Sasak Erotic

The Sasak are the people of Lombok, the island immediately east of Bali across the narrow Lombok Strait — a strait that also happens to be one of the sharpest biogeographical lines on earth. Lombok sits on the Asian side of the Wallace Line in cultural terms but the Australasian side in faunal terms, and the Sasak live with that doubleness: rice terraces and volcanic soils that feel continuous with Java, but a drier, scrubbier landscape than the wet green of their famous western neighbor. They number around three and a half million, and on Lombok itself they are the overwhelming majority, with Balinese, Sumbawan, and Chinese minorities layered into the towns.

Their language, Sasak, is Austronesian and closely related to Balinese and Sumbawan, but it is internally fractured into several mutually intelligible dialects that locals can place by ear within a sentence or two — a marker of village rather than nation. Sasak has its own pre-Islamic script tradition, aksara Sasak, derived from the Old Javanese family and still used for ritual texts and palm-leaf manuscripts called takepan.

Almost all Sasak are Muslim, but the religious texture of the island is unusual. The mainstream community practices ordinary Sunni Islam, oriented toward the same calendar and obligations as Muslims elsewhere in the archipelago. Alongside it survives Wetu Telu — literally "three times" — a syncretic form concentrated around the village of Bayan in the north, in which adherents pray three times a day rather than five and delegate much of the formal religious labor to a class of elders, while keeping pre-Islamic ancestor rites and agricultural ceremonies intact. Wetu Telu has been pressured for decades by reformist Sunni currents and is now small, but it remains the most-discussed feature of Sasak religious life.

Lombok's history runs through Majapahit influence, a long period of Balinese rule from the Karangasem kingdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then Dutch conquest in 1894 after the Sasak aristocracy invited the Dutch in to break Balinese control — a bargain whose consequences they then had to live with. That sequence still shapes how Sasak speak about themselves: as people who were dominated, who pushed back, and who came out of it with an island that is theirs. Distinctive customs include peresean, a ritualized stick-and-rattan-shield duel staged at festivals, and nyongkolan, the public wedding procession in which the groom's party walks the bride home through the village to gamelan accompaniment.