Rangda

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Before the word evil is allowed anywhere near her, there is the object: a slab of pale pule wood, the milk-white timber of Alstonia scholaris, worked into a face with bulging eyes, a mouth of tusks, and a long tongue of gilded leather hanging to the chest. It is not a prop and it is not on display. It lies wrapped in white cloth in the pura dalem, the temple of the dead, at the kelod end of the village — the seaward, downstream, dissolving end — and it is never carved, never consecrated, never lifted from its wrapping without offerings set down first. The wood is cut on a chosen day with a priest present; the finished mask is fed and censed and addressed. The Balinese call such a thing tenget: charged, dangerous, alive with a power that has been called into it. This is the first fact about Rangda, and the tradition insists on it before any other. She is a face the community keeps under cloth in the graveyard temple because they hold that the face has weight.

A Rangda mask — bulging eyes, tusks, and the long lolling tongue — at the Setia Darma Mask and Puppet House, Ubud. Anandajoti Bhikkhu, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The widow and the two lines of her descent

The name says what she is. Rangda is Old Javanese and Balinese for “the widow,” and it is not a proper name at all but an epithet — the word a woman becomes when the story of Calon Arang reaches its end. The Wikipedia entry on Rangda records the plain gloss, “a term in old Javanese that means ‘widow,’” and the whole figure hangs from that word: a woman without a husband, at the edge of the settlement, in command of powers the settlement fears. She reaches the record along two lines that scholars keep carefully apart, and only one of them is a story the tradition itself tells.

The tradition-internal line runs through the legend of Calon Arang, the widow-witch of the village of Girah — Dirah in some tellings — in the kingdom of Daha, or Kediri, in eastern Java. The tale is set in the reign of King Airlangga, and here a correction is owed at once. The Rangda article dates that reign to “the late 10th century,” but Airlangga is an eleventh-century king, ruling from about 1019 to 1042 of the common era, son of the queen Mahendradatta and the Balinese king Udayana Warmadewa. The tenth-century date is an error, and the corrected one matters, because it is the same eleventh century in which the historicizing line will place its candidate for a real Rangda. In the legend, Calon Arang is a mistress of black magic whose daughter, Ratna Manggali, is beautiful and yet can find no husband, because every suitable young man fears the mother. The slight is unbearable. The widow goes to the cemetery and offers a sacrifice to Bhatari Durga, and Durga answers: flood rises over Girah, and plague follows the water, and the people begin to die.

The king turns to the sage Mpu Bharada — Bharadah in the older spelling — who sees that the widow cannot be beaten while she holds her power, and that her power is written in a manuscript she guards. So Bharada sends his pupil, Mpu Bahula, to court Ratna Manggali and marry her; and inside the house Bahula finds the book of magic and takes it, and with the widow’s own knowledge turned against her the two priests overcome her at last. It is in that final fury, cornered and unmade, that the widow rises into the towering demonic shape the Balinese call Rangda. The Calon Arang tradition preserves the tale as an Old Javanese and Balinese kidung, a sung poem, copied and recopied through the manuscript centuries; copies are held today in the Netherlands, at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden. The date of its composition is genuinely uncertain — often estimated to the twelfth century or later — and the estimate should be worn loosely, as an estimate and not a fixed fact. The tale, in its own frame, is not finally a story about killing a monster. It is a story about knowledge: who holds it, how it is taken, and what it costs a woman to be feared.

The second line is the work of scholars, not of the legend, and it looks for a person behind the mask. Its candidate is Queen Mahendradatta, whose temple name was Gunapriya Dharmapatni, a Javanese princess of the Isyana dynasty who lived from about 961 to 1011 CE, married the Balinese king Udayana Warmadewa, and bore the hero-king Airlangga. The record of Mahendradatta marks her out for one thing above all: “her devotion to Durga,” which she is believed to have carried from Java to Bali. After her death she was deified in the form of the goddess she served — depicted as Durga Mahisasuramardini, the eight-armed slayer of the buffalo demon — and enshrined within the temple of Pura Bukit Dharma Kutri at Buruan, in Blahbatu, Gianyar Regency, where the stone image, dated broadly across the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, still stands. The proposal that this Durga-devoted, deified queen is the historical seed of the widow-witch is a hypothesis, advanced by scholarship and contested within it; the folk version that has her exiled for sorcery finds no support in a record that instead honored her, co-signing inscriptions with her husband and enshrining her as a goddess. What is not in doubt is the shape the whole thing takes: whether one begins from the legend or from the statue, the road leads to Durga.

Queen of the leyak, terrible face of Durga

Within the living cosmos of Balinese Hindu practice, Rangda is the concentrated power of the left. The Balinese order the world along an axis that runs from the mountains to the sea, from kaja to kelod, pure to impure, upstream to down; and Rangda belongs wholly to the seaward, chthonic pole, the domain of the pura dalem and the cremation ground and the powers that dissolve. She is the sovereign of the leyak, the leak — the shape-shifting witches who fly at night as heads trailing entrails, or as balls of blue fire, feeding where the living are weakest. She is mistress of the left-hand arts. And above all she is a face of Bhatari Durga herself, the consort-energy of Siwa in the mode of slayer and devourer, the goddess in her fierce aspect, whom foreign observers have reached, not wrongly, to set beside Kali. To call Rangda a monster is to miss the theology entirely: she is what the tradition holds to be a real and necessary power, the divine turned toward destruction, without which the divine would be only half itself.

Her iconography spells out that role in the body. The Wikipedia account describes her as “a mostly nude old woman, with long and unkempt hair, pendulous breasts, and claws,” her face “a horrifying fanged and goggle-eyed mask, with a long, protruding tongue.” Every element reads: the flame-like hair of the wild, the sagging body of the old woman past childbearing, the tusks and claws of the raksasa and the bhuta, the demon-forces that the Balinese take to be as real, and as much a part of the sacred order, as the benevolent ones. She is not given this face to frighten children. She is given this face because this is the true countenance of a power the cosmos requires.

Here the load-bearing correction must be made plainly, because the whole English-language reception makes the opposite mistake. The Rangda article itself calls her “the personification of evil” and describes her endless meeting with the guardian Barong as “the eternal battle between good and evil.” She is not the devil, and that is not what the encounter means. The Balinese frame is rwa bhineda: the two-that-are-different, the doctrine that order and chaos, right hand and left, mountain and sea, the seen world of sekala and the unseen niskala, are complementary halves of a single whole, each real, each necessary, held in productive tension rather than set to annihilate the other. Barong is the guardian; Rangda is the destroyer; and the point of their meeting is not that the guardian wins. In the drama neither of them ever finally wins, because a world in which one pole had extinguished the other would not be balanced — it would be broken. Rangda is Barong’s necessary counterpart, the terrible face without which the protecting face would have nothing to stand against and nothing to protect. What looks from the front row like good defeating evil is, in the tradition’s own reading, the permanent marriage of two powers, permanent precisely because it is never resolved.

At the height of the Calonarang drama comes the passage that has drawn cameras and ethnographers for a century, and it must be described at the distance of the public record, because it is a grave and bounded rite and not a technique that anyone elsewhere might attempt. The men who have taken up the kris, the wavy dagger, fall under Rangda’s power and turn the points inward against their own breasts. Within the frame of the drama it is her magic that drives the blade toward the flesh, and the Barong’s power — with the holy water, the tirtha, that the pemangku sprinkles — that shields the body, so that the pressed daggers do not pierce. The two forces meet in the single entranced dancer, and the balance of opposites is made, for a moment, terribly visible in a human chest. It is recorded here only as the public record records it, and left in the keeping of those to whom it belongs. Through all of it the mask remains the center of gravity: carved of pule wood and consecrated with offerings, kept wrapped and housed in the pura dalem at the kelod edge of the settlement, where Durga’s domain lies. The dancer who wears it does not, in the tradition’s understanding, merely portray Rangda. The mask carries her, and to put it on is to make room.

The camera, the ticket, and the sober record

Rangda entered the Western imagination through the ethnography of one decade, the 1930s, and that record has to be read with care, because it partly made the thing it claimed to find. Miguel Covarrubias gave the Barong–Rangda drama and the kris trance a wide readership in his Island of Bali of 1937, the book that fixed “the last paradise” in the popular mind. In the same years Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson filmed the Calonarang and Barong trance during their Bali fieldwork, and the short documentary they made from it — Trance and Dance in Bali, photographed across 1937 and 1939 and edited with a music track and released around 1951 to 1952 — put the image of women pressing krisses to their breasts before generations of viewers who would never see the rite otherwise.

That film is exactly where the caution is owed. The anthropologist Ira Jacknis, reviewing how it was made, noted that the sequence “was not an ancient form, but had been created during the period of their fieldwork”: a Balinese troupe had, around 1936, combined the Rangda-and-witch play, the Calonarang, with the Barong and the kris dance into the single spectacle the camera then recorded. The performance was staged in daylight because no lighting equipment was available for the night rite it was drawn from; and the film substituted, in Mead’s own account, “young beautiful women for the withered old women who performed at night,” with female kris-dancers who were themselves unusual. What the film documents, then, is not an unchanging ancient rite but a specific mid-1930s production — valuable precisely as that, a record of a moment when Balinese artists and foreign observers were together assembling the version of “Bali” the world would inherit. To take it for a window onto the timeless is to repeat the decade’s own error.

Rangda danced in a Barong-and-kris performance, mask and costume worked in the full fanged form. Mw. Asperslag, Collectie Wereldmuseum (formerly Tropenmuseum), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Today Rangda lives a doubled life, and the two registers sit uneasily side by side. On one side is the tourist economy: abbreviated, ticketed Barong-and-Kris shows run most mornings in Batubulan and around Ubud, in Gianyar, staging the Calonarang tale for coach parties in the space of an hour and closing with photographs on the stage — the encounter reduced, in the marketing, to the good-versus-evil gloss the tradition does not hold. On the other side, and untouched by the ticket, are the full Calonarang dramas performed at temple odalan in the graveyard precincts of the pura dalem, where the mask is consecrated, the ground is charged, and the danger and the taboo are real. The sacred dimension is not the spectacle, and the people who keep both know exactly which is which. A consecrated Rangda mask remains, in the living understanding, spiritually potent — and the potency is not a figure of speech. In February 2021, in Denpasar, a young performer died after being stabbed during a Rangda performance, a sober reminder, stated as the fact it is, that the krisses in these hands are ritual weapons and not props.

Scholarship since the 1930s has kept returning to the same knot, reading the Calonarang texts, the Durga cult, and the Mahendradatta hypothesis against one another and asking how far the three faces are one. Is the widow-witch of Girah, the deified queen of Bukit Dharma Kutri, and the Sanskritic Durga of the slain buffalo demon a single figure seen from three distances, or three figures the tradition has braided together over a thousand years? The braiding is itself the phenomenon. What the whole complex shows is not a doctrine imported whole from India but a distinctively Balinese synthesis — Saiva theology, ancestral veneration, and an older animist stratum fused into something that belongs to this island and no other. The wider machinery of exoticized Bali, and the histories it overwrote, belong properly to the story of the Balinese as a living people; against that history Rangda stands as the sharpest edge of the island’s own theology rather than a specimen of its superstition. She is the widow whose grief loosed a plague, the queen whose devotion to Durga outlived her death, and the left hand of a cosmos the Balinese hold in balance rather than in judgment — kept under white cloth in the graveyard temple, fed before she is ever carved, and met each time by the beast who is not there to defeat her but to stand, for as long as the world stands, on the other side.

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