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

Continued...

exposing, casteless mountain-peoples (Bali Aga) and the Hinduized population with its differential cremation rights, stretching from immediate burning for kings to eventual cremation after disinterment for ordinary commoners. Thus, according to later views, Van den Brock had confused Sudras with Bali Aga; but the intimate connection between death and public status was already obvious in 1835.

Van den Broek, if read carefully, represents a quantum leap over his predecessors. Although he perpetuates clichds of the absolute monarchy coupled with tile 'blind trust' of the king in his priests, lie lets provocative exceptions to this supposed slave-based absolutism filter through; for example:

After the cremation of the prince's corpse, both slaves were given their freedom and married to each other and given household goods, two buffalos and rice-fields.

Such passing comments highlight lengthy descriptions of rites, processions, and feastdays with their puppet theatre, dance performances, cock and cricket fight and gambling. Included is a knowledgeable allusion to marriage ranks:

Polygamy (veelwijwerij) is generally allowed; they can have as many wives as wealth permits; however, an ordinary Balinese seldom has more than one. Chiefs (Hoofden) usually have three, four or five, according to their rank and income, while the rajas commonly keep from eighty to a hundred or more wives, all of whom are considered legitimate (echtevrowen), although they occupy different ranks in accordance with the descent (afkomst) of each. The children also are all considered legitimate, and bear the title Gusti (which signifies Prince or Nobleman). They are classified according to the rank of their mother. A portion of these wives are fit for the public ceremony of the raja and accompany him in public, carrying his betel supplies, writing tools, toilet articles, mirrors, fans and so forth.
Later we shall trace the implications of this pattern in modern Bali well beyond the province of royalty.
Apart from its ethnographic content, Van den Broek's report is patently politically minded. He concludes that a European administration could only improve and expand the island's culture and that the rajas, while impressed with Dutch superiority in matters of war, still regard Europeans as monsters and continue to oppress worthy populace:

These folk, once having been brought under the authority of Netherlands' rule, should obey her command as willingly as they have respected their rajas, especially when they discover that their lot will be thereby remarkably improved.

Van den Brock later stoops to strategy: 'If the Netherlands should come to war with Bali, Jembrana would be the best landing place. Most remarkably, he pauses to project what a commoner must really think about his overlord; this supposed flow of Balinese consciousness is set in quotation marks:

1 am an insignificant creature (nietig wezen), of no consequence. The raja has the disposal of all my possessions, my person, my wife, and children. If 1 sink beneath