Of ritual suicide, constructed spirituality, and wax prints
Whereas we saw few foreigners while in Yogyakarta, in the plane to Denpasar, Bali, there were more foreigners than we had spotted during our five days in Jogja.
Bali, not surprisingly, turned out to be overloaded with tourists. Indonesia’s 17000 islands get around 12 million foreign tourists per year. Just the island of Bali gets around 6 million of those. Yes, the island is pretty, but we quickly found that traffic is an absolute abomination. Almost all the roads are too narrow, but even getting around on a scooter, motorbike, can mean crawling to a practical halt whenever trying to get literally anywhere.
So, we had plenty of time to appreciate the scenery between the airport and the friend’s house we were staying at during our first few days. We drove past a Holland Bakery (hard to miss, as they have a Dutch windmill on the roof), which we had also spotted in Yogyakarta, and found wholly underwhelming. How could this be a successful chain of bakeries?
We hadn’t quite noticed a dual economy in Yogyakarta, even though, there, more typical tourist restaurants were noticeably more expensive than those frequented by locals. In Bali, the price difference was significant. In the tourist Valhallas Canggu, not too far from where we were first staying, and Uluwatu, where we stayed during the second half of our visit to Bali, prices were much, much higher at any venue frequented by tourists.
In Uluwatu, a meal at an eatery frequented by Indonesians would be around 1 euro. A meal at a restaurant targeting foreigners could be 10 times that, or more, depending on what you might be fancying.
Part of this insane price difference is a consequence of that Bali is one of the very few somewhat nearby holiday destinations from Australia that also cater to western tourists. Hordes of Aussie youth spend summer holidays, and long weekends, in Bali.
Australia is expensive, so anything that is cheaper, which includes meals that are 10 times the cost of what they should be, are welcomed with open arms.
Hipster cafes and restaurants are packed with Instagram influencers and digital nomads, sipping IPAs under signs that read ‘Eat local’.
Bali as a popular tourist destination, however, is a constructed concept, envisioned by the Dutch colonial masters, dating back to the first half of the 20th century.
The western colonial powers took a few hundred years to meaningfully control the hinterlands of the coastal outputs they started to establish from the 16th century onwards in what we now call the Global South. Part of their eventual success was based on navigating playing off local powers against each other, and waiting for sporadic opportunities to insert themselves into the local power structures.
This didn’t work for the Dutch in Bali. There, local kingdoms were decentralised, martial, and themselves adept at playing competing rivalries to stay independent.
After some mixed success in the late 19th century, fortunes reversed, in favour of the Dutch, during the first decade of the 20th century. In 1906, the Dutch attacked two palaces in Denpasar. In the face of what, after centuries of colonial aggression, must have looked like an overwhelming force, the Dutch were met by processions leaving the palaces, where all participants continued to ritually kill themselves, in favour of handing themselves over to the Dutch.
Two years later, this process repeated itself at another Balinese palace.
As an aside, this Dutch ‘intervention’ of 1906 was led by a certain Rost van Tonningen. Born in Suriname, from a family which, for a few hundred years, played a significant role in governance positions in the Netherlands. His son, Meinoud, born in Surabaya, in Java, became a prominent Dutch politician in the 1930s, representing the NSB, fascists which collaborated with the Nazis, and served as the president of the Dutch Central Bank during the war.
He supposedly committed suicide in June of 1945, after Dutch liberation, and was survived by his wife, Florentine, who until her death in 2007(!) continued to propagate the ideals of Nazism, becoming popularly known as the ‘Black Widow’.
A large part of the Dutch objective in Bali was to secure a monopoly on the trade of opium, then extending this to salt and coffee.
To exert this colonial control, the Dutch ‘froze’ Balinese culture, portraying the island as a ‘timeless’ Hindu enclave, in need of protection from Islamic Java, the island next door. Rituals, dances, and temples were preserved, but as a kind of living museum, laying the groundwork for the modern Western image of Bali we are all so familiar with today, and the very reason why every self-respecting spa, anywhere in the world, models itself after what its owners believe is an authentic Balinese aesthetic and spirituality.
In the service of exploitation, Bali was kept poor, with reenforced cast hierarchies to facilitate governance and control. But although the Dutch were forced to leave most of Indonesia shortly after the Second World War, the ‘Baliseering’ (Balinization) of the island, branding it as an enchanted island at peace with itself and nature, had triggered the tourist boom the island still benefits/suffers from today.
One turning point was the film Virgins of Bali, mostly consisting of scenes of topless Balinese women, and a great success in 1932. ‘Civilised’ (white) women were not allowed to go topless in Bali, but ‘uncivilised’ women were, which the film exploited successfully.
Bali became exotic but harmless, erotic but tasteful, and spiritual yet accessible, here turning women into symbols of colonial fantasy.
Under Sukarno, the first Indonesian president after independence, the concept of Bali as an exotic paradise, targeting western tourists, was abandoned. But, with the arrival of the autocrat and dictator Suharto, the paradisiacal version of pre-war Bali was revived in a more modern form, with significant financial success, benefitting the island while a large part of the profit chain is really controlled outside of Bali, but also bringing traffic to a standstill, and making every spa the world over look exactly the same, feeding on the idea of Bali being inherently mystical.
Traditional dances and ceremonies became tailored as tourist attractions. One such example being the ceremony-as-theatre at the Uluwatu Fire Temple. Spectacular, the show was actually developed as recently as the 1930s, by a Balinese choreographer, together with a German artist.
Originating as a trance ritual, it was repurposed into a performance art form for wider audiences, with a hint of its changed nature being that it is not performed inside the temple grounds, which are sacred, but in a dedicated amphitheatre right next to the temple.
This shows a kind of dualistic abuse; Indigenous culture is repackaged for exploitation, but it’s tourists who are forking over good amounts of money to be presented with what they are lead to believe is authentic. Probably because the theatre production consists of scenes from the Ramayana, when we visited, a large portion of the audience was from India.
Another example of attempted exploitation is how the Dutch colonial power attempted to corner the market on batik production. Batik is a method of dyeing a fabric by which the parts of the fabric not intended to be dyed are covered with removable wax. Hugely popular in the region, the Dutch thought they could take over the production and sale of batik by industrialising the process. Only to find that no Indonesian was interested to acquire the inferior machine-produced material from Holland.
However, at the time, the Dutch still had access to colonial markets, including West Africa.
After Belgian independence (from the Netherlands) in 1830, a smaller Dutch population meant a struggle for building Dutch armies of a size similar to before Belgian separation. One consequence was that the Dutch recruited a few thousand Africans from the Dutch Gold Coast, roughly modern-day Ghana, to serve in Indonesia. It’s speculated that the trigger for the popularity of Dutch batik in Africa was that, upon retirement, many of these soldiers ended up living in Elmina, where they had taken with them an appreciation for the Indonesian batik, which was made available to them in the form of the inferior Dutch copy, now known as Dutch Wax cloth, and since has become hugely popular in a range of African markets, with, now, Chinese ‘knockoffs’ having taken over significant portions of that market.
Fascinating histories, depressing colonial legacies, Bali is very pretty, but the heavy focus on tourism, the insane traffic, and the unnecessary high prices, means I’m not likely to return.