Memories of Indonesia and communication technology before electricity, telephone and smartphone

Recently, needing a break from our dreadful, insane politics and the pandemic, I turned to completing a project begun months ago, the organizing for storage of countless photographs scattered across my desk, of photos taken in 1980 as I crossed Indonesia, visiting over forty villages on a consultancy for the Ministry of Health. Several years ago I included a number of the photos in various blog posts but this time, reviewing and reminiscing, one in particular, different from the others, caught my attention. It is, I think, from Sumatra, but what it has me remembering is that when I and my assistant/interpreter entered the village we were received, not by the village headman and village health team, but by this traditionally dressed man who immediately walked over to a gong and struck it. We waited and some minutes later people began arriving, we introduced ourselves to one another, the headman and health team members settled in and my interviewing began. I was so charmed by the gong that after the meeting I asked its keeper to pose with it for the photo. The one other photograph with a gong is, as the sign on the office building indicates, in a South East Sulawesi village where I am standing with the PUSKEMAS/ Community Health Center team and their mobile clinic van.

I looked on-line for “Indonesian gong” and learned only that the word gong came to us from Java and refers to a flat, circular metal disc that is struck with a mallet.  Gong is defined as a percussion musical instrument used in Asia and Southeast Asia.

In further searches, the term “slit drum” was attached to pictures of the sort of instrument I saw in Indonesia but from the Republic of Vanauto, a Melanesian island nation east of Australia, which puzzled me. Melanesians are different from Indonesians. The Pacific island people related to Indonesians are the Polynesians.

I set that anomaly aside, searched for “slit drum” elsewhere and discovered a long tradition of the drums as a means of communication throughout Indonesia. Here for photos and background information from a Jakarta newspaper article on Java’s slit drum, the kenthongan, now made in bamboo rather than wood.

The article reads “Those who grew up in the 1980s are perhaps the last generation familiar with the sound of kentongan beaten at night …  a slit drum used in traditional villages to communicate, (to) produce rhythmic beats as a sign that some residents were on duty patrolling the village. … At a time when telephones were rare, sound codes from the beating of kentongan were vital for communicating. … ….  beginning from the era of the kingdoms of the archipelago, (the kentongan) spread to almost all regions in Indonesia. Each region has its own code and meanings for kentongan sound patterns. ….. a sign for residents to gather, an invitation to participate in cleaning up or building something in the village and as a sign that prayers will start soon. …”

In Madura, a small island off Java, the slit-drum is called gul-gul.  In Bali, it’s the kulkul.

“…beginning from the era of the kingdoms of the archipelago …”  I wonder. Could it have been that the slit drum was part of an earlier Indonesian culture, one of village folk long before the time of kings and kingdoms. While learning something of Balinese history, I learned, as well, a bit of Island South East Asian history and prehistory. I read that the earliest people in the islands were, of course, Paleolithic Age hunter-gatherers, living off the land, moving frequently in small bands from one camp site to another, making and using flaked stone tools. (See here for using simple stone flakes as tools.) In Australia, people lived in such societies into modern times, but mostly the hunter-gatherers were replaced or absorbed by later migrants with a Neolithic Age culture, neolithic meaning new stone for the ground stone tools, the axes and adzes, suited for clearing the land and working the soil to grow their food.

The Neolithic Age began some 12,000 years ago, originating independently in different centers around the world. For the island nations of South East Asia, it evolved along the Yangtzi River, the beginnings of agriculture and domesticated animals, of making pottery and weaving cloth, of hundreds of farm families living in a settled village where, unlike the thirty or so adults in a hunter-gatherer band, to function well as a community they needed more than direct face-to-face communication.

the Austronesian languages

From circa 3000 to 600 BCE, a seafaring Neolithic people, the Austronesians, sailing in outrigger boats, coming from south China, maybe Taiwan, arrived in the Indonesian islands, bringing with them a Neolithic Age cultural complex based on rice agriculture. They became the village folk of Indonesia from whom the later cultures arose. I discuss the Austronesians  here  in a blog post on Bali.

By 500 BCE, a Bronze Age culture had developed in Java, influenced by, possibly brought by, people from what is now the area of Vietnam. It was the Dong Son culture, a complex that included the skills for making bronze tools and weapons (iron came later) and for more complex and productive agricultural practices, all of which increased the food supply, population growth and social complexity. The number and the size of villages in Java increased. Chieftainships developed as the beginnings of government. There was trade and warfare. By the 8^th century kings and kingdoms were flourishing. The wooden slit drum, having arrived with the Austronesian Neolithic, continued as a means of communication within the village and between villages but the bronze gong eventually replaced it as a musical instrument.

I wondered how a man (ordinarily, woodworkers are male) using a polished stone axe or adze or chisel could carve a slit drum, or anything, from wood and discovered a rich literature on these tools from archeologists and hobbyists who are knappers.

Neolithic adze

Neolithic stone axe with handle

Further reading on Neolithic tools informed me on  … “Wood began its broad role in human life with the ground and polished tools of the Neolithic. Home and fire and furniture and utensils, cradle and coffin were products of the ax, adz, and chisel, which could fashion wood intricately and with precision. This kit of tools turned wood into an almost universal building material, for a host of new things was now possible, such as dugout canoes, paddles and framing for hide-covered boats, sledges, skis, wooden platters and ladles, as well as other household gear. “  Here  for a description of stone tools.  And here for an excellent article from archeology on Neolithic tools

It does not surprise me that in Bali the slit drum announcing a community meeting, wedding, funeral, an emergency is simple in form but beautifully and elaborately housed. Each village community, the banjar, has its own slit-drum, the kulkul, that is kept hanging under the roof of a small but ornate wooden pavilion, a bale, called the bale kulkul, In a temple complex the bale kulkkul is larger and far more elaborate. In striking the temple wooden kulkul one is calling upon the gods. For calling the demons, one strikes a bamboo kulkul.

The bamboo slit drum would have been a related instrument and present in Austronesian culture. In the Philippines it is called kagul, used as a percussion instrument for social dances and in the rice fields to scare away birds competing for the harvest seeds.

Returning to the anomaly of Indonesia’s Austronesian Neolithic Age slit drum being featured in articles on Melanesia’s small island republic, Vanuato, we turn to archeology and population genetics for information on the cultural and racial history of the islands.   Quoting Samir S. Patel, here  — “Analysis of seven 3,000-year-old skulls from the oldest cemetery in the South Pacific, on Efate, an island in Vanuatu, is helping explain how the region was settled. The people of this island nation today resemble Melanesians—natives of Australia and New Guinea—more than Polynesians, such as natives of New Zealand and Hawaii. Osteological data are showing that a people called the Lapita, who first colonized the Pacific, looked more like Polynesians. Melanesians apparently came later and the groups intermarried. In places such as Vanuatu and Fiji, Melanesian traits won out, while Polynesian ancestry dominated elsewhere, as people island-hopped to the east.” The Fiji islanders’ slit drum, the lali, horizontal and quite simple, seems close to the original Austronesian Neollithic slit drum.

In present day Papua New Guinea, hunter-gatherers arrived around 42,000 to 45,000 years ago. Around 7000 BC, they independently domesticated plants, taro providing the basic crop, and developed agriculture for settled village life. Around 500 BCE a migration of Austronesian-speaking peoples settled on the New Guinea coastal regions, introduced pottery, pigs, certain fishing techniques — and the slit drum. However, being of a Neolithic based on rice agriculture and this soil, climate, etc. not suitable for growing rice, the Austronesians did not increase in numbers. The region remained Melanesian. Later, in the 18th century traders brought the sweet potato to the islands, where it became an additional staple, increased the food supply and made possible a significant increase in population. This photo, possibly taken decades ago, is from a village outside a town, Buin, of men in their clubhouse, conveying coded messages by drum.

The Polynesian Austronesian culture originally included the slit drum, as pictured here in Samoa and Tahiti but in a form obviously elaborated after the introduction of iron and steel tools.

How fascinating this early technology for communicating within and between communities. One could continue with a history of how the slit drum in other lands, in Africa and elsewhere, held a community and communities together – but enough of that for now. Let me simply note how it worked in one part of the world in the beginnings of its history.

For other of my 1980s photographs taken in Indonesia  —

Among them are those I took of Yogyakarta’s wonderful, colorful 1980 Eid al Fitr celebrations.

And a few years ago, thinking of Ravi, my husband, and looking through a family album he had put together, I found two of the 1980 photos of me in the historic Macassar, now called Ujung Pandang.  I outline  here  the role Macassar played in European and Indonesian history and why it interested Ravi, then more of the city, plus photos of the Ujung Pandang medical school doctors and staff I was there to meet and who briefed me on the national rural health care program I was to evaluate.

Next, In “Visiting the Villages in Indonesia, Part I” I describe something of the project and include photos of a village and its people in South Sulawesi, intending to follow with blog posts on a cross-section of the villages I had visited. Instead, by having chosen a village in Bali,  here, as the next one to describe, I got side-tracked; got lost in reading for background, in discovering Bali’s unique agricultural-community system, plus its art, and all that interspersed with reading into Island South East Asian history.  Finally, eight blog posts later I woke up, realized I had researched enough, analyzed enough on how Bali became and continued to be, quoting Jawaharlal Nehru, a land like “the morning of the world,” and moved on from this project, interesting to me as it is, to write about my other interests.

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Good-bye to Bali

This is my eighth essay on Bali, and it’s time to move on. For months, beginning with this essay, I’ve been reading, thinking, puzzling over the history of Bali, searching for the reasons why this peasant society is so different from other peasant societies, setting down in writing a good part of what I learned along the way and finally arrived here, at journey’s end. I remain as charmed as ever by Bali’s remarkable people and by the countryside Nehru described as “the morning of the world.” In my first letter from Indonesia to Ravi I wrote, “I love Bali.” Someone took photos of me in my first days at work in Bali, of me with the village development program team, walking with the health center staff and sitting with the volunteers at a ceremony, obviously happy to be in their company. I wonder if the people there noticed something that strikes me whenever I go through my photographs from Indonesia. Unlike in most other countries where I lived and worked, I am the same size as the women of the country.

Among the many images of Balinese society, like the subak and banjar, I carry away with me is that of a highly cohesive community with each person’s place in it well defined and arranged into an interpersonal hierarchy so amiably and gently enforced as to be almost invisible to an outsider; I sensed the conformity, the importance of group over individual, but learned of the hierarchy through reading. And although I had read of a Balinese class system that uses Hindu caste names and did encounter it once, briefly, I never felt or sensed the larger societal hierarchy.

I have an explanation and diagram of the Indian caste system here

In outline for India, Brahmins were the priests, Kashatriya the warriors controlling government, Vaisya the craftsmen and merchants, Shudra the peasant farmers. Ranking below these castes grouping were, and still are, the outcaste peoples. The caste hierarchy is basic in Indian society, enormously complicated and crosscut by social class differences, levels of wealth differences, regional and rural and urban differences.

Portrait of the Buleleng king and his secretary

For Bali, Brahmin priests and Kastria/Kashatriya warriors from Hinduized Java moved into Bali with the Majapahit conquerors and set themselves up as a ruling elite over the various kingdoms that evolved during their domination. Men from India were among them.

A prince during the colonial period

The conquering men married Balinese women and established royal lineages. From what I read, Wesya/Vaisya lineages may descend from the Hinduized men from Java who served as administrators under the Ksatrias kings. Indian traders, who are Vaisya, may have been among them. (12% of Balinese Y-chromosomes are likely of Indian origin) I read that Balinese men did not do commerce. Women did the small, local trade. Chinese and Sulawesi men did the major trade. Eventually Chinese men brought in Chinese wives and established their own small, often affluent, ethnic communities. The vast majority of the people, the village farmers and craftsmen/farmers, were Shudra.

For descriptions of Bali’s caste systems, here and here.

My one encounter with the Balinese social hierarchy happened near Denpasar in 1978. I wrote about it in a letter to Ravi. “… After our formal interviewing, we stopped at a family gathering in an old temple complex with modern housing included. She (my colleague) knew one of the women there, the mother of a school friend, and talked with her. Actually, we were on the site of an ancient royal residence, participating in the gathering of the king’s descendents for their annual ceremony. The head of the lineage, a very handsome man, lives in Denpasar and works in the Governor’s office. He speaks English. He, and many others, asked me to visit them. The hospitality is so easy and gracious. For the ceremony, women had brought food and it was blessed in the temple. This was also the day for blessing all knives and the kris. After we left my colleague told me her school friend is from this lineage, which is Kashatriya. The friend is a lawyer and married a lawyer who is Shudra. Her family disowned her, so the couple moved to Surabaya. The mother said the family still does not forgive the daughter for marrying below her caste. It is strange to hear the Indian caste names being used. … … ”

From another 1978 letter to Ravi and the children —

“I have just returned from a most wonderful day. A woman from the office, Dr. Inne, a lovely person, picked me up this morning at 7:30 and we drove in the office jeep to a village on a mountain lake, Lake Batur. The volcano is also Mt. Batur. The countryside is green, terraced rice fields with coconut trees. Temples are everywhere and the village houses are quite decent. People smile; children are bold and friendly. In the village hamlet I interviewed the midwife and program fieldworker. Next we went across the lake by a motorized ferryboat to a second hamlet, up a hill to talk with the village headman. We could see a steady stream of tourists, all Indonesian, climbing up, staring at everything.

“Both these hamlets are of the aboriginal Balinese, who are considered very different. The road into their mountain area is from only three years ago, and they have been further isolated by strong endogamy. They do not cremate like other Balinese; they put the bodies of their dead on the ground under a tree that gives off a sweet smell that stops the odor of decay. So there we were, older boys hanging around, just watching; me, through Dr Inne, talking with the headman and taking notes; skeletons lying in a clearing with rotting clothes and bowls of food offerings; old Chinese coins scattered around on the ground. I picked up three of the coins.

“By 4:00 pm we finished the interviewing and had a chat with villagers who wanted to know how village people in America do family planning. I put my notebook down and we just talked. Inne is a good interpreter. Rural people don’t often express curiosity about other countries. I did my best to respond in a way that would make sense to them.

“From there Inne and I went to a restaurant high on a ledge, over the lake, facing the volcano. Then back to Denpasar, past temples and rows of women, each woman carrying on her head a colorful, carefully arranged stack of food, taking it to the temple to be blessed. I spent the evening talking with program people. Tomorrow I’ll write all day, must work hard.

(I have since learned the name of the village – Trunyan – here and here.)

“Two days later – These are country folk. People are up and moving by 5:30 am. It is now 7:45 and I am dressed, have had breakfast, reviewed some materials and am waiting for the office car. My room is one in a U around a small garden, one story. I’m told it is the first hotel in Bali, 1927 or so, and the plumbing and electricity reflect that fact. But I like the place. Last night a group of Japanese teenagers moved in. Wherever they move they have American pop music blaring. Why do teenagers like noise?

“I wrote all day yesterday. Hope the people at the office find the report useful. … …”

And now I move on to other parts of my life in Indonesia, always there for work and preoccupied with it but happy being with the people in this land of amazing, beautiful islands.

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The Artful Crafts of Bali Part III

My previous essay on the artful crafts of Bali, here, ended with the statement, “In 1354, Majapahit forces from Java, led by Gajah Mada, landed in Bali and captured Bedulu. It changed the course of history for Bali.” With that invasion an island of chieftainships and small kingdoms began its transformation into a medieval sort of society, one of substantial kingdoms, each with a Hinduized high caste elite ruling over peasant villages and marketplaces. Cities, truly urban communities, did not develop until the Dutch colonial period in the mid-19^th century.

And this provides the context to complete my exploration begun four months ago of Bali’s crafts and folk art. I discussed the basketry, pottery, spinning and weaving, the production of bronze tools and musical instruments — crafts inherited from Neolithic and Bronze Age times, the sort I am fond of and collect – and continued on to a brief consideration of stone and wood carving from later times, after the society had evolved from simple autonomous villages into chieftainships and small kingdoms. For this essay I venture further into Bali’s history and how the Balinese culture, unique and so very attractive, came into being, captivating artistically minded foreigners and managing to resist the damaging effects of sun-and-sand tourism.

The 1354 CE invasion was the beginning of Bali’s kingdoms, providing royal patronage under which traditional dance, music, painting and sculpture flourished and was elaborated. Balinese dance and the gamelan are folk dance and folk music, taught by villagers to the young; they were important in daily life. As reported in Margaret Mead’s anthropological studies in the early 1930s, the dance movements were highly stylized; the stories, characters, themes being danced were known to everyone; theatrical performances were given frequently, for each rite de passage (birth, marriage, etc.) for religious rites, for celebrations, etc.  In the 1980s I twice watched performances of dance with an Indonesia colleague who commented on the meaning of the dancers’ movements and dismissed as novices the graceful, high-spirited girls I favored. Regarding paintings and sculpture, largely religious in nature, a simple love of decoration may well have contributed to their ubiquity in royal palaces and temples, as well as in village life. Quoting from an excellent discussion of traditional Balinese painting, here, “… (Painting) was a world of Hindu gods, demons, and princesses dressed in the ancient attire of Hindu Javanese times. Quaint but uninspiring, their purpose was to instill moral and ethical values by relating laws of adat. Specialists in the traditional arts of religious drawing and painting were commissioned by the rajas to paste gold leaf on pieces of clothing; paint statues and artifacts in bright splashy colors; and decorate wooden cremation towers, palace altars, and pavilions. Noblemen from the courts loaned each other artists, in this way spreading art all over the island.”

In the 20^th century, foreigners introduced the concept of art for art’s sake, of the explicit valuing of creativity and individual expression in painting and sculpture. Fortunately, many of the traditional craftsmen and women were intrinsically artists and their work survives to be appreciated as art.

I will summarize here some of what I learned of Bali’s history. I’m still thinking about my conclusions and final thoughts. That I’ll add later.

With the 1354 invasion, Bali was pulled into the Majapahit Empire, a vast thalassocracy based in east Java, an empire stretching from Sumatra to New Guinea — present-day’s Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, southern Thailand, Sulu Archipelago, Philippines and East Timor.

Thalassacracy? It was a new word for me, but after weeks of reading Indonesian history, struggling to remember long, totally unfamiliar names of people and places outside my experience, of feeling overwhelmed, “thalassocracy” was a gift. It gave me a framework for organizing this new information, for making sense of it. I began to see how people acted and to imagine why.

First, a defintion. Thalassocracy is from Greek, thalassa, meaning “sea” and kratein, meaning “to rule”, thalassokratia, “rule of the sea,” to rule by controlling sea lanes, a state ruling over maritime realms, a sea-borne empire.

Phoenician ship

An example of a thalassocracy familiar in western history is the ancient Phoenician network of merchant city-state ports, each a politically independent unit separate from its hinterland, a sea-based civilization spread across the Mediterranean from 1500 BCE to 300 BCE. Sidon may have been the oldest of the cities. From there a colonizing party founded the city of Tyre and onward to the founding of other such city-states and a great Mediterranean commercial empire. Each city faced the sea, separate from its tribal hinterland. It depended upon the people outside its walls for food and basic goods but was not an urban community that had grown organically out of the society behind it.

It was from the Phoenicians that we inherited the alphabet, a way to write letters that represent phonemes, the basic significant sound units from which words are formed. It is a way to write a language that can be easily learned and applied to any language. Unlike a scribe or a priest who specialized in being literate (as with hieroglyphics or Chinese), a trader could quickly learn a script to write his language, keep records, read the ancient religious stories some wise man had transcribed from the oral tradition. Through their maritime trade the Phoenicians spread writing by alphabet across their territory. One variant was adopted by the Greeks, who transmitted it to the Romans.

The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BCE and became the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia. Most alphabetic scripts of India are descended from the Brahmi script, which is often believed to be a descendant of the Aramaic script, transmitted via the Persians to the Mauryan Empire (322 BCE – 185 BCE) and the Gupta Empire (320 — 550 CE) of India —  and from there to Sumatra, Java and Bali. For centuries in India, the Ramayana, Mahabharta and Bhagavad Gita epics in the Sanskrit language had been passed on orally, through story-telling, and finally set down in writing during the Gupta Empire. Sanskrit words entered the Javanese Austronesian language with the adoption of Indian religions and Javanese today regard Sanskrit as an ancestral language.

Maritime Silk Road for spices

Javanese ship, Borobudur, 9th century

Before discovering thalassocracies, I rarely thought of sea lanes or of rivers, the original highways of rising civilizations. Nowhere I lived as a child was near a river or a lake, and as for the sea, in my center-of-the-continent world people believed two enormous oceans, one on either side, protected America from the rest of the world. It was ancient roads, like the Grand Trunk Road and Roman roads, that fascinated me and I wrote about them, with pictures, here.

Not until the 1960s was I anywhere near the sea, but when I did get there the experience was serious. I lived in an ancient city-state, daily visiting the harbor and the buildings that had once been part of an Indian Ocean commercial empire. I was in Mogadiscio, the northern-most of East Africa’s coastal city-states, where men in dhows sailing the monsoon winds from India and Arabian lands came to trade, continued down the coast to other city-states, including Malindi, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Kilwa, and last to Sofala, then sailed north when the monsoons turned back toward India. I do not know if any one of the coastal city-states in the region controlled the others as in an empire, but before the Italians came to Somalia at the beginning of the 20^th century, the Sultan of Sohar in Oman, but living in Zanzibar, controlled much of the trade, or at least taxed it. I included the photos of Mogadiscio’s Customs building and Omani residences in previous essays. Notes, pictures and my photographs of the original Mogadiscio are here and others are here and here.

Indonesia is a nation of islands but for me it was land I entered and left by air and traveled across by vehicle. I was on water only when taking the ferryboat between Surabya and Madura. Only now am I coming to understand much of what I saw and experienced. I wrote previously, here, about what being in Indonesia meant for me. The time was from 1977 to 1991 and I did consultancies, evaluating rural health care programs across the islands for the Ministry of Health, viewing Indonesian society from the perspectives of villagers and medical personnel. I flew to Jakarta from Paris, where Ravi and I were living, usually having broken the long flight with a stay-over in Delhi or Bangalore, once in Lucknow, twice in Allahabad, visiting with one or another of Ravi’s aunts, uncles, cousins. Within hours of being in India I was in Indonesia, a culture so different from Indian culture that learning of Hinduism in Indonesia’s past surprised me, as did the Buddhism in Borobudor and in Bali. Islam also came to Indonesia via Indian traders, but I was involved with primary health care, with colleagues, with new friendships and hardly noticed religious practices. After having lived in Somalia, Turkey, India, France, I took a diversity of religions as a normal part of life.

Through writing previous posts, discovering Ravi’s childhood in India, exploring the cities and places where he grew up, I learned something of India’s history. Now I return to India and try to understand why, beginning in the 2^nd century BCE, men in those great civilizations, still new to me, would bother to get into ships and sail from the Bay of Bengal, even as early as the Mauryan Empire, to the distant eastern seas. (I wrote of Mauryan culture and Buddhism here.) The motive was not seeking land to settle a growing population; the men in ships were traders. Still, what were they looking for and what did they carry with them to use in an exchange? I assume (reasoning from Bronze Age traders in my part of the world) the Indian traders were well armed and ready to fight, using metal weapons, and to take what they came for. Violence may not work well long term, but the threat of violence would underlay the trade relationship, and perhaps, ensure the payment of a tax. Once trade with a coastal city proved profitable, the Indian traders’ guild would, most likely, establish a trading post there, with a member in charge, ready to welcome and provision fellow Buddhist traders (Ganesh was their deity) when they stopped at the port.

Indian traders sailed to the islands for profit, but they also carried with them new technologies and new concepts. By the 5^th century, traders from the South Indian Pallava dynasty had brought writing to Tarumanagara, a Hinduized kingdom based near Jakarta, where their script was used for recording the names and deeds of kings. (By the 8^th century other Indian scripts were introduced and an indigenous script evolved from them.) The traders used Sanskrit, the lingua franca of ancient and medieval South Asia, not their own languages, Telagu or Tamil.  (as Latin, inherited from Rome, was the lingua franca of medieval Europe)

Chola Empire c. 1030 CE

I wondered what items were being traded across these vast distances, and with whom. In the Bronze Age tin and copper for tools and weapons were among the first commodities to be traded anywhere, and the lumber for building ships, tall trunks for the masts, were resources to be sought, not available everywhere.  By the time of the Srivijaya thalassocratic Empire based in Sumatra, 650 – 1377 CE, the great empire that preceded the Majapahit Empire (c.1293 — 1500), the goods traded were “… Rice, cotton, indigo and silver from Java; aloes, resin, camphor, ivory and rhino’s tusks, tin and gold from Sumatra; rattan, rare timber, gems and precious stones from Borneo; exotic birds and rare animals, iron, sappan, sandalwood and rare spices from Eastern Indonesian archipelago; various spices of Southeast Asia and India; also Chinese ceramics, lacquerware, brocade, fabrics, silks and Chinese artworks. … ” Incidentally, the Srivijaya Empire was important in spreading Buddhism across Southeast Asia.

Chola navy and the battle of Kedah

Throughout most of their shared history, ancient India and Indonesia enjoyed friendly and peaceful relations. However, it was also competitive and in 1025 CE, the Chola king from Tamil Nadu in South India, launched naval raids on Srivijayan cities. This particular attack on a city in Malaysia. was short and meant only to plunder.

Bali never came under a thalassocracy’s dominance; it was not geographically situated for that. As noted previously, here, until modern air travel Bali was not an easily accessible island. It is surrounded by coral reefs. The channel west of Bali is not easily navigable; the currents are very strong.

Chinese ship 13th century

Heavy seas lash the southern coast and the few harbors are small, but not so small as to deter Chinese and Sulawesi Bugis traders despite the fact that ships sailing near the shore frequently crashed and sank, providing the Balinese with goods to be salvaged at their leisure. Bali’s agricultural wealth also attracted Javanese adventurers. Carved into a 10^th century Belanjong pillar found near the Sunar harbor, Denpasar is an inscription in both Sanskrit and Balinese, indicating that a king of the central Java’s Buddhist Sailendra Dynasty had lead a military expedition from the sea to this site. The Sailendra was both a thalassocracy and a large civilization in Central Java, Buddhist and most notable for Borobudur.

Model of a Majapahit ship

The Majapahit thalassocratic empire, 14^th century, was based in an East Java city, recently discovered and being excavated, near today’s Surabaya. Gadja Mada succeeded in landing his ships in sufficient numbers to conquer the Balinese kingdoms. (How I wish I had known this history in the 1980s when I was driving about in Surabya, staying there in a hotel, taking the ferry to Madura.)

A clear outline of the relationship between Java and Bali and the succession of kingdoms and empires is here.

Bali was not overtaken by a thalassocracy but it had always been linked with Java, receiving much of its culture from the more advanced Javanese civilizations. With conquest, Hinduized Javanese, and a certain number of Indians, moved in and set themselves up as an elite. They brought their religion and writing, as well as the technology, iron working, for making tools – the hoe, iron clad plow, knives, axes — critical in producing the abundance of food that supported a growing population and the elites’ lifestyle. The blacksmiths also fashioned the kris, prestigious swords, for the kings’ warriors.

The blacksmiths of Bali are a guild with their gods and religious ritual inherited from Hindu traditions. They have a lineage name, Pande, and are endogamous.  From a newspaper account: Family head Pande Putu Sunarta, his brother, Pande Made Suteja, and their wives and children are richly proud of their heritage and of the knowledge they continue to hold in an unbroken tradition that began as early as the 11th century in Java under the Majapahit Kingdom and that later came to dominate almost all of Indonesia. Sunata said, “At the time our family arrived in Bali there was only the Bali Mula (villagers) here. There were no cities at that time because kingdoms had not yet begun, so in a way our family helped in the establishment of the kingdom working as blacksmiths. … my tools are an extension of my body … we learned this esoteric knowledge from our ancestors …”

Traces of the blacksmith ancestors in Java, with the Hindu Ganesha as their god, are found in a rather strange 15^th century Javanese–Hindu monument located on the slope of a mountain between Central and East Java provinces. At the time, the area was under the rule of the late, 1293–1500 CE, Majapahit Kingdom. This scene in bas relief depicts on the left Bhima, the mighty blacksmith of the Mahabharata, forging the metal while a dancing Ganesha in the center holds what may be a dog, while Arjuna, of the Bhagavad Gita, on the right operates the tube blower to pump air into the furnace.  An interesting article on metallurgy and its important symbolism in early times is here.

A good article here on Bali’s exceptional metallurgy — in bronze. copper, brass, silver, gold and iron.

In 1585, the Portuguese government in Malacca, on the Malay peninsula, sent a ship to establish a fort and a trading post in Bali. The mission failed as their ship foundered on the reef of the Bukit peninsula, at Denpasar. However, five survivors made it ashore and were welcomed by the king of Gelgel, known as the Dalem. He provided them with wives and homes and they became part of his court.

In 1597, a Dutch explorer arrived in Bali with 89 men, a mere third of the number who had begun the journey. After visits to Kuta, on the western shore of Denpasar, and Jembrana, to the northwest, he assembled his fleet in Padang Bai, northeast of Denpasar and now a ferry port. He met with the Dalem of Gelgel and one of the Portuguese sailors from 1585. In 1601 a second Dutch expedition appeared and the Dalem gave them a letter allowing the Dutch to trade in Bali.

Balinese slave 1718

Besides these attempts, the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, left the Bali trade to private traders, mainly Chinese, Arab, Bugis and occasionally Dutch, who mainly dealt with the  opium and slave trade. According to Willard A. Hanna’s Bali Chronicles, 2004, “Balinese slaves were highly prized both in Bali and overseas. Balinese male slaves were famous for their manual skills and their courage, the females for their beauty and artistic attainments.” The kings of Bali typically sold opponents, debtors, criminals, orphans and widows as slaves to be used in Batavian households, the Dutch Colonial Army, or sent abroad, the biggest market being the French Mauritius. Payment to the Balinese kings was usually made in opium. The main port for this trade was the Buleleng harbor in north Bali.

In the mid 19^th century the Dutch built their harbor, Singaraja, on the northern coast and marched their soldiers south to take over the island.

I think of Balinese society, beginning with the Majapahit invasion, as medieval, one of kingdoms where the ruling elite lived in palace enclosures and most everyone else lived in villages as farming folk who were also the craftsmen/women. And there were market towns. I have not learned who ran the markets but read that women did most of the trading and Balinese men did not engage in trade. The Chinese and Bugis traders provided the royal families with opium but must also have sold metals to the bronze and iron smiths, maybe through the king, who would take his cut. By the mid-1800s, as the slave trade diminished, kings/princes depended on selling their subjects’ rice, cattle, palm oil and cotton cloth for revenue. Pierre Dubois reported that tobacco, coconut, coffee and indigo were cash crops, but I think those were mainly in north Bali.

My picture of the court society comes from “Bali in the Early 19^th Century: the Ethnographic Accounts of Pierre Dubois” by Helen M. Creese. He was a bureaucrat in the Dutch colonial government, the Civil Administrator in Badung, in the 1830s.  He wrote poetic accounts of rice terraces, rivers, hundreds of villages and small domains stretching down from the mountains to the sea, but mostly he spent his time with the ruling class and was caught up in its status system, its complications and constantly changing configurations. (I will comment later on the relationship between Bali’s caste elite and the villagers.)

Most salient are Dubois’ observations on how geography determined the governmental structure of Balinese society. It was an island of relatively small principalities, using his term, with sharp borders between them. Each principality was separated from its neighbors by deep ravines and high mountains, and a high mountain range separates the north from the south. There are no navigable rivers to sail. Roads, where they existed, were extremely difficult to use and dangerous because of tigers and “malefactors,” by which Dubois must have meant bandits and thieves.

Balinese soldiers

Poor mobility mitigated against warmongering and against hostile forces of one prince launching an offensive against another, especially in the wet season. The principalities remained small; no one prince could conquer the others to build a national kingdom and outsiders, even the Dutch, did not see Bali as a profitable place for extracting raw resources or for establishing plantations. From the book by Geertz in the 1950s: wars between the princes were short. Battles were fought on foot using only knives, spears and bludgeons, fighting often stopped at nightfall or sometimes with the first death in battle, and only rarely did a war involve extended campaigns.

Dubois wrote of the taxes the Prince collected on all forms of public ritual and entertainment, on any productive activity such fishing, salt, sales, besides a share of the harvest and the corvée, a labor tax on the peasant.

In the principality justice system the Prince was the highest authority, and Dubois considered his decisions mostly arbitrary rather than just. The Prince did not keep a police force or a standing army. There was, of course, no school system. The Geertzes were less negative about the ruling class. They saw the political system of Prince, lords and subjects as buttressing and making possible a great deal of ritual activity. The peasants provided the food and the work but they were also the main participants in the great feasts and dramatized displays.

The views of Bali from Dubois’ perspective, and from those Margaret Mead, here, and Clifford Geertz, are different from the way 20^th century foreign artists viewed the culture and how later tourists see Bali. Until fairly recently, perhaps until Indonesia’s independence, the real Bali was a land where the powerful took far more than their share of what the society produced, but because the Balinese villagers understood how to use their rich soil, water, climate and were left until recently without much interference from the outside world, they lived far better, had more leisure and a richer culture than most villagers elsewhere.

More of my thoughts and observations next … …

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The artful crafts of Bali, Part II

In Part I of this essay, from a month ago, I outlined here my views on the Balinese as a peasant society, on the society’s origin and its beginnings, critical points in its history and more thoughts on why Bali is so different from other peasant societies. I describe much of Balinese culture through a discussion of its crafts – of the basketry, pottery, spinning and weaving, the production of bronze tools and musical instruments — crafts from the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, the sort I usually pick up when in other countries.

Unfortunately, the quality of Balinese crafts completely escaped my attention when I was there, preoccupied with work and my Indonesian colleagues. Instead, I bought two ordinary souvenirs in an ordinary shop, but even they are worth a comment. One is a wood carving I had made for Ravi’s desk, of his name with the barong hovering protectively over it. The barong, king of the good spirits and enemy of Rangda, the demon queen, is everywhere in Bali, including in a ritual dance between Barong and Rangda that represents the eternal battle between good and evil. It is one of the surviving beliefs from Bali’s Austronesian origins, from a time when their religion was a form of animism, when they honored the spirits of nature and the spirits of ancestors who remain among the living, and all good spirits, like the one whose image I took home with me.

In Bali and Java, ancestral spirits possessing exceptional supernatural abilities are the hyang, spirits that inhabit sacred realms in high places, in the mountains and volcanoes. Since hyang move only in straight lines, a traditional Balinese building has a wall, an aling-aling, just inside the doorway that will stop them from entering. A dance and ritual performance treats possession by the hyang. Anthropological accounts report the Balinese fearing malevolent spirits that move through the village, dangerously, in the dark of night. These beliefs continue and persist alongside and mixed in with later, Indian influenced religious beliefs and the numerous complex rituals that permeate all aspects of Balinese life.

I bought the other souvenir, a statuette only six inches tall, probably because seeing something so thoroughly Indian surprised me, and as with all Balinese crafts, I was impressed with the skillful, highly detailed carving of two figures bonded together as one. But it needs explaining.

wayang puppet of Garuda

It is of the god Vishnu sitting astride Garuda, a giant mythical bird with the head and wings of a bird and the body of a man. In this pose of god and mount, Garuda leans forward, standing with legs splayed. He wears a headdress. Unfortunately, the long beak of my statuette’s Garuda is chipped.

And how did Vishnu and Garuda come from India to Bali? More broadly, how did it happen that Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam are Indonesian religions and part of Indonesian culture?

An aspect of Bali’s culture that usually receives considerable attention, its religion, was not something I noticed while there. I had no time to attend the elaborate public rituals that attract tourists and no occasion to observe private worship. With colleagues and friends I discussed our work and common interests. On one consultancy, a six-month assignment across Indonesia, my assistant/interpreter was a medical student, ethnic Chinese and recent convert to Christianity. He told me about his Christian groups and activities but we avoided talk of his faith. I greatly appreciated Indonesians’ generally open and tolerant attitude toward the religion, or non-religion, of others.

But still, seeing elements of Hinduism and Buddhism in Bali and of Islam elsewhere in Indonesia did seem a bit odd and I had no way to explain it. In the history I learned in school, that of Europe, the adoption of Christianity followed military conquest from Rome, and centuries later Islam followed conquering Arab and Persian armies. Otherwise, colonialism was a factor in spreading the two world religions.

Borobudur

I had wondered how Buddhism moved from India to countries throughout Asia, especially to South East Asia. And how could Islam be found so far from its center? The answer surprised me. It was trade and traders, men from centers of empire in India sailing forth from the Bay of Bengal into South East Asia and the islands to acquire goods, such as spices and cloth and lumber to build their ships, carrying with them their Hinduism, Buddhism, and later, Islam. Reasoning by analogy from what I know of merchants (and wrote of here) who sailed from Portugal in the 16^th century to nations around the world, and particularly to Indonesia, I can imagine how the spread of a new religion happened, slowly, over the centuries. Inevitably, some of the tradesmen married locally and settled down in coastal towns, created small communities practicing their Indian faith. People in the vicinity would be attracted to the more complex, more abstract beliefs and mythologies of the Mauryan (322 and 185 BCE) and the Gupta (320 to 550 CE) Empires’ sophisticated cultures, later those of the Chola and of the Gujeratis. Traders brought other innovations as well, such as a script for writing and iron for tools and weapons, all of which would lead to economic growth. The local community increased in size and social complexity and when a chieftain or a king converted, the faith spread. Adopting the king’s religion expresses political loyalty, and his religion becomes the religion of the state.

Java’s agriculture is highly productive and by the 8^th century the population on the Kedu Plain of Central Java was large and dense enough to support a sizable, culturally rich Buddhist kingdom ruled by a royal line known as the Shailendra Dynastry. (The royal court is pictured on a Borobudur bas-relief, shown in Part I .) The marvelous Borobudur was built in the 9th century, designed in the Javanese Buddhist architecture style that blends ancient ancestor worship and Buddhist concepts. The word in Indonesian for ancient temples and sacred structures is candi; thus the Borobudur is Candi Borobudur.

One of the world’s great historic figures is Ashoka of the Maurya Empire, and to him we owe the rise of Buddhism as a religion and a philosophy. (I wrote here of Ravi’s childhood visits in Sarnath and his fascination with Buddhism.)  Ashoka ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent from c. 268 to 232 BCE. The center of his empire, Magadha, today’s Patna, was also the birthplace of Buddhism. Ashoka was born Hindu, but, according to legend, after witnessing the devastating effects of war on his people he embraced Buddhism, resulting in Buddhism’s consequent spread across the empire. He promoted economic growth, and as Mauryans began absorbing the ideals and values of Buddhist teachings, discouraged the caste system. Buddhism became the religion of traders and merchants.  (Jainism arose in the same period but did not spread beyond India.)

Early expanion of Buddhism

 

Many Buddhists believe Buddha is an incarnation of Vishnu. In Indonesia, the heroic, mythical Airlangga of the 11^th century, ruler of an East Java kingdom but born and raised in Bali, follower of Buddhism, is shown in statues and paintings as Vishnu-like, riding Garuda. I have not read of Airlangga as a Vishnu incarnation but some believers may view him as such. He is associated with the Garuda, a mythical bird that captures the imagination, like the image of the eagle being ubiquitous in European cultures. And the concept of the phoenix, originally from ancient Greece. Indonesia uses the Garuda Pancasila as its national symbol.

I notice that Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, is not included in the Indonesian Vishnu and Garuda. In the Indian original she is Vishnu’s consort and almost inseparable from him, as if his spirituality must be balanced by her practical emphasis on wealth and prosperity, all of which takes me back to a continuing discussion between Ravi and me, sometimes with an edge on it, about American culture. This is too complex for little more than an outline here; maybe I’ll return to it another time in detail. Suffice it to say that Ravi grew up in an extended family where educated Brahmins in the professions or holding a government position had the highest prestige, the Sikhs and their military symbols were admired, but tradesmen and men in small businesses had low prestige. Although somewhat different, it reflected the usual Indian caste system. In American culture, almost the opposite holds; small business, business in general, is prestigious, a job with government is so-so, and except for medicine, professions rank by how much money the person earns. In Bali, traditionally, men did not engage in trade. In the local marketplace women were the traders. (This is a pattern in many cultures.) The more lucrative trade of major commodities was done by outsiders, by men from China, Sulawesi, and of course, from India. Some of the early Indian traders elsewhere in S.E. Asia recognized Lakshmi in their temples as one of their own, but in Balinese culture she had no male advocates to rescue her from obscurity. In the stories of Airlangga, in an East Java statue, he is depicted as Vishnu accompanied by his two consorts, Lakshmi and Sri, the Indonesian goddess of rice and of wealth.

Vishnu and Garuda was part of the Indian traders’ Hinduism but during the early era of their influence in Indonesia, from the 8th through the 11^th centuries, when traders and merchants were organizing into guilds and adopting Buddhism as their religion they took Ganesha, the elephant god, as their principal deity.

Borobudu

The elephant is not an animal familiar to me, but Ravi, despite having no contact with them, loved the idea of the elephant. In India, traveling with him, I had the good fortune of occasionally seeing real elephants in their natural setting. I had read of warrior elephants being critical in Ashoka’s expansion of the Mauryan Empire but that had been in India’s past. In the 1980s I watched a row of elephants, obviously working animals, ambling along a rural road; then a bridegroom in Jaipur riding to his wedding on an elaborately decorated elephant, and on another day tourists perched atop an elephant on their way to a palace. I met an elephant while standing in a South India temple as it gently touched the top of my head with its trunk. Once, when Ravi and I were driving on a bridge, crossing a river, we stopped for a few minutes to watch a boy, a mahout, bathing an elephant that lay on its side, stretched out in the shallow water. They both appeared at that moment to be in a perfect state of contentment.

Sumatran Ganesha

It took me a while, but I came to understand why the elephant could become a god-figure in India and why Indonesian Buddhists would adopt Ganesha into its pantheon. After all, Indonesia has it own elephant, a smaller and separate species, now in danger of extinction. I know of the Sumatran elephant from a Batak wood carving where the eyes, tusks and trunk are suggested.

One of Bali’s earliest known Buddhist sites is near Ubud, in Bedulu, now a small town but in the 9^th century the center from where a king ruled over many villages, employed some sort of military force, and where Buddhist priests kept temples for the practice of Buddhism. Today a 9^th century sanctuary, the Goa Gajah, Elephant Cave, and the ruins of a temple bathing pool remain. No elephant is pictured anywhere, and no clear idea is given by anyone to explain why the cave has elephant as its name. The elephant was not indigenous in Bali. Available here are photographs and descriptions of what the tourist can see — the ruins of a Buddhist temple that was carved from the rock, with broken carvings and unfinished statues of the Buddha strewn about; of an ancient shrine in the cliff face with statues of Ganesha and two goddesses; of the man-made cave interior for which the Goa Gajah is the doorway and of the ritual bathing pool with seven apsara statues carved into the side walls and from which the fountain water flows. A statue of Buddha from as early as the 8^th century is mentioned.

I regret not having seen these historical places and not having visited the Denpasar museum. Here for a discussion of Buddhism in Java and Bali, and here to learn what remains of Buddhism in Bali.

In India, Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge and all literary arts including music, literature and speech and Ganesha is the god of intellect and wisdom. Saraswati did not make it to Indonesia, but the Indian traders took Ganesha with them and today he is the Indonesian god of the sciences.

Another experience I missed while working in Bali was Yeh Pulu.  In Bedulu, after visiting the Goa Gajah and surroundings, one goes to the other side of town to see a frieze carved into a cliff face. It is a bas-relief sculpture some twenty-five meters long and two meters high, from the 14^th century, depicting in a sequence of scenes the everyday life of Balinese villagers. Some consider it a story enacted by the Hindu god Krishna. I think it the former. Individuals are distinguished from one another, local architecture is shown, people are at work, there are real animals, game is being hunted. At the end of the tale is a statue of Ganesha.

I was struck by the presence of the horse, an animal domesticated on the Asian steppes, not indigenous to Indonesia, nor, as inferred from linguistic evidence, brought along with the Austronesian heritage. Two seemingly unrelated words are used in different parts of Indonesia for horse, but linguistic analysis and the islands’ social history indicate that the horse came from India. A thoughtful, well written and all too-brief discussion is here. It would be fascinating to search further for the roots of the two words in India’s two language families – Dravidian and Indo-European.

This account of a temple touched me.

In Tampaksiring, north east of Ubud, are remains of Gunung Kawi, a temple and funerary complex from the 11^th century, shown in Part I of this essay.

In 1354, Majapahit forces from Java, led by Gajah Mada, landed in Bali and captured Bedulu. It changed the course of history for Bali. That next, but first a comment on Bali’s stone and wood carving. An excellent discussion is here.

I like the introductory sentence — “The Balinese seem unable to tolerate unadorned stone. With fanged, bulging-eyed statues guarding every gate and shrine, and walls, benches, and pedestals of traffic signs carved in stone, stone-carving is so ubiquitous on Bali … …” and the urge to carve and ornament surfaces was already flourishing during the Buddhist period just covered. I wonder what happened to the urge for representative art, as in Borobudur and in Yeh Pulu. The men who carved objects from the island’s soft stone and of wood were village farmers practicing their craft to produce the traditional, standardized items required for the community’s religious and ritual life. During the time of medieval kingdoms, they were employed by the royal family to provide ornaments and objects for the royal palaces and temples. Art and creativity were not the craftsman’s explicit goals but certain among them were also artists and we sense that in a good number of the statues and decor we now treasure.

 

 

 

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The Artful Crafts of Bali, Part I

I wrote my fifth essay on Bali three months ago, in October. This should be the last; I should stop puzzling over what makes Bali and the Balinese so attractive to so many people, myself included, but cannot until my curiosity is satisfied. I was in Bali four times, first in 1978 and thrice during the 1980s, always on assignment to evaluate village primary health care programs, too tightly scheduled to be a tourist. Still, through my work and with colleagues I saw much of the island, met delightful people and came away fascinated with Bali, which is not the way one usually feels after visiting peasant villages. Now, nearly forty years later, I round out my experience of Bali and return to address the question of how this unique culture and its rich tradition of folk art came about.

Bali’s remarkable agricultural system (described here and here) is almost unique. It entails the entire village community being engaged in planning and coordinating activities and each family contributing the labor, then rewards them all with an abundance of food and long stretches of leisure time. One other society, the Ifugao of the Philippines, in mountainous northern Luzon, has a similar rice paddy irrigation system with the similar harvests and another feature of their culture — their complex system of unwritten law — that long ago drew in  anthropologists to study them. A complex system of law, recorded in some form of writing, is needed by a large complex society governed by an elite, not by a relatively small society of communities based on kin relationships and led by a council of elders. However, for the Ifugao tribal people and for the Balinese villagers, the exigencies of a mountain rice paddy irrigation system required developing a complex system of rules and an organization for routine, impersonal enforcement of the rules, which the two societies did, totally independently of one another, each rewarded with abundant, dependable harvests.  In 1995, UNESCO declared the Ifugao Rice Terraces as a World Heritage Site and in 2008 inscribed as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage the Ifugao Hudhud Chants, the traditional poetic narrative chants practiced by the community during the rice sowing season, at harvest time and at funeral wakes and rituals.

For understanding how the Balinese sculptures and paintings and crafts came into being, developed through the ages and persists into the present, factors other than harvest abundance and the gift of leisure must be taken into account. This I needed to explore.

It may not seem right to think of Balinese as peasants, but that is what they were until tourism took over the economy. The Bali we know was until recently a medieval society of small kingdoms, each kingdom with a royal family in a palace compound ruling over, and being sustained by, village dwelling peasants whose lives revolved around producing food, tools, containers, cloth, and buying and selling goods in a local marketplace. Inferring from studies I read, I picture the city of the kingdom to be little more than a central marketplace set in the vicinity of the royal establishment and major temples. Craftsmen remained in the villages, no moving to live in towns or organizing into guilds, no forming communities separate from being farmers. Further, because Bali had no merchant class to build separate trading establishments, each able to support a community, it had no urban working class. And the Dutch, taking control in the mid 1800s, chose not to impose major changes on the society.

I begin with Bali’s beginning, then consider intermediate periods and finally quote from two sources for a description of the medieval kingdoms that continued into the 20^th century. Written records and archeological evidence for reconstructing Bali’s history are scarce but linguistic studies and population genetics give us basic information on where Bali’s ancestors came from and approximately when they arrived on the island.

As with all of Indonesia’s islands, the island of Bali was formed during the thaw that followed the last glacial period, circa 110,000 to 12,000 years ago. By around 45,000 years ago, certain Homo sapiens, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, using flaked stone tools, having migrated out of Africa and walked to Asia, made boats and traveled eastward by sea. New archeological evidence shows that by 42,000 years ago these early settlers had crossed the then shallow oceans to reach New Guinea, Australia and other islands. Paleolithic stone axes and adzes were found in northern Bali, in Sembiran.

The Austronesian language

Circa 3000 to 600 BCE a seafaring Neolithic people arrived on Bali and replaced the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, Neolithic meaning the agricultural revolution.

Dai women in Yunnan Province

Their language, and their culture, was Austronesian, one of a large family of languages spoken in most of the Indonesian archipelago; in Borneo; in all of the Philippines, in the Polynesian islands; much of Malaysia; in areas of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Taiwan; and oddly enough, in Madagascar off the East African coast. And also by a minority community, the Dai, in South China

I’ve resisted the temptation to wander off from Bali and discuss the origin of the Austronesian peoples.

migrations of the Dai

But — The history is too important to not at least outline. (For Japan, see the fifth Comment here.) A well accepted theory on the origins of this enormous language family is known as The Express Train Hypothesis. Linguists based it on the fact that the indigenous tribes of Taiwan are very small in population size but have a large number of Austronesian languages.

The theory holds that they, the Formosans, brought the Neolithic from China, increased in numbers and migrated outward, first to the Philippines, and became ancestral to all the Austronesian peoples. Recent genetic evidence, however, indicates that both the Taiwan aborigines and the Indonesians derive from the Dai ethnic, now small in numbers but previously widespread throughout the Yangtze region. Indonesia’s ancestors, then, would have originated in the region around the Tonkin Gulf, the homeland of the Dai, and migrated south through the Vietnam corridor, while the Taiwan aborigines migrated directly from mainland China.

neolithic tools

ducks by the 800s CE

The Austronesian Neolithic migrants to Bali brought with them ground stone tools, rice farming, the dog and the pig. The chicken was domesticated in North China and quickly adopted everywhere as a farm animal. The Austronesians brought, as well, the making of clay pots and certainly of basketry, although it is not a craft that leaves evidence for the archeologist to easily discover.  For a brief, readable history of Bali, here.

The Balinese today are essentially from that Neolithic migration. A study of the contemporary Balinese Y chromosomes show 83.7% Austronesian, some 2.2% possibly from the pre-Neolithic hunting/gathering Homo sapiens. Other genetic evidence shows approximately 12% of the Balinese paternal gene pool is from India, from Hindu priests and rulers who migrated in and became a ruling class.

Bali mountains and rivers

That’s it. No other migrations. A homogeneous population with one common history. Until recently, the island was not easily accessible. It is surrounded by coral reefs. The channel west of Bali is not easily navigable; the currents are very strong. From Hildred and Clifford Geertz’s very interesting book, “Kinship in Bali,” in the 1950s – “Bali, historically, has been quite effectively cut off from the rest of the world. Located on the southern edge of the Indonesian archipelago, with the mountains on its northern side, Bali’s back is turned on the commercially busy Java Sea where Chinese, Arabs, Indians and Europeans sailed to reach the Spice Islands. Bali’s harbors are few and small. The southern coast is lashed by heavy seas, and the Balinese people have never been attracted to sailing or fishing.” Formerly, shipwrecks near shore were common and the Balinese salvaged their contents.  Here for a map of the spice trade.

Nevertheless, between 800-300 BCE, the Balinese did have contact with the Dong Son society of Northern Vietnam, a Bronze Age civilization, “civilization” meaning cities where a military, religious ruling elite was based and ruled over a countryside of villages. The Bronze Age saw the widespread adoption of agriculture and use of irrigation. The wheel was introduced during the Bronze Age and people used animal drawn carts. Knowledge of astronomy and mathematics developed during this period. The first forms of writing were developed.

The Balinese acquired from the Dong Son civilization the knowledge of and techniques for casting bronze tools, weapons and drums. Since copper and tin for making bronze are not found in Bali, we have to assume trade routes had developed, most likely by traders from China and from Sulawesi.

I have not yet discovered when the Balinese first practiced paddy rice agriculture with the water buffalo. They could have brought it with them as part of the South China Neolithic or acquired it later from the Dong Son contact. I should think the more advanced tool kit of the Bronze Age would help in expanding the terracing required by paddy rice farming. The later introduction of iron tools would have been critical in further improvements and elaborations. I will discuss in Part II of this essay when and under what circumstances they began their present irrigation system. For some reason, they did not acquire the potter’s wheel or the wood-lathe, both Bronze Age innovations.

From the 700s to 900s CE the Balinese were influenced by the Medang Kingdom of central and east Java, a period when Buddhism was being introduced from India and Bali had its first known kingdom.

Borobudur

Borobudor is from this period. The bas-relief sculptures here are from Borobudur. The East Java Singhasari Kingdom, also Hindu-Buddhist, followed. (At some point I’ll return to how and why Buddhism spread as a world religion.)

I want to pause at this point before continuing on to Bali in the year 1343 CE and the Majapahit Kingdom to consider four of the crafts for which Bali is famous. Two came out of the Neolithic, pottery and basketry. Cotton cloth and bronze smithing came from the Bronze Age.

The ancient Austronesian Neolithic seafarers brought with them the making of clay pots. However, for reasons I do not understand, the craft did not fare as well in Bali as in other lands. Alternative materials, such as bamboo and the pandanus leaf, were available for making containers, and the Balinese used them skillfully, but until metal containers arrived nothing could replace ceramic for carrying water, cooking, safe storage. Every village would need someone, usually a woman, to make its pots and the usual terracotta objects for religious rituals.

The pots were made by coiling, the first and basic technique. A series of pictures are shown here. Women of the Hopi, an indigenous people of the southwestern United States, made some of the most beautiful pottery ever this way. Imagine the skill required by the Balinese woman to keep the wall of the pot from collapsing while adding layer upon layer, employing only two simple wood tools to smooth the surface. She set the finished pot out to dry, then fired it with nothing more than a covering of straw. The resulting pot, no matter how attractive, is brittle and easily broken. I found no explanation for why the potter’s wheel and better means of firing were not adopted. Certainly both improvements could have been introduced to the Balinese, as were spinning and weaving. In other societies, the potter’s wheel came with men taking over the making of pottery as full-time craftsmen. I wondered if the local clay might not have held up under proper firing, but with the tourist market having developed and a man taking over to turn ceramics into a business, that same clay, called excellent red clay, was shaped into tiles, properly fired and sold for roofing material, at least until the clay of the potters’ village was depleted.

A partial view into the past can be seen in a contemporary village of potters not yet fundamentally changed by the tourist industry. It is said that traditional Balinese excluded potters from the villages because they were considered unclean, so the potter families stayed together, living in a special village, such as Pejaten village, in Tabanan district. Until recently, they were poor, owning only the land they lived on and no rice fields. Every family worked to turn out its own pottery. Men dug out the clay but women made the pots, in recent times on a hand-wheel but with the traditional method of firing, and they sold the pots in local markets. Here for a view of contemporary ceremics in Bali.

Surely, basketry began in the Neolithic, at least in the late Neolithic, along with spinning and weaving. I have baskets from many cultures. It is primordial craft. In Bali, as elsewhere, baskets are part of daily life, used in every household, made from local materials, sold in the village markets, and as is usual for Bali, they are beautifully fashioned. The finest baskets, the finest I have seen anywhere (except for those from Ischia, now extinct) are made in Tenganan village, a Bali Aga culture that holds to the original Austronesian traditions and ceremonies. The Tenganan baskets are made of a reed from the area and “smoked” over coconut husks to add patina and strength.

drop spindle

In most cultures, the weaving of cloth began in the late Neolithic, which archeologists infer from spindle whorls of stone or pottery. (I wrote about that here.)  Cotton was cultivated in the Indus Valley civilization by 2500 BCE but the Austronesian Neolithic did not include the making of cloth. Growing the cotton plant, processing the harvested boll for fiber, spinning with a drop spindle and weaving came to Bali from India via Java, perhaps around 200 BCE. For the Indian Textile history here.

Documents on the history of China’s T’ang dynasty named a place, possibly in Bali, that paid tribute in cotton cloth to China in 647 CE, and again, a copperplate inscription found at a village in Bali, dated to 896 CE, covered something about taxes on raw cotton and on yarn, and something about a devastating raid. Apparently, there was trade, plus more forceful means for exchanging goods, with cotton yarn and cotton cloth being primary commodities. Various historians report that Bali produced cotton “of the most excellent quality and in great abundance” in its drier coastal regions. It was noted that the weavers of the pre-Majapahit Tenganan village preferred the cotton grown on Nusa Penida, a small island off the east coast of Bali.

Traditionally, everywhere, spinning was women’s work. Spinning is the complex, time-consuming process of transforming cotton fiber into yarn and it requires knowledge, skill and considerable labor. First the seeds must be separated from the fiber, followed by the processes of willowing, lapping, carding and drawing. In Bali and throughout the islands, women spun this finished fiber into yarn using a drop spindle, not so simple as it appears. They spun while sitting together, while walking, whenever and wherever their hands were not otherwise engaged. After spinning, they used another process to stretch the yarn. Then to dye it. The stages are detailed here. By the 1600s, the spinning wheel had been introduced into Java, most likely by traders from India, and it reached Bali under the Dutch. After the spinning comes the weaving. How much time would it take to make one sarong, even after growing the cotton? A month? Maybe longer.

In the 1700s and later the Dutch trading company, the VOC, took over and developed a profitable, for them, business based on exporting cotton yarn made by Indonesian women; they acquired hand-spun yarn from Java and sold it in Holland. They built an industry for producing yarn in Java but not cloth in Java. After all, one reason to keep a colony was to control a market of colonials who had to buy goods the colonialist produced at home.

Bali is known for its ikat, a length of cloth in which the pattern is made by tie-dying either the warp or weft yarn before the weaving. The weaving is done by women using a belt loom. Bali favors the weft ikat; warp ikat is favored on other Indonesian islands.

the geringsing dress

The yarns, either warp or weft, are tied in places with lengths of banana bast. When the yarns are dipped in dye the tied areas resist the dye and remain uncolored. Repeated tying and dyeing results in an intricate, multihued pattern. (When I was working in Sumatra, a colleague gave me an ikat from that island.) Weaving a length of cloth in which both the warp and the weft are resist-dyed prior to weaving is called double ikat. It is done in only three countries: India, Japan, and one village in Bali, again the Bali Aga village of Tenganan. (It must be a tourists’ favorite today, which is one way to keep traditional crafts alive.) These lengths of cloth have high spiritual significance and in Tenganan they are still worn for specific ceremonies. They are called geringsing and treasured for the magical powers they are believed to possess.

A video very much worth watching is here. It is by Hans and Fifi and filmed in Semiran village in north Bali. Among other interesting sights, we see a woman weaving, the last of the town’s traditional weavers. The local basketry is shown. A traditional house/compound is opened for filming. In the compound, separate buildings are for sleeping, preparing food, storing food. A plow can be seen. The couple also film a temple complex with its Majapahit architectural and decorative elements.

King and Queen  Borobudur

an 11th century temple

Bali’s bronze smiths believe themselves to be the descendants of a number of gamelan-smith extended families in Tihingan village, Klungkung Regency, and these families believe they migrated from Central Java during the time of Java’s Indian influenced Buddhist kingdoms, possibly coming to Bali when the first royal palace courts were established, perhaps following an invasion and when chieftainships were evolving into small kingdoms. Recently archeologists uncovered near Tihingan a hearth from a disused, previously unknown foundry they date to the 11th century CE. The first written inscriptions found in Bali are Buddhist in nature and they use the Indian Sanscrit as well as the Balinese language. They appeared in the 8th century CE on clay pallets in the regency of Gianyar. A pillar in Sanur, 914 CE, is the first known inscription in which a Balinese king recorded his name and it shows connections with the Buddhist kingdom in Central Java. For photos of the Buddhist temples, the candi, and extraordinary architecture from that period in Java —  here.

Borobudur musicians

Bali gamelan instruments

The Borobudur bas-relief sculpture  of musicians lacks metallophones and xylophones but the musical ensemble is thought to be the ancient form of the gamelan, before bronze smiths produced the instruments for later rulers in their palaces and temples. The palace elite would have been the one audience who could have afforded imported copper and tin to make the instruments and to support the craftsmen/farmers in their villages. Today’s bronze gamelan musical instruments are beautifully made. A description of how the smiths work and produce the instruments is here.

In 1342 military forces from the Javanese Majapahit kingdom landed in Bali. Seven months later they defeated the Balinese king and captured the Balinese capital Bedulu, situated near today’s Gianyar town.

To be continued … … but first a memory.

It happened in northern Bali, in a village near the original Dutch city, Singaraja. I was in the province to review the villages’ primary health care program and was staying in a hotel, an elegant but seedy Dutch hotel that faced onto a broad but empty road that led, I think, to the harbor. My young interpreter/assistant friend and I were the only guests staying there. The hotel is probably gone. Singaraja had been a grand colonial city with fine architecture, such as this Dutch colonial house. The Dutch later moved their base to Batavia, today’s Jakarta, and I stayed in such a house in Jakarta. I will look into why the Dutch moved to Jakarta.

My clearest memory of being in north Bali is of a plea from the headman of one of the villages. He had waited for me to complete my interviewing and observations, then said he wanted to show me something, so I followed him, with my interpreter, outside the village to a visually lovely area, green and lush and wet with pools of water. The headman told me the worst health problem for the villagers was not an illness in my program; it was malaria, and he thought I should know they had tried to fight the disease. A few years previously, a government official had shown them a method for controlling the mosquito population, and for a year or so the villagers had greatly reduced the number of new cases of malaria. The control mechanism was putting a slick of oil over the water that always covered much of the ground around the village, and it worked. They gratefully repeated the oil slick a second time, with the same effect. However, as the headman explained, putting down the oil and cleaning and maintaining the area required more work and time than they could spare from their farming. Finally, they had to choose; it was either having enough food or being free from malaria. I reported his story to the authorities I knew. How great is the need, the suffering, how limited the resources.  I can still feel the sadness.

And I remember from a primary health care program in a southern American state talking with an older Sanitary Engineer in the state’s Department of Health. He told me that when he first worked there, in the 1940s, malaria had been a common problem but he had located the low areas where water accumulated and had ditches dug to drain the land. It solved the malaria problem. The headman’s village land could not be drained in that manner.

Further on malaria and colonialists — I wrote here about the British defeating Tippu Sultan, 1799, in his royal establishment in Srirangapattana and stationing their troops in his city, only to find they were being defeated by the mosquito. Consequently, they moved their base to another of Tippu Sultan’s forts, the delightful Bangalore situated on high ground with a pleasant climate free of a mosquito infestation.

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Art from Greece through Persia to China in a time before the Silk Road

For weeks I’ve been reading and learning Indonesian history, discovering all sorts of intriguing things — then last week an article reminded me of something that interested me decades ago and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I simply had to follow through and find out what new had happened.

The article is “Discoveries May Rewrite History of China’s Terra-Cotta Warriors.”

“The 8,000 terracotta warriors that have kept watch over the tomb of China’s first emperor for more than 2,000 years were the result of outside influence, new evidence suggests. Based on DNA remains found on the site, archaeologists think ancient Greek sculptors could have been on hand to train local artists – a find that could overturn centuries-old assumptions about contact between the East and the West before Marco Polo.”

The Terracotta Army is a collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China. It is a form of funerary art buried with the Emperor in 210–209 BCE.

Thousands of clay soldiers stand in trench-like underground corridors, positioned according to rank, each soldier a unique individual with his own facial features, expression, hairstyle, the higher ranking of them outfitted with full bronze battle gear. Weapons (swords, daggers, spears, arrowheads) are included. Originally the statues were brightly colored but when exposed to air the paint and lacquer flaked off.

I once saw two of the terracotta soldiers. It was in 1988 and I had gone to the Cleveland Museum of Art specifically to see its collection of Indian paintings, unaware of the exhibition being held, “The Quest for Eternity: Chinese Ceramic Sculptures from the People’s Republic of China.” As I remember, the two statues were placed high, on display, maybe near the entrance, and walking by them, looking up, I was stunned by their presence. A friend had been waiting for me. She came over and hurried us on. Oddly, I can still see the statues in my mind’s eye, but not the paintings. Later, thinking of them and being outside the States, I somehow thought the terracotta army was from the Shang Dynasty and read a bit about it as background, all of which I’ve forgotten. An image of the soldiers returns as I read of them again, and with new information, they are even more interesting.

Gandhara

The evidence for Greek artists having participated in creating the statues especially interests me. I knew of  Gandhara art, but this wonderful Greek-influenced statuary was much later, in the first and second centuries CE., too late for the terracotta statues.  Besides, I wondered why a civilization sophisticated enough to produce the terracotta marvels would need input from a far distant culture and one less advanced than itself. Curiosity would not stop nagging at me so I finally decided that with this question, plus the importance of Chinese influence on Indonesia and its culture, I really should take the time to learn something of China and Chinese history.

Where to begin? I make sense of ancient civilizations by thinking in anthropological terms, beginning with the basic era, the Neolithic. It is a period of people living in villages, cultivating fields of a staple, usually a grain, with the hoe, raising domesticated animals, using stone tools, making pottery and weaving cloth. For China, the earliest known Neolithic was along the Yellow River c. 8500 BCE., based on millet and the pig. Silk was being produced by 5000 BCE.

By 7500 BCE a rice-based Neolithic had developed on the Yangtze River, but that is another part of China. I will return to it when writing about the origins of Indonesian culture.

The next historic era is the Bronze Age, meaning that within a landscape of farming villages there developed a military ruling elite and a religious elite who lived in cities, often walled cities, in palaces, surrounded by specialists and craftsmen, by servants and laborers while keeping control over the peasants who sustained them with food, goods and labor. The military protected their peasantry from raids and attacks by other rulers, and with the religious elite, served as the ultimate judicial authority. The invention of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, had made possible weapons more effective for warfare and axes and blades stronger and more durable than stone tools for clearing and working the land. Metal-working required new sorts craftsmanship, and since the ores are rarely found together, it created the need for trade and for traders, a new occupation of men, and some women, who ventured out beyond the community, in contact and negotiations with people in other societies.

In China, the smelting of copper was discovered early, c. 5000 BCE, in several Neolithic cultures. Tin ore is relatively rare but small deposits were found along the Yellow River, accessible to Bronze Age civilizations. The earliest was the Xia dynasty. c. 2070 – 1600 BCE, followed by the Shang dynasty, c. 1600 – 1046 BCE, the earliest dynasty for which there is archaeological evidence. The Shang dynasty, a period of small kingdoms, was followed by the Zhou dynasty, c. 1046 – 256 BCE, characterized as a feudal society, meaning one with a military hierarchy in which a ruler or lord offers mounted fighters a fief (medieval beneficium), a unit of land, with its peasants and natural resources included, to control in exchange for a military service. The individual who accepted this land became a vassal, and the man who granted the land become known as his liege or his lord.

Qin Shi Huang Di, the man whom the terracotta soldiers were to serve in the afterlife, came to the throne of the kingdom of Qin in 246 BCE at the age of 13. Within 25 years his military forces had conquered all of the other Warring States and unified all of China under the Qin Dynasty. He was the First Emperor of China. During his rule he standardized coins, weights, and measures; interlinked the states with canals and roads; and is credited with building the first version of the Great Wall. He died in 210 BCE.

The Han Dynasty, 206 BCE – 220 CE, followed the Qin Dynasty. It ruled for four centuries and is considered a golden age in Chinese history. China’s majority ethnic group refers to itself as the “Han people” and the Chinese script is referred to as “Han characters”

A good article on the Bronze Age with pictures of bronze artifacts is here.

The Iron Age, the era when iron objects were first produced, is a third archeological Age based on technology but less consistently related to a type of social organization.  Iron tool and weapon use began between c.1200 to 600 BCE, depending on the region and on when the knowledge was developed for smelting iron ore, removing impurities, and for steel, regulating the amount of carbon in the alloy. Other Iron Age innovations were the potter’s wheel, the rotary quern for grinding grain, and the wood lathe.

In the Mediterranean region, c. 1300 BCE, iron technology developed during a time of disorder and violence known as the Bronze Age Collapse. Trade routes for tin ore were disrupted and bronzesmiths responded by turning to the more abundant and accessible iron ore. Meteorite iron had been known and used for making swords. As the technology evolved, iron became cheaper, stronger, lighter and forged iron implements eventually superseded cast bronze tools and weapons. For some reason, the process seems to have been slower in China than in Europe. Nevertheless, in the Yellow River region during the Spring and Autumn Period, 722 – 481 BCE, farming was revolutionized by the use of cast iron tools and oxen to pull the plow. The food supply increased and population increase followed. Iron objects, such as handcuffs and collars for slaves or criminals, were found in Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s tomb but the terracotta warriors’ weapons were bronze, not iron.

The Chariot and four horses fascinates me. I have here a picture and discussion of a similar chariot and charioteer in India being taken into battle by four horses, possibly in the 4^th century BCE.

From the Cleveland Museum of Art website —

“Some of the most famous ceramic horses are those found in the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (reigned 221-208 BCE). In three separate pits, more than 7,000 pottery soldiers, horses, and chariots and tens of thousands of bronze weapons (swords, daggers, spears, cross-bow triggers, and arrowheads) were excavated. They would have been brightly painted, though much of the color is now lost. In the center of the chariot, a chariot driver holds the reins in both hands. On either side of him are two chariot soldiers. Standing with their feet placed to balance their weight while the chariot is in motion, one hand holds the side-rail of the chariot the other a weapon. Since the charioteer has both hands on the reins, he cannot protect himself. He wears a special uniform with long-sleeved armor to protect his arms and hands and a high collar to protect his neck.”

From a Shang Dynasty archeological site —

“The light chariot, with 18 to 26 spokes per wheel, first appeared, according to the archaeological and inscriptional record, about 1200 BCE. Glistening with bronze, it was initially a prestigious command car used primarily in hunting. The 16 chariot burials found at Xiaotun raise the possibility of some form of Indo-European contact with China, and there is little doubt that the chariot, which probably originated in the Caucasus, entered China via Central Asia and the northern steppe. Animal-headed knives, always associated with chariot burials, are further evidence of a northern connection.”

In later centuries, about 200 BCE, other Indo-European contacts, this time Greek artists from the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, today’s Afghanistan, traveling north of the Taklamakan Desert, arrived in Xi’an, Qin Shi Huang’s city, to show his artists the art and science of modeling the human body. Men of Bactria had already led expeditions into Xinjiang, northwestern China. The historian Strabo wrote: “they extended their empire even as far as the Seres (Chinese) and the Phryni.” Several statuettes and representations of Greek soldiers have been found north of the Tien Shan, and are on display in the Xinjiang museum at Urumqi.

Hand of the Maitreya, the future Buddha, Gandhara, 3rd-4th century CE

How often in considering the history of this region of the earth we are led back to Alexander the Great. In 330 BCE, with an army of Macedonian and Greek soldiers, he invaded territory in today’s Afghanistan as part of his war against Persia. Greek soldiers settled down in this fertile realm, defeated enemy armies and founded the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. Although cut off from Europe, for three centuries they carried on with Greek culture. Greek was the language of government and the elite. One of their cities, Ain Khanum, excavated in 1970s, showed a complete Greek city with an acropolis, amphitheater, temples, and numerous statues. Their coins are among the most beautiful ever made. The Greeks of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, which included Gandhara, transmitted the art of sculpting human likeness to India, and most likely to Qin.

Quoting Lukas Nickel —

Ancient Chinese records tell that 12 giant statues, clad in “foreign robes” “appeared in Lintao” in what was the westernmost part of China. (The word “Lintao” can also mean any place far to the west.) The records do not say how this appearance happened, who brought them there, or who exactly the statues depicted; they do reveal the statues were larger than life and so impressed Qin Shi Huang that he decided to build 12 duplicates in front of his palace by melting down bronze weapons that had been used for war. Thus, we know that he, unlike other ruling elites in China, knew of and favored a foreign mode of sculpture.

In separate pits near his mausoleum were found a few dozen statues of half-naked acrobats and dancers on which the sculptors attempted to render a bone structure, muscles and sinews to depict a person in movement. Further, “This comes close to an understanding of the human body that was employed at the time only in Hellenistic (Greek influenced) Europe and Asia.” Nickel argues that creating this sort of realistic sculpture is not something that a sculptor could learn without some practice, that it took the ancient Greeks centuries to master it, and “The creation of a believable human body preoccupied generations of Greek sculptors. It was a complex artistic and intellectual process that did not happen overnight.”

Researchers salvaged traces of European mitochondrial DNA from skeletons buried near Qin Shi Huang’s tomb, confirming the Greeks were there.

China had no tradition of building life-size figures with realistic details before the construction of Qin Shi Huang’s tomb, and none since then.

I love the 1^st and 2^nd century art of Gandhara, much of it Buddhist. More on that in another essay.

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An Addendum to Comments on the Balinese/Indonesian word Musyawarah

For people who are fascinated with words, how we borrow them from other cultures and how the meanings of a word changes through time and circumstances, I’m adding an addendum to a discussion in my previous essay.

It has to do with Musyawarah, a word I heard in Java in the 1980s and met again in reading about the decision-making process villagers in Bali use for organizing their many and complex community activities. It reminded me of my time, in the late 1950s, when I was involved with a Mexican-American community from southern Texas newly settled into Wisconsin, a midwestern state. A group of women asked me to help them create a social club, something they had watched the men trying and always failing to do. After our own two failed attempts to hold a meeting, I introduced them to how it is done and how a group makes decisions. The idea is for someone to raise a question or a proposal for the group and begin a discussion, after which, with all views having been presented, the leader would form a statement of what action to take and everyone would vote yes or no. I went on to explain that the majority would win and the minority would accept because in a future vote they might win, but by then no one was listening to me. I was preposing a procedure from my culture, one that simply would not work in my friends’ Mexican-American culture. The approach that did work was closer to Musyawarah. At the time musyawarah was not a word in my vocabulary; I called it talking to consensus. The experience taught me a lesson: the concept of debate and the loyal minority in my culture is not a universal; it is simply one mode of group decision-making. I discussed that here.

Yesterday, talking with a friend about Musyawarah, he said that although he had never used the word, Arabic has Mushawara, and we wondered if the meanings were the same. Surely the word in Javanese derives from Arabic. As early as the 8^th  century Muslim merchants, mostly from India, had sailed to the Indonesian islands to trade and often to marry and settle in, bringing Islam and Arabic with them, establishing Muslim communities, converting the royalty until finally, by the early 16^th century, Islam had replaced the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit dominance.  Mushawara as a word entered the Indonesian languages and was used, somewhat changed, for already existing behaviors the Indonesians had not as yet named.

I went on-line, searching for Mushawara, its meaning and how it is used. This is what I found –

— The Virtual Mosque defines Mushāwara as Consultation. Their translation from the Koran on the meaning of Consultation in private and public life is well worth reading. I summarize, briefly and in secular terms, this view on Consultation — A leader’s consulting with followers should be a standard practice within the family and the community. Consulting with followers makes them feel important and respected, generates good feeling toward the leader, gives the leader information and additional perspectives, allows the leader to better know his followers, and makes followers feel responsible for actions taken.

— In Kerala, India, the Muslim community, about a quarter of Kerala’s population, has an organization of Sunni scholars and clerics called the Samastha Kerala Jamiyyathul Ulama. (Ulama is Arabic for a body of scholars with specialist knowledge of Islamic sacred law and theology.) They call their supreme body and working committee The Mushawara, The Consulate Body. It consists of 40 eminent scholars who are drawn purely on the basis of their Islamic scholarship, religious piety, faithfulness and devotion.

— The Tablighi Jamaat is a Sunni Islamic organization. (Tabligh is Urdu for mission or to preach and Jamaat is Arabic for a Muslim religious assembly) It originated in India and has most of its adherents, numbering in the many millions, in South Asia but is increasingly global. It is a proselytizing and revivalist movement that focuses on urging Muslims to return to orthodox Sunni Islam, particularly in matters of ritual, dress, and personal behavior. It has been called “one of the most influential religious movements in 20th century Islam.” For a Tablighi Jamaat congregation, during a Mushawara (discussion or Consultation), the Shura (consultative committee) decides on all matters, large and small. A Mushawara is held daily. (taken from “Islamic Revivalism: Encounter the Modern World, A Study of the Tabligh Jama‘at” by Jan A. Ali)

— Quoting the Muslim chaplain in a major U.S. Midwestern university —  In Muslim tradition, there is a deeply rooted sense of Mushawara (seeking counsel), and Naseeha (advice). Chaplaincy aims to advise and lead a community, which indeed is the concept of seeking Naseeha and Mushawara. In essence, chaplaincy is an integral part of service to our faith community and while we may not have the same name for the profession, we do have a similar practice in our faith tradition.

— The website of an Islamic financial advisory firm includes a Mushawara meeting in its services, as well as a meeting with Shariah Auditors and guidance from Shariah-Scholars.

And what are my thoughts on this? Apparently, for these Muslims, certain words are so central to their belief system that they must be expressed in Arabic in an otherwise English text. Clearly, Mushawara is one of those words; it is defined, illustrated and explained in the Koran. Nasheeha is less clearly defined.

“Consultation,” their translation of Mushawara, has a number of meanings in English. One part of the definition in my Webster’s dictionary has consultation being the act of consulting. To consult means to deliberate, to consider. Interestingly, though, in old English the meaning was more concrete; it meant to call together, as in gathering the senate (supreme council of the Roman republic) and asking it for advice. I like to search in my etymological dictionary for the origin of words. Consult, and related words such as Consul and council, originated in ancient Rome and had to do with government and formal organizations.

Given this original meaning, Consultation seems a reasonable translation for Mushawara in the Koran. The book is sacred but the activities described for Mushawara are secular; they relate to family and political relationships. They are of the wise patriarch calling upon his subordinates for information and for keeping them engaged as faithful followers.

A later meaning of Consultation was a conference of specialists, e.g. lawyers and medical practitioners, to discuss, decide, plan. Generally, when I use the words consult or consultation, it means seeking the advice of an expert on a particular matter. I wonder how the Muslim groups using Mushawara and calling it Consultation would describe the process of what they actually do and how they interact in their meetings. Is it in the patriarchal mode described in the Koran, or is it in the mode of a leader guiding a consensus-building, free-flowing discussion that includes an exchange of information and ideas?

In Indonesia, to suit the Indonesian culture, “Mushawara” was transformed into “Musyawarah.” In Bali it is a method of decision-making for a system of food production that evolved over the centuries in that particular environment, discussed here. No one individual or family controls the rice irrigation system; it is owned by all the communities and is managed by the landowning families talking to consensus when they gather at the temples to keep informed, make decisions and do the work required.

I had thought of Musyawarah as an effective approach to decision-making for small groups in small communities, but doubted it could be adapted to decision-making for large, complex organizations.  In a paper in the Social Science Research Network Kawamur Koichi argues otherwise.

“This paper analyzes customary practices of consensus decision-making, called Musyawarah-mufakat, as a basis of democratic stability in Indonesia. Musyawarah and mufakat (deliberation and consensus) are a traditional decision-making rule in Indonesia which has often been observed in village meetings. This paper argues that this traditional decision-making rule is still employed even in a modernized and democratized Indonesia, not only at rural assemblies but in the national parliament as well. Furthermore, this consensus way of decision-making provides an institutional basis for democratic stability by giving every parliamentary player, whether big or small, an equal opportunity to express his/her interests. On the other hand, this system of Musyawarah-mufakat decreases political efficiency in the sense that it takes a long time to deliberate drafted laws in the parliament.”

Hmmm. The word Mufakat – Is it Arabic or Indonesia? — —  but enough for now. I could go on forever thinking about the origins of words, and more importantly, about decision-making in modern, democratic societies — but haven’t finished thinking and writing about my time in Bali and what I learned there.

Update –

The friend who said Musyawarah could be from the Arabic Mushawara saw in the paragraph above Mufakat being defined as deliberation and consensus. He suggested I find out if Mufakat is also spelled Muwafakat. And it is. I found on-line “A Dictionary of the Sunda Language of Java” by Jonathan Rigg. In the dictionary — Mupakat, Arabic, Properly Muwafakat, also Mufakat, to agree, to be of one mind, to unite efforts, to form a joint resolution

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Continuing with a discussion on Bali, on mushyawarah and on Balinese art.

I continue to ponder over why Bali is so attractive to visitors, including myself. Jawaharlal Nehru called Bali “the morning of the world” when he visited Indonesia in 1950 and the poet Rabindranth Tagore said, “Wherever I go on the island, I see God.” But Bali is more than a beautiful landscape; the island is something of a Shangri La where outsiders want to live as well as to visit. And how did this come to be? I figured out the basics of Bali’s centuries old social and economic system, outlined here, and the impact of tourism here, then continued reading into the large and never ending literature on Balinese history until I felt I understood something of what made Bali different – and what that difference is, or was. Amazingly, I find myself engaged to the point where I cannot let go and move on to other places where I worked and was involved. I read about Bali and one memory after another occurs to me, of a similarity with another culture here or of a difference there, and I want to get it all down into writing.

For example, I read about how the Balinese organize their irrigation farming and community activities and encounter references to musyawarah, an Indonesian word I heard some thirty-five years ago in Java, and memories from even longer ago than that are revived.

Musyawarah is the name for a social process I first observed in the 1950s, and having no one word for what was happening, described it with phrases and sentences. I was studying the urbanization of a Mexican-American community of migrant farm workers, Spanish speaking, who were taking jobs and settling into a Midwestern city rather than return as usual to their home base at the Texas border. In my second year of being with them, a number of the younger women asked me to help them organize a woman’s social club for the community, and it became quite an experience for us all. Among other things, it was when I discovered my expectations for how a meeting should be run were a product of my Anglo-Saxon culture. In meetings as I knew them, if an issue arose and different points of view were expressed, the members held a discussion, then took a vote and the minority accepted the outcome, the majority view, as that of the membership. In our Mexican-American club, in our early meetings, when we needed to make a group decision we held a discussion and took a vote, after which those who lost the vote walked out of the meeting, emotionally if not physically, without comment, angering the majority and leaving each side with secret, and not-so-secret suspicions.

I could not understand what was happening, so Consuelo, my close friend, explained for me the factions in the community and the older women and their feelings. When I expressed the idea of the minority staying on and maybe later even persuading others to their point of view, it drew a blank with her. Obviously, the concept of the loyal opposition was not in their culture and to save our club we had to work around that fact. With another woman, we devised a set of procedures that suited our Mexican-American women; essentially, every group decision had to be discussed until we all agreed on the same thing. It was a time-consuming, tiresome process and sometimes resulted in an action so innocuous it meant almost no action at all, but we stayed together, had good times together and accomplished good works, such as persuading and helping Mexican-Americans get to the polls and vote during local elections, have their voice heard. It was the first time Spanish was heard in the municipal hall. Unusual for that community, our social club survived for years, for long after I had left.

I called the procedures we invented “talking to consensus.” With some added features it was “musyawarah,” the process for group decision-making used by the Balinese. In later years, I observed the same process being used elsewhere, in other cultures, in tight but stratified groups, as with medical teams. The discussion went on and on and on until finally the decision reached usually was what the top man (almost always a man) wanted anyhow, but at least everyone had a say and was heard, small concessions were made along the way to the hard-to-convince, no one lost face and everyone was responsible for the outcome of actions taken. Musyawarah became part of my personal vocabulary.

Another feature of Balinese society I think about is the way in which foreigners respond to the place of art in Balinese culture. I read here that  “Life in Bali is based on art. It’s so essential that there is no word for “art” in Balinese. It is difficult to explain the relationship that the Balinese have with art to someone who has never seen it. The Balinese carve, weave and paint beautiful objects for daily use – they become objets d’art in the most pristine sense of the word. The Balinese have a kinetic, green, tangible relationship to art.”

But — except for their highly productive agriculture in an unusually benign setting that allowed them far more leisure time for crafts and religious rituals than any other peasant society I know of, the Balinese are essentially like everyone anywhere else. It is a basic fact of life that peoples everywhere and throughout human history have “… a kinetic, green, tangible relationship to art.” Balinese art is folk art; people in all the societies I know and know about have folk art but rarely have a name for the artistic beyond the functional.

Consider early Homo sapiens painting on the walls of caves, c. 30,000 BCE, propitiating the spirits of animals they hunt and incidentally producing great art. In college, in my first anthropology course I was impressed with the beauty of ancient tools used by the hunters, like the Solutrean point in France, 22,000 years ago,

and Clovis points in the Americas 13,000 years ago, beautiful beyond any functional requirement. In Neolithic villages with agriculture and domesticated animals, beginning some 12,000 years ago, craftsmen/women made tools and weapons, pots, baskets, cloth, objects for religious rituals, structures to live in, all useful and many pleasing to the eye. In towns and cities of the past,

a lady’s needlework

women with leisure handled cloth with care and imagination, adding beauty to ordinary useful items, and women today continue those crafts as hobbies, to sew and quilt and do embroidery as a craft and an art. Today travelers collect those lovely items people from traditional societies made for use; we display them in our homes and call them art.  (I wrote here about my collection of women’s artful craftwork. )

Why do I, and other people, find ordinary objects from traditional societies so much more attractive than things we have around us today? Could it be because through long experience with shaping and firing a pot, heating and hammering metal, weaving and decorating fabric, doing a dance, playing a musical instrument, singing ancient songs, performing a ritual, doing ordinary activities within the community, people naturally understood the materials and ideas from which they made things, things that “have stood the test of time.”

We live today in a world of the continually new. When plastics, for example, came on the scene in the 1940s I found things made of it downright ugly, but gradually the nature of the material, its limitations and potentials, became better understood and now some items in plastic, such as a table made in clear acrylic, can be quite attractive. (but most aren’t)

My first encounter with folk art being collected, and sold, was in 1962, in Oaxaco, south Mexico. It was also the first time I was in a traditional peasant village. Ravi and I had driven to Oaxaca with our two small children to visit a friend, an anthropologist doing a study in the villages, and we stayed in the city with a middle-class family from the old urban elite.

They were a family who had centuries-old ties with certain villages, probably a landlord-sharecropper relationship that modernization had severed. Nevertheless, the husband/father knew the villages and used his knowledge and love of the local craftwork to stock his popular tourists’ shop with relatively simple but exquisitely shaped and textured pottery. I was struck by the means through which he acquired the pots he sold. He found in the surrounding villages the potter he considered to be an artist as well as a skilled craftsman, agreed to buy every pot made for him and displayed for sale only those he thought had turned out well. The price and lifestyle differences between village, city and tourist economies allowed him to support the folk artist while running a business to support him and his family.

Balinese village economy remained intact into recent decades and the crafts never ceased being part of the farmers’ lives. Weaving, metal working, ceramics, painting, stone masonry, wood working did not move, as it did in Europe after medieval times, to the city to become the full-time occupations of independent craftsmen organized in guilds. In Bali, a highly developed, centuries old folk art remained in the villages, as if ready for foreign artists in the 20^th century to discover and to set up artists’ colonies around them in Ubud and Denpasar. Here for a discussion of Balinese art after there arrived in Bali new materials and new ideas for creating works of art, plus outsiders to purchase the art.

In my very first hours in Bali in 1978, walking about in Denpasar, near my hotel in Sanur, a boy, maybe twelve years old, came along beside me, speaking English. He had across one arm a pile of paintings done on cloth and was trying to talk me into buying. It was my first time seeing Balinese art and the paintings of pretty girls he showed me I dismissed as overdone and touristy, but two paintings did catch my attention. On the way from Paris to Jakarta I had spent time with family in Delhi and naturally noticed the paintings with Indian themes, one of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, and a second vaguely Indian. When I bought them the boy asked me if I would like to come to his village and meet his grandfather, the artist. Sadly, I could not arrange it. Ravi had the paintings framed and I keep the Barong hanging in my study. (I’ll try to do better photos of them.)

The dance and myth around the Barong is explained here. Here for a touristy but fun presentation in Ubud.

The Barong is a truly ancient myth, a male spirit in the likeness of a boar, a tiger, a serpent or a lion. The lion form is from the Gianyar Regency subculture; Ubud is located in Gianyar and therefore the lion Barong is most familiar to tourists. In an important ritual dance Barong protects the community against a powerful evil witch, Ranga, who is aided by Durga, Indian goddess of death. (I resist the temptation to do a psychological analysis of the myth.) Hanuman is part of the culture introduced through the India-influenced Majapahit Empire, beginning in the 1300s. He is in both the Hindu epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata.

Craftwork from traditional societies intrigues me. Over the decades I acquired, besides my collection of fabrics, things of copper, bronze and brass; baskets; some pottery; a few knives; a bow and quiver of arrows; an ancient handmade gun; a Dayak blowgun (but no kris) and other items, not really a collection, just things I enjoy seeing and thinking about. I will comment next on the Bali crafts and folk art.

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Visiting the villages in Bali, Part II

Continuing the discussion of why Bali’s villages are so different from peasant villages elsewhere — The answer lies, as discussed in the previous essay, with the Subak, a unique system of irrigation agriculture, and the Banjar, the community the Subak supports. The next question asks how it was that Balinese villages, despite being surrounded by the commercialism of sun and sand tourism, had remained intact, had not been undone by the time I saw them. However, that was some thirty years ago and I needed to catch up on the current situation. Fortunately, from what I read and from the photographs available on-line, villages seem basically the same today as they were then, more expensively dressed, changed and maybe set for greater change, but still intact.

The villages of Bali are the most studied of peasant village societies anywhere, beginning during the 19^th century, under Dutch colonialism. The anthropological, journalistic, artistic, casual and admiring accounts of Bali are too numerous to list or to cite. Two of the articles I read are from early anthropological research, Margaret Mead’s study of Balinese psychology and Clifford Geertz’s “Tihingan: A Balinese village.”

Geertz describes the traditional social system and its subsystems — Subak, Banjar, kinship, levels of social status called caste but different from caste in India, volunteer groups for work or for other activities – and how these multiple subsystems with the memberships and identities they create manage to mesh and interact in the person’s social and psychological life. “A Balinese ‘village’ is a very busy place, and the complexity of the ways in which people are, even in formal terms, related to one another is staggering. If one were to apply stylistic categories to social structures … the Balinese would surely be classed as rococo.”   Perhaps this is reflected in its traditional art.

Since Geertz’s time, the village has grown in size and it encompasses any number of Banjars, each Banjar varying in size from about fifty to two hundred land-owning, Subak-participating households, and each person there by heredity, by being born into it, or by marriage. The Banjar defines the boundaries of the kinship-based community and has a governing council to which the couple of each household belongs and must participate. The Banjar works so well that it has been formally, legally incorporated into the national village level government. For descriptions by admiring foreigners of how the Banjar functions, here and here.

In the mid-1930s, the great Margaret Mead, anthropologist, having determined they were typical of the island, studied two villages and a town, focusing on psychological aspects of the culture. She wrote that Balinese culture was in many ways less like her own than any other culture yet recorded. She was a social scientist and regarded the Balinese objectively, but nevertheless, I think she had trouble relating to a culture so sharply different from the American in terms of individual independence and individual expression. For the Balinese, all activities were done in groups; their arts reflected a love of being in the crowd; they were not a verbal, analytical people. So different, but she admired them; they were good managers and they got things done.

And the village economy? Mead saw it in an historical context.

Gate in Gelget, old royal capital of Bali

Before the Dutch arrived, in the mid 1800s, there were several small kingdoms on the island and villagers recognized the Rajah who ruled over the kingdom in which they lived. From his elevated position he acted as patron of the arts, protector of religious activities and gained his living by levying taxes in kind, probably part of the rice harvest; by the corvée, a labor tax from the peasant; by commanding the work of craftsmen and artists, and of servants and soldiers, for his palace; and maybe, on occasion, by seizing land. The money in circulation was Chinese coins. For the vast majority of the people, the villagers, rice and goods were sold in markets and in the villages. Services were paid for in coin or in food, or most likely, through bartering of goods and services. Nearly all adults were engaged in farming and farmers became part-time specialists in a craft or art or service – in music, making and repairing instruments, dance and dance equipment, teaching dance. Villages specialized in making pottery or baskets or metal objects or cloth or stone cutting. The Dutch governed through the ruling caste, the Rajahs; they had little impact on ordinary life but did build roads, introduced their own money and brought in new things to buy, especially cheap calico cloth, lamps and bicycles.

We have pictures of daily activities from Mead’s 1930s ethnography: “ … pennies given children for snacks and sweetmeats … children come with their pennies to buy food at the vender stalls …. market places where shoppers can hardly thread their way among endless trays of carefully sorted and arrayed fruits and foods … little stands where ready-made offerings to the gods are sold…. in the temples, children scrambling on the floor for dropped pennies … boys gamble for pennies they find in offerings …”

Geertz, writing some twenty years later, reported that families kept gardens and they made things to sell. Men cut down coconuts to earn money. Craftsmen were paid for making and repairing the gamelan instruments. Social class differences seemed based more on ritual status than on wealth and consumption. However, Mead remarked: The Regents/Rajahs have begun to express their prestige more and more in terms of automobiles and less by patronage of the arts.

I found this information from 1996 on economic life. — —

The local economy was based almost entirely on agriculture and government employment in offices and schools.

In tourist areas, carvers and painters produce objects for sale to visitors, often on consignment from art shops. Most of the objects are simply that – a tourist’s souvenir, but a modern style of Balinese art has evolved, influenced by the European artists who came to Ubud in 1920, bringing new materials, new ideas and a market for local artists’ work.

In 1996, and possibly still today, villagers went to the nearby market town to sell agricultural items they had grown or things they had made and to buy vegetable, fruits, packaged and other foodstuff. Men sold cattle in a central market. Merchants traveled to the villages to buy agricultural goods or to sell such items as cloth, patent medicines or soap.

Life on Bali has changed since 1996; villagers are working outside the Banjar but they continue to identify as farmers. At harvest time, students return from the university, clerks leave their offices and professionals take their vacation time, all to help with the harvest and to participate in ritual activities in the temples and in ceremonies.

Between 1978 and the mid-1980s I visited nine Balinese villages, each time flying into Denpasar and proceeding from there to stay for a day or two in each village, always focused on how the health care program in question was faring. In 1978, new to the scene, I naturally heard of the two prime tourist locations, Kuta and Sanur, and once visited Kuta because my interpreter/assistant friend was young and curious about this hippie hang-out on a beach where spectacular waves came crashing in at a sunset like none other I have ever seen. I was totally unaware of the village around which the tourism was building. My information about Kuta village is from a study done in 1984 by Antonia Hussey. She describes Kuta as a very poor farming-fishing village.

It is instructive to consider the consequences of tourism for Kuta village, a village with no land suitable for irrigation. They grew cassava, soybeans, groundnuts and coconuts, raised cattle and pigs and also fished in waters where fishing could not have been easy, even after they had the outboard motor. As described, the village, population 9000 in 1970, looked similar to other Balinese villages and was organized into Banjars, twelve of them, but did not, could not, belong to the Subak system. Tourism began after 1970, with explosive growth. Land became valued for commercial development rather than agriculture and villagers began acting as individualistic entrepreneurs who invested, built, sought employment, gained income. Outsider investors arrived, bringing development but also theft, prostitution and drugs. The Banjars, traditionally responsible for maintaining peace, surrendered their authority to the newly augmented provincial police force. Kuta village became a town and one of the chief tourist destination sites in Bali.

Eventually a surfing colony was established in Kuta and it included boys and men from the original village. Alex Loenard, an anthropologist, did his dissertation on the society that took shape around the surfing at Kuta Beach. He wrote of the Balinese: The sons of fishermen, they were used to playing in the sea, and even knew and practiced a form of wave-riding themselves. “We called it serup,” a Kuta surfer in his early fifties told me. “Or another way of saying it was myosor umbak. We lay on pieces of wood and rode already broken wave to shore. We also used parts from the fishing boats that lined Kuta Beach then – the lengths of bamboo attached to the sides of the boats, the pangantang. So we understood the foreigners’ surfing.”

Kuta is not a place I would visit, but it is popular. Tourist pamphlets indicate that once the sun goes down, it’s the rough and ready party zone of Bali.  I found on-line one tourist advising other guys on how to have fun in Kuta. He warned them against wasting time on the smiling Bali girl venders; they aren’t the ones for sale. Margaret Mead wrote that many women kept roadside stalls from where they sold food they had prepared and “ the vender girls who skillfully make a persuasive art of repartee …” Smiles, charm and talk, that’s all.

In my 1980 consultancy with the Ministry of Health I stayed for two nights in a Sanur Beach hotel. The organization’s staff placed me there, probably thinking I would enjoy it, while they arranged my visits to the villages. Instead, I was annoyed; I wanted to start working, or at least be around the office where I could gauge what was in store for me. Still, I had a stack of documents to read — and a small adventure at the beach, described below.

Except for several villages in northern Bali, near Singaraja, I went into villages within driving distance of Denpasar and in each village stepped into another world, but one in tune with the larger society. I met with health care volunteers, interviewed, checked program records, etc. walked about and took photographs, such as those of the men with their fighting cock roosters, without offending anyone. In fact, the dancers’ group gathered for me to take their picture. Everyone was pleasant, outgoing and cheerful. In a letter to Ravi I wrote “On Sunday I watched boys practicing a dance. They were quite good. The gamelan and the dance are part of life. The women in batik sarongs are wonderful to watch, especially walking in a row along the road, each carrying on her head a basket of food to be blessed in the temple. The society is tight, though, and control over the individual is thorough, from the top down. All quite gentle but firm nevertheless.”

And this returns me to my second question — How has the Balinese village survived the commercial lure of tourism? I was most concerned with the dance and wondered how changed it had become through its profitable catering to tourists, how, by being performed for money outside its ritual context, it could remain meaningful. Then, reading Margaret Mead’s study I discovered she had paid the villagers to allow her to photograph them as they practiced and performed the dances, and that was all right.

Dancer — from an antique painting

Dance in a village

She wrote: “Payment for theatrical performances is the economic base upon which the Balinese theatre depends.” The Rajahs once paid for theatrical performances. Next the Dutch paid for the same and many a Dutch colonialist studied Balinese arts, religious rituals, the pleasing ways and wrote an article or a book about them. Tourists are the most recent audiences eager to pay to hear the gamelan and see the dancers perform and leave them alone afterwards. Here for photos of a tourism performance and of the village volunteers.

Margaret Mead wrote: “… two characteristics of Balinese culture are the ready acceptance of those small details of customs and technology which can be absorbed without changing the basic premises of life, and the utter inability and unwillingness to contemplate any other drastic changes.”

With foreign investment changing the landscape, I wonder how long the village culture can last. The negative impact of tourism — rice fields sold to foreign investors to build luxury resorts, villas, residential complexes … malls and shopping complex built on a wetland … Subak organizations threatened … irrigation channels closed by buildings and roads … … And above all, rising individualism among the young … …

Finally, the small adventure on the first day for this assignment in Bali –

I was stuck in the Sunar Beach hotel but had documents to read, so after lunch left it to sit in a chair at the beach. A beautiful place and no one around. I read for awhile, then went for a walk and came upon a group of girls, some ten of them about 7 or 8 years old, playing while their mothers were out in the water collecting seashells to sell to the tourists, and as I remember, seaweed for the family. The girls surrounded me and began asking questions in the little English they knew. As I coaxed out information from them I realized they would be the ones selling the shells later that day and decided they needed more English. I had them stand in a line, repeat after me each new word and indicate they understood it. It was a cooperative exercise that for some reason included words for features of the face. Could their dance have been the reason why? Our classroom exercises were fun and we played school for an hour or more until the mothers arrived and moved the girls on. They had work to do. I returned to my chair and documents. Later, when I was heading back toward the hotel, the girls came by, each with a basket balanced on her head. My favorite, the girl who had been the most eager to learn new words, stopped and came to me. With both hands she lowered her basket onto the sand, reached in, picked out a pretty small shell and handed it to me. “You are my teacher.” Of course, I still have the shell. What is better than a student’s appreciation.

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Visiting the villages in Bali, Part I.

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.

Ubud Palace

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 –

Borobudur, late 7th century, plow and bullock

Central Java

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 9^th 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.

Bali topography map

Pura Besakih at sunrise

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.

Majapahit architecture

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.

Wayang, puppet theatre

Bali dancers 1929

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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