THE STORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF BALINESE ART

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. T he axes and the drums seem to belong, rather than to a definitely Chinese culture like the Han, to an ancient, mysterious 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 head-dress of flowers. Tjili shapes are made in wood, of Chinese coins sewn together, woven into textiles, modelled 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 busting, 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 Pedjeng drum, ornamental strips (bebatikan) , groups of rosettes called “ moons “ (bulan) , the tjili, and a stylized tree (kayon) .