A Brief History
Today’s Indonesians mainly descend from people who came from south China via the Malay peninsula and moved along the island chain to Java, Bali, Lombok, and beyond, from 3000 to 1000 b.c. Archaeological finds show that there was a flourishing Bronze Age culture in Bali and Lombok between about 1000 and 100 b.c. Trade and cultural exchanges with Southeast Asia had certainly begun by that period, and there were frequent contacts with India by a.d. 100. About this time, too, wet rice cultivation was introduced to Bali, changing the face of the countryside to its present appearance of rice paddy fields and terraces.
Indian traders and teachers brought Buddhism to Java. It had only a limited influence in Bali, however, where people continued in their ancient animist beliefs, worshipping the spirits of the mountains, rivers, and other natural forces.
Hinduism Comes to Bali
In the eighth and ninth centuries a.d., several Buddhist rulers in Java converted to Hinduism, along with their subjects. This time, many people in Bali followed suit, perhaps attracted by the complex Hindu mythology — the Balinese today still have a love of the old stories — and by the way their local gods could be housed easily in the crowded Hindu pantheon. Around 930, the kingdom of East Java conquered Bali and the conversion process accelerated. A mild form of the caste system and the concept of the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu were introduced. But Bali was no mere vassal state of Java. From 1019 to 1042, Airlangga, son of the Balinese king Udayana, ruled over East Java with the help of a Javanese princess, while his young brother acted as regent in Bali. During the 12th and 13th centuries, Bali was often independent.
A powerful Hindu empire named after its capital, Majapahit, united all of Java by 1320. The Majapahit general Gajah Mada reconquered Bali in 1343, and annexed a large part of the Indonesian archipelago. Hindu art and scholarship spread through the islands, but on most of the islands, this flowering was short-lived. With the death in 1389 of King Hayam Wurukin, its last great ruler, the empire of Majapahit began to decline.
Muslim traders and teachers had already started converting several of Java’s princes and people to Islam, especially in coastal areas, and in the 14th and 15th centuries the movement spread to the interior. By the year 1500, seeing their world breaking up, many Majapahit aristocrats, priests, and scholars fled to Bali, where their culture continued to flourish. Islam never gained a strong foothold in Bali, which was difficult to invade because of its many reefs and lack of harbors, and had few products to attract traders. The early 16th century also brought the first European ships to Indonesian waters, when the Portuguese came in search of spices and set up trading posts — though not on Bali.
In 1550 Bali was united under Batu Renggong, the formidable ruler known as Dewa Agung (god-king) of Gelgel, near Klungkung. His men even succeeded in turning back the tide of Islam for a short while, adding eastern Java and Lombok to his domains. During his rule, Balinese power, culture, and influence reached a peak, with a boom in temple building and the associated crafts of sculpture and woodcarving.
During the next 250 years, Bali’s rulers fell to squabbling among themselves and the island split into ten or more rajadoms. Bali’s contact with the Dutch was restricted to providing slaves — mainly Balinese who had broken the rajas’ laws or priests’ taboos — and soldiers for the army of the United Dutch East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC). The company was the instrument of influence of the Netherlands until it went bankrupt in 1799 and was superseded by the government. Throughout the 18th century, Dutch influence and authority slowly spread across the Indonesian archipelago, but bypassed the relatively poor, unimportant island of Bali.
Between 1811 and 1817, during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain took control of Indonesia and seriously thought of staying once the wars were over. Britain’s administrator, Stamford Raffles, who was named Lieutenant Governor, even visited Bali, and may have had it in mind to build a trading station here. After the war, however, the British government decided to restore Dutch territory and interests — and Raffles found another site, the island and future port of Singapore.
The Dutch Take Over
Once re-established in Java, the Dutch attempted to increase their influence and also to prevent the Balinese from plundering ships wrecked off the coast (the Balinese considered shipwrecks to be gifts from the deities of the seas, and felt it would be insulting to refuse them). Following the looting of a ship in 1841, the Dutch decided to use force. Some 1,600 men, recruited mainly from other Indonesian islands, landed on the north coast in 1846 and burned Singaraja. Immediately, the Balinese rajas agreed to stop the plundering of wrecks, and to pay compensation for the 1841 incident, but it soon became clear that they had no intention of honoring the deal. In 1848 the Dutch landed a second military expedition in the north of Bali. Advancing inland to attack the Balinese base at Jagaraga, they were ambushed by a bigger but less well-armed force led by Jelantik, younger brother of the Raja of Bululeng. In spite of appalling losses, the Balinese won the day. The defeated Dutch invaders retreated in disorder to their ships, but the following year, a third Dutch military expedition, far stronger than its predecessors, landed near Singaraja. The northern rajadoms sued for peace; they were offered terms calling for them to disarm and submit to Dutch rule. The response of Jelantik was to fall back to Jagaraga and prepare to fight. This time the Balinese were overwhelmed and thousands were killed, some in a suicidal march towards enemy guns, a ritual death in battle known in the Balinese language as puputan. After a second Dutch landing at Padangbai Bay, the puputan ritual was repeated when the Raja of Karangasem and his family threw themselves on the enemy guns.
During the rest of the 19th century, the Dutch, using the rajas and other aristocrats as regents, took control over most of Bali, but their influence in the south remained limited. This was emphasized in 1904 when a ship wrecked off Sanur was plundered of its cargo. The Dutch demanded reparations for this act; the southern rajas refused. In 1906 a force of mainly Moluccan troops led by Dutch officers marched on Denpasar to enforce compliance. They found the place almost deserted, until suddenly the Raja of Badung, together with his family and hundreds of courtiers, emerged from the palace. On a signal from the raja, one of his priests stabbed him with a kris (knife), and then, pausing only to stab their children first, the rest of the royal party began a puputan, either killing themselves or running suicidally towards the enemy. When the dreadful scene was repeated by the Dewa Agung and his wives and followers in 1908 in front of the palace at Klungkung, the rajas’ resistance to Dutch rule was at an end.
The public in the Netherlands was appalled by these grisly events. From then on, Bali and the Balinese came to be looked on as unique — to be protected from the colonial treatment that had turned the other islands into plantations exploited for profit. Tourism was discouraged, although a few foreigners did make the journey and returned to the outside world with news of the island’s extraordinary culture. An American couple, Bob and Louise Koke, opened the first hotel on Kuta Beach in 1936; Louise G. Koke’s memoir, Our Hotel In Bali, provides an idyllic portrait of Bali’s first, tenuous endeavor at tourism from 1936 until the Japanese invasion in 1942.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Cokorde Gde Agung Sukawati, ruler of Ubud, extended a long Sukawati family tradition of patronizing talent and craftsmanship by hosting visiting Western artists, including the German painter, Walter Spies, who stayed for 14 years. Spies’ influence revolutionized painting in Bali, which had previously been one of the least inventive of Bali’s arts, bound by repetitive conventions. The Pita Maha school of young Western-influenced artists emerged (also influenced by the Dutch pastel-ist, Rudolf Bonnet), putting Ubud on the world map of contemporary art. Spies’ house and spring-fed swimming pool (now part of the Tjampuhan Hotel) were visited by Western artists, academics, musicians, and stars of theater and film. Deeply involved in Balinese culture, Spies himself choreographed the still-performed version of the most famous Balinese dance, the kecak, based on a story from the “Ramayana.” When Germany invaded Holland in 1940, Spies was interned as an enemy alien. He died in 1942, when a ship on which he was being transported to British Ceylon was torpedoed by the Japanese.
From 1900 until the start of World War II, many young Indonesians received a Dutch education, with the brightest students going to universities in the Netherlands. The Dutch language gave the vast polyglot archipelago a sense of unity, even among islands that had been bitter enemies for centuries. Indonesian nationalism and a movement for independence from Holland gained strength.
War and Independence
Early in 1942, soon after their attacks on Pearl Harbor and Singapore, the Japanese invaded and occupied Indonesia, with the intention of exploiting its oil and rice. Until the end of World War II, the difficult Japanese occupation continued; with the surrender of Japan in August, 1945, Indonesia declared its independence. The years from 1946 to 1949 saw the Dutch trying to reassert control; however, weakened as it was from years of Nazi occupation, the Netherlands was not able to muster the huge forces needed to recapture all the islands.
On Bali, in November, 1946, Indonesian nationalist fighters, led by Ngurah Rai, found themselves trapped by Dutch forces close to Marga, north of Tabenan. Outnumbered and outgunned, Ngurah Rai and all 96 of his followers were killed in what is regarded as Bali’s last puputan. Their sacrifice is commemorated by a monument and museum at the site, together with stones bearing the names of each of those who died on the island of Bali during the struggle for independence (see page 68).
Finally on 17 August 1950, five years to the day after independence was first declared, the fledgling Republic of Indonesia was recognized by the Netherlands. Sukarno, preeminent in the nationalist movement, emerged as the new nation’s leader.
The 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung heralded the arrival of the new nation, and its leader Sukarno was welcomed to the world stage. Together with India’s Nehru and Tito of Yugoslavia, he was credited with the foundation of the non-aligned movement.
Years of Confusion
A succession of short-lived coalition governments wrestled with the problems posed by separatist movements of the various island groups, dislocation caused by war and its aftermath, a badly neglected infrastructure, and the colo-nial legacy of over-exploited plantations. Frustrated by Indonesia’s loss of direction, Sukarno declared a form of martial law in 1957. A so-called “guided democracy” and an appointed national council and non-party government took the place of the elected assembly and ineffectual coalitions.
The period between 1959 and 1965 was a surreal time of government by means of slogans and Orwellian acronyms. Sukarno attempted to control the competing nationalist, religious, and communist groups; NASAKOM was the word he used to represent their supposed common interests. As if that wasn’t enough, processions paraded with placards emblazoned with MANIPOL (Sukarno’s political manifesto) and DEKON (his economic declaration) written on them, and there were others which condemned NEKOLIM (neo-colonialism and imperialism). In the meantime, the Indonesian economy collapsed and hyper-inflation destroyed the currency.
The country’s limited foreign-exchange reserves were squandered on window-dressing projects, grand monuments, and stadiums to host the Asian Games of 1962, seen as part of a plan to bring Indonesia into the world spotlight. International travel agents were given a tour of the country, including a visit to Bali that coincided with an important Balinese ceremony in March 1963 at the so-called “mother temple” Besakih, on the slopes of the island’s highest mountain, Gunung Agung. Portentously, Gunung Agung, though long dormant, chose this particular moment to begin emitting smoke and firing rocks into the air, but the ceremony went ahead anyway, literally under a cloud. The official guests had scarcely left Bali when Gunung Agung exploded in what was the most violent eruption the island had seen in centuries. Lava flowed down its slopes, but despite the impressions conveyed by reporters (and by photographs seen in many books), it covered only a limited area. The chief instrument of destruction was the volcanic ash that showered down on the northern half of Bali, covering it with a layer 40 cm (15 inches) thick. Crops were wiped out; the rice terraces were devastated, and starvation threatened.
The ash fall also blocked rivers, but the dams it formed could not retain the waters for long. When they broke, torrents of mud and rock tore down the valleys and through the villages and towns along the river banks. The official death toll of 1,600 was a wild underestimate. The sky went black even over southern Bali, although Denpasar received only a sprinkling of ash.
Coup and Revenge
On 30 September 1965, a group of army conspirators, who claimed they acted to prevent a possible coup against Sukarno, kidnapped and killed six army generals. In the following days, General Suharto, one of the most senior surviving commanders, isolated the conspirators and effectively seized power. The blame for the killings was pinned on the Communist Party, the PKI, which denied any involvement. A pogrom was then unleashed, first in Java and next in Bali, with widespread killings of suspected Communists. The Chinese minority, mainly shopkeepers, moneylenders, and other small businesspeople, were also a target. In common with the other immigrant groups, they had been compelled by law to display the flag of their country of origin, even if a century had passed since their ancestors had come to Indonesia. Throughout Indonesia, every Chinese business, marked by the flag of China, and associated in people’s minds with communism, was attacked. The numbers killed will never be known: in Bali alone the total casualties may have exceeded 60,000.
Sukarno’s association with the PKI led to his being forced to yield most of his powers. Only his honored role in the independence struggle saved him from trial. In 1968 Suharto took over the presidency.
Growth and Modernization
In the decades following, the economy stabilized as growing oil revenues fueled expansion. The Chinese community, backbone of the nation’s economy, carefully rebuilt its commercial interests, this time much less visibly. Tourism to Bali was seen as a money-spinner: the 1970s saw a rapid increase in the numbers of foreign visitors. During the 1980s, the authorities decided to develop a more up-market tourism on Bali. Nusa Dua was designated to become a huge tourist enclave where only large, luxury hotels would be built. To bring the necessary volume of visitor traffic to fill all the new rooms, Denpasar Airport’s runway was extended out into the sea to handle big airliners. During the next decade, Bali became one of the most prosperous places in the country. In order to help Balinese better prepare for new jobs in the tourism market, English language courses became mandatory in middle and secondary schools throughout the island.
The late 1990s were a period of disillusionment with the long-lived Suharto regime’s many failings and widespread corruption. As the Indonesian economy faltered, ethnic conflicts erupted in many parts of the country; even Lombok experienced a brief flare-up of violence against Christians and ethnic Chinese. But Bali, with its unique Hindu culture and its international, tourism-oriented outlook, has remained an island of stability throughout this unsettled period of Indonesian history.
