A Balinese Altar Observed: Stepping Out of the Footnotes and into the Fold

Between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, the Karangasem dynasty was one of the most powerful royal families of Bali, ruling over large areas not just of Bali, but of the neighboring islands of Lombok and Sumbawa. By Balinese accounts, what spearheaded the expansion to Lombok involved a princess of the royal family, Ratna Inten (“Diamond Jewel”). Altars can be said to have a material life of their own, and in the pavilion of Ratna Inten in the southern palace in Amlapura, Karangasem, East Bali, hers is a folded affair. Gunung Rata (literally, “Flat Mountain”) is the term given for her royal shrine. Building a Balinese sacred structure is as much a ritual process as it is a materially driven, practical undertaking.New white cloth (kasa anyar) –quilted white on white-- envelops the wooden internal structure, revealing a stitched interior from the cloud-like cushioning on the ceiling to the four surrounding walls. Even the beds side by side, each with their four posts integrated into the stereobate structure of the shrine, are swaddled in white cloth, the separate carved pillars wrapped like slim dancers’ waists, sutured together with white thread. If the history of art of Bali had been focused more on the raw materials of construction and not the power of images, Princess Ratna Inten would have assumed greater prominence. This presentation promises to tell her story, quite literally, step by step