The villages of Bali were different from any I had ever seen anywhere else, and I soon became yet another visitor totally charmed by the Balinese and their lifestyle.
In 1860, the famed naturalist, and Charles Darwin’s co-author for The Origin of Species, Alfred Russel Wallace, sailing from Singapore, landed at Singaraja, the Dutch port in northern Bali, and traveled inland to study the flora and fauna. He wrote of Bali: “I was both astonished and delighted; for as my visit to Java was some years later, I had never beheld so beautiful and well-cultivated a district out of Europe. A slightly undulating plain extends from the seacoast about ten or twelve miles (16 or 19 kilometres) inland, where it is bounded by a fine range of wooded and cultivated hills. Houses and villages, marked out by dense clumps of coconut palms, tamarind and other fruit trees, are dotted about in every direction; while between them extend luxurious rice-grounds, watered by an elaborate system of irrigation that would be the pride of the best cultivated parts of Europe.”
In the 1930s, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson lived in a mountain village and in a town, Ubud, in south Bali, studying and writing articles on Balinese culture.
The artists Miguel Covarrubias and Walter Spies, and musicologist Colin McPhee all spent time there, with Ubud as their center. Their accounts of the island and its peoples created an image of Bali as “an enchanted land of aesthetes at peace with themselves and nature.” Western tourists began coming to the island, first arriving by ship at Singaraja and after 1966 at the international airport near Denpasar.
I had barely heard of Bali before going in 1978 as a consultant to evaluate a national health care program being introduced there and in villages across Indonesia. This was the first of four visits to Bali, the last in the mid-1980s, always on an assignment, staying in an ordinary hotel, during the day walking about in a village observing and interviewing, always too busy to do much as a tourist, which was fine with me. Being with the ordinary people was entertainment enough, as photos taken of me with them, here, confirms.
But what was it about the villagers that charmed me so? Why was Balinese traditional life different, why the physical and social environment so orderly, pleasant, egalitarian, so much of it touched by art? One explanation occurred to me. It had to do with the effects that irrigation farming has on a society (I wrote about that here, in discussing the original city of Bangalore) but I needed to do some reading and additional thinking. To begin –
For more than 2,700 years Indonesians have used wet rice farming to grow their basic food crop. Javi and Bali, especially, are suited by their soil, climate and water sources to achieving the high yields that support a dense population, the prerequisite for a complex civilization. The climate is hot, averaging over 25°C all year round; the volcanic soil is fertile; rainfall is high during the west monsoon, from October to April, so the rice fields are naturally flooded for one crop, and from December to March, during the dry season, water is brought to the fields from a river or springs to grow second crop of rice or maize, sweet potatoes, lentils. Steps in the farming cycle are explained here.
Irrigation is used throughout Indonesia but Bali’s is different. Beginning in the 9th century and continuing through the centuries, the Balinese developed an irrigation system known as Subak, the components of which are the forests that protect water flowing from the mountain tops; terraced rice paddies connected by a system of canals, tunnels and weirs; people from village communities using handmade tools to build, plant, harvest, drain and maintain it.
Management of this large system, some 20,000 hectares, is exercised through a hierarchy of temples, the centers of control located at critical points either high on the mountainsides at the source of water or at points along its way downhill to the paddies below. No one person controls the system; it is owned by all the communities and is managed by consensus among the landowning families when they gather at the temples to keep informed, make decisions and do the work required.
Critically, Subak is imbued with symbolic and religious meaning, especially at the temples, expressed in the philosophical concept of Tri Hita Karana, which brings together the realms of the spirit, the human world and nature. The system became sacred, as do objects and ideas when they symbolize the good for everyone, the social above the individual. In 2012, Subak was enlisted as a UNESCO world heritage site. An article here on protecting the Subak. Here on the temple, the Pura Besakih.
An anthropologist, Stephan Lansing, using his considerable analytical skills and listening to the people of Bali, came to understand the Subak system and has explained its genius to the outside world. It is a system in which upstream owners of land share equally with downstream owners because they would lose if they did not; all of the owners must coordinate planting and fallow in complex ways to control the flow of water and to prevent an outbreak of pests that would destroy all the crops. Everyone contributes equally to the inputs and benefits equally from the harvest. The complexities of Subak are explained here in a brilliant summarization of Lansing’s writing, plus an account of how he helped save Bali’s heritage from international misinformed agricultural engineers. I highly recommend your reading it. This near debacle of an efficient, effective traditional system had me remembering why so many Third World socio-economic development programs failed.
I think it no coincidence that the Subak system began and took form in a time preceding the series of Hindu–Buddhist influenced Balinese kingdoms that ruled Bali and the Lesser Sunda Islands from the early 10th to early 20th century. The high yielding agricultural system supported population growth, prosperity and the establishment of cities, each with a ruling class and a sophisticated court culture.
Buddhism and Hinduism came to Bali through contacts with the larger and more powerful kingdoms of Java, from the 9th century Medang Kingdom, the period of Borobudur, to the 13th to 15th century Majapahit empire. As the Majapahit empire waned, Islam spread in Java, primarily through increasing numbers of traders from the Indian state of Gujerat bringing their Muslim faith with them. I can picture them marrying local women and settling down, establishing small communities, building mosques, all analogous with what the Portuguese did, less successfully, in Makassar a century or two later. It is known that Muslim traders married into and converted royal families. However, Bali remained Hindu and became the refuge for fleeing Hindu courtiers, nobles, priests and artisans. (During my 1980s travels across Sumatra, Java and Sulawese, when I went walking in the towns where my hotels were located, looking into the shops, I found Chinese and Indian shopkeepers. The Chinese stayed separate in marriage and religion. The Indians were Muslim and married locally.)
Oddly, I have found no concrete evidence of Indonesian empires spreading through warfare, no paintings or carvings of warriors and battles. The one archer in a Borobudur bas-relief is a scene from the Indian Ramayana. How unlike what I have been reading about civilizations in India and further west. I will return to this. It fascinates me.
So – I have the outline of an answer to my question of why Bali is so special. It is because of the basic Balinese community, the Banjar, that evolved within the framework of a unique system of irrigation, the Subak, that produces an abundant and a dependable supply of food for everyone in the society on a schedule that allows for a great deal of free time and leisure. And there was no need to arm against aggressors from outside. With influences brought to them from India via Java to add to their original culture, the Balinese developed and elaborated a rich artistic tradition. In the village, as a folk art, the boys play in the gamelan orchestra and both girls and boys dance. They are taught and they practice and practice; ordinary boys and girls acquire the skills of professional performers, and they put on performances to celebrate ritual occasions. The court culture has the puppet theatre and painting and the carving of wood and stone.
The Banjar community, about a hundred households, continues as the hereditary owners of the Subak. I think it may have historically been the village but is now is a sub unit of the larger village. Importantly, it remains the basic social unit in the society and has retained its unity as Bali grows in population and has become part of the modern world. A picture of the banjar today and how it controls interaction between tourist bars, nightclubs, shopping and the local society is here.
I have a second question: Why, at least in the years I was in Bali, had tourism not undone that traditional culture, detached it from its roots, changed the people and the culture, as had happened elsewhere? I think I found part of an answer to that question just a few days ago, reading Margaret Mead’s ethnography.
I’ll consider the second question next. — —
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