A Ritual Register in Bali

When Islam became dominant on Java in the sixteenth century, the Hindu Buddhist literary tradition did not vanish but shifted east, above all to Bali, which became the ark of Old Javanese literature. Balinese scribes copied and recopied the kakawin and prose classics onto lontar palm leaf manuscripts, and Balinese Hinduism absorbed Old Javanese as a liturgical and learned register beside Sanskrit and high Balinese. Pedanda priests recite mantras and hymns whose language is Old Javanese and Sanskrit, kakawin singing societies, sekaa mabasan, meet to chant the old poems and translate them line by line into Balinese, an activity that is both literary study and devotion, and passages of the epics are performed at temple festivals, tooth filing ceremonies and cremations, where the Bharatayuddha and Arjunawiwaha accompany the great rites of passage.

The wayang shadow theatre keeps Kawi in the mouths of its puppet heroes, with the dalang shifting between Kawi for the noble characters and Balinese or Javanese for the clowns who translate. On Java itself the school of Yogyakarta and Surakarta court poets preserved a Kawi flavoured literary Javanese, and modern Indonesian universities teach Old Javanese as the classical language of the archipelago's civilization.