Bali: Dharma’s Last Fortress

From protecting Java’s fleeing Hindu-Buddhists to resisting pressures to abandon its own faith, Bali’s story is one of civilisation’s most remarkable acts of endurance.

The last article in this column discussed how a tiny-dot-on-the-map Bali rose to the occasion by rescuing the endangered Javanese lives and over a millennium old Hindu-Buddhist heritage of theirs, and how it accommodated both in the manner of protecting and upholding the Dharma. While all that happened in the 16th century, it must have been beyond Bali’s imagination that it was destined to face itself a similar kind of struggle around 400 years later.

It all happened very dramatically in the 20th century, post Indonesia’s independence in 1949. The first and foremost virtue from among the Pancasila (Sanskrit Pancha-Sheela, meaning ‘five virtues’) philosophy adopted by Indonesia as the foundation of its state policy, pertained to religion; its interpretation prescribed faith in one God, and its implementation on ground meant accepting only the ‘internationally recognized’ religions established by a prophet and a holy scripture. This perfectly suited Islam and Christianity who believed in a monotheistic creed propagated by one prophet, namely Muhammad and Jesus respectively.

Last Bastion

Bali was the only Hindu majority island with a sizeable Hindu population concentrated in one place, though there were a few small Hindu community pockets scattered throughout Java as well as Sumatra. Although Hindu religion was not unknown in Indonesia, due to the country’s Hindu majority history of over a millennium as well as the fact of the Hindu background of not only the mighty Majapahit kings but also other famous kings of smaller kingdoms elsewhere who are remembered and lauded even today, the Balinese found themselves in a tight spot, having to defend their heritage against many odds.

In the opinion of the government’s Ministry of Religion officials, the Balinese community rituals were actually localized polytheistic and ‘animistic’ practices, and not Hindu, and therefore they could not be identified as Hindu. One of the arguments was that the Balinese model did not match with the Indian model, which could be recognized as properly Hindu. 

This was a shock of their life for the Balinese, whose ancestors had strived hard to protect their religion within increasingly Islamizing Indonesia for previous half a millennium, the spirit of which was carried forward by respectably accommodating the fleeing Javanese Hindu-Buddhists within their fold. The Ministry of Religion opinion was obviously coloured; it was possibly motivated by an unspoken Islamist fervour lurking within especially the junior bureaucracy of the state, combined with an overall sense of frustration over having failed in the attempt at declaring Indonesia an ‘Islamic State’ post-independence filled in certain sections of the polity.

The objective was to identify as many non-Muslim and non-Christian Indonesians as ‘animists’ as may be possible, and then branding them ‘religion-less’ as per Pancasila’s working guidelines, thereby making them available as potential targets for proselytization by the craving missionaries – both Islamic and Christian – where the competitive strength of the former’s resourcefulness and success rate was unmatched. And steps were taken exactly in that predictable manner – in the early 1950s, the Ministry of Religion empowered its local branches, manned mainly by outsiders, to encourage Muslim and Christian missionaries to convert and thus ‘help’ the ‘religion-less’ people to get a religion, so as to fit them perfectly Indonesian citizens, as was interpreted as mandatory under the first ‘Sila’ out of the Pancasila philosophy.

If this design had succeeded in its execution, the Balinese would have lost everything that they were proud of as their own – the religion as handed down by their ancestors, the unique culture that their secluded island had cultivated since antiquity, and thus their identity itself. The Hindu-Buddhist Javanese of the 16th century had succeeded in saving their lives, religion and culture by fleeing to Bali, though the hardest part was about severing ties with their ancestral land under duress. Now, in the 20th century, the Balinese were pressed against the wall in a bid to make them abandon their identity, though they would continue to live in their ancestral land. So, even if there was a contextual contradiction involved in the matter, and a change among the players, the theme of the game somehow happened to be the same – an assault on a specific cultural identity of a section of the population.

Battle for Survival

At that point, the great battle for survival put up by the Balinese resilience began. Some of them, especially the youth, sensing the upcoming trouble early, had turned to India, seeking Government of India scholarships and thus gaining entry in Indian universities and society, building their networks and seeking support for their cause of survival. However, in the meantime and as if godsent, an Indian Arya Samaj monk called Narendra Dev Shastri had arrived in Bali in 1949. While he settled eventually in Bali for the rest of his life, marrying a local Balinese woman, he became an inseparable part of the local community movement, which he actually led by redefining and reshaping the local Hindu belief system with all its paraphernalia, so as to make it fit well within the legally prescribed framework of religion, which was acceptable to the state of Indonesia. The fact that this battle for the Balinese identity was going on for around a decade and a quarter, ending with the official nod of ‘recognition’ from the Ministry of Religion in 1963, speaks volumes about the Balinese steadfast determination, Indian ingenuity applied by Narendra Dev Shastri and a great collaboration between the two.

(The writer is a Ph.D. researcher in international relations. Views personal.)