The Javanese heritage

Considering the 4 million inhabitants of Bali, the twenty or so bookstores and libraries that emerge from a simple internet search may seem disappointing. However, although contemporary books are rare or are intended primarily for a public interested in religious issues, the island can nevertheless boast a rich literary past that we would like to date back to the eighth century thanks to the "stupika" found near Pejeng. These clay figurines, decorated with Buddhist texts, have indeed been dated to this distant era. Not much more recent, in Sanur, there is a stone pillar, called Prasasti Blanjong, engraved a priori in honor of Sri Kesari. Three figures seem to mention a date that could be close to the year 914 of our calendar. However, if we stick to more conventional supports, and although in Bali these are made of palm leaves (lontar) and not our traditional paper, it is customary to divide the literature into three phases that correspond to three languages: Old Javanese, Middle Javanese and Balinese.

Before evoking these periods, it is necessary to recontextualize by recalling the links that united Bali and its close neighbor, Java, because it is indeed on this island that the story begins, a sweet mixture of reality and fiction. Thus, the Nagarakertagama, attributed to the court poet Mpu Prapanca who would have written in 1365, tells how Gajah Mada, Prime Minister of Hayam Wuruk, the sovereign founder of the Javanese kingdom of Majapahit, would have conquered Bali after having defeated the king, described as a pig-headed monster endowed with magical powers. It is said that this victory was accompanied by a cultural enrichment because, in contact with the Javanese, the Balinese were opened to new artistic forms, theater, dance and music, and were initiated into different trends in sculpture, architecture and painting. Legend has it that when Majapahit gave in to the Muslim invasion of the kingdom of Demak in 1527, the Javanese artists and religious found refuge in Bali. In fact, at the time of this war, the mythical Majapahit no longer existed, but it is true that somehow Bali found itself the recipient of a culture that was not initially its own, and that it preserved it like a museum guard. This legacy is embodied in the literature in Old and Middle Javanese, oral and manuscript, which it is very difficult to judge whether it is legacy or the work of Balinese. The fact that some documents have been found on the island confirms neither, but the question still remains sensitive in our time. This corpus includes the Nagarakertagama, previously mentioned, which is a long epic poem to the glory of Hayam Wuruk, copies of which have been scattered in Bali but also in Lombok, another island of the Sunda archipelago, to which one could associate the Paranton(Book of Kings), genealogy of the Javanese rulers since the era of Singasari, the kingdom that preceded Majapahit. But this collection also includes "kidung" written in Middle Javanese. These chansons de geste can be warlike chronicles as in the Kidung Rangga Lawe which tells of the revolt of the prince of Tuban against the king of Majapahit, but also tragic love stories like the Kidung Sunda in which a marriage proposal turns into a clan struggle, or the Calon Arang, named after a witch who sowed desolation because her daughter could not find a suitor. Finally, some texts of the last period are more specifically interested in the history of Bali, they belong to the register of "balads", these chronicles of which historians are still trying to disentangle the true from the false. All of these manuscripts are generally classified by intellectuals into six categories, with manuals - mystical or scientific - representing a significant proportion.

Colonization and independence

The union between Java and Bali ended at the end of the eighteenth century when the last princes of Blambangan, in East Java, broke away from the kingdom of Mengwi, pledged allegiance to the VOC (Dutch East India Company) and converted to Islam. Newcomers were indeed present on this scene at the end of the world, and the arrival of the English at the beginning of the 19th century did not help the territorial wars. The middle of the century was hardly more serene, the Dutch imposing themselves in the north of Bali by a violence whose paroxysm will be reached during a third military expedition to which the king of Buleleng and his court will retort by a "puputan", a collective suicide.. The reasons that pushed the Dutch to relax their yoke at the beginning of the 20th century, notably by preserving the local culture, are certainly numerous, but they were translated into literature by the creation in 1928 of a museum-library in the former royal palace of Singaraja, which became the House of Culture, and which now houses more than 3000 manuscripts on poles.

Some say that the 1930s and 1950s were a good time for writers to emerge - although one might think that they were mainly exploring the nationalist path, but only two authors really crossed geographical and linguistic boundaries. The first is Putu Oka Sukanta, born in 1939, who took up the pen at the age of 16. His aspirations were interrupted by the prison sentence he received in 1966, at a time when his country - independent since 1949 - was experiencing serious political unrest. Overcoming censorship by publishing abroad, he is at the origin of an abundant work of which the French reader will have the chance to have a glimpse thanks to the Forum Jakarta-Paris which translated Le Voyage du poète in 2010, and to the editions Les Indes savantes which published his memoirs in 2013 under the title Dignité! These titles are nevertheless to be sought on the second-hand market, just like Telegram (Picquier, 1992) which is nevertheless a good gateway to the work of Putu Wijaya, a prolix and multifaceted writer who was born in 1944. He has always been a theater fanatic and has been a journalist, novelist, director of a theater company and filmmaker, a passion that has earned him a good reputation and several awards, both in Indonesia and in Europe. To conclude on an optimistic note, the UWRF (Ubud Writers & Readers Festival) counted 25,000 visitors in 2019, compared to 300 at the first edition in 2002, proof if any were needed that Balinese literature is highly anticipated.