The Conquest of South Bali
At the time of Holland's final conquest of Bali in 1906, the island
was administered by autonomous lords and their officials. Each of its nine
warring principalities—Klungkung, Karangasem, Mengwi, Badung, Bangli, Tabanan,
Gianyar, Buleleng, and Jembrana—was separated by sharply demarcated borders
and each competed for the loyalty, support, and deference of the population.
In May 1904 the small Chinese steamer Sri
Koemala was wrecked and looted off Sanur. The owners held the Dutch
government directly responsible. The Dutch, in turn, demanded the raja
of Badung pay damages and punish the looters. The raja, with the support
of bordering states, refused. The dickering between the Dutch and the raja
dragged on for two years, with the deadlock finally used as a pretense
for the Dutch to throw a complete naval blockade around southern Bali.
On 15 September 1906, the Dutch anchored
a large war fleet off Sanur and landed an expeditionary force of 2,000
men. Opposed on the beach at dawn the next day by Balinese attacking with
golden spears, the Dutch started their final advance on Denpasar, trundling
their cannons behind them. By 19 September they reached the town's outskirts.
The naval bombardment commenced early the next morning, firing the king's
palace and the houses of the princes.
The royal families of Badung were in a state
of frenzy. Hopelessly outgunned but unwilling to face the humiliation of
surrender, the raja invited anyone who wished to follow him in a puputan,
a "fight to the end." After ordering everything of value destroyed,
the raja, his nobles, generals, ministers, courtiers, retainers, and all
his relatives—men, women, and children—dressed in their most splendid ceremonial
attire. They then formed a fantastic procession on great gilded palanquins
of state and marched down the main avenue of Denpasar to face the Dutch
rifles.
Hurriedly, interpreters were sent out by
the Dutch to stop them, but they continued. Suddenly the procession stopped.
The raja dismounted the palanquin, gave a signal to one of his priests,
and was stabbed in the heart. Immediately, the Balinese began killing each
other. The Dutch soldiers, startled by a stray shot, fired volley after
volley into the crowd. As if in a trance, men and boys and loinclothed
women with loose hair savagely attacked the Dutch, while court ladies contemptuously
flung gold coins and jewels at the stunned soldiers.
This fight to the death resulted in 3,600
Balinese dead and the annihilation of the entire royal family. The wives
and followers of the king crawled upon his body to die; the heaps of dead
became mounds. Some Balinese went among the fallen, killing the wounded
with gold kris while priests sprinkled holy water on the dead and
dying. Another mad rush, led by the 12-year-old brother of the raja, were
all mowed down.
The way to the burning palace was now free,
over hundreds of mangled, bloodied corpses. The Dutch lost only one sergeant,
stabbed to death by a woman. Only one small Balinese boy survived the massacre.
Later that day, the army faced another puputan led by the raja of
Pemecutan. Dutch troops then ranged through the countryside, slaughtering
the aristocracy and looting and leveling palaces.
It was not yet over. On 23 September 1906,
the Dutch marched on Tabanan, the regency west of Badung. The raja offered
to surrender on condition that he be allowed to retain his title and certain
rights to his land. The resident, unable to answer until he consulted the
colonial government, took him into custody. The following day the raja
cut his own throat with a blunt sirih knife.
Two years later the only remaining independent
raja at Klungkung, the Dewa Agung, launched another puputan, killing
himself and his entire family. The rajas of Karangasem and Gianyar to the
east, who had formerly pledged their loyalty to the Dutch, were allowed
to retain their titles and land. Any remaining royalty who opposed the
Dutch were exiled and their properties confiscated.
The Dutch now controlled the entire island,
and the glorious Bali-Hindu theater-state, so jealously guarded and preserved
for more than a thousand years, came to a bitter end. The puputan
is commemorated today with a plaque in front of the Bali Museum in Denpasar
depicting men, women, and children marching to their deaths.
Early Twentieth-Century Dutch Administration
In contrast to its violent and bloody campaigns to subdue the island,
the Dutch colonial administration after Bali's conquest can only be described
as benign, even enlightened. Newspaper accounts of the massacres of 1906
and 1908 shocked church groups, the Dutch people, parliament, and governments
around the world. Protests poured into the colonial office. The Dutch colonial
administration was then shamed into treating the Balinese with a patriarchal,
soft, hands-off policy unprecedented in the Indies, instituting reforms,
engineering roadways, establishing schools and hospitals. The island soon
took on the appearance more of a trusteeship than a colony. The army stayed
on until 1914, when Balinese resistance was considered sufficiently controlled
and its duties were taken over by a police force.
Governance of the island was then reorganized
along the same hierarchical lines employed by the rajas. In 1929, the former
kingdoms of Bali were restored to their hereditary rulers as zelfbesturen
(self-governing territories) in a grandiose ceremony at Besakih. In this
system of indirect rule, those who had been loyal to the Dutch, such as
the raja of Karangasem, retained their autocratic rights over the people
of their regencies. These puppet regents were made responsible to the colonial
government for the conduct of their subjects and for the payment of taxes.
The Dutch controleur was looked upon as an "elder brother,"
and his orders were called "recommendations."
The Dutch Legacy
The Balinese became the darlings of the Dutch authorities. Indeed,
the Dutch administration took a patronizing attitude toward the people
and their culture, allowing the Balinese to continue using their own language
and practice their own adat. Although the remaining pro-Dutch princes
were deprived of political powers, they maintained much of their influence
and importance as patrons of the arts. We must also be forever thankful
to the Dutch for keeping the missionaries out of Bali; it was more convenient
for them to control the people through their liaisons with local leaders
and let religion take its own course. So little did Dutch colonialism affect
Bali that even up until the 1970s, before the building of the international
airport, a rural Balinese village was probably very similar to a Javanese
village of the 17th century.
Foreign visitors and tourists were vigorously
discouraged from visiting Bali. A small group of dedicated Dutch officials
safeguarded Bali's culture, which enjoyed a rebirth during the first three
decades of Dutch rule. One can still see in the highlands above Singaraja
and in Denpasar steepled homes with double doors, wrought-iron grillwork
gates, and hanging porcelain lamps, remnants of Dutch efforts to Hollandize
Bali.
The occupying Dutch were not, however, totally
humanitarian. Although no rubber or tea plantations were established, as
in many parts of Java, the Dutch took over the highly profitable opium
monopoly. Starting on 1 January 1908, any Balinese over the age of 18 was
allowed to legally purchase opium from one of 100 official suppliers set
up around the island. Realizing a profit margin of over 90%, within one
year opium sales accounted for 75% of the island's administrative budget.
Only a small portion of the money ever benefited the Balinese directly.
In 1910 alone, while the Dutch earned one million florins from opium, they
spent less than 20,000 florins on schools. By the late 1930s, because of
the combined clamor from Indonesian organizations and the Dutch Ethicists,
the Dutch opium monopoly served only a few old die-hard Chinese addicts.
Discovery by the Western World
Over the decades following the conquest and occupation of the south,
a select group of tourists, expatriates, actors, and celebrities adopted
Bali as their private paradise, building ornate villas in Ubud and Sanur.
These early sojourners would arrive on Bali by steamship at Singaraja,
then motor south to Denpasar, invariably staying at the Bali Hotel.
The publication in 1926 of a remarkable book
of photographs, Gregor Krause's Bali: Volk, Land, Tanze, Feste, Tempel,
mesmerized all of Europe. Krause's priceless photos, taken while he was
a government doctor on Bali between 1912 and 1914, revealed a culture which
had remained unchanged through the centuries. In the early 1930s a few
documentary films, such as The Island of Demons from Germany and
Goona Goona, out of the U.S.A., were distributed in America and
Europe, bringing this isolated cultural outpost to the attention of the
world. Bali by this time had also gained an underground reputation as a
homosexual paradise; in 1935, a nightclub opened in Manhattan called the
Sins of Bali.
The influence of such foreign artists as
Walter Spies, Rudolph Bonnet, and Le Mayeur during the 1930s made a significant
impact on the development of modern Balinese painting. An elite circle
of foreign anthropologists, ethnologists, intellectuals, and musicians—Margaret
Mead and Buckminster Fuller among them—were also drawn to Bali, devoting
themselves to studying its culture.
Among the classic works produced in the 1930s
is The Island of Bali, by the Mexican illustrator and writer Miguel
Covarrubias. It was also during this period that the German novelist Vicki
Baum visited the island, writing her vivid Tale of Bali in 1937,
depicting the European conquest from the Balinese point of view. Dutch
colonial officials and distinguished European scholars began to build a
body of published work on Bali, anthropological literature with no parallel
anywhere else in the world.
The Japanese Invasion
In the early 1940s the Balinese were rudely shaken out of the political
isolation and benign lethargy which typified the latter years of Dutch
rule. On 10 January 1942 the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies, landing
troops on Celebes and Borneo. Denpasar's airfield was taken on 20 February,
cutting communications with Australia and the Indies. Bali was used as
a Japanese base for the invasion of Java on 26 February. On 8 March 1942
the Dutch surrendered with hardly a fight.
During the ensuing three years of Japanese
occupation, while the rest of the eastern islands were subject to the oppressive
arrogant control of the Japanese Navy, the occupier's treatment of the
Balinese was comparatively indulgent. Nevertheless, Bali's population suffered
critical food and medical supply shortages, while the island's transport
system was almost totally disrupted.
With his oratorical power and dominating,
charismatric style, an ex-engineer named Sukarno (1901-1970) had emerged
as Indonesia's most forceful nationalistic political personality during
the 1930s. Sukarno cut deals with the Dutch to avoid being sent into exile;
later, the Japanese used him to help them govern more effectively. During
the Japanese occupation Sukarno seized every opportunity to educate the
masses, inculcating in them nationalistic fervor.
In spite of their arbitrary cruelty and oppression,
the Japanese offered an extraordinary and unprecedented opportunity for
independence. The Japanese indoctrinated and politicized the Balinese,
trained and armed paramilitary youth groups, and generally encouraged consciousness
of what it means to be an Indonesian.
In April 1945, with the war turning against
them, the Japanese even sent Sukarno and other independence figures on
a speaking tour to promote nationalism. But the most useful contribution
the Japanese made to Indonesia, in the end, was to lose the war.
Revolution
On 17 August 1945, 11 days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
Sukarno proclaimed Indonesia's independence in Jakarta. Before the Dutch
could return to restore order, Balinese militants moved to sieze weapons
from the Japanese. The subsequent war of independence against the Dutch
lasted for more than four years.
On 20 November 1946, the Battle of Marga was fought in Tabanan in central
Bali. Colonel I Gusti Ngurah Rai, 29 years old, led his 95 guerrillas in
a last-ditch battle in which all were killed by aerial bombardment—a reenactment
of the puputans of 40 years earlier. Today you see Ngurah Rai's
name commemorated on street signs all over the island; Bali's international
airport is named in his honor.
Although Balinese resistance was broken,
the Indonesians eventually won the war. In 1946 the Dutch made Bali the
headquarters of their federal "Republic of East Indonesia" (NIT),
which they backed as a rival to the revolutionary republic based on Java.
Their plan was to one day merge the island into a pro-Dutch federation.
The Dutch tried to build support among the people by promising to revitalize
Bali's devastated economy. But the Dutch lost their chance at dividing
the islands when they broke their treaty with the new government and launched
a direct attack on republic headquarters in Yogyakarta in central Java.
After this "police action" proved ineffectual, Holland formally
transferred the former Netherlands East Indies—including Bali—to Indonesian
authorities in 1949. The Dutch left behind their most precious legacy—a
wildly diverse Indonesian nation welded into a unitary state.
The New Republic
Following the exit of the Dutch came constant bickering between the
military, secessionists, communists, conservatives, and religious fanatics.
The new country experimented with a democratic constitution; cabinets turned
over every six months. To stop the chaos, President Sukarno declared in
1956 his policy of "Guided Democracy," involving the creation
of a National Council made up of members handpicked by himself. Sukarno
declared the age-old Indonesian tradition of mufakat, or decision
through consensus, would best suit Indonesia as a method of decision-making.
Politcal parties and legislative bodies were abolished. On Bali, the old
power arrangements continued, with the various principalities converted
into kabupaten and the rajas or members of their families assuming
the office of bupati (mayor).
In the years following the establishment
of Sukarno's extralegal "Guided Democracy," Bali came to distrust
the arrogant, incompetent, and corrupt centralized regime. Jakarta, in
turn, resented the special treatment Bali had received from the Dutch;
many in the government also felt the Balinese had cooperated all too willingly
with their former colonial masters. Though Sukarno was half Balinese, he
showed little empathy for the Balinese and their plight. In the late colonial
period, the island had been one of the best-administered regions in the
archipelago, but under the new republic it became one of the most neglected
and dependent. By 1962, the island was relying on injections of 300 tons
of rice per month from the powers in Jakarta. A clique of corrupt Sukarnoists
and new Balinese capitalists, both civilian and military, lorded it over
the landless peasants, aggressively jockeying for state patronage and competing
with each other for wealth and power at the expense of the natives. Village
administration, local adat, and large public rituals were redefined
and appropriated by Indonesian government institutions to enhance state
authority.
Bad government led to the disintegration
of the island's economy. Government offices were filled with bungling bureaucrats
who insisted on bribes before performing even the most routine services.
Sukarno meanwhile treated Bali like his own private playground. He and
his entourage visited the island constantly, demanding special dance performances
be staged, abducting Balinese women for sexual favors, commandeering without
payment vehicles, paintings, and whatever else seized their fancy. Advance
squads of soldiers would sweep in to shoot dogs and pigs so parties of
devout Muslim visitors would not be revolted by sight of the unclean creatures.
What did the Sukarno era leave behind? A
former Dutch resthouse at Tampaksiring converted to one of Sukarno's private
palaces, the eyesore of the Bali Beach Hotel at Sanur, and the establishment
of Bali's only tertiary institute, the Udayana University of Denpasar.
The 1965 Coup and its Aftermath
In the waning days of Sukarno's reign, conflict increased between the
high-caste capitalist class and communists pursuing a more militant role
in land reform and harvest-sharing policies. Bali's governor, Anak Agung
Bagus Suteja, increased the participation of the Indonesian Communist Party
(PKI) and other leftists in the island's administration and legislative
bodies. The PKI's aggressive policy toward land reform understandably had
tremendous appeal to landless peasants and poor tenant farmers. Land was
seized unilaterally from rich landowners; landlord-employed thugs destroyed
sharecroppers' crops and razed their huts. Government offices were burned,
scuffles and armed attacks broke out, religious ceremonies were disrupted.
A full-scale civil war, drawn along class lines, was underway.
A series of ominous natural catastrophes
also weighed in: rat and mouse plagues, insect infestations, crop failures,
and, finally, the violent eruption of Gunung Agung.
The mountain exploded during the holiest
of Balinese ceremonies, Eka Dasa Rudra, a purification rite in which harmony
and balance in people and nature are restored in all 11 directions. The
ceremony, held only once every 100 years, was precipitously held some 10
years early at the behest of Sukarno, appararenty to impress a convention
of travel agents. Midway through the opulent proceedings, Gunung Agung
began to shower the whole area with ash and smoke, finally exploding in
its most violent eruption in 600 years. Earthquakes toppled temples, hot
ash ignited thatched roofs, volcanic debris rained upon the earth. As the
molten lava moved toward them, Hindu priests prayed frantically, hoping
to appease the angry gods, assuring worshippers they had nothing to fear.
In the end, 1600 Balinese were killed, 86,000
left homeless, and 100,000 hectares removed from production. A layer of
hot choking dust lay over the whole island for a week, covering fields,
houses, and streets. One-quarter of Bali was turned into black lava desert.
The catastrophe was attribted to the wrath of the god Shiva in his most
evil aspect as Rudra. This disaster ultimately became a damning judgment
on the entire Sukarno era.
Because empty land for evacuees was not available
on Bali, the consequences of overpopulation became acute for the first
time in the island's history. No longer could farmers move temporarily
to another part of the island, later returning to a land covered in fresh,
fertile ash. Thousands had to be resettled in Sulawesi.
The failure of crops, the uprooting of many
villages, and the forced evacuation of masses of people contributed substantially
to the communal clashes and massacres of tens of thousands of Balinese
during the purge of Indonesian communists in 1966. Internal refugees poured
into Denpasar and Singaraja where, together with large numbers of unemployed
urban poor, formed a restive, disaffected underclass ripe for mobilization
by communist mass organizations.
Finally, all hell broke loose. On the night
of 30 September 1965, six high-ranking army leaders were kidnapped, tortured,
and killed in Jakarta, allegedly by communist conspirators. The attempted
coup d'etat, suppressed skillfully within days by a previously little-known
general named Suharto, led directly to an archipelago-wide bloodbath.
The Indonesian Communist Party was immediately
banned, and Sukarno was forced to delegate wide powers to Suharto. Mass
arrests followed. On 8 October fanatical Muslim youths attacked and burned
the communist party headquarters in Jakarta, initiating a bloody wave of
anti-communist reprisals that rolled over Java and Bali, leaving whole
villages devastated and in many cases obliterated. The killings on Bali
started in earnest in December 1965 and soon began to take on the dimensions
of a mass purgation, an "essential" exorcism of the island. Devout
Balinese murdered godless communists whom they believed mocked their religion
and threatened their pious way of life. In the witch hunt for "communists"
old scores were settled and many noncommunists wiped out. Wealthy businessmen
took advantage of the chaos to murder their Chinese and Balinese competitors.
On Java the people had to be egged on to
kill the communists; on Bali they had to be restrained. The "trance
killings" reached a fever pitch in 1966, when whole groups of Balinese
were rounded up and slashed, clubbed, and chopped to death by communal
consent. The killers included small boys, encouraged in some cases by Hindu
priests. The purge on Bali became so indiscriminate commandos finally had
to step in to restore order. From then on the killing was coordinated by
the military and police, working with civilian authorities to make sure
only the "right" people were executed. Dressed in ceremonial
white attire, the victims were led to the killing fields dispassionately,
almost politely, without hatred. Of a population of two million, it is
estimated as many as 50,000 were killed. The horrific bloodletting is rarely
referred to today.
Suharto's pro-Western "New Order"
ushered in a long period of relative stability and rampant capitalist development.
In 1979, the Eka Dasa Rudra cleansing ceremony was held again and completed
without incident. Suharto's attendance at the ceremony was an attempt to
place Bali's religion and culture firmly in the national psyche, an indispensable
part of the pan-Indonesian culture.