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History
of Bali
The New Expatriate Colony
In the wake of the
tragic puputan massacres, the Dutch faced a serious
public relations problem. Popular outcry at the horrific
manner in which Bali's last kingdoms had fallen led many in
Europe to protest what they saw as the brutality of Dutch
colonialism. Seeking to renovate their image, the Dutch
turned their efforts toward the two forces that would play
the major role in molding Bali in the years to come:
tradition and tourism. Dutch scholars and colonial
bureaucrats began a program to collect information on
Balinese culture, and to preserve those aspects of it that
they saw as admirable. They gathered information on art,
language, local politics, religion, and especially the
Balinese caste system, which fascinated the Dutch in those
days when the rights of Europe’s own royalty were being
questioned. But this colonial scholarship was hardly
disinterested learning for its own sake. By cataloguing
culture the Dutch hoped to finally penetrate the Balinese
mentality that had left them confused for so long, and by
understanding something of Balinese social organization they
expected to be better positioned to control it.
In studying Bali, the Dutch
tended to rely heavily on the interpretations of those they
considered to be local experts: Brahmana priests and members
of the royal families. The puzzle they were able to piece
together of the island was thus quite partial, overlooking
the experiences of the majority of Balinese, who lived the
life of ordinary farmers, fishermen or traders. But whether
or not the Dutch succeeded in getting to know the “real
Bali” was of little importance compared with the
tremendous value of the image they succeeded in creating. By
turning Balinese culture into an object that could be
enclosed in an academic text, the Dutch also were
repackaging it as something that could be sold. By
advertising Bali as a "paradise island," where
happy peasants lived in quiet rural villages in harmony with
nature, where a great Hindu civilization still respected its
ancestors, its gods and its kings, and where wise, proud
priests preserved ancient traditions against the onslaught
of modernity, the Dutch were able to both erase their
problematic part in shaping Bali’s history and increase
their revenues by luring curious travellers to the colony.
It was perhaps no accident that the first real tourist
hotel, the Bali Hotel in Denpasar, was erected in 1928 on
the very same spot where the royal family had met their
bloody end at the hands of the Dutch army two decades
before.
The Dutch succeeded in
literally building over a history of colonial control and
violence, replacing it with a new façade. From now on, the
Western image of Bali would be one not of bloodthirsty
barbarians but of a noble, spiritual people, living in peace
with their environment and each other, and, most
importantly, extending a warm welcome to their foreign
guests. Lured by this vision of a tropical paradise on
earth, a new European and American colony began to invade
Bali.
By the 1920s, Bali was
already hosting a steady stream of wandering Westerners who
came searching not for the material wealth and power that
their predecessors had hoped for, but sustenance of a
different sort. These early expatriates were the world-weary
elites of their homelands, who came to Bali to take refuge
from the stresses and restrictions of the modern world. As
artists, anthropologists, writers, musicians, or as simply
seekers after an exotic island experience, this new tribe of
travellers disembarked from their luxury ocean liners to
begin their adventures in exotic Bali. Some hit the beaches
of Sanur and Kuta, where they opened fabulous hotels that
combined all the colorful charisma of tradition with all the
comforts of home. Drawn to these enclaves of island opulence
were the likes of Charlie Chaplin, the famous star of the
silent silver screen, the renowned playwright Noel Coward,
and the American heiress Barbara Hutton. During those days,
a Westerner of even moderate financial means could live the
life of visiting royalty in a gorgeous private villa,
complete with a small army of gracious Balinese servants to
attend to one’s every command. For these privileged
guests, Bali was an endless festival, where one could feast
on the rare and delicious bounty of the East and be feted by
a dazzling display of its mystical, magical traditions.
Still other travellers, of a
more intellectual and artistic bent, left the shimmering sea
behind them and headed for the cool hills around Ubud to
search for an insider’s view of Balinese society. Worrying
that Bali was in danger of becoming overwhelmed by
Westernization, these adventurers tried to distance
themselves from other “typical” tourists and become not
merely observers but participants in the ongoing activity of
the island. Most influential among this new crowd of culture
mavens was Walter Spies, the son of a German diplomat, whose
deep passion for the East had been nurtured by a stint as a gamelan
musician in the court of the Sultan of Yogyakarta, Java.
With the permission of Ubud’s royalty, Spies built himself
a beautiful house at the edge of the Campuan River - today
the site of the luxurious Hotel Campuan - and began to
immerse himself in the wonders of Bali. As a scholar, Spies
diligently devoted himself to collecting Balinese folktales
and traditional customs, and photographing the dazzling
beauty of Bali’s landscape. As a painter, he created
stunning images of the traditional Balinese social world,
especially of those peasants whose simple, spiritual
lifestyle he so admired. Working with the Dutch painter
Rudolph Bonnet, Spies encouraged Balinese painters to
explore new styles of artistic expression, which would lead
to a revolution in the traditional arts of Bali. Spies and
Bonnet also helped organize the artists of Ubud into an
association to preserve and promote their paintings, called
Pita Maha, and they founded the Bali Museum in Denpasar and
the Puri Lukisan in Ubud to showcase the work of local
talent. As a musician, Spies supported and recorded a number
of Balinese groups, and introduced his friend, the American
composer Colin McPhee, to the shimmering grace of the
Balinese gamelan, which McPhee would later bring to
the attention of the Western world through his books on Bali
and his own Eastern-inspired compositions. Spies also left
his mark on Bali’s musical map by helping the Balinese to
create the kecak dance, a thrilling spectacle
involving dozens of sarong-clad men chanting a hypnotic
chorus of chak-ka-chak-ka-chak - the sound of a
forest full of monkeys - dramatizing the story of the Indic
epic Ramayana, where Prince Rama’s beautiful wife, Sita,
is captured by the evil Ravana and rescued by Hanuman, the
leader of the monkeys, and his proud band of primates. And,
perhaps most importantly, as a gracious host with a
formidable knowledge of his adopted homeland, Spies helped
spread the word of Bali’s natural and cultural wealth to
the world. He opened his doors to dozens of curious visitors
and acted as an advisor to those who came seeking knowledge
of Bali’s rich cultural heritage - including the
organizers of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, where
the famed surrealist Antonin Artaud became entranced with
the bewitching allure of Bali, and the makers of the 1920s
film Goona-Goona, which portrayed Bali as a land
where love magic wove its spells and made Bali the hip new
destination for American trendsetters. New York City became
so swept up in the Bali craze that there was even a
nightclub there called “The Sins of Bali,” that promised
revelers the ultimate in exotic and erotic island
entertainment.
Following in the footsteps of
these early travellers came another breed of
culture-hunters. These were the pioneers of a new academic
discipline called anthropology, which sought to replace
stereotypical images of exotic otherness with a more
informed understanding of culture. Forgoing the luxury
hotels and the glittering nightlife, these more
serious-minded scholars set up shop in the villages of Bali
and began the daunting task of learning the difficult local
language and immersing themselves in everyday life. Foremost
among these intellectuals were the American anthropologist
Margaret Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson, a scholar
trained in the elite atmosphere of Cambridge, England. Mead,
who would later become the most famous anthropologist of the
20th century,
preaching a message of tolerance and cross-cultural
understanding to the American masses, was one of the few
visitors to Bali who was not entirely seduced by its charms.
For Mead, Bali was an example of a culture that had
overregulated life. The endless rituals and the complicated
rules of etiquette and language and hierarchy all worked,
she felt, to repress the Balinese personality under the
weight of social order. In her autobiography, Mead would
later write that she and Bateson often felt Bali to be quite
similar to Bateson’s England, stuffy and controlling. Mead
sought to escape this aspect of Bali by turning away from
the high culture of priests and princes that earlier
travellers and scholars had fetishized, and focusing her
attentions on village life, especially its wilder side. Mead
was fascinated by the black magic that haunted the midnight
crossroads and the deserted graveyards, and the social
conflicts that threatened to burst out from underneath a
veneer of social harmony. She was especially interested in
the drama of Calonarang, the story of the evil witch
Rangda whose dark powers send the followers of the
benevolent Barong into a crazed trance, causing them to turn
their keris daggers on themselves in fits of
uncontrollable anger. Mead and Bateson’s work showed a
side of Bali that the tour brochures, with their extravagant
descriptions of island allure, often overlooked, placing
Bali high on the list of the world’s most spellbindingly
complex cultures.
But with World War II looming
on the horizon, the party suddenly came to an end. Germans
like Walter Spies were considered enemies of the Dutch and
were arrested. The few foreigners who remained on the island
were placed in concentration camps when the Japanese
occupied the East Indies in 1942. And those who dared to
return after the war was over found Bali a changed place.
The Japanese occupation and the struggle for independence
from colonial rule had depleted the island’s resources.
And Bali was now part of the new nation of Indonesia, which
had at its helm the charismatic, controversial President
Sukarno. Sukarno, the son of a Javanese father and a
Balinese mother, had a special place in his heart for
Balinese culture. He was an active promoter of the Balinese
arts, and even built himself a luxurious palace at Tampak
Siring, near the Tirta Empul temple, whose spring water was
believed to be a holy gift from the gods. As a notorious
womanizer, Sukarno was bewitched by the beauty of Balinese
women, and invited many a young dancer to entertain him in
his island abode. Sukarno was also eager to show off Bali to
the wider world as the prize jewel in Indonesia’s
many-colored crown, and he invited hosts of foreign
journalists and dignitaries to visit, including India’s
Prime Minister Nehru, who bestowed upon the island the
memorable title of “the morning of the world.” Sukarno
also planted the seeds of tourism development in Bali by
using Japanese war reparations funds to build the Bali Beach
Hotel in Sanur, the island’s first high rise hotel. But
despite his love of Bali, Sukarno was not always perceived
as welcoming to its Western guests. His fanatical
nationalism, combined with a good dose of sympathy for a
growing communist movement, kept many would-be tourists away
from Bali, which was, in any case, itself experiencing
tremendous social tensions at the time. Conflicts over
issues of caste, wealth, political allegiance and the role
of traditional elites in the modern nation grew more tense
during the 1950s and 60s, and finally exploded in 1965,
leading to the deaths of thousands of Balinese. It was not
until the New Order government of Suharto took control of
Indonesia and began vigorously promoting tourism as the cure
for Bali’s troubles that the West renewed its love affair
with Bali.
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