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Continued... Wesia, ten, fifteen, and twenty days, respectively, and for a Sudra twenty-five. The corpse of a Brahman who dies of leprosy must remain buried ten years before it can be cremated, while that of a Sudra who succumbs of this illness must wait twenty five years before it may be subjected to the process of cremation purification and liberation of the soul. An Indian optic focused the Brahmanas - at least their specialist priests, marriage excepted - and leading Satrias. However, it distorted the Wesias and aryas and completely blurred the Sudras. The latter seemed simply to be relatively prosperous agriculturalists, far better off than their Indic namesakes. Moreover, Bali was praised for lacking true pariahs: The Sudras or Kaulas, although impure following the old Hindu opinion, were not despised in Bali and Lombok. Following Balinese conceptions those who deal in certain impurity-producing circumstances are definitely unclean, as for example, people who have drawn water where a corpse has been washed, or over whose heads excrement has been poured; people from the triwangsa who have humbled themselves before Sudras, etc. There is a graduated difference in the duration of the impurity. The lowest status in Balinese society (the Kaulas) naturally have no titles; as in Java, those who have children are called in daily life 'father of' (Pan or Nang) mother of' then follows the name of their eldest child. Apart from this in all statuses men were indicated with 1 and women with Ni, while between these prefixes and the proper names. A general rule for all statuses obtains that men can marry women of lower birth (noblemen, even Sudra women) while women can only take as spouses men of the same or higher status. The wife who belongs to a lower status than her husband is called penawing in contrast with bechik or padmi, the wife of the same caste. The children of
penawings and bechik are also distinguished with the same names, Sudras
were perceived in counter distinction to triwangsa. The unimportance of
urbanized market-systems and the general lack of the urban/rural dichotomy
so conspicuous in Islamized Java prevented the Dutch from conceptualizing
Bali's mass of commoners - sometimes said to be sheltered, sometimes oppressed
by the Hindu courts - as what we would today call a peasantry. In 1917
Sudras appeared to be mainly what their betters were not, which did not
always work to their disadvantage, especially in the more sensational
areas of courtly custom: |
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we must point out a very important distinction which the Balinese make between
two clearly separate groups of ancestors. The first of these groups consists
of the dead who are riot yet completely purified. This group is in turn subdivided
in pirata, those riot yet cremated, and pitara, those already cremated. The
former are still completely impure; the latter have been purified, but are still
considered as distinct, individual souls. The second group consists of the completely
purified ancestors who are considered as divine. Everything Bali Indonesia |
