Fia Hamid-Walker reflects on the transformation of the Balinese legal system under Dutch colonial rule, and argues that it was not merely a shift in legal form but a deliberate act of colonial legal violence, where legal narratives were deployed to undermine Indigenous authorities and impose political domination.
TWAILR: Reflections ~ 76/2025
This reflection examines the transformation of the Balinese legal system under Dutch colonial rule, which was not merely a shift in legal form but a deliberate act of colonial legal violence, where legal narratives were deployed to undermine Indigenous authorities and impose political domination. Colonial authorities reconstructed legal memory by discrediting the Kings’ Law and privileging the post-colonial Adat Law. In pre-colonial Bali, the legal order was based on two interconnected systems: the Kings’ law, which derived from Old Javanese codes influenced by Hindu-Buddhist jurisprudence and was enforced by royal courts and high priests, focusing on public law, state authority, and social hierarchy; and pre-colonial Adat Law, a village-based set of customary regulations linked to local religious and social governance, addressing everyday issues such as agriculture, land use, and community disputes resolution. The legal erasure was evident in how the Dutch colonial administration codified our current understanding of Adat Law through structures like the ‘Adatrechtbundels’ (compendia of Adat Law), which standardised and fixed highly localised and diverse practices into administratively legible forms. As Ratno Lukito notes, the transformation of pre-colonial Adat Law into a state-defined category enabled colonial officials to manage Indigenous populations through indirect rule, while sidelining other forms of legal authority under the Kings Law, such as the royal courts and priestly councils.
This reflection explores how Western legal anthropology, colonial administration, and functionalist theory collectively reframed Balinese jurisprudence as primitive and savage to justify military intervention and systemic Indigenous erasure. The colonial invention of Adat Law, while grounded in pre-existing Indigenous legal orderings, represents a selective and simplified version of legal pluralism tailored to colonial needs. This reflection further examines how such colonial legal reforms influenced Indonesia’s postcolonial system, particularly through its codification in National Adat Law, and how these legacies continue to shape legal governance. By tracing the creation and institutionalisation of Adat Law, we see colonial residues in Indonesia’s current legal order.
Dutch colonial rule in Bali formally began in the mid-nineteenth century, perpetuated through military expeditions between 1846 and 1908. However, Dutch commercial and political influence in the region dates back to the seventeenth century under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). While the VOC was dissolved in 1799, its bureaucratic legacy and commercial legal regimes laid the groundwork for the Netherlands Indies administration.Although international lawyers were not explicitly deployed in the Bali context, broader nineteenth-century debates about the civilising mission and legal pluralism shaped how colonial authorities viewed and transformed Indigenous legal systems. The imposition of European legal rationality was closely tied to international legal discourses used to justify intervention in ‘uncivilised societies’ through the rhetoric of reform and order.
Characteristics of the Pre-Colonial Balinese Legal System
The legal system of pre-colonial Bali was derived from two principal sources of legal codes. The first source comprised the Old Javanese legal codes, commonly referred to as ‘the Kings’ Law’, which were associated with public law and served to protect the interests of the ruling class elites. The Kings’ Law was significantly shaped by the traditional Sanskrit Laws of Manu, which consist of 2,685 verses and 18 grounds for litigation. These laws served as the cornerstone for legal reasoning and practice in the Indic courts throughout the reign of Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms in the Indonesian archipelago (5th-15th century CE). The second source consisted of village-level regulations, known as pre-colonial Adat Law. These laws primarily addressed agriculture and village governance and were often documented as sacred village rules stored in temples.
At the heart of the pre-colonial Balinese legal system was the fusion of Hindu legal codes and local custom-religion, specifically in this context, Balinese Hinduism, represented by the Kings’ Law, interwoven with village-based ritual authority, the pre-colonial Adat Law. While Indigenous legal orders in other parts of the Indonesian archipelago have at times been linked to Islamic traditions, particularly in Sumatra and Java, the pre-colonial Balinese Indigenous legal order was closely tied to temple-based spiritual governance. The pre-colonial Balinese Kings’ Law jurisprudence encompassed the codification and administration of civil and criminal justice, reflecting the concept of Dharma. The pre-colonial Balinese jurisprudence encompassed the codification and administration of civil and criminal justice, reflecting the unique concept of Dharma – an interpretation of rights and obligations based on social hierarchy. A person’s place in the social order was of transcendent importance. The term ‘Dharma’ is challenging to translate, as it encompasses a broad range of concepts, including law, practice, customary observance, duty, and morality. Consequently, law, religion, and social order are deeply interwoven. Therefore, any efforts to separate these categories and define specific concepts may misrepresent Hindu cosmology and perspectives. Colonial legal systems, however, ignored these intricacies and merged diverse legal and religious forms across the archipelago, from Balinese Hindu jurisprudence to Islamic-influenced customary practices in Sumatra, into a single legal category. Dutch colonial systems simplified these varied expressions of Indigenous legal orders, reducing a wide range of customary and religious practices across Indonesia to one legal category – ‘Adat Law’. The reduction of complex Indigenous legal cosmologies to the single term, Adat Law, exposes the colonial tendency for bureaucratic simplification at the expense of epistemic diversity.
The Structure and Power of the Kings’ Law
Before colonisation, the Balinese legal system was structured hierarchically. At the village level, the Klian Tempek and Sedahan Agung served as the initial courts. Appeals could proceed to the Pambekal Gede and, ultimately, to the Kerta, a royal legal council established by the Balinese Kings, composed of high priests who interpreted sacred legal texts and provided rulings on complex disputes among priests. While the Kerta consulted the Old Javanese Law Codes (rooted in Dharmasastra and Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms like Majapahit), the Kings retained ultimate discretion. The colonial Dutch viewed this discretionary power as barbaric, emphasising the Kings’ cruel treatment of the Balinese. This powerful legal sovereignty held by the Kings posed a direct challenge to Dutch colonial ambitions. Legal transformation thus required the permanent elimination of royal authority.
Dutch Commissioner H.A. van den Broek’s 1817 report characterised Balinese justice as despotic. The colonial Dutch highlighted practices such as widow-burning (masatia) and the plundering of shipwrecks as evidence of despotism and cruelty, portrayals that served as rhetorical tools to legitimise military intervention and reinforced their self-image as civilizing agents, rather than reflecting an objective necessity for such actions. Reports and witness statements were subsequently curated to support this image of barbarism, including those by Thomas Stamford Raffles, a British colonial official and founder of modern Singapore, who also served as Lieutenant-Governor of the Dutch East Indies. Raffles’ own writings, such as The History of Java (1830), reinforced European views of Indigenous legal systems as despotic and uncivilised and were influential in shaping both British and Dutch colonial discourses on law and governance in Southeast Asia.
The colonial Dutch narratives that cast the Old Javanese legal codes, the authority of council priests, and the Kings as a brutal and unrefined legal order, were followed by military intervention aimed at dismantling this legal structure, targeting the spiritual and political core of Balinese governance: its legal texts, its ritual-legal institutions, and the Kings who presided over them. The Dutch military intervention was also launched to establish the moral foundation for Dutch legal and administrative dominance over [Bali]. Between 1846 and 1849, Dutch military intervention was launched against the Balinese Kings. These military interventions aimed to reform the pre-colonial legal system following the Netherlands Indies government’s takeover of Bali in 1849. Starting in 1850, the colonial Dutch altered the pre-colonial Balinese legal framework, rendering it irrelevant and obsolete. The Dutch colonisers implemented ‘enlightened’ administrative practices and judicial systems following the military intervention. As a result, the pre-colonial Balinese legal system underwent fervent reform at the hands of colonial powers.
However, the dual nature of the colonisers was evident. Although military intervention was framed as a humanitarian effort to liberate the Balinese from despotic kingship, this narrative served as a veneer for a broader colonial strategy: to dismantle existing legal authority and replace it with a regime amenable to Dutch administrative control. This moment marks a critical pivot in this reflection’s central argument: how colonial actors used law not merely as an instrument of governance, but as a weapon to erase, simplify, and subsume complex Indigenous legal worlds under a singular colonial rationality. The 1906 Dutch intervention in Badung, culminating in a mass ritual suicide (puputan) by the Balinese Kings and their court, was similarly framed as a tragic yet necessary end to despotic rule.
Western Legal Anthropologists Depict Pre-Colonial Law as Rudimentary
Colonial anthropologists, such as Bronisław Malinowski, framed Indigenous legal systems as primitive unless they met Western scientific standards. Despite similarities found in the structure between Balinese legal procedure and the British Common Law, Malinowski’s functionalist approach excluded the Balinese legal system from Western modernity because it is based on the concept of Dharma. This exclusion reflects a deeper Eurocentric bias within early legal anthropology. Rather than recognising the sophistication of legal systems built on non-Western ontologies, such approaches implicitly uphold Western legal rationality as the benchmark for legitimacy. Malinowski’s approach was part of a broader colonial knowledge project that relegated Indigenous legal systems to the realm of the ‘primitive’ and thus made them ripe for reform or replacement. It is precisely this epistemic violence that the Dutch colonial regime operationalised to justify the erasure and simplification of Balinese-Hindu jurisprudence.
Malinowski’s work influenced other Western anthropologists, such as Max Gluckman, a South African-born anthropologist, who introduced legal processes into anthropological inquiry and examined non-European legal systems, including those of the Lozi (historically referred to as Barotse). The Lozi are an Indigenous group in what is now western Zambia, whose legal system was extensively studied by Gluckman. His work on the Lozi jurisprudence revealed structural similarities with British Common Law, including hierarchical court procedures and reasoned adjudication. Despite parallels, Gluckman, like Malinowski, viewed the Lozi legal system, regardless of their internal sophistication, as lacking full legal modernity. Although noting procedural sophistication in the Lozi legal system, Gluckman ranked it on a developmental spectrum beneath European systems, reinforcing colonial hierarchies under the guise of comparison. This demonstrates how European scholars acknowledged legal complexity in non-European societies while still reinforcing the colonial order by viewing them as less developed.
This comparative study suggests that both the Lozi and Balinese sophisticated legal systems were seen as inferior to European systems. Here, a useful counterpoint emerges from Indigenous resurgence literature, which challenges colonial narratives of legal primitivism by foregrounding the legitimacy and sophistication of Indigenous legal orders on their own terms. Scholars such as John Borrows, Heidi Stark, and Glen Coulthard have challenged Eurocentric hierarchies of legal knowledge and called for the resurgence of Indigenous legal traditions not as remnants of the past but as living, evolving systems. The Western legal tradition, whether it is British common law or Dutch civil law, has often been perceived by its proponents as superior. The colonial Dutch believed it was their moral duty to free the Balinese from the harsh laws enforced by their tyrannical kings. However, framing colonialism as a mission to liberate the Balinese from despotic leaders risks accepting its justificatory logic. Furthermore, Peter Fitzpatrick has critiqued the Eurocentric and colonial biases of functionalist legal anthropology, where ‘modernity’ implies Western legal ideals of rationality, centralisation, and secularisation.
The Dutch portrayal of Balinese kings as tyrannical served to legitimise their intervention, but this narrative obscures the violence of colonial conquest and the imposition of a foreign legal order. Colonialism functioned not as emancipation, but as a strategy of domination—one that disrupted Indigenous legal systems and restructured them in the image of European administrative rationality; it signifies a power dynamic between two unequal parties, where the colonial Dutch sought not only to control and dominate the Balinese but also to impose their cultural order on them. These colonial epistemologies rationalised the imposition of Dutch legal authority. The Balinese system’s complexity was erased under the claim of moral reform. The Dutch elevated village-level Adat Law over the Kings’ Law, institutionalising a simplified legal order more amenable to colonial control.
In his work ‘Colonialism and Legal Form: The Creation of ‘Customary Law’ in Senegal,’ Francis Snyder argues that ‘customary law’ is often a colonial construct, selectively recognised and operationalised by imperial regimes to define, stabilise, and contain Indigenous legal orders within the framework of colonial administration. What colonial powers named ‘customary law’ often bore little resemblance to the legal practices that communities themselves had developed and lived by. Instead, it was the product of a specific colonial logic that sought to transform fluid and plural normative systems into fixed, recognisable, and governable entities. Snyder’s intervention is valuable here because it highlights how the very act of recognising Indigenous law could be a form of epistemic violence, where recognition meant redefinition, simplification, and subordination to colonial legal rationality. This colonial formulation of ‘customary law’ was then institutionalised and upheld as the legitimate expression of Indigenous legal tradition, despite bearing little resemblance to the normative practices it displaced. In the Balinese and Indonesian context, this colonial-era concept of customary law is now known as Adat Law. Recognising this trajectory invites a more critical re-engagement with the category of ‘customary law’ itself, as both a legal object and a political tool.
Clifford Geertz’s 1958 case study titled ‘The Judging of Behaviour’ includes the well-known example of a Balinese dispute resolution involving a man named Regreg. Geertz used this case to analyse how informal legal mechanisms operated in Balinese society. These councils were village-level dispute resolution bodies that, by the mid-twentieth century, had acquired the power to impose punishments, a function not typically associated with the pre-colonial Balinese legal system. Geertz’s analysis suggests that these councils, although appearing traditional, were products of colonial legal reconfiguration. Their structure and authority reflected a hybrid form shaped by both Indigenous norms and Dutch administrative design. As such, Geertz’s observations cast doubt on the authenticity of contemporary Adat Law as a direct continuation of its pre-colonial form. Adat Law was never absent from pre-colonial law, but it was one element among many.
The postcolonial endurance of Adat Law in Indonesia is thus a legacy of colonial legal engineering, not simply cultural continuity. While Adat Law originated as one component of a pluralistic legal system, colonial rule narrowed its scope, codified its content, and elevated it as the representative legal form of Indigenous governance, all while displacing royal and priestly authorities. In the postcolonial era, this colonial construction of Adat Law has become institutionalised within the Indonesian national legal system, often framed as an emblem of legal authenticity and tradition. Yet this institutionalisation is deeply contested. Adat Law remains at the centre of contemporary legal and political struggles in Indonesia, particularly in relation to Indigenous land rights, environmental governance, and cultural autonomy.
While some communities have sought to reclaim the current understanding of Adat Law as a basis for asserting sovereignty and resisting state overreach, others critique the state’s instrumental use of Adat Law as a tool of incorporation and control. In post-independence Indonesia, Adat Law has been formally recognised as part of the plural legal system, coexisting alongside state and Islamic law. However, this recognition often echoes colonial simplifications: the state tends to privilege codified and static versions of Adat Law that align with bureaucratic logics, rather than the flexible, unwritten, context-sensitive practices embedded in Indigenous communities. Scholars such as Ratno Lukito have explored these tensions, arguing that postcolonial Indonesia’s legal pluralism remains shaped by colonial efforts to contain and govern Indigenous legal systems.
These tensions are evident in debates surrounding the Constitutional Court’s decisions on customary land, such as the 2012 ruling (MK35/PUU-X/2012), which declared that Indigenous-managed rainforests are not part of state forest zones and must be returned to the respective Indigenous communities. While this Constitutional Court decision is hailed as a victory for Indigenous rights, its implementation has remained uneven, raising questions about the extent to which the state is willing to recognise Indigenous sovereignty fully. This is compounded by the bureaucratisation of Indigenous leadership structures and the use of state-approved definitions of ‘Indigenous membership’. Thus, post-colonial Adat Law is not simply a legacy of the colonial past—it is a living site of negotiation, conflict, and potential resurgence in Indonesia’s postcolonial legal landscape. Yet, what persists is less a pre-colonial inheritance than a colonial artefact. Contemporary legal debates, including disputes over land rights, religious authority, and decentralised governance, continue to operate through this inherited frame, which risks reinforcing the very erasures it once enabled.
Conclusion
This reflection has examined how Dutch colonial rule in Bali transformed plural, cosmologically grounded, and socially embedded legal traditions into a narrowed, bureaucratised framework under the banner of Adat Law – a term strategically deployed to simplify, domesticate, control, and institutionalise Indigenous legal traditions. By discrediting the Kings’ Law and privileging a reconfigured version of village-level custom, colonial authorities reshaped Balinese legal memory and governance in ways that persist to this day. Drawing on legal anthropology, postcolonial legal critique, and Indigenous resurgence scholarship, this reflection demonstrates that what is now referred to as Adat Law is not merely a continuation of Indigenous legal traditions but a structure fundamentally altered by colonial imperatives. The postcolonial endurance of this construct prompts us to reevaluate the terms of legal recognition and the risks associated with reviving colonial forms under the guise of cultural authenticity. Continuing to use the term Adat law risks reproducing the colonial framing of Indigenous legal traditions as static, governable, and inferior. Postcolonial legal critique perspective reminds us that legal pluralism, while ostensibly inclusive, often reproduces asymmetries shaped by histories of conquest and global legal ordering. What appears to be recognition may be containment. The challenge, then, is to shift from preservation to transformation: to approach Adat Law not as a fixed tradition, but as a living site of contestation, innovation, and resistance. Decolonising law requires more than critique. It demands an epistemic reorientation, one that not only disrupts colonial legal categories but also affirms the plural, relational, and place-based legalities that colonialism sought to erase. Adat Law, in this sense, is not just a legacy to be remembered, but a horizon to be reimagined.
