Advantages
Music of Kebyar
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Mahendradatta
Music of Kebyar
Administrative

Story of Bali, Indonesia

Continued...

were constantly emphasized, rather than their equaly remarkable divergences for example, kinship and marriage. without raffles concep of bali as literal java minor to sustain the interest of the english and their dutch successors,the island culture would have remained in obscurity even longer.
Otherwise, the report on raffles reconnaissance mission in 1815 contains little general insight into balinese mores. his description of caste, for example, is inferior to the one by his less famous rival, John Crawfurd, Raffles is mistaken on point one when he assumes the princes are Brahmanas, However, Raffles correctly notes the existence of the optional marriage (sentana) in which a son-in-law resides in the house of his wife s father, and he gleans from Crawfurd two particularly anomalous customs. The bodies of the dead are burnt, except in the case of children before they have shed their teeth, and of all persons dying of the smallpox. Yet there is no effort to understand these variations in cremation practices. A contemporary of Raffles, Jonh Crawfurd, wrote a chapter On the Existence of the Hindu Religion in the Island of Bali (1820) after his study trip in 1814. Like later nineteenth-Javanese components. And like their sixteenth-century forerunners, both Crawfurd and Raffles saw many things that struck them as being anything but Hindu, but they saw such things through Hindu spectacles, and so had a distorted view (Swellengrebel,1960) Crawfurd provides the link betwen the initial 1597 characterization of Bali-Hinduism as a product of South Asia and the first definitive study in 1849 by the Sanskritist R. Friederich. Moreover, his Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Island (1856) presents a blend of practical information of custums across cultures. Contrary to the received stereotypes, the dictionary even hints at possible flexibilities in the Balinese caste system. A Waisya (Wesia) prince may even happen to take a fancy for the daugther of a Bramin (Brahmana) when it becames expedient that he should be gratified. Mr Zollinger, in his interesting account of Lombok, gives an example. The young raja of Mataram in that island, A Balinese, fell in love with the daughter of the chief dewa. In order to possess her a friendly legal ceremony became necassary. The Braming went throught the form of examplling his daughter from his hause, denouncing her as a wicked daugter. By this she lost her rant as the daughter of a Bramin princes (Crawfurd 1856). Yet, Crawfurd s account of Bali-Hindu religion cannot escape the limits of its age it adops as representatif the uppercrust. In Buleleng, Crawfurd interviewed Brahmens, in particular Brahmana Siwa priests, whose sect may indeed be denominated the national religion. He thus recount the pedanda Siwa slant on religious life their disdain for pedanda boda in Karangasem kindom, the origins of the four warnas from the body parts of Brahma; the existence of so-colled outcastes or