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One of the most spectacular touristic places in the world, with a representation of beauty and colour in the popular mind. Hard to believe that it is only a single island little more than a hundred kilometres across.
Bali does not seem to have a great tradition of independence, although it has its own cultural and historical memory, written in lontars, sort of books made with elongated rectangles of palm leaves, stitched together by vegetable fibres. What I read about Bali in Poland was a sort of amateurish monograph of Janusz Lenartowicz, published in the 1990s; the author tried to give some account of the local beliefs, cosmological system, rituals; that is of course a conundrum requiring greater expertise; as far as I know, we had little or no such knowledge in our academic system. Also, the Poles rarely went to Bali as tourists; it was too expensive for us. My husband, on the contrary, spent there too many boring summers to accept any further trip to this location. And of course, in the Netherlands, I could find expertise as well as popular awareness to get full insight into whatever Bali may stand for historically and in the contemporary world. This is just to give an idea how the world may look different, when contemplated from various European locations, even situated not so very far apart, as Kraków and Amsterdam are.
It was a Dutch captain Cornelis Houtman who discovered the island for the Europeans in 1597, but the human presence is attested since pre-historical times. There is a consistent historical record of Bali in the chronicles written on Java, in the kingdom of Madjapahit, as well as the local ones, since 14th century at least. 1520 seems to be the date of the first independent kingdom on the island. These are still Braminic kingdoms before both the advent of Islam and European colonialism. But the history seems to operate in this part of the world rather by local autonomies, as vast as a single village, than large, centralised states. The Dutch put an end to this system as late as 1906.
Religiously, as I said, Bali is a conundrum. There are layers after layers of different belief systems, starting with the local animism, populating the space of the island with nefarious spirits, such as bhuta, gaman, leyak. There is also a particular form of Shivaism, in which Shiva often appears in Tri Murti with Brahman and Vishnu; there is a cult of Shiva as Surya and Rudra; and there is tantra as well – I would gladly inquire about the details.