The tradition of writing on lontar leaf is at least a thousand years old in Bali. Lontar resembles copper plates because the leaf produces a writing material of long, thin strips that contain typically four lines of writing. Sometimes the text consists of two lines of writing and drawings illustrating the contents.The production of writing material from the palmyra palm was, until the twentieth century, a cottage industry. Mature leaves were harvested during the dry season, which occurs in Bali between May and October. A long process of washing, drying, pressing, smoothing, trimming, and polishing produces a medium for incising with an iron stylus. A black paste is smeared over the leaves, then wiped off, leaving the writing blackened and more easily seen against the brown color of the leaves. The leaves are perforated with three holes and bound together to keep the pages in sequence. Hard covers, often decorated, protect the leaves. Lontar manuscripts are placed in boxes or bags and kept in temples, special pavilions, or an offering shelf in the northeast corner of the owner’s house. Lontar manuscripts exist in Sanskrit, Old Javanese, and Modern Balinese languages. They can be quite short business documents, recording names of village council members, regulations on rice cultivation and irrigation, and instructions for cock-fighting. Some contain diplomatic correspondence between Bali’s courts. There are manuals of rituals, medical knowledge, and explanations of the divination properties of letters of the alphabet. Longer texts recount family genealogies and the descent of kings, histories of kingdoms, and stories that derive from Indian epics.

Throughout the archipelago communities have made lontar from the
leaves of various palm trees, such as the sugar and coconut palms which
grow in rainy areas, as well as from leaves of the palmyra from the drier regions of the eastern archipelago. Some villages also produced a coarse paper from the inner bark of trees. Other writing materials were bamboo and the treated skins of goats. Letters were written on these materials either with a knife or with a pen fashioned from the rib of a leaf or bamboo.

Writing with a pen required the manufacture of inks from soot and tree
resins. Ink pots and book stands were also necessities for the professional writer. Paper made from tree bark was flexible for rolling into scrolls. Stories and illustrations were penned on scrolls, which were slowly unfolded to show listeners the pictures as the reader chanted the text, often to the accompaniment of a drum.Palm leaves, best used in strips, were suitable for the regular lines of the kawi script. In reading sessions which have been observed and recorded over the past three hundred years, lontar leaves are laid flat on a low table or offering tray when they are read. A group of men take turns to recite or sing the contents and explain its meaning in everyday language. Rituals of making offerings, burning incense, and reciting special prayers precede reading as well as the copying of texts.

Lontar manuscripts have a lifetime of about two hundred years. Damaged texts are disposed of by cremation. The Balinese lontar tradition persisted into the twentieth century. In addition to copying and recopying old texts produced in Bali, Balinese writers preserved texts originally composed in Java by this same process of copying. Balinese lontar preserve selected texts from a Javanese cultural form after it ceased to exist in Java. Balinese lontar remind us that writing on perishable tree leaves existed side by side with writing on stone and metal. The surviving inscriptions from Java, therefore, probably represent only one part of a much larger written record.

Popularity: 12% [?]

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...