Archive 'History of Bali'
by Putra - 07 Nov 2006 @ 5:20 am · Category History of Bali
At the time of Holland’s final conquest of Bali in 1906, the island was administered by autonomous lords and their officials. Each of its nine warring principalities-Klungkung, Karangasem, Mengwi, Badung, Bangli, Tabanan, Gianyar, Buleleng and Jembrana-was separated by sharply demarcated borders and each competed for the loyalty, support, and deference of the population.
In May 1904 the small Chinese steamer Sri Koemala was wrecked and looted off Sanur. The owners held the Dutch government directly responsible. The Dutch, in turn, demanded the raja of Badung pays damages and punish the looters. The raja, with the support of bordering states, refused. The dickering between the Dutch and the raja dragged on for two years, with the deadlock finally used as a pretense for the Dutch to throw a complete naval blockade around southern Bali.
On 15 September 1906, the Dutch anchored a large war fleet off Sanur and landed an expeditionary force of 2,000 men. Opposed on the beach at dawn the next day by Balinese attacking with golden spears, the Dutch started their final advance on Denpasar, trundling their cannons behind them. By 19 September they reached the town’s outskirts. The naval bombardment commenced early the next morning, firing the king’s palace and the houses of the princes.
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by Putra - 18 Jul 2006 @ 5:25 am · Category History of Bali
In the waning days of Sukarno’s reign, conflict increased between the high-caste capitalist class and communists pursuing a more militant role in land reform and harvest-sharing policies. Bali’s governor, Anak Agung Bagus Suteja, increased the participation of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and other leftists in the island’s administration and legislative bodies.
The PKI’s aggressive policy toward land reform understandably had tremendous appeal to landless peasants and poor tenant farmers. Land was seized unilaterally from rich landowners; landlord-employed thugs destroyed sharecroppers’ crops and razed their huts. Government offices were burned, scuffles and armed attacks broke out, religious ceremonies were disrupted. A full-scale civil war, drawn along class lines, was underway.
A series of ominous natural catastrophes also weighed in: rat and mouse plagues, insect infestations, crop failures, and, finally, the violent eruption of Gunung Agung. The mountain exploded during the holiest of Balinese ceremonies, Eka Dasa Rudra, a purification rite in which harmony and balance in people and nature are restored in all 11 directions.
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by Putra - 15 Jul 2006 @ 5:23 am · Category History of Bali
Revolution
On 17 August 1945, 11 days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Sukarno proclaimed Indonesia’s independence in Jakarta. Before the Dutch could return to restore order, Balinese militants moved to seize weapons from the Japanese. The subsequent war of independence against the Dutch lasted for more than four years. On 20 November 1946, the Battle of Marga was fought in Tabanan in central Bali. Colonel I Gusti Ngurah Rai, 29 years old, led his 95 guerrillas in a last-ditch battle in which all were killed by aerial bombardment-a reenactment of the ‘puputans’ of 40 years earlier. T
oday you see Ngurah Rai’s name commemorated on street signs all over the island; Bali’s international airport is named in his honor. Although Balinese resistance was broken, the Indonesians eventually won the war. In 1946 the Dutch made Bali the headquarters of their federal “Republic of East Indonesia” (NIT), which they backed as a rival to the revolutionary republic based on Java. Their plan was to one day merge the island into a pro-Dutch federation. The Dutch tried to build support among the people by promising to revitalize Bali’s devastated economy.
But the Dutch lost their chance at dividing the islands when they broke their treaty with the new government and launched a direct attack on republic headquarters in Yogyakarta in central Java. After this “police action” proved ineffectual, Holland formally transferred the former Netherlands East Indies-including Bali-to Indonesian authorities in 1949. The Dutch left behind their most precious legacy-a wildly diverse Indonesian nation welded into a unitary state.
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by Putra - 14 Jul 2006 @ 5:20 am · Category History of Bali
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.
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by Putra - 11 Jul 2006 @ 5:14 am · Category History of Bali
Early Contacts
Bali remained obscure in the West for so long because of its lack of spices, fragrant woods, ivory and natural harbors, and because of its natural orientation toward the deep straits and treacherous tidal currents and reefs of the south rather than the tranquil Java Sea. These factors tended to isolate Bali from the elaborate international trade, which swirled around it.
Bali was therefore allowed to evolve uninterrupted artistic and social traditions far more independently than other settlements in the region. But the island soon attracted notice because of its position at the beginning of the Lesser Sunda Islands. In the early 16th century, navigators started labeling the small island east of Java Major “Java Minor.” Not long thereafter the name “Bally” began to appear on maps.
The English buccaneer Sir Francis Drake paid a call in 1580. In 1585 the Portuguese attempted to establish a trading station in south Bali, but their ship was wrecked off Bukit. Finally, in 1597, a small fleet of Dutch war yachts, headed by Cornelius de Houtman, landed on Bali. He and his crew of 89 men were all that were left after a 14-month trading journey that began in Holland with 249 men.
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by Putra - 09 Jul 2006 @ 5:10 am · Category History of Bali
Over 400 years ago most of East Java was exactly like Bali is today. Prior to 1815 Bali had a greater population density than Java, suggesting its Hindu-Balinese civilization was even more successful than Java’s. When Sir Stamford Raffles wrote History of Java in the early 19th century, he had to turn to Bali for what remained of the once-great literature of classical Java.
Even today Bali provides scholars with clues about India’s past religious life, clues which long ago vanished in India itself.
The Warmadewa Dynasty
Bali first came under the influence of Indic Javanese kings in the 6th to 8th centuries. The island was conquered by the first documented king of Central Java, Sanjaya, in 732; stone and copper inscriptions in Old Balinese have been found that date from A.D 882.
From the 10th to the 12th centuries, the Balinese Warmadewa family established a dynastic link with Java. Court decrees were thereafter issued in the Old Javanese language of Kawi and Balinese sculpture, bronzes, and other artistic styles, bathing places, and rock-cut temples began to resemble those in East Java. The Sanur pillar (AD 914), partly written in Sanskrit, supports the theory that portions of the island were already Indianized in the 10th century.
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by Putra - 08 Jul 2006 @ 5:03 am · Category History of Bali
Homo erectus, a distant ancestor of modern man, lived in a part of Indonesia between 350,000 and 800,000 years ago during the time of the great Ice Ages. Fossilized bones of “Java Man” from this period were found in Central Java in 1890, and stone axes and adzes have been discovered on Bali, in the northern village of Sembiran.
As the earth cooled during the Ice Ages, glaciers advanced from the Polar Regions and the levels of the world’s oceans fell. Many of the islands of Indonesia became joined to the landmasses of Southeast Asia and Australia by exposed land bridges. The early humans, as well as animals, moved through these areas across the land bridges linking the islands. It is thought there were two main routes into Indonesia from the Asian mainland; one led down through Thailand into Malaysia and then into the archipelago while the other came down via the Philippines with branches into Kalimantan and Sulawesi.
Homo sapiens first appeared around 40,000 years ago. These hunter-gatherers lived in caves and left their rock paintings on some of the Far Eastern islands of the archipelago. The Neolithic era, around 3000 BC, is marked by the appearance of more sophisticated stone tools, agricultural techniques and basic pottery. Remains from this era have been found at Cekik Village, in the far west of Bali, where evidence of a settlement together with burials of around a hundred people are thought to range from the Neolithic through to the Bronze Age.
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