemban, tied around their breasts, leaving the shoulders exposed. With the spread of Islam and the influence of Arabic and Indian modes of dress, the sarong came to be worn with a loose knee-length tunic (baju kurung) or a neat-fitting jacket-type tunic, also knee-length (kebaya labuh), made of embroidered voile or organdie or lace yardage, secured down the front with ornamental brooches. For formal wear, the tailored tunics and sarongs of women of noble birth were generally made of handwoven kain songket, with a matching shawl or selendang. Commoner women who could afford it would wear a batik sarong with a baju kurung fashioned from a different and softer fabric.

Up until the 1890s, before it was deemed immodest, Malay women often wore a bodice wrapper (kemban) with their sarongs.

Studio portraits of ‘posed natives in traditional dress’ were common subjects for postcards in the early twentieth century.

Sultan Abdul Samad of Selangor (r. 1857–98) and his entourage in a variety of handwoven cotton and silk tunics and sarongs.

The Enduring Sarong

Azah Aziz, Malaysia’s doyenne of traditional costumes, believes that the sarong is by far the oldest costume in the Malay World and was worn by both men and women on formal and informal occasions long before trousers and baju or jackets and tunics came into being. The sarong is typically a large tube or length of fabric, most often wrapped around the waist and worn as an ankle-length skirt by women. Men would wear it down to the ankles on informal occasions and slightly shorter over loose trousers where formality was involved. The sarong is secured by folding and twisting the upper edge of the cloth so that it fits tightly around the wearer’s body. Women usually fold then twist their sarongs to one side while men fold theirs in front to secure them. As a costume, the sarong is ingenious because it demands no zippers, buttons or pins. In a tropical, humid climate, it is ideal because it is comfortable and airy, allowing air to circulate in the folds covering one’s legs. According to Azah, a family’s status and wealth or poverty were measured by the number of sarongs it possessed.

Locally woven cotton or silk plaid sarongs (kain tenunan) or imported Indian cotton plaids from Pulicat (kain pelekat) are primarily worn by Malay men at home and to the mosque.

The versatile batik and plaid sarong worn in a variety of formal and informal styles, c. 1910–20.

caption goes in here and Ilit prat nos esse minim il dolorper sustin hent acilisl enisl eniscilit nis nulla faccum venibh eraesed tat. Min vulput luptat la augiam quis nibh eugait autpa.

caption goes in here and Ilit prat nos esse minim il dolorper sustin hent acilisl enisl eniscilit nis nulla faccum.

A rattan processor in a stamped batik sarong teamed with a white singlet, his companions in kain pelekat.

The sarong is also a wonderfully versatile garment, whether the ends are sewn to form a tube or left free in the form of a long cloth. In addition to its function as a wrapped skirt, the sarong is used as a head covering, a bathing cloth when folded above the breasts, a baby cradle, a baby sling, a wrapping cloth, a carrying bag, even a makeshift prayer mat. Many Malaysian men and women sleep in a sarong and a blouse or T-shirt. On the east coast of Malaysia, the distinctive headdress of Malay fishermen is an unsewn sarong wrapped around the head in the form of a turban (kain semutar), on which they can carry heavy loads. Later, specially designed square head cloths were sometimes worn. Nowadays, unsewn sarongs are used as tablecloths or fashioned into Western-style skirts, trousers and blouses. In Malaysia, plaid sarongs are invariably associated with men and batik sarongs with women. The growing popularity of the batik sarong from Indonesia was directly responsible for the development of batik in Malaysia.

This shellfish collector wears the distinctive east coast headdress—an unsewn batik sarong wrapped around the head in the form of a turban (kain semutar).

The Peninsular Malay Headdress

Apart from the sarong format, the batik technique was formerly applied to the square head cloth, called tengkolok, worn by men of the Malay Peninsula. Similar in size to the Javanese head cloth (iket) but folded and worn in a different way, it was predominantly patterned with repeated geometric motifs enclosed by multiple borders often containing meandering foliage. The design structure and patterns closely resembled the continuous grid on kain songket.

The Roots of Batik

The roots of batik are ancient, difficult to trace and much debated, with many countries claiming to be the original cradle of the art. The word ‘batik’ itself, meaning ‘to draw with a broken dot or line’, is derived from two words—the Javanese word amba, ‘to draw’, and the Malay word for ‘dot’, titik—but batik has become a generic term referring to a process of dyeing fabric by making use of a resist technique, covering areas of cloth with a dye-resistant substance to prevent them from absorbing colours. Today batik is recognized and practised in many countries by craftsmen and contemporary artists.

It is not exactly known when and where people first applied beeswax, paraffin, rice and other vegetable paste, even mud, to cloth that would then resist a dye. What is known is that the batik process existed in India, China, Japan, Thailand, East Turkestan, Europe and West Africa from ancient times, employing a variety of dye-resist techniques, before it emerged in Indonesia, on the island of Java, in the sixteenth century before the arrival of the Dutch. Here it was to develop into one of the greatest and most enduring art forms of Asia. Here also wax became the dominant resist material used, and here also the canting or stylus was developed and perfected, allowing the drawing of hitherto unknown fine and complex lines of wax on the surface of cloths.

The first known record of batik in Java, on a sixteenth-century lontar palm, refers to tulis (‘to write’), while the word ‘batick’ first appears on a Dutch bill of lading for a shipment of cargo that set sail from Batavia (present-day Jakarta) to Bencoolen (Bengkulen) on the west coast of Sumatra. The first systematic study of batik appears in Thomas Stamford Raffles’ The History of Java, published in 1817, in which Raffles, at that time Lieutenant Governor of the Dutch East Indies, describes in detail various types of clothing and the local techniques of weaving and patterning of cloth. Illustrations in the volume show numerous batik blocks and the designs produced from them.

At the time batik emerged in Java, Southeast Asia was a fluid assemblage of coastal and inland communities that were in constant communication with one another. There was a great deal of reciprocal exchange of goods and ideas, in particular between India and Southeast Asia as Islam spread through the region via Indian and Arab Muslim traders. There is no record, however, of artisans in the Malay Peninsula adopting the process of wax-resist batik making from the Javanese in the sixteenth century. It appears that Javanese batik only became familiar to Malays from the early nineteenth century through the Islamic designs produced especially by artisans from the north coast of Java for a Muslim clientele.

It is generally agreed that the Malays of the peninsula adopted the habit of wearing batik, especially batik sarongs, long before the east coast Malays of Kelantan and Terengganu began making batik themselves. The preference of the people remained for locally woven cotton or silk plaid sarongs (kain tenunan)—the Malay plaid is considered the earliest and most widespread contribution of Malay weavers to Southeast Asian textiles—or imported Indian cotton plaids from Pulicat, known as kain pelekat. The labour-intensive kain songket and kain limar continued to be woven at the behest of sultans or rajas for ceremonial use and other special occasions. Indeed, up until the twentieth century, all Malay women from all sections of society were expected to be skilled at weaving, which may partly explain why surface-decorated cloth took a back seat. But with the increasing availability of cotton from India and England, woven with tight, smooth surfaces on industrial looms that made it possible to stamp designs with precision, as well as chemical dyes in a wide range of colours that did not need to be steeped for long periods, the local weaving industry was driven into decline. As British colonial officer R. O. Winstedt admonished in his pamphlet on ‘Arts and Crafts’ (1909), now was the time for Malays to learn the art of batik from Java.

A selection of the precious Malay hand woven textiles that, in one way or another, exerted an influence on the design register of later machine-woven, surface-decorated batik cloth. From left: a geometric patterned weft ikat silk stole (kain limar) from Kelantan, inspired by Indian patola silks; a silk kain limar stole from Kelantan, combining a red-dyed floral border and a green-dyed badan (body) covered with Islamic script; the kepala (head) of a ceremonial royal sarong from Terengganu, patterned with supplementary metallic gold threads (kain songket), its design featuring the ubiquitous triangular pucuk rebung (bamboo shoot); a woven plaid silk sarong (kain tenunan) from Pahang.

Forerunners of Malay Batik

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Malay artisans did not completely spurn applying designs to the surface of machine-woven cloth, especially as it did not depend on a highly evolved technical level of weaving or dyeing. In a little known publication, Serian Batik, produced by the Malaysian Handicraft Development Corporation in the late 1970s, it is stated that the earliest form of Malay batik was a rudimentary form of resist dyeing that came to be known as batik pelangi. It is attributed to a woman named Minah Pelangi who lived in Terengganu during the 1794–1808 reign of Sultan Zainal Abidin II and was the best-known proponent of the art.

A prototype of Malay batik, batik pelangi (‘rainbow cloth’) was a rudimentary form of tie-and-dye in which patterns were made by stitching and gathering small areas of the cloth before dyeing and, sometimes, painting. The process was repeated for each colour.

The spatial arrangement and bright colours of Indian textiles are apparent in batik pelangi, as are some of the patterns, such as rows of triangles and droplet-shaped paisley figures, locally known as bunga boteh.

Batik Pelangi

Popularly known in India since the eighteenth century as bandhani from the Hindustani word ‘to tie’ and in Indonesia as pelangi or ‘rainbow’ after the colourful end result, batik pelangi was created using a tie-and-dye process in which areas to be left undyed on the cloth were bunched and bound tightly so that the dye could not penetrate. The process was repeated a number of times using a different set of bindings and a different dye each time to achieve a multicoloured rainbow effect. Pelangi textiles closely resembled their Indian prototypes in spatial arrangement, design elements—mostly random abstracts—and range of colours. Because the technique was particularly suited to lightweight machine-woven fabrics, especially silk, as well as to the more garish chemical dyes used in the process, batik pelangi was popularly used for smaller, softer items of apparel, such as head cloths and sashes for men, most often palace dignitaries, or as bodice wrappers for their royal womenfolk.

In a further development of the batik pelangi technique, and a more likely precursor of today’s Malaysian batik, Winstedt, in his pamphlet on ‘Arts and Crafts’, tells of how the random, abstract designs generated by the pure pelangi tie-and-dye technique on already woven cloth evolved into more typical Malay floral scrolls with the use of small wooden stamps carved with only a single flower or a portion of a border.

The stamps were pressed onto a pad comprising a wet rag impregnated with water-soluble red ferruginous earth and applied to the cloth laid on a padded tabletop, the earth washing away during dyeing. The pale red outlines of the designs made by the wooden stamps were stitched and the threads pulled tight to prevent the dye reaching the outlines (a process known in Indonesia as tritik). The nodules protruding from the stitched areas of the cloth were then bound with thread or banana leaf or tree fibres before the cloth was immersed in a dye bath. After the cloth had dried and the stitching and tying were undone, it was stretched on a frame and the white design areas of the cloth that had resisted the dye were brushed with different coloured pigments.

The batik pelangi technique, being particularly suited to the new imported lightweight, machine-woven cloths and to bright chemical dyes, was mostly used for smaller, softer items of clothing, such as stoles, sashes and bodice wraps.

In this 1930s kain pukul (stamped cloth) sarong from Kelantan, black dye is stamped on pale Chinese silk with wooden blocks in imitation of Chinese-influenced lokcan (‘blue silk’) designs from Pekalongan and Lasem in northern Java, characterized by patterns of stylized phoenixes and other mythical creatures, and lines (‘thorns’) protruding from the motifs.

An early single-colour kain pukul sarong featuring pairs of mirror images of the bunga sikat pisang (banana comb motif) on the badan (body).

Kain Pukul and Kain Terap

Evolving from the pelangi technique of applying the outline of a design on machine-woven cloth with a simple wooden stamp, the next logical step towards the development of batik was to print motifs with carved wooden blocks, a process known in Kelantan as kain pukul (stamped cloth) and in Terengganu as kain terap (printed or engraved cloth). Not only was the Malay Peninsula covered with forests, making wood abundant for printing blocks, but there has also been a long tradition among Malay men of making objects from wood, both functional and unadorned and sophisticated and decorative. Another necessary ingredient was the presence of imported cotton cloth with a tight, smooth surface on which an impression could be stamped without being absorbed as was common with loosely compacted handwoven cloth.

In the years leading up to 1920, it is recorded that two visionary and entrepreneurial men on the east coast of the peninsula, Haji Che Su bin Haji Ishak of Kota Bharu, Kelantan, and Haji Ali of Terengganu, were simultaneously experimenting with making a batik-like cloth using wooden blocks (sarang bunga, literally ‘flower nest’) to stamp out repeated designs on white cotton using a bluish-black pigment derived from wood and bark—not wax and therefore not true batik. Although the practice lasted a mere decade, the wooden blocks used by these men would almost certainly have been inspired by the expertise of Malay woodcarvers as well as the patterns observed on the Javanese batik sarongs available for sale on the peninsula. These, according to Winstedt, included ‘batek lesam [Lasem], batek gersek [Gresik] and batik kalongon [Pekalongan]’ after their places of origin along the north coast of Java, as well as the generic ‘batek jawa’. The motifs carved on the wooden blocks in museums and private collections do indeed reveal striking similarities to the floral, faunal, geometric and border motifs prevalent on Javanese sarongs—individual blossoms, large floral bouquets, foliated arabesques, creeping vines and the triangular bamboo shoot (pucuk rebung). Although very few examples remain of this crude printing technique, those that do show repeated floral patterns along the borders of bedsheets, tablecloths, shawls and sarongs. The white background cotton was sometimes dyed or parts of the pattern painted by hand. Azah Aziz says the cloth was often called kain batik Kedah as it was apparently popular in the state of Kedah in the northwest of the peninsula although it was not made there.

Skilled Malay woodcarvers were called upon to create printing blocks, such as this large Pekalongan-style bouquet in a basket.

A collection of early wooden blocks carved with floral, geometric and border motifs, used for decorating the surfaces of imported cotton cloth.

The block-printed pineapple design on this sarong made by SAMASA, Kota Bharu, Kelantan, was inspired by a shirt worn by Sean Connery in one of the 1960s James Bond movies.

Batik Kotak

In a further imitation of the Javanese batik available in the early 1900s, in 1926 two sons of Haji Che Su of Kelantan, Mohd Salleh and Mohd Yusoff, adopted a type of silk-screen method to produce inexpensive ‘batik Jawa’ sarongs featuring the large Pekalongan-style floral bouquets of Java’s north coast. Known as batik kotak (kotak means ‘box’ after the frame used to hold the muslin screen stretched across it), the process required several large screens the size of a sarong, one for each colour to be printed on the cotton fabric. Instead of applying a resist material such as wax or lacquer to the fabric itself, the waxed design was applied direct to the muslin screen in the required pattern and then placed over the cloth. Dye was poured into a frame and forced through with a roller-like implement onto the sheet of cotton fabric underneath. Where the screen was masked by the resist design, the dye was unable to penetrate and reach the fabric. The wooden frame was then lifted clear and the design repeated on a further section of the cloth. Although this type of printing was quick, the setting up of the screens and the drawing of the motifs was time-consuming, which may explain why the process was not widely adopted outside Haji Che Su’s family. The founding of a family business, SAMASA Batik, still in operation today by Haji Che Su’s descendants, signalled the start of batik making as a cottage industry in Kelantan.

The real breakthrough in the development of Malaysian batik came, however, in the 1930s with the widespread adoption in Kelantan and Terengganu of wax stamping utilizing metal blocks. This development was inextricably linked with local production of the batik sarong in imitation of imports from the north coast batik centres of Java, and is the subject of the next chapter.

A combination block-printed/hand-painted 1960s sarong from SAMASA, Kota Bharu, Kelantan, featuring the recurrent Pekalongan-style floral spray on the kepala (head) and badan (body) and an intricate background of small filler leaves.