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

Story of Bali, Indonesia

Continued...

Chandala - potters, dyers, distillers, and [cattier dealers who are confined to the outskirts of villages. Accordingly, Crawfurd illustrates his History of the Indian Archipelago with two drawings made in Bali, one a Brahmana priest, the other a remarkably foreshortened portrait of a raja and his female attendant, both captured in that supreme state of lapsed psychological focus so characteristic of Balinese attending rituals and ceremonies.

Crawfurd's documentation of the cherished prerogatives of Brahmana s is enriched by direct comparisons with India. He gives detailed examples of contrast between Balinese and Indic food regulations: in Bali only the Brahmana s refused to cat with the inferior classes, and the raja drank tea prepared and handed to him by his attendants who were generally Sudras ( 1820). And lie alludes to a central paradox in Balinese marriage customs, lacking only the theoretical apparatus to elaborate it:

The superior classes may take concubines from the inferior; but the opposite practice is strictly interdicted. The offspring of such unions, as in continental India. forms a variety of new castes. A legal marriage, however, can be contracted only between persons of equal rank, so that the four great classes are in this manner preserved distinct (1820).

(With some concept of ideal actual to better characterize these values, and, with a graduated scale between concubine legitimate spouse, Crawfurd might have appreciated some of the particular properties of Balinese marriage values.) Suttee, cremation, the role of Brahmana s in state justice, deities and festivals are all compared and contrasted in a statement or two to corresponding traditions of India. The report concentrates on Kawi language, systems of chronology, legends of the migration of caste to Bali, tales from Indian epics, and other favorite topics of Brahmana literati. Finally, a few lines comprise the First tentative view of the relation of the state system of administration to local social and economic organization:

Each village forms a little municipal community complete in itself, having its chief, a deputy, a village priest, etc., cacti entitled to some small remuneration from the funds of the village.

The principle on which the land is assessed on Bali is peculiar, reconciling and assimilating the interests of the sovereign and subject. The raja is, by a sort of fiction, considered the proprietor of all the water of irrigation, and to him are entrusted what in these countries may strictly be termed the important functions of managing and directing it. Each proprietor pays a tax proportionate to the supply he receives and the revenue of the prince is in the ratio of the quantity he supplies. It is his interest therefore, to keep the water courses in repair, to construct new canals and to extend the cultivation (Crawfurd 1820).

To discern that a raja's power had more to do with water than with land was a provocative result of a few handicapped sessions with the Brahmana s of Buleleng in 1814.

Thus by 1820, Bali was classified as an atavism of old Java with a genuinely Hindu religion and state administration. These two holistic concepts of Balinese