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Religious and Colonial Influences

By the first century CE, Hinduism had already arrived in Indonesia through trade routes from South India. Hinduism includes many local gods, goddesses, and practices. With Hinduism came the idea of a king descended from a god, and the installation of gods in temples at which people worship and pay homage to them through the arts. Both visual and performing arts traditions developed as part of these practices. Over time, a number of Hindu kingdoms developed across the western portion of the Indonesian islands, and with each temple there were specific deities, ritual practices, and dynamic power systems at work. On the small island of Bali, for example, the members of 20,000 Hindu temples celebrate festi vals throughout the year in honor of such Hindu deities as Arjuna, Shiva, Ganesh, and others (Figure 12.2). These festivals include stunning visual arts in the form of masks, costumes, sculptures, carving, and painting; they also include sounds of human voices, bronze gongs, bamboo rattles, wooden instruments, and drums. The Hindu religion brought with it the caste system. The Indonesians who live on the islands of Java and Bali in particular exist within social strata: what we might think of as class, but actually based on historical Indian social divisions. In Bali one finds more Sanskrit-based words in the speech of the upper stratum than those, who use more local words and expressions. Perceived “insiders” tend to be the educated elite; the majority of the population tends to belong to the working classes.

FIGURE 12.2 Hindu religious procession at Pura Besakih, Bali. PROPERTY OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS