The Balinese

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He is awake before the light, and the first thing he does is not for himself. In the mountainward corner of the family compound stands the sanggah, the house-shrine, and to it he brings the first act of the day — a folded palm-leaf tray of flowers and rice, a wafer of smoking incense, water flicked from a blossom — set down for the ancestors and the gods of the place before the kettle is on. Somewhere across the hamlet the kulkul, the slit-drum in the council tower, may sound the day’s summons: a work-call, a death to attend, a festival to prepare. If he farms, the water threading his rice terrace this morning reached it by the turn of a cooperative older than any living memory, shared in strict sequence with the fields above and below his own. And on the wall, or in his head, is the calendar, and the calendar says whether today is an ordinary day or the odalan, when the whole neighborhood will dress and carry offerings uphill to the temple that holds its anniversary. Before he is anything else — before he is a name, a rank, or the holder of a doctrine — he is a member: of a compound, of a council, of a village, of a flow of water, of a temple’s turning year. To be Balinese is, first, to be woven in.

A layered people

The Balinese call themselves Wong Bali or Krama Bali, and by their own tradition as much as by the documentary record they are a layered people rather than a people of one origin. Their language, Basa Bali, belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian, kin to Javanese and Sundanese and the wider Indonesian family, and it carries the island’s order in its very grammar: Balinese is classed as Austronesian and spoken by some three and a half million people, with a system of speech registers — an ordinary low level, a middle level, and a high or refined level called singgih — by which a speaker fits every sentence to the rank of the person addressed. Courtesy and wangsa, rank, are encoded before a word is finished.

The deep past beneath that grammar is Austronesian. A 2005 study of Balinese Y chromosomes found the paternal lines to be roughly 84 percent Austronesian, 12 percent Indian, and about 2 percent Melanesian — a genetic sketch of the same layering the culture remembers, an Austronesian base with an Indian overlay carried in by religion and letters, and an older Melanesian trace beneath. Onto the Austronesian ground came Hindu-Buddhist court culture out of Java across the first millennium. By the ninth and tenth centuries Bali was already a Hindu-Buddhist island, ruled by the Warmadewa dynasty and reading and carving in Indic script; the holy-spring temple at Tirta Empul, whose founding inscription is dated to 962, belongs to that early stratum, generations before the events that fixed the island’s later shape.

The decisive mark came from Java a few centuries afterward. In 1343 an expedition of the Majapahit empire crossed the strait and took the Balinese seat at Bedulu, folding the island into the Hindu-Javanese world; and when Majapahit itself gave way to the rising Islamic sultanates around 1527, its aristocrats, priests, and scribes crossed to Bali in numbers, as the standard historiography records — the courtly Hindu-Javanese order fleeing east “after the collapse of the Javanese Hindu Majapahit Empire.” From that transplant descend the court at Gelgel and its successor at Klungkung, and the fourfold rank order the Balinese name catur wangsa: Brahmana the priestly line, Ksatria the royal and noble line, Wesia the line of administration and trade, and the great majority, the Sudra — historically called jaba, “outside” — who make up perhaps ninety-three percent of the people to the triwangsa’s seven.

Two things about that inheritance are better held loosely than stated flat. The Majapahit “conquest” is more accurately read as expedition, migration, and long absorption than as a single overthrow; the island took a Javanese court world into an Austronesian one over generations, and made it Balinese. And the wangsa order, though it borrowed the names of the Indian varna, evolved into a hierarchy of ritual precedence and courtesy without India’s untouchability. Sudra status carries no implication of ritual impurity, social exclusion, or restricted access to religious life: the Sudra farmer makes the offerings, chants the prayers, and keeps the festivals as a full participant, and the system that ranks descent and governs the honorifics of speech is a grammar of respect rather than a wall of purity. How much of the order was Javanese imposition and how much an older Austronesian stratification recast in Javanese dress is genuinely debated, and the debate is part of the record.

Nor is the Majapahit story the whole island. In the uplands live the communities the lowlanders call the Bali Aga, the “original Bali” — Tenganan, Trunyan, and others — who trace themselves to a Bali that stood before the Javanese came and who keep an older custom, apart from the court-descended norm. They are a distinct strand within the Balinese world, not outside it: the “original” and the “come-over” are less two peoples than two depths of one long settling.

They are, in any case, a large living people and not a remnant. The 2010 Indonesian census counted 3,946,416 Balinese, about 1.7 percent of Indonesia’s population; some 3.34 million live on Bali itself, roughly 85 percent of the island’s people, and the figure is now commonly given as near four million. Around 95 percent of the Balinese follow their own Hinduism, and Bali is the only Hindu-majority province in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation.

The weave of belonging

To be born Balinese is to be born into that weave, and the tradition teaches the weave as its first lesson. A person belongs at once to a household and its family shrine; to a banjar, the hamlet council that musters the labor of ceremony, cremation, and marriage that no single family can bear alone; to a desa adat, the customary village, anchored by its three core temples set along the sacred axis — the pura puseh of origins toward the mountain, the pura desa of the living community at the center, the pura dalem of the dead toward the sea; to a subak, if the family farms; and to the wider network of pura, the temples, that bind all of these to the ancestors and to the gods. Above the many devas stands, in the devotional framing, Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, the formless supreme godhead from whom every deva emanates and to whom the empty lotus-throne of the padmasana is raised.

The logic animating the whole has a name: Tri Hita Karana, the three causes of well-being — right relation among people, right relation with the divine, and right relation with nature. It is less a maxim than a working order, and it is under that name that the island’s rice landscape entered the world’s register. In 2012 UNESCO inscribed the Cultural Landscape of Bali Province: the Subak System as a Manifestation of the Tri Hita Karana Philosophy — five sites and some nineteen thousand five hundred hectares of terraces and water-temples, cooperative irrigation reaching back to the ninth century, and among them the eighteenth-century royal water-temple of Pura Taman Ayun. The citation named the thing correctly: not a scenic backdrop but a living system, worked by the people who understand it as sacred.

Water is the medium of the sacred here — the tradition is often called Agama Tirtha, the religion of holy water. The subak, a congregation of the farmers who draw on one mountain source, is at once an engineering order and a liturgical one, and the two are not separable. The sequence of who floods and who drains, a problem at once hydrological and agricultural, is settled at the water-temple as a religious question, the flow traced up the slope to Dewi Danu, the goddess of the crater lakes from whose waters the terraces are ordered, and honored in the paddy as Dewi Sri, the rice-mother whose body is the harvest. What looks from outside like piety laid over agriculture is, on the island’s own terms, a single act.

Space itself is oriented. Bali is read along the kaja–kelod axis — kaja toward the mountain, the seat of the gods and the direction of purity; kelod toward the sea, the direction down which the impure is carried off — so that a Balinese knows, in every room of the compound, which way is high. The great mother-temple of Besakih climbs the flank of the holy volcano at the kaja end; the sea-temples, Tanah Lot on its tidal rock and Uluwatu on its cliff, face the powers of the deep at the other. And the year turns by a dense calendar of odalan, the temple-anniversaries, each carried by the banten and canang offerings of flowers, rice, and incense laid on thresholds and shrine-ledges and curbstones before the day begins, and swept away by dusk, and made again before the next light.

The most famous of the island’s sacred dramas stages the same order. The guardian Barong and the fearsome power of the left, Rangda, meet in the entranced climax of the kris-dance — but their contest is not good against evil in any borrowed sense. It is rwa bhineda, the balance of complementary opposites whose tension holds the world together; neither pole is meant to be extinguished, and there is no final victory because the balance, not the triumph, is the point. The rite kept for the gods on a temple’s own day is a distinct thing from the abbreviated version staged for visitors, and only the first is the operative one. The arts for which the Balinese are renowned — gamelan, dance, the carving of wood and stone, painting — belong, in the traditional frame, to this same economy: not decoration but offering.

Canang sari, the daily offering of woven palm leaf, flowers, rice, and incense, laid out fresh across Bali every morning. Dennis Sylvester Hurd, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The modern century

The Balinese entered the outer world’s imagination through catastrophe and through art. The Dutch conquest of the island closed with the puputan, the march to death-in-battle in preference to surrender. At Denpasar on 20 September 1906 the raja of Badung came out from his palace at the head of his court, dressed in the white of cremation and carrying a blessed kris, to be cut down before the Dutch guns; on 18 April 1908 the Dewa Agung of Klungkung and his followers did the same, completing colonial control of the island. Over a thousand are reckoned to have died in the first; the second sealed the conquest. The Balinese hold these not as defeats but as the supreme expression of dignity under an overwhelming force — a choosing of the end on one’s own terms.

Under Dutch rule the island was curated as a kind of living museum, and the interwar ethnographers and artists built its outsized reputation. Miguel Covarrubias’s Island of Bali (1937), Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s Balinese Character (1942), and later Clifford Geertz’s Negara (1980) and Fred Eiseman’s Bali: Sekala & Niskala are the classic accounts — a corpus that both preserved the tradition and romanticized it, best read as the datable record of outsiders looking in rather than as the thing itself. Much of it was written about a people who could not, at the time, answer back; that has begun to change, and Balinese scholars and priests now contest and correct the record about themselves.

In the same century the Balinese reframed their own religion. The Parisada Dharma Hindu Bali, founded on 23 February 1959 and later renamed the Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia, codified Agama Hindu Dharma and foregrounded Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa as one supreme God — in part to satisfy the first principle of Pancasila, the state ideology, which requires belief in one supreme God. The Indonesian state formally recognized Agama Hindu in 1962. This was a genuine and consequential reform, and it is best read as historical rather than timeless: the explicit, systematic monotheism was foregrounded in the twentieth century, laid over an older worship thickly populated with devas and ancestral bhatara, and the fuller reckoning with that shift belongs to the account of Widhi himself.

Grave history followed close on the reform. On 17 March 1963 the volcano erupted at the height of the once-a-century Eka Dasa Rudra rite being held at Besakih on its flank; the eruption killed well over a thousand people, yet the lava passed the mother-temple by, which many Balinese have read ever since as a sign. The fuller account of that day belongs to the mountain’s own temple; here it is one hard event among several. Two years later came a wound with no natural cause. In the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, following the failed coup and the army-backed purge of the left, Bali was among the very worst-hit regions in the country: tens of thousands of Balinese were killed, early estimates running to fifty thousand or more, whole villages diminished in the last months of 1965. For decades it went unspoken, and it is still not fully reconciled — carried by the same communities that keep the temples. It is set down here plainly, without sensation and with no collective blame to assign.

A Melasti procession, the community carrying its temple’s sacred images toward the water for purification. Jonatanbagus, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Today the Balinese are the largest Hindu community in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, sustaining a living tradition under the pressures of mass tourism — and through shock, after the 2002 bombings that killed 202 people at Kuta and struck at the island’s economy and its sense of itself at once. Their terraces are a World Heritage landscape and their temples draw visitors by the million, and the paradise the outside world buys is a thing to be noted and questioned rather than adopted. Beneath it the working religion holds. The man who rose before light and carried the first tray to the house-shrine will carry another tomorrow; his banjar will sound its drum for the next death and the next festival; the water will come down the terraces in its shared and ordered turn; and the calendar will name the next odalan. None of this asks him to hold a doctrine in his mind. He holds, instead, his places in the weave — the compound, the council, the village, the water, the temple’s turning year — and the weave, in return, holds him.

→ Related: Sang Hyang Widhi · Dewi Sri · Dewi Danu · Barong · Rangda · Besakih · Tanah Lot · Uluwatu · Pura Tirta Empul · The Bali Aga · The Majapahit