BALI: Artists’ Island

Seven years ago, when Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias first visited Bali, that East Indies island had not become a stopping-place on round-the-world tours, or the subject of travel films notable primarily for their pictures of “brown girls with beautiful breasts.” Separated from Java by a deep, narrow strait, conquered by the Dutch only 22 years before, Bali was a populous, rainy, mountainous island with no good harbor, hard to get to, hard to get at. By the time Covarrubias made his second visit (1933), Balinese dancers had been the sensation of the Colonial Exhibition in Paris and the tourist rush was on. Women had taken to wearing “clumsy blouses,” Dutch gold currency had gone up, prices had fallen and Artist Covarrubias was distressed to find hard times even in this paradise.

Last week he published a big, 417-page book,* illustrated by his own sketches and his wife’s photographs, that did Bali up brown. Because he believes that Balinese culture is sure to be corrupted. Covarrubias includes dutifully informative chapters on language, magic, community organization, native legends. Most animated parts of his book deal with the primitive agricultural communism of Bali, with the bewildering luxuriance of art in a land where almost everybody is an artist. Land in Bali is owned by the villages, under terms of “the wisest law ever passed by the Dutch Government,” cannot be sold to foreigners, and is leased, the natives believe, directly from the gods. Although there is poverty in Bali when the price of rice falls, and rigid caste divisions (natives must learn two languages, so a nobleman can address a commoner in lower-class language while the commoner replies vice versa), ownership of property has little to do with it. Villages are governed by an organization to which every married man, which means every adult male, belongs; work is apportioned by a council and slackers are taken care of by the simple device of being declared “dead,” which means they are expelled from the village and consequently get no food. A proud, courteous, joke-loving people, the Balinese have no jails, police their villages in fashion reminiscent of volunteer fire departments in small U. S. towns where putting out fires is a less important function than the holding of dances and feasts. For minor offenses against the village, such as the rare cases of theft, the wrongdoer is punished by being paraded through town, while natives beat drums, shout hilariously, act as if nothing so ridiculous had ever been known before. But when natives go amuck, commit murder, threaten violence, the alarm bell rings as it does for a fire, and the whole community turns out to kill the criminal as it does to extinguish flames. Ceremonial “kidnappings” feature many weddings. The extremely modest Balinese make an official open secret of these elopements. Bride and groom set an hourfor the kidnapping. The bride pretends to struggle pitifully. Her relatives pretend to try to save her. Onlookers pretend nothing is happening. After the bride has been abducted, the village rushes off in a playful hunt in the wrong direction, pretending to console the happy parents. Now elopements in rented cars are fashionable in Bali.

Art is so general that the Balinese have no word for it. Housewives prepare offerings to the gods in the form of sculptured food, with statues carved in gristle decorated with red peppers and lacy lining from the stomachs of hogs. The handles of daggers and the designs on native cloth show the same painstaking craft.

Covarrubias believes that the Balinese became a race of artists because the rich land and their social organization gave them leisure, because art never became the exclusive possession of intellectuals, because the remoteness of Bali protected it from foreign influence. He found on the walls of North Bali temples, cheek by jowl with bas-reliefs of gods and monsters, some comic-strip carvings showing a fat Dutchman drinking beer, a man cranking a car, a highway robbery modeled after a scene in a cinema.

*ISLAND OF BALI — Miguel Covarrubias — Knopf ($5).