As Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof was manning his family textile shop along Chulia Street in Penang one fateful day in March 1970, he was pleasantly surprised to see Hamzah Sendut walking in.

The last time Ghulam-Sarwar had seen the former lecturer was when he graduated from the University of Malaya (UM) in 1964.

Hamzah was then the master of UM’s First College, where Ghulam-Sarwar had been a member of the junior common room committee that ran the college.

Striding alongside Hamzah was S Kandasamy who had just been roped in by the former to be the assistant registrar of the newly established Science University of Malaysia.

Hamzah had been appointed its first vice-chancellor in late 1969 and had been tasked with getting Malaysia’s second university off the ground.

After the usual exchange of pleasantries, and after the duo had informed Ghulam-Sarwar that they were shopping for clothes for Kandasamy, Hamzah asked: “What are you doing here?”

When Ghulam-Sarwar told him he was helping his father at the shop, Hamzah shot back: “Don’t waste your time here. Come and join us.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Well, you can start a performing arts programme under the humanities department.”

“What the hell is performing arts?” asked the startled Ghulam-Sarwar who, after graduating in English in 1964, had taught at the Methodist Boys School for three years before his father made him quit and join the family textile trade.

Ghulam-Sarwar, who relished this opportunity to get out of the textile business, confided he’d like to teach English instead but Hamzah said they’d already got someone else for that job.

“Come and help set up the programme and after one or two years, we can think about you joining the English department.”

And so in June 1970, Ghulam-Sarwar, whose knowledge of performing arts was limited to what he had learned at a major conference on Southeast Asian music and theatre at UM in 1969, set about establishing the country’s first performing arts programme.

Neither he nor Hamzah suspected then that Ghulam-Sarwar’s name would one day be etched in the halls of learning as Malaysia’s most distinguished scholar of traditional Malay performing arts, as well as a leading international specialist in traditional Southeast Asian theatre.

Today, he is the director of The Asian Cultural Heritage Centre Berhad, a private research initiative set up by him to promote research in traditional Asian cultures, and the author of numerous academic papers, poems and books — both fiction and non-fiction.

At USM, Ghulam-Sarwar quickly got to work creating courses for the performing arts programme.

He brought in thespians Kishen Jit and Vijayasamara Wickrama, who was into children’s theatre, to teach practical courses part-time while he took care of the theoretical aspects of the programme.

In 1973, Hamzah told him to do a Master’s followed by a PhD in performing arts, saying: “If you do this, you will be the pioneer in the country.”

Ghulam-Sarwar didn’t want to do western theatre and sought the advice of the dean of the school of humanities, Professor Robert Van Neil, who told him to confer with visiting professor James Brandon of the University of Hawaii (UH) who was scheduled to arrive soon.

Brandon, then the world authority on Southeast Asian theatre, advised him to study at UH.

Noting that Ghulam-Sarwar was not keen on doing a Master’s course, returning home and then going again to do a PhD, Brandon suggested he write to the university to go direct to the PhD programme.

Initially, his application was rejected as his first degree was English and he had no theatre experience but Brandon, who was by then back in Hawaii, managed to convince the university to accept him.

The Malaysian also received a scholarship from the East-West Centre of Hawaii.

At UH, he did courses in acting, directing, technical theatre, western theatre history, Indian theatre, ancient history of Southeast Asia, and visual arts, among others, and also learned how to play the gamelan.

Ghulam-Sarwar was game for anything and took all sorts of short courses as well, including archaeology, yoga and photography.

After hearing about the Ramayana, he found a professor teaching the Vedas and Upanishads and asked him to teach the Ramayana but the latter said it was not part of the course he was conducting.

However, he agreed to personally teach the Ramayana to Ghulam-Sarwar once a week.

“I read all I could about Ramayana in Southeast Asia. He was an expert on India and the Ramayana. So once a week, we’d meet and he’d learn from me and I’d learn from him. There was no exam but at the end of the course, he asked me to write a paper which I did,” he tells me.

Today, Ghulam-Sarwar is an expert on Ramayana theatre in Southeast Asia. He has visited countries such as India, Indonesia and Thailand to research how the Ramayana is performed and has written about 20 papers on this.

Ghulam-Sarwar is the only scholar of the Muslim faith presenting papers on the Ramayana at international forums.

Last year, he was invited to contribute to the Global Ramayana Encyclopaedia, a 50-volume project and he has agreed to write on the Ramayana in Malaysia.

And for his PhD thesis, the Malaysian chose the Mak Yong dance-drama popular in Kelantan. As no one at UH had heard of the Mak Yong, he had to forage for material and put up a show to enable the professors to decide.

The Parit Buntar-born then contacted ethnomusicologist prof William P Malm of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbour, who had presented a paper on the Mak Yong at the 1969 Southeast Asian music and theatre festival at UM.

The 100-plus hours of recordings Malm had done on the Mak Yong in Kelantan in 1968 proved invaluable, and Malm himself came down to Hawaii to teach music students the Mak Yong music so that the show could be as authentic as possible.

It proved a success and Ghulam-Sarwar was allowed to do his dissertation on the Mak Yong.

Upon returning to Malaysia in early 1975, he moved to Kelantan to do fieldwork for his PhD. He did research until November that year, meeting Mak Yong performers and watching every performance that he could.

He later spent two weeks in Indonesia before flying back to Hawaii to present his thesis.

Ghulam-Sarwar, armed with a PhD in Asian Theatre, returned to USM in 1976 where, after 10 years of existence, the programme he started was turned into a faculty, becoming known as Pusat Pengajian Seni or School of the Arts.

Ghulam-Sarwar introduced wayang kulit or shadow play to USM. He frequently flew in dalang Hamzah Awang Amat from Kelantan to teach his students.

He himself took the opportunity to interview and document Hamzah’s rich skills and knowledge.

Working with several Mak Yong performers such as the famous Khadijah Awang, Ghulam-Sarwar helped create interest in the Mak Yong again.

Together with Hamzah and Khadijah, who played a central role in reviving interest in the Mak Yong, he taught students of Aswara, the National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage.

Although his research and promotion of Mak Yong and the wayang kulit ran counter to the Kelantan PAS government’s policy of erasing pre-Islamic influences or at least diminishing their importance, he continued his passion.

I ask him about it and he says: “In the 60s and 70s, there was no problem, although there were not many performances as you couldn’t earn anything from it. Only in the 80s did Mak Yong performers face problems with the Kelantan government.

“In fact, while I was doing my early research in Kelantan, there was a Mak Yong performance every night except Thursdays during a month-long Pesta at the Kota Bharu town padang. The pesta was an official function. I was there every day to watch the Mak Yong performances.”

From the 80s, traditional art forms which had Hindu or Buddhist influences were rigorously discouraged by the Islamist Kelantan government. In 1998, there was an outright ban on Mak Yong, wayang kulit and other such art forms by the PAS state government.

Ghulam-Sarwar himself had several run-ins with the Kelantan authorities over the performances he helped stage.

However, in 2005, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) proclaimed Mak Yong as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

The nomination sent to Unesco was prepared by Ghulam-Sarwar on behalf of the then ministry of culture, arts and heritage.

Following calls from various people and organisations, including the UN, the Kelantan government lifted the ban on Mak Yong in 2019 but insisted the performances must be shariah-compliant.

That, of course, changes the character of Mak Yong.

In 2002, Ghulam-Sarwar joined Universiti Malaya’s Cultural Centre as a professor. He was a visiting professor at the University of The Philippines during a year’s sabbatical from UM.

From 2009 to 2014, he served as a senior academic fellow at the International Islamic University of Malaysia.

Apart from traditional Asian theatre, his major interests include Asian literature, folklore studies, as well as South- and Southeast Asian cultures, comparative religion, mythology and Sufism.

“I have published poetry, drama as well as short stories. I’ve done a translation of Kalidasa’s Sanskrit play Shakuntala as well as translations of Urdu poetry into English. I’m currently translating ghazal into English, as well as an anthology of Islamic literature.”

But the world knows him more as the repository of invaluable knowledge about Southeast Asian traditional theatre and performing arts and one of those working to preserve the Mak Yong, wayang kulit and other traditional Malay arts.

His Dictionary of Traditional Southeast Asian Theatre, published by Oxford University Press in 1994, has become an indispensable reference book.

And today, Ghulam-Sarwar himself is considered the foremost authority on traditional Malay performing arts and the specialist in Southeast Asian traditional theatre.

Not bad for a man who once asked: “What the hell is performing arts?”