Bali Tourism News

Bali Village Waxes on Batik

April 6th, 2009

Liz Sinclair

“Batik is about the hand and the heart of the worker,” Pak Tjok said.

Pak Tjok Agung Pemayun is a slight man, with a shy but intense energy about him, always moving restlessly. He becomes animated when he talks about his plans for the future of his village, Pejeng, near Ubud in Bali, and how he hopes to recreate it as a model organic and sustainable village. He runs a batik workshop, BISA Indigo Natural, in his village and is know on the street as Pak Tjok Batik.

Pak Tjok is an economics graduate and worked as an accountant in the ’90s — that is, until 1997. He was working for the Nelayan Group when the Asian financial crisis hit that year. He saw big companies going bankrupt and others being bailed out by the government and came to believe  the best path to economic prosperity for his people is through small businesses that don’t rely on bank loans.

He decided to go back to his village to help out. He is related to the Ubud royal family and believes that they have a responsibility to help the people and the economy of Ubud. Instead of getting jobs outside their villages, royal leaders should stay and help out, he said. Despite being of royal blood, Pak Tjok is a man of humility. (He refused to have his picture taken by the Jakarta Globe, saying that he wanted the attention to be on his workers and the company.)

Pak Tjok is watching Ubud as it loses its agricultural land to development for tourism. Balinese people don’t realize what a precarious situation this leaves them in, he said, considering the economy could go into recession and tourism could fall off without warning.

If a crisis hit, Pak Tjok said, he and his family would have enough rice from their hectares of rice fields. But many of the Pejeng villagers don’t own rice fields. If there were a crisis, they wouldn’t be able to eat, he said.

Pak Tjok said that in his opinion, the head of each village should be responsible for providing jobs and finding ways to bring in income. Indonesia is too big, he said, too centralized in Jakarta, to look after the needs of all its citizens. He wants the Balinese to be self-sufficient and not rely on the Indonesian government.

Pak Tjok’s batik workshop was not his first business idea. He tried weaving, then wood-carving, then bead making, but none of these business ideas worked out.

So Pak Tjok went on a trip around Java Island to investigate the batik industry. In Pekalongan, Central Java Province, Pak Tjok learned that 30,000 people were working in the batik industry. He also discovered that most batik in Bali was imported from Java, and that few people in Bali were making batik.

“Batik is not our textile culture [in Bali],” he said, “Batik is from Java.”

Pak Tjok had come across a good business idea, although getting started was not easy: He said people making batik in Java had a tendency to hide their knowledge of the batik-making process. But he was persistent and gradually found people that would teach him.

Batik is made using a wax-resist process. A pattern is created on a piece fabric using melted wax, either painted on by hand, with a tool called a canting, or stamped with a mold, called a cap. When the wax has set, the material is dyed. This process is repeated for multiple-colored patterns. The wax is then removed, generally by boiling the cloth in water, and the patterns are left in white. At BISA, the women draw the designs with canting, and the men use cap and dye the cloth.

In 2002, after the first Bali bombing, Pak Tjok set up his batik workshop using indigo and natural dyes, starting with a modest three people — he now employs 76. “We are the first and best in Bali. We’re the first [that uses organic indigo and natural dyes] in Bali, and there’s only one, so we must be the best,” he said, laughing.

BISA’s cinder-block workshop, which exudes the strong smells of wax and raw indigo, is located near the Pejeng market.

The atmosphere is friendly. In a large room, circles of five women are at work. In the center of each circle is a burner topped with a tin pot of wax. The women chat and laugh softly as they each dip their canting into the wax, one at a time.

Pak Tjok prefers to hire women, rather than men, he said, because men are “not too fair handling their wages.” He said that when the men had extra money, they would spend it on cockfights or gambling, rather than giving it to their wives and children. This practice, Pak Tjok said, is destructive to Balinese culture, and he wants to support women, who spend their money on their families.

Wayan Meliawati, 26, who sorts and packs orders, used to work in a supermarket. Her family can’t get by without her income, she said. She had to work rotating shifts at the supermarket and couldn’t always look after her children in the evenings. At BISA, she only works during the day, close to home.

Pak Tjok continues to run the business largely by himself, with some office support, marketing the products, dealing with clients, overseeing new designs, accounting and managing the staff. He said that it was too difficult to set his business up as a yayasan (nonprofit group), which he would have preferred, as their was too much paperwork involved for just one person to handle. Instead, he turns BISA’s profits back to the workers, as needed. He has plans that cover his workers’ health costs and educational expenses for their children.

Pak Tjok can only afford to pay his workers Rp 16,000 ($1.40) a day, as his profits are not high, but in Java, he said, workers generally make Rp 8,000 a day.

The only other work available for women in Pejeng is in construction, and although it pays Rp 25,000 a day, the work generally only lasts a week or so for each job.

Both the indigo dyes and the cotton that BISA uses are organic, but Pak Tjok could not get organic cotton woven in Bali, so his cotton comes from Tuban, East Java Province. He wants to establish a project in East Bali to grow organic cotton; the dry climate there is very suitable, he said.

He is also constantly experimenting with new types of organic indigo, importing different seeds from overseas. He thinks he may be able to grow organic indigo in the dryer and poorer parts of Bali to provide income to local people there.

He hopes to train other Balinese in batik-making. The Balinese government once asked him to set up a training program to share his knowledge with all of Bali’s districts, but before the program could start, the budget was cut. He said that local governments didn’t look out for the long-term needs of the Balinese people, emphasizing that they need to set up their own village-based enterprises.

It costs about Rp 200 million to set up a workshop like BISA, which, Pak Tjok said, is not a lot of money for a village to spend. “[But] most villages don’t think small. They are impatient, they want big business.”

Pak Tjok would like to see a “one village, one studio” system for batik established in Bali. He said that he saw a specialization model in Java whereby one area would only do wax work and export the fabrics to be dyed in another area. He thinks that a similar model could be applied in Bali, where some villages would do the wax work, others would do dyeing and still others would grow the raw materials; all would get an income from the finished products.

To help set Pejeng up as the model organic and sustainable village he envisions, he has donated a large piece of land to be used as an organic garden. He has a dream that Pejeng can become a tourist destination like Ubud, with organic warung (street food stalls) and craft shops. In his vision, tourists would be able to visit BISA and buy directly from the workshop. He wants to set up a recycling and waste management program in the village. All these programs, he said, would create much greater village-based employment.

But Pak Tjok doesn’t want to work like this forever. He hopes to eventually relocate with his family to Nusa Penida, a small island off the southeast coast of Bali. Ideally, he would like to turn BISA over to the workers, but for now, he said, “If I’m not here for a week, there are problems.”

He has tried to teach his workers to be independent, but they lack confidence. He encourages them to choose their own designs, but they don’t have business skills, they have a “labor mentality,” he said. They expect to work for someone else and get paid, they’re not used to thinking of running a business for themselves, he said.

Most workers say they cannot manage the workshop, or are simply uninterested. Pak Tjok hopes Pejeng’s next generation will gain the business skills necessary to keep small businesses like his going.

“It’s too late for the parents. I’ll have to steal the children and teach them instead,” he said with a laugh. And he hopes that happens in a center he wants to build where English, computer and business skills can be taught. Otherwise, he hopes he can sell BISA and distribute the profit to the workers. He will be happy either way, as long as BISA continues to provide jobs and prosperity to the village.

Source: www.thejakartaglobe.com

Entry Filed under: Bali Tourism News