Running a silat perguruan often feels like standing at a junction where every direction comes with criticism. Do too little and people say the art is no longer effective. Do too much and others say you’ve lost the adab, sold out, or become “too Western.” I’ve sat in both conversations, sometimes on the same week, and the tension is real. This isn’t about picking a side. It’s about the practical dilemmas many of us face when we try to keep the art alive without bankrupting ourselves, injuring students, or getting torn apart by the community that claims to love it.
One of the sharpest points is safety versus realism. Techniques that can genuinely injure people, certain throws, neck related applications, hard sparring, are not theoretical. A few years ago PERSILAT itself adjusted rules around dangerous throwing techniques because the risk was recognised. Yet for a small school the calculation is blunt. If a student ends up in hospital the instructor often carries the financial and emotional weight. I’ve seen older teachers get blamed by parents when a child couldn’t attend school for weeks. In places like Singapore, where liability is high and most of us are small players, that risk is not abstract. At the same time adult students, especially those working in security, are not asking to become professional fighters. They want training that is relevant to their reality. The question then becomes which silat, taught how, for whom. Effectiveness cannot be judged without looking at the type of training and the people in front of you. Pretending every class must look like hard combat, or that every class must stay purely formal, misses this.
Resources sit at the centre of the dilemma. Safe intense training needs mats, protective gear, space, and time. Those things cost money. Yet the moment fees are mentioned the old refrain appears. Teaching silat must be ikhlas. Student numbers drop when payment is requested. So the instructor is left choosing between under equipped classes that cannot safely push realism, or sustainable classes that invite accusations of commercialising the art. Segmentation is one practical response. Tradition has its place, sport silat has its place, applied fighting and sparring have theirs. Sparring will involve clinching, scrambling, and contact. Insisting on formal adab language inside every sparring session often creates confusion rather than clarity. Separating the contexts allows each to be trained properly instead of forcing everything into one mould that satisfies no one.
Modernisation brings its own friction. When some of us rebrand or restructure material for seminars, combining what we were permitted to share by our teachers with complementary systems while keeping full lineage transmission separate, the reaction from certain quarters is predictable. It is labelled “silat ala Barat,” “no adab,” or “not real.” The intention was often the opposite. To avoid casually giving sanad to people who have not earned it, while still making useful training accessible. Behind the scenes the comments still travel. Many of the louder traditional objections come from an older generation whose assumptions have not adjusted to how people actually live and train today. Concepts such as “silat is not for showing off” make marketing and recruitment almost impossible. “Don’t charge properly” leaves teachers asking how they are supposed to eat. “Deadly techniques only on dummies” is sensible, yet it sits beside the claim that gym work or fitness is unnecessary. These positions protect certain ideas, but they also limit who can sustain a school and who can train consistently.
The sport and modern side carries its own problems. Treating competition experience as automatic self defence knowledge ignores how specific drills build reaction under pressure. Opening schools without lineage or clear principles becomes easy. Following only a federation syllabus can push a perguruan’s own curriculum to the side until students are overloaded with material that does not belong to their school. Traditional structures function in a way like a second layer of verification. Without some filter, schools appear quickly after every trend and the quality varies wildly. The difficulty is that the filter is often applied rigidly while the practical needs of students and instructors are treated as secondary.
What might help is less purity and more cooperation. Schools without facilities can partner with those that have them. Instructors strong in business can run seminars that also cover sustainability. Teachers who do not focus on weapons can send students to those who do. Sport practitioners can spend time with the artistic and traditional sides, and vice versa. The ecosystem becomes more stable when people stop treating every other approach as a threat. Talent for higher level competition, including MMA, can still be identified inside that broader base. The obstacle is familiar. Most people are not ready to invest money or time without a clear personal return. Parents ask what the benefit is. Professional fighters under sponsorship train far more consistently than the average pesilat who manages one or two sessions a week. Everything eventually returns to resources and realistic expectations.
Silat does not have to choose between dying as a pure but unsustainable tradition or becoming a diluted activity that loses its character. It does have to accept that instructors operate under real constraints of safety, money, time, and community judgment, and that different segments of training can coexist without one cancelling the other. The crossroads is uncomfortable precisely because both the traditional warnings and the modern pressures contain valid points. Navigating it requires more conversation and less assumption that the other side is simply lazy, greedy, or ignorant. For those of us actually running classes, the daily question remains practical. How do we train people usefully, keep them reasonably safe, sustain the school, and still recognise the art we were given? The answers will not be perfect. They rarely are. But they are better found in open discussion than in quiet frustration.
Bird’s eye view
- Build loose alliances between perguruans so schools with mats, space or protective gear can share them with schools that do not have those things. A few places already do informal student exchanges. Making it more normal would reduce the pressure on every single guru to own every piece of equipment.
- Agree on clearer categories of training that the community can recognise. Something like traditional forms and adab in one stream, sport silat in another, and applied or security focused work in a third. When the categories are named and accepted, people stop treating every class as if it must satisfy every standard at once.
- Create a shared basic safety standard that different groups can adapt. Not a heavy rulebook, just simple points on protective gear for sparring, progressive introduction of throws, and what should stay on dummies. If enough teachers use the same language, parents and new students hear less contradiction.
- Run joint business and marketing sessions for instructors. Many older gurus never learned how to talk about fees, recruitment or sustainability without feeling they are breaking tradition. Short practical workshops on pricing, simple online presence and explaining value could reduce the “ikhlas means free” pressure.
- Protect lineage while opening commercial doors. Keep full sanad and deeper transmission inside the perguruan, and treat seminars or short courses as separate products that do not automatically give lineage. When this distinction is clear and repeated, the “sold out” accusation loses some force.
Ground level
- Split your own classes into clear tracks from the start. One track stays closer to traditional movement and etiquette. Another is more applied or sparring focused. Students choose or move between them. This stops you from having to defend every session against every criticism at the same time.
- Charge a modest, transparent fee and explain exactly what it covers. Mats, gear replacement, hall rental, your time. Some people will still complain. Others will accept it once they see the number is not random and the class is safer because of it.
- Use controlled tools for the dangerous parts. Dummies, slow progressive drills, and clear stop signals for throws or neck related work. You can still show the technique exists and how it works without putting students in hospital. Most adult students in security work care more about relevance than full contact chaos.
- Partner with one or two other teachers for the things you do not cover. Send your students to a weapons person for a module, or host a sport silat instructor for a few sessions. You keep your core teaching and students still get wider exposure without you having to become everything.
- Start very small collaborations instead of waiting for big unity. Share one seminar, swap a few students for a month, or run a joint open day. These small moves cost less time and money than full alliances, and they show other instructors that working together does not mean losing their own school.
None of these remove the tension completely. They just make the practical problems smaller so the art can keep moving without every guru having to solve the whole community’s issues alone.
