Born in 1921, Gedong Bagus Oka was a prominent Indonesian intellectual and a Hindu known for her contributions to the establishment of the Ashram Gandhi Canti Dasa in 1976. She was one of the first Balinese women to receive a liberal Western education under the Dutch colonial rulers of Indonesia. Exposed early on to Christian teachings and Western philosophy, she was able to reconcile Hindu-Balinese traditions by discovering the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and, to a lesser extent, those of Swami Vivekananda. She dedicated a major part of her life to social work in Bali and Java, where she founded three centers for worship and community living (“Ashrams”).
Oka grew up in Karangseam, East Bali, Indonesia. She was one of four Balinese girls sent to Hollandsch-Inlandsch School (Dutch School of Natives) in Yogyakarta during the prewar period. While studying, she stayed with the family of Professor Johanes Herman Bavinck, a professor at the College of Christian Theology in Yogyakarta, and there she was highly influenced by Christianity. Its spiritual, ethical, and democratic values challenged her and forced her to rethink her own Balinese Hindu traditions. She came to believe that Hindu religion in Bali was highly influenced by Balinese local culture and that many of its rituals were lacking in spiritual intensity. As a consequence, much of her remaining life was spent trying to promote a more spiritual approach in the local Balinese Hinduism. During Indonesia’s independence struggle and formative years of the new Indonesian nation-state, she sought to promote a strong role of religion in society. Later, in the 1960s and early 1970s, her activities became more spiritually oriented with the foundation of the Yayasan Bali Santi Sena (the Balinese Peace Front).
She continued her studies at Christelijke Paedagogische Algemene Academy (Christian College) in Jakarta and thereafter taught at a higher secondary school in Singaraja. She returned to school to earn a bachelor’s degree in English from the Udayana University in Bali in 1963 and remained there, teaching English at the Faculty of Letters between 1965 and 1972.
In order to promote the teachings of Gandhi, Gedong translated her English biography into Indonesian, which was published in 1975. In 1976 she founded the Ashram Gandhi Santi Dasa situated in the village of Candidasa, Bali. She spent most of her time managing the activities of the Ashram, which were geared toward practicing “svadeshi” (local self-sufficiency). Projects were designed to improve the local agriculture based on Balinese traditional knowledge. The Ashram also provided school education to orphans and the children from poor families in the community. Daily religious practices at the Ashram included prayers, chanting, yoga, meditation, and a simplified form of Vedic fire ritual. Students could also listen to spiritual lectures and study sacred literature available in the ashram library.
In 1996, she established the Ashram Bali Gandhi Vidhyapith in Denpasar, which educated students about Gandhi’s thoughts at the local universities. Yet another Ashram was established in Yogyakarta, which now has followers from local Hindu community as well as Muslims and Christian Javanese. In 1999, she even served as a member of the Indonesian Parliament representing Bali.
Gedong’s spiritual philosophy and her modern interpretation of Gandhian thoughts in the Hindu dharma brought her public prominence, praise from some quarters, and criticism from others. She died in Jakarta at the age of 82 in November 2002, following a period of prolonged illness. She is remembered for her immense contribution to interreligious harmony and education.
Ruchi Agarwal
See also: Christianity; Colonialism; Hinduism; Indonesia; Interreligious Relations and Dialogue; Women.
Bakker, F. L. The Struggle of the Hindu Balinese Intellectuals: Developments in Modern Hindu Thinking in Independent Indonesia. Amsterdam: VY University Press, 1993.
Ramstedt, Martin. “Two Balinese Hindu Intellectuals—Ibu Gedong Bagoes Oka and Prof. I Gusti Nguarah Bagun.” IIAS Newsletter 23 (October 2000): 12–13.
Orientalism is the title of a book by Edward Wadie Said (1935–2003), a Palestine-born, former professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Orientalism appeared in 1978 and almost immediately became a milestone in Anglo-American literary theory as well as a foundational text of postcolonial theory. Taking “the Orient” as example, Said discloses the connections between Western culture, Eurocentrism, and colonialism in the scholarly and imaginative “construction” of non-European cultures.
From the eighteenth century onward, knowledge about “the Orient” was not only produced by professional Orientalists such as philologists, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, etc., who studied the “Near” and “Middle East” as academics. Knowledge and imaginations about “the Orient” were ideologically infused by colonial power as well as economic and political interests. Through textual analysis and by appropriating Michel Foucault’s notions of discourse and representation, Said examines “Orientalism” as a specific discourse, as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and … ‘the Occident’ ” and as a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978, 2, 3). Knowledge about the colonial “other” is never “pure” or “objective,” Said argues, but intrinsically informed by the Occident-Orient relationship of power and domination. Orientalist discourses are implicitly driven to demonstrate the inferior cultural achievements of the colonized. The Orient is not an inert fact of nature, but a phenomenon constructed by naturalizing Orientalist assumptions and stereotypes (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1998, 168).
Said initiated a new kind of study of colonialism by arguing that the creation of authoritative knowledge about non-European “others” cannot be detached from the process of maintaining power over them. The discursive formation of Orientalism directed awareness of the Oriental “other” in academic institutions, museums, colonial offices, the fine arts, literature, and politics. In that way, Orientalism became an exemplary model for analyzing politics of representation under the perspective of postcolonial critique. In the global intellectual arena, the accusation of being an Orientalist became a universal weapon of postcolonial scholarship directed against anything written by Westerners. Besides its significant influence, Said’s book also aroused fierce criticism, even among intellectuals of the global South. One recurrent critique points to Said’s tendency of fixing the West-East binary as a static feature. The hegemonic West as well as the misrepresented East are portrayed as homogenized entities without any realm for negotiation, change, and internal multivoicedness. Such a pilloried binarism is countered by the concept of hybridization and the deconstruction of binaries such as center/periphery, colonizer/colonized, Western/non-Western, etc.
Orientalism as a mode of “othering,” based on the dichotomy of West versus the rest, is not restricted to the colonial past or exclusively Western. The threat scenario of a “clash of civilizations” as drawn by the influential U.S. political scientist Samuel Huntington sets the “human rights imperialism” of the West against the values systems of “the” Islamic and Confucian civilizations of the East. In the realm of Southeast Asian politics, this scenario was answered by a “reverse Orientalism” as the “Asian values” debate of the Singaporean school illustrates (Hill 2000). Proposed is a homogenous unit called Asia that has peculiar values (community, order, hierarchy, discipline) at its disposal, which are morally superior and far better suited to cope with modernity than Western values with their emphasis on fateful individual liberties (which lead to moral decline, breakup of the family, drug abuse, etc.). Despite the critique—that it is obviously neo-Confucian values defined as pan-Asian values with the intention to justify authoritarian rule and Confucian paternalism, to legitimate nation-building politics as well as to reinforce “Protestant” work ethic—the promotion of “Asian values” has been widely discussed in Southeast Asia, at least in the 1990s.
In the realm of consumer culture, to take another example, the recent branding of an “Indochine chic” functions partly as internal Orientalism. Strangely, it is the French colonial past, otherwise blamed for so many miseries of the present, that serves as a source of a sentimental, tasteful, desirable, and authentic culture, at least for the aspiring middle class in some Southeast Asian metropolises.
Within Southeast Asian studies, critique of Eurocentric distortions and colonial biases were addressed by historians and social scientists long before the publication of Said’s Orientalism. Scholars such as Jacob C. van Leur and John R. W. Smail called for an autonomous Southeast Asian history beyond European narratives, chronologies, categories of analysis, and colonial arrogance. Syed Alatas’s study The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977) is a thorough analysis of the colonial construction of the image of the “backward native” and the use of this image as a moral pretext for the justification of the colonizer’s civilizing mission.
Although frequently cited, Orientalism as a one-to-one model for historical analysis inspired not too many studies on Southeast Asia directly. It is mostly scholars in the field of Islamic studies, especially Malay studies, who make direct recourse on Said’s text in their efforts to deconstruct Orientalist misrepresentations (e.g., Aljunied 2004). Generally speaking, Said’s book took effect rather indirectly as an exemplary exercise in applied deconstruction. Deconstruction, a literary theory and method originally drafted by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, had significant impact on the social sciences and humanities since the 1970s. As one consequence thereof, the assumption of a primordial, inherent, or fixed cultural identity has been called into question since. Adrian Vickers’s Bali: A Paradise Created (1989) as well as the work of Michel Picard (1996) demonstrate clearly that what is understood today as the essence of Hindu Balinese culture is a “coproduction” of the Dutch colonial administration, the Indonesian Ministry of Culture and Education, Western bourgeois desires, the tourism industry, and the Balinese people. In a similar vein, John Pemberton (1994) studied the molding of Javanese identity during the Dutch colonial period and its influence on Suharto’s concept of nationalism, and Joel Kahn (1993) delineated the “constitution” of Minangkabau identity in the context of Dutch colonialism.
Another, far more spectacular case is the discovery of the “gentle Tasaday” in the Southern Philippine rainforest in 1971 (Nance 1975). Instantaneously, and in the midst of the gruesome Vietnamese war, these peaceful “stone-age” people represented the pristine state of humankind, the hope of humanity. A decade later, the Tasaday tribe turned out to be a hoax staged by the Philippine politician Manuel Elizalde. In 1988, the manufacturing of this “Invented Eden” (Hemley 2003) was deconstructed by linguists and anthropologists in an international conference. Due to the deconstructivist impact of Said’s work, the notion that collective identities are discursively created, governed by unequal desires and political interests, is widely accepted within the academe.
In the long run, it has been the “postcolonial turn,” decisively initiated by Said’s work, that had more effective repercussions on Southeast Asian scholars than Orientalism as a text. Along these lines, Adrian Vickers calls for a “post-Saidian analysis” that “requires complex forms of cultural history and anthropology” and “needs to incorporate Southeast Asian modernities as Southeast Asian epistemologies” (Vickers 2009, 68).
Peter J. Braeunlein
See also: Colonialism; Confucianism; Ethnicity; Globalization; Humanism; Indonesia; Islam; Nationalism; Philippines; Postcolonial Theory; Study of Religion; Tourism.
Alatas, Syed Hussein. The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism. London: Frank Cass & Co., 1977.
Aljunied, Syed Muhd Khairudin. “Edward Said and Southeast Asian Islam: Western Representations of Meccan Pilgrims (Hajjis) in the Dutch East Indies, 1800–1900.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 1 (2004): 159–75.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998.
Hemley, Robin. Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Hill, Michael. “ ‘Asian Values’ as Reverse Orientalism: Singapore.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 41, no. 2 (2000): 177–90.
Kahn, Joel. Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture, and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993.
Nance, John. The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age People in the Philippine Rain Forest. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Pemberton, John. On the Subject of “Java.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Picard, Michel. Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture. Singapore: Archipelago Press, 1996.
Vickers, Adrian. “Southeast Asian Studies after Said.” Arts: The proceedings of the Sydney University Arts Association 31 (2009): 58–72.