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

Story of Bali, Indonesia

Continued...

of all Brahmanas. Pedanda roles were perhaps the first inherent conflict to be documented in Balinese culture, but the priestly image was insufficiently appreciated as a perpetual generator of argument.
In 1917, doctrine about the twice-borns the Satrias and especially the Wesias remained obscure:

The caste of Satria's is subdivided into (1) Satria dalem - including the people of the princely families of Klungkiing, Bangli, and Cianyar, (2) Satria Predewa, (3) Satria Presangiang, (4) Satria Pungakan, (5) Satria Bagus. Title: Dewa for the man and Desak for the woman. The third caste, Wesia, includes a major group, the Aryas divided into Arya Sentong, Beleteng, Waringin, Kapakisan, Belog and Benchulu. Title: Gusti for the niz,,i arl Gusti- Ayu for the woman. In Karangasem and Lombok the Aryas were titled I Gusti. In Lombok, one recognizes also the Wargis, with the title Gusti or Dane, as the lowest class of Wesias; while in Jembrana and Tabanan a specific category of people from the Wesia caste bears the noble title: Salit
Such hints of regional variation later grew into Korn's monumental Het Adat recht van Bali ( 1932), which records, for example, how aryas varied in title, rights, history, and power across locales and kingdoms. Already in the Encyclopedia the definition of wargi (lower women taken by superior males, that is, hypergamy) and the notion of aryas as a special group of the Wesia caste strains against the feudal
analogy where aryas were envisioned as landed nobility. Difficulties with this arya scheme are most conspicuous in efforts to sort out the actual ruling houses by caste, with the obvious slippage between warna label and title indexes of status:

The rajas (vorsten) of Bali and Lombok belonged to the Satria and Wesia caste. Satrias (Dewa) were those from Klungkung, with the high title of Dewa Agung, and those from Bangli and Gianyar. The rest were Gusti. Although of lower caste, the princes as such stood above their Brahmana subjects (onderdanen) [yet they could not take a Brahmana wife. They saw themselves willingly regarded as the earthly representative of the godhead, and this exalted position accords with the fact that their decisions or pronouncements (paswaras) were more powerful than the law codes.

Special provisions that allow a prince to wed a Brahmana women to save his line from extinction here go unrecorded.
Earlier accounts had sensationalized the raja oppression of a worthy, democratic folk. Now that the colonial regime was stabilized, retrospects of the Balinese state were moderated. It was perhaps out of a high regard for the achievements in irrigation supported by the rajas that the Encyclopedia limits its tally of despotic excesses to these:

Naturally, under the raja administration the Triwangsa people had many privileges above commoner folk. They were only lightly punished for the same errors; t he higher the status the less the penalty, with the understanding however that servants and slaves to some extent shared the same level of privilege as their masters. Such things were rendered metaphorically with the words Kahaubaning waringin, which means 'enjoyed from the shadow of the banyan tree, For a pendanda the defilement from touching a corpse lasts only five days, for a Bramana, Satria, and