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Introduction

Those of us who began our research on Bali in the 1970s had only one English source on which to rely for any sense of Balinese history: Willard A. Hanna’s Bali Profile: People, Events, Circumstances 1001–1976, reprinted here as Bali Chronicles. I first came upon it on the shelves of a Balinese scholar, Madé Kanta, and after months of patiently combing the bookstores of Bali came upon a worn copy for the princely sum of Rp 7,000. It still remains one of the favorites that I dip into every now and then for a taste both of a different sense of Bali and for the flavor of the time in which it was produced.

The book that you have before you began life as a series of American Universities Field Staff Reports. Having been published first in that form, where leading anthropologists of Bali such as James A. Boon and Clifford Geertz referred to them, they were then republished in 1976 as a single volume under the title Bali Profile. Not all of the original reports seem to have been incorporated into this single volume, which concentrates on colonial processes by which the Dutch took power over Bali and the neighboring island of Lombok. The fact that the chapters were originally separate reports accounts for the slightly disjointed nature of the whole. With his good knowledge of Dutch, Willard A. Hanna produced a similar set of studies on Ambon that remains one of the key introductions to Eastern Indonesia.

Bali Chronicles contains two types of views of Bali. It is not a history as such—it lacks the footnotes, the archival research and the questioning approach to sources of an historian. Rather, it presents a set of largely Dutch views of the island, as Hanna himself notes in his Foreword, but tied to the view of the early period of the New Order government of President Suharto (president from 1967 to 1998).

What Hanna has done is essentially to produce clear and entertaining summaries of a set of very different Dutch writings on the island, as well as of Balinese control of Lombok. He has not tried to reconcile the discrepancies between these views, let alone to check them against Balinese sources, as shown by the bad spelling of Balinese names taken directly from these sources. Nevertheless, we get a good sense of the different European participants in Balinese history, the Dutch government contract-maker Huskus Koopman, the Danish trader Mads Lange, the Controleur—or district officer—P. L. van Bloemen Waanders, and the parliamentarian H. H. van Kol. Further archival research would have fleshed out the character and motives of these participants: the fraudulent manner in which Huskus Koopman tricked various Balinese rulers into signing over sovereignty, Mads Lange’s involvement in the arms trade, and H. H. van Kol’s advocacy of socialism. And we do not have enough sense of the attitudes and motivations of many of the Balinese actors. Many of them, particularly the members of the Karangasem–Lombok dynasty, remain victims of bad Dutch publicity.

Even for those who can read Dutch, such a compilation is of some value. But then Willard A. Hanna has attempted to reconcile the written views of Bali with the sense of history provided by Balinese and other participants: Bobby Mörzer Bruyns, one of the founders of Bali’s tourist industry; Jimmy Pandy, who helped restart the tourist industry after World War II, the Indonesian Revolution, and the Post-Revolutionary conflicts; former governor I Gusti Bagus Oka and Ibu Gedong, major figures in fixing Bali’s cultural identity; and Ide Anak Agung Gde Agung, former Foreign Minister of Indonesia and head of the royal family of Gianyar.

Through Mörzer Bruyns and other oral sources we get a good sense of the characters involved in the founding of the tourist industry of Bali. Hanna combines his summary of their accounts with useful statistical and social information. His overall account of early twentieth-century Bali is a rosy one, viewed through the nostalgic rose-colored glasses of its participants. Unfortunately, the majority of Balinese, for whom life in the 1930s involved poverty and hardship, would not agree with the view that “Life in Bali in the 1930s was agreeable not only for affluent foreigners but also for the Balinese.”

It is especially through the controversial Ide Anak Agung that Hanna provides an early New Order view of Bali. As a major opponent of former President Sukarno, Ide Anak Agung’s political views shine through this book’s negative account of the Sukarno period, and even in the conservative account of the period of Balinese participation in the Indonesian struggle for Independence of 1945–49. Many more Balinese were enthusiastic, even passionately devoted, supporters of Indonesia’s first president than the book indicates. Here Hanna and Ide Anak Agung were very much of a like mind; Hanna coming from Cold War America had no time for the Left’s ideas of Land Reform or People’s Art, while Ide Anak Agung, as a very modern traditional ruler, was on a side of politics that was simultaneously conservative and liberal. His political grouping, identified with the leadership of the wise Sutan Sjahrir, was conservative because of its opposition to radical reform, particularly of wealth and privilege, but adopted a liberal and internationalist perspective. Ide Anak Agung’s own cosmopolitan life and outlook exemplified this.

This book’s highlighting of the kingdom of Gianyar at the expense of the other former Balinese kingdoms needs to be taken with a grain of salt, since Gianyar was the newest of the Balinese kingdoms, and had neither the status of the high kingdom, Klungkung, nor the prestige of Gianyar’s main twentieth-century rival kingdom, Karangasem. The autobiography of one of Karangasem’s royal sons, Dr A. A. Madé Djelantik, The Birthmark: Memoires of a Balinese Prince (Periplus), makes a useful counter reading to the pro-Gianyar views of Bali Chronicles.

At a time when the Balinese are desperate to restore tourist numbers to the days before Indonesia’s political crises and the catastrophic bombings of October 2002, it seems strange that Hanna was so worried about what would happen when Bali’s tourist visits reached the 300,000 mark. This is another reflection of the views current at the time the book was written: that Bali required a strategy to preserve its culture against tourism. In retrospect, this strategy, which had its origins in the research of Balinese writer Nyoman S. Pendit on the international sociology of tourism, ignored a number of issues. First, culture is not a fixed or unchangeable “thing,” but rather an adaptable series of perceptions and social representations. In Bali’s case, tourism has helped to reinforce a separate sense of Balinese identity, and given Balinese players in Indonesian society the means by which to support their island’s idea of uniqueness. As Hanna points out, the dilemma for Bali has always been one of how to support a dense population with limited resources, and tourism is the chief means to provide such support. Bali, in that sense, has been a model of success for other islands, and even nations, to emulate.

The real problem for Bali, one that was not so clear in the priorities of the 1970s, is preserving nature rather than culture. Rather than reaching the predicted level of 500,000 visitors per year in 2000, Bali achieved over 1,000,000 per year, but at the expense of its ecology. Despite excellent planning processes, government authorities were left at the mercy of rampant development too close to beaches, in ugly ribbons of small shops, and throughout areas that were originally planned as “green belts.” The result has been polluted and eroded beaches, shortages of water, and a deterioration of the quality of life for most Balinese. The challenge of the twenty-first century will be to restore tourism while making Bali livable.

Hanna’s sense of concern for Bali, and his devotion to the island, shines through in each part of the book, no more so than in the last section, with its potted version of Balinese religion and culture. Falling back on stereotypes of “the Balinese,” as any such summary will, this section is most in need of updating. No longer can we say “the Balinese family lives in a spacious, walled compound which is part of an enclave of compounds,” for example, since the majority of Balinese live in crowded conditions in cities, although in many cases the villages that Hanna encountered in the 1970s have been incorporated into urban sprawl in a way that maintains many earlier aspects of social organization.

This is a book of its time, a description of Bali’s interaction with the West, but a book that deserves re-reading. Willard A. Hanna has left us a book that should be enjoyed as a collection of voices, sometimes dissonant, often self-serving, but always fascinating.

Associate Professor Adrian Vickers University of Wollongong January 2004