Balamon Cham Village

The afternoon in the Cham Bàlamôn village passes slowly. Low houses lean close together, and their whitewashed walls have faded in the sun. A red bougainvillea trellis hangs over a porch, and a few petals have dropped onto the step. The wind from the fields carries the smell of straw and dry earth, the smell of sunny, windy Ninh Thuận. Barefoot children chase each other across a dirt yard, and their laughter rises and then fades. Under an old tree, an elderly man sits very still with a bundle of worn paper in his hand. His eyes follow lines of soft, flowing letters that the family has never seen before.

The youngest child tugs at the father's hand and asks quietly, "Dad, what writing is he reading?" The father looks over and shakes his head, because he does not know either. From the next house, an old woman drying rice grain looks up. She smiles kindly, brushes her hands on the hem of her tunic and walks slowly over.

"That is Cham script," she says in gentle Vietnamese. "Our letters. They come from the Grantha script of southern India, but we Cham have kept them and used them here for centuries." The Cham are a people of south-central Vietnam whose ancestors lived in the ancient kingdom of Champa. She looks toward the tree. "That man is not a researcher. He is a priest, learning his sacred duties."

She sits down on the step and keeps talking to the family. "This is a village of the Cham Bàlamôn. More than 50,000 of us live here in Ninh Thuận." She explains that the name Bàlamôn comes from the word Brahmana, the priestly line of long ago. Bàlamôn is a Cham Hindu tradition. "We are Hindu, and we have always been." This faith goes back to the kingdom of Champa, around the 5th century. That makes it more than a thousand years old. She says it calmly, the way she might speak of the age of the banyan at the village gate, something too familiar to need a raised voice.

Then she says something that silences the family. "We have never left this place." She tells them the Cham did not go to India, and nobody carried their faith to them from far away. This land is home, and the faith grew up right here. One Hindu magazine once wrote that, together with the people of Bali, this community is one of two places that keep a native Hindu tradition, one that does not come directly from India. But she does not put it that way. She only says, "This faith is ours. It was born here. It will stay here."

She points to the man under the tree. "He is studying to become a Po Paséh one day, the first rank among the priests." After many years of study he may rise to Po Tapáh. And if he keeps all the knowledge whole, he will become Po Adhia, the highest priest. Each rank passes on the prayers by word of mouth, from teacher to student, one generation after another. No school can take the place of that. Everything lives in the memory of the teacher, and flows to the student through afternoons of sitting and learning like this one. That is how the chants, the rituals and the worship of the Linga have stayed whole until today.

She leads the family softly past a small shrine at the edge of the village. Inside stands a Linga, a sacred symbol of the god Shiva. She says quietly that the Linga is what the Cham Bàlamôn have honored since the time of Champa, and still do. The community also has red brick towers that have stood since Champa times. Among them are the towers of Po Inu Nugar and Po Rome. Two more are Po Klông Garai and Po Dam. The whole village gathers at these towers on great feast days. But in everyday life, the sacred is right here too, in the small shrine of the village.

The youngest child, about seven years old, pulls at the mother's sleeve and asks, "Mom, are they sad, when the world outside changes and they stay like this?" The old woman hears and turns back with a smile. "Child, we are not like this because we cannot change. We are like this because we choose to keep it. Those are two very different things."

The family walks slowly back as the afternoon turns gold. The man is still reading under the tree. A little girl carries out a cup of water to him. Smoke from someone's kitchen drifts thinly above the low roofs. The village is just as it has always been. It does not need to go anywhere. It only needs to be handed on, from one generation to the next, like the lines of letters on that page, like the sunlight resting on the old trees at the end of the afternoon.