Gandhi and Marley alive in Candi Dasa

Gandhi and Marley alive in Candi Dasa

By Degung Santikarma and Emma Baulch

DENPASAR (JP): Most people consider Bob Marley and Indira
Gandhi long gone, but they are alive and well in Candi Dasa.
Perhaps the Balinese belief in reincarnation has allowed their
rebirth there.

At the north end of the main road running through Candi Dasa,
Legend Cafe, a tribute to Bob Marley, and a Gandhian ashram,
reluctantly face each other as the traffic whizzes back and forth
between them. Locals reach a crossroad when they hit their teens.
Take a left turn and you're on the road to Marley, a hunting
society oozing sexuality. Hunters of spiritual enlightenment take
a right turn and are headed for Gandhi and a life of chastity.

Visitors to Candi Dasa also arrive at the Gandhi-Marley
crossroad. There is a sign directing travelers to turn right for
Candi Dasa Ashram, turn left for Legend Cafe. Those seeking
spiritual siblings (in the niskala sense) will take the right
turn. Those seeking a sibling spirit (Jim Beam, Johnny Walker,
Jack Daniels) will head left. Yoga and Hindu mantra junkies will
turn right, while their "binary opposition", yogurt and Rastaman
freaks, will take a left.

The Candi Dasa Ashram, the only Gandhian ashram in the
southern hemisphere, spreads out along 75 acres of beach in the
sleepy tourist town. Established 20 years ago by the formidable
Gandhi follower, Ibu Gedong Oka, the ashram has since developed
tourist accommodation offering a number of double bungalows in
its expansive garden. Visitors to the ashram are greeted by blue
Ganeshas and Gandhian mottoes which adorn the white washed walls.
A notice board announces "OUR DAILY ROUTINE". It's a 16-hour day
which starts with a 5 a.m. morning prayer and ends with 9 p.m.
Yoga, English and mantra classes are carefully scheduled
throughout the day. Ashram members -- there's about twenty five
of them -- get help with finishing senior high school. As part of
the package they get a strict routine of prayer, English lessons
(Gandhian principles are discussed in English) and reading.

Bob Marley preaches to a heavy bass beat as Wayan, one ashram
member, beats the kulkul. It's time for evening prayer. Twenty
five coiffed, bathed, beaming youngsters file into the prayer
room to the not-so-distant sound of "Get Up Stand Up" (For Your
Rights).

Gigolos

At 9 p.m. it's ashram bed time but Legend is thumping. The
gigolos start to gather, getting ready to dance and prance until
the early hours. Komang, an outreach worker for an AIDS NGO, sits
with a bucket of condoms in one corner taking appointments for
counseling sessions the next day. Made, bear-breasted, is
twirling in a green sarong to a techno cacophony. Legend's
feature Bob Marley mural watches over him. For tourists to Candi
Dasa, following the legend ritual means sacrificing the early
morning prayer at the ashram. Didn't Wayan ever want to do the
same? Was she never tempted to be unfaithful to Gandhi and for
one night let down her hair, kick up her heels and have a wild
time with Marley?

Maybe the heavy male culture of Legend makes it hardly an
option for a young Balinese girl, even if for only one night.
Perhaps it's at the Gandhi-Marley crossroads that Balinese girls
and boys go their separate ways. But there are boys at the ashram
too, even if they are far outnumbered by the girls. Does the
Gandhi choice signal a desire for some kind of orthodoxy, some
kind of answer to Bali's "spiritual crisis"? Has Gandhi in Candi
Dasa given voice to young people's disillusionment with the
penetration of consumerism ant the Balinese "tradition" itself?

In Candi Dasa, Gandhi seems to offer an anti-consumerist,
nativist orthodoxy -- a no-frills spirituality. He symbolizes the
young people's rejection of a Balinese obsession with esthetics
and elaboration, egged on by a tourist demand for spectacular
ceremony.

What of the gigolo path to Marley? Maybe the gigolos aren't so
good at mathematics, but they all figured this equation: reggae
plus sex work equal modern Balinese man. One taste of white
exotica and you're through this modern rite of passage. it is
much less painful than circumcision. The whole Legend tribe has
long been initiated, and the Western exotica may have faded into
the mundane. But tourists have retained an important social
function: they are the object of the gigolo cultural statement.

The path to Marley offers opportunities to reply to the
consumerism and cultural stagnation that have penetrated Bali
through tourism. The response of the Balinese gigolo is to
penetrate the tourists. But Marley is more than a sexualized
cultural statement. Like Gandhi, he is a symbol of nativism and
anti-consumerism. Seemingly, the Marley gigolos embrace a kind of
Western decadence, while the Gandhi freaks reject it. Seemingly.
But while the ashram kids conduct flowing and complex
conversations with guests in their Gandhian English, the Marley
gigolos will stumble over a melange of Balinese pronunciation
assisted grammatically by a few arak and coke.

It's at the Gandhi-Marley crossroad that people make the
choices about how they will react. Marleyites adapt a "go with
the flow" attitude, while the Gandhi converts prefer to
crystallize some kind of nativist, spiritual orthodoxy.
Eventually though, both appear to symbolize at least a
questioning of the worldly situation. Ironically, both have
chosen nativist, yet imported, messiahs.

Boundaries

There's a heavy blurring of cultural boundaries going on for
all concerned: the tourists, the Gandhi converts and the Marley
gigolos. At Legend, hippies find each other. The Californian
hippie finds her perfect match in a Balinese Rasta hippie. At the
ashram, Gandhi introduces tourists seeking something beyond the
material and mundane to locals logging to shed their ceremonial
baggage.

Gandhi and Marley go local, local go Gandhi and Marley. Is it
globalization? Maybe.

Agus swaggers into Legend on a wet afternoon. It's been two
years since he was last here. Since then he's been in Germany,
and the experience has trimmed his Rasta-ness to a single earring
and a short hairstyle.

"We have to know who we are," he concludes over his second
fruit lassie. "We need to preserve our own culture." He's
suffering from a heavy dosage of culturally conservative German
Romanticism. With one foot back on the path to Gandhi, he's
almost a Legend traitor. But the other foot is firmly, stubbornly
rooted in Legend. He's synthesized a dialectical conclusion, a
modern nasi campur: Bali = Gandhi + Marley.