Is it a keris handle and when yes from where?

[A. G. Maisey]

In my Post #6 I commented that I did not understand what Hales had meant by "---of this type---".

For me, the "type" of all these hilts is the Kakatua or cockatoo type, & I've seen a lot of kakatua hilts, not necessarily only on keris, I've seen them on various other sundry knives and even as a handle for a dheplokan.

The hilt style that is being called "serindit" is for me a kakatua type, maybe a sub-type.

The connection of cockatoos with the ancestors, the dead, the Hidden World is pretty widespread in SE Asia, so it is easy to understand how it became a hilt motif.

These hilts with the kakatua motif that began this discussion have synthesized into a humanoid figure. Possibly "morph" might be a better word than "synthesize", as "morph" indicates a gradual change, "synthesize" is simply to combine. But to use "morph" we would need a lot of examples of the kakatua type of hilt that demonstrates the gradual change from bird motif to humanoid motif.

In any case, whether the kakatua type of hilt gained humanoid characteristics gradually (which I personally believe is the case), or by a process of synthesis, we do have examples of kakatua type hilts with humanoid characteristics, something that is easy to understand and something that I have seen, whether very clearly defined, or merely suggested, in more examples than the two old ones earlier in this thread. Even if we look at modern examples of the kakatua type where the bird motif is very dominant, nobody needs a real lot of imagination to see the movement of wings & feet towards arms & legs.

I think it becomes a matter of interpretation, based upon examples of the kakatua motif already encountered, and not limited to just keris. Perhaps Hales did mean "kakatua style expressed as ancestor figure", and that idea, taken in isolation, might seem to indicate extreme rarity, but taken against a wider background, not really so rare.

Based upon what I know of the way in which Javanese & Balinese craftsmen work, the finished piece of art does not necessarily represent the idea in the artist's mind when he started to produce the art work, the finished item can be dictated by the material, or by other factors, as one carver said to me:- "--- I'm not thinking about what I'm carving, I just let my hands work ---". This sort of expresses the idea that the thing being carved is already present in the material, all that is required is for the artist to remove the excess material that covers it.