Arakan Library - An Age Of Pride And Contentment

Arakan: - One Who Preserves and Takes Care of Their Own Nationality.

Publication by Arakan Action Association (AAA.)

ARAKAN'S ASCENT DURING THE MRAUK U PERIOD

EDITED BY SUNAIT CHUTARANOND & CHRISBAKER

AN AGE OF PRIDE AND CONTENTMENT

During the first part of the reign of King Sirisudhammaraja(1622-1638), the open conflict with the Mughals in East Bengal continued unabated. Father Manrique who stayed in Arakan between 1629 and 1634, reports that when he arrived for the first time in Arakan, missionaries had not been able to cross the Bay of Bengal due to seven years ongoing Arakanese raids. The Mughal chronicler Talish notes that “in no other part of the Mughal empire has any neighbouring infidel king the power to oppress and domineer over Muslim: but rather do infidel kings show all kinds of submission and humility in order to save their homes and lands, and the Mughal officers of those places engage in making new acquisitions by conquest” (Sarkar 1933, 423). In October 1623, Sirisudhammaraja led an attack against Bengal which may be idenitified with the raid against Dakhin Shabazpur referred to by Mirza Nathan. Ibrahim Khan Fath-Jang immediately dispatched a fleet, but “towards the close of the day, information was received that the Raja of the Mags had returned to his own country in order to fight against an enemy of his named Barhama [Burma] who had attacked his country from the other side” (Nathan 1936, 2:639-41). Neither Arakanese nor Burmese sources provide any information on this Burmese attack. In December 1625, Dhaka was attacked by a fleet of 1,600 boats that plundered the city with impunity. One year later, an Arakanese fleet pillaged Syriam and Pegu, a raid on which the Burmese sources are mute.

In April 1624, Shah Jahan revolted against his father, the Mughal emperor Jahangir, and took control of Bengal. Sirisudhammaraja sent him precious gifts, and the Mughal nobleman responded favourably by sending “a valuable dress of honour along with many presents and a peremptory farman was issued confirming the sovereignty of his territory” (Nathan 1936, 2:710-1). Shah Jahan's revolt failed in October 1624. But Sirisudhammaraja's skilful diplomatic initiative was far from useless as four years later, Shah Jahan became emperor. During his long reign (1628-1658), no serious attempt was made by the Mughals to invade Arakan, despite the constant slave raids by the Luso-Asian community in East Bengal.

In 1628, the murder of the king of Burma, Anaukhpetlun, by his son provoked a succession crisis. The parricide son hoped to gain the support of King Sirisudhammaraja to prop his claim for the throne, but was killed by his own guards. Nonetheless it turned out to be a welcome situation for the king of Arakan who had an opportunity to interfere in Burma's affairs. The decision who would succeed on the throne was not immediately taken as Anaukhpetlun's brothers were fighting rebellious governors in the Shan country. An Arakanese embassy was sent to Burma with a royal letter containing the barely veiled threat of an intervention. The early 1630s saw three more embassies to Burma and at least one Burmese mission to Arakan as well. We know nothing of the outcome of this diplomatic exchange, but an open conflict was obviously put off. Somewhere between 1630 and 1635, King Prasaatthong of Siam sent an embassy to Mrauk-U which may have suggested an alliance between the two kingdoms against a menacing Burmese state (Van Vliet 1975,95).

But in the late 1620s and early 1630s, the field of political and military options became narrower than it was at the beginning of the century. The second part of Sirisudhammaraja's reign was marked by a gradual change in Arakan's relations with Bengal and Burma.While the reigns of the Warrior Kings Sirisudhammaraja and his successors could at best defend and maintain Arakan's acquired position. Burma recovered its formers strength and Mughal power was solidly established in Bengal. Under these circumstances, new conquests were nearly impossible. Dissuading any major attack from either the Burmese or the Mughals became the only reasonable and practical choice for Arakan's leaders. From this perspective, the annual raids against Bengal should be seen as pre-emptive strikes against impending Mughal invasions.

There is no doubt that in the middle of the seventeenth century, the kingdom of Arakan reached its apogee. Mrauk-U had become a prosperous, cosmopolitan city where traders from all over the Indian Ocean were found (Bhattacharya 1999). While the king remained attached to a secular Arakanese tradition of Hindu-Buddhist court ceremonial and the practice of Buddhist dhamma, the advice of Muslim officers was welcome as long as, we may surmise, it shared the anti-Mughal stance of their royal master. The poetry written by Daud Qazi and Alaol with the encouragement of their Arakanese protectors figures among the masterpieces of Bengli literature. For the historian, this fact illustrates the sophistication of a polyglot court which sponsored a remarkable cultural efforescence. Persian was used by the royal chancellery. The Japanese, Christan, and Muslim guards further contributed to the international flair of Mrauk-U's palaces.

The strength of the monarchical power and the political order were such that even a dynastic that even a dynastic revolution in 1638 (ominously the year 1000 of the Arakanese era) did not weaken the foundations of the kingdom. The Arakanese annals pay considerable attention to the simmering conflict between King Sirisudhammaraja and Kusala, the powerful lord of Laung Krak, who had an intimate relationship with Queen Natshinmay. Na Lak Rum, an adviser, tried to persuade the king that Kusala wanted to evict him from the throne through secret magical means. Father Manrique indirectly confirms-in a very confusing account of animal and human sacrifices initiated by the king to obtain longevity (sic! ) --the violence of the clash which stamped the second part of Sirisudhammaraja's reign . According to Dutch sources, the king had some of Kusala's men executed, but later gave his rival a high appointment at court. After the king had passed away, the heir apparent, possibly still a child, was killed, reportedly with the helping hand of Queen Natshinmay. While the members of the royal council, intimidated by the queen, were wavering in their resolution to whom they should hand power, the personal guard of the lord of Laung Krak took possession of the palace and indulged in a bloodbath in which most members of the court were ruthlessly slain. On 3 July 1638, the usurper made himself king and adopted the title Narapati, “Lord of men.” Narapati's massacres did not spare him several years of effort to establish his own network of power. He convened an assembly of the abbots of the capitals's twelve major monasteries under the pretence of seeking guidance , but more likely with the desire to enhance his legitimacy. Most of his supporters were “new men,” unfamiliar with court procedure and wealth. Narapati also appealed to Sirisudhammaraja's senior adviser, Na Lak Rum (who had prudently sought refuge in the southern Chittagong area), to resume his former place at the court. Narapati remained on the throne for seven years, but his active reign covered only five. After 1643, the king grew seriously sick and his son, the future King Satuidammaraja (1645-1652) took care of daily court business. Dutch sources about this period and a revolt by the Chittagong governor in 1638, the export of rice and the slave trade were flourishing and secured a continuous flow of revenue into the royal treasury. The king led an expedition in the Chittagong hinterland and invaded the Bhallua area (Noakhali) where, according to the Na Mi rajawan , seven “kings” acknowledged the authority of the Arakan rular (CL 1932, 2:220).

King Candasudhammaraja's long reign (1652-1684) brought to an end the golden age of Arakanese court life. He is remembered as a great king and so he was. But he was not a conqueror and leader of men as most of his predecessors. In 1665, he lost the island of Sandwip, famous for its sugar and salt production. One year later, he lost Chittagong, the economic basis of the kingdom's commercial wealth.

The conquest of Chittagong was the culmination of the political consolidation in Bengal which had begun earlier in the century. In 1660, Shah Shuja, the governor of Bengal, had lost a decisive battle against his brother Aurangzeb which sealed the contest for the imperial throne. With his family and a retinue of several hundred, Shah Shuja ran for his life and, ironically, sought refuge in Arakan. He refused to give one of his daughters to the Arakanese king. His followers were accused of fomenting a revolt and setting the palace ablaze. When Shah Shuja tried to sneak out of the country, he found death in uncertain circumstances (Schouten 1727, 299-36; Bernier 1830, 150-6; Qanungo 1986, 645; Harvey 1922; Hall 1936, 88-9). Later, envoys of Aurangzeb were humiliated and molested when they came to Mrauk-U and asked for the release of Shah Shuja's relatives. But due to unfavourable circumstances, it was not until 1664 that Shaysta Khan, a newly appointed governor of Bengal, undertook serious steps to prepare a military expedition against Arakan. The Arakanese swiftly reacted and manned a formidable armada which sacked the Mughal fleet moored near Dhaka. But this attack merely strengthened the determination of Shaysta Khan who did not leave anything to chance, but meticulously prepared the invasion of Chittagong by sea and by land.

After the fall of the city, Candasudhammaraja did nothing to retrieve it from the hands of the Mughals (Sarkar 1936, 182-209; Hall 1936, 95-7; CL 1932, 2:222). The Mughal chronicler Talish plainly recognized that the treason of the feringhis (Portuguese) had been crucial for the conquest of Chittagong (Habibullah 1945, 38). We may thus wonder why the king failed to retain the long-standing loyalty of the Luso-Asian community which had monopolized the mutually profitable slave trade. In less than a year, the royal domain shrank from the Feni River in the north to the area of Ramu, south of Chittagong, from where the Arakanese expansion had started two hundred years earlier. The year 1666 marked the onser of a decline that remained barely perceptible until the king passed away nearly twenty years later.

For his Arakanese subjects, Candasudhammaraja was above all a virtuous and pious Buddhist king. The chronicles suggest that the loss of Chittagong did not distract the king from one of his regular pilgrimages to the Mahamuni image. The king built three impressive pagodas which belong to the series of five maraung (victory over [the evil] Mara) pagodas which display the Irrawaddy valley's architectural influence on Arakan's religious art.

Wouter Schouten, a doctor of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), wrote an enchanting description of Arakan's wealth and of the boisterous self-confidence of its king after his visit in 1660-61 (Shouten 1727). He stayed four months in Mrauk-U, extensively visited the capital's surroundings, and left vivid and sometimes surprisingly romantic descriptions of the country and its people. The major items of the VOC's trade were slaves and rice which the Dutch needed on their plantations in Java. When Satuidehammaraja became king in 1645, the Dutch factor Arent van der Helm, who had openly supported a rival candidate to the throne, hastily left the country. But in 1653, the VOC returned to Mrauk-U. A 1656 VOC mission led by Jacobus Hensbroeck, according to Subrahmanyam's recent analysis, was hobbled by mutual misunderstanding, compromise over commercial interests, and breaches of etiquette (Subrahmanyam 1997). Yet Candasudhammaraja agreed to even more favourable trading conditions than earlier. So the VOC kept on importing textiles from Coromandel and buying rice for Batavia (Raychaudhury 1962; Hall 1936). Like his predecessors, Candasudhammaraja was very much aware of the importance of trade which furnished an essential part of the royal revenue. Today's historians may not be able to quantify the falling volume of trade, but commercial decline during the last two decades of the seventeenth century was directly liked with political decline. The tragedy of Arakan's commerce lay in the fact that when Chittagong was lost to the Mughals, not only a majority of Luso-Asians (both slave raiders and traders) left the kingdom, but, under Mughal pressure, the Dutch VOC (a major consumer of rice, coarse cloth, and slaves) did so as well. The Indian Muslim traders who bought rice, beeswax, lac, rubies, and cotton, still came to Arakan, but their number probably declined as well when the political disorder in the country became endemic.

When king Candasudhammaraja passed away (1684), royal authority was already undermined by rival groups of palace guards. For over twenty years, no king or usurper on the throne was able to obtain any lasting recognition of his power beyond the surroundings of the capital. The chronicles specifically state that Uggabala, Candasudhammaraja's eldest son and successor, entered monkhood during the life of his father.This could indicate that he sought protection from political infighting at court. Bow can we explain this sudden deterioration of Arakan's social and political order? Hunderds, possibly thousands, of troops had manned the forts of Chaittagong, Sandwip, Chocoria, Ramu, and other places conquered since the sixteenth century. When Chittagong fell, the garrisons fled to Arakan's heartland. As long as the royal revenue was sufficient, an extensive military establishment was affordable. But the military disaster of 1666 entailed a deadly blow to trade. After the fall of Chittagong, the kings probably had to live off the wealth amassed during more prosperous days. Dissent at the court and rebellions in the countryside sprang not only from political strife, but also from growing competition for the control of shrinking resources. Weak kings despoiled the treasures of the palace to secure some loyalty among their troops and gain some legitimacy (CL 1932, 2:225). The political and economic crisis was further intensified by the heterogeneous character of the Arakanese troops. Probably one third of them were kui ran (read ka-ran), recruited from royal service groups. Besides the native Arakanese, there were men from diverse cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds: Muslims of Bengali origin, descendants of deported Mons, and survivors of Shah Shuja's bodyguard who had been recruited as royal archers. The chronicles refer to Mon and “Indian” leaders of the royal guards who led revolts in various parts of Arakan's heartland and set up king at will. The sudden implosion of the political order that resulted from the infighting among these elite troops between

1685 and 1710 illustrates how much the stability of the monarchy had depended on their loyalty.

The political order was restored in the first half of the eighteenth century and Arakan's fame lingered on for some years, but the kingdom never fully recovered from the loss of its connections to the trading network of the Bay of Bengal. The prestige of the kings faded away in a tepid eighteenth century when the kingdom became a Southeast Asian backwater.

Arakan Library was founded by a group of Arakan Action Association (AAA) in exile in Thailand from Burma in 2007 doing to voice for the knowledge, the people democratic and human rights.

Arakan Action Association (AAA)

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