Bali: the Island of the Gods

Few places on earth have captured the human imagination quite as completely as Bali. Referred to the world over as the Island of the Gods, this relatively small volcanic island in the Indonesian archipelago has become one of the most celebrated travel destinations on the planet, drawing millions of visitors who come seeking its extraordinary natural beauty, its living artistic traditions, its deeply spiritual Hindu culture, and the singular sense of enchantment that seems to pervade even the most ordinary corners of Balinese life. Bali is an island where the sacred and the secular are not merely coexisting but inseparable, where offerings of frangipani and incense appear at doorways and crossroads, where the sound of gamelan music drifts across rice paddies at dusk, and where an ancient civilization has developed one of the most complex, beautiful, and harmonious ways of life that humanity has ever produced.

Yet Bali is also a place of profound contrasts and twenty-first-century challenges. The same qualities that make it so magnetically attractive to outsiders have also placed enormous pressure on its culture, its environment, its water supply, and the very way of life that tourists come to witness. The story of Bali is therefore not simply a story of an earthly paradise. It is a story of resilience and adaptation, of ancient traditions meeting the modern world, of a small island people who have somehow maintained the essence of their extraordinary civilization while absorbing wave after wave of external influence, from the Hindu priests of medieval Java to the Dutch colonial army to the global tourism industry.

Understanding Bali requires understanding something of its paradoxical nature. It is an island of approximately 5,780 square kilometers, roughly the size of the American state of Delaware, and yet it contains within that modest area a volcanic mountain range, terraced rice paddies that cascade down hillsides in breathtaking steps, dense tropical forests, dramatic sea cliffs, black sand beaches, coral reefs, and a human landscape of temples, villages, and artistic traditions of unrivaled density and variety. It is home to approximately 4.2 to 4.4 million people, the vast majority of whom practice a form of Hinduism found nowhere else on earth. It sits within Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, a nation of more than 270 million people among whom Bali's Hindus represent a remarkable and historically significant anomaly. To understand how this came to be, and why it matters, is to understand something essential about the resilience of human cultures in the face of great historical pressures.

Geography and the Volcanic Landscape

Bali occupies a position of critical geographical significance within the Indonesian archipelago. It lies between the island of Java to the west, separated by the narrow Bali Strait, and the island of Lombok to the east, separated by the Lombok Strait. The Lombok Strait is particularly significant in biogeographical terms because it marks the Wallace Line, named for the nineteenth-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, which separates the Asian and Australasian ecological zones. Animals and plants found west of the Wallace Line are predominantly of Asian origin, while those found east of it are predominantly of Australasian origin. Bali sits just west of this boundary, which means its flora and fauna belong to the Asian zone, a fact that distinguishes it ecologically from Lombok despite the relatively short distance between the two islands.

The island's physical geography is dominated by a central spine of volcanic mountains that runs roughly east to west across the island. This volcanic range was formed by the same tectonic forces that have shaped the entire Indonesian archipelago, where the Indo-Australian tectonic plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian plate, producing a chain of volcanic islands that stretches from Sumatra through Java to Bali and beyond. The result in Bali is a landscape of extraordinary drama: mountains that rise steeply from the narrow coastal plains, densely forested slopes that give way above the tree line to raw volcanic rock, and deep river gorges carved by streams fed by the abundant tropical rainfall that the central mountains capture from the prevailing monsoon winds.

The most sacred and significant of Bali's mountains is Mount Agung, which rises to 3,031 meters above sea level and dominates the northeastern part of the island. Agung is not merely Bali's highest peak but its spiritual center, the axis mundi around which all of Balinese cosmological thought is organized. The Balinese regard Agung as the home of the gods, particularly Mahadewa, a Balinese manifestation of Shiva, and the mountain is held in such reverence that every traditional Balinese home and temple is oriented with reference to it. The Balinese compass directions are not north and south but kaja, meaning toward the mountain, and kelod, meaning toward the sea, and these directions carry profound moral and spiritual weight that shapes the physical organization of every Balinese settlement, home, and temple compound. Kaja is associated with the divine, the pure, and the auspicious; kelod is associated with the demonic, the impure, and the dangerous. Human life is understood as a journey between these poles, and the architecture of every traditional Balinese space reflects this fundamental cosmological orientation.

Agung is an active stratovolcano with a long history of catastrophic eruptions. The most devastating eruption in living memory occurred in 1963, when Agung erupted with a violence that killed more than a thousand people, destroyed numerous villages, and sent pyroclastic flows racing down the mountain's flanks with terrible speed and heat. The eruption was particularly traumatic for the Balinese because it occurred during the Eka Dasa Rudra, the most important purification ceremony in Balinese Hinduism, held only once every hundred years. The coincidence of the most sacred ceremony with volcanic catastrophe was interpreted by many Balinese as a sign of profound cosmic disorder, a rupture in the harmonious relationship between the human and divine worlds that the ceremony was designed to renew. More recently, Agung erupted again in late 2017 and continued intermittent eruptive activity into 2019, forcing the evacuation of nearly 100,000 people from the flanks of the mountain and disrupting air travel to the island for extended periods.

To the west of Agung lies Mount Batur, a very different kind of volcanic landscape. Batur sits within a large volcanic caldera approximately thirteen kilometers in diameter, created by a massive ancient eruption that caused the original mountain to collapse inward. The caldera contains Lake Batur, a crescent-shaped lake of remarkable beauty that is the source of much of the water that irrigates the rice fields of central and eastern Bali. The sacred significance of Lake Batur is immense: the temple of Pura Ulun Danu Batur, which overlooks the lake and the caldera rim from its dramatic position high on the inner wall of the caldera, is considered the second most important temple in Bali after Pura Besakih, and it plays a central role in the island's cooperative water management system. Mount Batur itself, which rises to 1,717 meters from within the caldera, is an active volcano that has erupted numerous times in the past century and continues to produce eruptive activity that attracts volcanology researchers and curious visitors alike.

The southern part of Bali, below the volcanic spine, is characterized by gently sloping alluvial plains and a landscape that has been intensively cultivated for many centuries. This is the heartland of Balinese wet-rice agriculture, where the famous terraced rice fields that appear in virtually every photograph of Bali have been built and maintained over hundreds of years by communities organized through the subak irrigation system. The river gorges that cut through the southern slopes of the volcanic mountains are often very deep and dramatic, making travel between villages historically a matter of descending into and climbing out of these gorges, and they have served as natural boundaries between communities. The northern coastal region of Bali is significantly drier than the south, with a rain shadow effect produced by the central mountains. The town of Singaraja, the island's former colonial capital under Dutch rule, sits on the northern coast and was once the most important port of entry into Bali before tourism shifted the island's economic center decisively to the south. The western part of Bali is covered by the Bali Barat National Park, a protected area of lowland forest, coastal mangroves, and coral reefs that is home to the extremely rare Bali starling, also called the Bali myna, one of the world's most critically endangered birds and a symbol of Bali's unique natural heritage.

The People of Bali

The Balinese people are the indigenous inhabitants of Bali, a people of Austronesian origin whose ancestors migrated from mainland Southeast Asia and Taiwan through the island chains of what is now Indonesia over the course of several millennia beginning around 2000 BCE. The Balinese language belongs to the Austronesian family and is closely related to Sasak, the language of the neighboring island of Lombok, and more distantly to Javanese and Malay. The Balinese language has a complex system of speech levels, in which different vocabulary and grammatical forms are used depending on the relative social status of the speaker and the person being addressed. This system, known as sor singgih basa, reflects the hierarchical nature of traditional Balinese society, which is organized along lines of caste derived from the Hindu varna system that arrived with the Indian-influenced civilization of ancient Java.

Balinese society is traditionally divided into four castes, known locally as wangsa or soroh. The highest caste is the Brahmana, the priestly class, followed by the Ksatria, the warrior-noble class, and the Wesia, the merchant class. These three groups together are known as triwangsa, the three peoples, and make up a relatively small proportion of the total population. The vast majority of Balinese belong to the Sudra caste, known locally as Jaba, a term that means outsider and refers to their position outside the formal hierarchy of the upper castes. Despite the formal caste hierarchy, Balinese society is in practice quite fluid in many respects, and caste status does not necessarily correlate with economic wealth or political power in the modern world. Nevertheless, caste remains profoundly important for ritual purposes, determining such matters as the form of cremation ceremony to which an individual is entitled, the type of high seat or pavilion that may be built within the family compound, and the appropriate language register to use when addressing someone of different status.

The population of Bali is approximately 4.2 to 4.4 million people, making it one of the most densely populated islands in Indonesia. The ethnic Balinese make up roughly 90 percent of the population, with the remainder consisting mainly of Javanese migrants who have settled on the island since Indonesian independence in 1945, as well as smaller numbers of people from other Indonesian islands and a growing community of foreign residents drawn by the island's lifestyle and the opportunities created by the tourism economy. The population is heavily concentrated in the southern lowlands, particularly in and around the provincial capital of Denpasar and the regency of Badung, which contains the major tourist centers of Kuta, Seminyak, Legian, Canggu, and Nusa Dua.

A distinctive feature of Balinese social organization is the banjar, the neighborhood association that serves as the basic unit of community organization in every Balinese village. Every Balinese man and his family belong to a banjar, and membership brings both rights and obligations. The banjar manages the affairs of its members collectively, organizing communal labor for temple upkeep and ceremonies, collecting funds for community events, and adjudicating disputes. A man who fails to fulfill his obligations to the banjar risks expulsion, which in traditional Balinese society is one of the most severe social sanctions possible, effectively cutting a person off from the community networks on which daily life depends.

Balinese Hinduism: Agama Hindu Dharma

The most distinctive and defining characteristic of Bali is its religion. While Indonesia as a whole is approximately 87 percent Muslim, making it the most populous Muslim country on earth, the island of Bali is approximately 83 to 87 percent Hindu. The Hindus of Bali practice a form of religion known as Agama Hindu Dharma, a complex and beautiful synthesis of orthodox Indian Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, ancient Javanese Hindu-Buddhist traditions, and indigenous animist beliefs that is unlike any other form of Hinduism practiced anywhere else in the world.

Balinese Hinduism shares with Indian Hinduism the fundamental belief in the supreme divine principle, Brahman, and in its manifestation as a trinity of creator, preserver, and destroyer in the forms of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. The pantheon of Balinese deities includes these great gods as well as a vast array of spirits, demigods, and ancestral beings that inhabit every aspect of the natural and built environment. However, Balinese Hinduism places particular emphasis on the role of the ancestors, who are believed to return to the world periodically to visit and bless their descendants, and on the maintenance of proper ritual order through an elaborate system of offerings, ceremonies, and purification rites that permeates every aspect of daily life.

The origins of Hinduism in Bali are complex and much debated by scholars. While it is certain that Hinduism and Buddhism reached the Indonesian archipelago from India through trade contacts beginning in the early centuries of the Common Era, the specific form of Hindu-Buddhist culture that developed in the region was profoundly shaped by local conditions and indigenous beliefs. The most direct precursor to Balinese Hinduism was the Hindu-Buddhist civilization of the great Javanese kingdoms, particularly the Majapahit Empire, which reached its zenith in the fourteenth century under the prime minister Gajah Mada and dominated much of the Indonesian archipelago. When Islam began to spread rapidly through Java from the fifteenth century onward, the Hindu-Buddhist nobility, priests, and intellectuals of Java fled eastward to Bali, bringing with them their literature, their arts, their ritual knowledge, and their court culture. This migration, which intensified during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, transformed Bali into the principal refuge and repository of Javanese Hindu-Buddhist civilization. The Balinese themselves regard this as a foundational event in their history, and the legacy of Javanese Hindu culture remains visible in Balinese language, literature, dance, and ritual practice to this day.

One of the most profound philosophical concepts at the heart of Balinese Hinduism is the principle of Tri Hita Karana, which translates roughly as the three causes of wellbeing or the three sources of prosperity. This concept holds that human flourishing depends on the maintenance of three sets of harmonious relationships: the relationship between humans and God, referred to as Parahyangan; the relationship between humans and other humans, referred to as Pawongan; and the relationship between humans and the natural environment, referred to as Palemahan. These three relationships are understood as mutually interdependent and equally essential. To neglect any one of them is to disrupt the cosmic balance on which the wellbeing of individuals and communities depends. The concept of Tri Hita Karana is not merely a philosophical abstraction in Bali but a practical guide to daily life, expressed in the layout of temples and villages, in the conduct of agricultural work, in the management of water resources, and in the endless cycle of ritual observance that sustains Balinese society.

The visible expression of Balinese Hinduism that most immediately strikes visitors to the island is the extraordinary density of temples and shrines. It is often said that Bali has more temples than houses, and while this may be a slight exaggeration, the statistic points to something real. Estimates of the number of temples on the island range from ten thousand to more than twenty thousand. Every Balinese family compound has its own household shrine complex with a minimum of three shrines, one for the supreme deity, one for the deities of the sun and cosmos, and one for the deified ancestors of the family. Every village has at minimum three principal temples: the pura puseh or temple of origin, dedicated to the founding ancestors and Brahma the creator; the pura desa or temple of the village, dedicated to the village community and Vishnu the preserver; and the pura dalem or temple of the dead, dedicated to the ancestral dead and Shiva the destroyer.

The ritual life of Bali is sustained by an elaborate system of offerings, known as banten, that Balinese women prepare and present at shrines throughout the day. These offerings, which range from small daily presentations of flowers, rice, incense, and coins placed in tiny palm-leaf baskets called canang sari to elaborate ceremonial constructions that take days to prepare and stand several meters high, represent the fundamental Balinese religious act of maintaining proper relationship with the divine. The preparation of offerings is considered a form of devotion in itself, and the sight of women moving through the streets carrying tall towers of offerings on their heads, or crouching to place small canang sari before the family shrine each morning, is one of the most characteristic and moving sights of Balinese daily life. Across the island, billions of these small offerings are made each year, representing an extraordinary collective investment of time, skill, and devotion in the maintenance of cosmic order.

The Subak Irrigation System

Among the most extraordinary of Bali's cultural achievements is the subak system, the cooperative water management system through which the island's rice fields have been irrigated for at least a thousand years. The subak is not merely a technical system for distributing water but a social, ritual, and philosophical institution that integrates agriculture, community organization, and religious practice into a unified whole that embodies the principle of Tri Hita Karana in its most practical and visible form. It was recognized as a masterpiece of human cultural heritage when the Cultural Landscape of Bali Province, which includes the subak system and its associated temples and rice terraces, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List on July 6, 2012.

The subak system is organized around the principle that water, like all of Bali's natural resources, is a gift from the gods and belongs to the community rather than to individuals. Water flows from the mountains to the sea through a network of rivers and irrigation channels, and its distribution among the rice fields of an entire watershed is coordinated through a network of subak organizations, each of which is associated with a temple dedicated to the rice goddess Dewi Sri. The highest institution in the subak hierarchy is the pura subak or subak temple, and above that the pura ulun danu or lake temple, which governs the distribution of water at the level of entire river systems. The most important of these lake temples is Pura Ulun Danu Batur, which coordinates water management across a large portion of the island.

What makes the subak system remarkable from a scientific and engineering standpoint is its efficiency. Balinese farmers have for centuries maintained complex hydraulic systems of tunnels, aqueducts, weirs, and distribution channels that route water over great distances and across challenging terrain. In some cases, irrigation tunnels hundreds of meters long cut through ridges to bring water from one valley system to another. The system is managed not by a central bureaucracy but through a decentralized network of farmer-priests who coordinate water distribution through ritual calendars, temple ceremonies, and community meetings. The planting and harvesting schedules of rice fields across an entire watershed are synchronized through the ritual calendar of the subak temples, ensuring that pest populations are disrupted by coordinated fallow periods, that water is distributed equitably among all users, and that the interests of all farmers in a watershed are taken into account.

Research published in scientific journals has demonstrated that the subak system's pest management effectiveness through coordinated fallow periods is comparable or superior to that achieved through chemical pesticide application. When the Indonesian government introduced the Green Revolution program in the 1970s and 1980s, encouraging farmers to adopt high-yielding rice varieties and intensive chemical inputs rather than the traditional subak-coordinated cultivation calendar, rice pest outbreaks actually increased dramatically rather than decreasing, ultimately requiring the government to acknowledge that the traditional system was more effective and to support its revival.

The subak system has nonetheless faced severe threats in recent decades from the pressures of tourism and agricultural modernization. The conversion of rice fields to hotels, villas, and commercial establishments has disrupted the continuity of irrigation systems, and the intensification of rice cultivation using chemical inputs and high-yielding varieties has in many areas undermined the cooperative social infrastructure on which the system depends.

The Balinese Calendar and Sacred Time

The Balinese relationship with time is radically different from the linear, clock-measured time that governs most of the modern world. The Balinese use not one but two interlocking calendrical systems, each serving different purposes and together creating a richly textured sacred time in which virtually every day has specific ritual significance and associated observances that shape the rhythm of community and individual life.

The first and most distinctively Balinese of these calendars is the Pawukon calendar, a 210-day cycle that is used to determine the timing of most religious rituals and ceremonies. The Pawukon calendar consists of a complex system of multiple concurrent weeks of different lengths, from one day to ten days, that run simultaneously. The permutations of these different week cycles produce a pattern of days with different ceremonial characters, some auspicious and some inauspicious, some appropriate for particular activities and some to be avoided. The most important ceremonies in the Balinese ritual calendar, including the Galungan and Kuningan festivals, are scheduled according to the Pawukon calendar and therefore recur every 210 days rather than annually, making the Balinese ceremonial year significantly different from the solar year.

Galungan is perhaps the most joyful of the major Balinese holidays, celebrated on the Wednesday known as Budha Kliwon Dungulan in the Pawukon calendar. Galungan marks the victory of dharma over adharma, good over evil, and is also the occasion when the spirits of deceased ancestors are believed to return to earth to visit their families. The streets of Balinese villages are decorated with tall, elegantly curving bamboo poles called penjor, adorned with rice stalks, coconuts, fruits, flowers, and offerings hung from their arching tips, creating a festive canopy over the roads. Elaborate feasts are prepared for both the living and the visiting dead, and families visit temples together in their finest traditional dress. Ten days after Galungan, the celebration of Kuningan marks the departure of the ancestral spirits back to the realm of the divine, and is observed with additional ceremonies and offerings.

The second calendar is the Saka calendar, a lunar calendar based on the Indian system, which consists of twelve months and is used for the timing of major religious ceremonies including, most importantly, the Balinese New Year. The Saka calendar is the basis for determining the date of Nyepi, the Day of Silence, which is one of the most extraordinary and distinctive observances in any religious tradition on earth.

Nyepi falls on the day after the new moon of the first month of the Saka year, typically in March or April of the Gregorian calendar. It is a day of complete silence and stillness observed across the entire island of Bali. For twenty-four hours from six in the morning to six the following morning, all activity on the island ceases. No fires may be lit, no lights may be switched on, no vehicles may travel on the roads, no one may leave their home compound, and no work may be performed. The airport closes. The harbor is quiet. Even the internet connection is suspended by local providers in cooperation with the government. The island, which on most days hums with the activity of millions of people and tourists, falls into a profound silence broken only by the sounds of the natural world: birds calling, crickets singing, the wind moving through the palms.

The purpose of Nyepi is twofold. On one level, it is a spiritual purification, a day devoted to meditation, fasting, self-reflection, and the renewal of one's relationship with the divine. On another level, it is understood as a strategy to deceive the evil spirits and demons known as bhutas and kalas, who are believed to prowl the island at the new year looking for souls to harm. Seeing and hearing nothing, the demons are supposed to conclude that the island is uninhabited and move on without causing harm. The night before Nyepi is marked by the Ngrupuk parade, one of the most spectacular sights in Bali, in which enormous papier-mache effigies of demons known as ogoh-ogoh are paraded through the streets on bamboo platforms carried by teams of young men, accompanied by the crashing rhythms of percussion instruments, the light of burning torches, and the noise of firecrackers. The ogoh-ogoh themselves are works of considerable artistic craft, often standing several meters high and representing fearsome demonic beings with elaborate costumes, glowing eyes, and terrifying expressions. At the end of the parade, the ogoh-ogoh are burned to symbolically destroy the evil forces they represent, cleansing the island in preparation for the silent day that follows.

The Arts of Bali: a Living Tradition

Bali has long been celebrated as an island where the arts are not a luxury or a specialized profession but an integral part of daily life in which virtually every member of the community participates. Every village in Bali has its own gamelan orchestra, a percussion ensemble typically consisting of bronze metallophones, gongs, drums, and flutes, whose music serves as the sonic accompaniment to almost every ritual and ceremonial occasion. The gamelan is not merely entertainment but a form of offering to the gods, and the musicians who play it are performing a sacred service to the community. The repertoire of Balinese gamelan music is enormously varied, ranging from the stately and majestic sounds of the gamelan gong gedé to the rapid, interlocking figurations of the gamelan kebyar, a style that emerged in the early twentieth century and became the dominant form of contemporary Balinese composition.

Dance in Bali is inseparable from religious practice. The major forms of Balinese dance are classified by their relationship to the sacred: wali dances are performed inside the most sacred inner courtyard of the temple and are offerings to the gods; bebali dances are performed in the middle courtyard and serve a ceremonial function; and balih-balihan dances are performed in the outer courtyard and may also be staged for secular audiences. The most famous of Balinese dances to international audiences are the Kecak, the Legong, and the Barong.

The Kecak, sometimes spelled Ketjak and popularly known as the Monkey Dance, is one of the most visually and aurally dramatic of all Balinese performing arts. A performance of Kecak involves a circle of dozens or even hundreds of men, their torsos bare and wearing black-and-white checked cloths at the waist, who create a hypnotic vocal accompaniment by chanting an interlocking pattern of syllables, primarily the syllable cak, in rapidly shifting rhythms. Against this living orchestra of human voices, a dramatic narrative from the Hindu epic Ramayana is enacted, typically the story of the abduction of Sita by the demon king Ravana and her rescue with the help of the monkey general Hanuman. The Kecak as it is performed today was largely created in the 1930s through a collaboration between the Balinese dancer and choreographer I Wayan Limbak and the German artist Walter Spies, who drew on an existing trance ritual tradition to create a theatrical performance for external audiences. Though its origins are thus relatively recent and partly shaped by Western influence, the Kecak has become thoroughly integrated into Balinese cultural life.

The Legong is a classical court dance performed by young girls who are trained from an early age in an extraordinarily demanding technique involving precise, codified movements of the eyes, fingers, and body. Legong performances tell stories from Balinese mythology and history, with the dancers portraying multiple characters through the subtle modulation of their gesture vocabulary. The costumes worn by Legong dancers are among the most elaborate in all of Balinese performing arts, consisting of gilded headdresses decorated with fresh frangipani blossoms, intricately patterned cloth wrappings, and accessories that transform the young dancers into divine beings.

The Barong dance dramatizes the eternal cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil, represented respectively by the Barong, a benevolent lion-like spirit that protects the village, and Rangda, the terrifying widow-witch who represents death and malevolent magic. The Barong costume is worn by two dancers who disappear inside an elaborate lion-like mask and body covering adorned with mirrors, fur-like fringe, and gilded ornaments. The battle between Barong and Rangda never concludes with a definitive victory for either side, because in Balinese cosmology good and evil are not simply opposed but interdependent. The performance typically ends in a kind of sacred standoff, maintaining the cosmic balance that makes life possible.

Traditional Crafts and Artistic Villages

The artistic wealth of Bali extends far beyond its performing arts into an extraordinary range of visual and craft traditions. The island's villages have traditionally specialized in specific art forms, creating clusters of expertise that have produced some of the finest craft work in all of Southeast Asia.

The village of Celuk, located just south of Ubud on the main road between Denpasar and the central highlands, is the center of Balinese silversmithing and goldsmithing. Celuk artisans work in silver and gold to produce filigree jewelry, religious ornaments, and decorative objects of extraordinary delicacy and technical refinement. The tradition of metalwork in Bali has deep roots in the island's Hindu culture, where gold and silver have both ritual and aesthetic significance, and the finest Celuk work represents a living continuation of centuries-old techniques.

The village of Mas, located a few kilometers east of Ubud, is celebrated for its woodcarving. Balinese woodcarvers work in a variety of tropical hardwoods to produce religious statuary, architectural ornaments, masks, and decorative objects ranging from realistic to highly stylized. The tradition of woodcarving in Bali underwent significant transformation in the twentieth century, partly through the influence of foreign artists who encouraged Balinese carvers to develop more expressive and personal styles beyond the established repertoire of traditional religious forms.

Ubud itself, the cultural capital of Bali located in the central upland region of the island, is the center of Balinese painting. The painting tradition in Bali has ancient roots in the production of sacred narrative scrolls and temple decorations in a highly stylized two-dimensional style known as the Kamasan or wayang style, named after the village of Kamasan in eastern Bali where the tradition has been continuously maintained. In the early twentieth century, however, Balinese painting underwent a profound transformation through contact with foreign artists, particularly Walter Spies and the Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet, who settled in Ubud and developed close relationships with local painters. Together with the Balinese prince Cokorda Gede Agung Sukawati, Spies and Bonnet founded the Pita Maha artists' cooperative in 1936, which encouraged Balinese artists to move beyond traditional religious subject matter, to use perspective and shading, and to draw on the full range of Balinese daily life as artistic subject matter.

The Ubud style that emerged from these interactions became enormously influential and is today what most people think of as Balinese painting: richly colored depictions of rice fields, markets, ceremonies, and daily village life, filled with carefully observed natural detail and executed with great technical skill. However, the relationship between Balinese artists and their Western interlocutors in the 1930s was complex, and scholars have debated the extent to which the Pita Maha movement represented genuine artistic development or a form of cultural colonialism that redirected Balinese art toward the tastes of a Western market.

Among the other important craft traditions of Bali is weaving. The district of Gianyar is particularly renowned for its production of endek, a Balinese silk and cotton ikat fabric in which the threads are tie-dyed before weaving to create intricate geometric and floral patterns. Endek fabric is used to make the traditional Balinese ceremonial clothing worn at temple visits and ceremonies, and the production of endek remains an important cottage industry throughout central and eastern Bali. The Tenganan village in eastern Bali is famous for producing geringsing, a rare double ikat fabric in which both the warp and weft threads are separately tie-dyed before weaving, a technically demanding process that makes Tenganan geringsing among the most labor-intensive and costly handwoven textiles in the world.

History: the Majapahit Legacy and the Hindu Refuge

The history of Bali as a distinct cultural entity is inextricably linked to the history of Hindu-Buddhist civilization in Java. The great Javanese empires of the first millennium CE, particularly the Sailendra dynasty and later the Mataram kingdom, spread Hinduism and Buddhism throughout the western part of the Indonesian archipelago, and Bali was part of this broader cultural world. However, Bali's historical trajectory diverged sharply from Java's beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the expansion of Islam through the Javanese trading cities began to erode the foundations of the Hindu-Buddhist courts.

The Majapahit Empire, the last and in many ways the greatest of the Hindu-Javanese kingdoms, reached its peak during the reign of King Hayam Wuruk in the mid-fourteenth century, when it controlled a vast maritime empire stretching across much of the Indonesian archipelago. The Majapahit court at Trowulan in eastern Java was a center of Hindu-Buddhist learning and artistic achievement without parallel in Southeast Asia. When the Majapahit began to decline in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, partly due to internal dynastic conflicts and partly due to the growing power of Islamic trading cities on Java's north coast, the Hindu-Buddhist elite of Java began a long eastward migration that would ultimately transform Bali.

The migration of Javanese Hindu priests, nobles, artists, and scholars to Bali during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries profoundly shaped Balinese culture. These refugees brought with them not only their religious knowledge and ritual practices but their literature, music, dance forms, and court culture. The Balinese epic poem the Nagarakertagama, which celebrates the glories of the Majapahit Empire, became a central text of Balinese cultural identity. The refined court culture of the Majapahit found a new home in the Balinese kingdoms that emerged during this period, and Bali became the last refuge of a Hindu-Buddhist civilization that had otherwise been swept away by the tide of Islamization across most of the Indonesian archipelago. This is the fundamental reason why Bali today is a Hindu island in a Muslim nation: it was not that Bali independently developed Hinduism, but that it became the repository of a Javanese Hindu-Buddhist civilization whose homeland had been transformed beyond recognition.

Dutch Colonial Conquest and the Puputan

The peace of Bali's Hindu kingdoms came to a violent end in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Dutch East Indies colonial government turned its attention to bringing the island under direct colonial rule. The Dutch had maintained a commercial relationship with parts of Bali since the seventeenth century, and a political presence on the northern coast since the 1840s, but they had not attempted to impose direct administrative control over the island's southern kingdoms until the first decade of the twentieth century.

The conquest of southern Bali produced some of the most dramatic and tragic episodes in Indonesian colonial history. The Dutch military campaigns against the kingdoms of Badung in 1906 and Klungkung in 1908 were met not with conventional military resistance but with the extraordinary Balinese response known as puputan, a term that translates approximately as ending or fight to the death. In both campaigns, when it became clear that Dutch military superiority made conventional resistance hopeless, the rajas and their courts, dressed in white ceremonial clothing and adorned with their finest jewelry, marched out from their palace gates to confront the Dutch forces. When the Dutch soldiers opened fire, the Balinese royal family and their retainers turned their krises, the traditional Balinese daggers, on themselves or upon one another rather than submit to capture. Women and children joined the puputan alongside the men, throwing jewelry and gold coins at the Dutch soldiers in a final act of defiant generosity. Hundreds of people died in these mass ritual suicides, including the rulers of Badung and Klungkung and members of their families.

The puputan had a profound effect on Dutch public opinion and on the subsequent course of colonial policy in Bali. The spectacle of Balinese royalty choosing death over surrender shocked the Dutch public and created a powerful anti-colonial narrative that made it difficult for the colonial government to pursue policies perceived as destroying Balinese culture. In response, the Dutch colonial authorities adopted a policy known as the Baliseering or Balinization, in which Bali was deliberately preserved as a traditional Hindu island unspoiled by Western modernization, in contrast to the more heavily Islamized and commercially developed islands. This policy had paradoxical consequences: it protected Balinese culture from some of the most destructive forces of colonialism but also froze it in an idealized form and created the foundations for the tourism economy by constructing Bali as an unspoiled paradise for Western visitors.

After the Japanese occupation of the East Indies during World War II, which lasted from 1942 to 1945, the island was incorporated into the newly independent Republic of Indonesia following the national revolution of 1945 to 1949. Indonesia's declaration of independence was proclaimed on August 17, 1945 by Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, and the Dutch recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in 1949 formally ended colonial rule. The integration of Bali into the new Indonesian republic was achieved, and Bali became a province of Indonesia, a status it retains to this day.

The 2002 and 2005 Bali Bombings

The single most devastating blow to Bali's modern prosperity came in the early hours of October 12, 2002, when three bomb explosions ripped through the Kuta beach resort area in southern Bali. The first bomb was detonated by a suicide bomber inside Paddy's Pub, a busy nightclub on Legian Street. Seconds later, a far more powerful car bomb exploded outside the Sari Club across the street, a venue packed with tourists, many of them young Australians. A third bomb exploded with lesser effect near the American consulate in the nearby city of Denpasar. The two explosions in Kuta together killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, 38 Indonesians, and victims from more than twenty other countries. More than two hundred people were injured, many suffering catastrophic burns.

The 2002 Bali bombings were the work of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian jihadist organization with ideological links to al-Qaeda, and were the deadliest terrorist attack in Indonesian history. The perpetrators, including the bomb-maker Azahari Husin and the operational leader Imam Samudra, were eventually identified, arrested, and tried. Three of the convicted bombers were executed by firing squad in November 2008.

The impact of the bombings on Bali was devastating. Tourism, which accounted for the overwhelming majority of the island's economic activity, essentially collapsed in the immediate aftermath. Hotels stood empty, restaurants and shops closed, and the hundreds of thousands of Balinese whose livelihoods depended on the tourism economy found themselves without income. The psychological trauma was also profound. Bali had long seen itself as a place apart, a sacred island protected by its ceremonies and the goodwill of its gods, and the bombings shattered that sense of invulnerability.

Then in October 2005, a second round of bombings struck Bali, this time targeting three restaurants in Jimbaran and Kuta, killing twenty people and injuring more than a hundred. The 2005 bombings were smaller in scale than those of 2002 but confirmed that Bali remained a target for extremist violence. Despite these devastating setbacks, Bali's recovery was eventually achieved. The Balinese drew on their deep reserves of cultural resilience and collective solidarity to rebuild their tourism industry, and international visitors returned in growing numbers through the late 2000s and 2010s. By the years immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic, Bali was receiving more than six million international visitors per year.

The Sacred Temples of Bali

No account of Bali would be complete without a detailed examination of its temples, which represent perhaps the most concentrated expression of Balinese Hindu civilization and its relationship to the landscape. The temples of Bali range from vast royal complexes that attract pilgrims and tourists from across the world to tiny shrines perched on rocks in the sea or nestled among the roots of ancient banyan trees.

The most sacred and important temple complex in Bali is Pura Besakih, often called the Mother Temple, which occupies a magnificent position on the southwestern slope of Mount Agung at an altitude of approximately 960 meters. Pura Besakih is not a single temple but a complex of more than twenty major temples and many smaller shrines, covering a vast area and representing the collective sacred heritage of all the Balinese people. The main temple of the complex, Pura Penataran Agung, rises in a series of terraced courtyards up the slope of the mountain, with tiered shrines known as meru whose towering black thatch roofs create a dramatic silhouette against the sky. The origins of the temple complex at Besakih are ancient, with evidence of worship on the site dating back more than a thousand years.

Pura Tanah Lot is perhaps the most photographed of all Balinese temples. The temple sits on a large rock formation just off the southwestern coast of Bali, separated from the shore at high tide by a stretch of sea. At sunset, the silhouette of the temple against the orange sky and the crashing waves provides one of the most visually dramatic images in all of Southeast Asia. The temple is dedicated to the sea and to Dewa Baruna, the god of the sea, and a venomous sea snake is believed to guard the temple's sacred spring.

Pura Ulun Danu Bratan is a strikingly beautiful water temple built on a small peninsula extending into Lake Bratan in the cool volcanic highlands of central Bali. The multi-tiered meru of the main shrine appear to float on the surface of the lake in the early morning mist, creating an image of serene and otherworldly beauty. The temple is dedicated to Dewi Danu, the goddess of water, and its placement on the lake reflects the central role of water in Balinese religious cosmology and agricultural life.

Pura Luhur Uluwatu, perched at the edge of a dramatic sea cliff at the southwestern tip of the Bukit Peninsula, is both a major sacred site and one of Bali's most spectacular natural viewpoints. The temple stands at the edge of a cliff that drops roughly seventy meters to the sea below, and the combination of sacred architecture and vertiginous natural beauty creates an experience of great power. The temple is home to a large population of grey macaque monkeys, who have developed an expert ability to steal glasses and cameras from visitors, and who are generally regarded as sacred guardians of the site.

Tourism: Opportunity and Obligation

Tourism is the engine of the Balinese economy and has been for decades, but it is also the source of the island's most serious and difficult challenges. The transformation of Bali from a remote island of rice farmers and artisans into one of the world's most popular tourist destinations has occurred with extraordinary speed, largely over the course of the past five decades, and the consequences have been both empowering and deeply troubling.

The benefits of tourism to Bali have been substantial. Tourism revenues have raised the standard of living for large parts of the Balinese population, funded the construction of schools, hospitals, and infrastructure, and created employment for hundreds of thousands of people not only in Bali itself but in other parts of Indonesia through related industries. The international attention focused on Bali by tourism has also provided a degree of protection for its cultural heritage: the worldwide recognition of Balinese art, dance, music, and ceremony has given the Balinese people powerful reasons to maintain and invest in these traditions, and the global audience for Balinese culture has created both pride and economic incentive for their continuation.

However, the costs of mass tourism have been equally substantial and in some respects more visible. The southern part of Bali, particularly the regencies of Badung and Gianyar, has experienced explosive and in many respects unplanned urban growth driven by tourism development. The districts of Kuta, Seminyak, Legian, Canggu, and their surrounds have been almost entirely transformed from agricultural and fishing communities into a dense and often chaotic landscape of hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, spas, and villas. The rice fields that once covered the coastal plains of southern Bali have been converted to development at an alarming rate: estimates suggest that hundreds of hectares of productive agricultural land are lost to development every year, fragmenting the subak irrigation systems that depended on contiguous areas of rice cultivation.

Water is perhaps the most serious resource challenge facing Bali. The combination of a rapidly growing resident population, millions of annual tourists, and hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms and villas demanding large amounts of water for swimming pools and landscaping has placed the island's freshwater resources under severe stress. Groundwater extraction in the southern tourism zone has exceeded sustainable levels, causing saltwater intrusion into aquifers near the coast and a steady decline in the water table in many areas. The subak irrigation system, which depends on the natural flow of water from the mountains through channels and rivers, has been disrupted by groundwater extraction that reduces the base flow of rivers during the dry season.

Traffic congestion in southern Bali has become a critical quality-of-life issue. The Balinese tradition of conducting ceremonies and processions on public roads, combined with the high density of tourism-related traffic, has created a situation in which some of the roads of the Kuta-Seminyak-Canggu area are effectively gridlocked during peak hours for much of the day. The narrow roads that were adequate for a pre-tourism population of farmers have not been systematically expanded to accommodate the volume of vehicle traffic generated by mass tourism.

The impact of tourism on Balinese culture is more complex and contested than either its proponents or critics typically acknowledge. On one hand, cultural performances that were once purely ceremonial have increasingly been staged for tourist audiences, raising questions about the authenticity and spiritual integrity of practices that have been commercialized. The Kecak fire dance performed at Tanah Lot each evening for busloads of tourists is a different experience from the same dance performed at a village temple for a community engaged in active religious ceremony. On the other hand, the economic support that tourism provides for Balinese arts and crafts has in many cases enabled traditions to survive that might otherwise have declined as young people sought more lucrative employment in other sectors.

Despite these challenges, Bali has continued to attract visitors in ever-growing numbers, drawn by the extraordinary combination of natural beauty, cultural richness, spiritual atmosphere, and tropical climate that remains unmatched by any other single destination in Southeast Asia. The ongoing challenge for Bali is how to manage this appeal in a way that preserves the qualities that make it attractive while providing sustainable livelihoods for its people and maintaining the ecological and cultural foundations on which both its distinctiveness and its economic vitality ultimately depend.

Balinese Food and Cuisine

The cuisine of Bali is one of the most distinctive and celebrated in Southeast Asia, deeply rooted in the island's Hindu culture, its tropical agriculture, and its traditions of communal ceremony and ritual feasting. Balinese cooking makes extensive use of fresh tropical ingredients including coconut, lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, kencur, shallots, garlic, chilies, and the leaves of the kaffir lime, combined in spice pastes known as base genep, or complete base, that form the aromatic foundation of most Balinese dishes.

The most iconic and celebrated of all Balinese foods is babi guling, a whole roasted suckling pig that is the centerpiece of virtually every major Balinese ceremony and celebration. The pig is stuffed with a complex mixture of spices and herbs including turmeric, galangal, coriander, and candlenuts, rubbed with a spiced coconut oil mixture, and then slowly roasted on a spit over a wood fire for several hours until the skin is perfectly crisp and golden. Babi guling is deeply embedded in Balinese ritual culture and is considered an essential offering at temple ceremonies and life-cycle celebrations. As Bali is a Hindu island where pork is not subject to the dietary restrictions that apply in Muslim communities, babi guling is a distinctly Balinese dish that reflects and reinforces the island's religious identity.

Betutu is another ceremonially important Balinese dish, in which chicken or duck is stuffed with a rich paste of spices, wrapped in banana leaves and then in the fibrous husk of a coconut, and slowly cooked by burying it in the embers of a fire or in a wood-fired oven for many hours, sometimes overnight. The result is extraordinarily tender meat permeated with the complex flavors of the spice paste. Lawar is another ceremonially essential Balinese food, a complex mixture of finely chopped vegetables or fruits with grated coconut, aromatic spices, and sometimes minced meat. The preparation of lawar for a ceremony is a communal activity involving many men working together, and the recipe passed down within a village or family is a matter of considerable pride and tradition.

For everyday meals, nasi campur Bali, a plate of steamed rice accompanied by a selection of small portions of various dishes, is the standard everyday meal format. The sambal, or chili paste, that accompanies most Balinese meals is typically fiery and complex, made from fresh chilies, shrimp paste, and other aromatics. Sate lilit, a Balinese satay in which a spiced minced meat mixture is wrapped around bamboo or lemongrass skewers and grilled over charcoal, is another beloved everyday and ceremonial food. The freshwater eels and fish of Lake Batur are local specialties of the central highlands, while the coastal areas offer fresh seafood grilled with Balinese spice blends that are among the finest examples of Indonesian coastal cooking.

Ecology and the Natural World

Beyond its cultural riches, Bali possesses a natural environment of extraordinary beauty and biological diversity. The island's coral reefs, particularly those of the Tulamben area on the northeastern coast and the waters around the peninsula of Nusa Penida to the south, are among the finest dive sites in Southeast Asia, with remarkable populations of manta rays, sea turtles, reef sharks, and the extraordinary sunfish or mola mola that appears seasonally in the cooler waters around Nusa Penida. The Bali Barat National Park in the northwestern corner of the island protects important remnants of tropical dry forest and is the last refuge of the Bali starling, whose wild population fell to fewer than ten individuals at its lowest point and has only recovered partially through intensive conservation and captive breeding programs. The volcanic lakes of Batur and Bratan support unique freshwater ecosystems, and the forests of the central mountain range harbor populations of macaques, civets, and a variety of bird species.

The Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park, located on the Bukit Peninsula in the southernmost part of Bali, represents a different kind of monumental project: a vast cultural park centered on a colossal bronze statue of the god Vishnu riding the sacred eagle Garuda, which after decades of construction was finally completed in 2018. The statue stands approximately 121 meters tall, making it one of the tallest statues in the world and certainly the tallest in Indonesia. It has become both a major tourist attraction and a significant landmark visible from much of southern Bali.

Conclusion: the Enduring Island

Bali enters the twenty-first century as a place of extraordinary achievement and complex challenge. Its civilization, built over a thousand years of Hindu-Buddhist culture and protected through the extraordinary resilience and adaptability of its people, remains one of the most complete and coherent living cultural systems on earth. The arts, the religion, the agricultural practices, and the social organization of Bali represent a distinctive answer to the fundamental human questions of how to live in community with one another, with the natural world, and with the divine, and that answer is expressed with a beauty and sophistication that has moved and inspired visitors from all over the world.

The challenges facing Bali are real and in some respects frightening. The pressure of global tourism on a small island ecosystem is immense, and the pace of change over the past half-century has been far greater than any previous period in Balinese history. The young Balinese who today work as villa managers, tour guides, and digital entrepreneurs are living in a world fundamentally different from that of their grandparents, and the question of how much of the old culture can survive in the new reality is genuinely open.

But if the history of Bali teaches anything, it is that the Balinese have an extraordinary capacity for cultural synthesis and adaptation. They absorbed the Majapahit Hindu civilization of Java and made it their own. They endured Dutch colonialism and emerged with their cultural identity largely intact. They survived the trauma of the 2002 bombings and rebuilt their economy from near-ruin. There is reason to believe that they possess the cultural resources and the collective will to navigate the challenges of the twenty-first century as well, preserving what is most essential in their extraordinary civilization while adapting to a world that is changing faster than ever before.

The island of the gods remains, despite everything, one of the most remarkable places on earth: a small volcanic island that has given the world a living demonstration of what is possible when a community places beauty, ceremony, spiritual devotion, and harmony with the natural world at the very center of its collective life.

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