A Broken Piece Of History

The 30th September Movement (Gerakan 30 September, abbreviated as G30S) was an organization of Indonesian Armed Forces officers who, in the wee hours following the night of September 30 1965, assassinated six top Indonesian Army generals in an abortive coup d'état.

Only Suharto escaped.

Later that morning, G30S declared that it had taken President Sukarno under its protection. Suharto, head of the strategic reserve, mobilized. By the end of the day, the coup attempt had failed in Jakarta. Meanwhile, in central Java there had been an attempt to take over an Army division, as well as several cities. By the time the G30S rebellion was put down, two more senior officers were dead.

In the days and weeks that followed, the Army blamed the coup attempt on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Soon a campaign of mass killing was underway, which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists. Suharto took over; his 32 year tenure was called the New Order. A few years after it finally ended, Transparency International named him 'the most corrupt leader of all time.'

In a New Order propaganda film Pemberontakan G30S PKI (The Sept. 30th PKI Rebellion), during the failed coup the generals were tortured before finally being killed. The generals' faces, it was claimed, were sliced with razors and their eyes were gouged out before their bodies were dumped into a hole. The Army, long cultivated by Western powers, turned on the PKI 'Maoists' with a vengeance.

The Dutch historian W.F. Wertheim says:

It is by no means certain that the leadership of the PKI or members of its central committee played a role of any importance in the preparation and execution of the putsch.

Many believe that it was Suharto who had egged on the G30S indirectly. The 1966 "Cornell report", a preliminary account of the event drawn up by academics Benedict R. O. Anderson and Ruth McVey from Cornell University, reached the conclusion that the coup was the outcome of an internal army affair, stemming from a small clique in a certain division, which attempted to use both Sukarno and the PKI leadership towards its own ends.




In Bali, in the waning days of Sukarno’s regime, conflict had increased between the high-caste capitalist class, and the lower-caste communists pursuing land reform and more equitable harvest-sharing with sharecroppers.

The communists were one of Sukarno's main supporters, and they were using his tottering regime to further their own agenda of taking over by winning the forthcoming elections. Dipa Nusantara Aidit, the Maoist theoretician heading the PKI, presided over a cadre that was the third largest communist organization in the world after the Soviet Union and China.

In the early 1960s, Bali’s first governor, the Sukarno-appointed Anak Agung Bagus Suteja, increased participation of the PKI in the island’s administrative bodies. The son of the last Raja of Jembrana, Anak Agung Bagus Suteja was influenced by socialist ideas from his school years. Dutch colonial authorities imprisoned him in 1948-49, and after Indonesian independence he was appointed governor of Bali by Sukarno, due to his royal lineage as well as his image of being a leftist idealist.

Land was seized unilaterally from the Brahman and Satria landowners, Wesiya or Chinese businessmen were kidnapped and found murdered. In retaliation, landlord-employed thugs destroyed sharecroppers’ crops and razed their huts, and various government offices were mysteriously burned. A slow-burning revolution, at once a civil war and a class war, was underway.

A serious of ominous natural catastrophes struck Bali: rat plagues, insect infestations, crop failures, and finally, the violent eruption of Gunung Agung in 1963.

The mountain exploded during the holiest of Balinese ceremonies, the once-in-a-century Eka Dasa Rudra, a purification rite in which harmony between people and nature is restored in all 11 directions. (The ceremony was forced to be held 10 years earlier than it was due at the behest of Sukarno, apparently to impress a convention of travel agents. Midway through Sukarno's shindig, Gunung Agung began to shower the area with ash and smoke, finally exploding in its most violent eruption in 600 years.)

The earthquake that accompanied the eruption toppled most temples. As molten lava rushed towards them, the Brahman priests prayed frantically, hoping to appease the angry gods, assuring the devotees they had nothing to fear. In the end, thousands of Balinese were killed, hundreds of thousands left homeless, and a layer of hot choking dust lay over the whole island -- a quarter of Bali had been turned into a black lava desert.

Displaced refugees poured into Denpasar and Singaraja where, together with unemployed urban poor, they formed a restive underclass ripe for mobilization by communist cadres, and even more caste-violence broke out.

Following the events of September 30, a tinder-box atmosphere settled over the island. In December 1965, once the anti-communist purges were mostly underway (or over) in Java, Suharto's special forces landed in Bali.

The killings on Bali started in earnest, and soon began to take on the dimensions of genocide.

Devout Balinese, led by the Brahman and the Satriya, murdered anyone suspected to be a godless communist. In the witch hunt, many old scores were settled, and many wealthy businessmen took advantage of the chaos to murder their competitors. It is a cliche that in Java the people had to be egged on to kill the communists; in Bali they had to be restrained. Vigilante groups drawn from families of upper-caste landlords butchered sharecroppers suspected to be PKI. Priests called for sacrifices to satisfy spirits angered by past sacrilege and social disruption. The Balinese Hindu leader, Ida Bagus Oka said "There can be no doubt the enemies of our revolution are also the cruelest enemies of religion, and must be eliminated and destroyed down to the roots."

The “trance of killings” reached a fever pitch in 1966, when entire "impious" clans in villages were being rounded up wholesale and slashed, clubbed, and chopped to death by communal consent. The purge became so indiscriminate that commandos finally had to step in to coordinate -- the military and police, working with civilian authorities, had to make sure only the “right” people were executed.

Anak Agung Bagus Suteja was summoned to Jakarta, he disappeared in the purges without a trace. PKI-head D.N. Aidit lived on the run until he was apprehended and executed. He remained defiant until the very end. Given half-an-hour before being executed, he started to deliver a speech. The passion with which he spoke made his captors very angry -- they were unable to control their rifle triggers. The location of Aidit's remains are unknown.

Between December 1965 and early 1966, an estimated 80,000 Balinese were killed, roughly 5 percent of the island's population at the time, and proportionally more than anywhere else in Indonesia. Based on his fieldwork in Indonesia in the 1970s and 80s, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that people remembered the killings as a "broken piece of history, evoked, on occasion, as an example of what politics brings."

Below, a contemporary 'student documentary' on remembering G30S.

Bali Yatra

I am at the old Buleleng harbor in Singaraja, a day before the new moon of the month of Kartika (when Diwali is traditionally celebrated in India.)

In the historical Kalinga or Orissa, the subsequent full moon (Kartika Purnima) is celebrated as Bali Yatra -- the day the boats left for Bali. (More here. Above, Bali Yatra 2010 being celebrated at Cuttack's Gadagadia ghat on the Mahanadi river.)

As the sun retreats south throughout September, the northern part of the Indian subcontinent begins to cool off. With this, air increases in density and pressure begins to build up over northern India, while the Indian Ocean and its surrounding atmosphere still hold heat, making the air over the sea lighter. Cold winds start to sweep down from the Himalayas and Indo-Gangetic plain, towards the vast heat-sink of the ocean. This is known as the Northeast or Retreating Monsoon.

The Sadhabas (or Sadhavas) were the ancient mariners of Kalinga. Around Katrika Purnima (late Oct/early Nov), the winds from the Retreating Monsoons would waft their wooden boats over the waves of the Indian Ocean to Nusantara. During Bali Yatra, toy boats are floated in the rivers and beaches of Orissa.

The connection between Kalinga and the spice islands finds mention in Kalidasa's Raghuvamsa. The princess Indumati -- she whose navel is as beautiful as an eddy -- is to choose her own husband from amongst the assembled princes at a swayamvara. Indumati is the sister of the king of Vidharbha, and her old nurse Sunanda chaperones her, explaining the strengths of each suitor. King Hemangada of Kalinga is described as the master of the Indian Ocean, who enjoyed the fruits of trade with the islands therein:

यमात्मनः सद्मनि संनिकृष्टो मन्द्रध्वनित्याजितयामतूर्यः|
प्रासादवातायनदृश्यवीचिः प्रबोधयत्यर्णव एव सुप्तम्॥
yamātmanaḥ sadmani saṁnikṛṣṭo mandradhvanityājitayāmatūryaḥ |
prāsādavātāyanadṛśyavīciḥ prabodhayatyarṇava eva suptam ||

There is a great Ocean in the vicinity of the mansion of this king (of Kalinga) whose waves can be seen from the windows of that mansion… the Ocean-god himself gives watch and bugles with the sounds of his waves to wake up this king...

अनेन सार्धम् विहराम्बुराशेस्तीरेषु तालीवनमर्मरेषु|
द्वीपान्तरानीतलवङ्गपुष्पैरपाकृतस्वेदलवा मरुद्भिः॥
anena sārdham viharāmburāśestīreṣu tālīvanamarmareṣu|
dvīpāntarānītalavaṅgapuṣpairapākṛtasvedalavā marudbhiḥ ||

With such a king you can take pleasure trips in the groves of palm full with the murmur of leaves, on the seashore whereto breezes waft fragrance of clove flowers from far-dispersed islands of the Ocean.




Kalidasa, generally accepted to have written in the 4th century AD, has left vivid pictures of the civilization that reached those far-dispersed islands.

In the Raghuvamsa, Dilipa, the father of Raghu, begets his son through prayer and sacrifice. Once Raghu comes to the throne, he finds his father's vassals restive. Raghu, though young, determines to show them that no disloyalty will be tolerated. He decides on a show of strength in the form of a war-march. Starting from his capital Ayodhya, he first marches eastward to the Bay of Bengal; then to the south along the eastern shore to the tip of the Indian peninsula as far as Kanyakumari; from there, north along the western shore until he comes to the mouth of the Indus and the badlands under the depredations of the Hephthalites (White Huns); then, finally, through the outlying portions of the Himalayan plateau he enters Assam and thence returns to Ayodhya. In the end, Raghu performs a sacrifice declaratory of universal sovereignty, in which he distributes everything he has in his treasury, leaving himself a beggar.

The passages of Canto 4 (in which most of the above action happens) are full of interesting ethnographic observations. After the defeat of the 'Hunas' in Transoxiana:

तत्र हूणावरोधानां भर्तृषु व्यक्तविक्रमम्|
कपोलपाटलादेशि बभूव रघुचेष्टितम्॥
tatra hūṇāvarodhānāṁ bhartṛṣu vyaktavikramam|
kapolapāṭalādeśi babhūva raghuceṣṭitam ||

Raghu's valor expressed itself amongst the husbands of the Huna women, and it became manifest in the scarlet color of their cheeks.

The 6th-century Gothic historian Jordanes wrote that the Western Huns, upon the death of Attila, "disfigured their faces horribly, with deep wounds, so that the gallant warrior should be mourned not with the lamentations and tears of women, but with the blood of men." Similar customs have apparently been observed amongst the Kutrigurs, Turks, Magyars, and Tajiks.

विनयन्ते स्म तद्योधा मधुभिर्विजयश्रमम्|
आस्तीर्णाजिनरत्नासु द्राक्षावलयभूमिषु॥
vinayante sma tadyodhā madhubhirvijayaśramam|
āstīrṇājinaratnāsu drākṣāvalayabhūmiṣu ||

Raghu's soldiers removed their fatigue of victory by means of wine, while sitting on excellent antelope skins spread on the grounds of grape-orchards.

After crossing the River (Oxus?), Raghu and his army encountered the Kambojas, an ancient Indo-Scythian people often mentioned in Indian texts:

काम्बोजाः समरे सोढुं तस्य वीर्यमनीश्वराः|
गजालानपरिक्लिष्टैरक्षोटैः सार्धमानताः॥
kāmbojāḥ samare soḍhuṁ tasya vīryamanīśvarāḥ|
gajālānaparikliṣṭairakṣoṭaiḥ sārdhamānatāḥ ||

Along with the walnut trees that bent their tops unable to withstand the pull and push of the elephants tied to them with halters, the kings of Kamboja, too, bent their heads down before Raghu in token of their submission.

Many centuries later, of course, the name Kamboja would find another home in SE Asia.

Raghu's son is Aja. It is he who Indumati -- she of the banana-stem-like thighs -- garlands at the swayamvara. (It turns out they were two dancers from the heavens who had been cursed to go stay on earth.) The couple are fated to pass away soon (rejoining the celestial dance-halls of Indra) -- a flower from Narada's garland falls to the earth, crushing Indumati, an incident that also survives in the Javanese kakawin Death By Sumanasa Flower. Aja follows his beloved into death, leaving behind a year-old orphan. This is Dasaratha, father of the future avatar Rama.

Interestingly, the marriage ceremonies described in the Raghuvamsa match the traditional marriages of old Javanese texts -- the tying of clothes, the circumambulation of fire seven times, the offerings consigned to the flames in specific order - are the same and occur in the same sequence. See here for more.




Before the 1990s, the earliest direct evidence for contact between India and Indonesia indeed pointed to a start around Kalidasa's time. The evidence consisted of stone and metal inscriptions dating from the fourth and fifth centuries AD, found in West Java and Kalimantan.

Indirect evidence (cloves were known to Pliny The Elder, c. 70 AD), had, though, pointed at an earlier contact.

A few miles east of us is Sembiran. Recent excavation at Sembiran (undertaken by Universitas Udayana and the Indonesian National Research Centre of Archaeology) has established that the significance of this site is a very considerable one for Southeast Asian history.

Sembiran has recently yielded the first securely stratified evidence of Indian trade contact with Indonesia (dated to c. 2000 years ago), during the period of Rouletted Ware manufacture and Roman trade in southern and eastern India, as represented by the famous site of Arikamedu in Tamil Nadu. Neutron activation analysis has showed that the Sembiran specimens of Rouletted Ware have identical pastes to samples from Arikamedu, and certain shards have on them Brahmi or Kharoshthi characters.

I Wayan Ardika and Peter Bellwood have assessed the date range for the Sembiran materials as most likely in the AD 1-200 range, in terms of the chronological overlap between use of the Kharoshthi script and the Rouletted Ware.

From an article "An Indian Trader In Ancient Bali" by Lansing et al:

The site of Sembiran itself was located at the head of a small sheltered bay that no longer exists. Several inscriptions in the Old Balinese and Old Javanese languages were discovered in the vicinity. These inscriptions, written nearly a thousand years later (AD 896-1181), refer to long-distance or seafaring merchants (banyaga; banyaga saking sabrang); a merchant guild (banigrama; Sanskrit vanigrama); a market officer (ser pasar), and other aspects of seaborne trade. Ardika and Bellwood observed that in contemporary East Java the term banigrama is associated with foreign traders, and further that inscription Sembiran C (Old Javanese, 1181 AD) mentions that the term juru kling may be a specific term for Indians or the descendants of Indians. Ardika and Bellwood interpreted these inscriptional finds to indicate that this region of north-eastern Bali was the scene of intense maritime trading activity about 1000 years ago, with archaeological evidence pushing this activity back perhaps a millennium further. At that time, the Sembiran site likely consisted of a settlement located inside a small and shallow bay in the coastline, peopled by native Balinese who were presumably in contact with visiting traders who were able to bring in large amounts of Indian trade pottery sometime between 200 BC and AD 200.

Below, the old Buleleng Harbor of Singaraja, the few miles of coast through where Indian influence seems to have entered Bali in its early history.

Acintya

Acintya -- "that beyond thought", "inconceivable", or "unimaginable" in Sanskrit -- is the Supreme God of Balinese Hinduism, equivalent to the concept of Brahman. He is the Supreme God in the traditional wayang theater of shadow puppets. Acintya is also called Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa in modern Balinese usage (the term means All-In-One Destiny Controller; it was invented in the 1930s by Christian missionaries to describe the Christian God to the Balinese, but quickly co-opted into popular usage to invoke, instead, the Acintya.)

In many temples on Bali or Lombok, Acintya is symbolized by an empty throne on top of the highest pillar or remotest outcrop (the Padmasana, or "Lotus Throne".)

The empty lotus throne can be seen repeatedly in early Buddhist art, there is a 2nd-century Mathura statue that symbolizes the Buddha as the absent but immanent teacher represented by an empty throne. However, the important distinction seems to be that Acintya, while also represented by an empty-throne, is, unlike the immanent Buddha, transcendent -- He teaches nothing, He corrects nothing, He just Is, outside our sense experience.

Prayers and offerings are not made directly to Acintya, but only to the other manifestations of the deity, i.e. the regular Hindu Trinity and the various dewa.

The Balinese mind, as we shall see, has recoiled from nothingness; so there is a figure like the Sun God with flames or rays erupting from his body, infinity-symbol arrows into the void, in the mandala behind the empty throne.

Acintya and his abode, the padmasana throne, were innovations credited to the immigrant Majapahit monk Nirartha, who led a major Hindu renaissance in Bali in the 16th century.

Nirartha ("Un-Meaning") was a Hindu monk, also called Dwijendra ("Lord of the Twice-Born") or Pedanda Shakti Wawu Rauh ("Newly Arrived Powerful High Priest"), who lived in eastern Java in the district of Blambangan, i.e. just across the Bali Strait. He came to Bali in the 1540s, just as Emperor Akbar was ascending the Mughal throne in India.

In Java, Majapahit authority was in decline; the northern coast, seat of many Muslim communities (made of both foreign merchants and Javanese), was in the process of declaring its independence from the Majapahit yoke, and the times were turbulent. Demak was established as the first Islamic Sultanate on Java. Yogyakarta and Surakarta were fragmenting as the ancien regime unravelled, to be replaced by local warlords declaring themselves as Sultan, turning their attention towards bringing the coasts back under the control of the interior.

As Islam came into Java from the North and the West, Majapahit priests must have watched the 1.5 mile strip of water separating Blambangan from Bali longingly; across the water, Gelgel and other principalities flexing their muscles promised to remain Hindu strongholds even as a new agama religion gained sway in Java.

So, legend says, across the water went Nirartha.


Formal historical facts about Nirartha are hard to find. Merle Ricklefs, formerly affiliated to the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, writes in his History of Modern Indonesia:

The inward-looking tendency of [Mataram Sultan] Agung's empire was in any case clear. He did not move his court to the to the north coast, where trade could be encouraged and supervised, but stayed in Mataram, which has neither access by river to the north coast, nor any ports of its own, and where the sea offers access only to the Goddess of the Southern Ocean's Domain . His wars had devastated the coastal areas to such an extent that the export of Javanese rice was affected, at least in some years. For trade and traders he had only contempt, as he explained to the first VOC ambassador in 1614. The dynasty of Mataram had conquered the coast at enormous cost; the crucial question for the future of the fragile empire was whether the coastal districts could be governed from the interior in such a way as to encourage the prosperity of all. If this could be done, Java would become a unified economic and military force of enormous potential. But events were to show that this was not to be.

Outside Java and Sumatra there were no conquerors to be compared with the kings of Aceh and Mataram ... There were important things happening in many areas, of course, but much of the history of this period in other areas has not been studied of is inadequately documented. The internal history of the Balinese kingdom of Gelgel during its golden age of sixteenth century cannot be reconstructed with confidence. Legends tell of the greatness of King Dalem Baturenggong and his priest Nirartha. Gelgel apparently dominated all of Bali and districts elsewhere from the Eastern Salient of Java to Lombok and Sumbawa, but with the present state of knowledge little more can be said with confidence.

Where SOAS could not help, I turned to Ida Bagus.

We were sipping luwak coffee. (Kopi Luwak is made from the beans of coffee berries which have been eaten by the Palm Civet Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, and then passed out through its digestive tract. In the cat's stomach, enzymes seep into the beans. After the beans have been defecated, they are gathered and roasted, yielding an aromatic coffee with little bitterness -- a Bali special.)

"Dwijendra Danghyang Nirartha Markandeya came from Mahameru in Java, sailing across the ocean on a pumpkin," he says. "One of his master's wives had fallen in love with him. He had to escape the embarrassing attention and keep his life simple." Bagus sighs and looks at the ocean in the middle distance, puffing on his kretek in silence for a while.

"He did not cross the Bali Strait, the Sultan's men always watched it closely, he went around and landed at Singaraja. The pumpkin kept him safe on a long journey. So it a taboo amongst the Brahmans of Bali, who are descended from Danghyang Nirartha, to ever cut or eat a pumpkin."

"The king Dalem Baturenggong heard of him, and invited him to desa Gelgel, to the south."

Danghyang Nirartha brought with him a belief in one Supreme God known as Acintya, and one supreme goal -- moksha -- in life. Moksha is an ancient Hindu concept meaning release from samsara and the suffering involved in being subject to the cycle of repeated death and reincarnation or rebirth; it was developed into the concept of nirvana by Buddhism. Acintya could be worshipped in his many manifestations through offerings of three elements : fire, water and fragrant flowers.

Perversely, in time the prayer and the offerings became inseparable from daily life, necessary in order to ensure the blessing of every venture. Rather than the mystic concepts grafted from Java, it was this preoccupation with offerings -- Bebali -- so dominated the everyday life that the island became known as Bali.

The word bebali is derived from we-walen, which roughly means "that which can be performed." Performed offerings are woven flowers; pagodas of fruit; spun cloth; wayang puppet shows; or dance-dramas.

Following the ouster of Sukarno in the mid-1960s, Pancasila was reinterpreted in the official Indonesian policy on religion to only recognise monotheism. The first of the silas asks for "Belief in the one and only God, (Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa.)" The concept of Acintya helped the Balinese reconcile their religion with the framework of official monotheism. Interestingly, the title of Maha Esa (Mahesha) has traditionally in Hinduism been Shiva's. The Indonesian Buddhists Organization at this time also proposed that there was a single supreme Buddhist deity, Sang Hyang Adi Buddha.



Clifford Geertz, the emeritus anthropologist of cultural symbols, writes:

Bali, where I worked both in another small provincial town, though one rather less drifting and dispirited, and, later, in an upland village of highly skilled musical instruments makers, is of course in many ways similar to Java, with which it shared a common culture to the fifteenth century. But at a deeper level, having continued Hindu while Java was, nominally at least, Islamized, it is quite different. The intricate, obsessive ritual life--Hindu, Buddhist, and Polynesian in about equal proportions--whose development was more or less cut off in Java, leaving its Indic spirit to turn reflective and phenomenological, even quietistic, in the way I have just described, flourished in Bali to reach levels of scale and flamboyance that have startled the world and made the Balinese a much more dramaturgical people with a self to match. What is philosophy in Java is theater in Bali.

As a result, there is in Bali a persistent and systematic attempt to stylize all aspects of personal expression to the point where anything idiosyncratic, anything characteristic of the individual merely because he is who he is physically, psychologically, or biographically, is muted in favor of his assigned place in the continuing and, so it is thought, never-changing pageant that is Balinese life. It is dramatis personae, not actors, that endure; indeed, it is dramatis personae, not actors, that in the proper sense really exist. Physically men come and go, mere incidents in a happenstance history, of no genuine importance even to themselves. But the masks they wear, the stage they occupy, the parts they play, and, most important, the spectacle they mount remain, and comprise not the facade but the substance of things, not least the self. Shakespeare's old-trouper view of the vanity of action in the face of mortality--all the world's a stage and we but poor players, content to strut our hour, and so on--makes no sense here. There is no make-believe; of course players perish, but the play does not, and it is the latter, the performed rather than the performer, that really matters.

... The Balinese have at least a half-dozen major sorts of labels, ascriptive, fixed, and absolute, which one person can apply to another (or, of course, to himself) to place him among his fellows. There are birth-order markers, kinship terms, caste titles, sex indicators, teknonyms, and so on and so forth, each of which consists not of a mere collection of useful tags but a distinct and bounded, internally very complex, terminological system. When one applies one of these designations or titles (or, as is more common, several at once) to someone, one therefore defines him as a determinate point in a fixed pattern, as the temporary occupant of a particular, quite untemporary, cultural locus. To identify someone, yourself or somebody else, in Bali is thus to locate him within the familiar cast of characters--"king," "grandmother," "third-born," "Brahman"--of which the social drama is, like some stock company roadshow piece-- Charley's Aunt or Springtime for Henry --inevitably composed.




Under the auspices of Nirartha's spiritual leadership the six directional Sad Kahyangan temples were built or expanded: Pura Besakih, Pura Batur, Pura Sukawana, Pura Batukaru, Pura Andakasa and Pura Lempuyang, centres of worship for all Hindu Balinese. All have high empty thrones dedicated to Acintya, standing silent as women bear pagodas of fruit and girls sway with bebali below.

At Batukaru, the Western of the the directional temples (dedicated to Mahadewa) the padmasana shrine is at the back, in the far right corner. Acintya is depicted in gold at the top, His back towards the most sacred mountain. The lowest level of the padmasana throne is supported on the back of the cosmic turtle, the Bedawang, which carries the Universe on his back. The two eternal serpents, Nagas Basukih and Anantaboga, lie coiled over the turtle to dampen the earthquakes which arise when it stirs. While the padmasana is now one of many shrines, and probably not the primary one in anything but name, the concept of Nirartha's Acintya of the ultimate liberation, transported from the Indus, to Mathura, to Java, to this remote mountain on Bali, watches forlornly over the present.

From Arun Das Gupta's essay on Rabindranath's voyage to Indonesia:

Rabindranath was looked upon in Bali as a Mahaguru, not in the sense of a university professor but of something reminiscent of the ancient Indian Hindu sage Bharata Guru Agastya. The raja of Karang Asem, who had a philosophic cast of mind, wanted the poet to interpret some passages from the sastra (Balinese religious texts) for him. [Suniti Kumar] Chatterji, with his knowledge of Sanskrit, helped out as much as possible. The raja then surprised his Indian visitors by asking a philosophical question. He asked what, if the worship of gods, the building of temples, the performance of funeral ceremonies and the observance of social codes cannot be the final aim in life, man's ultimate quest should be. Chatterji replied by asking the raja to answer the question himself. Then came the startling reply: 'Dewa Dewa tida apa, Nirvana satu' (Gods and their worship are immaterial, Nirvana is the supreme goal). Tagore was greatly touched and in his poem on Bali referred to this encounter as follows: 'We said the same mantras together, pondered over the same question of Nirvana'.

Before leaving Bali, Tagore was to write in a letter home:

The island is beautiful, the people are very nice, but my mind does not want to make a home here ... In the air of India, in her rivers and fields, in all her nature, I have seen a generosity of the spirit ... I see there a lot of pain, her human habitations are images of misfortune, but overcoming all these, in her skies a voice comes to us crossing the ages, bearing a message of the greatest of liberations. In the lower parts of India there are the shackles of pettiness, the constant hubbub of the inconsequent, and the despair of those that are less; but her upper aspect is a seat of the immense, her invitation an eternal one towards the infinite.

Nirartha lived out his life in Bali teaching and codifying. The Balinese kakawin poem Mayantaka is attributed to him. It is said that Nirartha achieved moksha in Pura Luhur Uluwatu, the last padmasana shrine built by him. The message of moksha -- that awful eternity without labels -- taken in like bitter Java, passed through the Polynesian body of Bali, to yield the fragrant and aromatic bebali.

Below, Pura Luhur Batukaru (also spelt Batukau.)

Income To Which No Tears Are Attached

A study says that Bali needs at least 516,000 hectares of productive land to feed its population. The island has only 325,000 hectares of fertile land. According to WHO standards, Bali can only sustain a population of about 1 million; 1.6 million would be 'tolerable'; the actual population is 3.32 million. On top, 2.5 million tourists visit every year.

The island's water supply is 4.7 million cubic meters per year, while 5.4 million cubic meters are used annually. The major lakes are falling, in some cases the water level goes down a foot a year. Water levels are trending down in a majority of Bali's rivers, and deep wells are being bored to make up for the loss of surface water. Of course, as ground water is pumped out, sea water from all around the island seeps in. Farmers in south Denpasar can no longer grow crops in the brackish soil, they sell their land to developers building one tourist enclave after another. Bali now has 50,000 hotel rooms; and the hotels have successfully resisted any meaningful water tax.

For a thousand years, Bali had its own traditional pulsed system of irrigation, called the subak. The subak system -- built around water temples whence allocation of water is made by a priest -- is famous among anthropologists and agronomists for its engineering, its social structure, and the guiding hand of religion.

As Bali's 400 rivers and streams issue from the central highland catchment areas, they dig deep channels in the volcanic rock. For a thousand years, farmers have cut tunnels through the rock to feed water into aqueducts, from where bamboo piping carries the water to the top of terraced rice fields. Gravity does the rest, the water flows down from terrace to terrace till it comes to down to the level of the beaches. Sluices or gates on dams are opened or closed to create pulsing -- inundating the seedlings when desired, drying them out when needed. Irrigation tunnels are precision-engineered through rock, running for kilometers at a time, to accurate delivery at the top of the fields; the oldest has inscribed on its walls AD 944 as the year of construction.



Anthropologists have enduringly viewed the rise of central state power as tied to the administration of irrigation. Karl Marx believed that "the prime necessity of an economical and common use of water .... necessitated in the Orient ... the centralizing power of government." When Engels asked him for substantiation, he replied that an "intact example" was Bali.

When the Dutch colonized Bali, they felt that control over irrigation was one of the powers they should inherit from the Balinese royal houses. They also felt that the island should be run profitably. One popular idea in the Netherlands was for the colonial government to own an opium import monopoly, by which it could sell "juice" to the natives at handsome profit, and use some of that profit to run the island.

Opium had been traditionally traded in Bali by the Bugis from Sulawesi, and also the Chinese. The merchants paid a duty to the local rajas who ruled each district in Bali. Around the 1890s, annual agricultural tax revenue in any one raja's domains did not amount to much more than 15,000 dutch guilders (each guilder or dutch florin was about 10 grams of silver.) In comparison, opium revenue for the island was close to 1,000,000 guilders.

The Dutch decided to take control, abolishing independent opium sales, forcing people to buy only from them, in Bali as in Java. The rajas who revolted were mown down with guns.

Henri Hubert van Kol, a Dutch parliamentarian, visited Bali in 1902 with the goal, alongside travel, of reporting back to the Dutch government how to administer the island better. The promotion of opium, by the time van Kol arrived, had done even more damage to the Dutch East Indies than the wars that ended in colonization. He wrote:

On Java alone, 16 million guilders are obtained from 150,000 Chinese and Javanese who could spend that money on better things than poppy juice. The native becomes poorer, and brings his jewelry, clothes and tools to be pawned. He pawns his land and would rather commit a crime than work ...

Most of the addicts were modest users, but under the monopoly opium was more expensive -- when the income of a family was scarcely 100 guilders a year, the total revenue stated by van Kol indicates that most of the users spent their entire income on opium.

H.H. van Kol lobbied strenuously to abolish the opium monopoly and develop tax revenues more along the traditional lines of agricultural land and water taxes, so that the economy of Bali could be based on "income to which no tears are attached."

Eventually his argument prevailed; but when the Dutch colonial state tried to take control of the systems of agriculture, they found to their consternation that the kings enjoyed no power over irrigation.

The princes of Bali had diffuse, overlapping kingdoms whose boundaries were entangled and disputed. Most of the kingdoms straddled watersheds and there was little possibility of controlling water upstream in one watershed without inviting retribution in another. Confounding conventional and Marxist theories, it turned out that the water was actually controlled by temples, not kings.



A subak consists of all the rice terraces irrigated from a single dam. The dams are stacked one below the other down the river canyons. From the dam, a single canal system, usually of a few kilometers' length, carries diverted water to the subak, often with the aid of overhead aqueducts or tunnels.

Individual farmers whose fields are irrigated by a subak form a congregation that then becomes affiliated with the activities of the particular water temple.

The water temple -- pura -- is headed by a Hindu priest, who draws up a calendar of water use -- when the planting season starts, which subak draws water when, and how the pulses of water flow out. Water interacts with the soil in fields as part of a complex agri-biology -- the pulsed cycles impact soil pH, temperature, nutrient circulation, aerobic conditions, micro-organism growth, pest-drowning, weed suppression etc. -- the pura calendar accounts for all these aspects. The system is fragile, even a day's disorder in water-flow will damage a farmer's crop.

Pura congregation-members prepare offerings to the gods, repair and decorate temples, clear small field canals, mend dykes and make repairs to water channels. The head priest of Pura Er Jeruk explained the system to American anthropologist Stephen Lansing thus:

There are 14 subaks all of which meet together as one here. They meet at the Temple Er Jeruk. Every decision, every rule concerning planting seasons and so forth, is always discussed here. Then, after meeting here, decisions are carried down to each subak. The subaks each call all their members together: "In accord with the meeting we held at the Temple Er Jeruk, we must fix our planting dates, beginning on day one through day ten."

For example, first subak Sango plants, then subak Somi, beginning from day ten to day twenty ...




Heeding van Kol's advice, the Dutch had tried to convert Bali into a plantation economy -- a colonial dependency with roads, railways, shipping etc., designed to support the conversion of a subsistence agriculture into cash crops. Of the process of creating this colonial dependency, Lansing writes in The Three Worlds of Bali :

The classical states of Bali were not merely conquered but obliterated: the people killed, the libraries burned, the palaces reduced to rubble. It is all the more remarkable, then, that the cultural and institutional life of Bali. Balinese civilization, in fact was able to survive...The real roots of this civilization lay elsewhere, in intertwining networks of thousands of temples where the power of the myths was guarded, nurtured, studied ...

While the Dutch destroyed what part of Bali they could see -- by abolishing the monarchy and radically remaking the visible culture, the temples tucked away in the paddies endured. Lansing notes that the Dutch did not understand the decentralized system of irrigation, nor the importance of water temples in agricultural production, and they abandoned any attempts to intervene in water management solely allowing the ancient system to transpire. They did install an irrigation bureaucracy, which consisted of collecting rice taxes, performing land surveys, and building irrigation works, yet they remained clueless as to the vital role of water temples in both agriculture and social organization.

Lansing states:

Because the Dutch model of irrigation vastly underestimated the complexity of the sociobiophysical systems involved in rice production, water temples and bureaucracies coexisted without creating technical problems in irrigation control. Most Balinese rice terraces continued to produce two crops per year, as they had before the arrival of the Dutch.

After Indonesia became independent, the new state continued on a path of development based on the bureaucratic capitalism, as designed by the colonizers. This resulted in a disastrous attempt at a Green Revolution.

The Bali Irrigation Project was launched in 1979 by the Asian Development Bank in order to improve the performance of irrigation systems while disregarding the practical role of the pura. All of the new changes contradicted the traditional water management based on ritual and religious cycles. Lansing writes:

The Green Revolution approach assumed that agriculture was a purely technical process and that production would be optimized if everyone planted high-yielding varieties of rice as often as they could. In contrast, Balinese temple priests and farmers argued that the water temples were necessary to coordinate cropping patterns so that there would be enough irrigation water for everyone and to reduce pests by coordinating fallow periods.

If farmers on adjacent fields synchronize their cropping patterns to create a uniform fallow period over a sufficiently large area, rice pests are temporarily deprived of their habitat and their populations can be sharply reduced. Field studies indicate that synchronized harvest/fallow patterns result in pest losses of around 1%, compared to losses upwards of 50% during continual cropping as imposed by the Green Revolution's "Massive Guidance."

While the first few years brought greater harvest, Massive Guidance quickly led to ecological collapse. The lack of crop rotation and natural harvest/fallow cycles resulted in less productive fields. As the pests could not be controlled by fallow fields interrupting their breeding cycles, massive use of pesticides was pushed onto the farmers. The new pesticides killed the good insects that used to eat the bad ones.




Balinese farmers began pressing the government for a return to irrigation scheduling by the pura, but were taken to task for their religious doggedness and 'conservatism.' In 1983, the US National Science Foundation sponsored Lansing to examine the role of water temples in Balinese irrigation management. Lansing subsequently tried to convey to development officials that the rituals of the water temples were a historically successful system of ecological management that should not be ignored. The Asian Development Bank wrote back:

We do not fully share the expressed concerns of Mr. Lansing. Certainly there is a direct relationship between large areas of fallow land for a considerable period and the population of pests. However, pest control programs carried out efficiently and effectively will control the pest population and allow growing of rice year-round if adequate water resources are available as is done, for example, in certain areas of Central and East Java where farmers grow three rice crops per annum. It should be noted, that there is no development without affecting traditional systems or customs. Everybody can criticize and damage a project, but only a few people can overcome those difficult problems and make the project viable.

In 1987, Lansing collaborated with a computer simulation expert, James Kremer, to calculate the effects of various crop management scenarios. Their model, using historical rainfall data, concluded that the traditional water temple system was far more effective than the government's policy. Around 1991 Jakarta started to back down; development agencies are now encouraging Balinese rice farmers to return to the system that had served them well for over a thousand years. The farmers are inching back to making $600 per year from their rice crops, i.e. subsisting on the iconic $2/day.





In the meantime, of course, tourists have discovered Bali; as mentioned the island now gets 2.5 million visitors a year and boasts of 50,000 hotel rooms. Tourism is the new opium. In the 1990s Australian college-students discovered the drunken-bikini-scene in Kuta, and more recently Liz Gilbert has opened the eyes of American single-white-females to Ubud. Rice farmers are selling out of their land, foreigners are moving in to build "Bali style" bungalows.

Outside Goa Gajah, as we draw into the parking lot an elderly parking attendant waves to Ida Bagus. "My uncle," he explains, "my mother's brother."

"If this were India," I tease him, "you would have hid from your elder that cigarette you are smoking."

"I know," says Ida Bagus. "He is always telling me to quit. My uncle's side is very .... hmm ... holy ... they used to be water-temple priests."



An article in the Sydney Morning Herald titled "Bali skirts the fine line between selling body and soul" says:

We decide over lunch that she's almost certainly a Bulgarian hooker, this girl with the blonde mullet, the full-body tan and the iPod tucked fetchingly into her G-string. With the dreamy-jerky movements of a Sim she dances alone at the centre of the beach-shack restaurant, directing her Mona Lisa smile at the dreadlocked Aussie surfers.

As her toasted pelvis rotates mesmerically, two things strike me. First, that she gives new meaning to the term Bali belly. Second, that as livings go, Bulgarian hooker probably still beats 50-kilogram top-of-the-head load-bearer for $2 a day, like the mother of the taxi driver who brought us to this out-of-the-way Balinese beach ...

"Bali style'', now a sort of global soft porn for design heads. You know the look. Dark satiny timber, broad eaves, simple planes, glancing daylight, walled courts, infinity pools, gauzy hangings, luscious views and frangipani evenings strewn with tiny lights. Far grander than Bali-colloquial, Bali style has shades of Japanese serenity, Polynesian sensuality and cool Moorish seclusion. It does for Bali architecture what Paul Simon did for Zulu music; enriching and teasing it open for Western tastes without diminishing its power.

But this very lusciousness, with its enormous drawing power, is part of the problem. Already, while tourists pad around endless azure pools on emerald lawns fringed with luxuriant tropical planting, Bali beyond the touro-strip is parched and brown.

Locals say it hasn't rained for a year. The lovely golden cattle sit emaciated on picked-bare dirt. Groundwater is depleted, rivers dry or polluted, and lakes seven metres down. Water comes by tanker over roads that are more pothole than asphalt, and then by head - yet the big hotels strenuously oppose any increase in the water tax.

For the moment, Bali continues to rotate its pelvis and smile seductively at its fat white guests. But does it, in quiet moments, wonder at what point hospitality becomes prostitution?


Below, a walk in the rice fields.

I Made Brahma

Ida Bagus Dalem is driving us around in Bali. He solemnly hands me his card -- it states his name, his mobile phone, his village, and then, in proud red letters, "#1 Troublemaker In Bali."

Bagus is about 40, stocky and muscled, a curlicued dragon-tattoo covering his shoulder and biceps. The tourism food-chain in Bali is complicated, and Bagus is at its bottom; at the top are lenders from Java who finance cars, followed by rich people in Bali who import them, then there are fleet operators who manage them, tourist-agencies who make commission-based retail bookings, and finally the drivers who are paid daily wages. "I am a Brahman", says Bagus. "My whole village is Brahman. I work for a Satriya who runs an agency. A Wesiya leases the car. A Sudra in Kuta imported it. Most of the money you are paying goes to Muslims in Java." He seems happy with this arrangement, an inversion of the traditional Hindu caste-structure. Unusually for Bali, Bagus is single, and lives in his older brother's family compound. His sister-in-law feeds him every day, and his nephews sleep around him on those nights he is not out chasing girls.

We pass artisan villages as we head from Sanur to Ubud; here a clump of houses making silverware, there one carving statues. Prominent signs outside proclaim "I Made Rama", "I Made Budi", "I Made Indra" and so on.

This is not the pride of the sculptor, but a complicated naming system at work.

The European system of given name(s) followed by surname is a relatively recent template. In ancient times up to the middle ages people could be reasonably identified by one name: Aelfred, or Beowulf, or Cicero; you got by just as Socrates. Only by the 16th century did monarchs (Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England) require persons to take surnames. It is likely the change was fueled by increased population and increased mobility -- people were showing up in London or Paris from faraway parts and no one knew which Henri you meant. Leonardo? the one from Vinci near Florence? The Basque from Gama?

The Balinese naming system is different; it consists of rules that indicate gender, clan, birth-order, what their parents expect them to be, and so on. A baby is not named right away at birth -- parents will wait till specific days on the traditional calendar to name a newborn with a Balinese Hindu ritual.

If the child is chronically sick, or otherwise unlucky, it is felt the name was not suitable, and another can be chosen when the child is older. (Sukarno, who had a Javanese aristocratic Muslim father and Balinese Hindu Brahman mother, had to get his name changed from Kusno Sosrodihardjo to Su Karno, or Good Karna, after surviving a childhood illness.)

After marriage, the wife does not take the husband's name.

There is also widespread use of teknonyms -- when your first child is born you lose your birth-name and begin to be called "Father of Shiwa" or "Mother of Shinta". Again, when your grandchild is born, you become "Grandfather of Prayuda" or "Grandmother of Srikandi". Over time, all but a few of your contemporaries forget your birth-name.



As we drive cross- and circum-island (the owner of the agency calls every night to complain about the unexpectedly large number of miles being logged on his leased car), I have long discussions with Bagus about what goes into a Balinese name. Here are (as I understand them, no doubt imperfectly) the Balinese naming templates:

I or Ni signify gender - Male or Female.

The next part is a caste-name. Brahmans have the initial honorific of Ida, and males of the senior-most Brahman clan on Bali are titled Ida Bagus. The women of this clan are called Ida Ayu.

The Satria have caste-names like Anak Agung (male), Anak Agung Ayu or Anak Agung Istri (female); Agung means great or prominent. Putra, or Prince, for a boy, and Putri, or Princess, for a girl, are also used.

Wesiya caste-names are Gusti (meaning prominent-person, or leader, akin to the Sanskrit mahajan), Desak, and so on.

There are no special caste-names the Sudra. Traditionally they only add I for male or Ni for female in front of their names.

The next part of the name signifies birth order. Wayan/Putu/Gede/Nengah are used for the first born baby, Made/Kedek for the second born, Nyoman/Komang for the third born, and Ketut for the fourth born baby. For No. 5, you go back to Wayan, No. 6 could again be Kedek and so on. Obviously, if a couple have children there will be a Wayan, so finding someone called Wayan in Bali is like trying to find a Rama in India.

Subsequently, the name might be personalized with some circumstance of birth. If there was bad weather when the mother gave birth, a male second-born baby might be named I Made Kerug (kerug means thunder). If born on a Sunday, a male first-born baby might be named I Wayan Redite (redite means Sunday). If there are no remarkable circumstances, you name the baby after a deity or cultural concept -- e.g. I Made Wisnu.

More examples -- Ida Ayu Ngurah, meaning Brahman woman, of the most-high Long Life clan, whose personal name is Ngurah, or Gift from Heaven. Anak Agung Rai, meaning a Satriya whose personal name is King. I Gusti Ketut Rajendra, male of the Wesiya caste, fourth born, whose personal name is the Lord of Kings. Ketut Liyer, the fortune-teller from Eat Pray Love ("sometimes to lose balance for love is part of living a balanced life"), has a name that means Fourth Born Bright Light. (See here for a post-fame encounter with Ketut 'liar'.)

All over Bali you see checkered cloth (black-and-white, saffron-and-white) draped over trees or statues, or worn by people in ceremonies. The cloth is called saput poleng -- poleng means two-colored -- and it signifies the deep understanding that overcomes black-and-white thinking. The more enlightened you are, you see that sorrow is part of happiness, learn that a mistake is a path to the truth, understand that nothing is prescriptively bad or good, and accept both laughter and tears as gifts. Poleng is a common "given" name -- 'Gus Made, the most famous painter of the Balinese Pita Maha generation -- his famous tempera Legong Dance is below -- had as his full name Ida Bagus Made Poleng.



Once a child is born, the parents' birth names cease to be used. The teknonym appears; after the birth of their son Poleng, a couple whose names were Pudja and Deblog are now called Father of Poleng and Mother of Poleng.

The circularity after 4 stations -- Wayan to Made to Nyoman to Ketut back to Wayan -- also appears in the naming of generations. The word for great-grandfather -- kumpi -- is the same as that for great-grandson. This identity of generations reveals itself in prayers to the dead. The deceased's contemporaries -- siblings, cousins, friends -- will not pray to him as he is not senior to them. The dead get prayers from three generations below, but not from the fourth generation, i.e. the great-grandchildren; the kumpi are regarded as being cyclically linked back to the same generation, and not junior to the deceased. The 5th generation, i.e. consisting of the great-great-grandchildren, is regarded as senior to the deceased and would also not pray to him.

The Balinese kin group, in some ways similar to the Hindu gotra, is the dadia. We have encountered the Ida Bagus dadia. In the case of the three upper castes, the triwangsa, an illustrious Majapahit immigrant would be the common ancestor. (The Javanese conquerors of Bali in Gajah Mada's time contributed the Brahmans, Satrias and Wesiyas. 93% of the population of Bali, who represent wong Bali, i.e. the original people of Bali as distinct from the colonizing wong Majapahit, are Sudras.) Brahmans are, more specifically, said to be descended from Nirartha, the Javanese priest who came with the Majapahit and codified Balinese Hinduism.

The triwangsa are also referred to as wong jero, which means insiders (they lived inside the fortified walls of the conquerors) and the Sudras are referred to as wong jaba or outsiders (they lived outside the walls, in the country.)

Unlike gotras, however, dadia groups are not exogamous; by preference they are endogamous -- you try to marry within your circle of close kin. The ideal partner is a patriparallel cousin, which, for a male, would be his father's brother's daughter, that is, his first cousin on his father's side. The resources of the bride's family stay within the dadia, preventing fragmentation of scarce land. (In certain cases, you can pay a fine to the local ruler and be allowed to marry outside the dadia, as in the cases of elopement or abduction.)

Note that coupled-cousins are also common, for much the same reasons, within European royalty (list here). Charles Darwin married his first cousin Emma (their grandparents were also cousins), and Albert Einstein married his mother's sister's daughter Elsa, who was also his second cousin from his father's side.



The Sudra in Bali are not untouchable; while they are of lower status, the concept of touch-pollution does not exist. Inter-caste marriage is tolerated, and there always has been a certain amount of caste-mobility. The king of Klungkung, whose ancestors were installed by Gajah Mada, technically changes from being a Brahman to a Satria when he becomes the ruler (though he retains, uniquely among Satria, the title Dalem, see here.) Mixed marriages, however, still result in a change of status, and the rules concerning such status-changes are complex and reflect the power of patriarchy. A high caste triwangsa man may marry a lower caste Sudra woman; continued for three generations, high caste is lost. Till then, the children automatically receive their father's status; the wife enjoys a higher position, changing her title to jero (insider.) A high-caste woman, however, cannot marry a lower-caste man.

Today, modern economies and politics have upended the power structure of caste, but it still manifests itself in language. "For you can not speak the same Balinese language when you talk to a Sudra as you do when you talk to a Brahman like me." says Bagus. "It is a taboo."

There are three caste-contexted dialects of the Balinese language; they are Bali Alus (from halus, decorum; the highest level), Bali Madya (middle level) and Bali Sor (the lowest level). Bali Madya and Bali Sor are spoken in Balinese daily life, and can be used amongst friends or people of the same caste. Bali Alus must be used when talking to someone of a higher caste.

"Have you had your lunch?", in each caste-contexted dialect is:
Bali Alus : Sampun ngrayunang?
Bali Madya : Sampun Ngajeng?
Bali Sor : Sube medaar?

Think of the difference as being that between English greetings based on the tone of familiarity the speaker wishes to strike:
Good Morning, Sir!,
'Morning!, and
How's goes it, dude!
Only, in Bali, the entire language is so stratified, and all speech must follow the caste-context. Even a waiter or a bellboy, if suspected to be a Brahman, would normally be spoken to in High Balinese as a mark of respect for his caste.

When a Sudra meets a Brahman he reflexively bows his head. Pavilions in palaces and houses are tiered to allow people to sit in accordance with their status -- a delicate way to ascertain a person's caste is to ask where they want to sit -- "Oh, I'd prefer downstairs." At meals, the highest-caste-rank person eats first, and it is not polite to leave until he gets up. This makes Ida Bagus Dalem very uncomfortable, to the point he refuses to eat with others.

In India, caste is, theoretically, an outcome of one's karma in previous incarnations; and, practically, it used to denote distance from political power (after becoming Chhatrapati, Shivaji brought Gagabhat of Varanasi to establish his lineage into the Rajput Kshatriya Sisodias.)

In Bali, caste does not have much of a theoretical explanation, but indicates (in ways similar to Aryan peripheries) how much one's Majapahit paternal line has mixed with aboriginal Balinese maternal ones.



As we drive to Singaraja, we pass a number of shops belonging to the Pande clan: Manik Pande's Kris Daggers, Sidarta Pande's Blades. In India, Pande would be a Brahmin surname, but in Bali the Pandes are a hereditary clan, set apart from the caste system. They are the smiths; the most influential among them being blacksmiths: Pande besi. You can learn how to make steel, but you cannot be called a blacksmith; the only way to become a blacksmith is to be born a Pande besi.

In Bali, many clan groups wrote lontars, formal religious charter documents, to codify, and amplify, their right to status greater than mere Sudra. The Pande clan's lontar, called the Prasasti Sira Pande Mpu, offers a history that is vivid and full of the molten-metal-worker's hubris. The Prasasti Sira Pande Mpu outlines a pre-Hindu mythology that describes the creation of Brahma, who appears in elemental Fire -- here, truly, 'I Made Brahma.' Mpu Pradah is proclaimed the first head of Pande clan. The lontar states that the Brahmans obtained their knowledge and power from the Pande, that the Pande are older than the Brahmans, and that they are of greater power and prestige. Pandes are not permitted to obtain holy water from Brahman priests because such priests are the inferior younger-brothers of the Pandes. Pande areas have their own temples and their own pemangku lay priests, who make their own holy water for use only by the Pande people.

The document also includes a declaration of independence, for those skilled clans who had the knowledge-base to refute agama Hindu hegemonies. The lontar contains warnings to other caste-less people, that, rather than follow the triwangsa, they should emulate the Pandes.

In the old days, even Brahmans spoke to those working as smiths in High Balinese. Pandes are also permitted to have 11 tiers on their cremation towers, an honor only accorded to persons of very high caste.



Bagus claims, half-preening and half-sheepish, that young Brahman single men like him are the playboys of Bali, able to catch girls easily; a Sudra girl still dreams of climbing the hierarchy and becoming a Jero, a newly-minted Brahman woman; she will, fantasizes Bagus, offer herself to any young Brahman who beckons with a finger. What about Sudra boys? "Their goal, every weekend," says Bagus solemnly "is to bring a Brahman girl into their arms. That is a very nice target for them."

And what language would be used? He guffaws -- "In bed? Of course the most familiar!"

Below - Bagus takes us into the Uluwatu temple.

Narasinga

At the highest point in the range of hills above Yogyakarta, where on a clear day you can see the planes forever taking off from Adisucipto, is Candi Ijo -- a 9th century Shaivite temple. Near it has been found, curiously, the only statue of Vishnu's Narasimha (Man-Lion) avatar encountered in Indonesia. The 4th avatar of Vishnu is Narasinga to the Javanese.

We are far down, on Malioboro St in Yogya, crushed within throngs of revelers celebrating, with a carnival, a royal wedding. Sultan Hamengkubuwono X’s fifth (and youngest) daughter, Gusti Kanjeng Ratu Bendara, a hotel management graduate from Switzerland, is getting married to a Sumatran civil servant (who has been elevated to royalty as Prince Yudanegara) at a mosque inside the Palace complex (story here.) President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is in town with the First Lady, and so is everyone else: the procession we are in the midst of was supposed to draw 100,000 souls.

"Too squishy." Mr. M says stoically as we watch, from the head of the parade, the floats set off one by one.

One of the floats is under police protection, perhaps the only one with a religious motif. A cop on a motorcycle is parked abreast of a statue of a fierce Vishnu with a lion's head (i.e. the Man-Lion or Narasimha avatar), attacking the demon-king Hiranyakashipu, who was about to kill his own son Prahlada because he worshipped Vishnu. The demon-king has collapsed, lying across Narasimha's thigh, his head hanging down, his arms hanging helplessly and his legs in the air in aimless struggle. Narasimha is ripping open the demon-king's abdomen with two hands, the entrails dangling.



A quick recap of the story from the Puranas:

In his previous avatar of Varaha (Boar), Vishnu had killed the demon Hiranyaksha whose depredations had become intolerable to mankind.

Hiranyaksha's brother Hiranyakashipu, greatly angered, decided the only fit revenge would be to kill Vishnu (the Protector of the Universe to Hindus.) Since only the most supernatural of powers would do, he believed Brahma, the Creator, might be the sole recourse, if he managed to conduct the right penances. This seemed to work; pleased with Hiranyakashipu's long austerities, Brahma appeared and offered him a boon. Hiranyakashipu wished thusly:

O my lord, O best of the givers of benediction, if you will kindly grant me the benediction I desire, please let me not meet death from any of the living entities created by you. Grant me that I not die within any residence or outside any residence, during the daytime or at night, nor on the ground or in the sky. Grant me that my death not be brought about by any weapon, nor by any human being or animal. Grant me that I not meet death from any entity, living or nonliving created by you. Grant me, further, that I not be killed by any demigod or demon or by any great snake from the lower planets. Since no one can kill you in the battlefield, you have no competitor. Therefore, grant me the benediction that I too may have no rival. Give me sole lordship over all the living entities and presiding deities, and give me all the glories obtained by that position. Furthermore, give me all the mystic powers attained by long austerities and the practice of yoga, for these cannot be lost at any time.

One day while Hiranyakashipu is performing austerities at Mandaracala Mountain, his home is attacked by Indra and the other gods. At this point the divine sage Narada intervenes to protect Hiranyakashipu's consort Kayadu, who he describes as sinless. Narada takes Kayadu into his care and her unborn child (Hiranyakashipu's son) Prahlada, becomes affected by the transcendental mantras of the sage, in utero. As he grows into boyhood, Prahlada is recognized as a devoted follower of Vishnu, first to his father's consternation, then to his livid rage.

Hiranyakashipu attempts to kill the boy; Prahlada is always protected by Vishnu's power. When asked to devote himself only to his father-king, Prahlada refuses to acknowledge his father as the supreme lord of the universe and claims that it is Vishnu who is omnipotent and omnipresent. Hiranyakashipu points to a nearby pillar and asks if 'his Vishnu' is in it:

O most unfortunate Prahlada, you have always described a Supreme Being other than me, a Supreme Being Who is above everything, Who is the controller of everyone, and Who is all-pervading. But where is He? If He is everywhere, then why is He not present before me in this pillar?

Prahlada calmly answers:

He was, He is and He will be. He is in pillars, and He is in the smallest twig.

Hiranyakashipu, unable to control his anger, smashes the pillar with his mace, and sets upon destroying his son. Following a tumultuous sound, Vishnu in the form of a Man-Lion appears from within the pillar, in defence of Prahlada. In order to kill Hiranyakashipu, yet not violate the boon given by Brahma, the form of Narasimha is chosen. Hiranyakashipu can not be killed by human, animal or god. Narasimha is neither -- he is a form of Vishnu incarnate as a part-human, part-animal. He comes upon Hiranyakashipu at twilight (when it is neither day nor night) on the threshold of a courtyard (neither indoors nor out), and puts the demon on his thighs (neither on earth nor in space), using his sharp fingernails (neither animate nor inanimate) as weapons, he disembowels and kills the demon.



At exhibitions of Indonesian art, the sculpture from Candi Ijo (above) is often shown. When at the Met in NY, a wall label extolling the "calmer, gentler spirit" of the Indonesians was placed next to the Narasimha sculpture; perhaps the curators thought a Thai massage was in progress.

At the Candi Ijo, high up in the green hills, there is a mantra written 16 times in the stone in foot-high mandalas: Om Sarva-vinasa, Om Sarva-vinasa (Hail, All-Destroyer) -- presumably invoking Shiva. It is a little odd that the Narasimha statue was found in this location. The vajra in the hands of the carnival Narasimha is also curious.

Below -- the carnival Narasimha. A fuller video of the floats is here.

Tinikidanuphanirayaramayanadakavigalabharadali

The story of Ravana, from a paraphrase of the Malay/Indonesian Hikayat Seri Rama, compiled by Shellabear and quoted in Rama Legends and Rama Reliefs in Indonesia:

Maharaja Ravana with his ten heads and twenty arms was sent by his father on a ship to Bukit Serandib, because he had behaved very badly. His father was Citra Baha and his mother Raksa Pandi, the daughter of Dati Kavaca. Reaching Serandib he carried out penance in that island. He hung himself down from a tree with his head downwards.

While Adam was living on earth, he saw him hanging there and was requested by the ascetic to speak for him in front of Allah that he should get four kingdoms. As his penance had been crowned with great success he got married. To begin with he entered into matrimony with the princess from the world of spirits, Nila Utama, who bore him, in due course of time, a son, Indera Jata. This prince had three heads and six arms and he was made the king of the kingdom of spirits at the age of twelve.

After that Ravana married the princess of the earth, Puteri Pertivi Devi, who also bore him a son, called Patala Mahirajan. Even he became a king at the age of twelve, on earth. A third marriage was made with the queen of the seas: Ganga Mahadevi. The son from this marriage was Ganga Mahasuri, who became the king of the seas at the age of twelve.

Thus Maharaja Ravana was the lord of all the worlds from the east to west. There were, however, four kingdoms which were not under his rule. The first was Indera Puri, the second Biruhasya Purva, the third Lagur Katagina, and the fourth Ispaha Boga. But, apart from these, there was everything on and in the earth, in the sea and within air, subject to the kind of reksasas, who had a magnificent palace built for him on the Bukit Serandib: Lanka Puri.



From the Hikayat tradition collected by Roorda van Eysinga, again quoted from the same source:

Dasarata the king of Ispaha Boga, the fourth of the kingdoms independent from Ravana, was the son of Dasarata Cakravati. Raman was the son Dasarata, the son of Nabi Adam.

As Maharaja Dasarata was still childless, after many years he tries to liberate himself from this terrible worry by the advice of a holy man. After consulting the sacred books, his advice was as follows, "Sacrifice for three days in the middle of the field."

Accompanied by one thousand disciples, the holy man flew through the air to the palace city of Mandura Pura and carries out a solemn sacrifice, after he has been solemnly fetched. The sacrificial rice was divided up into six balls. From these three balls were given to (Dasarata's first wife) Mandu Dari, and three to (the second wife) Balia Dari. But suddenly a crow, in actual fact an ancestor of Maharaja Ravana, all of a sudden came there and carried away one of the balls meant for Balia dari. In great rage the holy man cursed the crow and said that it would die by the hand of Mandu Dari's son and further whoever eats this rice ball would get a daughter, who would marry that son. The bird then flew to Lanka Puri, and reported to Ravana what had happened. On hearing this Ravana ate the rice.

After some time Mandu Dari gave birth to a son called Seri Rama, whose body color was emerald green and whose face was a beautiful as the full moon. She gave birth to a second son called Laksemana. Balia Dari gives birth to two sons Berdana and Citradana and after that to a daughter Kikuvi Devi. As Maharaja Dasarata once gets very ill with an abcess in the groin region his life was again saved by Balia Dari who sucked out the pus.

Ravana, on hearing about Mandu Dari, immediately leaves for Mandura Pura, disguised as a brahmin. He comes there to a gate with seven locks which, however, opened by itself on his muttering a magic formula and allows him to enter the palace. In the middle of the front coutryard, he sits down and begins to play his lyre. Dasarata, who was sleeping at Mandu Dari's side, was woken by the music, and as he went to the door, he saw a Brahmin in whom he recognized Ravana.

After a short talk, the latter lets Dasarata know that he wants to take Mandu Dari with him. Dasarata refuses in the beginning because of the children, but then finally promises to give her to him. But his wife is not apparently agreeable to this decision because she goes in her palace and scratches off her skin and makes a ball as big an egg from the skin. She puts this on a golden plate and sacrifices it. As a result the ball changes into a green frog. Even this is brought as a sacrifice and finally turns into a beautiful woman, a replica of Mandu Dari. Ravana goes off in great haste with this pseudo Mandu Dari (she is called Mandu Daki from now onwards, since daki = thrown off skin.) Dasarata who is very surprised to see own wife again, since he has seen his guest going away with her, accepts what has happened temporarily.

... After some time Mandu Daki gave birth to a daughter as beautiful as gold. Ravana sends immediately for his brother Maharaja Bibu Sanam, who comes with his pupils to Lanka Puri because he was a famous magician.

The horoscopes are drawn up but with a shake of his head Bibu Sanam relates that whosoever marries this child would kill its father and rule over the four worlds. Ravana was naturally unhappy at this prophecy and wanted to kill the girl immediately, but the mother suggested that it should be put in an iron box, and thrown into the sea and so it happens. The baby is given the breast for the last time, given over to its enang (governess), who then gives it back to Ravana. He gives the child to Bibu Sanam who throws the casket into the sea.

In the meantime the child in the iron casket floated from Lanka Puri to Darvati Purva to Maharesi Kali. One morning the saint was worshipping the sun. While doing do he stood with his navel in the sea, when the casket hit against his legs. After he had finished his prayers, he took it with him to his wife Manuram Devi. To the surprise of both, the whole house is filled with light as soon as the casket is opened and from the breast of Manuram Devi milk flows. It is clear to them that it has been destined by the gods that they become foster parents of this beautiful girl. Then Maharesi Kali plants forty palm trees in a row and says: "he who can cut through all these forty palm trees with one shot, he should marry this girl who was named Sita Devi."

As Sita Devi is twelve years old kings come from all regions to Maharesi Kali in order to fulfil his wager and to win his daughter as their wife. Even Ravana came in his flying chariot and it was like the heaven falling down. Maharesi Kali, however, missed the sons of Dasarata among the princes and did not wish to give Ravana any chance, before these princes were invited. On the advice of his wife, he went to bring Seri Rama and Laksemana and left for Mandura Pura.



AK Ramanujan asks in his essay Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation:

How many Ramayanas? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas , a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been? ...

In several of the later Ramayanas (such as the AdhyatmaRamayana , 16th C.), when Rama is exiled, he does not want Sita to go with him into the forest. Sita argues with him. At first she uses the usual arguments: she is his wife, she should share his sufferings, exile herself in his exile, and so on. When he still resists the idea, she is furious. She bursts out, "Countless Ramayanas have been composed before this. Do you know of one where Sita doesn't go with Rama to the forest?" That clinches the argument, and she goes with him.

In his essay, Ramanujan compares the story of Ahalya in Valmiki's Ramayana against that in the Ramayana of Kampan. The choice is interesting. The beauty of A-halya (the unploughed) is that of land not yet brought under cultivation. Sita's beauty is that of the furrow in new ploughed land. Rama is green as the new crop. His sons Lav (to scythe) and Kush (spear-grass) have strong connection to the furrow. Ahalya lets a stranger into her home because the stranger has taken on the form of her Brahmin husband - but is actually the god Indra. Sita lets a demon cross the 'Lakhsman rekha' of the hut's threshold because the stranger has taken the shape of a Brahmin sage. Both are punished for being object of a stranger's lust.

During their visit to Java in 1927, Tagore and Suniti Chatterjee encountered the tradition that Rama and Sita were siblings (or at least half-siblings.) Tagore found this interesting, and talked with Dutch orientalists, who confirmed that in their opinion the incest myth was the older one, and that it had been rewritten in the Indian tradition but not in the dispersed ones living on in South East Asia. In a letter home Rabindranath wrote:

If this opinion were to be true, I see some huge congruences between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. At the root of both the stories are two marriages. Both the marriages are, according to custom, inadmissible. In Buddhist histories we hear of brother-sister marriages but it is completely against our traditions. On the other side, one woman being married to five brothers at once is also novel and non-traditional. The second congruence is the test-of-arms at the first step of each marriage, even as that test is irrelevant to the purpose of each marriage. The third congruence is that neither bride is born from the womb of a woman -- Sita is the Earth's daughter, discovered in a furrow at the tip of the plough, Draupadi (Krishnaa) is created from a Yajna. The fourth congruence is the grooms in each case being subjected to usurpation of their kingdom and banishment to the forests with their wife. The fifth congruence in both stories is the molestation of the wife by the hands of the enemy, and revenge for the molestation.

Suniti Chatterjee, perhaps the greatest comparative-linguist in modern Bengal, was to cause a furore late in his life by claiming that the Ramayana had its origin in the Buddhist tradition, in the Dasaratha Jataka which was older than the Hindu sources. In an extempore lecture at the Asiatic Society, Kolkata, in January 1976, he contended that Rama was the sister of Sita, whom he married. See here for the Jataka, which carries the motif of Rahul's mother being the Buddha's sister.

And tinikidanuphanirayaramayanadakavigalabharadali? By the fourteenth century, there were already so many Ramayanas that Gadhugina Veera Naranappa (the classical Vijayanagara poet, whose nom-de-plume was Kumaravyasa) chose to write a Mahabharata instead, because he had heard the cosmic serpent who upholds the earth groaning under the burden of all the cacophonous Ramayana poets ( tinikidanu-phaniraya-ramayana-daka-vigala-bharadali)!