This was a pair of journeys I intended to make to the famed (or infamous) Christian settlements of West Bali: Palasari (Catholic) and Blimbingsari (Protestant).
Various guide books had explained to me long ago that under the Dutch colonial domination of the Indonesian archipelago, proselytizing was officially prohibited. Therefore, as Chinese and other Christians began to settle in and make conversions on the Hindu island in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Dutch colonial government sided with Hindus who claimed “foul”.
In the late 1930s the Dutch colonial regime forced many Catholics and protestant Christians to make a very long trek to the rugged and underdeveloped western part of Bali in order to create and build a new home—i.e. out-of-sight and mind of the great majority of Hindu families and Balinese & Dutch officials who functioned in South, Central, and Eastern Bali.
From my perspective, it appears to have been a forced removal, whereby the Christians were forced to dig up the rocky soil and arid west hill country of Western Bali with the most rudimentary of tools, i.e. creating a sort of Bantustan for Protestants in one town—Blinbingsari—as well as another catholic town some kilometers away.
Here is the story of these Balinese Christians as shared in the Rough Guides: Bali & Lombok.
“While Muslims have long been welcomed into western Balinese society, Christians have historically had a frostier reception. When the Dutch gained full control over Balinese affairs in 1908, they extended their policy of undiluted cultural preservation to include barring all Christian missionaries from practicing on the island. But attentions relaxed over the next two decades, and by 1932 Tsang To Hang, a Chinese representative of the American Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA), had made several hundred converts on Bali, mostly within Bali’s Chinese community but also some of ‘pure Balinese’ ethnicity. The CMA’s fundamentalist approach created hostility between the converts and their neighbors, however, as converts were encouraged to destroy Hindu temples and to question the iniquities of the entrenched Hindu caste system. Hindu leaders responded by forbidding Hindus from having any contact with Balinese Christians.” (p.359)
How did the European Colonial masters decide to make a peace?
“The Dutch soon banned the CMA, and in 1939 concluded that the best way to ease growing tensions between Balinese Christians and Hindus was to isolate the Christians in a remote, inhospitable area of uninhabitable jungle high up in the mountains of west Bali, some 30km northwest of Negara. Against massive odds and with an amazing pioneering spirit, the Protestants hacked the cross-shaped village of Blimbingsari out of the jungle and built a huge modern church at its core, the mother church for Bali’s entire Christian community. Some 5km southeast, the Catholics did the same for their community at Palasari.”(p.360)
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