Hear the word “shadow” and one’s mind immediately goes to the realms of the unreal — the illusory, the insubstantial, the image that flits momentarily against a surface before dissolving into the light. Such associations contrast starkly with the alluring physicality of the Javanese shadow puppetry form known as wayang kulit. The tanned buffalo hides out of which the puppets are crafted, the coconut oil traditionally used to grease the screen, the percussive plink of the orchestral accompaniment that registers as much on the skin as in the ear: it is no wonder that wayang kulit has been drawing audiences for over a thousand years to see performances that can stretch from night all the way into morning.

While modern scholarship on wayang kulit emphasizes the artform’s rich multisensory nature, early encyclopedias on the tradition focused overwhelmingly on the narrative aspects of its stories, which are often drawn from Hindu epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Such books gained popularity in the nineteenth century and are still produced today, where they are typically purchased as collector’s items for aficionados and as study materials for apprentice puppeteers learning the ropes. As the historian Miguel Escobar Varela has documented, these early encyclopedias were not mere neutral observers of the artform but had a demonstrable real-world effect on their subject matter. European scholars, for instance, likely introduced the notion that each wayang kulit story possessed an authoritative Ur-version, muscling out variants in favor of narrative homogeneity over time.

One such early wayang encyclopedia is Darah Bharata, verzameling van hoofdpersonen uit de Wajang Poerwa (Darah Bharata, collection of the main characters from Wayang Purwa, 1919), which features elegant illustrations by the Javanese artist Raden Soelardi. His work faithfully captures the puppets’ striking formal characteristics: T-shaped torsos; long, slender arms; and elaborate jewelry and patterned clothing, which puppet-makers execute via hand-tooling. Soelardi’s illustrations also reproduce the puppets’ vivid coloration and gilding — audiences at wayang kulit performances are not restricted to viewing the figures from the “shadow side” but often elect to sit behind the screen, where such details are indeed visible.

Soelardi was prolific across artistic disciplines: as well as being a palace painter and shadow-puppet maker, he penned Serat Riyanta (Story of Riyanta, 1920), often considered the first “true” Javanese novel, and was a court musician who made an important early attempt to transcribe the complex gamelan pieces that accompany Javanese theater.

Darah Bharata was published by the Commissie voor de Volkslectuur, a government office set up to disseminate — and control — vernacular literature in the Dutch East Indies. In the 1920s, wayang kulit was the subject of much interest and debate among Volkslectuur officials, who sought to use the theater to counter growing support for communism and self-governance. In a parallel move, during Japanese rule of the islands (1942–45), occupying forces attempted to seed propagandistic messaging into wayang kulit performances of the Mahabharata by pressuring puppeteers to give a more prominent role to the sun god, Surya — a nod to Japan’s self-conception as the “land of the rising sun” and to the imperial family’s mythic descent from the Shintō sun goddess.

Early shadow puppetry compendia were primarily aimed at two groups. On the one hand, there were Dutch-language books for colonial scholars, who often fixated on the genre’s supposed indebtedness to Indian theater, casting wayang kulit as a corruption of “pure” source material. On the other hand, there were Javanese-language texts aimed at an autochthonous readership composed of ardent connoisseurs and masters of the form. It was not until 1949 — the year that the Dutch finally relinquished their bloody grip on colonial rule — that an encyclopedia was made available in Bahasa Indonesia for the first time, introducing an Indonesian (but not necessarily Javanese) audience to an artform that would soon become a national symbol of cultural achievement and pride.