Cremation Season in Bali

I generally avoid going to Bali when I know there are a lot of cremations going on around Ubud, which is my base. As anyone with even the most passing acquaintance with Bali knows, cremations mean about two months of intensive labor before the big event and a month of ceremonies after.

The time the banjar (community group) requires of its members to prepare for cremations is no less than the time required by a full-time job. For those who actually have full-time jobs, they are run ragged. So that is why, despite the pomp, ceremony and undeniable photo ops, I try to avoid visiting Bali when my close friends are in the middle of cremation preparations. Unless I am close with their village and actually helping in those preparations myself, I know my friends will barely have time to see me during the month ir two preceding a cremation. .

Because cremations are extremely expensive, bodies are normally buried, and every five years or so the entire village digs up their dead for a fiery send-off. People of stature may enjoy their own cremation after only a month or two in the ground – or possibly awaiting the event above-ground by the benefit of preservatives

But whichever is the case, the final fire and smoke is the least of the labor. There are offerings to be made, multitudes of baskets to be woven, huge towers to transport the remains to be built, and of course, sarcophagi to be built in the shape of animals, such as lions and bulls. These are hand-painted in detail and hold the final remains when the torch is lit. The bodies are transported to the cremation grounds in the towers with much fanfare, ceremony, music and excitement. There the remains are transported to the sarcophagi. In villages near the tourist eyes, it is, in fact, a huge tourist attraction.

I remember when I was living with friends in a distant, hidden village preparing for village-wide cremation of 20 people.. As I shopped for an appropriate sarong and black lace for my kebaya, cunning vendors tried to pry from me where the cremation was taking place – so they could charge tourists to transport them there. I’m not much of one for a circus, so I demurred to give this information..

But in Ubud, a tourist town, there is no getting away from the fanfare. A Balinese friend from the area recently told me that when important royalty is cremated, filming rights are sold to big news stations. The last big royal cremation in Ubud, he told me cost over $1.5 million U.S. – this does not include labor, because of course the men and women of the village are not paid for their work, it is part of their civic duty. The rights were sold for over $ 2.5 million U.S .- A tidy million dollar profit for the very rich banjar of Ubud.

After I bought my ticket to Bali, I was sad to hear that the “king” of Ubud had died. I did not know him personally, but just about everyone I knew around Ubud did. The Coq (a royal title) was a sociable and popular man. There was to be a cremation for him two months after my arrival. Of course, this meant that any friend from Ubud I normally hung out with would be too busy to do much but go to work and go to banjar. It also meant a lot of traffic jams as work was done at the palace right off the main road.

The main reason I was going to Bali was to see ‘Tut anyway… and he is from Padang Tegal not Ubud. (Casual tourists think Padang Tegal is part of the same banjar as Ubud, but in fact Jln. Hanoman, the other tourist drag that runs parallel to Monkey Forest Rd. and, indeed, the Monkey Forest itself is all the Padang Tegal banjar.) So you can imagine how I looked up to the heavens when Janna told me Padang Tegal had decided to hold a huge cremation for 87 people June 17. That meant the entire time I was in Bali Janna would be deep in cremation preparations and we would be lucky to catch even a few minutes together here and there. There go the travel plans around Indonesia. Well, I went anyway, and the cremation date was extended to July 19, partly because they needed to get more wood from Java.

So in the next few posts, I’ll put up a few photos of cremation preparations around Ubud.