Bali Chronicles. Willard A. Hanna
would contentedly eat enough rice to make up 90% or more of its total protein and caloric intake but is now compelled to rely more and more upon not very highly esteemed cassava and sweet potatoes. Although coffee, copra, cattle, and pigs provide important cash earnings, Bali’s economy shows a dangerously increasing excess of imports over exports, and the provincial government is largely dependent upon central government financing. An island which was rice-rich in the past and lavished its wealth upon cultural display is rice-poor today and is about to be reduced to catering its culture as cocktail canapé for tourists.
In yet more specific terms, Bali now has a population of over 2.2 million and is rapidly growing toward a total of 4.4 million by the year 2000. It is unable to support more than one million persons in anything approximating the degree of comfort and pleasure it afforded in times past. The annual per capita income is probably about $75. It would require a quadrupling of the rice harvest (from 200,000 to 800,000 tons) or the entertainment of some 300,000 visitors (there were 100,000 in 1973) to raise the income to $175; both together might raise it to a more respectable and acceptable $275. But the rice crop is not susceptible to any such escalation, sudden or gradual, and the prospect of 300,000 tourists is not especially reassuring with regard to the spiritual integrity of the future Balinese farmer turned tourist tout, the student graduated to become beach boy or bar girl, or the musicians, dancers, and actors who adapt their performances to the standards of the discotheque and nightclub. Aside from the development of tourism there seems to be no other possibility of stimulating economic growth on a scale remotely commensurate with the need. Coffee, copra, cattle, and pigs now bring in something like $4–6 million each year; but imports of textiles, foodstuffs, and other essential goods total at least $10–15 million. Arts and crafts yield $1 million; 100,000 tourists now spend $12.5 million. Provincial government revenues come to only about $500,000; provincial and central government expenditures on island administration and development amount to $6 million. Out of this very unsatisfactory fiscal mix, as reflected in official but not very reliable statistics, solvency is not the predictable end product.
The Balinese population, meanwhile, is being exposed to modern education—230,000 pupils at the primary level, 45,000 secondary school students, and 2,500 registered in the provincial university. Such schooling unfits the youth for life as farmers; it equips them to observe the difference between their own status and that of the foreign visitor. The latter will spend in a single day at the Bali Beach Hotel or one of the newer, even more luxurious establishments, what it costs a university student to maintain himself for six to twelve months. The government, which is spending a modest one to two million dollars per year on education ($2.00 per head at the primary level), is laying out an equivalent amount on new systems of communication. New roads and other facilities are calculated to serve the people; even more specifically and immediately, however, they accommodate the tourists, who are the carriers of discontent. In seeking suitable employment the educated young Balinese now turns, gratefully or reluctantly, to the tourist industry, so that a newly opening hotel has been known to receive 10,000 applications for 500 positions.
The Bali provincial government, like the Indonesian national government, is attempting to implement policies of basic reform and rehabilitation which will serve to repair the enormous damage done to the nation by the reckless policies of the Sukarno years, when Bali in particular was subjected to shameful neglect and exploitation. The policies of the new Suharto regime are epitomized in the popular slogan and acronym KISS, signifying Koordinasi, Integrasi, Simplifikasi dan Stabilisasi, or, alternatively, Sinkronisasi. KISS, by extension, also implies a whole macaronic catalogue of other much acclaimed principles, such as rationalisasi and modernisasi, anti-inflasi and antikorupsi, desentralisasi and deburocrasi, rehabilitasi, rekonstruksi, reorganisasi, revaluasi, restrukturasi, and reorientasi. In the very formulation of new concepts to guide policies and programs, the new Indonesians, the Balinese among them, are forced to reach out beyond their own linguistic context in the creation of a new semantics as the basis of rethinking, talking, planning, and acting. In seeking new inspirasi and identifikasi, they are thus impelled at one and the same time to construct and to conduct a whole new dialog for a new pendinamisan dan kevitalan politik, ekonomis dan sosial.
The Bali dialog now inevitably comes to a focus upon Cultural Tourism as contrived and christened by visiting French experts and subject to the mystical interpretation of the Balinese themselves. Some Balinese quite openly despair of explaining how tens and hundreds of thousands of frenetic sightseers are suddenly to be transformed into contemplative connoisseurs. Cultural Tourism, others suggest, means “tourism for Bali, not Bali for tourism.” The intent, in short, is to maximize the advantages (profits) and minimize the hazards (social and cultural pollution) and thus to preserve Balinese values while still acquiring desperately needed foreign valuta. If the Balinese themselves are to continue to enjoy their traditional way of life, work, and worship, they can do so, it seems, only if they invite outsiders to share the pleasure and delicately to pay the costs, a felicitous combination of circumstances which seems improbable. Bali, the paradise island of the Pacific, is now self-consciously converting itself into a tourist paradise. It may quite soon be neither if droves of tourists should shatter the very enchantments which they seek. KISS may very soon have to be re-spelled to read as an unpalatable KISSW, signifying an unwelcome overlay of Waikikianisasi.
It is prudent, however, to point out that certain highly discriminating visitors of the 1920s and 1930s, who first made the island’s magical charm well known to the outside world, warned even then that it was already too late for later comers to experience the real, unspoiled Bali. It was not then in fact too late. It is not too late now. Given Bali’s demonstrated capacity over the centuries for continuous and creative self-renewal, it still may not be too late in 2000. But a stampede of half a million tourists each year seems the formula for extinguishing, not rekindling the luminous culture which is Bali’s glory.
CHAPTER 1
The Dewa Agung and the Radjas
(Pre–1800)
Island Setting and Cultural Background
The island of Bali is celebrated for the peculiar splendor of its Balinese-Hindu culture, a highly developed and artistically embellished system of life and worship which was arrested in the sixteenth century at the very moment of its finest flowering and preserved into modern times with little perceptible loss of vitality. This life of medieval pageantry is still the living tradition of an island population made up of extraordinarily handsome and gifted people. The island itself is a Pacific enclave of such pristine natural beauty as to be suggestive, as Pandit Nehru poetically put it, of “the world’s last morning.” No one can very satisfactorily explain just how this miracle happened—how it was that one idyllic little island created and sustained a rich civilization that was in certain significant respects as anomalous in former times as it is anachronistic today, but one which has never until recently been tainted with artificiality.
The most plausible conjecture with regard to Bali’s good fortune is that the island and the islanders profited enormously from a quite fortuitous combination of involvement and detachment. Bali was exposed to the great early civilizing influences of Southeast Asia, but up until very late in the colonial era it was insulated against the intrusion of rude white barbarians. The island, furthermore, is as fertile as it is scenic, and the islanders are industrious as well as artistic. It must be conceded that ancient evils such as superstition, slavery, and suttee long persisted, but there have also been compensations. One of these has been the animistic conviction that the divinities of nature are more disposed to be protective than vindictive.
Bali lies just one mile off the eastern tip of Java on the direct trade route between the spice islands of the Moluccas and the Asian entrepôts which long distributed their cloves, nutmegs, and mace to a spice-hungry world. From early times the island was visited by Indian, Arab, Chinese, Japanese, Bugis and other Eastern traders who brought with them not only their goods but their manners and customs. But once the island was really inhabited, Bali and the Balinese did more to repel than to attract any considerable number of later settlers. Along most of its sea coast Bali enjoyed the natural protection of high cliffs and continuous coral reefs. The nearby seas were notorious