The Body Is Disappeared:
Cremations and Mass Graves in the Aftermath of Bali’s 1965-66 Massacres
Cremation in Denpasar, Bali
(Photograph taken by Author; August 2013)
Stefana Fratila
Stefana Fratila
“Goodness shouts. Evil whispers.”
-
Balinese Proverb1
The past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened
then have been eliminated. Only because the causes continue to exist does the
captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken.”
-
Theodor W. Adorno2
We wait in the street in Sidakarya, a suburb in the South of Denpasar, the capital
of Bali. The women patiently stand in a line holding over their heads the offerings they
have prepared over the course of the night. Men dressed in matching colours cluster
around their various gamelan instruments, with at least one balaganjur group ready to
accompany each body on its way to be cremated3. The whole neighbourhood is scattered
amongst these women and men, their radiantly coloured kebayas and sarongs reflected in
the light of their sparkling smiles, watchful eyes and the bright sun above. Without clear
signal, the musicians prop the heavy instruments over their shoulders, gongs are
suspended around necks and poised hands clasp cengceng kopyak at the ready. Suddenly,
the procession begins and we are on our way towards the cemetery. Some children are in
their school uniforms, sitting in the shade of the trees, waving at us from the sidewalks.
All around us, there is an overwhelming sense of celebration, of transition, surrounded by
the deep and hypnotic sounds of the balaganjur music.
1
World of Proverbs, accessed April 17, 2014:
http://www.worldofproverbs.com/2012/04/goodness-shouts-evil-whispers-balinese.html
2
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” in Can One Live after Auschwitz?, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Henry W. Pickford (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 18, italics added
for emphasis.
3
“Balaganjur” is a genre of gamelan music, played at cremations and other religious ceremonies across
Bali. The word roughly translates to ‘walking army’ in Old Javanese and the loud music can be likened to
that of a marching band because the players carry the instruments as they follow the badé, the cremation
tower that holds the body. For background information on balaganjur, see: Michael Tenzer, “Ensembles
and Repertoire”, in Balinese Gamelan Music (Tuttle: Tokyo, 2011), p. 106.
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Cremation is an integral feature of Balinese theology. In his extensive 1937
volume on Balinese culture, Island of Bali, Miguel Covarrubias writes, “Failure to
liberate the soul by neglecting to perform the cremation or by incomplete or improper
rites would force the soul to turn into a ghost that would haunt the careless descendents”4.
In Bali, cremations began to be practiced as early as the 13th Century though the notion of
reincarnation had already been prevalent across the island before the rule of the
Madjapahit5. Without a doubt, cremation practices have a longstanding history for the
Balinese, both symbolically and literally. It has even been said that the “proper cremation
and spiritual liberation of a loved one is a Balinese person’s most important earthly
duty”6. While I watched the cremation rituals unfold before me in 2013, I kept thinking
about the tens of thousands of bodies that were buried in mass graves following the
Indonesian Army-led mass killings of 1965–667. Bearing in mind the strong historical
presence of cremations in Bali, I feel compelled to ask a difficult question: In the
aftermath of the massacres, what impact do the mass graves have upon Balinese society
bearing in mind the significance of cremation rituals and theological beliefs?
Within the limited scope of this paper, I cannot (and should not) attempt to fully
answer this question. However, I do wish to put forward an interpretation of this
distinctly contentious circumstance, where a state-imposed silence on the matter prevents
Miguel Covarrubias, “Death and Cremation” in Island of Bali, (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1950), p.
360.
5
The Madjapahit were a ruling dynasty across the current-day Indonesian archipelago between the 12th and
13th Centuries. For background information on Madjapahit, see: Covarrubias, Ibid, p. 27, 360.
6
Leonard Lueras, Bali: The Ultimate Island, (Viking: Australia, 1986), p. 168.
7
It is estimated that somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people across Indonesia were murdered for
being alleged members of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, or Communist Party of Indonesia) in an
Indonesian Army-led purge. Bali is said to have been affected most seriously in proportional terms: about
5% of its total population, or 80,000 people killed. As is the case with mass murder, we cannot be
absolutely sure how many individuals were killed. These numbers may, in fact, be underestimates. Source:
Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Cornell University Press:
Ithaca, 1995), p. 209, 273.
4
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the Balinese to reconcile with the dark spell of their past. In The Dark Side of Paradise,
Geoffrey Robinson illuminates some of the dark history around the massacre that took
place on the island, now overrun with tourists. He reveals that the vast majority of those
killed in 65–66 “were rounded up without warning from field and home, often in the
middle of the night, transported to execution centres and unceremoniously shot, stabbed,
or decapitated, sometimes after being badly mutilated”8. Robinson also notes that very
few received a proper burial or cremation9. Decades of the Suharto’s aggressive silencing
around the mass killings has created severe tension between the religious beliefs and the
lived experience of the Balinese, which necessitates some degree of confrontation
towards what happened. As Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma have put it, “the
bloodshed of 1965 has soaked into Indonesia’s social landscape”10. Cremation is integral
to this tension because, according to Balinese Hinduism, it is through cremation that a
soul is “purified”11. This is not to say that burying bodies is in and of itself out of the
ordinary. In fact, it has been a longtime practice to temporarily bury bodies in graves
until an auspicious day arrives when they can be unburied for cremation; this ‘temporary’
period of time varies between weeks and years12. However, in the past this has, largely,
had to do with the financial strain that cremations bring to families not because the bodies
are absent. The expensiveness and inaccessibility of cremation rituals has actually been a
subject of reform since as early as the 1920s and due to a process of state-led
‘rationalization’ in the 1960s and 70s, the rituals have been transformed into cheaper,
8
Robinson, Ibid, p. 279.
Ibid.
10
Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, “When the World Turned to Chaos: 1965 and Its Aftermath in
Bali, Indonesia” in The Spectre of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 2003), p. 290, Italics added for emphasis.
11
J. L. Swellengrebel, “Balinese History and the Elements of Balinese Culture” in Bali: Studies in Life,
Thought, and Ritual (W. van Hoeve: The Hague and Bandung, 1960), p 43.
12
Covarrubias, Ibid, p. 27, 363–5.
9
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quicker, and (often) collective events13. Linda H. Connor has written extensively on
Bali’s growing modernity and desire for efficiency and the effects this has had upon
cremation rituals. She concludes:
A paradox of religious reformism in Bali is that the early reformers
were inspired by ideologies of democratic egalitarianism, and theirs
was essentially an oppositional discourse. In contemporary Bali, the
success of reformist doctrines can be attributed to their incorporation
into hegemonic processes of the nation state14.
This incorporation that Connor speaks of can be interpreted as the Indonesian state
undertaking the task of making death rituals as public as possible.
In this way, death rituals have also become more political in Bali than they
traditionally were; the state has made it virtually impossible for the families of those
killed in 65–66 to publically perform proper death rites or to publically mourn their dead.
By committing those killed and their families to a place of haunting, the state has
enlarged the trauma that surrounds (the tragedy of) mass murder. In Balinese theology,
the “place” where the dead remain until their purification has been referred to as “the
field of suffering”15. This language is distressing considering that so many of the victims
were buried in fields and that the concept predates these events. Therefore, the state has
deliberately created a field of suffering, transforming a spiritual space into a political
space. For affected families, this essentially extends the violence of the massacre into
their ongoing, everyday lives. The legacy of violence that the state spearheads is part of
the grave discomfort that the mass graves emit upon Balinese society. Traditionally, a
Linda H. Connor, “Contestation and Transformation of Balinese Ritual: The Case of Nagaben Ngirit” in
Being Modern in Bali, ed. Adrian Vickers (Yale University Southeast Asia Studies: New Haven, 1996), p.
179, 202.
14
Connor, Ibid, p. 207.
15
J. L. Swellengrebel, “Nonconformity in the Balinese Family: Obligations to the Dead” in Bali: Further
Studies in Life, Thought, and Ritual (W. van Hoeve: The Hague and Bandung, 1969), p 203.
13
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proper burial might have involved offerings and an open piece of bamboo placed in the
mouth of the dead, in order to let the soul out as the body as it awaits a proper cremation.
With the case of the mass graves, these kinds of rituals were not performed. For the most
part, the killed were buried unceremoniously and with no attention given to religious
customs (as vividly described in the aforementioned quote by Robinson). This is a
significant part of why the memory of the killings (as witnessed) and of those killed (as
family, friends, neighbours, or strangers), remains within the Balinese that were alive
during the massacres and carries meaning and influence upon their everyday (or, lived
experience). Dwyer and Santikarma also observe, “Violence – real, remembered, and
potential – continues to reverberate through social networks, marking everyday life”16.
One other distinct aspect about the ongoing tension around the subject is the way that the
mass killings were carried out – specifically the participations of civilians. In some cases,
people were killed as a result of personal relations like land claims, inheritance, past
insults or sexual jealousy17. Therefore, in Bali this period of violence did not necessarily
occur along party lines in the manner that it did in other parts of Indonesia18. In Bali,
practically anyone could find reason to fear for his or her life; anyone could turn anyone
into a ‘communist’ just by using the word. The word ‘communist’ became a weapon with
many sharp edges, further fragmenting Balinese society. This adds another layer of
contention because the many roles that the Balinese played in the massacre has also made
it even more difficult to break this state-imposed silence. There are many barriers in the
way. This might look like guilt, but it could also look like another piece of evidence
Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, “Speaking from the shadows: Memory and mass violence in Bali”
in After Mass Crime: Rebuilding States and Communities (United Nations University Press: Tokyo, 2007),
p. 194, Italics added for emphasis.
17
Ibid, p. 199.
18
Ibid, p. 198.
16
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holding the state responsible because the army was partially responsible for encouraging
these social divides by leading the killings. The importance of death rituals does not
escape the uncertainty of this violent time, which after all was a very short period of time.
In Bali, many were killed very quickly and this, partly, is because some made a decision
to die. Dwyer and Santikarma account how some who were sure they would be killed
would ask members of their own family to kill them, “preferring to die at the hands of
someone they trusted would carry out the necessary rituals for the dead”19. There are
even cases of individuals coming forward to authorities where they knew proper ritual
offerings had been prepared ahead of time20. The many kinds of deaths of this time period
complicate the state’s narrative of the mass killings. Amidst decades of Suharto’s
repressive regime, propaganda accounts of what happened have been disseminated in
order to tell one unified story: the state triumphed over communism. The ‘triumphant’
defeat of the communists was celebrated in school textbooks and within the graphic film
Pengkhianat G/30/S, which was shown in classrooms every year until 199921. Therefore,
even those who were not direct witnesses to the killings, have been raised in a suffocating
and confusing space when it comes to understanding what happened. Neither the
witnesses nor their children are allowed to publically discuss what was witnessed. On the
one hand, there is a brutal and biased story coming from the state and, on the other hand,
a multitude of accounts, stories and memories coming from within the private sphere, or
one’s family. These stories fundamentally contradict each other.
Now, a body tells a story. It is an entity, a physical presence that makes tangible
that a person has died – or that an individual once existed within. In 65–66, many were
19
Ibid, p. 200.
Ibid.
21
Ibid, p. 195.
20
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taken away in trucks, killed by military officers, and then buried in mass graves by local
villagers22 23. Robinson also asserts that the army orchestrated the killings in a manner
that manipulated cultural and religious symbols through the practice of nyupat, which
was essentially voluntary execution:
Nyupat, it was said, signified repentance and provided a guarantee
against a hellish afterlife or rebirth. The man in charge of the
executions – usually a military officer – would shout: “Who wants to
nyupat?”…Those who came forward were sent to a different part of
the execution area, where they were either shot, beheaded, or stabbed
like the others24.
This provides distressing corroboration that the state intentionally politicized rituals.
Confronting death is a private matter. Even if cremations had been public events for so
long, the rituals themselves were not traditionally political; the rituals never had anything
to do with the Indonesian state. Yet, in 65–66 the Indonesian Army used theological
beliefs to its advantage in order to more efficiently kill and control people. This brings to
mind a harrowing quote by Hannah Arendt: “they all died together…like things that had
neither body nor soul…It is in this monstrous equality without fraternity of
humanity…that we see, as though mirrored, the image of hell”25. The body in its relation
to Balinese understandings of reincarnation is critical here. When a body is taken away in
this manner, living family members do not see a corpse and all that remains is a memory
of that person (or, perhaps worse, the possibility that the person might even still be alive
and return home). A corpse offers some possibility of closure to loved ones, of coming to
terms with death as something that has happened, or past. Similarly, cremation is a
22
Robinson, Ibid, p. 301.
John Roosa, meeting with author, 6 March 2014.
24
Robinson, Ibid.
25
Hannah Arendt, “The Image of Hell” in Essays in Understanding: 1930 – 1954, ed. Jerome Kohn
(Harcourt Brace & Company: Orlando, 1979), p. 198.
23
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practice that provides spiritual rationale for death and subsumes grief into a state of
celebration for the Balinese. Through cremation, the body is disappeared. The remains
have become a component of the world and the body itself has disappeared before the
eyes of the person’s family. During the mass killings, however, bodies were buried in
mass graves without cremation or ritual. By not properly disposing of the bodies, the
massacred have been deemed disappearable26. In other words, the state understood those
killed as unworthy of proper burial or cremation and their families as undeserving of
closure; the state saw these people as disappearable. In this sense, the concept of
disappearance is contradictory. On the one hand, cremation physically disappears a body.
On the other hand, the bodies of the mass killings were taken away, or disappeared, by
force and with another layer of cruel intent when we take into account the Balinese
context of cremation and burial traditions. The ritual is what matters; how the body
disappears matters. Furthermore, the texture of the pain grows even coarser when we
consider how brutally the memory of those killed has been trampled on by the ruthless
Suharto regime. Dwyer and Santikarma sum up: “the trauma of these losses was
compounded by social sanctions against public mourning for the dead”27. Moreover, in
the absence of proper cremation rituals for unrecovered bodies, “ragged gaps” remain in
kinship networks28. The manner in which the mass killings were conducted torments the
private lives of affected individuals and passes on in both spiritual and literal ways from
Donna Harraway has a concept of the ‘killable’ which I am adapting here. Harraway states that we make
certain animals killable and that this makes them easier to kill, and then, eat. It is very likely that the term
‘disappearable’ has come up before in transitional justice theory though I am unsure when and where; I first
heard it in a seminar with Dr. Erin Baines. For background on ‘killable’: Donna Haraway, “Value-Added
Dogs and Lively Capital”, When Species Meet, Minneapolis: Univerity of Minnestoa Press, 2008, P. 45 –
67.
27
Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, “Speaking from the shadows: Memory and mass violence in
Bali,” Ibid, p. 201. Italics added for emphasis.
28
Ibid.
26
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one generation to the next. The state has told the Balinese that those killed were unworthy
of living. Therefore, the sub-text has been that they deserved to disappear in the manner
that they did, without proper ritual.
Against the Indonesian state’s rhetoric, memory is extremely fragile. In order to
come to terms with the disappearance of loved ones, the only possibility of religious
commemoration has been to perform rituals without the body. The centrepiece of such a
ritual is the adegan, or effigy in which the soul is embodied in order to be purified29.
There is evidence of these kinds of rituals also being performed before the massacres. For
instance, Covarrubias provides the following examples: a grave was opened and no bones
were found, the grave’s location was forgotten, or a person died at sea or outside of
Bali30. These kinds of rituals are all the more significant if we consider them in the
aftermath of the mass killings. The absence of bodies has not only deprived families to
mourn and perform customary death rituals, but it has also led to “deep uncertainties”
about the value of rituals that used effigies instead of actual bodies31. This has to do with
the aforementioned state-led rationalization of the 1970s enacted by the Parisadha Hindu
Dharma Indonesia (PHDI), which claims official authority over Hinduism in Indonesia32.
After the mass killings, the PHDI encouraged nyapuh, or cleansing rituals, to take the
place of more traditional cremation rituals; on the surface, these changes were to help
families who were waiting to cremate due to economic hardship33. The implication here,
however, was meant to address families who did not know the location of the bodies of
29
Covarrubias, Ibid, p. 368.
Ibid.
31
Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, “Speaking from the shadows: Memory and mass violence in
Bali,” Ibid, p. 206.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
30
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their loved ones as a result of the mass killings34. However, some families did not relate
to the PHDI’s ‘rationalization’ and, instead, claim to have been visited by their dead,
hearing their whispers (pawisik)35. The state does not and cannot legitimize these rituals.
It cannot determine or define the space that the spirits of the dead inhabit. This is for the
Balinese to confront on a personal level. Rituals are performative in nature. This begs the
question, for who are these rituals being performed? Perhaps on the surface-level, rituals
are performed for the gods or for satisfying social standards. However, I want to suggest
that rituals relating to the mass killings are truly meaningful when performed by oneself,
for oneself. In some cases, nyapuh or rituals with the adegan allow for family to an attach
meaning to an effigy, instead of a disappeared body. In this way, some were able to
connect to the effigy in symbolic terms, in the same way that others might relate to the
ceremonial aspects of a cremation. In the face of an impossible suffering, these rituals
have sometimes been necessary – albeit uncomfortable – to resort to. Yet, for these rituals
to hold meaning, families must act out of a necessity, to address the madness of a loss.
The necessity is not to satisfy the state or PHDI authorization. These rituals are
undertaken in painful, intimate circumstances, to better cope with and understand the
relationship of oneself to the massacred. The performance of a ritual can be viewed, here,
as an act of empowerment and control – as a way to confront grief. Yet, it hugely
depends on the circumstance that the ritual is performed in. There is room for exceptions
and improvisation if it is meaningful to the person performing the ritual. John Roosa
recounted a story of a villager he met doing his fieldwork in Bali who had been forced to
dig mass graves by military officers. He later made offerings and improvised a ritual that
34
35
Ibid.
Ibid.
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would ensure that the ghosts of those he had buried would not haunt him. In the case of
the villager who buried the massacred, the rituals help to distance himself
(understandably) from the act of burying strangers, and instead to attach meaning to the
ritual that comes after the act of burying. It can be argued that the ritual is something that
he has control over, whereas he did not have full control over burying the bodies having
been forced to do that. Furthermore, we have to also consider the active roles that
bystanders had in the killings. Sometimes families of those killed in the massacre join the
cremation processions of other families36. One might expect this to be unacceptable but,
in a markedly Balinese manner, they simply look away. Looking away is a choice, a big
one, which mitigates the tension about a collective responsibility (or even direct
responsibility in some cases). It allows for everyone, in a way, to perform their rituals
collectively (which satisfies the state) but the sub-text is rather dark and textured as the
event becomes about a variety of different narratives coming together into one
procession. It allows a personal dimension to enter an otherwise public, social, and (since
the killings) a political space. In this public space of the the, looking away is a real choice
especially if we consider that looking away during 1965-6 might have actually saved
many lives.
Hannah Arendt called death the most antipolitical experience there is, saying that
it “signifies that we shall disappear from the world of appearances and shall leave the
company of our fellows-men [sic], which are the conditions of all politics”37. Perhaps in a
place like Bali where the mass killings have made death so distinctly political, the only
possibility to escape the state rhetoric is to perform rituals for oneself. This is of immense
36
37
John Roosa, meeting with author, 6 March 2014.
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Harcourt: New York, 1970), p.67-8.
11
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power. The state-imposed silence has forced the Balinese to come up with other means of
addressing the violence and massacres of their neighbours or loved ones and, until that
silence is broken, the tension will continue and healing and reconciliation will remain a
secret, under the auspices of a commercial tourist industry. It would likely offer a degree
of healing and social transformation to recover the bodies from the mass graves and
perform upon them the proper death rituals. However, if reconciliation is led by a state
and the same power struggles are replicated, the legacy of violence will continue. The
most meaningful memory and commemoration will be led at the local level by
individuals, in the intimate performances of rituals or in resolution reached between
neighbours. Until then, the aftermath of the 65–66 mass killings is ongoing, lingering
amongst society as a whispering ghost.
“Goodness speaks in a whisper, evil shouts.”
- Tibetan Proverb38
38
“World of Proverbs,” Ibid.
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Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. “The Meaning of Working through the Past.” In Can One Live after
Auschwitz?, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Henry W. Pickford. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003.
Arendt, Hannah. “The Image of Hell.” In Essays in Understanding: 1930 – 1954, ed.
Jerome Kohn. Harcourt Brace & Company: Orlando, 1979.
Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. Harcourt: New York, 1970.
Connor, Linda H. “Contestation and Transformation of Balinese Ritual: The Case of
Nagaben Ngirit.” In Being Modern in Bali, ed. Adrian Vickers. Yale University
Southeast Asia Studies: New Haven, 1996.
Covarrubias, Miguel. “Death and Cremation.” In Island of Bali. Alfred A. Knopf: New
York, 1950.
Dwyer, Leslie and Santikarma, Degung. “Speaking from the shadows: Memory and mass
violence in Bali.” In After Mass Crime: Rebuilding States and Communities.
United Nations University Press: Tokyo, 2007.
Dwyer, Leslie and Santikarma, Degung. “When the World Turned to Chaos: 1965 and Its
Aftermath in Bali, Indonesia.” In The Spectre of Genocide: Mass Murder in
Historical Perspective. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003.
Haraway, Donna. “Value-Added Dogs and Lively Capital.” When Species Meet.
Minneapolis: Univerity of Minnestoa Press, 2008.
Lueras, Leonard. Bali: The Ultimate Island. Viking: Australia, 1986.
Robinson, Geoffrey. The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali. Cornell
University Press: Ithaca, 1995.
Roosa, John. Meeting with author, 6 March 2014.
Swellengrebel, J. L. “Balinese History and the Elements of Balinese Culture.” In Bali:
Studies in Life, Thought, and Ritual. W. van Hoeve: The Hague and Bandung,
1960.
Swellengrebel, J. L. “Nonconformity in the Balinese Family: Obligations to the Dead.” In
Bali: Further Studies in Life, Thought, and Ritual. W. van Hoeve: The Hague and
Bandung, 1969.
Tenzer, Michael . “Ensembles and Repertoire.” In Balinese Gamelan Music. Tuttle:
Tokyo, 2011.
13
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The Body Is Disappeared:
Cremations and Mass Graves in the Aftermath of Bali’s 1965-66 Massacres
Cremation in Denpasar, Bali
(Photograph taken by Author; August 2013)
Stefana Fratila
14
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“Goodness shouts. Evil whispers.”
-
Balinese Proverb39
The past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened
then have been eliminated. Only because the causes continue to exist does the
captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken.”
-
Theodor W. Adorno40
We wait in the street in Sidakarya, a suburb in the South of Denpasar, the capital
of Bali. The women patiently stand in a line holding over their heads the offerings they
have prepared over the course of the night. Men dressed in matching colours cluster
around their various gamelan instruments, with at least one balaganjur group ready to
accompany each body on its way to be cremated41. The whole neighbourhood is scattered
amongst these women and men, their radiantly coloured kebayas and sarongs reflected in
the light of their sparkling smiles, watchful eyes and the bright sun above. Without clear
signal, the musicians prop the heavy instruments over their shoulders, gongs are
suspended around necks and poised hands clasp cengceng kopyak at the ready. Suddenly,
the procession begins and we are on our way towards the cemetery. Some children are in
their school uniforms, sitting in the shade of the trees, waving at us from the sidewalks.
All around us, there is an overwhelming sense of celebration, of transition, surrounded by
the deep and hypnotic sounds of the balaganjur music.
39
World of Proverbs, accessed April 17, 2014:
http://www.worldofproverbs.com/2012/04/goodness-shouts-evil-whispers-balinese.html
40
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” in Can One Live after Auschwitz?, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Henry W. Pickford (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 18, italics added
for emphasis.
41
“Balaganjur” is a genre of gamelan music, played at cremations and other religious ceremonies across
Bali. The word roughly translates to ‘walking army’ in Old Javanese and the loud music can be likened to
that of a marching band because the players carry the instruments as they follow the badé, the cremation
tower that holds the body. For background information on balaganjur, see: Michael Tenzer, “Ensembles
and Repertoire”, in Balinese Gamelan Music (Tuttle: Tokyo, 2011), p. 106.
15
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Cremation is an integral feature of Balinese theology. In his extensive 1937
volume on Balinese culture, Island of Bali, Miguel Covarrubias writes, “Failure to
liberate the soul by neglecting to perform the cremation or by incomplete or improper
rites would force the soul to turn into a ghost that would haunt the careless
descendents”42. In Bali, cremations began to be practiced as early as the 13th Century
though the notion of reincarnation had already been prevalent across the island before the
rule of the Madjapahit43. Without a doubt, cremation practices have a longstanding
history for the Balinese, both symbolically and literally. It has even been said that the
“proper cremation and spiritual liberation of a loved one is a Balinese person’s most
important earthly duty”44. While I watched the cremation rituals unfold before me in
2013, I kept thinking about the tens of thousands of bodies that were buried in mass
graves following the Indonesian Army-led mass killings of 1965–6645. Bearing in mind
the strong historical presence of cremations in Bali, I feel compelled to ask a difficult
question: In the aftermath of the massacres, what impact do the mass graves have upon
Balinese society bearing in mind the significance of cremation rituals and theological
beliefs?
Within the limited scope of this paper, I cannot (and should not) attempt to fully
answer this question. However, I do wish to put forward an interpretation of this
Miguel Covarrubias, “Death and Cremation” in Island of Bali, (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1950), p.
360.
43
The Madjapahit were a ruling dynasty across the current-day Indonesian archipelago between the 12th
and 13th Centuries. For background information on Madjapahit, see: Covarrubias, Ibid, p. 27, 360.
44
Leonard Lueras, Bali: The Ultimate Island, (Viking: Australia, 1986), p. 168.
45
It is estimated that somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people across Indonesia were murdered
for being alleged members of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, or Communist Party of Indonesia) in an
Indonesian Army-led purge. Bali is said to have been affected most seriously in proportional terms: about
5% of its total population, or 80,000 people killed. As is the case with mass murder, we cannot be
absolutely sure how many individuals were killed. These numbers may, in fact, be underestimates. Source:
Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Cornell University Press:
Ithaca, 1995), p. 209, 273.
42
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distinctly contentious circumstance, where a state-imposed silence on the matter prevents
the Balinese to reconcile with the dark spell of their past. In The Dark Side of Paradise,
Geoffrey Robinson illuminates some of the dark history around the massacre that took
place on the island, now overrun with tourists. He reveals that the vast majority of those
killed in 65–66 “were rounded up without warning from field and home, often in the
middle of the night, transported to execution centres and unceremoniously shot, stabbed,
or decapitated, sometimes after being badly mutilated”46. Robinson also notes that very
few received a proper burial or cremation47. Decades of the Suharto’s aggressive
silencing around the mass killings has created severe tension between the religious beliefs
and the lived experience of the Balinese, which necessitates some degree of confrontation
towards what happened. As Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma have put it, “the
bloodshed of 1965 has soaked into Indonesia’s social landscape”48. Cremation is integral
to this tension because, according to Balinese Hinduism, it is through cremation that a
soul is “purified”49. This is not to say that burying bodies is in and of itself out of the
ordinary. In fact, it has been a longtime practice to temporarily bury bodies in graves
until an auspicious day arrives when they can be unburied for cremation; this ‘temporary’
period of time varies between weeks and years50. However, in the past this has, largely,
had to do with the financial strain that cremations bring to families not because the bodies
are absent. The expensiveness and inaccessibility of cremation rituals has actually been a
subject of reform since as early as the 1920s and due to a process of state-led
46
Robinson, Ibid, p. 279.
Ibid.
48
Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, “When the World Turned to Chaos: 1965 and Its Aftermath in
Bali, Indonesia” in The Spectre of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 2003), p. 290, Italics added for emphasis.
49
J. L. Swellengrebel, “Balinese History and the Elements of Balinese Culture” in Bali: Studies in Life,
Thought, and Ritual (W. van Hoeve: The Hague and Bandung, 1960), p 43.
50
Covarrubias, Ibid, p. 27, 363–5.
47
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‘rationalization’ in the 1960s and 70s, the rituals have been transformed into cheaper,
quicker, and (often) collective events51. Linda H. Connor has written extensively on
Bali’s growing modernity and desire for efficiency and the effects this has had upon
cremation rituals. She concludes:
A paradox of religious reformism in Bali is that the early reformers
were inspired by ideologies of democratic egalitarianism, and theirs
was essentially an oppositional discourse. In contemporary Bali, the
success of reformist doctrines can be attributed to their incorporation
into hegemonic processes of the nation state52.
This incorporation that Connor speaks of can be interpreted as the Indonesian state
undertaking the task of making death rituals as public as possible.
In this way, death rituals have also become more political in Bali than they
traditionally were; the state has made it virtually impossible for the families of those
killed in 65–66 to publically perform proper death rites or to publically mourn their dead.
By committing those killed and their families to a place of haunting, the state has
enlarged the trauma that surrounds (the tragedy of) mass murder. In Balinese theology,
the “place” where the dead remain until their purification has been referred to as “the
field of suffering”53. This language is distressing considering that so many of the victims
were buried in fields and that the concept predates these events. Therefore, the state has
deliberately created a field of suffering, transforming a spiritual space into a political
space. For affected families, this essentially extends the violence of the massacre into
their ongoing, everyday lives. The legacy of violence that the state spearheads is part of
Linda H. Connor, “Contestation and Transformation of Balinese Ritual: The Case of Nagaben Ngirit” in
Being Modern in Bali, ed. Adrian Vickers (Yale University Southeast Asia Studies: New Haven, 1996), p.
179, 202.
52
Connor, Ibid, p. 207.
53
J. L. Swellengrebel, “Nonconformity in the Balinese Family: Obligations to the Dead” in Bali: Further
Studies in Life, Thought, and Ritual (W. van Hoeve: The Hague and Bandung, 1969), p 203.
51
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the grave discomfort that the mass graves emit upon Balinese society. Traditionally, a
proper burial might have involved offerings and an open piece of bamboo placed in the
mouth of the dead, in order to let the soul out as the body as it awaits a proper cremation.
With the case of the mass graves, these kinds of rituals were not performed. For the most
part, the killed were buried unceremoniously and with no attention given to religious
customs (as vividly described in the aforementioned quote by Robinson). This is a
significant part of why the memory of the killings (as witnessed) and of those killed (as
family, friends, neighbours, or strangers), remains within the Balinese that were alive
during the massacres and carries meaning and influence upon their everyday (or, lived
experience). Dwyer and Santikarma also observe, “Violence – real, remembered, and
potential – continues to reverberate through social networks, marking everyday life”54.
One other distinct aspect about the ongoing tension around the subject is the way that the
mass killings were carried out – specifically the participations of civilians. In some cases,
people were killed as a result of personal relations like land claims, inheritance, past
insults or sexual jealousy55. Therefore, in Bali this period of violence did not necessarily
occur along party lines in the manner that it did in other parts of Indonesia56. In Bali,
practically anyone could find reason to fear for his or her life; anyone could turn anyone
into a ‘communist’ just by using the word. The word ‘communist’ became a weapon with
many sharp edges, further fragmenting Balinese society. This adds another layer of
contention because the many roles that the Balinese played in the massacre has also made
it even more difficult to break this state-imposed silence. There are many barriers in the
Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, “Speaking from the shadows: Memory and mass violence in Bali”
in After Mass Crime: Rebuilding States and Communities (United Nations University Press: Tokyo, 2007),
p. 194, Italics added for emphasis.
55
Ibid, p. 199.
56
Ibid, p. 198.
54
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way. This might look like guilt, but it could also look like another piece of evidence
holding the state responsible because the army was partially responsible for encouraging
these social divides by leading the killings. The importance of death rituals does not
escape the uncertainty of this violent time, which after all was a very short period of time.
In Bali, many were killed very quickly and this, partly, is because some made a decision
to die. Dwyer and Santikarma account how some who were sure they would be killed
would ask members of their own family to kill them, “preferring to die at the hands of
someone they trusted would carry out the necessary rituals for the dead”57. There are
even cases of individuals coming forward to authorities where they knew proper ritual
offerings had been prepared ahead of time58. The many kinds of deaths of this time period
complicate the state’s narrative of the mass killings. Amidst decades of Suharto’s
repressive regime, propaganda accounts of what happened have been disseminated in
order to tell one unified story: the state triumphed over communism. The ‘triumphant’
defeat of the communists was celebrated in school textbooks and within the graphic film
Pengkhianat G/30/S, which was shown in classrooms every year until 199959. Therefore,
even those who were not direct witnesses to the killings, have been raised in a suffocating
and confusing space when it comes to understanding what happened. Neither the
witnesses nor their children are allowed to publically discuss what was witnessed. On the
one hand, there is a brutal and biased story coming from the state and, on the other hand,
a multitude of accounts, stories and memories coming from within the private sphere, or
one’s family. These stories fundamentally contradict each other.
57
Ibid, p. 200.
Ibid.
59
Ibid, p. 195.
58
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Now, a body tells a story. It is an entity, a physical presence that makes tangible
that a person has died – or that an individual once existed within. In 65–66, many were
taken away in trucks, killed by military officers, and then buried in mass graves by local
villagers60 61. Robinson also asserts that the army orchestrated the killings in a manner
that manipulated cultural and religious symbols through the practice of nyupat, which
was essentially voluntary execution:
Nyupat, it was said, signified repentance and provided a guarantee
against a hellish afterlife or rebirth. The man in charge of the
executions – usually a military officer – would shout: “Who wants to
nyupat?”…Those who came forward were sent to a different part of
the execution area, where they were either shot, beheaded, or stabbed
like the others62.
This provides distressing corroboration that the state intentionally politicized rituals.
Confronting death is a private matter. Even if cremations had been public events for so
long, the rituals themselves were not traditionally political; the rituals never had anything
to do with the Indonesian state. Yet, in 65–66 the Indonesian Army used theological
beliefs to its advantage in order to more efficiently kill and control people. This brings to
mind a harrowing quote by Hannah Arendt: “they all died together…like things that had
neither body nor soul…It is in this monstrous equality without fraternity of
humanity…that we see, as though mirrored, the image of hell”63. The body in its relation
to Balinese understandings of reincarnation is critical here. When a body is taken away in
this manner, living family members do not see a corpse and all that remains is a memory
of that person (or, perhaps worse, the possibility that the person might even still be alive
60
Robinson, Ibid, p. 301.
John Roosa, meeting with author, 6 March 2014.
62
Robinson, Ibid.
63
Hannah Arendt, “The Image of Hell” in Essays in Understanding: 1930 – 1954, ed. Jerome Kohn
(Harcourt Brace & Company: Orlando, 1979), p. 198.
61
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and return home). A corpse offers some possibility of closure to loved ones, of coming to
terms with death as something that has happened, or past. Similarly, cremation is a
practice that provides spiritual rationale for death and subsumes grief into a state of
celebration for the Balinese. Through cremation, the body is disappeared. The remains
have become a component of the world and the body itself has disappeared before the
eyes of the person’s family. During the mass killings, however, bodies were buried in
mass graves without cremation or ritual. By not properly disposing of the bodies, the
massacred have been deemed disappearable64. In other words, the state understood those
killed as unworthy of proper burial or cremation and their families as undeserving of
closure; the state saw these people as disappearable. In this sense, the concept of
disappearance is contradictory. On the one hand, cremation physically disappears a body.
On the other hand, the bodies of the mass killings were taken away, or disappeared, by
force and with another layer of cruel intent when we take into account the Balinese
context of cremation and burial traditions. The ritual is what matters; how the body
disappears matters. Furthermore, the texture of the pain grows even coarser when we
consider how brutally the memory of those killed has been trampled on by the ruthless
Suharto regime. Dwyer and Santikarma sum up: “the trauma of these losses was
compounded by social sanctions against public mourning for the dead”65. Moreover, in
the absence of proper cremation rituals for unrecovered bodies, “ragged gaps” remain in
Donna Harraway has a concept of the ‘killable’ which I am adapting here. Harraway states that we make
certain animals killable and that this makes them easier to kill, and then, eat. It is very likely that the term
‘disappearable’ has come up before in transitional justice theory though I am unsure when and where; I first
heard it in a seminar with Dr. Erin Baines. For background on ‘killable’: Donna Haraway, “Value-Added
Dogs and Lively Capital”, When Species Meet, Minneapolis: Univerity of Minnestoa Press, 2008, P. 45 –
67.
65
Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, “Speaking from the shadows: Memory and mass violence in
Bali,” Ibid, p. 201. Italics added for emphasis.
64
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kinship networks66. The manner in which the mass killings were conducted torments the
private lives of affected individuals and passes on in both spiritual and literal ways from
one generation to the next. The state has told the Balinese that those killed were unworthy
of living. Therefore, the sub-text has been that they deserved to disappear in the manner
that they did, without proper ritual.
Against the Indonesian state’s rhetoric, memory is extremely fragile. In order to
come to terms with the disappearance of loved ones, the only possibility of religious
commemoration has been to perform rituals without the body. The centrepiece of such a
ritual is the adegan, or effigy in which the soul is embodied in order to be purified67.
There is evidence of these kinds of rituals also being performed before the massacres. For
instance, Covarrubias provides the following examples: a grave was opened and no bones
were found, the grave’s location was forgotten, or a person died at sea or outside of
Bali68. These kinds of rituals are all the more significant if we consider them in the
aftermath of the mass killings. The absence of bodies has not only deprived families to
mourn and perform customary death rituals, but it has also led to “deep uncertainties”
about the value of rituals that used effigies instead of actual bodies69. This has to do with
the aforementioned state-led rationalization of the 1970s enacted by the Parisadha Hindu
Dharma Indonesia (PHDI), which claims official authority over Hinduism in Indonesia70.
After the mass killings, the PHDI encouraged nyapuh, or cleansing rituals, to take the
place of more traditional cremation rituals; on the surface, these changes were to help
66
Ibid.
Covarrubias, Ibid, p. 368.
68
Ibid.
69
Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, “Speaking from the shadows: Memory and mass violence in
Bali,” Ibid, p. 206.
70
Ibid.
67
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families who were waiting to cremate due to economic hardship71. The implication here,
however, was meant to address families who did not know the location of the bodies of
their loved ones as a result of the mass killings72. However, some families did not relate
to the PHDI’s ‘rationalization’ and, instead, claim to have been visited by their dead,
hearing their whispers (pawisik)73. The state does not and cannot legitimize these rituals.
It cannot determine or define the space that the spirits of the dead inhabit. This is for the
Balinese to confront on a personal level. Rituals are performative in nature. This begs the
question, for who are these rituals being performed? Perhaps on the surface-level, rituals
are performed for the gods or for satisfying social standards. However, I want to suggest
that rituals relating to the mass killings are truly meaningful when performed by oneself,
for oneself. In some cases, nyapuh or rituals with the adegan allow for family to an attach
meaning to an effigy, instead of a disappeared body. In this way, some were able to
connect to the effigy in symbolic terms, in the same way that others might relate to the
ceremonial aspects of a cremation. In the face of an impossible suffering, these rituals
have sometimes been necessary – albeit uncomfortable – to resort to. Yet, for these rituals
to hold meaning, families must act out of a necessity, to address the madness of a loss.
The necessity is not to satisfy the state or PHDI authorization. These rituals are
undertaken in painful, intimate circumstances, to better cope with and understand the
relationship of oneself to the massacred. The performance of a ritual can be viewed, here,
as an act of empowerment and control – as a way to confront grief. Yet, it hugely
depends on the circumstance that the ritual is performed in. There is room for exceptions
and improvisation if it is meaningful to the person performing the ritual. John Roosa
71
Ibid.
Ibid.
73
Ibid.
72
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recounted a story of a villager he met doing his fieldwork in Bali who had been forced to
dig mass graves by military officers. He later made offerings and improvised a ritual that
would ensure that the ghosts of those he had buried would not haunt him. In the case of
the villager who buried the massacred, the rituals help to distance himself
(understandably) from the act of burying strangers, and instead to attach meaning to the
ritual that comes after the act of burying. It can be argued that the ritual is something that
he has control over, whereas he did not have full control over burying the bodies having
been forced to do that. Furthermore, we have to also consider the active roles that
bystanders had in the killings. Sometimes families of those killed in the massacre join the
cremation processions of other families74. One might expect this to be unacceptable but,
in a markedly Balinese manner, they simply look away. Looking away is a choice, a big
one, which mitigates the tension about a collective responsibility (or even direct
responsibility in some cases). It allows for everyone, in a way, to perform their rituals
collectively (which satisfies the state) but the sub-text is rather dark and textured as the
event becomes about a variety of different narratives coming together into one
procession. It allows a personal dimension to enter an otherwise public, social, and (since
the killings) a political space. In this public space of the the, looking away is a real choice
especially if we consider that looking away during 1965-6 might have actually saved
many lives.
Hannah Arendt called death the most antipolitical experience there is, saying that
it “signifies that we shall disappear from the world of appearances and shall leave the
company of our fellows-men [sic], which are the conditions of all politics”75. Perhaps in a
74
75
John Roosa, meeting with author, 6 March 2014.
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Harcourt: New York, 1970), p.67-8.
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place like Bali where the mass killings have made death so distinctly political, the only
possibility to escape the state rhetoric is to perform rituals for oneself. This is of immense
power. The state-imposed silence has forced the Balinese to come up with other means of
addressing the violence and massacres of their neighbours or loved ones and, until that
silence is broken, the tension will continue and healing and reconciliation will remain a
secret, under the auspices of a commercial tourist industry. It would likely offer a degree
of healing and social transformation to recover the bodies from the mass graves and
perform upon them the proper death rituals. However, if reconciliation is led by a state
and the same power struggles are replicated, the legacy of violence will continue. The
most meaningful memory and commemoration will be led at the local level by
individuals, in the intimate performances of rituals or in resolution reached between
neighbours. Until then, the aftermath of the 65–66 mass killings is ongoing, lingering
amongst society as a whispering ghost.
“Goodness speaks in a whisper, evil shouts.”
- Tibetan Proverb76
76
“World of Proverbs,” Ibid.
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