Balinese yuppies eagerly hunt for their past glory

By Degung Santikarma

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): In an exclusive neighborhood in Denpasar, a team of workmen shake their heads in confusion. They've been hired to work on a multibillion rupiah project: the renovation of a house that, in their eyes, already epitomizes the ultimate in modern luxury.

The front gate, an abstract sculpture of twisted iron and glass, is to be torn down and replaced with huge wooden panels hijacked from a 100-year-old house.

The wide lawn, an expanse of glistening green Japanese grass that would make any international golf course proud, is to be dug up and replanted with authentic Balinese grass, the same kind local farmers feed to their cows. The family temple, with its ornate carvings and gold-leaf decoration, is to be exchanged for a subdued shrine cut from soft volcanic stone and covered with a hand-thatched roof.

And the interior also is to be redesigned. The modern spring bed with its plush upholstered headboard and gaudy tropical print sheets is to be pushed aside to make way for an old teak four- poster, a hand-sewn kapok mattress and frayed ikat bed linen.

The marble floors are to be covered with scarred teak boards, and the walls adorned with the implements of another era: old wagon wheels, sickles used for harvesting rice and even a plow. The shining tiled bathroom with its porcelain and gold fixtures is to be demolished, and in its place, a deep stone bathtub will be set surrounded by a private garden filled with native orchids.

The works of modern art are to be sold, the display replaced with a new collection of artifacts: rare handmade gringsing cloths made by Bali Aga (original Balinese) villagers and antique wavy-bladed kris with jewel-studded handles.

The swimming pool stays, but its abstract architecture will now be hidden by a tangle of tropical trees and a collection of worn stone statues of Krishna, Rama and other figures from the Hindu pantheon. As the bewildered workers look on in disbelief, a small-scale war is declared against the modern premises.

Among the new Balinese middle class -- otherwise known as Buppies (Balinese Yuppies) -- a passion for the past has emerged as the latest contemporary trend. As everything from wooden cow bells to entire traditional houses have become hot commodities among Bali's dealers and designers, prices for antiques have gone through the (hand-thatched, of course) roof.

But according to local collectors, this mania for the premodern is not just an economically sensible strategy in a marketplace where anything, it seems, with sufficient patina can turn a profit. It is rather, they claim, a social mission, an attempt to safeguard and preserve Balinese culture.

The owner of the Denpasar house, who has made his fortune as a successful restaurateur selling pasta, pizza and cappuccino to tourists, explains his obsession with the ancient. "All the antiques in Bali are being packed into shipping containers and sent overseas by tourists. This is dangerous for our younger generation, who will never get the opportunity to understand the fine taste of their ancestors.

"It is only by preserving these great works of Balinese culture that we can make sure that a history of colonialism does not repeat itself." He is seeking, he said, to reverse the relations of power that saw sacred Balinese lontar (palm leaf) books, traditional paintings and ancient artifacts stored away in museums and universities in the West.

"Just to study your own history, you have to go to Holland or America," he complained bitterly.

This new fetish for the faded and the frayed seems, indeed, to have succeeded in giving the past new life. These days, the streets of Bali are lined with shops advertising antiques -- both authentic and made-to-order -- that cater not just to tourists but to wealthy locals.

Those Balinese whose parents, seeking to escape a life of agriculture, were busy building modern "office houses" out of concrete and decorating them with plastic and chrome, are now plundering the past for their own renovations.

Yet in contemporary Bali, history turns out to be a somewhat troublesome guest to invite for a revisit.

This new class of antique collectors counts among its members a select segment of local society who grew wealthy selling their home to the West as a tourist destination where traditions remained untarnished and where culture was the ultimate asset.

Preserving the past offers these Balinese a way to assert ethnic pride, displaying to the world that Bali's rich cultural heritage remains protected against the onslaught of tourism. Yet it is precisely this kind of advertising of a pristine past that pulls a steady stream of tourists to the island, eager to consume culture and export a prize piece of it back to grace their homes.

And the history that is being displayed in the gracious antique galleries and private residences of Bali's new rich also represents a select slice of history, sanitized to appeal to bourgeois tastes. Guest cottages in the shape of traditional rice barns or sickles and plows as art create a pretty image of a peaceful peasant past.

Yet, erased from this picture are the struggles, hardships and frequent acts of violence that marked the life of a Balinese farmer. Forgotten in these romantic recollections is the bone- weariness that comes from working in the fields from sunrise to sunset, the worries over rising prices of fertilizer or falling prices for crops, the desperation over a harvest attacked by plagues of pests, the fear of not having enough money to pay the high interest rates charged by local moneylenders or of not having enough power to resist the conglomerates who are looking to buy up land to build new tourist developments.

And the final irony: this new well-educated middle class, possessing both cosmopolitan tastes and the bank accounts to satisfy them, has been at the forefront of critique against Bali's traditional caste system.

Using the language of democracy and modernity as ammunition, they argue for a rejection of a past that they characterize as feudal and unjust. But while they claim to want to renovate history, they are turning to it for inspiration for their own building projects, creating faithful replicas of the palaces of Bali's traditional royalty.

And by patronizing the high-priced galleries and showrooms of the antique trade, they help create a new kind of hierarchical system based not on birthright but on wealth and taste and appreciation of tradition.

As the workers watch a carved wooded gedong agung gate that once graced the home of a Balinese raja (king) being unloaded from a truck, one of the laborers turns to his friend and asks, "We never had anything like that in our house when we were growing up. Did you?"