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Text of presentation at the research workshop, “Myanmar’s Democratic Transition and the Rohingya Persecution,” Oxford University, 11 May 2016
State and Society in Arakan since the Fourteenth Century: From Inclusion to Polarisation and Exclusion
Professor Michael W. Charney (SOAS, the University of London)
I would like to begin by discussing an immigrant group in Burma and please bear with me for a few moments, before forming any judgments. There are several things we know about this particular immigrant group. There is NO EVIDENCE that they existed before the fourteenth century, or for the language that they used, or for the particular religion that they hold today, or for their particular ethnic culture as it is known today.
They appear in Arakan in close association with a foreign court. They are both immigrants and foreigners in the littoral :
I am NOT referring to the Rohingya, the theme of today’s talks, but the Yakhaing Burmese-speakers, the Theravada Buddhists, whose culture, religion, ethnicity, is foreign to the littoral and is predated by the Muslim presence there. Now, having said this, can I step back and argue that I am NOT seeking to switch the positions of the Rohingya and the Yakhaing.
Instead, I am suggesting that if we apply the same historical method to the Yakhaing that I have seen applied to the historicity of the Rohingya by so much of the “scholarship” on the country in the years since my dissertation, NO GROUP in Arakan would pass the test as “indigenous.”
The problem is that the history of the Rakhaing Littoral before the fourteenth century and arguably before the fifteenth century is far murkier than a lot of the scholarship would have you believe. What we know is that there was an Indo-Aryan population, speaking in a non-Tibeto-Burman language, writing in an Indic script, building temples and practicing religion that was Hindu-Buddhist along north Indian lines, that was part of the larger Bay of Bengal world which was outside of the Irrawaddy world.
Then suddenly, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, we have invasions from the Irrawaddy Valley, from the kingdom of Ava and the Kingdom of Pegu, which at the time were engaged in a massive war with each other. And they enter Arakan and place their own kings and queens on the throne and bring in administrators, soldiers, and settlers. And what was
there gets transformed by integration with the Irrawaddy Valley, Burmese language appears, Burmese script predominates, Theravada Buddhism appears as a royal cult, Theravada Buddhist monks, and Irrawaddy Valley material culture probably also had its impact.
But even afterward this remained one of many influences and in another murky episode, a new line of indigenous kings, the Mrauk-U Dynasty — was established in the early fifteenth century, one that saw itself rooted in the Muslim world, one that adopted the Kalima, the Muslim confession of faith, that used Persian and Muslim titles, that built mosques as well as pagodas. And this court and culture had space for all, it is not so much syncretic but heterodox, its population not so much homogeneous and exclusivist, but inclusive and heterogeneous, one that is not bigoted but tolerant.
We are blinded to the possibilities of such a place because of the impact of the modern nation state. First, it requires conformity to the contemporary national imaginary, not a partial subscription. For example, although Burma is admitted today as having many ethnic groups, these ethnic groups are essentialized. So that the majority is Theravada Buddhist, Burmese speaking, and Burman, but only in one way, so you can’t have different kinds of Theravada Buddhist, Burmese speaking, Burmans, they allhave to be a singular type. So whatever is truly Rakhaing, is being viewed, understood, and turned into Yakhaing, losing its regional essence, its independent take on things, and being reworked on an Irrawaddy Valleytemplate, what I have called in the past Irrawaddyization. Now, this is one problem of the modern nation-state for Rakhaing, making things look like the Irrawaddy Burmans. This is not an uncommon problem, because it replicates similar developments in other countries around the globe as part of the development of the nation-state.
And this ENTIRE littoral, not just the half lying south of the Naf River is Rakhaing. This socialmentalitie was eradicated sometime after the Burman conquest in 1784/85. What many of those writing about the history of the region in recent years do not tell you is that most of the Burmese language historical sources in Rakhaing were written after the Burman conquest. So, when something is not found in European or Persian language sources, that is when it comes from a Burmese language chronicle, it relates Rakhaing’s socialmentalitie as it stood after 1785. And we find that with each new chronicle that the coverage of pre-1785 Rakhaing makes the latter look more and more like the Irrawaddy Valley Burma and British India. The Rakhaing look increasingly like Theravada Buddhist, Burmese-speaking Burmans are supposed to look, what we might call Y akhaing rather than R akhaing. And those who look different are portrayed increasingly as troublesome outsiders. The Rohingya go from fellow villagers to Mohammedans, to Bengalis, to Bengali marauders. And the presence of the Yakhaing culture is stretched back into the immeasurable depths of the past.
I do stress my point is not to undermine Rakhaing Buddhists, but to point to the shared immigrant nature of the entire population of the littoral, the shared and relative recentness to the emergence of the Rakhaing and Rohingya ethnic and religious communalism of today. I would sincerely like to remind them of the true Rakhaing past and its inclusive and heterogeneous orientations. And of the historical harmony that existed before the emergence of the modern nation-state, a process begun by the way with British rule in 1824 and not from 1948. I also wish to highlight the historicity of the term Rohingya, as legitimate and older than the Yakhaing identity proffered today by those who would seek to undermine a region’s unique culture and history.
