Pentjak Silat -- also spelled "pencak," with the "c" now taking the "tj" sound, for reasons having to do with Dutch colonialism and Indonesian nationalism -- is a fighting art from Southeast Asia.
There are myriad variants of this stuff. Every other village -- maybe all of 'em -- in Indonesia has its own homegrown style, hundreds, maybe thousands of different one used to exist. Many of these have been lost, many more homoginized and blended into others.
I'll speak generally here, with the caveat that such generalizations don't cover all the specifics -- there are exceptions.
Without going back to the beginning of recorded history, a brief bit of background.
First, the term: Pentjak silat means "the motions of fighting." The first word refers more to the form it takes, the second, to fighting per se. And it's a fairly new term. A hundred years ago, that wasn't what it was called. Just as Native Americans called themselves by their tribes -- Sioux, or Apache, for instance, and then subdivided those names into others -- Lakota or Chiricahua or Mescalero -- and there were no "Indians," thus did the Malaysians and Indonesians names their local arts.
While there were indigenous arts, usually based on the blade, Indonesians were and still are big on incorporating useful techniques from other styles. Thus the Chinese-Indonesian communuity's fighting art, based on what is usually called kung-fu, though that's another whole ball of wax, and called kun-tao, was often blended into what would eventually be called penjtak silat. Until the Dutch were kicked out of Indonesia, many silat schools went by the generic term of kun-tao or bersilat. And everybody would borrow stuff from everybody else -- if they thought it worked.
A fighter who saw move that worked, of course he'd swipe it. All martial arts have a thief in them somewhere, even the original one, whatever it might be, where moves of animals were often copied.
Um. Anyway, to shorten the story, the version of this art I study is called Pukulan Penjak Silat Sera(k). (There is some controversy about the "k," and I won't go into it here. But it is silent anyhow, so the final word is pronounced "Seh-rah," and that "r" is soft.)
This art comes from Java, more specifically western Java, and is probably a variation of Tjimande (aka "Cimande"), which is one of the oldest and most-practiced of the Javanese fighting systems. There is much contention about this, too, but this is what we believe. Anybody living in that region of the country would have likely come across Tjimande, and if they didn't steal from it, that would be unusual.
The art is named for the creator, known as Bapak Sera, which is yet another point of argument.
Silat Sera was brought to this country by the brothers de Thouars, Dutch-Indonesians, of whom there are still three living in the U.S.: Paul, Willem, and Victor. There is another brother, Maurice, and various cousins living in Holland.
In our style, Paul is the most senior U.S. teacher, and is given the honorific "Pendekar." This is a loaded word with a lot of different meanings, depending on whom is doing the defining, but suffice it to say that for my purpose here, it means he's the head of the system.
The brothers are a contentious and cantankerous lot (as silat players generally seem to be) and currently most of them a) aren't talking to each other b) aren't talking to their own senior-most students.
One of Paul de Thouars senior-most students is Stevan Plinck, also Dutch-Indonesian, born in Holland, but raised in the U.S. Many in the art consider Stevan to be Paul's finest and most accomplished student, me among them.
Stevan is my teacher. I've been training for something over ten years now.
Generally, teachers in silat are referred to in the U.S. as "Guru." Sometimes "Maha Guru," which in our context, means a particularly-gifted teacher, even though that is not the literal meaning in Bahasa Indonesian. Good teachers don't call themselves "Maha," but sometimes their students like to show a certain level of respect, and will use the term. I do so, and if people don't like it, too bad.
The art arrived here with the brothers in the early 1960's, and was considered a "closed door" system for some years, i.e., it was not offered to the public at large, but only to select students, who were usually Indonesians or Dutch-Indos.
Eventually, that changed. Daughter-arts, essentially stripped-down versions of the mother art of Sera(k) were developed by Paul and Victor, and used to screen American students. If you stayed long enough to master the skinny daughter, you might be introduced to the more voluptuous mother, as it were.
Our version of the art looks something like a combination of wing-chun boxing and grappling, though it is neither, the principles being radically different. It is based on the knife, and -- generally -- involves closing, smothering the attack, striking as necessary, and finishing with a takedown or throw. There is groundwork, and it is designed to deal with armed, multiple opponents.
To read more about it, go to Maha Guru Plinck's website, and check out the pages that Todd Ellner and Tiel Jackson have graciously put there: http://www.pencaksilat.com/
A few words about the image: Paul's logo is a garuda (eagle) with a tiger's head emerging from the bird's chest, with the eagle's talons wrapped around a pair of traditional Indonesian weapons, short tridents that are somewhat like the Japanese sai.
Stevan's logo honors the design, but changes it to American tropes: The bird is a red-tailed hawk, the cat is a mountain lion, and there is a Bowie knife and a trident in the hawk's talons.
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