Idanna Pucci - The World Odyssey of a Balinese Prince

The World Odyssey
of a

BALINESE PRINCE

Idanna Pucci

Illustrations by Anak Agung Mad Djelantik
Foreword by Goenawan Mohamad
Preface by Francesco Clemente

I dedicate my watercolors to Astri with whom I will be in love even in the afterlife.

Dr. A.A. Mad Djelantik

To Terence Ward, whose presence beside me transforms even the most strenuous task into a poetic experience.

Idanna Pucci

The Prince

Bali is one of those places where the local is surprisingly universal, not only because the place is treasured, idealized, and exoticized by many but also because its history is marked by events that people from diverse places and times can effortlessly share: beauty and violence, natural disaster and rare delight, innocence and cruelty, the mystery of birth and daily stupidity. All surface often in intense color and resonance like a big production movie.

This book, however, is not another romanticized account of Bali. It is simply a story of a mans life. It is Idanna Puccis good fortune that she has as her subject a highly unusual man, a person who gathers the local and the global in his singular personality and does it in an unpretentious way. He is not only a prince from Karangasem but also a person whose life was shaped by many different places and uncommon events. He is not only a man who has gone through a long series of historical accidents but also a medical doctor who is blessed with multifaceted talents.

Dr. A.A. Mad Djelantik, whose name in part comes from a ninth-century Balinese word, has seen a twentieth-century European war and a colonized feudal society transformed into a proud, sometimes chaotic, republic. An amazing list of geographical names punctuates his curriculum vitae: Baghdad, Kabul, Buru Island, Mogadishu.

The temptation of this epic is almost irresistible, partly due to the unassuming way Mad Djelantik recounts his remarkable life and partly to Idannas narration that gracefully moves in the realm of the anecdotal. The interesting thing about this book is that the words do not occupy center stage. In fact, they blend with the visual side of the narrativea series of watercolors created by Mad Djelantik himself. As visual records of his memoirs, their nostalgic tone unmistakably suggests a past chronicled with an agreeable lightness of remembering.

A memoir is by no means a self-rediscovery. It is a self-creation, the result of a construction of a narrative coherence. Singular events are organized and transformed into a poetic totality, and a plot is born to determine which memories must be included and which ones enhanced. At the end, what we discover is not a full representation of a self, yet it is just as forceful in revealing truth. And the narrative is an experience from which we learn about life.

In the case of Mad Djelantiks life and works, as told by Idanna, the learning begins and ends with the thought that it may be a good idea, even in our violent time, to recreate the possibility of joy.

GOENAWAN MOHAMAD

From East to West

In the tumultuous twentieth century, those born in the 1920s were fated to meet a special destiny. They found themselves face to face with the contemplative knowledge of the ancient Eastern cultures and yet unable to escape a barrage of Western materialistic propaganda.

The wisest members of that generation transmitted to the next generation what was left of their traditions, and their immediate descendants traveled by bus from Istanbul to Peshawar in the seventies seeking new freedoms. Today, the message of those traditions is somehow lost but its spirit survives in unexpected places all over the planet.

I am moved by the deep care with which Idanna Pucci has preserved the memory of a Balinese prince, born in those years under the shadow of a majestic volcano and who journeyed from East to West.

Idanna has lived a long time in Bali. And the island is the cultural equivalent of those gorgeous birds now in extinction because of their beauty and friendly nature.

In Bali, beauty and friendliness find their expression continuously through all the arts. Communication with another world is constant: with the world of the spirits, with nature, and with all those human beings who have passed on.

In her recounting the story of the prince, Idanna highlights, without romanticizing, the calm strength of a society still capable of tangibly feeling the sense of the sacred and living with it daily. The prince of these true stories feels the sense of the sacred. He knows how to recognize within the weft and warp of lifes material side the threads made up of coincidences, illuminating moments, and miracles.

We are grateful to Idanna and her prince for having reminded us that it is still possible to hear and witness the secret harmony that exists in the world with simplicity, a sense of humor, and above all with great joy.

New York, December 2017

FRANCESCO CLEMENTE

THE WORLD ODYSSEY OF A BALINESE PRINCE

The last raja of Karangasem, Gusti Bagus Djelantik (18871966), with one of his consorts, Ratu Istri Oka Cakrakusuma, and their eldest daughter, A.A. Ayu Winten Cakrakusuma.

The Island That Was

Invisible forces surround us at all times, wherever we may be on this planet. In some cases, these forces intervene at the last minute, just in time to save a human life. In our scientifically oriented Western societies, we tend to brush off such events as mere coincidences, a stroke of luck. However, the prince and protagonist of these stories referred to these incidents as good karma.

I first arrived in Bali at a time when the few foreigners living there were either artists or anthropologists or storytellers at heart, like myself. The culture attracted me like a magnet and soon I found myself captivated by the ceiling paintings in Kertha Gosa, the historic court of justice in Klungkung, the former royal capital of Bali. My long exploration into the meaning of the 144 paintings led me to settle in East Bali, under the looming shadow of the great Gunung Agung volcano.

It was during this time, many years ago, that I first met Prince Mad Djelantik around a dinner table in the southern coastal village of Sanur in Bali. It would not be out of place to remember that evening with the words Once upon a time.

It was in the early 1980s when I drove an old automobile down to the coast from the far eastern hills of Sidemen where I lived in the region of Karangasem, the former kingdom of the Djelantik dynasty.

As soon as I sat next to Dr. Djelantik, I was captivated by the simple ways of this Balinese gentleman with brilliant dark eyes and a smile open to the world. In his presence I felt as if a gust of fresh mountain breeze was blowing in the tropical humidity of the southern coast. He had recently retired from the World Health Organization and had opened a medical practice in his own house in Renon, not far from Sanur. Unless you knew who he was, you could not have guessed from his simplicity and modesty that the prince was one of the most respected and prominent personalities on the island.