Perhaps
the most remarkable of antiquities in Bali is the great bronze
drum kept in the Pura Panataran Sasih in Pedieng, the former home
of the demon-king Maya Danawa. Some Balinese say that it is one
of the subangs (ear-plugs) of the moon, while others say it is
a Sasih, the " moon " itself, that fell down to earth
and was caught in a tree. It remained there giving a blinding
light, preventing some thieves of the neighbourbood from performing
their nocturnal work.
One
of them, bolder than the rest, decided to extinguish the source
of fight and, climbing on the tree, urinated on it. The "
moon " exploded, killing the thief, and fell to the ground
in the shape of the present drum, which explains why it is broken
at the base. The people rescued it and placed it on a high latticed
shrine in the temple. The drum is of the style of the so-called
Chinese drums of the Han dynasty often found in Indo-China and
even in Java, but it is the largest and most beautiful I have
ever seen. The Pedjeng drum differs somewhat from the usual Han
drums; it is elongated, with three great handles, rather like
the bronze drums found in Alor, the island near Timor, where they
are still used as money, some being worth as much as three thousand
guilders.' The drum is decorated on it§ sounding surface
with a beautiful star in high telief surrounded by a border of
sweeping spirals, and on its sides with borders between parallel
lines rather like the popular design called "spears"
(tumbak) by the Balinese. Furthermore, there are strangely primitive,
or rather conven tionalized, human faces in low relief that have
no obvious relation to Chinese art and that are strongly Indonesian,
with the characteristic leaf-shaped ornament worn behind the ears,
the lobes of which are exaggeratedly distended by the weight of
unusual ear-rings. The general style, the motifs, and the workmanship
of the drum are all definitely related to the unique bronze axes
from the island of Roti, also near Timor, which were unfortunately
destroyed in the fire of the pavilion of the Netherlands in the
Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931 where they were exhibited. The
axes and the drums seem to belong, rather than to a definitely
Chinese culture like the Han, to an ancient, mysmysterious Indonesian
bronze age.' The Pedjeng drum is regarded with great reverence,
and people often bring it offerings.
Another
motif which appears to be of native origin is the figure called
tjili, a silhouette of a beautiful girl with a body shaped like
a slim hour-glass (two triangles meeting at their apex), with
rounded breasts, long thin arms, great ear-plugs, and wearing
an enormous bead-dress of flowers. Tjili shapes are made in wood,
of Chinese coins sewn together, woven into textiles, modeled in
clay to surmount tiles for roofs, and made into clay banks for
pennies. They are painted on rice cakes for temple ornaments in
Selat, and made out of palm-leaf for certain agricultural ceremonies
of the old mountain villages or as containers for the soul of
the dead (adegan) for cremations. Tjilis form the central motif
of lamaks, those beautiful but perishable ornamental strips of
palm-leaf, about a foot and a half wide by some ten to twenty
feet long, made for feasts by the women, pinned together with
bits of bamboo strips of busung, the tender yellow blades of the
sugar or coconut palm, taken from the tree before the leaf opens.
This is decorated with a delicate geometric pattern, a mosaic
of bits of the green leaf of the same palm, cut with a knife into
elaborate ornaments which are pinned on the yellow background,
forming borders like the ones on the Pedieng drum, ornamental
strips (bebatikAn) , groups of rosettes called 94 moons "
(bul6n) , the tjili, and a stylized tree (kayon) -. These magnificent
ornaments, perhaps the purest examples of the Balinese native
art, last only for one day, and after hanging for an afternoon
on an altar or a rice granary, by evening they are completely
wilted. Spies has collected every different type of Jamak design
for a period of years and he has hundreds of them. He claims that
every community has a peculiar design not found elsewhere.
The
figure of a tjili seems to have a strange hold on the imagination
of the Balinese, perhaps because it is the shape of the "
Rice Mother " (ninil pantun):, a sheaf of rice dressed into
the shape of a tjili. This would indicate that the mysterious
figure was connected with, or derived from, the deities of rice
and fertility, either Dewi Sri or Melanting also goddesses of
beauty and seed respectively. Again If the shape of. the great
offerings , a pyramid of fruit topped by a. fan of flowers and
palm-leaf, is also a tjili, so stylized however that only the
pyramidal skirt and the flower headdre'ss, remain. This became
evident when we saw in Kesiman, alongside-. the usual form of
offerings, one six feet tall made into realistic tjili her skirt
of melons ears of corn, oranges, jambu, and salak