3 - Wisata Religi: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Bali

Summary

In chapter 2, I dealt with the invention of the Wali Pitu and I briefly touched upon its relationship with tourism. This chapter will contextualise the mixture of tourism and pilgrimage by focusing on the Indonesian form of religious travel, namely wisata religi (religious tourism) which plays a key role in sustaining the Wali Pitu tradition. In contemporary Indonesia, pilgrimage to the graves of saints is one of the vibrant religious traditions showing a close connection to the rising religious market and tourism. Pilgrimage is not exclusively related to devotional activities but also a translation of modern demand for tourism. Scholars have witnessed a surge in saint worshipping in Java and other places in Indonesia. Especially in Java, pilgrimage to the tombs of saints of immense importance, involving thousands of sites and hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. This being so, reliable records on the growing number of pilgrims to saints’ tombs are difficult to obtain. Relying on the statistical data issued by the Indonesian Archaeological Department (Dinas Purbakala) from 1998-2005, David Armstrong found that in 2005, 3,272,000 pilgrims visited four (of the nine) tombs of the Wali Sanga in East Java. Among these four, Maulana Malik's grave was the one most visited. In 2005, it hosted 1,556,651 pilgrims, whereas there were only 128,905 pilgrims in 1998, which means there was over a tenfold increase in pilgrimages in only seven years. Likewise, as Glenn Smith observed, there appeared to be no decline in the frequency of visits to the graves of saints (bhujuk) in Madura. On the contrary, a growing number of villagers joined organised tours to many bhujuk scattered around the island of Madura.

This chapter is divided into five parts. The first part discusses the notion of wisata religi as a conceptual umbrella for Muslim pilgrimages not exclusively to Bali, but also to other religious sites in Java and Indonesia in general. This part poses the question of the position of wisata religi in light of the ‘official’ wisata budaya (cultural tourism) of Bali, that echoes the colonial and post-colonial discourse on tourism in the island. The following three parts serve as ethnographic sections that discuss the ‘religious entrepreneurs’ of wisata religi, that play key roles in marketing and organising wisata religi to the graves of Wali Pitu, wisata religi in Bali, and the pilgrims respectively.