The Rhetoric of Paintings: Towards a History of Balinese Ideas, Imaginings and Emotions in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries1

Western historical scholarship has taught us much about Southeast Asia in the period between 1800 and 1940. This was a time when the insistent, intensifying and transforming influence of Dutch colonial society and its culture became widespread in Bali and more broadly in the archipelago. Much too has been written about the analytical framework of European histories of these times. In this essay I discuss Balinese paintings from this same period which shed light on how painters and their works spoke to their viewers both about how the Balinese knew, imagined, thought and felt about the world in which they lived and about the visual representation and communication of these ideas, imaginings and feelings through the medium of narrative paintings. In this paper I hope to draw attention to a number of historiographical issues concerning the reception of the ideas, imaginings and feelings conveyed in paintings. In particular I shall have some remarks to make about the role of philology in this regard.


Introduction
W estern historical scholarship has taught us much about the period between 1800 and 1940, a time when the insistent, intensifying and transforming influence of Dutch colonial society and its culture became widespread in Bali and more broadly in the archipelago. Much too has been written about the analytical framework of European histories of these times. In this essay I discuss Balinese paintings from this same period which shed light on how painters and their works speak to us both about how the Balinese knew, imagined, thought and felt about the world in which they lived and about the visual representation and communication of these ideas, imaginings and feelings through the medium of narrative paintings. In this paper I hope to draw attention to a number of historiographical issues concerning the reception of the ideas, imaginings and feelings conveyed in paintings and in particular I shall have some remarks to make about the role of philology in this regard.

The Rhetorical Configuration of Paintings
The painters, I suggest, designed their works not just to recount a story but configured them visually in order to persuade viewers of the probable logical, ethical and emotional validity of generally shared beliefs and values (Smith 2007). Two examples might serve to illustrate the point. The painter of one nineteenth century work illustrating the Brayut story from the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam (Illustration 1; Tropenmuseum Amsterdam, 2058-2; Worsley 2016a & b) narrates a tale of family life-of discord and angry disagreement around the rituals at the time of Galungan (Illustration 2), and later, of reconciliation and restored harmony, at the time of the father's ritual meditation on a graveyard under the tutelage of a pedanda Boda, his consecration as a commoner dukuh priest and the youngest son's marriage, the moment when he, the son, assumed responsibility for the family's civic and ritual obligations (Illustration 3). The painting illustrates the efficacy of ritual, the different roles of men and women in family life, the moral virtue of the male head of family and the emotional appeal of a convivial harmony in family life. There is a second Brayut painting in the Nyoman Gunarsa Museum of Classical Balinese Art in Klungkung in Bali (Illustration 4), which shares an interest in these same rhetorical themes but the painter in this case appears to have been intent on downplaying the place of women in family life and highlighting the family as a closely-knit community of men-of father, sons and brothers (Worsley 2017:9-11;Vickers 2012:59;62;Gunarsa 2006:6, 104-105). Like these two paintings, there are many other paintings which illustrate the story of the Brayut family and display an interest in these same issues, but sometimes do so with subtle differences in their point of view.

Kamasan Painting in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Kamasan paintings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and those of related schools are narrative works in a style which the painters themselves and the viewers of their works regarded as realist, and able to represent the events, places and beings of the world in which they imagined they lived. 2 At this point I should note the way in which these painters achieved their rhetorical intentions: how they selected stories to tell and scenes to illustrate and designed their paintings to draw the attention of viewers to the points they wished to make about the world. This process is embedded in a variety of ritual and other narrative practices-in dance, theatre and texts inscribed in manuscripts and their recitation and glossing. Painters painted their paintings from particular points of view, as members of some status, class or kin group and gender and viewers too viewed the paintings from these same sorts of points of view. 3 Each telling of a story was, as Inden put it when writing about another cultural context, a moment in 'the relationship between social agents, simple or complex, who are engaged in the rhetorical processes of 'criticism, appropriation, repetition, refutation, simplification, [and] abbreviation […]'. 4 If we are to discover the rhetorical intent of a painting it must be in the context of these rhetorical processes and practices in which painters and their viewers are engaged at particular historical moments.

Obstacles in the Way of Historical Interpretation
There are obstacles in the way of this task, however. The first is circumstantial. Very often we know little about the dating of paintings or the identification of painters and the communities in which they lived and worked, and the individuals and institutions who patronized them and for whom their works were painted, because the paintings have very often been long removed from the social context in which they were originally produced, displayed and viewed. 5 The second obstacle concerns the very nature of visual systems of communication. The abstraction, which inhabits all art systems, Forge has argued, lends a multivalency to the elements of visual design of such a system. In one context they may be perceived to have one meaning but at the same time suggest other cognate meanings, which only 'those who have been socialized into the society within which they were created' understood and could contest. 6 The ensuing ambiguity, he says, creates opportunity for the expression of 'a very real and intense emotion in their [viewers]' concerning 'key associations and relationships that are essential to ritual and cognitive systems' (Forge 1977:31). Furthermore, we know precious little about the transmission of Balinese painterly traditions in nineteenth and early twentieth century and the display of paintings (Kat Angelino 1921Angelino -1922Kanta 1977Kanta -1978Forge 1978). It is clear of course that they were painted and embroidered on cloth and on wooden screens or parba and decorated the ceilings of pavilions of justice and the living spaces of palaces and house 5 They are removed from the original social and cultural context in which they were once created and then viewed on ritual and other occasions and become part of museum and private collections cherished as part of national and ethnic heritages or as commodities to be bought and sold. Information about their origins is frequently scarce, even non-existent, as are dates on paintings, and signatures in the period before the 1930s rare indeed. Judgments about the date of a painting can often only be approximate and rely heavily on the identification of the materials used, the cloth and pigments, and identification of the painter by stylistic signatures. Two useful publications on the subject of the deracination of Indonesian artefacts are Hardiati & Keurs (2005-2006 and Keurs (2007) which include chapters by Brinkgreven andHout (2005-2006), Brinkgreven and Stuart-Fox (2007) on Balinese collections in museums in The Netherlands and by Lunsingh-Scheurleer (2011) on ancient Javanese artefacts housed in Dutch museum collections. See also Brinkgreven (2008). See Campbell (2013:1-43;200-233) for discussion of patronage in recent years and Vickers (1985) for earlier forms of patronage. See also Vickers (1979Vickers ( ), (1982  compounds. They were displayed during rituals in temples and private household shrines, just one aspect of the elaborate reception and entertainment of the gods and ancestral spirits who visit for the time of a ritual. However, we have to wonder what a member of a Balinese temple congregation could make of the glimpses caught of paintings amidst the elaborate decoration and busy and varied activities on ritual occasions-the circumstances in which very many Balinese had the opportunity to view paintings.

The Two Brayut Paintings
At the beginning of my remarks I made reference by way of example to two paintings of the Brayut family and concluded that their painters-intending to draw attention to the efficacy of ritual among other things-chose to illustrate scenes from the story of this commoner family's celebration of the festival of Galungan. Why did these painters feel called upon to draw this ritual event to the attention of viewers? Why was it important to celebrate the rites of Galungan? Were they simply paying lip service to age-old customs or were they perhaps responding critically to what they considered lapsed moral values in times of real or threatened social, even what they understood to be cosmic change in the world they inhabited and the need to ward off dangers by reminding fellow Balinese of the efficacy of ritual and ancient family values? Was the interest which the painters of our Brayut paintings shared more broadly by others in Balinese society in this period?
To answer these questions, we have available contemporary accounts of Bali and the Balinese. These include the descriptions of the festival of Galungan by European visitors to the island in this period. 7 We also have evidence that a contemporary Balinese shadow play of the narrative existed, as well as ritual and temple JURNAL KAJIAN BALI Vol. 09, No. 01, April 2019  architectural practices which are focussed on the Brayut family. 8 However, it is to the corpus of nineteenth and early twentieth century Balinese manuscripts and three works which contain accounts of the rites of Galungan that I want to turn in order to discuss the role of philology in the historical interpretation of these three works. There are manuscripts which record the Geguritan Brayut, a Balinese ballad which narrates the tale of the Brayut family and was widely known in Bali in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. 9 There is also the Usana Bali, a work, which was known to Balinese readers in a variety of versions in this same period and contains an account of the origins of the ritual observance of Galungan and its association with the goddess Durga (Hinzler 1986). And there are also records of the liturgies of the rituals conducted during the festival of Galungan (Arwati 1992;Sirikanden 1982;Sugriwa 1957;Surpha 1972;Wiratmadja 1969).

The Historical Interpretation of Works in Manuscript Traditions
As in the case of paintings, there are difficulties which stand in the way of the historical interpretation of works recorded in the form of manuscripts. Manuscripts too have often been removed from the cultural and social context of their use and all too frequently the names of authors and copyists, the dates and places of their authoring or copying are not recorded. Furthermore, the presence 9 The story of Pan and Men Brayut appears to have been known widely in Bali in the 19th and early 20 th centuries. of variable readings between manuscripts of the same work gives rise to important consequences for a work's comprehensibility. Resolution of these kinds of difficulties of interpretation, historically the business of philologists, can also give rise to problems-in particular the introduction of anachronisms as I have argued was the case in Belo's and Hooykaas's description and text edition of the litany of a ritual which a pemangku conducted in the temple Pura Nagasari in the village of Sayan between 21 st and 25 th April 1937(Belo 1966Hooykaas 1977:1;Worsley 2017). Faced with variable renditions of rituals and the presence of 'errors' in manuscripts, what is the task of philology if it is not to produce a work's originary moment or autograph or at least a text that was fully comprehensible? In a series of articles, Sheldon Pollock has commented on the place of philology as a discipline central to the humanities. In one of his essays he was particularly concerned to promote philology's legitimate interest in the text's tradition of reception, and in this enterprise, he emphasized the 'historical malleability' of texts as audiences respond to them over time and in different cultural contexts. Interpretations of texts, he argues, cannot be judged to be 'correct or incorrect in their historical existence' [my emphasis]. They simply exist, and the philologist's task is to explain what about the text itself summoned particular interpretations into existence and how the world, as readers of the text imagined it to be, shaped such views of the text. When doing this he emphasised the need to be aware of differences between inconsequential variations and enhancements of greater historical significance. Having noted this last point, it must be said that the identification and explanation of any textual error, contamination or variant-call them what you will-will contribute to our better understanding of Balinese linguistic, orthographic, lexical, grammatical, narrative and conceptual understandings and practices. 10 JURNAL KAJIAN BALI Vol. 09, No. 01, April 2019  The task of the philologist is not to expunge variations, errors and contaminations in the text of a work but to explain them in the historical moment of their occurrence. If we are to apply this principle to the historical interpretation of Balinese works, it is particularly important that we identify the textual practices of Balinese authors and scribes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-their copying, reworking, excerpting, glossing and recitation of texts-and in particular we need to consider whether the hermeneutic search for the true form of an autograph which Pollock has identified as so fundamental a Western philological preoccupation was shared by Balinese authors and copyists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 11 In recent times, a number of commentators have deepened our understanding of the textual practices of Javanese and Balinese authors and copyists. 12 In the course of my rereading and reconsideration of this literature-still far from complete-my attention was drawn to what we might refer to as an 'openness' in the Balinese tradition of textual transmission. By which I mean, depending on genre, copyists were not narrowly focussed on the reproduction of a work's autograph. In 1972 Robson, for example, in his study of the courtly Kidung Wangbang Wideya, tentatively recognised an element of this openness in textual transmission when he noted the existence of what he referred to as 'horizontal 11 Pollock (2014:402-403) notes that the first real defence of the correctness of a historicist reading of texts in the European philological tradition came with the publication of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologica-politicus in 1670 and it is worthwhile here to recall Pollock's summary of the coherent program of the Tracatus. Good reading, according to Spinozaone that would produce the singular true understanding of a text-was founded upon: as deep a familiarity as possible of the text's original language, based on usage in the corpus; the history of the text's transmission and its current text-critical state; the salient features of the text's genre; the history of its canonization; a form of discourse analysis that depends, not a priori on doctrine, but on the text's coherence with itself; the assemblage of all parallel passages within the text and the author's other works that can illuminate the obscure; a reconstruction of the historical context; the relevant biography of the author and the historical constraints of the authorial intention; the nature of the original audience and their thought-world; and all relevant intertexts.
JURNAL KAJIAN BALI Vol. 09, No. 01, April 2019  contamination' in the manuscripts he consulted but what it seems his Balinese copyists regarded as perfectly acceptable alternative readings. In 1988, in his Principles of Indonesian Philology, he was clearer, arguing that there was even evidence that copyists considered that they enjoyed a freedom to enhance a work's appeal to contemporary audiences. Acri too, has drawn attention to the kind of radical paraphrasing, synthesising and restyling of central works at important moments of religious history-in this case, of Balinese premodern Śaiwa tattwa and tutur, which became the object of debate among the various factions of the Balinese intelligentsia who sought to reform their religion in the early twentieth century. According to Acri, these practices were based firmly on a traditional understanding of Sanskrit and Old Javanese, "folk etymological derivations" and analogies of sound and meaning', when anomalies in the text of these premodern works were identified (Acri 2013:68-71, 74-78, 82-85). Finally, Vickers' research on the Balinese Malat marks an important advance in our understanding of this openness in the textual practices of nineteenth and early twentieth century authors and copyists, and in many ways anticipates Pollock's proposed investigation of a text's tradition of reception (Worsley 1972(Worsley , 1984Robson 1988:23). Vickers noted that cataloguers described all but one of some ninety eighteenth and nineteenth century manuscripts of the Malat he had located as 'incomplete, 'fragments', or 'variants'. Only one manuscript, discovered in Brandes' collection, was said to contain a complete version of the Malat. However, in this case there are doubts about whether the manuscript was a copy of a 'single Balinese manuscript into a folio book, or whether Brandes had a number of different manuscripts copied as one'. 13 Vickers argued there is in fact little evidence that there was ever a single original, 'that this original was 'complete', or that it preceded all visual representations and performances of the Malat' in paintings and in the Gambuh dance-drama (Vickers 2005:7-9). '[T]he process of the formation of the written text', he argued, 'was a lengthy and complicated one involving interactions between oral storytelling, musical forms, theatre and other visual traditions, and that these interactions did not cease once a body of manuscripts had been produced.' This process addressed the ongoing need to recount performed or painted stories, for texts to be sung on ritual occasions, and to speak to 'the specific times and places in which they were produced.' This process 'was then a positive experience that kept the Malat alive and rendered it a broad cultural phenomenon, allowing it to serve as political model, romantic entertainment, an element of ritual and a form of history, not tied to any single function' (Vickers 2005:10).

Conclusions
To identify the rhetorical intentions of painters, we must situate their works in the processes of the rhetorical exchanges in which painters and the viewers of their works were engaged at particular historical moments-in the case of paintings of the Brayut story and their representation of rituals, in the context of the competing ideas, imaginings and emotions evoked in contemporary performances of the shadow play, in oral story-tellings of the tale and in ritual and temple architectural practice, and of course in particular in the processes of copying, recitation and glossing of works such as the Geguritan Brayut, the Usana Bali and the litanies of the rites of Galungan. We need to be mindful of the potential interplay of ritual, narrative and rhetorical practices and processes at the historical moment of the generation of each version of these works. Historical interpretation of them requires explanation in the context of a dynamic process of historically shifting understandings of a workof what Fox has referred to as the 'performative reframings' which any work undergoes in the changing social conditions in which its reception takes place over time (Fox 2005:90-91).