Advantages
Music of Kebyar
Commoners
Temporal Perspectives
Village Fields
Knowledge
Magnificent
Betutu
Evidences
Tropical
Mahendradatta
Music of Kebyar
Administrative

Continued...

The administration of justice of the Raden Pan Kertas The college of Brahmanas supported by each raja] is based on the paswaras in addition to tile old codes (wetbocken) of which a great number, certainly more than ten, exist, the most important being Agama and Adigama. The Agama law code is rich with provisions taken directly from Hindu codes, besides which appear others of Javanese or Balinese origin. In contrast with the village and irrigation society regulations - following which all members, regardless of their caste, are fully equal in laws and obligations - in the law codes and paswaras the caste system appears strongly in the foreground. Following the wetboeken, the fact that someone committed some offence against another of higher caste produced aggravating circumstances, while in the opposite case extenuating circumstances were assumed. A Sudra who seriously offended a Brahmana was condemned to death; a Brahmana who offended a Sudra was merely required to pay a fine worth a few dimes. If an inferior (toes bodily harm to a superior there results punishment by mutilation, such as cutting off hands or feet.
These harsh punishments and, perhaps even more, the prejudicial scale of penalties, dismayed Western observers. They hoped to purge such injustice, while preserving the legal spheres for irrigation and local custom and the old royal courts of appeals.

These, Balinese legal traditions created dilemmas for the Dutch administrators of the island. The indigenous system was found in many ways to be rational, in that laws were recorded, decisions were justified by precedent, and distinct spheres of jurisprudence were a long-lived institution. Moreover, in their local affairs indigenes adhered to principles of equality that abstracted individual legal rights and responsibilities from other social, economic, and religious attributes. Yet, elsewhere in the system certain strata of the society were set above the more severe penal code. Moreover, by reading between the lines of post- 1849 reports, it is obvious that no simple explanation of blind oppression could explain commoner support of such differences: The lower strata actually seemed to believe their betters merited milder penalties for ostensibly the same offence.

Dutch administrators in Bah might have been able to accept radical hierarchy in title, learning, residence, property, religious merit, and so forth, but never in legal, especially, criminal. proceedings. In the conflict of the two legal systems we can best sense the poignance of that storied meeting, and mutual failure to comprehend, between the Ancient East and the New West. In modern Western traditions it was precisely in these instances in which the suspected wrongdoer confronted the state that theories of individual equality had been most fully realized - in principle equality under law had been achieved. Wherever the colonial record describes the efforts to reform beliefs in radical qualitative differences among strata of human society - expressed most vividly in differential criminal accountability- tile history of ethnology becomes legitimately sensational: Western observers seem to have felt they were confronting Europe's own past before the Age of Reason. In terms of graded punishment whereby a superior's ritual purity mitigated the pollution of his offense, if in little else, the Balinese were 'feudal,' and the Dutch considered it their legal mission to enlighten them.