BALI GUIDE

BALI HISTORY

For a Balinese ruler faced with defeat, surrender was never an option. Traditionally (bali festival), the only honorable course of action was to end his life and set aside his temporal power in a fight to the death, a ritual of self-sacrifice known as "Puputan". Literally, puputan means "ending" or "finish", but symbolically it also encompassed the proper display of courage and loyalty that was inherent in Balinese kingship.

As the Dutch began to sweep through the remaining independent pockets of indigenous authority at the end of the 19th century, three Balinese kingdoms chose to end their independence in this dramatic way. Part ritual, part bravado, the Balinese armed with traditional weapons (indonesia festivals) and dressed in ceremonial finery, followed their rulers into the face of Dutch gun and cannon fire, then turned their kris on themselves in order to die with their king. It was necessarily an uneven contest as traditional Balinese weapons such as spears, pikes and krises were pitted against the artillery of the Netherlands Indies armed forces.

The incorporation of Bali into the Netherlands Indies was a long and bloody process that brought about the annihilation of each of the Balinese royal lineages whose rulers opted for honour through the ritual of the puputan rather than peaceful consession. In Bali this process of conquest had begun 60 years earlier with the signing of the Kuta Peace Treaty in July 1849. At the conclusion of this first major military encounter between the Balinese and Dutch, the north and western parts of Bali, Buleleng and Jembrana, had already lost their independence. Coming briefly under the governorship of the tiny landlocked kingdom of Bangli, north Bali had been administered by Dutch officials from 1854, and was placed directly under colonial authority when the Residency of Bali and Lombok was established in 1882.

For much of this period the Dutch were content to allow the rulers of south and east Bali to remain independent. Their effort to control Bali were actually assisted by the strong rivalries that existed between many of Bali's kingdoms. The ambitious ruler of Lombok (bali events) had gained control of the eastern kingdom of Karangasem in 1849 by allying himself to the Dutch, and the small kingdoms of Bangli and Gianyar had both recognized the advantages of concessions to the Dutch presence. In 1891, the same intense Balinese rivalries put an end to the once important kingdom of Mengwi when Badung, together with its close ally, Tabanan, defeated its king and incorporated all his lands into Badung (dive show).

H.M. van Weede, taking from his journal in Jakarta National Archives Museum, an eyewitness of the massacre, described the scene: "After the artillery fire stopped, the prince went there with his followers, women and children totalling around one hundred people, and there hidden from our view, they stabbed each other with kris. We found them together in a heap, the prince buried under the bodies of this faithful followers, as if to show that they wanted to protect him to the death, and the most beautiful young women we had seen in Bali lay lifeless next to their children. The gold sedan chair and other valuables lay there in the middle of the corpses."