THE
COMMUNITY
The
Village
The capitals
of the princes' districts, the seats of the regencies, are commercialized
half-European, half-Chinese towns like Denpasar and Buleleng; but
the true life of Bali is concentrated in thousands of villages and
hamlets. With their thatched roofs they lie buried under awnings
of tropical vegetation, the groves and gardens that provide for
the needs of the villagers. Out of the chartreuse sea of ricefields
they surge like dark green islands of tall palms, breadfruit, mango,
papaya, and banana trees.
Underneath the cool darkness, pierced only by the shafts of sunlight
that sift through the mesh of leaves, are the houses hidden from
view by interminable mud walls that are broken at regular intervals
by long narrow gates. All the gates are alike: two mud pillars supporting
a small roof of thick thatch, giving access to each household by
a raised doorstep of rough stones. In front of every gate is a stone
bridge, or, simpler still, a section of coconut tree trunk to ford
the deep irrigation ditch that runs invariably along both sides
of the road.
A simple village consists
of family compounds, each completely surrounded by walls, lined
on each side of a wide well built avenue that runs in the direction
of the cardinal points; from the mountain to the sea, the Balinese
equivalent to our " north and " south." The villages
grew as they spread in these directions, and the Dutch bad only
to pave the main streets and extend them through the rice fields
to obtain the five hundred mile net of automobile roads that covers
this small island.
The Balinese, being still
essentially pedestrians, took good care to shade the roads with
large trees, and every morning and every evening one sees the people
in the streets, men going to work, nonchalantly beating rhythms
on their agricultural implements, or returning from the fields overloaded
with sheaves of rice heavy with grain. Poised women come and go
with great loads or shin black clay pots on their beads. If it happens
to be market day in the village, at dawn the roads are crowded with
husky people from the nearby villages who come to sell their produce
- piles of coconuts, bananas, or vegetables, pottery, mats, baskets,
and forth - carrying on their beads even the table that serves as
stand. If there is a feast in the village temple, the people parade
in yellow, green, and magenta silks with fantastic pyramids fruit
and flowers, offerings to the gods, in a pageant that you have made
Diaghilev turn green with envy.
Naked children play at the
gates by the bell-shaped bask where the fighting cocks are kept.
Each morning the baskets a', lined out on the street so that the
roosters may enjoy the spectacle of people passing by. Small boys
wearing only oversize sun-hat drive the enormous water-buffaloes,
which in Bali appear in colours, a dark muddy grey, and a pale,
almost transparent pink albino variety. A water-buffalo will not
hesitate to attack tiger; their ponderous calm and their gigantic
horns are awe inspiring to Europeans, who have been told that their
evening bath. the buffaloes. They have often charged white people
for no apparent reason, although the smallest Balinese boy can man
handle the great beasts. They love to lie in the water and be scrubbed
by their little guardians, who climb all over them and bang from
their horns when they take them for their evening bath. The buffalo
tolerates the children perhaps as a rhinoceros tolerates the birds
that eat the ticks on its back.
The Balinese raise a fine
breed of cattle, a beautiful variety of cow, with delicate legs
and a long neck, that resembles overgrown deer more than ordinary
cows. Ducks are driven in flocks to the rice fields, where they
feed on all sorts of small water animals. Their guardian is a boy
or an old man who leads them with a little banner of white cloth
on the end of a bamboo pole topped by a bunch of white feathers.
This he plants on the ground and be can then go away for the rest
of the day, sure that his ducks will not wander away. At sundown
the trained ducks gather around the flag waiting to be taken home.
When the duck guardian arrives, the flock is all together, and at
a signal from the flag, they march home, straight as penguins and
in perfect military formation.
All Balinese domestic animals
are rather extraordinary; chickens are killed constantly by rushing
automobiles, but their owners make no provision to keep them from
the road except the low bamboo fence that bars the house gate, and
that is intended, perhaps, more for the pigs, which in Bali belong
to a monstrous variety that surely exists nowhere else. The Balinese
pig, an untamed descendant of the wild bog, has an absurd sagging
back and a fat stomach that drags on the ground like a heavy bag
suspended loosely from its bony hips and shoulders.
The roads are particularly
infested with miserable dogs, the scavengers of the island. Most
dogs are attached to the house they protect and keep clean of garbage,
but they reproduce unchecked and there are thousands of homeless
living skeletons, covered with ulcers and mange, that bark and wail
all night in great choruses. The Balinese are not disturbed by them
and peacefully through the hideous noise. The curs are suppose frighten
away witches and evil spirits, but I could never disco bow our neighbours
knew when it was an ordinary mortal not a devil that the dogs barked
at; they always awoke when stranger came into the house at night.
Such dogs were undoubtedly provided by the gods to keep Bali from
perfection.
The Balinese make a clear
differentiation e dwelling-grounds and the " unlived "
parts of the village, for public use such as the temples, assembly
halls, market, cemeteries, public baths. The village is a unified
organism in every individual is a corpuscle and every institution
and organ. The heart of the village is the central square, invariably
located in the " center " of the village, the intersection
of the two-A avenues: the big road that runs from the Balinese "
, South " and a street that cuts it at right angles from "
east west " Consequently the crossroads are the center of a
Rose Winds formed by the entire village; the cardinal dir mean a
great deal to the Balinese and the crossroads are a spot of great
importance.
All around and in the square
are the important public. places of the village; the town temple
(pura desa) , with its assembly (bale agung) , the palace Of the
local feudal prince , the market, the large shed for cockfights
(wantilan) , and the tall and often elaborate tower where hang the
alarm tomtoms (kulkul) to call to meetings, announce events, or
warn of dangers. Also important to the village life is the ever
present waringin , a giant banyan, the sacred tree of the Hindus,
planted in the square. Under its shadow take place the shows and
dances given in connection with the frequent festivals; market is
also held there in villages that do not have a special market enclosure.
In ancient villages the waringin grows to a giant size, shading
the entire square and dripping aerial roots that, unless clipped
before they reached the ground, would grow into trunks that unchecked
might swallow up a village. A beautiful village waringin is an enormous
rounded dome of shiny leaves supported by a mossy, gnarled single
trunk hung with a curtain of tentacles that are cut evenly at the
height of a man; but in the waringins that have grown freely outside
the village, the tree spreads in every direction in fantastic shapes.
The aerial filaments dig into the earth and grow into whitish trunks
and branches emerging at illogical angles and filled with parasite
ferns, a dreamlike forest that is in reality a single tree
Somewhere in the outskirts
of the village are the public bath and the cemetery, a neglected
field overgrown with weeds and decaying bamboo altars, with its
temple of the Dead and its mournful kepuh tree, a sad and eerie
place. The bathing-place is generally a cool spot shaded by clusters
of bamboo in the river that runs near the village, where all day
long men and women bathe in the brown water in separate modest groups.
Some villages have special bathing-places with fancy water-spouts
and low walls of carved stone, with separate compartments for men
and women. Tedjakula in North Bali is famous for its horse bath,
a special compartment that is larger and even more elaborate than
the baths for the people. See By Bali
culture
More on Bali community 1,
2, 3,
4, 5,
6, 7,
8
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