Titania Veda

A scene from a theater production of La Galigo. (SP Photo)

Epic Fight to Save ‘La Galigo’

Roger Tol talking about “La Galigo.” (Photo: Titania Veda, JG)

Since the 1800s, literary scholars have attempted to preserve “La Galigo” — a piece of Indonesian literature written in the dying language of the Buginese of South Sulawesi, and which experts call the longest ethnic document in the world, exceeding even the Hindu epic “Mahabharata.”

Major threats to “La Galigo” include the tropical climate, which causes documents to deteriorate rapidly, and the loss of people who comprehend the language and script used to record the epic.

Roger Tol, an expert on Bugis literature and director at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Jakarta (KITLV), gave a talk in May on the epic.

“ ‘La Galigo’ is basically an origin story, the myth of origin. It’s perceived by the Bugis as containing moral lessons on how they should conduct their lives,” Tol said.

The corpus tells the history of the world from the gods through their descendants, spanning many generations and focusing on Sawerigading, crown prince of the Luwuq Kingdom, which is seen as the cradle of Bugis culture.

Written circa 14th century and thus predating the 17th century arrival of Islam to Sulawesi, the collected work is estimated to total 6,000 folio pages, containing 300,000 lines of verse. It was written in an archaic form of the Buginese language, which is now only used in traditional wedding ceremonies.

“It is a dead language, an old language seldom used that is based on Sanskrit and our old language,” said Muhammad Salim, a native Bugis and “La Galigo” translator.

“The common folk, the old people who preserved it, are almost all dead. Among the young, there are none who can speak it.”

Originating from oral tradition, “La Galigo” was handwritten, using 24 characters that resemble hieroglyphics, Tol said. He attributed the disappearance of the written language to the rise of printing, as the indigenous script would have been difficult to reproduce.

The lion’s share of the known manuscripts are in the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, while fragments of others are scattered throughout libraries around Europe. A collection of about 600 pages is also part of the library of the Cultural Foundation of South and Southeast Celebes, in Makassar.

The introduction of “La Galigo” to the outside world began with John Leyden, a Scottish poet and linguist, who in 1808 first documented the epic as a Bugis work. In 1939, Dutch philologist R.A. Kern went further and undertook the arduous task of summarizing the epic episode-by-episode, resulting in a 1,400-page catalog titled “Episodes of the Buginese Epic I La Galigo”.

In 1987, a project to translate “La Galigo” into Bahasa Indonesia was launched and funded by KITLV in collaboration with the Prince Claus Fund. Twelve volumes of the epic were translated into Indonesian by Salim, who was then head of the Department of Culture in the Sidrap district of South Sulawesi. However, due to setbacks in funding, only two of the 12 volumes were published. The 12 volumes only constitute one-third of the complete epic. “Galigo I,” the first volume, was printed in 1995 and “Galigo II” followed five years later.

“This means the Bugis people can understand ‘La Galigo’ line by line,” Tol said. “Not only as summaries or overviews, but word by word, to be able to enjoy its cadence and poetic rhythm.”

He hopes the remaining 10 volumes will be published with funding from the Indonesian Ministry of Culture and Tourism. “There are plans by the ministry to fund the project, but so far I have not seen any implementation.”

Though there is an overall coherence and unity throughout the epic, Tol said, for it to have been written by a single author verges on the impossible.

“With oral tradition, we may think it’s memorizing but it’s actually composition on the spot. Storytellers may be able to memorize, but not 6,000 pages. They’ll memorize the storyline, the protagonist, know the language, special vocabulary, and use parallelism and repetitions.”

Since 2004, with Tol as an adviser, acclaimed New York theater director Robert Wilson has taken a theater production, “I La Galigo,” to an international audience, with performances in Jakarta, Singapore, Europe, America, Australia and Taiwan.

Gentille “Illenk” Andilolo has played the title character, I La Galigo, in all performances. “I am happy that those who did not know about this part of Bugis culture before, know of it now,” said Illenk, who is himself of Bugis descent. “The sad part is why didn’t our own people think of it? ‘La Galigo’ was thought to be something of no value, the Bugis didn’t even glance at it. Now, they realize its value.”

“La Galigo” was nominated for the Unesco Memory of the World Register by Tol and Mukhlis Paeni, a historical expert on South Sulawesi and the chairman of the Indonesian Historical Society, in 2008, and they will resubmit an updated application in March 2010. The applications are on behalf of the MOW Indonesia committee.

“When it was first nominated, the documentation wasn’t complete since ‘La Galigo’ is scattered around the globe,” said Endang Rusmiyati, head of the scientific information division for the Indonesian Institute of Sciences and an MOW member.

“It will be easier, once it is a Memory of the World, to find funding for the preservation of ‘La Galigo,’ ” she said.

In 2002, the La Galigo Study Center was established at Hasanuddin University in Makassar by Nurhayati Rahman, head of the Social Sciences and Humanities Division at the university’s Center for Research and who helped edit “Galigo II.”

“I established the study center because there were none in the universities,” she said. “There were no publications or library and documentation departments about the culture of South Sulawesi.

“The revitalization of ‘La Galigo’ is a large part of the center. We advocate and explain that this culture is dying because of the Internet and globalization. If we don’t study this, it will be a risky thing because our identity will be in jeopardy. Thankfully, our students have shown an interest and are inspired.

“We are returning the heritage of ‘La Galigo’ to the lap of its owners.”

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