Traders and Poets at the Mrauk-U Court

From 1580 to the early 1640s, the kingdom of Arakan was an aggressively expansive polity in the Eastern Indian Ocean whose very existence depended on constant warfare against its immediate neighbors, the Mughal emperors and the Burmese kings. At the same time, trade thrived and a culturally diverse society flourished at the kingdom’s capital until the late seventeenth century. While focusing on the commercial network and the presence of Bengali poets at the Mrauk-U court, the paper faces the apparently contradictory fact that trade and cultural flowering were dependent on the results of Arakan’s war-driven policies.

The Bengali literature composed between the reigns of Sīrisudhammarājā (1622–38) and Candasudhammarājā (1652–84) in the cosmopolitan court milieu of Mrauk-U is fascinating window on the cultural history of the Mrauk-U kingdom during the seventeenth century. The period of the kings of the golden palace offers all the conditions favorable to the development of high culture: a fairly stable political situation, wealth, and strong regional and supra-regional connections that allowed the circulation of men and ideas. Besides the Splendid architectural remains of Mrauk-U, the description of banquets and celebrations that come down to us show the magnificence and the pomp displayed by the Arakanese kings.

But, with the exception of the chronicles, no extant literary corpus produced at the court of the Arakanese kings has come to light until today. It is Bengali literature that provides the most comprehensive picture of the literary culture as conceived and practiced by the members of the royal court. This does not mean that literature in languages other than Bengali was not read and produced in Mrauk-U. Besides Bengali, we do find evidence of literary activities in Arakanese, Pali, Sanskrit, Hindavi, Persian and Arabic, though these are not documented to the same extent. For instance, Arakanese literature is mainly represented by poems and chronicles, Pali was studied as the sacred language of Buddhism, Sanskrit scholarship was practiced by brahmans, Bengali Muslims and Buddhist monks and, besides its ritual use, was considered as a technical and scientific language (astrology, poetics,etc.). As for Hindavi, Persian and Arabic, their use is explicitly referred to in the Bengali texts.