Place · Hindu island · Indonesia

Bali

Function

Landscape & environmental change

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

-8.341, 115.092

Worth knowing

Its rice terraces are managed by subak, water-temple associations in which the irrigation schedule is set by ritual at the temple rather than administratively — a thousand-year-old system that UNESCO listed in 2012 and that turns out to allocate water more efficiently than the state's attempts to replace it.

Connections (6)

• Maritime routeCuttack

  Odisha keeps the memory of its own maritime trade in a festival rather than a monument: at Bali Jatra each Kartik Purnima, on the Mahanadi bank at Cuttack, people float paper boats and the words Aa Ka Ma Bai are recited for a sailing season that ended centuries ago. The sadhaba merchants sailed to Java, Sumatra, Bali and Borneo; Bali's Hindu ritual order, Sanskrit liturgy and caste structure are the surviving end of that world, though the direct Odia link is cultural memory rather than documented descent.

• TransmissionBorobudur, Java

  When Java turned Muslim from the fifteenth century the Hindu-Buddhist court culture moved east to Bali, where the priesthood, the Old Javanese liturgy, the caste order and the Ramayana all continued — so Bali is in large part the surviving remnant of the Majapahit and pre-Majapahit Java that built Borobudur and Prambanan. The Balinese still call their literary language Kawi, which is Old Javanese, and read the kakawin poems in it.

• AnaloguePadmanābhaswāmī, Thiruvananthapuram

  Balinese Hinduism and Kerala's are the two places where an old temple order survived in a form that is neither north Indian nor quite like anywhere else — a hereditary priesthood, elaborate purification, temple festivals that organise the agricultural year, and a caste structure applied to all of it. Bali's subak irrigation temples allocate water by ritual calendar, which is administratively exactly what a Kerala temple's ur and sabha once did.

• Devotional corpus onKakawin Rāmāyaṇa

  Bali reads the Old Javanese Kakawin Ramayana as liturgy rather than as heritage: it is recited in mabebasan sessions where a reader chants a verse and an interpreter glosses it in Balinese, performed in wayang kulit, and danced. The kecak, the chorus of men chanting the monkey army's sound, was devised in the 1930s in collaboration with the German painter Walter Spies and is now as Balinese as anything older.

• Maritime routeBāli Jātrā

  The voyage the festival is named for, and the one destination whose name the Odia observance kept. Kalinga's sādhabas sailed on the north-east monsoon to Java, Bali, Sumatra and the Malay coast, and Bāli Jātrā means voyage to Bali. What makes the tie visible is what went with the cargo: Bali is the one place in Indonesia where a Hindu society survived the region's conversion to Islam intact, with Sanskrit liturgy, Balinese Brahmin priests, temple festivals and the Rāmāyaṇa still in daily performance.

• Sacred transplantHinduism

  The one place outside the subcontinent where a Hindu society survived intact, and it survived by being the refuge: Majapahit's priests and nobility withdrew to Bali as that kingdom fell in the sixteenth century. What is kept there is not a copy — Sanskrit liturgy and a Brahmin priesthood, but a 210-day calendar, water-temple irrigation associations, and cremation rites that a visiting Indian priest would not recognise in detail. A religion left to itself for four hundred years.

On these journeys

• India and Southeast Asia — scripts, Sanskrit and sacred kingship
• The Ramayana across the eastern seas

Sources

Wikipedia, “Bali” and “Balinese Hinduism”. J. Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers (1991); UNESCO inscription documents for the Cultural Landscape of Bali Province (2012).

• Wikipedia — Bali
• Wikipedia — Balinese Hinduism