When the Kulkul Stops Sounding for You

In a Balinese village, the day is often announced from above the rooftops. Hanging in a small tower at the banjar hall or in the corner of a temple stands the kulkul, a hollowed log of wood with a single slit cut along its side, and when it is struck, everybody within earshot knows what the sound means. A meeting is being called. Work is about to begin. A ceremony is starting. Someone has died. Long before phones, the village read its schedule off a drum.

What makes the kulkul more than an alarm is that it speaks in sentences. The rhythm changes with the message, slow and swelling for one summons, urgent for danger, and each organisation in the village keeps a drum with a voice of its own. To hear the kulkul is to be addressed by name, as a member. Which is why the most feared sentence in Balinese customary life is the one where the drum says nothing at all.

That silence has a context, and it is worth understanding the instrument first, because the kulkul is not one drum but a whole system of them. Once you know how a village sounds when everything is working, you can hear what it means when one household drops out of the music.

A hollow log that learned to talk

The kulkul is a slit drum, one of the oldest communication devices in Southeast Asia, mentioned in old Balinese manuscripts such as the Lontar Markandeya Purana and known in the Dutch colonial period by the name tongtong. Making one is patient work. A trunk of jackfruit wood or teak, commonly one to two metres long, is cleaned of its bark, a slit is chiselled along one side, and the inside is carved out into a cavity. Struck with a wooden beater, the hollow log answers with a deep, carrying note that rolls across the rice fields and rooftops far better than a voice could.

The finished drum hangs in the bale kulkul, a watchtower-like pavilion of base, wooden frame and sheltering roof, placed where its sound will travel furthest, in front of the bale banjar or straddling a temple wall. Temple towers can be tall masonry structures carved with mythic figures, while the village version is often a simpler wooden frame. Balinese tradition also sorts the drums by who they address. The bale kulkul of a banjar holds the kulkul manusia, the drum of humans, used for civic life. In temples there is the kulkul dewa, always carved from jackfruit wood and struck in a very slow rhythm to call the gods, and the kulkul bhuta, made of bamboo, sounded for the bhuta kala, the unruly spirits who must also be kept informed. Even the unseen world, in other words, gets its announcements.

The towers are older than the religion that now surrounds them. The bale kulkul at Pura Penataran Sasih in Pejeng keeps the Moon of Pejeng, a bronze drum roughly 2,000 years old, a reminder that the drum tower predates the arrival of Hinduism in Indonesia and simply carried on, absorbing new gods into an older habit of listening.

Every group had its own voice

A Balinese person rarely belongs to just one organisation. There is the banjar, the desa, the temple congregation, the gamelan group, the youth association, and the subak, the irrigation society that organises water and work among rice farmers. Traditionally, each of these kept its own kulkul, and each kulkul had its own colour of sound, so that a farmer in the fields could tell at once whose call it was and whether it concerned him. Membership, in this world, is something you can hear. The kulkul is often described as a symbol of the organisation itself, and that is literally true: the group exists, audibly, every time its drum is struck.

The calls themselves follow patterns. An appointed member, the kasinoman, may first carry short notice from door to door, and then the kulkul is knocked at the agreed hour to gather everyone at once. Ordinary summonses are commonly beaten in two rounds, duang tulud, the strokes starting slow, quickening as fast as the striker can manage, then easing off again. Some events need no notice at all because the drum alone is the message: a wedding, an emergency, a sudden meeting. And when a member of the village dies, the biggest kulkul, the banjar's own, is struck in three rounds, because a death is the business of every member, and all are obliged to come and help with the burial and the rituals that follow.

Around these public drums there were always smaller ones. Farming groups in the highlands kept bamboo kulkul at their field huts, one to call the chickens at feeding time, the birds trained to come running at the familiar pattern, one to announce that the keeper of the farm was present. The same hollow log, scaled down, becomes a farm bell. The principle never changes: a known sound, addressed to those who belong to it.

The sound is the membership

To understand why the drum matters so much, it helps to see how a Balinese customary village works. In the desa adat, belonging is not a passive status. A krama, a member household, owes work, contributions and presence, and in return the village owes the household its protection, its ceremonies and its help at every large moment of life, from weddings to cremations. Almost all of that exchange is coordinated publicly, and the kulkul is its public address system. When the drum sounds for a work party, it is also confirming that you are one of the people the village counts on, and one of the people who can count on the village.

This is what I find quietly remarkable about the kulkul: it makes belonging audible, several times a week, in a way no membership card or registry ever could. You do not check whether you are still part of the village. You hear it, drifting over the roofs while you are cooking or working, and the hearing is the proof. A community that announces itself this way is constantly renewing its own membership list, in public, where everyone can notice an absence.

When the kulkul stops sounding for you

Against that background, the heaviest customary sanction in Bali lands differently. Kasepekang, the punishment a desa adat reserves for members who defy its rules and refuse every lesser penalty, cuts a family out of village life while leaving them physically inside it. Neighbours are instructed not to speak to them or deal with them. Communal help, the pooled labour called panyanggran, is withdrawn for celebrations, for religious observance, for disaster and for death. And the kulkul, as the kasepekang article on this site puts it, is no longer sounded for them.

Read that detail slowly. The family is not expelled, not driven past the village boundary. They still live in their house, still hear the drum, because sound cannot be fenced off from one address. But every call it makes is now a call they are not part of. The drum that announced their weddings and would have announced their deaths passes over their roof in silence that is not really silence, a summons addressed to everyone except them. Exclusion usually works by removing the excluded person from the place. Kasepekang works the other way round: it removes the place, socially and spiritually, from around the person, and it does much of that work through one withheld sound.

It is, I think, a sanction that understands its own culture perfectly, which is exactly what makes it so severe. In a village where membership is a sound, the cruellest punishment is not noise or violence but becoming inaudible, no longer counted among those the drum is for. The family hears every meeting they may not attend and every ceremony they may not join, carried clearly through the evening air.

Telephones arrived, and the drum stayed

None of this has stood still. Observers of Balinese village life have long noted that the kulkul changed remarkably little over the centuries despite the arrival of the telephone and radio, technologies that should have made it obsolete overnight. Today the practical summons increasingly travels by siren and WhatsApp group, and as temporary farming organisations have faded and field work is subcontracted for daily wages, the number of drums has quietly fallen too. A group chat is faster, reaches the fields instantly, and never needs its roof repaired.

And yet the kulkul has not followed the telephone pole into history. It is still struck for the Tawur rituals on the day before Nyepi, still calls meetings at the bale banjar, still announces a death in three slow rounds. Part of the reason is simple conservatism, but I suspect the deeper reason is the one this article has been circling: a WhatsApp message can summon people, but it cannot say what the kulkul says. The drum does not just deliver information. It performs the existence of the community, out loud, in a voice that belongs to the village itself and to no one else.

That is the honest tension the kulkul now lives in. As a tool, it has been beaten; as a symbol, it has no replacement at all. Perhaps that is fine. Instruments often retire into meaning once their work is done, and a drum that began as a message service can end, if end is even the word, as the sound a village makes to remind itself who belongs to it. The families who dread its silence understand that better than anyone. To live under those rooftops is to know that belonging, in Bali, has always had a sound, and that the sound has a name.