Photos, a bite to eat, and now just a bit of hanging around while the bride and groom get changed into another set of stunning outfits for the evening reception. The band arrives and tunes up, the caterers get going big style, the organiser and her team (headsets and clipboards) get changed from day wear to evening wear, the photography team set up their lighting and take up their positions in front of the stage. Hoards of gorgeous young women dressed up to the nines in killer heels flirt and have their photos taken with gorgeous young men in sarongs, the man with the microphone tells everyone to take their places and then we’re off for the second half. Now the invited guests start pouring in and the batik being worn is a feast for the eyes. If I felt under-dressed before, I now feel doubly so!
The newly weds head up a procession of their nearest and dearest to the sound of gamelan music, and the music and the sight of them wearing traditional gold wedding cloth and velvet gold couched jackets (look at the photo at the top), and suddenly I’m moved to tears. Now this is a proper Javanese wedding!
We hundreds of guests slowly make our way up onto the stage to shake hands and congratulate the parents and the happy couple.
After that its time to sit and eat some very superior nosh (but no alcohol of course) and compare these two family weddings twenty years apart. The bride and her female relatives (apart from Niken who is Christian) all wear head coverings – twenty years ago, the women wore their hair in traditional buns with elaborate hairpins. This wedding had none of the old rituals I remember either, the groom breaking an egg with his foot and the bride washing his feet before he enters the wedding, the kowtowing to parents, the mutual sharing of ritual dishes, the exchange of batik cloth. As Niken had told me, this is a modern Muslim wedding.
This is a sign of how many things are changing in modern Java, the most obvious change being the increasing influence of conventional Islam. Back in the 1980s it was hardly noticeable that Java was Muslim, the call to prayer was muted, most women were bare headed and the prevailing guiding spirit at any life event was “Kejawin” a mix of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, the authentic home-grown spirit of Java.
Thirty years later, things have changed: the mosque’s loudspeakers are never far out of earshot, the wayang, the kris and the gamelan are fading in popularity and the “jilbab” scarf is worn by more than half of women and its on the increase. Jim objects strongly to the jilbab on purely aesthetic grounds if nothing else – they’re often made of beige polyester!
The other thing that’s changed is that we’ve all gone up in the world so much! We were all just little batik sellers back in the day and our kids played in the gangs, now our friend’s children go to Universities abroad, buy land and build houses and studios. We have friends who can afford to put on a wedding like this!
The other change is the number of cars on the road and as we finally make our way out into the warm Javanese night, we are faced with the pressing problem of how to get home through a gridlocked city on New Year’s Eve!
And if you’d like a look, we have some great Javanese wedding cloth on the website. |
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