Dutch Administration
The Balinese became the darlings of the Dutch authorities. Indeed, the Dutch administration took a patronizing attitude toward the people and their culture, allowing the Balinese to continue using their own language and practice their own ‘adat’. Although the remaining pro-Dutch princes were deprived of political powers, they maintained much of their influence and importance as patrons of the arts.

We must also be forever thankful to the Dutch for keeping the missionaries out of Bali; it was more convenient for them to control the people through their liaisons with local leaders and let religion take its own course. So little did Dutch colonialism affect Bali that even up until the 1970s, before the building of the international airport, a rural Balinese village was probably very similar to a Javanese village of the 17th century.

Foreign visitors and tourists were vigorously discouraged from visiting Bali. A small group of dedicated Dutch officials safeguarded Bali’s culture, which enjoyed a rebirth during the first three decades of Dutch rule. One can still see in the highlands above Singaraja and in Denpasar steeple homes with double doors, wrought-iron grillwork gates and hanging porcelain lamps, remnants of Dutch efforts to Hollandize Bali.

The occupying Dutch were not, however, totally humanitarian. Although no rubber or tea plantations were established, as in many parts of Java, the Dutch took over the highly profitable opium monopoly. Starting on 1 January 1908, any Balinese over the age of 18 was allowed to legally purchase opium from one of 100 official suppliers set up around the island. Realizing a profit margin of over 90%, within one year opium sales accounted for 75% of the island’s administrative budget. Only a small portion of the money ever benefited the Balinese directly.

In 1910 alone, while the Dutch earned one million florins from opium, they spent less than 20,000 florins on schools. By the late 1930s, because of the combined clamor from Indonesian organizations and the Dutch Ethicists, the Dutch opium monopoly served only a few old die-hard Chinese addicts.

Discovery by the Western World
Over the decades following the conquest and occupation of the south, a select group of tourists, expatriates, actors, and celebrities adopted Bali as their private paradise, building ornate villas in Ubud and Sanur. These early sojourners would arrive on Bali by steamship at Singaraja, then motor south to Denpasar, invariably staying at the Bali Hotel.

The publication in 1926 of a remarkable book of photographs, Gregor Krause’s Bali: Volk, Land, Tanze, Feste, Tempel, mesmerized all of Europe. Krause’s priceless photos, taken while he was a government doctor on Bali between 1912 and 1914, revealed a culture, which had remained unchanged through the centuries. In the early 1930s a few documentary films, such as The Island of Demons from Germany and Goona Goona, out of the U.S.A., were distributed in America and Europe, bringing this isolated cultural outpost to the attention of the world. Bali by this time had also gained an underground reputation as a homosexual paradise; in 1935, a nightclub opened in Manhattan called the Sins of Bali.

The influence of such foreign artists as Walter Spies, Rudolph Bonnet, and Le Mayeur during the 1930s made a significant impact on the development of modern Balinese painting. An elite circle of foreign anthropologists, ethnologists, intellectuals, and musicians-Margaret Mead and Buckminster Fuller among them-were also drawn to Bali, devoting themselves to studying its culture.

Among the classic works produced in the 1930s is The Island of Bali, by the Mexican illustrator and writer Miguel Covarrubias. It was also during this period that the German novelist Vicki Baum visited the island, writing her vivid Tale of Bali in 1937, depicting the European conquest from the Balinese point of view. Dutch colonial officials and distinguished European scholars began to build a body of published work on Bali, anthropological literature with no parallel anywhere else in the world.

The Japanese Invasion
In the early 1940s the Balinese were rudely shaken out of the political isolation and benign lethargy which typified the latter years of Dutch rule. On 10 January 1942 the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies, landing troops on Celebes and Borneo. Denpasar’s airfield was taken on 20 February, cutting communications with Australia and the Indies. Bali was used as a Japanese base for the invasion of Java on 26 February. On 8 March 1942 the Dutch surrendered with hardly a fight.

During the ensuing three years of Japanese occupation, while the rest of the eastern islands were subject to the oppressive arrogant control of the Japanese Navy, the occupier’s treatment of the Balinese was comparatively indulgent. Nevertheless, Bali’s population suffered critical food and medical supply shortages, while the island’s transport system was almost totally disrupted. With his oratorical power and dominating, charismatic style, an ex-engineer named Sukarno (1901-1970) had emerged as Indonesia’s most forceful nationalistic political personality during the 1930s.

Sukarno cut deals with the Dutch to avoid being sent into exile; later, the Japanese used him to help them govern more effectively. During the Japanese occupation Sukarno seized every opportunity to educate the masses, inculcating in them nationalistic fervor.

In spite of their arbitrary cruelty and oppression, the Japanese offered an extraordinary and unprecedented opportunity for independence. The Japanese indoctrinated and politicized the Balinese, trained and armed paramilitary youth groups, and generally encouraged consciousness of what it means to be an Indonesian.

In April 1945, with the war turning against them, the Japanese even sent Sukarno and other independence figures on a speaking tour to promote nationalism. But the most useful contribution the Japanese made to Indonesia, in the end, was to lose the war.