Bali, or paradise regained

PAUL MORAND

In 1925, when I went round the world, I had never heard of Bali, and neither had most people. Cruises did not stop there, travel agencies did not mention it, the shipping companies did not evoke it in the soft colors of their advertisements, and after a night of dancing till dawn the ladies did not say, with a sigh: "Shall I go to bed or fly to Bali?" During the last three or four years the movies have drawn the attention of the world to Bali. Astounding burials, terminating in truly Wagnerian flames, strange ceremonies in which the participants stabbed each other, and many other delightful or mysterious rites, abandoned elsewhere, were thus revealed to our blase gaze. Things we had seen in the photographs or sketches of old travellers, or read in Chinese or Hindu narratives before the European conquest, things we had sought out in the smaller Buddhistic states, like Siam, Burma or Cambodia, actually existed in our own time. Could we really get somewhere in time, before the guides, the missionaries, the commercial travellers, the radio? Everyone rushed to this earthly paradise. There was a rush by the searchers for the Infinite, the prospectors of the Golden Age, those who had been merely disillusioned by the islands of the South Seas. The rumor quickly spread, in a world sick and tired since the war, that in Bali every day is a holiday, as in Venice in the time of Casanova. First it was included in one or two American cruises; then, at the Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1931, we were charmed and surprised by the Bali dancers. Nowadays a visit to Bali is compulsory; it is the Capri of 1932; it has taken the place of languorous Tahiti in the minds of college boys and in the hearts of women of forty. This last hit of Asia has been brought nearer to us by the new weekly air lines from Europe, by Imperial Airways, by the French Indo-China line, and particularly by the Dutch line, which brings India within four days of the West. A colonial hotel and bungalows have already been built at Den Pasar; Chinese merchants are installing themselves like worms in fruit; batiks are manufactured in Manchester; the inlaid porcelain in the walls of the temples is Czecho-Slovakian; opposite the coast of Java the women have ceased to go naked and cover their breasts. Let us hasten to talk of Bali, for tomorrow it will he only a memory, so true is it that men always kill what they wish to love. Bali and the tiny, almost independent principalities connected with it will soon have gone to rejoin in legend the Sultanates of Sumatra, the Negro kings of Conrad's youth, and the princelets who still survived in Samoa when Stevenson arrived.

Nature has traced such a framework that ugliness cannot live in it; architecture dominates this setting of volcanoes, towards which the rice fields rise in an amphitheatre, their great luminous surfaces giving an impression of stability. With their glistening waters these rice fields look like huge glass staircases, an ultra modern setting of such fragile brilliance that one would hesitate to walk upon them. A solitary slender waterfall, as crooked as the blade of a kris, connects these steps. At twilight one approaches them to catch the fading light of the sun. The Bakoengar, the Batoe Kaoe, the Bali Peak rise to a height of nine thousand feet, and the most terrible volcano of the Straits, the Batoer, elevates to heaven, like the smoke of a sacrifice, its double column of steam, above the volcanic lakes of an infinite blue. Nature in the very process of formation—the outline of rumbling craters, crowned with sulphurous flames, with incandescent chimneys, with "anger fires," as the natives call the volcanoes—which contrasts with the nonchalance of man. Bali is a hyphen between Asia and Oceania, a mixed island in which Malayans and Javanese mingle. It is an unstable and friendly island, settled neither on its idols nor its race nor even its ever trembling soil, shaken by profound and formidable explosions, a veritable cauldron, which reminds one of primitive Japan, but a Japan which no superior destiny had peopled with supermen, or called (happily) to take part in the life of the world, in the industrial struggle. Bali has remained an oasis of forgetfulness, tolerance and smiling indifference, and therein lies its charm. The natives look you straight in the eye, with no trace of an inferiority complex, whereas the Javanese lower their glance. Although the temples fly a flag (which, despite its being red, white and blue, is not the Dutch flag but that of the Hindu trinity), the religion which they teach has none of the ferocious partiality of Islam. Where they have succeeded in implanting themselves on the island, Vishnu and Kali have ceased their grimacing threats and have become softer in contact with the peaceful Sakyamuni. The propaganda of the Christian missionaries has no effect upon the frivolous population of Bali, entirely given over to dancing, cock fights and love. Dutch rule, humanized by long colonial experience, helps to preserve this last paradise intact.

At this time of bitterness and depression, one is ashamed to say so, but the inhabitants of Bali are happy. At every breath of danger in the course of their history, they bent their backs, like their own tall, slender cocoa trees, and survived the typhoon. War, pestilence, the raids of Arab slave-merchants, commerce, motor cars, noise—all the plagues, ancient and modern, kept away from them as if by enchantment. It had to be the Chinese who brought them opium and cocaine! The men, crowned with flowers, short but muscular. their chests bare, their loins enveloped in the sarong, give all their care to pleasure and all their leisure to the theatre. Death does not frighten them and is itself the pretext for the most sumptuous theatrical performances. I refer to burials. The women are the most beautiful in all Asia. They wear huge tubes of silver or gold in the lobe of their ears and, in spite of the weight, the carriage of their heads is upright and ravishing. Their chewing gum is the betel, which reddens their mouths with their black and rather badly lacquered teeth. All the hardest toil is theirs, until they have lost their youth and freshness, until their slender bodies wither and fade, and their uneven breasts flatten and fall ... in the hard labor of the rice fields. Meanwhile the men chatter, carry their doves in cages beneath an umbrella on market days or amuse themselves by tickling with a blade of grass two grasshoppers enclosed in a hollow bamboo. But the great diversion of the Balinese is their religion, which is wholly external. At all hours along the roads one encounters processions, a species of Asiatic Panathenæa: women carrying on their heads mixed offerings of flowers and food, on their way to the temples guarded by demons so terrible that they even make the children laugh, with their staring eyes, their wide nostrils, and their great tongues hanging down to their knees. In the sanctuary, priests, whose curved finger nails are shaped like elephants' tusks, accept the food which is offered, send the essence of it to the gods and eat the rest, the best portions being too full of matter to interest pure spirits. When, during the mystic dances, some one of the faithful tries to express his faith by plunging a knife into his body, the priests intervene and throw water in his face from a cone made of banana leaves. Religion accompanies every act of life: births, marriages, burials, the building of a house, baths. . . . The Balinese are afraid of water, which is curious when one has Malayan blood in one's veins. For him the sea, whose shores are of black sand, contains the evil spirits, and into it are thrown the sacrificed animals, all animals except the pig, for pork is greatly appreciated. The pig, if I may so put it, is invited everywhere and is entirely devoured, save the head and the bristles, which are offered to the ancestors. The Balinese like to get drunk, and it is when they get drunk that their dances are most frenzied, especially at burials and marriages.

The marriages are charming, being preceded by a pretence of abduction, as in ancient Greece. Then, before the altar the priest hits the foreheads of the betrothed against each other, the woman's hair is ruffled (an obvious symbol) and the pair take a bath together. Now the young couple must navigate between the reefs of life, between the innumerable lucky and unlucky days, the taboos, the fetiches, the orders of the chief, and the prescriptions of the medicine man, the taxes of the Dutch officials, called "white eyes," or the insurmountable barriers of caste. What do such things matter? Before everything a Balinese must be married. Bachelors are despised, and the phrase, "What good is she?", whispered at a passing girl, is sufficient to dishonor her. It matters little that marriage afterwards makes of her a domestic animal. As the natives rudely put it, woman is "a meal ticket"; she alone will give you daughters whom you can sell, thereby providing for your old age and procuring money for funerals. In effect, the Balinese have only one object in life: to be beautifully buried. Special religious orders come to embalm the deceased, turn his face towards the East, and wrap his body in a straw mat. For three days (eternal regrets are not good form) everybody wears mourning and discards their jewels. Then one tries to propitiate the three souls of the deceased by making offerings, and his remains are kept until a favorable date. Finally he is enclosed in a ridiculous fish or cow, made of paper, and cremated with great pomp, amidst many perfumes, and his ashes are thrown into the sea. As late as 1903 the widows burned themselves on their husbands' pyres. Once seventy-four wives committed suicide for one husband. Today in Bali, as in India, this charming practice has been abandoned.

The popular theatre, of which there is so much talk, has not been achieved at Moscow, hut in Bali. There the theatre is not cut off from life, but is related to it through religious ceremonies and family and civic festivals. In the neighborhood of a performance there is always buying and selling and eating. The entire population listens to interminable plays while eating spiced rice and sweets composed of sago and tapioca, mixed with fruit and flowers (in Bali they eat flower salads) ; they also eat bananas fried in boiling coconut oil. Any evening, during a walk, one may encounter by the roadside groups crowding around dancers and actors, the latter moving slowly to the sound of hardwood xylophones and copper cymbals. Every form of dramatic art is cultivated in Bali: the slow evolutions of the dancers, the grace of the painted boys or of the bayaderes disguised as phantoms or magicians, sword combats, shadow-shows (the earliest movie), plays in which the actors speak behind masks of leather or wood.

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In addition, there is a real opera, a dancing conservatory, far superior to that of Pnom-Penh in Cambodia or of Bangkok in Siam. The traditions of the sacred Hindu dancers, of the a psoras, as recorded for all time in their petrified gestures in the basreliefs of the temples of Angkor, are perpetuated in Bali in the purest spirit of ritual, and one can see them reproducing fictitiously the most celebrated scenes from Hindu mythology, the last survival of the Dravidian invasions. The civilisation of Bali is Hindu and the navigators from the Coromandel coast did not visit this island as conquerors, hut as peaceful merchants, bringing rice, the art of weaving and religion. At the time when, under the influence of the Arabs in the sixteenth century, Semitic merchants from Oman or Yemen, the neighboring islands, from Java and Sumatra, surrendered to Mussulman propaganda (which was hostile to external religion and to the Koran, from which the theatre is excluded > Bali succeeded in remaining Buddhist.

The mosque is not far away, nor the hypnotic necromancers, with their magic wands which protect the houses from fire and theft. Nevertheless, Bali remains, on the whole, faithful to the Perfect One, above all things, as Borobudur to the great temples long ago. Bali remains the Eastern cornerstone of Buddhism, against the dark paganism of the South Seas, the cannibal islands and the customs of the head-hunters. At the extreme point of the Strait, Bali is like a little Greek island in the vanguard against the barbarians, and it belongs to that Malayan Mediterranean where the cult of the divine Sakyamuni flourished a thousand years ago and extended from China to Ceylon. To Buddha Bali owes all the tranquil harmony of her manners, her spirituality, her tolerant religion of beauty. If today Bali remains prosperous, happy, profoundly indifferent to the foreigner, if she turns her back upon her nearest neighbors (seen from Bali, Batavia is already Europe), if she laughs, dances and still wears a garland of flowers, while the rest of the world groans and gnashes its teeth, it is indeed to Buddha, her master, that she must return thanks for this blessed peace.