A path to maturity

Lovely: The headpieces worn by daha in the village of Asak are extremely ornate, and feature fresh frangipani flower petals that have been carefully folded into various shapes.Every year, 25-year-old Ni Putu Juli Antari travels 65 kilometers from her workplace in Denpasar to return home to Asak to perform the Rejang Asak traditional dance for her village’s Kuningan celebrations.

In the tradition of Bali’s ancient villages — with Asak in Karangasem one of them — only daha, or 16-year-old girls and above who are not married, may perform the sacred Rejang Asak dedicated to the Hindu gods.

Juli is one of the eight senior daha in her village. The village considers them to have reached the appropriate age for marriage and they will be leaving the daha group.

In Asak, the roles of daha and their male counterparts, termed teruna — referring to a yet-to-be-married 16-year-old man and above — hold important cultural, religious and social functions.

The daha and teruna roles help the village’s youngsters gain complete emotional and physical maturity and prepare them to become the village’s next generation.

The daha and teruna perform communal work at religious and customary events like performing sacred dances at major temple festivals. Most of these young people faithfully return to their remote village for the events, despite working in cities as faraway as Denpasar and Badung.

Daha and teruna, who in their roles have displayed loyalty and dedication to their village, are awarded tokens of appreciation in the form of plots of land in the village at the end of their daha and teruna terms once they are married.

“To become a daha is an honor. We are not only dancing but will also receive certain provisions for our marriage in the future,” said Juli, an employee at an Indian restaurant in Sanur, while she busily puts on makeup and dresses up for her Rejang Asak dance, part of the Ngelawang Daha ritual during the recent Kuningan religious holiday.

Juli’s makeup artist is her own grandmother, Ni Wayan Ripa, a daha herself back in the day. Not all people can create the headgear worn by Rejang Asak dancers. The ornaments usually require hundreds of frangipani flower petals, which are folded into various shapes like fans and flowers.

“This time around the frangipani trees in the village are not blooming. We had to search for the flowers all the way in Denpasar and buy them at a high price,” Ripa said. Due to the lack of frangipani flowers, several daha could not participate in the dance, she added.

Each element of the head ornaments has its own meaning, such as the white frangipani flowers symbolizing purity and the gegirang leaves symbolizing cheerfulness.

After more than two hours of makeup and costume preparation, Juli and dozens of other daha marched to the village’s Bale Agung, a long elevated open pavilion, to beginthe Ngelawang Daha ritual in which all the village’s daha dance, chant traditional songs and circle the village’s temples to purify the area.

Two days afterward, the teruna join the group of daha to continue the activities.

Amid the sound of gamelan being played by the village’s elders at the Bale Agung, a senior daha, Ni Nengah Asih, led the group of chanting daha in circling the village’s temple 13 times as the day turned to dusk.

Before circumambulating the temple, Asih arranged the lines of daha according to their age and experience. The older and the more experienced daha stood in front while the juniors followed behind.

The arrangement by age and experience symbolizes the regeneration process among the dancers, as it allows the younger Rejang Asak dancers to naturally learn the movements of the dance by following the elder daha.

“The young girls here are ready to marry once they perform the ritual to end their daha term,” said I Wayan Pahing, one of the village elders.

Pahing said that Asak obtains various social benefits from the daha and teruna system, one of those benefits being that it prevents local youth from marrying at too young of an age.

Transition: The daha of Asak circumambulate the village’s temple 13 times as the day turns to dusk in a ritual held during the village’s Kuningan celebrations.The daha and teruna system also eases the work of village elders in monitoring residents, as the arrival of new daha and teruna also indicates the presence of newlyweds and new families.

Asih was recently appointed the daha leader and bestowed the title subak. Her predecessor retired after 10 years of service as a daha and is planning her wedding, the village presenting her with the gift of bull’s genitalia.

A man who comes to the end of his service as a teruna in order to get married will receive the gift of a bull’s head from the village. These unique gifts are an acknowledgement from the village that these men and women have reached an appropriate age to marry.

As nightfall arrived, Asih continued to lead the Nglawang Daha procession, chanting various songs that describe the kinds of leaves, flowers and traditional cakes Asak women must prepare for temple festivals.

Their solemn movements and melodious chants spread a wave of tranquility over the entire village.

— Photos By

JP/Agung Parameswara