The Balinese worship the mountains and believe the sea to be the domain of evil spirits. Any trip up the countless roads into the hills will reveal why the locals believe this part of the Indonesian island to be sacred. The beauty of the mountains, sculpted rice paddies and dramatic valleys are the main reason why many see the island as the most beautiful place on earth. Bali – as KLAUS PAHLICH, publisher of World Water Watch, discovered – is one giant sculpture.
All photos: Klaus Pahlich
For centuries rice has shaped Bali, its land and its people. On the slopes of the volcanoes the farmers, burnt away the jungle, pulled out the remaining tree roots and built up the soil into terraces. They diverted the water with aqueducts across deep valleys, dug new river beds and trapped the water in the pools of their terraces. Today the whole island looks like a piece of landscape art.
Rice is of paramount importance to the Balinese, and the planting and harvesting of this grain of life is accompanied by an amazing number of ceremonies and offerings. Balinese farmers are still firmly rooted in the ancient religious traditions surrounding each successful crop which begin before the first seed is planted and continue up to and beyond the harvest. It is not just farmers, but the whole community that is involved in the rice-growing process. Most rural life in Bali revolves around this precious staple – from preplanting ceremonies and planting to guarding against birds and pests and harvesting.
The rice farmer’s day begins shortly after dawn when the men set out for the fields, accompanied by flocks of ducks that are brought to feed all day in the flooded paddies. The undulating rice terraces are the most striking feature of the landscape. Each individual plot of rice, the sawah, is irrigated and contained by dykes of black earth, one flowing into the next like a rhythmic pattern on green silk. Every farmer owning one or more sawahs is compelled to join a subak, an agricultural society that controls the distribution of irrigation water to its members.
Like other Balinese associations, the spirit of the subak is communal. All members abide by the same rules with each allotted work in relation to the amount of water he receives. Subaks help the small agriculturalists by assuring them of water, guarding irrigation channels against efforts by outsiders to divert the water for their own use, repairing any damages in the dykes and organizing banquets at a propitious time, such as the completion of a harvest. At least once a month, a general meeting is held in the small temple of the subak, a Hindu shrine in the middle of the rice fields dedicated to the agricultural deities.
Subak associations are important for the prosperity of the Balinese people. The mountainous terrain makes irrigation extremely difficult. Only through this full cooperation among neighbouring farmers have the Balinese become renowned as the most efficient rice-growers in the Indonesian archipelago. People as far away as India and Japan come to learn from the Balinese irrigation system.
Before the fields are planted, offerings are made to gain the goodwill of the Hindu deities, who provide the crop with water and favourable conditions for a successful harvest. A little shrine, constructed of bamboo, can normally be found near every sawah as an altar for the offerings that are placed there at specific times during the growing season.
Rice planting and religion go hand in hand and everywhere, even just around the next corner, you will meet devout people. Agama Hindu, Bali’s dominant religion, underpins the peaceful life of a people who have settled below the blue mountain peaks and above the sea’s horizon. The divine spirits (the deities and ancestors) are honoured through worship and devotion. The evil spirits (demons, witches and ghosts) are placated through purification and exorcism. Both must be provided for since happiness and contentment come only to those who take both forces into consideration. Even during Galungan, the island-wide festival when all the temples ring with merriment, women do not forget to lay down offerings of rice, sweet cakes and flowers as tokens to pacify the evil spirits.
At the beginning of the last millennium Oryza sativa (the scientific name for rice) was brought to the archipelago by Indian merchants. Previously the Balinese people may just have lived off the liquid of sugar-cane – or so it has been recorded. But then the god Vishnu showed mercy on the hapless people. The god of Hades sneaked up to the earth und raped Mother Earth, laying the seed. After that he threatened the god of Heaven, Indra, with war if he would not show the people how to cultivate rice. From this time on, Bali was a land of rice. But, now, just 1,000 years after the first rice corns were planted, the bond between agriculture and religion is being untied, the mythological Mother Earth again raped, but this time it is being done by politicians and the chemical industry.
Every single subak nominates a klian, the title for the chairman of a subak, whose task is to coordinate the requirements of the subak members and the necessities of the gods. The holy scriptures decide on which days the farmers have to thank the gods, on which days the subak chairman has to go to the Pura Ulun (Ulun temple) at the Bratan Lake to fetch the holy water with the priest and on which days the seeds should be sown. But the gods give the people a selection of days to choose from, and so the director is able to coordinate the flooding time with other subaks. If all 1,200 subaks flooded their terraces at the same time, the water would run out.
Some years ago, the Government in Denpasar, Bali’s capital, decided on a unified planting time. The effect was to halve the harvest. After that debacle, the bureaucrats left it to the the gods to decide.
Up to the 1970s, the Balinese people had four words for rice: padi bali was the name for the growing rice, jijih the name for harvested rice, beras the ground rice and nasi the fried or steamed rice. In the late 1970s, most of the farmers had to learn new names for rice – IR 36 (tiga nam), IR 61 or PB 5 were the new hybrids and the biologists‘ response to Asia’s population explosion. The population of Indonesia rose to more than 200m and brought the archipelago of Indonesia to fourth place in the world after China, India and USA.
The old rice allowed one or two harvestings a year, the miracle-rice IR 36 (tiga nam) brought three harvests a year, and the farmers were told that the Indonesian people would never go hungry again. And it was true: after this “green revolution” Bali’s rice production enabled the growers to export rice into the rest of Indonesia.
But the Balinese population is exploding as well: 4m people on this small island means much more than 1,000 inhabitants per sq km. The volcanic soil is clearly fertile, there is plenty of water and there are three rice harvests a year. Moreover, other products like fruit, vegetables, tobacco, coffee, peanuts and cloves are planted. Yet, despite all this abundance, the farmers fear they will not be able to feed the fast-growing population in the future.
Life has changed for the Balinese. It was never a problem getting rid of the waste. People threw their organic waste into the waterways, trusting on the next high flood during the rainy season to sweep it into the sea. Modern life brought litter that cannot rot. So you can easily find on the beach plastic bottles and other, more unspeakable things. Even tourists brought a lot of problems to the island, not only by using too much water. Many Balinese found jobs in hotels, as taxidrivers and as guides, while art, previously produced for religious reasons, became just a saleable commodity. In 1995 about 1m tourists came to Bali, and the island’s tourist authority had the ambitious aim of achieving 1.5m visitors a year in subsequent years. But in the last five years, the whole island has been hit by the problems of violence in other parts of Indonesia. Sixty per cent of tourists failed to return. Not all of the Balinese people could go back to their occupation of farming because of the changes in rice production and now suffer poverty.
Religion too made life less easy for the Balinese people. Thanksgiving after the harvest is now three times a year, which means that the ceremonies must be celebrated three times with three lots of offerings and asking for forgiveness of the gods each time. But the gods have not been satisfied. The new rice does not grow as high as the old padi bali, and the rice corns do not remain on the stalk. For this reason the rice must be threshed directly on the field. This is too much work for the Balinese, and so itinerant Javanese workers are hired to do this job.
For the old rice it was enough to follow the rules of the holy scriptures and send out the ducks to clear the terraces of snails and other noxious animals or plants, and the ducks‘ droppings were enough to fertilize the fields. The new rice needs expensive medicine – blue bags against grasshoppers, white bags against water beetles, nitrogenous fertilizer, trisodium phosphate and potash. But none of this helps the new rice to taste as good as the old rice. The hybrids consist mainly of starch. The old rice could be stored for up to 10 years, but the new rice cannot be stored long, because it goes mouldy after a few months.
For the farmers to continue their old way of life according to their religious rules, they must be paid a higher price for the old padi bali. They know very well why the taste of the rice disappeared. Today rice is harvested by machines or by big sickles. For the old rice they had a small knife, and with a quick movement they severed the stalks.”The old rice never saw the knife. We never frightened it!”
