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Buddhist or Muslim Rulers? Models of Kingship in Arakan (Western Burma) in the Fourteenth to Fifteenth Centuries
By Michael W. Charney – National University of Singapore
Early Modern Arakan: A Brief Overview
The early modern kingdom of Arakan hugged the eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal. Although it had important cultural interactions with the Irrawaddy Valley to its East over the Arakan Roma Mountains, Arakan’s early modern prosperity depended largely upon maritime trade, and that generally with Muslim traders. The Arakanese kingdom centred around three chief capitals, from which the periodization of precolonial Arakanese history has derived: Vesali (seventh to ninth centuries, followed by political fragmentation and a break- up of the kingdom until the thirteenth century), Launkret (thirteenth to early fifteenth centuries), and Mrauk-U (1430 until1785).
As a cultural crossroads between South and Southeast Asia, Arakan was home to heterogeneous religious traditions, including Hinduism, Islam, and Mahayana, Tantric, and Theravada Buddhism. As a result, art historical, epigraphic, and material evidence could be used to support claims that the Arakanese were traditionally Muslim or that they were traditionally Buddhist, giving rise, in part, to the religious communal conflict between Muslims and Buddhist in Arakan today. Arakanese chronicles, and generally we only have Buddhist Burmese- and Pali language pesa manuscripts at the moment, describe an ideal model of a Hindu-Buddhist state, especially during the Mrauk-U period. There was a king at the center, four chief ministers, and four chief queens around him. The king was a dhamma-raja and was personally devoted not only to Buddhism per se, but especially to the royal cult of Maha-muni, that is, a cult of the Amitaba, the future Buddha. Many of the religious buildings dated from the period and attributed to these kings are today Buddhist, although these buildings have been re-built over and over again and no oneis really certain of what they originally looked like or in what capacity they functioned. This evidence has been used to substantiate the view of a solid Buddhist or Hindu-Buddhist kingship.
