The Bali Aga

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A length of gringsing takes years, and the reason is in the making. Both the lengthwise threads and the crosswise threads must be bound and dyed to their pattern before a single row is woven, so that the design has to be laid down twice over — once along the warp, once across the weft — and made to meet itself exactly on the loom. This is double ikat, the most exacting of all resist-dyeing, and outside a few villages in India and Japan it is woven in only one place on earth: Tenganan Pegringsingan, in the hills of eastern Bali. The cloth’s name reads its own purpose. From gering, illness, and sing, not — cloth “without illness,” held to protect and to heal, and worn at the passages of a life, the first hair-cutting, the tooth-filing, the marriage, the covering of the dead. The women who weave it belong to a community that calls itself, when it must use the outsiders’ word at all, the Bali Aga.

The name is not the one they would choose. Read plainly it means “mountain Balinese,” and in some mouths the second word slides further, toward mountain folk who are backward or foolish, so that the label has worked for centuries as a mild demotion. Many of these communities therefore prefer Bali Mula — “the original Balinese,” the first, the source. The preference is itself an argument. It says that these are not a marginal tribe up in the highlands but the stock the island began from, the people who were in place before the event that reorganized everything around them.

The original Balinese

That event was the coming of Java. In 1342 the armies of the Majapahit, the great Hindu-Javanese empire of the eastern archipelago, crossed to Bali under the patih Gajah Mada, and after some months of fighting took the old Balinese seat at Bedulu in 1343, folding the island into the empire. In the settlement that followed, Majapahit seeded Bali with Javanese nobles, priests, and temples, and with a fourfold ranking of birth — the catur wangsa, the ordering of brahmana, satria, wesia, and the commoner sudra majority — administered by rajas who traced their descent to the conquerors and by a high priesthood of pedanda. From that seeding grew the courtly, caste-ordered world that most Balinese know, the wong Majapahit who remember Java as the homeland of their letters and their law. The Bali Aga are, by their own telling and the ethnographer’s alike, the communities that stood apart from that settlement: they did not take on the catur wangsa, kept older temple forms and their own customary councils, and went on governing themselves.

Where authority in the courtly south descended from a raja and his pedanda, in these villages it rises from the married householders themselves. The signal institution is the ulu apad: a council not of chosen individuals but of married couples, ulu jangkep, ranked by seniority of marriage rather than by inherited rank or by election. The eldest couples sit at the head; a household advances up the bench as those above it retire or die. Membership is bound tightly to the ground. In Tenganan full standing, and the seat in the council that comes with it, is reserved for those born in the village of village parents; to marry an outsider forfeits it, and the strictest custom forbids divorce and polygamy outright. This is the seam that divides the Bali Aga from the Majapahit-descended majority — not a different god but a different constitution, self-rule by the seated couples, land held by the community, rank measured by the years of a marriage rather than by the accident of birth.

How sharply they differ, and how far the “original” claim can be pressed, is a matter scholars weigh rather than settle. What can be counted is counted. A 2015 survey identifies some 62 traditional Bali Aga villages, with a combined population near 63,000, scattered across seven regencies but gathered into three zones. In the highlands of Bangli, around the Kintamani caldera, lie about 25 of them, Trunyan among them; in the east, in Karangasem, roughly a dozen, Tenganan chief among these; along the north coast and its hills, in Buleleng, another fourteen or so — Sembiran and Julah on the shore, and the upland cluster of Sidatapa, Cempaga, Tigawasa, Pedawa, and Banyuseri. It is the northern group that touches the island’s deepest documented past. These coastal villages sit beside Bali’s oldest inscriptions, and the record here is not vague. The Sukawana copper-plate, dated to 882 CE and reckoned the earliest firmly dated Balinese inscription, already names the trades of the north — indigo-dyers and morinda-dyers, whose craft it exempts from tax — four and a half centuries before Gajah Mada ever sighted the strait. The Sembiran series runs deeper still: about ten copper plates in Old Balinese spanning the years 922 to 1181, the earliest of them, Sembiran A1, dated 922 CE and issued by King Ugrasena, who remitted the village’s taxes after robbers had sacked the town and carried its people off. Excavation near the shore between Sembiran and Julah has turned up Indian rouletted ware and a Dong Son bronze drum reckoned some two thousand years old — the marks of a maritime crossroads open to India and mainland Asia long before any Javanese court reached the island.

The villages, for their part, do not date themselves by copper. They keep their own genealogies of origin, and each is particular to its patch of ground. Tenganan holds that its land was set out for it by the god Indra himself, who chose its people to keep a territory laid out as a small image of the world. Trunyan simply is its tree. And the Bali Aga remember, too, a resistance: a revolt in 1344, under a leader named Ki Kayuselem, against the Majapahit order just settled upon the island. Whether that rising is event or emblem is not clear — it comes down as legend braided with record, the way much of the deep Balinese past does — but it fixes the posture the name itself carries. These are the people who did not go over.

The aboriginal pole

Within the Balinese sacred world the Bali Aga hold the aboriginal pole. When the mainstream courts overlaid the imported order — the four castes, the great cremation, the high Brahmana priesthood — these villages kept the island’s older layers, a folk Hinduism woven tightly through with strata of ancestor-veneration and the powers of place. They lean on the pemangku, the village priest, and on the elders of the council rather than on the courtly pedanda; their cosmos is ordered less by rank of birth than by seniority and the balance of the seated couples. This is the frame from within which their custom makes sense, and two of the signature villages show its shape.

At Tenganan the highest deity is not one of the usual great figures of the Balinese pantheon but Dewa Indra, the god of war, who in the village’s charter myth gave it the very land it stands on. That gift is repaid each year. During the roughly month-long Usaba Sambah festival, which falls around June, the village holds the rite it calls mekare-kare and the wider island calls perang pandan, the pandan war. Paired young men meet in the open before the seated village, each armed with a tight bundle of thorned pandanus leaf and a small round shield of woven rattan. They grapple and strike; the thorns tear the skin of the back and shoulders; blood is drawn, and the drawn blood is the point — offered to Indra, a gift of the body’s own courage back to the god whose ground the village holds in trust. It is described here at the distance of the public record, not as a thing to be enacted. There is no enmity in it and no revenge afterward: the young men who fought embrace, and their wounds are dressed with a village medicine called boreh kare, a paste of turmeric, galangal, and vinegar. The combat is not defeat and victory. It is devotion and balance, a debt paid in the one currency the god is owed.

Mekare-kare, the pandanus-leaf combat of Tenganan Pegringsingan, an offering of drawn blood to Dewa Indra. Photograph by Riza Nugraha, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Around this rite the women weave the gringsing that gives the village its full name, Pegringsingan, “the place of the cloth without illness.” Its power is protective and healing, even exorcistic, and its palette is narrow and old — a deep red, a russet neutral, a blue-black — got from morinda root and from indigo. Yet indigo itself Tenganan holds impure and forbidden within its bounds, so the bound threads are sent out to the neighboring village of Bugbug to take their blue and returned before the weaving. The oldest inscription of the north named those same two dyes, the indigo and the morinda, a thousand years before the looms that still use them; the cloth is a living end of a very long thread.

Kain geringsing wayang, a ceremonial double-ikat cloth carrying figures from the shadow-play, from Tenganan Pegringsingan, 19th century. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.90.22), gift of Mary F. Kefgen. Public domain.

At Trunyan, on the eastern shore of Lake Batur beneath Mount Abang, in the caldera of the old volcano, death itself is taught differently. The village’s guardian is Ratu Gede Pancering Jagat, “the great lord, the pivot-pin of the world,” worshiped by the Trunyanese as Bhatara Da Tonta — present not as a painted image on a shrine but as a great effigy some four meters tall, a megalithic figure of considerable age, kept within the temple that bears the deity’s name, Pura Pancering Jagat, whose founding a tenth-century copper-plate already records. He is honored not by the gilded, jangling processions of the tourist south but by the Barong Brutuk: unmarried young men, purified and secluded beforehand, who dress in nothing but long aprons of dried banana-leaf and dance before the megalith to no gamelan at all, on the full moon of the fourth Balinese month, around October. It is among the oldest ritual forms surviving on the island.

And Trunyan keeps its dead in a way the mainstream does not. In the rite the village calls mepasah, the married dead — those who died whole and in the ordinary course — are neither cremated in the great fire that frees the soul elsewhere on Bali, nor buried, but laid on the open ground at the cemetery of Sema Wayah, each covered by a triangular screen of bamboo, an ancak saji, beneath a vast banyan the villagers call the taru menyan, the “fragrant tree.” Its scent, they hold, answers the other scent, the earth’s slow work, so that the grove stays sweet. When the flesh is gone the skull is set on a stone altar some five hundred meters north of the hamlet of Banjar Kuban. This place is not for everyone: those who died unmarried, and children, and those taken by violence or misadventure, are laid in cemeteries of their own, so that the completeness of a person governs the ground that receives it. Within the frame the emphasis falls not on death as spectacle but on belonging and return — the village’s own married dead, resting whole where custom ordains, watched over by the megalithic lord of the place. What outsiders later hang upon the practice is another matter.

The living past

The Bali Aga entered outside knowledge early, and they entered it as a foil. To the courtly majority they were the un-Javanized remainder, the mountain Balinese; to the colonial administrators and the ethnographers who followed, they became something more flattering and no less confining — the island’s “living past,” an older and purer Bali held against the courts. Miguel Covarrubias, in Island of Bali (1937), already fixed Tenganan and Trunyan in the traveler’s imagination as autonomous archaic survivals, and that appetite has not faded so much as industrialized. At Trunyan it takes its grimmest shape: the open-air dead of Sema Wayah, the weathered row of skulls on the altar, repackaged for the day-tripper as “Skull Island,” the cemetery reached by boat across the lake and retailed on the dark-tourism circuit as a thrill of the morbid, its most reliable hazard the hustling of visitors rather than anything the rite itself intends. That framing the tradition does not adopt, and it should be named as reception and refused as description. At Tenganan the pressure comes as a crowd and a market: the pandan war draws cameras, and genuinely sacred cloth years in the weaving shares a stall with faster imitations run up for sale.

Read critically, the modern scholarship dismantles the frozen-relic picture altogether. In the Göttingen studies of Sembiran and Julah, Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin has shown that the northern villages named in the copper-plates reorganized themselves repeatedly between the tenth and twelfth centuries — entangled in maritime trade, rewritten by royal decree, sacked and resettled — so that they cannot be read as communities that endured unchanged from some pre-Hindu dawn. Thomas Reuter, in Custodians of the Sacred Mountains (2002), argues the same for the highland desa of the interior: their order is a lived and adapting tradition, not a museum piece, and the very question of “Austronesian aboriginality” against a later ritual organization of the state is one scholars actively contest. The Bali Aga are original the way a language is original — a deep and continuous root, not a thing preserved in amber.

That correction has a wider bearing. Balinese Hinduism is itself a distinct syncretic tradition, an Indic court religion knit into an older Austronesian ground of ancestor and place, and not simply a branch of the Hinduism of India; and its twentieth-century reformers, pressing for the state to recognize the faith as one of the nation’s religions, foregrounded its monotheism — the one formless godhead behind the many devas — in terms that answered the demands of the modern republic. That reform, carried forward from the founding of the island’s Hindu council in 1959 and the state’s recognition of the faith in 1962, is set out where it belongs, in the account of Sang Hyang Widhi. The Bali Aga sit instructively at the edge of that reformed orthodoxy. Their cult of Indra as a supreme village god, their megalithic guardian at Trunyan, their refusal of the great cremation that the courts hold central — up the volcano at the mother temple the whole island’s order is gathered and made single, and against it the Bali Aga keep an older, more local shape — all of this fits awkwardly, and usefully, against a faith reformed toward a single supreme God. They are a reminder, folded into the living present, that the Balinese sacred world has depths the reform did not invent and could not flatten.

For they are a living people, and their custom is present tense. It is not held for the visitor’s benefit but maintained, deliberately and self-consciously, by the communities that keep it — Tenganan runs a village culture festival and sells its cloth on its own terms; the councils of married couples still seat themselves by seniority in the long pavilions; the choices about marriage and membership and the disposition of the dead are made, village by village and house by house, and not answered the same way in every valley. The full story of the Balinese as a whole, and of the grave modern history the island has passed through, is told elsewhere. Here it is enough to hold the smaller and harder thing: some sixty communities, the oldest presences on their ground, deciding in the present what of the old covenant to keep — the god who gave the land, the fragrant tree above the dead, the cloth woven without illness, the seated couples in whom the village governs itself.

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