The Utsawa Dharma Gita Competition: The Contemporary Evolution of Hindu Textual Singing in Indonesia

Abstract

The singing and interpretation of Balinese religious and literary texts in ritual contexts and in the broadcast media have undergone an extraordinary revitalisation in the past quarter of a century. This revival has fostered the Utsawa Dharma Gita (UDG) competition, or Festival of Sacred Songs, in which representatives from local and regional groups compete to perform textual works drawn from the Hindu scriptures. The UDG is held annually in Bali, and a national level competition, which traces its origins back to the 1970s, has been held every three years since 2000. This national event brings together participants from all over Indonesia, many of them members of the Balinese diaspora, and focuses attention on pan-Indonesian Hindu religion and culture. Although many of the same social, cultural and religious dynamics are at work in all forms of textual singing, in competition format, in which the focus is on the performance of sacred songs, tradition, culture and religion are reformulated and fused in distinctive ways. Like similar competitions in which each of Indonesia's major religious groups participates, the UDG provides a distinctive forum for the public expression of religion in contemporary Indonesia. In the last decade the focus of the UDG is now slanted towards the public enactment of orthodox Hindu religious values and towards orthopraxis in its textual choices. This paper considers the ways in which the UDG has accommodated and incorporated local forms of cultural and religious expression and state-driven institutional agendas during its 35 year history