Introduction

Rice is the stable food of half the world’s population and is the world’s most important crop. Rice cultivation in Bali goes back at least 2,000 years. The current method of irrigation goes back at least 1,000 years. Sir Stamford Raffles was impressed by the rice cultivation when, as the British Lieutenant-Governor of Java and its dependencies, he visited the ruler of Buleleng in North Bali in 1815.

Words for rice

Rice is the staple diet of the Balinese. The word nasi (rice) also means “meal”. The Balinese cannot really conceive of a meal without rice and the number of words for rice indicates its importance:

Padi

Rice growing in the field or rice that has been cut but not threshed, or cut and threshed, but not husked (the husk and bran are removed at the mill, or in the old days by pounding with a mortar and pestle); the English word “paddy” comes from padi.

Gabah

Unmilled rice that has been separated from the stems.

Beras

Milled, uncooked rice.

Nasi

Cooked rice.

Nasi – Cooked Rice.

Types of rice

There are three different types of rice:

Barak

Red rice.

Injin

Black rice, which is in fact a dark, blackberry purple.

Ketan

White sticky, glutinous rice.

Balinese Black Rice.

Available to eat at Murni’s Warung.

There are four sacred directions, each of which has a sacred colour, red, black, white and yellow. God intended to give the Balinese rice of all these colours, but there was a problem in transmission. Siwa sent a bird to bring the rice to the Balinese but the bird ate the yellow rice – except for a little bit which it planted under the eaves of its house. From the seeds grew turmeric, kunyit. Yellow rice does not grow in Bali, but mixing white rice with turmeric can make it. This is the fourth type of rice. Offerings of yellow rice are needed for certain offerings, and especially during Kuningan: see the chapter entitled Balinese Ceremonies in Secrets of Bali for an explanation of Kuningan.

New or miracle rice

Rice grows very well in Bali and the quality is excellent. Padi Bali is the old traditional Balinese rice, grown from time immemorial, but now largely replaced by “new” or “miracle” rice. Padi Bali takes 210 days to grow, the length of the Balinese year.

During the 1950s Indonesia was forced to import nearly one million tons of rice every year. After 1965, Suharto made self-sufficiency a major goal. Oil revenues in the late 1960s were invested in setting up bureaucracies and Bali was one of the first targets for the Green Revolution.

See Secrets of Bali for details of the so-called Green Revolution.

In the well irrigated south of Bali, rice is wet rice, while in the dryer areas to the north, dry rice is grown. Dry rice produces only one rain-fed crop a year.

World market

Indonesia does not figure in the leading world rice exporters. They are Thailand, Vietnam, China, the United States, Pakistan, India and Burma – in that order. According to the year 2000 figures, annual exports by them totalled 18 million tons. Apart from the United States, they account for 70 per cent. of the world’s rice exports.

Rice cycle

Just before planting, the fields are flooded and ploughed by cows. Tractors are used in Bali, but not in these parts. The fields look like reflecting mirrors. Then they are fertilized. After planting – by hand over several days – the yellow-green shoots of young rice sprout up. The little seedlings are reflected in the silvery water. This is a dangerous time. Scarecrows, wind chimes, bamboo bird-scarers and pulleys of cloth are put up to frighten the birds. People keep watch and yell at them.

Women Preparing Rice 1860s – 70s.

Two months later the rice will have grown taller and green. When they turn, the plants are mature and ready to harvest. It takes about five months in all. After harvesting, the stubble in the fields is burnt or alternatively flooded, so that the old rice stalks slowly decompose under the water.

Ceremonies

Balinese Offerings for the Rice Goddess, Dewi Sri.

The divine rice plant is considered an animated female being and is treated with particular respect. Each stage is carried out on an auspicious day, accompanied by appropriate offerings. Rites of passage, just like for a human being, are conducted.

Some of the rituals are carried out by the farmer at a small temporary shrine in the upstream corner of the field, others at the water temples. The rites include water opening, field preparations, transplanting, growth, panicle appearance, flowering and harvesting.

The upstream corner of the rice field is sacred. Here offerings are made to Dewi Sri. At harvest time a sacred image of Dewi Sri herself is made from rice that grows closest to this spot. It is not eaten but carried to the rice barn and given offerings.

Subaks

Control of irrigation, which is water coming from a higher source and directed into the many terraced rice paddies, is very important to the life of the population. It requires the rice farmers to co-operate with each other in social units, as mentioned in the chapter entitled Balinese Organisations in Secrets of Bali.

Water temples

The powers of the water temples, and the Temple of the Crater Lake, Batur as the supreme water temple, are therefore considerable and considerably important. The Dutch didn’t understand this. They didn’t have to. They were religious matters as far as they were concerned and posed no threat to their interests. The Dutch were more concerned about collecting tax.

The Indonesian Government also didn’t understand the water temples or even know about them. They passed laws demanding constant cropping of the new rice and farmers were forced to abandon traditional cropping patterns. Soon there was chaos in water scheduling and terrible outbreaks of pests.

It was not until well into the 1980s that the role of the water temples was appreciated, thanks largely to anthropologist Stephen Lansing, who has written a lucid account of his research in a book called Priests and Programmers. See Secrets of Bali  for the details.

For more details on the Temple of the Lake see the chapter entitled Famous Balinese Temples in Secrets of Bali.

Dewi Sri

The Rice goddess, Dewi Sri, is the favourite manifestation of God amongst the Balinese. She is male and female, as indeed are all the gods, people and things in the cosmos. At important times in the rice cycle, images of Dewi Sri, made of rice stalks, are set up in the rice fields, in the shape of two triangles, with a pinched waist. This is called a Cili.

There is a nice story of Dewi Sri’s origin in Secrets of Bali.

Dewi Sri, as befits her importance, is a symbol of Bali and appears everywhere in many guises. Anthropomorphic deities, like Dewi Sri, evoke and remind us of the human presence in engineered landscapes.

Paddy fields

Rice paddies do not just produce rice. They produce a lot of protein. There are eels, frogs and fish in the paddies. There are also dragonflies. Little kids hunt the dragonflies with long, sticky rods, pull off their wings, pierce them alive on a stick, roast and eat them.

Rice Paddies.

The rice paddies also provide a living for Balinese ducks, which, by the way, cannot fly. Read their contribution and how they inspired numerous paintings in Secrets of Bali.

Genetic Code of Rice

In April 2002 the genetic code of rice was published and it was discovered that rice has 15,000 more genes than humans. See more in Secrets of Bali.

Balinese Rice

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The First Balinese

The first wave of humans moved east out of Africa. About 1.8 million years ago they are believed to have reached China. At that time the levels of the sea rose and fell many times so they could have made it by land to Java. Later it would have to have been a journey by sea.

China domesticated rice about 8,000 years ago. Linguists and archaeologists are widely agreed that the first Austronesian settlers sailed south from southern China via Taiwan and the Philippines into Indonesia between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, cultivating rice as they went. They probably moved because of a population explosion. There is genetic evidence as well. It had been thought possible that the Polynesians could have come from America and not Asia – as Thor Heyerdahl had suggested in the Kon-Tiki expedition – but genetics has now shown this to be incorrect and that their journey began in coastal China or Taiwan.

Between 3000 BC and 400 AD, a period of nearly 4,000 years, they had colonized most of the inhabitable islands of the Pacific from the Philippines to Hawaii and Easter Island. They also settled on Malaya’s coasts, south Vietnam and even Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. In these places, the Austronesian family of languages survives.

In the Philippines, one group went east and another group went west. The one moving west towards Indonesia spoke Malayo-Polynesian languages, to which Balinese belongs. They had several religious practices that resemble Bali’s religion closely. Probably between 2,500 and 3,000 years ago they reached West Indonesia. Nothing is known about the people who lived in Bali (and there would have been some) before then.

Perhaps these early seafarers kept moving because of population pressures. Or maybe they were reacting to volcanoes, earthquakes, typhoons or other natural disasters. The monsoon winds would have helped them as long as they kept near the equator.

There is archaeological evidence of habitation about 2,000 years ago at two sites in Bali, one in Gilimanuk on the northwest coast and the other in Sembiran in the north-centre. Read more about it in Secrets of Bali.

Rsi Markandeya

The alternative story is that Rsi Markandeya, a great Siwaite Hindu saint, was the first person to set foot on Bali, when it was still joined to Java, around the end of the 8th century. Read more about it in Secrets of Bali.

The Metal Age

In northeast Vietnam, about 500 BC to 300 BC, around the Dong-Son area in the North Annam region there was a flourishing metalworking culture. Richly decorated gong-like drums, which were probably imported by Indian traders, were first starting to appear at this time. They were favourites amongst the Indonesians.

By at least the first century AD Bali had acquired the skills to cast or smelt copper, bronze and iron. It may be, although there is a debate about it that the massive Pejeng kettledrum, called the Pejeng Moon, was made in Bali. It is still in the imperial temple, Pura Panataran Sasih, Pejeng, not far from Ubud. It is housed three meters above the ground, so it is wise to bring binoculars.

Read more about it in Secrets of Bali.

India and China

Trade with India began in the first century AD. Indian ceramics of that period have been found in Bali. The Indians were just interested in trade, not conquest or migration.

The Chinese were also trading with Indonesia by at least 400 AD. They came as Buddhist monks, traders and emissaries of the Middle Kingdom. Ships sailed back and forth between India, Indonesia and China. The Chinese scholar, Yi-tsing, reported in 670 AD that he had visited a Buddhist country called Bali.

The Indians also introduced religions to Indonesia. By the 5th century AD a Hindu kingdom had been founded. By the 600s one of the kings of Sumatra was a Buddhist and the town of Palembang, a centre of Chinese trade, was much influenced by Buddhists coming from India and China. The kingdom of Srivijaya, around modern Palembang, in fact became a major centre of Mahayana Buddhism, whose political influence was felt all the way up the Malayan peninsula as far as Thailand. Monks and priests travelled to Bali from the kingdom of Srivijaya.

The first photograph of Borobudur by Isidore van Kinsbergen after its first restoration about 1873. A Dutch flag is flying on top of the main dome.

There were probably Buddhists in Java in the 5th century and certainly by the 8th century AD. In Java the great Sailendra dynasty built the largest Buddhist temple in the world, a great stepped, pyramid-shaped mandala, Borobudur, on the outskirts of Jogjakarta in south Java, some time between 750 and 850 AD.

The Javanese kingdom of Mataram assumed regional power in the mid-9th century.

Just as the dominance of Buddhism throughout the eastern half of Asia seemed inevitable, Islam attacked successfully. It moved into the Malay Peninsula and then captured most of the Indonesian islands, but not Bali. In east Java an early Islamic tombstone carved in about 1082 has been found. Islam swept through the southern part of the Philippines.

The Early Balinese Kings

The earliest evidence of kingship is from seven bronze edicts in Old Balinese from 882 – 914 AD. They are dated according to the Indian Saka calendar, which shows Indian influence. It is likely that the local rulers were impressed by stories of the Indian rajas and, wanting to strengthen their own control, asked for advice from the Brahman priests. The rituals of these powerful priests would supernaturally legitimise an increase in the ruler’s power. The princes tried to associate themselves with Indian culture as much as possible and created family trees with roots in Indian culture. They claimed to be temporary incarnations of the Hindu gods.

The link between divinity and kingship is not only a Balinese concept. King Solomon was anointed by Zadok the Priest. Anointing is reserved for priests, prophets and kings and forms the central part of the coronation ceremony of the English monarch.

The earliest ruler is Kesari Warmadewa, three of whose inscriptions have been found. He ruled around 913. This is probably the same man as Sri Wira Dalem Kesari, who is said to have built a palace at Besakih, the present day Merajan Selonding being his place of worship. He is said to have enlarged Pura Panataran Agung, which was then a small and simple temple, as well as building some other Besakih temples.

Nine subsequent bronze edicts, from 915 – 942 AD, show the kings using Indianized names.

Historical finds suggest that the capital was in the region of Intaran/Pejeng and Bedulu. Read more about it in Secrets of Bali.

It was a feudal system. The king and the court offered protection and mediated in village disputes. In return the villagers provided services, maintained temples, carried out rituals and ceremonies. They paid taxes and on request provided the king with armed guards. Communications between the king and the commoners were through the village council.

There are references to weavers, iron and goldsmiths, irrigation tunnel builders, carpenters, masons, shipbuilders, musicians, singers and dancers. These specialisations suggest a healthy surplus-producing economy, which would have been based on wet and dry rice cultivation. Vegetables, cotton and kapok were grown and horses, cattle, goats and pigs were bred.

Relations with East Java

The Java-inspired marriage of the great-granddaughter of the king of East Java to the Balinese prince Udayana brought about a Javanization of the Balinese court. Her name, Gunapriya Dharmapatni comes before that of her husband in documents. Read more about it in Secrets of Bali.

Their two sons, Erlangga (sometimes spelt Airlangga) and Anak Wungsu inherited the right to rule. Airlangga was sent to Java and worked for his grandfather in East Java. He succeeded in uniting East Java, ruling it from 1037 to 1049, while his younger brother ruled Bali, perhaps in his name. Bali was therefore one of Erlangga’s domains and started a link with Java.

Erlangga developed a deep interest in a mystical, inner religious life and became a hermit. Tradition has it that he had the body of a king and the head of a Hindu mystic.

Nine massive, stupa-shaped royal tombs, called Gunung Kawi, near Tampaksiring, completed around 1080 AD, are evidence of royal funeral cults and strong Javanization. They are a short trip from Ubud and are reached by walking down 300 steps.

Java rules Bali

Bali was conquered for the first time in 1284. It became subject to foreign rule by the East Javanese king, Kertanegara, the founder of the Majapahit dynasty. Religion was brought back to and centred in the court. The influence of the mountain temples waned.

There were strong Tantric elements again. Black magic and sorcery returned. These concepts are still evident in today’s trance cults, occult practices and beliefs in witches and goblins, which are especially dominant in the south and south-western parts of Bali, and particularly in Sanur, Kesiman, Tabanan and Gianyar, where the court had the most influence.

Bali is independent again

Kertanegara was murdered in 1292 and Bali was independent again for another 50 years.

Java carves Bali up

For the Balinese, history really begins with the Majapahits and with a myth. The myth is that in 1343 the great Majapahit kingdom of East Java, then at the height of its powers, sent armies to Bali to defeat the king of Bali, who was a supernatural monster with a pig’s head, who lived near Pejeng. The Balinese therefore see themselves as the descendants of the great Majapahits – with the exception of a few pockets of aboriginal Bali Aga people.

Indonesian nationalists claim that the Majapahit Empire stretched over what is now modern Indonesia as well as the Malay peninsula. The actual area was probably only Java and some nearby coastal regions, with a nominal tribute being paid by other coastal states.

Following the conquest the prime minister and commander-in-chief, Gajah Mada, asked a Javanese Brahman priest for help in bringing the Balinese into line. The priest sent his grandson, Ida Dalem Ketut Kresna Kapakisan, who established his court and palace at Samprangan, just east of Gianyar, around 1349. He founded a dynasty that would last until the 20th century. He was born a Brahman, but had to change his status to a Satria, in order to rule. It is noteworthy that caste can be changed. He had the full support of Javanese administrators, who were located strategically throughout the island.

Kapakisan subdued most of Bali but there were a few areas that were difficult. Read more about it in Secrets of Bali.

Two leading local clans, the Paseks and the Bandesas, who traced their origins to Javanese high priests, collaborated with Kapakisan. They were given special tasks in respect of the temple system and village order. King Airlangga and Empu Kuturan had already entrusted these clans with leadership. (For details on Empu Kuturan see the chapter entitled Famous Balinese Temples in Secrets of Bali.). The Paseks are still influential today.

When Dalem Ketut Kresna Kapakisan died, his eldest son became the king, but he was weak and was replaced by his younger brother, I Dewa Ketut Tegal Besung, who moved the court to Gelgel, near Klungkung, on the southeast coast in 1383 and founded the Gelgel dynasty. Gelgel became an artistic centre.

He died in 1460 and was succeeded by his son, Waturenggong, and the court flourished.

Bali’s Golden Majapahit Age

Over in Java, in the late 15th century, disputes sparked off civil wars and the Majapahit Empire was declining. Islam had entered through Sumatra in the 13th century and at the beginning of the 16th century was making headway in the coasts of Java. They pressed inland and dealt the Empire a fatal blow between 1515 and 1528. The aristocracy, priests, jurists, artists, artisans and those unwilling to be islamised moved to the easternmost parts of Java and Bali. The descendants of the former vassal Balinese kings stayed in power and eased the process.

Read more about it in Secrets of Bali.

God-king worship also changed. Although he was still believed to be the incarnation of Wisnu, people no longer actually worshipped him. Nevertheless he was directly associated with the divine. As far as religion went, there was emphasis on complex classification systems and numerological and colour symbolism. See the article entitled Balinese Symbolism.

He kept close contact with ordinary people, travelled and mounted theatrical performances. Painting, literature, music and drama were promoted as useful propaganda for royal policy. During his reign, cremation, which was a privilege of the nobility, began to be practised by all strata. The Pasek and Bandesa clan members continued to be entrusted with temple properties and leadership tasks.

Nirartha

Government, caste and religion were reformed under King Waturenggong’s priestly teacher and poet, Nirartha, who came from East Bali in 1537. Read more about it in Secrets of Bali. See the chapter entitled Names, Titles and Castes.

Decay

With King Waturenggong’s death around 1558, the Golden Age went into rapid decline. There were tremendous rivalries, much scheming and inevitable decay. This state of affairs continued for about 100 years until eventually a new king, Dewa Agung Jambe came to power.

Gelgel seemed to have lost its power and was polluted spiritually, so the capital was moved to neighbouring Klungkung. The Gelgel period is therefore roughly 1400 – 1700 and the time of its dissolution was about the same time that the Dutch were becoming solidly established in the rest of the country.

Dewa Agung Jambe became the first king of Klungkung in 1686 and was known as Dewa Agung, a title inherited since then by all kings of Klungkung. For the next 200 years the Dewa Agung was the nominal, supreme king of Bali.

Allegiances were withdrawn from Gelgel and a number of tiny autonomous states grew up, ruled by powerful aristocrats, who claimed to be descendants of the nobles who accompanied Kapakisan from Java in 1343. They ruled as kings or princes. In the end Bali became nine small kingdoms: Karangasem, Badung, Mengwi, Gianyar, Tabanan, Buleleng, Bangli, Negara and Klungkung. (These names still exist as distinct administrations called kabupaten. Their chief executives are called bupatis). Yet they all regarded Klungkung as the highest royal authority. There was great rivalry between them, which was good for the arts and created great artistic endeavours – and still does.

So, Klungkung is the direct heir of Gelgel and Samprangan and through them the Majapahits.

Ubud

There is a story about the origins of the Ubud Royal family. Read more about it in Secrets of Bali.

Bali Aga

It is usually said that the Bali Aga people are those who were living in Bali before the Majapahits arrived from Java, although there is no evidence for this. Read more about it in Secrets of Bali.

Balinese History – Pre-history to the Europeans

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