Article

Curating Shadows: Malayan Shadow Puppets in Singapore's Asian Civilisations Museum

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Curating Shadows: Malayan Shadow Puppets in Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum

Abstract

Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum houses a large collection of shadow puppets from Malaysia, but very little is known about them except that the originated in Kelantan during the period of British colonial rule. Scant records exist explaining how they ended up in the museum’s ethnographic holdings, or the social significance of the collection for the museum and for Kelantanese theatrical arts. Examining the puppets through both an aesthetic and curatorial lens allows us to expand our knowledge of museology and cross-cultural encounters, and contributes to discussions on the interrelationship between history, the performing arts, and the politics of collecting at the periphery of colonial Malaya.

Summary

Johnson and Lim undertake a close iconographic and curatorial reading of the 146 Malayan shadow puppets held in Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum, a collection whose provenance is largely obscured by the haphazard record-keeping of the former Raffles Library and Museum. The central problem they address is one of epistemic loss: because the RLM’s director Cecil Boden Kloss dismissed the registration of small ethnographic accessions as “unnecessary routine work,” and because records were further eroded by the Second World War and institutional relocations, the social histories of how these puppets entered the collection have been almost entirely effaced. Only a handful of figures carry named donor attributions, leaving the bulk of the collection as a kind of archival silence that the authors attempt to fill through material analysis of the puppets themselves.

The authors argue that the puppets function as inscribed texts bearing the traces of multiple cultural encounters—between Kelantanese court and village, between Thai Buddhist and Malay Muslim aesthetic traditions, and between local practitioners and the colonial museum apparatus. By distinguishing between Kota Bharu and Tumpat iconographic styles (particularly in the rendering of Hanuman), and by tracing the introduction of the sayap sandang (curved “wings”) onto royal male figures, they demonstrate how local-level artistic transformations in Kelantan during the 1920s and 1930s were shaped by court patronage, the establishment of the Kampung Temenggung Arts Centre, and cross-ethnic theatrical collaborations. These transformations were then captured, decontextualised, and stored by the colonial museum, where they now exist as ethnographic specimens rather than living performance objects.

The article positions itself at the intersection of museology, art history, and the history of colonial knowledge production. It draws on the RLM’s annual reports, accession registers, MBRAS membership records, and press coverage to reconstruct the networks through which puppets moved from Kelantanese homes and courts into Singapore’s museum walls, foregrounding the roles of individuals such as Tengku Khalid, Anker Rentse, and Frederick Chasen as active agents in a process of colonial placemaking.

Key Findings

  • The ACM’s Southeast Asian puppet compendium totals 713 pieces, of which 372 were procured from the former Raffles Library and Museum; the Malayan subset comprises 146 puppets (132 wayang siam, 5 Thai nang talung, 9 indeterminate possibly representing the extinct wayang gedek genre) (p. 52).
  • Only 9 of the 147 Malayan puppets in the ACM have clearly accessioned RLM records; the remaining 123 wayang siam puppets are of uncertain origin, a gap attributed to Kloss’s 1924 dismissal of small-accession registration and to data loss during the war (pp. 57–58).
  • Tengku Khalid bin Tengku Bendahara donated 9 wayang siam puppets in 1932, recorded by assistant curator Herbert Dennis Collings; a 12 March 1946 correspondence indicates the donation was made to MBRAS member William Linehan, British assistant adviser in Kota Bharu (1931–33) (p. 59).
  • Anker Rentse, a Danish MBRAS member and long-time Kelantan resident, donated a complete set of wayang siam puppets to the RLM, receiving coverage in the 1935 and 1936 annual reports but no entry in the accession registry; he had earlier donated 150 puppets to the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen in 1931 (pp. 58–59).
  • The sayap sandang (curved “wings” attached at the waist of royal male figures) is absent from the Tengku Khalid puppets of 1932 but present on later ACM figures, supporting a dating of the style’s widespread adoption to the late 1930s or after; Sheppard attributed its introduction to Tengku Temenggung post-Bangkok visit, while Foley credited the puppeteer Yakob in the 1940s–50s (pp. 63–65).
  • The ACM’s 123 unattributed wayang siam puppets include a disproportionately large number of fanged ogre generals (29 figures), 19 animals, and 23 monkey generals/kings, with several figures stylistically predating the 1930s and closely resembling puppets in the National Museum in Kuala Lumpur attributed to the maker Wan Su (pp. 66–67).

Conclusion

Johnson and Lim conclude that the ACM’s Malayan puppet collection is not a neutral repository of “traditional” artefacts but a palimpsest of colonial and local agency, in which the act of collecting was inseparable from the social prestige of MBRAS membership, the Kelantanese court’s own project of artistic legitimisation under modernist Islam, and the epistemological imperatives of the colonial museum. The puppets’ material forms—particularly the divergence between Kota Bharu and Tumpat styles and the cross-ethnic borrowing of nuuraa aesthetics into wayang siam iconography—encode a history of cultural negotiation that the museum’s own records failed to capture, making the objects themselves the primary evidence for a history that official documentation left unwritten.

Context

  • The study draws on the Raffles Library and Museum accession registers and annual reports (1921–1936), MBRAS membership and correspondence records, Straits Times press coverage, and comparative iconographic analysis against collections at the British Museum, Pitt Rivers Museum, Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen.
  • Historiographically, the article extends the work of Alexandra Green (2018) on the British Museum’s wayang siam collection and Matthew Isaac Cohen’s (2017) politics of Javanese puppet display by shifting focus to the Malayan periphery of colonial collecting and by treating the puppets’ material forms as primary historical sources in their own right, rather than merely as objects to be contextualised by external texts.

References