Hindu Hegemony

Hindus in India have been beaten down for the last 1000 years or more. The situation for Hindus improved slightly after 1857 when the Mogul Empire was abolished and the British promised not to interfere in the religious affairs of Indians. The situation has actually worsened for Hindus since Independence. However, strident propaganda by leftists and their fellow-travelers and slanted history texts written by academics with political agendas have indoctrinated the average Indian that being Hindu is bad and demanding equal treatment alongside minorities is a criminal act.

This unhappy state of affairs is not perceived by Hindus who have never left the country. On the other hand, they are so conditioned by the propaganda that they meekly go along, sometimes out of a wrong sense of fair-mindedness.

It takes living in a secular democracy such as the US to realize what secularism means to the average US citizen and understand how it has been twisted out of shape for political reasons in India. Not that a country such as the US that has a holiday for Christmas and issues special stamps for Christmas can be said to be totally secular. But at least they are not shoving their religious observances down the throats of people who follow other religions and permit the free exercise of religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and even that intolerant brutish Arabian cult called Islam.

So it is natural to wonder what a country where the Hindu majority exercises hegemony over their fellow citizens belonging to a different religion looks like. One of course has to leave India to find such a country. But actually it is not hard to find such a place in the world.

You have seen in the travel brochures the terraced rice fields, the men and women with a slightly oriental cast, the festival processions, etc. You might think that you are prepared after reading them and the Lonely Planet guide but nothing actually prepares you for Bali. For it is Bali, not Nepal, where Hindus reign supreme though it is not a separate country but a miniscule island in the huge Islamic ocean of Indonesia.

Bali is about 95% Hindu with a small Muslim population which has migrated from the nearby island of Java in search of economic opportunities. Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch when the British ceded the East Indies to the Dutch in return for the Dutch staying out of India, Sri Lanka, Malaya and other British possessions.

The Dutch colonization of Bali was brutal. There were about ten independent kingdoms in Bali ruled by hereditary rajas. The rajas refused to submit to the Dutch and several of them sallied out of their forts accompanied by their entire court clad in white in a ceremonial battle called “the shedding of the blood�. Wielding only bows and arrows, they were defenseless against the Dutch who had machine-guns. But they chose to die out as a dynasty rather than submit to the invaders. The Dutch public was shocked at the stories of these men choosing to advance against machine-gun fire in the full knowledge that they were courting death.

In the years that followed, the Dutch rulers realized that Bali was unique. It had a great artistic heritage that was rooted in the Hindu religion of the population. To maintain the unique cultural heritage of the Balinese, the Dutch banned all proselytization activities, be it by Christian missionaries from Europe or Muslim preachers from Java. Because of this, Bali has remained a Hindu land.

We landed at the Denpasar airport. Long used to hosting foreign tourists, the customs and immigration officials quickly stamped our passports and waved us through. In the airport itself, one could clearly see signs of the Hindu heritage of Bali; as we took a taxi to our hotel, we saw more evidence of it.

All along the road, there were several curio shops selling handicrafts. Then we saw the huge statue of Arjuna at an intersection. Most of the traffic circles had a statue, usually of some hero from a Hindu epic or of a Hindu god. Chaturmukha Square for instance has a statue of Brahma with his four heads looking at the four directions. At another place, it was Lord Vishnu on the Garuda and in a palace we saw a statue of Saraswathi as veena-pustaka-dharini (carrying a veena and a book, as the patron Goddess of Learning, exactly like she would be represented in India).

There are welcome signs painted on some of the walls along our path. The words though written in Roman script were in pure Sanskrit: Om Svasti Astu (roughly, “May all be well with you�).

At the hotel, a bellboy carried our bags to our rooms. His nametag read “Giri�. I said to him that “Giri� meant mountain in India; he replied the meaning is the same in Bali.

We went into a local department store. I found that all the curios had a religious theme to them. There were hand-carved statues of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Ganesha, Saraswathi, Lakshmi, etc.

A man implored me to come to his store to look at the clothes they have for sale. As I walked with him, he introduced himself. “Mohammad�, he said; “Muslim.� Ah, yes, a country where Muslims had to identify themselves because they were a miniscule minority!

I saw several roadside restaurants saying “Muslim Waroeng�, meaning “Muslim restaurant�. They do that to advertise the fact that they serve halal food. Balinese eat ham and pork quite often so the few Muslims in Bali had to be sure they were not violating their dietary laws.

We rented the cab for the next several days so that we could go all over the island. As we drove around, we saw several women carrying offerings on their heads to a temple. When we reached the temple, we were told we could not come in that day as entry was restricted to Hindus only. When we said that we were Hindus from India, we were warmly welcomed into the temple compound. One of the men asked if we had brought dupa, incense sticks. When we said that we were driving along and had stopped by on an impulse, he shared his incense sticks with us. This particular temple belonged to the raja of that locality and the remnants of the royal family still came there regularly for worship.

The Hindu temples had gopuras (towers) much like South Indian temples do except that instead of being made of stone and bricks, they were made of bamboo and thatch and so did not contain the enormous number of figurines that a South Indian gopura would have. But one could see 7, 9, 11 or even 13 stories to the various towers, much like you would see in South India.

Hinduism came to Bali around the 10th century when the Javanese kings who lost the battles to their opponents crossed the sea and arrived in Bali. They overthrew the established kingdoms in Bali and imposed their religion on the Balinese. Most Balinese became sudras, the invading kings were kshatriyas and their priests were brahmanas. The tradesmen were classified as wesyes (vaishyas). These four varnas have evolved into many castes but the total number does not exceed a hundred unlike in India where they number in the thousands. Those Balinese who refused to accept the new order escaped to the mountains and live in isolated settlements and are called Aga Bali. The Balinese call their religion Agama Hindu. The temples house no idols at all. While the Balinese accept Hindu gods such as Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, they worship God as a Formless One.

We went to the city of Ubud. Ubud is a cultural center and has a museum that exhibits Balinese art. Every painting in the museum had a religious theme. They showed scenes from the Ramayana. When I read the captions beneath the paintings, I was able to recall the stories that I had read as a child. They were as accurate as any Ramayana books I had read in India to the last line of detail.

On our way back, we stopped at a cultural show. The topic for the day was the story where Sita was abducted by Ravana and then visited by Hanuman in her prison in Lanka. The usual village entertainment is enactment of the Ramayana. Thus the story as well as the art form is maintained and transmitted from generation to generation.

The next day, as we drove around we talked to a middle-aged local woman during our lunch. She said that Sanskrit is taught in schools though demand for it is becoming less with the onslaught of alien cultural influences. The Bhagavad Gita was also taught in schools and the government had purchased the television serial Ramayana from India and broadcast it over Balinese TV after translating it from Hindi to Bahasa Indonesia.

One day we drove to Gunung Agung, where Pura Besakih is located. Gunung Agung is a dormant volcano. Pura Besakih, the holiest temple in Bali and called the Mother Temple, is actually a complex of several temples and once every hundred years, a great big ceremony called the Ekadasa Rudra is celebrated here. The last time the festival was celebrated was in 1979 and the government of Indonesia requested the government of India to send them huge quantities of Ganges water to sanctify the premises; India of course obliged. Actually, the Ekadasa Rudra was celebrated in 1963 but the volcano erupted that year killing many people. The volcanic eruption was attributed to the fact that the Ekadasa Rudra was held on the wrong date and caused the gods to get angry. After much debate, the Ekadasa Rudra was celebrated again in 1979 though it is not supposed to be held more frequently than once in a hundred years. President Suharto was the chief guest and spent the day standing in the hot sun to please the Hindus of Bali. One animal and bird of each species on Bali was sacrificed on this occasion.

On another day, we went to the Monkey Forest. The monkeys, though raised in the wild, are quite tame. They eat peanuts out of your hand, gently picking one peanut at a time from your palm. When you have no more food, you just show them your empty palms and they scamper off quietly. Even the animals in Bali are as gentle as the people!

The Balinese calendar is quite close to the Hindu calendar. The New Year Day is a day of complete rest. Nobody is allowed to leave his house or be seen in a public place. So, flights are cancelled and essential personnel such as those serving guests in hotels stay in the hotel that day and do not go home. The belief that the New Year Day is a day of rest is enforced on all the population of Bali no matter what their religion is, I was told.

Bali is throwback to an earlier era. This is what India would have been like before the invasion by ruthless foreigners who killed millions of Hindus for their Faith. A great sense of sadness enveloped me as I contemplated the pathetic condition of Indian Hindus compared to the proud Hindus of Bali. Bali shows that Hindu hegemony would be a benevolent and beneficent one. We ought to try it in India.