Bali


Bali is an Indonesian island and province and the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. East of Java and west of Lombok, the province includes the island of Bali and a few smaller offshore islands, notably Nusa Penida, Nusa Lembongan, and Nusa Ceningan to the southeast. The provincial capital, Denpasar, is the most populous city in the Lesser Sunda Islands and the second-largest, after Makassar, in Eastern Indonesia. The Denpasar metropolitan area is the extended metropolitan area around Denpasar. The upland town of Ubud in Greater Denpasar is considered as Bali's cultural centre. The province is Indonesia's main tourist destination, with a significant rise in tourism since the 1980s, and has become the country's area of overtourism. Tourism-related business makes up 80% of the Bali economy.
Bali is the only Hindu-majority province in Indonesia, with 86.40% of the population adhering to Balinese Hinduism. It is renowned for its highly developed arts, including traditional and modern dance, sculpture, painting, leather, metalworking, and music. The Indonesian International Film Festival is held every year in Bali. Other international events that have been held in Bali include Miss World 2013, the 2018 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group, and the 2022 G20 summit. In March 2017, Tripadvisor named Bali as the world's top destination in its Traveler's Choice award, which it earned once again in January 2021 and 2026.
Bali is part of the Coral Triangle, an area with high diversity of marine species, mainly fish and turtles. In this area alone, over 500 reef-building coral species can be found. For comparison, this is about seven times as many as in the entire Caribbean. Bali is the home of the Subak irrigation system, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is also home to a unified confederation of kingdoms composed of 10 traditional royal Balinese houses, each house ruling a specific geographic area. The confederation is the successor of the Bali Kingdom. The royal houses, which originated before Dutch colonisation, are not recognised by the government of Indonesia.

Etymology

The name Bali is attested in ancient Balinese inscriptions as part of the compound *Vāli-dvīpa*, where Sanskrit **dvīpa** means "island".
One of the earliest attestations of *Vāli-dvīpa* occurs in the Belanjong pillar inscription, dated to Saka year 835 / Phalguna month, under King Sri Kesari Warmadewa.
The precise meaning of the element *Vāli* in *Vāli-dvīpa* is not certain. Some hypothesized interpretations include:
  • That *Bali* derives from Sanskrit *bali*, meaning "offering", "tribute", or "sacrifice", thus rendering *Bali-dvīpa* as "Island of offerings" or "Island of sacrifice".
  • That *Vāli* may relate to terms signifying "power", or "force", or possibly be a phonetic variation common in epigraphy, which would suggest meanings such as "Island of strength" or similar.

    History

Ancient

Bali was inhabited around 2000 BC by Austronesian peoples who migrated originally from the island of Taiwan to Southeast Asia and Oceania through Maritime Southeast Asia. Culturally and linguistically, the Balinese are closely related to the people of the Indonesian archipelago, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, and Oceania. Stone tools dating from this time have been found near the village of Cekik in the island's west.
In ancient Bali, nine Hindu sects existed: the Pasupata, Bhairawa, Siwa Shidanta, Vaishnava, Bodha, Brahma, Resi, Sora, and Ganapatya. Each sect revered a specific deity as its personal Godhead.
Inscriptions from 896 and 911 do not mention a king until 914, when Sri Kesarivarma, a contemporary of the Kesari dynasty in the Kalinga Kingdom of ancient India, is mentioned. They also reveal an independent Bali, with a distinct dialect, being influenced by the Sanskrit and Pali languages, where Buddhism and Shaivism were practiced simultaneously. Mpu Sindok's great-granddaughter, Mahendradatta, married the Bali king Udayana Warmadewa around 989, giving birth to Airlangga around 1001. This marriage also brought more Hinduism and Javanese culture to Bali. Princess Sakalendukirana appeared in 1098. Suradhipa reigned from 1115 to 1119, and Jayasakti from 1146 until 1150. Jayapangus appears on inscriptions between 1178 and 1181, while Adikuntiketana and his son Paramesvara appear in 1204.
Balinese culture was strongly influenced by Indian, Chinese, and particularly Kalinga Hindu culture, beginning around the 1st century AD. The name Bali dwipa has been discovered from various inscriptions, including the Blanjong pillar inscription written by Sri Kesari Warmadewa in 914 AD, and mentioning Walidwipa. It was during this time that the people developed their complex irrigation system, subak, to grow rice in wet-field cultivation. Some religious and cultural traditions still practiced today can be traced to this period.
The Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit Empire on eastern Java founded a Balinese colony in 1343. The uncle of Hayam Wuruk is mentioned in the charters of 1384–86. Mass Javanese immigration to Bali occurred in the next century when the Majapahit Empire fell in 1520. Bali's government then became an independent collection of Hindu kingdoms, which led to a Balinese national identity and major enhancements in culture, arts, and economy. The nation with various kingdoms became independent for up to 386 years until 1906, when the Dutch subjugated and repulsed the natives for economic control and took it over.

Portuguese contacts

The first known European contact with Bali is thought to have been made in 1512, when a Portuguese expedition led by Antonio Abreu and Francisco Serrão sighted its northern shores. It was the first expedition of a series of bi-annual fleets to the Moluccas, which throughout the 16th century, traveled along the coasts of the Sunda Islands. Bali was also mapped in 1512, in the chart of Francisco Rodrigues, aboard the expedition. In 1585, a ship foundered off the Bukit Peninsula and left a few Portuguese in the service of Dewa Agung.

Dutch East Indies

In 1597, the Dutch merchant-explorer Cornelis de Houtman arrived at Bali, and the Dutch East India Company was established in 1602. The Dutch government expanded its control across the Indonesian archipelago during the second half of the 19th century. Dutch political and economic control over Bali began in the 1840s on the island's north coast when the Dutch pitted various competing Balinese realms against each other. In the late 1890s, struggles between Balinese kingdoms on the island's south were exploited by the Dutch to increase their control.
In June 1860, the famous Welsh naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, travelled to Bali from Singapore, landing at Buleleng on the north coast of the island. Wallace's trip to Bali was instrumental in helping him devise his Wallace Line theory. The Wallace Line is a faunal boundary that runs through the strait between Bali and Lombok. It is a boundary between species. In his travel memoir The Malay Archipelago, Wallace wrote of his experience in Bali, which includes a strong mention of the unique Balinese irrigation methods:
I was astonished and delighted; as my visit to Java was some years later, I had never beheld so beautiful and well-cultivated a district out of Europe. A slightly undulating plain extends from the seacoast about inland, where it is bounded by a fine range of wooded and cultivated hills. Houses and villages, marked out by dense clumps of coconut palms, tamarind and other fruit trees, are dotted about in every direction; while between them extend luxurious rice grounds, watered by an elaborate system of irrigation that would be the pride of the best-cultivated parts of Europe.

The Dutch mounted large naval and ground assaults at the Sanur region in 1906 and were met by the thousands of members of the royal family and their followers, who, rather than yield to the superior Dutch force, committed ritual suicide to avoid the humiliation of surrender. Despite Dutch demands for surrender, an estimated 200 Balinese killed themselves rather than surrender. In the Dutch intervention in Bali, a similar mass suicide occurred in the face of a Dutch assault in Klungkung. Afterward, the Dutch governors exercised administrative control over the island, but local control over religion and culture generally remained intact. Dutch rule over Bali came later and was never as well established as in other parts of Indonesia, such as Java and Maluku.
In the 1930s, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, artists Miguel Covarrubias and Walter Spies, and musicologist Colin McPhee all spent time here. Their accounts of the island and its peoples created a Western image of Bali as "an enchanted land of aesthetes at peace with themselves and nature". Soon after, Western tourists began to visit the island. The sensuous image of Bali was enhanced in the West by a quasi-pornographic 1932 documentary, Virgins of Bali, about a day in the lives of two teenage Balinese girls, who the film's narrator Deane Dickason notes in the first scene "bathe their shamelessly nude bronze bodies." Under the looser version of the Hays code that existed up to 1934, nudity involving "civilised" women was banned, but permitted with "uncivilised", a loophole that was exploited by the producers of Virgins of Bali. The film, which mostly consisted of scenes of topless Balinese women, was a great success in 1932, and was perhaps the main catalyst for the popularity of Bali among tourists. The Dutch also dedicated significant efforts to implement Baliseering politics to maintain traditions on the island, as well as preventing the Islamization of the Islamic sultanates from Java and banning Christian missionaries' activities.
Imperial Japan occupied Bali during World War II. It was not originally a target in their Netherlands East Indies Campaign; however, as the airfields on Borneo were inoperative due to heavy rains, the Imperial Japanese Army decided to occupy Bali, which did not suffer from comparable weather. The island had no regular Royal Netherlands East Indies Army troops. There was only a Native Auxiliary Corps Prajoda consisting of about 600 native soldiers and several Dutch KNIL officers under the command of KNIL Lieutenant Colonel W.P. Roodenburg. On 19 February 1942, the Japanese forces landed near the town of Sanoer and the island was quickly captured.
During the Japanese occupation, a Balinese military officer, I Gusti Ngurah Rai, formed a Balinese 'freedom army'. The harsh treatment of the Balinese by the Japanese occupation forces fomented more resentment than the former Dutch colonial rulers.