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

Continued...

quarter. This idealized third generation - with each brother passing a prestigious duty to his eldest son - signified that Marketside East was entrenched in the classical administration of Tabanan. Traditions then stress how many sons each brother bore and whether there were any patriparallel cousin-marriages, an auspicious union in a prospering group. The youngest of the three brothers fathered by First Secretary was sonless, and other Marketside East relatives settled in the south subhouse, but ideals of the descent-based ground plan persisted. Emphasis falls, however, on the eldest brother. He had two sons: the elder bore only one son, but the latter took ten wives (one a patriparallel cousin); the first six wives each begat one son. The third brother also advanced the group's demographic strength. He bore ten remembered sons - one of whom made Marketside East's first patricousin marriage - so many that he built a northern extension of the original central quarter. But by this time, elders note, the Dutch were conquering Tabanan. The last Marketside East first secretary died in 1908, but his descendants filled other important posts during the colonial administration. Furthermore, thanks to their fecundity, Marketside East's population surpassed five hundred by the early 1970s. But the population figure refers to one group only because enough power of internal diplomacy, and ancestral will, was marshalled to hold the successive generations practically and ideologically intact.

This imperfectly recalled, precolonial genealogy is important to modern Market side East because of privileges these predecessors reputedly won from the raja in matters of sex, status, power, and death, nearly everything dear to the classical Balinese. These current visions of past glories suggest how commoner groups often assumed royal prerogatives - an important phenomenon in traditional Balinese society.

Proud elders recount that in sexual affairs Marketside East was licensed to maintain, raja-fashion, a Haremlike assemblage of outsider candidate-wives known as chichirinan. In the raja's case these girls were the flawless pick of the kingdom and included specimens abducted from the subjects of his own collaterals. Picture, as informants did, the fathers of the realm nervously harboring their loveliest daughters, forbidding them to bear towering offerings to temple festivals, lest they be espied by a royal scout and hustled into the closely protected female quarters of the palace, where the eyes of male visitors were restricted to foot level. For there was slim chance a girl would become a legitimate low-caste wife (penawing) of the raja, thus placing her family in an ongoing, advantageous wife-giving relationship (wargi) to the court. More likely after affording a few years' licentious satisfaction, she would degenerate into a slavelike servant. Supposing she did ascent to penawing, the danger persisted that if the over enamored raja treated her in a fashion suitable only for same-caste wives (padmi). she might incur the jealousy of the lesser royal families and not live to become even slavelike - or so recalled current informants from the tales of their fathers and grandfathers. They say that a wealthy father whose child had fallen into royal hands would often pay a bribe to retrieve her. Or rather than take a risk, a less wealthy father might perforate any desirable daughter'