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CHAPTER 1

The Dewa Agung and the Radjas

(Pre–1800)

Island Setting and Cultural Background

The island of Bali is celebrated for the peculiar splendor of its Balinese-Hindu culture, a highly developed and artistically embellished system of life and worship which was arrested in the sixteenth century at the very moment of its finest flowering and preserved into modern times with little perceptible loss of vitality. This life of medieval pageantry is still the living tradition of an island population made up of extraordinarily handsome and gifted people. The island itself is a Pacific enclave of such pristine natural beauty as to be suggestive, as Pandit Nehru poetically put it, of “the world’s last morning.” No one can very satisfactorily explain just how this miracle happened—how it was that one idyllic little island created and sustained a rich civilization that was in certain significant respects as anomalous in former times as it is anachronistic today, but one which has never until recently been tainted with artificiality.

The most plausible conjecture with regard to Bali’s good fortune is that the island and the islanders profited enormously from a quite fortuitous combination of involvement and detachment. Bali was exposed to the great early civilizing influences of Southeast Asia, but up until very late in the colonial era it was insulated against the intrusion of rude white barbarians. The island, furthermore, is as fertile as it is scenic, and the islanders are industrious as well as artistic. It must be conceded that ancient evils such as superstition, slavery, and suttee long persisted, but there have also been compensations. One of these has been the animistic conviction that the divinities of nature are more disposed to be protective than vindictive.

Bali lies just one mile off the eastern tip of Java on the direct trade route between the spice islands of the Moluccas and the Asian entrepôts which long distributed their cloves, nutmegs, and mace to a spice-hungry world. From early times the island was visited by Indian, Arab, Chinese, Japanese, Bugis and other Eastern traders who brought with them not only their goods but their manners and customs. But once the island was really inhabited, Bali and the Balinese did more to repel than to attract any considerable number of later settlers. Along most of its sea coast Bali enjoyed the natural protection of high cliffs and continuous coral reefs. The nearby seas were notorious for sudden storms; they were also known to be shark- and barracuda-infested. The Balinese people themselves were physically vigorous and likely to be ferocious in battle. They regarded the seas as the abode of demons and monsters and were little inclined either to explore them or to extend aid and comfort to alien voyagers. One of the beliefs of the island was that whatever and whomever the waves tossed up on the shore were destined to become the property of the kings, shipwrecks being meant for plunder and castaways for enslavement. Bali therefore remained little known to the outside world and not especially inviting to better acquaintance. The early Asian and the later European seafarers preferred generally to sail on past Bali to other islands which offered surer, safer profits.

Notwithstanding their suspicion of what the seas bore them, the Balinese were quick to accept certain outside influences, which they ingeniously adapted to their own requirements, meanwhile devoting themselves to the development of their lovely and fruitful island. They began the planting of rice at least two millennia ago and achieved a scientific and artistic standard of cultivation unmatched in the region. At least a millennium and a half ago they began to transmute their native animism by adopting Hindu rites; by the sixteenth century they had achieved a distinctive civilization matched in miniature if it did not indeed surpass anything in India itself or Indianized Southeast Asia. The microcosmic Balinese-Hindu world survived intact up until the nineteenth century and did not then really shatter when it felt the full impact of Dutch colonialism. Even in the twentieth century the illusion if not the actuality of the traditional Bali still persists.

The early history of Bali is a matter of theoretical reconstruction of the precise origins of the population and the evolution of the society. The Balinese are clearly a blend of the various Mongoloid peoples who moved through mainland into insular Southeast Asia long before historic times. Their well-integrated society is the creation of an animistic, agricultural people inspired by vigorous priests and princes. The first great outside influence upon the early Balinese was exercised by Indian or Indianized traders and travelers who brought with them the Hindu learning. Bali shared very generously in the great wave of Indianizing influences which spread throughout most of Southeast Asia in the latter half of the first millennium. In politics and religion the Indians introduced the key concept of the God-King, whose capital reflects the splendors and perfections of Heaven and whose people prosper only so long as the ruler conducts himself in conformity with natural and divine law. Every Balinese ruler therefore had his monumental kraton or puri (palace) from which he exercised spiritual and temporal power through a hierarchy of courtiers and priests who not infrequently deposed an evil ruler and replaced him with a better.

Hinduization and Javanese Influences

The conversion of primitive Bali into a Hinduized society was the result not of conquest and colonization but rather of the contagion of civilization. The rulers found in Indian culture the religious and administrative practices which exactly served their purposes, and the people responded with such enthusiasm as to prove the appropriateness of the choice. India provided the literary, the artistic, the social, as well as the theological and political model for an evolving Balinese society. The Balinese exercised their own creative adaptations while still retaining much of the Indian original. Even today Bali preserves manifestations of early Hinduism, among them manuscript copies of certain epics, which have since disappeared in India itself.

The Hinduization of Bali was a process of many centuries. The most pervasive influence was exercised not by India itself but by nearby Java, which had been subject even earlier than Bali to an even more extensive Indianizing process. The documented history of Bali during this period is mainly a catalog of names of obscure royal personages and imprecise references to forgotten events. Modern archaeologists have reconstructed the approximate historical sequence from fragmentary inscriptions in Sanskrit or classical Balinese on various objects of stone and metal, most of them temple treasures. By an amazing exercise of erudition they have matched up names, dates, and events to create a chronological outline which meshes with a rather more detailed table similarly constructed for the island of Java and other regions.

One thus learns that certain Hinduized rulers invoked certain Indian deities in commemorating their own succession to the throne, in building or endowing a temple, in winning a battle, or in celebrating other events. It is clear that by the year 1001 (or perhaps 991), when the first reasonably well authenticated historic event occurred, Bali was already very extensively Hinduized. In that year, presumably, was born Airlangga, the son of a Balinese King, Dharmmodayanawarmmadewa (also known as Udayana, and sometimes identified with King Udayadityavarman of Cambodia who was exiled in about the year 1000, perhaps to Bali), and his Javanese queen, Gunapriyadharmapatni (also known as Mahendradatta). In his early youth Airlangga was sent for education and marriage to the court of the Emperor of Java. When the Emperor was himself overthrown in the course of civil wars, Airlangga was invited to succeed him. He devoted himself to rebuilding the empire and in so doing he added his home island of Bali to the Javanese domain, ruling it through a regent who was no doubt an uncle, brother, or cousin. Airlangga thus inaugurated a period of close Javanese–Balinese political and cultural contacts which continued, to Bali’s very great advantage, for well over three centuries. The relationship was not without its conflicts. The Balinese several times asserted their autonomy and the Javanese Singasari emperors, or their successors, the Modjapahit, as often reasserted their own hegemony. Balinese rulers, in whose veins flowed varying proportions of Balinese and Javanese blood, were always implicated in dynastic rivalries which Modjapahit was not infrequently called upon to settle. The Javanese ruler Kratanagara, for instance, found it necessary to pacify and reunify Bali in the year 1262 (or 1284), as did the great General Gadjah Mada in 1343. Modjapahit imposed more and more of its own institutions upon its far from unreceptive dependency. Eventually, when the Modjapahit Empire itself collapsed in 1515, migrations of refugees from Java to Bali resulted in still more massive cultural transfusion.

Modjapahit Conquest and Early Rulers

With the Modjapahit period Balinese history begins to assume clearer content and pattern although much remains legendary. Gadjah Mada constituted Bali a province of the empire with a Modjapahit governor. Kapakisan, the first incumbent, and, according to Balinese legend, the offspring of a stone Brahma and a heavenly nymph, became the founder of a line of princes who ruled the island more as supporters than as subordinates of the Javanese state. Kapakisan and his successors sometimes used the Javanese title of Susuhunan (Great Sultan, or Emperor), but more commonly the Balinese title of Dewa Agung (Great Deity), thus more than merely implying that they ruled independently and by divine right. Kapakisan built his kraton (Javanese term) or puri (Balinese) in Samprangan and ruled firmly but justly over the whole of the island. He was succeeded by his son, Krsna-Kapakisan, about whom nothing is known except his name. Krsna-Kapakisan was in turn succeeded by his own son, I Dewa Samprangan, about whom nothing is known which does him credit.

I Dewa Samprangan, the third Dewa Agung, was so given to vanity, frivolity, and venality that his counselors encouraged his young son, I Dewa Ktut, to build a separate kraton in nearby Gelgel and gradually to usurp the powers which his father was too dissipated to exercise. I Dewa Ktut succeeded in restoring royal authority and prestige. He is especially celebrated for having journeyed to Java to participate in a solemn imperial council called together by Emperor Hayam Wuruk (r. 1350–1380) to consider the gathering troubles which were already shaking his empire and were to overwhelm and destroy it a century later.

The fall of Modjapahit signaled the rise of Mataram, a new Javanese empire built out of small kingdoms newly reinspired and reinvigorated by the advent of powerful Islamic influences. Many thousands of Modjapahit Hindu priests, nobles, soldiers, artists, and artisans fled from Java to Bali to escape their Muslim conquerors. In Bali they gave fresh impetus to an already strongly Hinduized culture which was thus able to enrich and maintain itself while in Java the Hindu tradition was almost submerged under the Islamic overlay. But Hindu Bali and Muslim Java became implacable enemies. The East Javanese state of Blambangan, separated from Bali by a mile-wide strait which was both difficult and dangerous to cross, became a buffer region. The Balinese claimed and occasionally half conquered Blambangan, Mataram often threatened but usually failed to mount a counter invasion, and for centuries Balinese–Javanese relations remained readily inflammable.

Dewa Agung as Emperor and Symbol

At the end of the fifteenth century, then, the Dewa Agung and his remote court at Gelgel, who suddenly fell heir to the still glittering legacy of the vanquished and vanished Modjapahit Empire, achieved previously undreamed of splendor and authority. The sixteenth century was destined to be Bali’s golden age. Under Batu Renggong, who became the Dewa Agung in about the year 1550, the various Balinese principalities were welded together into a strongly centralized kingdom. Batu Renggong followed up his successes at home by launching military expeditions abroad. He conquered Blambangan, where he installed a vassal ruler and supported him against Mataram’s counterattack. Then he turned his attention eastward to the islands of Sumbawa and Lombok, which he both conquered and colonized. Political and military triumphs of Batu Renggong’s reign were more than matched by a cultural renaissance. The Balinese transformed the Modjapahit influences to conform to their own special needs and abilities. They created what is in fact the contemporary Balinese culture, endowing it with that special element of Balinese genius, the secret of eternal renewal of youth. The Balinese still share with the Javanese many common traditions of language, music, dance, sculpture, and literature, but the gap between Hindu Bali and Muslim Java is almost as wide as that between youth and old age. The older, the Balinese-Modjapahit culture, paradoxically preserved its freshness and animation, while the younger, the Javanese-Mataram society, grew both sober and somber. It is the riddle and the miracle of Bali that from the embers of Modjapahit Java should have been ignited the fires which still burn bright in the neighboring islet.

Emergence and Divergence of Eight Radjadoms

Gelgel’s golden age flickered during the reign of Batu Renggong’s son, Radja Bekung, and died out under his grandson, Di Made. Radja Bekung engaged in an ill-advised adventure in Blambangan which all but provoked a full-scale invasion by Mataram of Bali itself. He lost the respect of the other Balinese princes, who became openly defiant, and he played host to the first Dutch visitors, whose arrival eventually proved to have been an omen of evil. But it was Di Made who suffered the undeniable, the irreparable reverses. He lost Blambangan, Sumbawa, and Lombok, and he lost also the allegiance of the other princes. Di Made’s successor, Gusti Sideman, abandoned the kraton of Gelgel, which was clearly under a curse, built a new one in nearby Klungkung, and sought to rule as grandly as had his predecessors. But it was already too late. The Dewa Agung was to be less prominent thereafter than various of his presumed vassals. Klungkung therefore never matched Gelgel in glory, but Bali’s silver age, which set in when Klungkung was founded, saw the island-wide dissemination of the Gelgel culture.

The Dewa Agung and his court in Klungkung continued to symbolize Hindu imperial grandeur but never again imperial power. The other princes became the Dewa Agung’s rivals and even his enemies; their own punggawa (chiefs) at times presumed to virtual autonomy; the pendanda (priests) sometimes assumed almost independent temporal power over villages and groups of villages which fell theoretically within the domain of the radjas. The ruling families, princely and priestly, were polygamously intermarried and easily provoked to blood feuds. Divination, prophecy, and mere superstition were factors of comparable significance to jealousy, intrigue, and military conflict in conditioning personal and state affairs. As the domain and the authority of the Dewa Agung diminished, there emerged a dozen more or less clearly defined little independent radjadoms. Eight of these still survive as geographic and political entities (now administrative districts). They are: Gianjar, Badung, Bangli, and Tabanan in addition to Klungkung in the South-Central region, and Buleleng, Karangasem, and Djembrana in the North, the Northeast, and the Northwest respectively.

The history of these eight Balinese radjadoms of modern times— and those of adjacent Lombok—is closely linked to that of Dutch colonial penetration. It is a story which remains as yet to be very accurately reconstructed from fragmentary and conflicting records, many of which are still lost in Dutch and Indonesian archives. Some inspired student may one day search out the sources in order to write what could be a classic of East–West relations as revealed in the vivid Balinese microcosm. For present purposes and with present resources, it must suffice merely to identify the protagonists and to establish the progression by reference to radjas and radjadoms.

The Dewa Agung and his radjadom of Klungkung survived but did not flourish, for the Dewa Agung himself was powerless and his kingdom was minute. Little Gianjar rivaled Klungkung as a center of traditional Balinese culture and even presumed at times to military might. But until the latter part of the nineteenth century, Gianjar was never at the focus of Balinese events, and neither were the neighboring states of Bangli, Tabanan, or, except for brief intervals, Badung. These states shared with Gianjar and Klungkung the fertile rice lands of the southern slopes of the central mountains and shared also the rich culture which rich rice lands nourished. Mengwi, a state of the center, enjoyed occasional prominence but overreached itself and was partitioned among its neighbors (1891), surviving today only in the loyalty of the people to the family of the traditional ruler and to the state shrines. The Dewa Agung’s military and political powers passed first to Buleleng, the large northern state which was the first focus of foreign commerce and international competition; next to Karangasem, the large eastern state which came to dominate also the island of Lombok; and eventually to the Dutch. Buleleng and Karangasem, sometimes friends, sometimes enemies, generally under the rule of members of the same royal family, were to become the two power factors of modern Bali.

Gusti Pandji Sakti, who came to the throne at the end of the seventeenth century, was primarily responsible for Buleleng’s assertion of island hegemony. By skillful political and military maneuvers he extended his own authority throughout most of Karangasem and Djembrana, exacted deferential treatment from the southern states, and concentrated next upon Blambangan. He listened sympathetically to an appeal from Mas Purba, the heir-apparent to the throne of Blambangan, who sought military aid in ousting a rival and resisting Mataram pressures. Gusti Pandji Sakti sent an expedition to Java (1697), which placed Mas Purba more or less securely on the throne, but succeeded more convincingly in establishing his own claim to succession to the Dewa Agung’s former power. But Gusti Pandji Sakti’s son-in-law, Gusti Agung Sakti, the ruler of Mengwi, presently usurped his father-in-law’s own kingdom of Buleleng (1711). He went on to consolidate his position by another adventure in Java, where Mas Purba had wavered in loyalty and flirted both with Mataram and the Dutch. The joint radjadom of Buleleng–Mengwi flourished for the better part of the eighteenth century but then separated again and forfeited power to Karangasem.

Karangasem began its rise to prominence by seizing the opportunity to champion Balinese interests in Lombok at a time when Buleleng was preoccupied by exploits in Java. Upon slipping from Balinese control in the time of Di Made, Lombok had fallen under the domination of Sumbawa and Goa (Makassar), sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. It had been subjected by and through these states to strong Islamizing influences. The paramount radja was converted to Islam along with various of his court; aided if not in fact compelled by soldiers from Sumbawa and Goa, the radja then attempted to expel the large Balinese Hindu population already living in the island. The new Muslim clique in Lombok had to contend meanwhile with very troublesome little rebellions among the warlike Sassak tribespeople, who made up the greater part of the population. Karangasem found this situation conducive to its own endeavors to bring Lombok once again under Balinese control, an objective which, after half a century of intermittent effort, it quite clearly accomplished. By the mid-seventeenth century Lombok was parceled out among four weak little radjadoms, each ruled by a Balinese prince who owed his allegiance to Karangasem.

It may be of help in fixing in mind the main currents of Balinese history to do as many of the Balinese themselves do, which is to accept a much abridged version of events from Modjapahit times onward and to dwell upon a simplified pattern of conflict mainly between the North and the South. According to popular Balinese account, the Modjapahit conquest of Bali and collapse in Java occurred in quick succession and the leading characters in the former, Gadjah Mada and Arja Damar, accompanied Bra Widjana, the fallen Madjapahit Emperor to Gelgel to re-establish his court. In appreciation for his distinguished services, Bra Widjana named Arja Damar as Prime Minister and assigned him extensive lands to be divided among himself and his followers. Arja Damar received, in fact, virtually the whole of the lush rice growing area of the south which then constituted the states of Tabanan and Mengwi, from which later split off Badung and Bangli. To Gadjah Mada went the large but not so desirable central mountain region and the coastal areas beyond, out of which, presently, were created the radjadoms of Buleleng. Karangasem, and Djembrana. Gadjah Mada’s services in the Bali campaign had not been deemed especially meritorious, for he had idled away his time in various pleasures leaving it to Arja Damar to fight the major battles and to lead the main invasion forces southward from Buleleng. Thus there originated the jealousies and rivalries of two different sets of rulers, those of the South, who stemmed from Arja Damar, and those of the North, who stemmed from Gadjah Mada. The latter all but openly repudiated their allegiance to the Dewa Agung in the mid-eighteenth century. The former continued to pay homage and tribute, however meager, up until the late nineteenth or very early twentieth century.

Decline of Dewa Agung’s Authority

The conspicuous decline of the Dewa Agung’s own power and prestige, according to this reading, dates from approximately the year 1750 when there occurred a series of incidents which shocked all of Bali. The Radja of Karangasem, an ascetic sage of repulsive physical habits and appearance, generally so engrossed in meditation that he let his excrement drop where it might, paid a visit of homage to Klungkung in the course of which he greatly shocked and outraged the Dewa Agung. When the Radja set out again for home, the Dewa Agung gave orders that he should be ambushed and assassinated, and the Radja was accordingly murdered. His three filial sons immediately sought to take vengeance. They raised an army and marched into Klungkung to invest the puri. Some residue of respect for tradition deterred them from either killing or deposing the Dewa Agung or even depriving him of much of his realm. But they made virtual declaration of independence and returned home to rule Karangasem without much further regard for the Dewa Agung’s authority. The eldest son succeeded as radja; presently, he conquered Buleleng, where he made his younger brother radja, and then Lombok, which he assigned to the other. From that time on, Karangasem, Buleleng, and Lombok were more often hostile than amenable to Klungkung. But at the time of the Balinese–Dutch wars of 1846–1849, both Karangasem and Buleleng, but not Lombok, solicited and reciprocated the Dewa Agung’s support.

The long and the short versions of centuries of Balinese history, much of which, technically, is pre-history, converge upon one famous personage, Gusti Gde Karangasem, Radja of Karangasem at the turn of the nineteenth century, the gadfly of the Dewa Agung and the kingpin of a new coalition. Once having made himself master of Buleleng as well as of Lombok and having made his brothers the radjas, he next added Djembrana to his domain. He did so over the vigorous protest of Badung, which had recently treated that state as an appendage of its own but had tolerated the rule of a Bugis prince from Makassar named Kapiten Patimi. Karangasem put rude pressures upon other states as well and stirred up widespread resentment and resistance.

By this time the patterns of Balinese power and politics were becoming almost incomprehensible even to the Balinese, as is still further indicated by the sudden emergence in the late eighteenth century of the state of Gianjar as a rival to Klungkung and a military threat to Buleleng, Karangasem, Mengwi, and Bangli. Buleleng itself presently rebelled successfully against Karangasem (1823), and the Radja of Karangasem, Gusti Gde Ngurah Lanang, was forced to flee to Lombok. There he built a new puri and attempted to impose central authority over the mutually jealous little Lombok radjadoms, which welcomed his defeat in Bali as an invitation to defiance; he sought at the same time to force his onetime vassals in Bali itself yet once again to recognize him as ruler. Gusti Gde Ngurah Lanang thus did much to create the insular and inter-insular turbulence which the Dutch found conducive to the imposition of Western rule.