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Journalism of Courage
I am in Bali, cruising up to the crater of the still active Mount Batur, throne of Vishnu, the mountain god of property here, and patron of peasants.
The bare-bodied Balinese boys insist on trailing behind and serenading Indians with the theme song from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, a film that plays to packed audiences here as well.
My escort on the island is 26-year-old Wiwin, whose mother is a peddler of the famed Bali T-shirts. She is a Hindu while his father is an East Javanese Muslim, he says.
Listening to Wiwin talk about his family, I remember that Indonesian President Megawati is touring India. She brings with her the proud legacy of Bali, a minority Hindu corner of a large Islamic sea, considered the mother culture here along with Java, the father culture of multi-ethnic Indonesia.
The eldest child of Sukarno, founding father and first president, Megawati8217;s paternal grandmother was a Hindu Balinese. And Sukarno, the poet president, had allowed himself to bask in the composite culture of both his parents, passing the same attitude to his children.
He invented the slogan 8216;unity in diversity8217; and imagined the country8217;s culture as a synthesis of all regional cultures, including that of the majority ethnic Javanese, ethnic Chinese, all urban life, rural traditions and elements of modern western lifestyles. He repeatedly pointed out to his people aspects of their common pre-Islamic past. Along with economic development, he was obsessed with the idea of cultural enrichment and social harmony.
According to Adrian Vickers, author of Bali, A Paradise Created, Sukarno looked to Bali to provide another dimension to the culture repertoire of Javanese symbolism.
While talking to his people about the future, Sukarno did not shy away from drawing multiple examples from well-known stories used to this day in the ancient art of shadow puppet theatre. He drew upon characters and incidents from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata that are popular, especially in the rural areas, to talk of his dream for modern Indonesia.
He built upon the idea of Ratu Adil, or the just king. In his most romantic moments he looked upon himself as god-king and reincarnation of Vishnu.
Sukarno was taught theosophy by his Muslim Javanese schoolteacher father and by the time independence was wrested from the Dutch he had a fairly good feel of the great mystical spirit of Asia. He saw Indonesian culture as a shining component of this whole.
Bali delighted him as a museum of the Hindu arts of ancient Java that had existed before the coming of Islam. As head of the largest Muslim country in the world, Sukarno forever delighted to play host to many other great leaders in Bali including India8217;s Nehru, Robert Kennedy and Ho Chi Minh. He encouraged Affandi, one of the modern Indonesian painters he admired most, to visit Bengal8217;s Santiniketan.
A favourite retreat of Sukarno was in the mountains of Bali. He built a home in the midst of lush terraced rice fields around a renovated Dutch rest house that overlooked a temple with the holy spring waters.
Looking back, it seems that Sukarno had made earnest attempts to pick out the essence of the minority religion and culture and elevated it to a national level. His dream remained to weave and integrate the prayers and practices of all the people of this island country into a modern anthem.
