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.