Bali

Early Bali

Bali had Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms from at least the ninth century, known from inscriptions in Old Balinese and later Old Javanese, and its rulers were closely connected with those of east Java. The eleventh-century king Udayana married a Javanese princess, and their son Airlangga became one of the great kings of Java. Majapahit conquered Bali in 1343 under its minister Gajah Mada.

Heir of Majapahit

As Islam spread in Java in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Bali remained Hindu. Balinese tradition holds that priests, nobles and artists of Majapahit took refuge on the island, and the courts of Gelgel and later Klungkung modelled themselves on Majapahit. Old Javanese literature, including versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, was preserved on palm-leaf manuscripts in Bali long after it had been forgotten in Java.

Balinese Hinduism combines the worship of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma and of a supreme deity with the veneration of ancestors, local spirits and the mountains, especially the volcano Gunung Agung. Its priests, the pedanda, perform rites in Sanskrit and Old Javanese. Every village has its temples, and daily offerings of flowers and food are made at shrines in houses, fields and streets. Society was organised in a caste system of four groups adapted from Indian models.

Colonial conquest

The Dutch took control of northern Bali in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1906 they invaded the southern kingdom of Badung; the raja, his family and court, dressed in white, walked into the Dutch guns in a ritual mass suicide, the puputan. In 1908 the same happened at Klungkung. The events shocked opinion in the Netherlands. The colonial government then promoted Bali as a living museum of Hindu-Javanese culture, encouraging tourism and scholarship. The kecak, a chant-dance of the Ramayana, was developed in the 1930s by Balinese performers working with the German painter Walter Spies.

Modern Bali

In the anti-communist violence in Indonesia in 1965–66, many tens of thousands were killed on Bali. Balinese Hinduism gained official recognition as one of Indonesia's religions in the 1960s, after reforms that emphasised belief in one supreme god to meet the state's requirement of monotheism. Tourism has become the mainstay of the economy. Terrorist bombings in Kuta in 2002 and 2005 killed more than two hundred people. The subak, the cooperative system of water temples and irrigation that organises rice farming, was listed by UNESCO in 2012.