Bali Chronicles. Willard A. Hanna
storms; they were also known to be shark- and barracuda-infested. The Balinese people themselves were physically vigorous and likely to be ferocious in battle. They regarded the seas as the abode of demons and monsters and were little inclined either to explore them or to extend aid and comfort to alien voyagers. One of the beliefs of the island was that whatever and whomever the waves tossed up on the shore were destined to become the property of the kings, shipwrecks being meant for plunder and castaways for enslavement. Bali therefore remained little known to the outside world and not especially inviting to better acquaintance. The early Asian and the later European seafarers preferred generally to sail on past Bali to other islands which offered surer, safer profits.
Notwithstanding their suspicion of what the seas bore them, the Balinese were quick to accept certain outside influences, which they ingeniously adapted to their own requirements, meanwhile devoting themselves to the development of their lovely and fruitful island. They began the planting of rice at least two millennia ago and achieved a scientific and artistic standard of cultivation unmatched in the region. At least a millennium and a half ago they began to transmute their native animism by adopting Hindu rites; by the sixteenth century they had achieved a distinctive civilization matched in miniature if it did not indeed surpass anything in India itself or Indianized Southeast Asia. The microcosmic Balinese-Hindu world survived intact up until the nineteenth century and did not then really shatter when it felt the full impact of Dutch colonialism. Even in the twentieth century the illusion if not the actuality of the traditional Bali still persists.
The early history of Bali is a matter of theoretical reconstruction of the precise origins of the population and the evolution of the society. The Balinese are clearly a blend of the various Mongoloid peoples who moved through mainland into insular Southeast Asia long before historic times. Their well-integrated society is the creation of an animistic, agricultural people inspired by vigorous priests and princes. The first great outside influence upon the early Balinese was exercised by Indian or Indianized traders and travelers who brought with them the Hindu learning. Bali shared very generously in the great wave of Indianizing influences which spread throughout most of Southeast Asia in the latter half of the first millennium. In politics and religion the Indians introduced the key concept of the God-King, whose capital reflects the splendors and perfections of Heaven and whose people prosper only so long as the ruler conducts himself in conformity with natural and divine law. Every Balinese ruler therefore had his monumental kraton or puri (palace) from which he exercised spiritual and temporal power through a hierarchy of courtiers and priests who not infrequently deposed an evil ruler and replaced him with a better.
Hinduization and Javanese Influences
The conversion of primitive Bali into a Hinduized society was the result not of conquest and colonization but rather of the contagion of civilization. The rulers found in Indian culture the religious and administrative practices which exactly served their purposes, and the people responded with such enthusiasm as to prove the appropriateness of the choice. India provided the literary, the artistic, the social, as well as the theological and political model for an evolving Balinese society. The Balinese exercised their own creative adaptations while still retaining much of the Indian original. Even today Bali preserves manifestations of early Hinduism, among them manuscript copies of certain epics, which have since disappeared in India itself.
The Hinduization of Bali was a process of many centuries. The most pervasive influence was exercised not by India itself but by nearby Java, which had been subject even earlier than Bali to an even more extensive Indianizing process. The documented history of Bali during this period is mainly a catalog of names of obscure royal personages and imprecise references to forgotten events. Modern archaeologists have reconstructed the approximate historical sequence from fragmentary inscriptions in Sanskrit or classical Balinese on various objects of stone and metal, most of them temple treasures. By an amazing exercise of erudition they have matched up names, dates, and events to create a chronological outline which meshes with a rather more detailed table similarly constructed for the island of Java and other regions.
One thus learns that certain Hinduized rulers invoked certain Indian deities in commemorating their own succession to the throne, in building or endowing a temple, in winning a battle, or in celebrating other events. It is clear that by the year 1001 (or perhaps 991), when the first reasonably well authenticated historic event occurred, Bali was already very extensively Hinduized. In that year, presumably, was born Airlangga, the son of a Balinese King, Dharmmodayanawarmmadewa (also known as Udayana, and sometimes identified with King Udayadityavarman of Cambodia who was exiled in about the year 1000, perhaps to Bali), and his Javanese queen, Gunapriyadharmapatni (also known as Mahendradatta). In his early youth Airlangga was sent for education and marriage to the court of the Emperor of Java. When the Emperor was himself overthrown in the course of civil wars, Airlangga was invited to succeed him. He devoted himself to rebuilding the empire and in so doing he added his home island of Bali to the Javanese domain, ruling it through a regent who was no doubt an uncle, brother, or cousin. Airlangga thus inaugurated a period of close Javanese–Balinese political and cultural contacts which continued, to Bali’s very great advantage, for well over three centuries. The relationship was not without its conflicts. The Balinese several times asserted their autonomy and the Javanese Singasari emperors, or their successors, the Modjapahit, as often reasserted their own hegemony. Balinese rulers, in whose veins flowed varying proportions of Balinese and Javanese blood, were always implicated in dynastic rivalries which Modjapahit was not infrequently called upon to settle. The Javanese ruler Kratanagara, for instance, found it necessary to pacify and reunify Bali in the year 1262 (or 1284), as did the great General Gadjah Mada in 1343. Modjapahit imposed more and more of its own institutions upon its far from unreceptive dependency. Eventually, when the Modjapahit Empire itself collapsed in 1515, migrations of refugees from Java to Bali resulted in still more massive cultural transfusion.
Modjapahit Conquest and Early Rulers
With the Modjapahit period Balinese history begins to assume clearer content and pattern although much remains legendary. Gadjah Mada constituted Bali a province of the empire with a Modjapahit governor. Kapakisan, the first incumbent, and, according to Balinese legend, the offspring of a stone Brahma and a heavenly nymph, became the founder of a line of princes who ruled the island more as supporters than as subordinates of the Javanese state. Kapakisan and his successors sometimes used the Javanese title of Susuhunan (Great Sultan, or Emperor), but more commonly the Balinese title of Dewa Agung (Great Deity), thus more than merely implying that they ruled independently and by divine right. Kapakisan built his kraton (Javanese term) or puri (Balinese) in Samprangan and ruled firmly but justly over the whole of the island. He was succeeded by his son, Krsna-Kapakisan, about whom nothing is known except his name. Krsna-Kapakisan was in turn succeeded by his own son, I Dewa Samprangan, about whom nothing is known which does him credit.
I Dewa Samprangan, the third Dewa Agung, was so given to vanity, frivolity, and venality that his counselors encouraged his young son, I Dewa Ktut, to build a separate kraton in nearby Gelgel and gradually to usurp the powers which his father was too dissipated to exercise. I Dewa Ktut succeeded in restoring royal authority and prestige. He is especially celebrated for having journeyed to Java to participate in a solemn imperial council called together by Emperor Hayam Wuruk (r. 1350–1380) to consider the gathering troubles which were already shaking his empire and were to overwhelm and destroy it a century later.
The fall of Modjapahit signaled the rise of Mataram, a new Javanese empire built out of small kingdoms newly reinspired and reinvigorated by the advent of powerful Islamic influences. Many thousands of Modjapahit Hindu priests, nobles, soldiers, artists, and artisans fled from Java to Bali to escape their Muslim conquerors. In Bali they gave fresh impetus to an already strongly Hinduized culture which was thus able to enrich and maintain itself while in Java the Hindu tradition was almost submerged under the Islamic overlay. But Hindu Bali and Muslim Java became implacable enemies. The East Javanese state of Blambangan, separated from Bali by a mile-wide strait which was both difficult and dangerous to cross, became a buffer region. The Balinese claimed and occasionally half conquered Blambangan, Mataram often threatened but usually failed to mount a counter invasion, and for centuries Balinese–Javanese relations remained readily inflammable.