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The Misuses of Histories and Historiography by the state in Myanmar : The Case of Rakhine and Rohingya
By Prof. Dr. Michael W. Charney, (SOAS)
Thanks for inviting me to speak. I am not a lawyer but a historian so my talk will be a little different than the others we listened to yesterday. While everyone else is looking for solutions, I am not doing that necessarily. Ultimately, some look to find solutions in holding Myanmar to account through international law. That’s what they can do. When I look at Myanmar I am trying to unravel the ways in which religious haters in the country misuse history to legitimate what they do. As Daniel Taylor’s talk indicated yesterday this has a real impact because countries, not willing to accept the stories that constitute genocide are partly influenced by the claims made by Myanmar that the Rohingya are foreigners that they are Bengali.
In the half hour that follows, I will give essentially two seemingly different sub-papers that actually must be viewed together before they can be synthesized into a single three-dimensional view. First, I am going to discuss what I think is important about the long-term historical background of the current crisis involving Rakhine and Rohingya, because so much is already going around about more recent decades, the citizenship law of 1982, the Tatmadaw, NLD etc, that I do not have to do that here. Second, I will explain why so much of this crisis is built on historical misunderstanding of Rakhine and Rakhine misunderstanding of history and how people picture history and people in it. I will then wrap all of this up in the end with some brief comments about some of the ahistorical things western academics have been doing in accepting one historical narrative that works against the Rohingya and why I think they are wrong.
We have thousands of years of the human past in Rakhine, a lot of archaeological remains, coins, inscriptions in non-Bamar languages that really give us little more than Sanskrit royal names and titles. There is nothing that could serve as a historical story you might relate to students or a lay audience until really the fifteenth century. You have historicised stories that are almost certainly apocryphal. Then, in the early fifteenth century, the Kingdoms of Ava and Pegu tried to establish cultural hegemony over the Indo-Aryan kingdom of Rakhine, importing kings and queens, courtiers, Buddhist monks, and Bamar settlers. You have a local king supposedly flee to the Muslim world, gain protection from the Sultan of Delhi or Bengal, it changes in different traditions, he teaches them various kinds of war tactics and the sultan sends him back with a Muslim army.
In 1430, we then have Rakhine ruler, supposedly the same guy, who comes back ousts the foreign, Bamar and Mon, invaders, establishes a religiously hybrid court, a sultanate from one perspective, a Buddhist court from another, but from inside the court, both at the same time. As the physical geography and climate favoured approaches to living and ruling, interacting, and community building, social mentalities that were flexible and inclusive, that favored the emergence of ethnically and religiously diverse communities, and states that by European standards would be seen as heterodox and a major source of confusion. Thus, we find lots of evidence that Buddhists and Muslims got along quite well. Certainly, this creation myth of sorts identifies Muslims and the Muslim world as the saviour and protector, not the enemy of Rakhine. That latter role is reserved for Myanmar and the Buddhist political world. The Irrawaddy world is something Rakhine needs saving from.
The new Mrauk-U court relied upon a Muslim army to protect it and its first religious building was mosque, the Santikhan mosque, its kings began using Muslim as well as Buddhist titles and issued coins with the Kalima. More importantly, in a population poor area, the court tried. The relics of decades of Rakhine Buddhist insecurity—numerous chronicles that are mutually irreconcilable in which they admitted that their kingdom was founded by a refugee prince coming from India protected by a Muslim army were evidence that the Rakhine desperately wanted to create evidence that they had always been in the region, back to the time of Buddha. Now they claimed that with the presence of so many different chronicles that they did not “know” about an earlier Muslim presence, but they knew, they knew, generations of Rakhine Buddhists have always known. But, over generations, even the most basic truths of one’s origins are forgotten (after all, how many of you know who your own great, great grandparents were?).
This is hugely important. It is impossible for us today—lay reader, professional historian, Rohingya or Rakhine– to provide a historical background to Rakhine without engaging vigorously with the politicised historical narratives that have been in production since the 1780s. Any background provided from whatever angle must be political because every source is a political artefact. So many gaps appear in the documentary record and so many contradictions exist in the “historical” narratives produced by local monks and courtiers from the 1780s there was plenty of space for compilers to act as composers and to fill these with ideas and beliefs of their own time. In other words, we read in chronicles descriptions of the history of Mrauk-U in the 15th century, we are not reading primary sources on that period. We are instead entering the imaginaries of Buddhist monks who lived geographically and temporally far away in Sandoway in the early 19th century. And their perspectives were built on a different society that had spent 40 years under Myanmar rule.
We also have to keep in mind that the Rakhine area we refer to today is not what it was then, but Rakhine has historically been all of the coast eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal. So, one problem is that while the Rohingya are real, and they or their forbears were in Rakhine as long as the Buddhist Rakhine were, and are just as indigenous, the terminologies we are must rely upon to discuss them and their history have been subject to significant efforts to engineer them into foreigners.
This contemporary Buddhist monopoly on history might have been balanced out with Rohingya voices if not for another accident of history, the replacement of Myanmar rule with British rule in 1826. The British decided on the basis of orientalist scholarship by Sir Arthur Phayre that Rakhine should be categorised as have one native language, one native race, and one native religion, despite its huge diversity. Although from a Western point of view, you can only be one or the other, local indigenous families probably moved many times back and forth between different ethnic categories, from Rohingya to Rakhine and even to Bamar and back again, depending on theperiod, the context, and to whom they married. So, when Phayre read the Bamar-language chronicles he accepted them as genuine and authoritative and rejected the coins and all the other evidence of Muslim culture and religion as anomalies. Phayre was thus blinded to the fact that Rakhine had been at least since the 15th century a Muslim and a Buddhist land, with a Muslim and a Buddhist court, and that historically, Bamars, Bamar-speakers, Theravada Buddhists from the Irrawaddy Valley were migrating into Rakhine at the same time as Muslim, Bengali-speakers. As Myanmar was gradually annexed by India, Muslims in Myanmar were treated officially as foreigners and not categorised by their local names. So the Rohingya not being recorded in the British colonial censuses of from the 1860s as Rohingya or not was a political choice by a state, not by the Rohingya.
