The Kingdom of Gelgel

What crossed the strait

Drafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)formation

When Majapahit ended on Java, its world did not end. It moved two miles east across a strait.

What crossed was not a court in flight so much as a tradition with people attached: priests, aristocrats, the Old Javanese literature, the ritual, the caste order, and the genealogies that ran the Balinese ruling houses back to Majapahit's own. Bali became — and has remained — the place holding the essentials of an Indo-Javanese religion and literature that Islam caused to disappear rapidly on Java itself.

Two heirs, wanting different things

Majapahit had two claimants and they wanted opposite inheritances.

Demak, the Muslim sultanate on the north coast, claimed it by descent — Raden Patah's line traced to Majapahit's own royal house — and used the claim to justify ruling Java after absorbing what was left of that court. A political claim, made by the polity that ended it.

Gelgel claimed everything except the politics. The Balinese kingdoms never held an acre of Java and never said they should; what they asserted was continuity of the priesthood, the texts, the ritual and the ranks. One heir took the throne and changed the religion. The other took the religion and never wanted the throne.

The same year, from three directions

1527 is the same event on three different islands and it looks like three different things.

From Java's inland court it is the moment the state stopped. From the north coast it is a conversion completed. From Bali it is the year the priests arrived — and the beginning of this kingdom's golden age under Dalem Waturenggong, which is the next chapter.

Nothing was destroyed on Bali in 1527. Something was received.

Waturenggong

Drafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)peak

Dalem Waturenggong's reign is the one every later Balinese account treats as the golden age — the point the courts of the nine kingdoms measured themselves against for the next four hundred years.

Gelgel under him held Bali, the eastern tip of Java, Lombok and parts of Sumbawa, which is the widest this polity ever reached. But the reason the reign is remembered is not the territory. It is that this is when the Javanese arrived.

Nirartha

Danghyang Nirartha was a Javanese brahmin priest who came to Bali in Waturenggong's reign as Majapahit was ending, and the Balinese tradition credits him with a great deal: the reorganisation of the priesthood, a body of religious literature, the padmasana shrine that now stands in the north-east corner of every Balinese temple, and the founding of temples along the south and west coasts — Uluwatu, Tanah Lot, Rambut Siwi — which are the ones a visitor photographs.

Whether one man did all of that is doubtful in the way such traditions usually are. What the tradition is describing, whoever did it, is a reorganisation of Balinese religion on Javanese lines inside a single reign, carried out by people who had just arrived from a court that had stopped existing.

The caste order

The other thing dated to this period is the wangsa system: the division of Balinese society into the three high groups — brahmana, satria, wesia — and the jaba majority outside them, with the ruling houses of the later nine kingdoms placing themselves in it by descent from named Javanese ancestors who came with Waturenggong's court.

That is what the Majapahit connection actually consists of, and it is worth being clear that it is not a sentimental genealogy. It was the organising principle of who could marry whom, who could hold which office, and what level of Balinese a person was addressed in — and it was still doing that work in the twentieth century.

Descent from a Javanese court that had ceased to exist was not a memory on Bali. It was the constitution.

The subak

Drafted from Hagerdal, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Lombok and Bali in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (2001)aside?What aside means

Gelgel lived on a tax on rice land, like most agrarian kingdoms. What made Bali different is what sat between the state and the land.

Balinese wet rice is watered by subak: associations of the farmers who share a single irrigation channel, which allocate water in rotation, maintain the works, settle disputes among their own members, and are organised around a water temple whose ritual calendar is the scheduling mechanism. A subak is not a village and does not map onto one — membership follows the water, not the settlement.

They are older than this kingdom. Inscriptions referring to irrigation associations on Bali run back to the ninth century, three and a half centuries before Majapahit installed the line this kingdom descends from. They outlasted it too: subak still allocate water on Bali, and the landscape they produced is on the UNESCO list.

A third party

A land tax assessed on Balinese rice land is assessed on land whose productivity is set by an institution the state did not create, does not run, and cannot easily override — because the water schedule is a ritual calendar and the priest who keeps it is not a royal official.

That is a genuinely unusual arrangement. Most agrarian states of this period sit directly on the cultivator: they assess, they collect, and where they want more they push. A Balinese king pushing on the water would have been arguing with a temple about a festival date, against farmers who had been settling that question among themselves since the ninth century.

It is worth comparing with what the same phrase covers elsewhere. On Java, a kingdom's land revenue ran through sima grants — land signed away permanently to a religious foundation, recorded on a stone at the site. In Burma the equivalent endowments ran so far that Aung-Thwin argues they eventually bankrupted Pagan: land kept leaving the tax base and never came back.

Three kingdoms living on rice land, and underneath the same three words are an endowment that alienates land forever, a monastic economy that swallowed a state, and a farmers' association older than the throne.

Nine kingdoms

Drafted from Hagerdal, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Lombok and Bali in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (2001)end

Gelgel's paramountcy collapsed around 1686 and the court moved to Klungkung. Its ruler kept the title Dewa Agung and the ritual precedence, and lost the power.

Bali spent the next two hundred years as nine kingdoms — Klungkung, Badung, Mengwi, Gianyar, Bangli, Karangasem, Buleleng, Tabanan and Jembrana — quarrelling with each other, and from Karangasem holding Lombok across the strait.

Only one of the nine claimed to be the continuation: the house of Klungkung, which kept the Dewa Agung title. The other eight argued their standing by descent from the same line without claiming its precedence — which is a more stable arrangement than it sounds, because it gave every ruling house a share in the same ancestry and only one of them a claim on the top of it.

Java went the other way in the same century. When Mataram was divided at Giyanti in 1755 it produced two courts, both of which claimed to be the continuation, and both of which still exist.

Hindu rulers over Muslim subjects

The Balinese kingdoms projected across the strait to Lombok from the seventeenth century, and from Karangasem they installed Balinese Hindu rule over a Sasak population that was Muslim.

That is worth sitting with, because it runs against the whole current of the period. Islam had been moving outward through these islands since a throne on the Sumatran coast took it in the thirteenth century — to Melaka, to Java's north coast, to Borneo, Sulawesi, Maluku and the southern Philippines, port by port, for three hundred years.

Bali is where the movement met something going the other way. A Hindu kingdom that had been made by refugees from an Islamised Java crossed a strait and put Hindu rulers over Muslim subjects, and held that arrangement into the nineteenth century. It is the one place in the archipelago where the tide ran backwards.

1908

Drafted from Hagerdal, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Lombok and Bali in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (2001)afterlife

Gelgel collapsed into nine kingdoms in 1686, and what happened to those kingdoms two centuries later belongs here, because the line that ended in 1908 was the one this kingdom had carried.

The Dutch took northern Bali in the 1840s and the rest of the island between 1906 and 1908. What they met at Badung in 1906, at Tabanan the same year, and at Klungkung in 1908 was puputan: the court, the household and the retainers walking out of the palace in white, armed, into rifle fire, until there was nobody left. At Klungkung the Dewa Agung — holder of the paramount title in unbroken descent from the Gelgel line — died that way with his court.

Dutch officers wrote accounts of it. The scale is disputed and the fact is not.

The line that ended there

The Dewa Agung's title had been continuous since Majapahit installed a governing line on Bali in 1343. Five hundred and sixty-five years, from a Javanese appointment on a conquered island to a man in white walking into rifle fire in front of his own palace.

And what did not end

Almost everything else.

The subak still allocate water, by the same associations, on the same principles. The padmasana still stands in the corner of every temple. The wangsa distinctions are still socially live. The priesthood, the caste order and the irrigation associations that the Javanese arrivals reorganised in the sixteenth century outlasted the dynasty that reorganised them, and then outlasted the empire that destroyed the dynasty.

Bali is the one place in the archipelago where the Hindu-Buddhist world of Medang, Kediri, Singhasari and Majapahit did not end but changed hands. When Majapahit fell, its literature and its religion moved east across the strait. This is the far end of that sentence: what moved outlived every polity on both sides of the water, including the one it moved to, twice.