12 Bali

The explanation of many of the characteristics which make Bali so different from its neighboring islands is to be found in its history. A thousand years ago, Hindu kings ruled over Java, Sumatra, Malaya and Indochina. Their capital was in Java, and, as their power waxed and waned, so Bali was either a vassal of Java or an independent state. In the fifteenth century, the islands were governed by emperors of the Modjopahit dynasty. Toward the end of their reign, Mohammedan missionaries began spreading a new faith in Java. Soon local princelings became converted to Islam and proclaimed themselves independent of the Hindu Modjopahits. Civil war overtook the islands and the last emperor, according to one account, was told by his priest that at the end of forty days the rule of the Modjopahits would be over. On the fortieth day, the emperor gave orders for his supporters to burn him alive. His young son, the prince, fearful of the fanaticism of his Muslim countrymen, fled to Bali, his last remaining colony, taking with him his entire court. The transfusion of the finest of Java’s musicians, dancers, painters and sculptors which Bali received by this migration has profoundly affected the character of the island and is perhaps one of the reasons why today the people of Bali are so extraordinarily gifted in the arts. Certainly, the Hindu faith which the Balinese, alone among the peoples of Indonesia, still follow so pervades the island that nearly every aspect of their existence is governed and modified by it, from the design of their villages to the mode of their dress and their everyday behavior. Furthermore, Balinese Hinduism, isolated as it is from the parent faith in India by a barrier of Islam, has evolved into a highly idiosyncratic version of the original belief so that Bali is virtually the possessor of a unique religion.

As we drove through the lovely villages and fertile fields, past plantations of palms and bananas, we, as all visitors to Bali are supposed to do, felt that we had arrived in an island paradise, the embodiment of everyone’s dreams of the ideal tropical island, where the people are beautiful and peace-loving, where the ground is so rich that fruit-bearing trees grow with the abundance of weeds, where the sun never ceases to shine and where man at last is in harmony with a bountiful and beneficent nature.

It was fortunate for us that we had approached the island by this route. Many visitors are compelled to arrive by air at Denpasar, Bali’s largest town, and Denpasar, as we discovered when we drove into it late that night, is far from being a typical sample of any island paradise. It is dominated by cinemas, cars, enormous hotels, souvenir shops and a concrete dancing arena outside the main hotel where visitors can watch specially arranged dances as they sit comfortably in their wicker chairs with a whisky and soda at their elbow.

We had come to the town for, in addition to everything else, it contained the usual proliferation of offices and we had to register our presence with nearly all of them. But here in Denpasar we were very fortunate, for we were guided through the formalities at great speed by Mas Soeprapto. We had met him within a few days of our arrival in Jakarta where he was an official of the radio station. Although he was not by birth a Balinese, he was a great expert on the island’s music and dancing and had been the business manager of a group of Balinese dancers which had recently toured the world. As a result he had a shrewd appreciation of the differences between western and oriental people, and he was one of the few Indonesians we had met who realized how frustrating we found the procrastinations of officialdom. When he had volunteered to be our guide should we visit Bali we had been delighted, and now, in Denpasar, we began to realize how very fortunate we were.

I expected Mas’ first action would be to take us out of the hybrid civilization of Denpasar back to rural Bali. The first night, however, he led us past the neon lights of the town center to the home of a nobleman in one of the quieter backwaters of the town. He had brought us to see the preparations for a great feast that was to be held the next day. The pavilions of the household were thronged with people. Women were deftly constructing beautiful lacy decorations from palm leaves, pinning the component whirls and tassels into position with thin slivers of bamboo. Pyramidal rice cakes, some white, some pink, were being laid out in long rows on napkins of olive-green banana leaves. Garlands of flowers were being hung from the eaves of buildings and rich ceremonial cloths draped round the shrines of the household gods. Between the pavilions lay six turtles still alive, their fore-flippers cruelly pierced and tied with a thong of rattan cane, their dry leathery heads sunk to the ground. They blinked slowly, their weary glazed eyes weeping copiously as the laughing, chattering crowd swept round them. They would be slaughtered that evening.

The next day Mas took us back to the house. The courtyard was even more tightly packed with people than it had been on the preceding night. All were wearing their best clothes, the men in sarongs, tunics and turbans, the women in tight blouses and long skirts. The prince, the head of the household, sat cross-legged on a small platform chattering to the more important guests, drinking small cups of coffee and eating gobbets of turtle meat spitted on bamboo sticks. In front of him a boy sat playing a dulcimer-like instrument with five bronze keys which he struck with a mallet, producing a monotonous tinkling tune.

Mas told us that the feast was to celebrate the performance of a tooth-filing ceremony. Jagged uneven teeth are considered by the Balinese to be characteristic of beasts and demons. Consequently, when every man and woman comes of age he should have his teeth filed so that all irregularities are removed and they are smooth and straight. The ceremony nowadays is not as widely practiced as it was, yet even now, if a person dies without having submitted to the ritual, his relatives will file the teeth of the corpse before its cremation lest the bestial attributes of uneven teeth should deny him entrance to the world of spirits.

Toward midday, a small procession emerged from the family pavilion. It was headed by the initiate-to-be, a young girl. Her torso was tightly wrapped in a red cloth richly painted with gold floral patterns. She carried over one shoulder a long sash of a similar material and on her head she wore a splendid and elaborate crown of gold leaf and frangipani flowers. Several older women, less extravagantly costumed, accompanied her, chanting as they walked. The column advanced down the crowded alleys to a pavilion hung with batik cloths. On its steps, a white-clad priest awaited her. She stopped in front of him and held out her hands. With hieratic gestures he took a funnel of woven bamboo through which he poured water so that it trickled over her outstretched fingers. His lips moved as he performed the ceremony, but the dulcimer player and the chanting women drowned his words. The priest put the funnel aside and led the girl into the pavilion. There she lay down on a couch, her head resting on a long pillow covered in a specially woven cloth of great magical significance. The priest blessed his instruments and leaned over her to begin the work of filing. The escorting women sang more loudly. One of them held her feet, and two others her hands as she lay prostrate. If the girl cried out during the operation, we did not hear it above the chants. Every ten minutes the priest stopped and held a mirror so that she might see how the filing was progressing. After half an hour the work was finished. The girl rose and was led out of the pavilion, pausing on the steps so that all might see her. Her eyes were welling with tears, her magnificent headdress awry and bedraggled, for her singing escorts had plucked some of the gold leaves from it to wear in their hair. In her hand she held a small decorated coconut shell containing the filings which she had spat out. She walked back through the pavilions on her way to the family temple where she would bury the filings of her teeth behind the shrine of her ancestors.

When we left the town the next day, we found to our surprise that, in spite of the busy international traffic flowing through Denpasar and its airport, western influences had hardly spread beyond the boundaries of the town; we had only to abandon our jeep and walk for short distances along the narrow tracks which wound through the rice fields to discover villages which were still totally unaffected by the modern world. With Mas Soeprapto as our guide, we spent day after day wandering through the island and every day—and every night—it seemed that some entertainment, some ceremony, was being held in one of the village houses or a temple.

The Balinese are a people possessed by a passionate love of music and dancing. Every man, whether he is a prince or a poor rice-farmer, seems to have the ambition to perform in his village orchestra or dancing group, and those who are not talented enough to do so count it a privilege to subscribe what they can afford to help in the purchase of costumes or fine instruments. Even the poorest, smallest village owns, communally, a gamelan. This is the traditional orchestra of Bali. The majority of its instruments are metal ones—large hanging gongs, smaller ones set horizontally in racks, tiny cymbals and many different variants on the dulcimer-like instrument we had seen in the ceremony at Denpasar. In addition to these, there may be a rebab, the two-stringed Arab fiddle, bamboo flutes and, always, two drums.

Most of these instruments are extremely expensive. Balinese smiths are able to forge the bronze keys for the dulcimers, but the secret of making the clearest-sounding and most musical gongs is possessed only by the craftsmen of a small town in southern Java and a fine gong is therefore a treasured possession, worth a great deal of money.

The music produced by the gamelan is of the most ravishing kind, full of subtle percussive rhythms, plangent ripples and crashing chords. I had expected that I should find it too foreign, too exotic, to give me any real pleasure. Yet it was not so. The musicians played with such verve, conviction and dedication, and their music was alternately so exciting and so tenderly contemplative, that we were enraptured by it.

Twenty or thirty people are necessary to play the full gamelan, and they perform with a precision and accuracy of timing which would rival that of any European orchestra. None of their intricate compositions is ever written down; the musicians carry them only in their memories. Furthermore, every orchestra’s repertoire is so extensive that it is able to play for many hours on end without repeating any one composition.

This high professional skill is only gained by arduous practice. Each night as dusk fell the village musicians gathered in a pavilion to begin rehearsals. As the tinkles and sonorous crashes of the orchestra rang round the village, we, with Mas as our sponsor, sought out the rehearsal pavilion to sit and listen. The leader of the gamelan is always the drummer and it is through the beats of his drum that he is able to control the orchestra’s tempo. Usually, however, he is an equally skillful performer on all the other instruments and he often stopped the music and walked over to one of the dulcimer players to demonstrate exactly how a theme should be played.

It was at these rehearsals that we saw for the first time the young girl dancers who perform the legong, one of the most beautiful and tender of all Bali’s dances. None of the three dancers could have been more than six years old. The instruments of the gamelan were ranged round three sides of a square, and in the arena so formed, the girls took their lessons. Their teacher was an old gray-haired woman who as a young girl had been a famous legong dancer herself. Her method of instruction was sharply, almost savagely, to thrust her pupils’ heads, arms and legs into the correct position as they danced. Hour after hour, the music continued and the children, under the severe eyes of their tutor, stamped and gyrated with quivering fingers and jerking eyes. Toward midnight the music at last came to an end. The lesson was over and in an instant the dancers changed from impassive sphinx-like figures to laughing scruffy children who ran giggling and shouting back to their homes.

The youngest members of the gamelan