Arakan Library - Arakan's Ascent During The Mrauk-U Period

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

ARAKAN'S PAST IN HISTORICAL WRITING

The state of historical research on Arakan is best illustrated by the fact that there is neither a printed collection of epigraphic sources of the Mrauk-U period nor any catalogue or detailed description of religious monuments, temples, pagodas, or mosques. The most readily available sources for the study of Arakan's history are Arakanese historiographical compilations which contain texts belonging to different literary genres (poetry, annals, narratives, eulogies). Some of these texts were printed, but most cannot be found in Western libraries. The only chronicle that presents a coherent narratives of Arakanese history is the Na Mi rajawan, of which only a few manuscript copies exist. Burmese, Persian, and Tripura chronicles as well as Bengali literary sources also contribute to our knowledge on Arakan. The travel accounts of the Austrian diplomat Georg Christoph Fernberger (1999), the Augustinian monk Sebastialo Manrique (1927), and the Dutch physician Wouter Schouten (1727) provide invaluable information on Arakan between the late sixteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth. Ongoing research in Portuguese and Dutch archives is now considerably enlarging our perception of the Arakanese monarchy as seen through the eyes of outsiders and the integration of the trade network of the Bay of Bengal (Guedes 1994; Subrahmanyam 1997). The growing interest in Arakan during the last ten years has resulted in a number of conference, articles, and even doctoral dissertations. Researchers on this hitherto little explored area have faced two major problems. One has been the painstaking task of collecting source materials in a country where, for a long time, a scholar could not freely travel. Even searching for references on Arakan in Western archives can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, as a Portuguese colleague observed. The second problem arises from the history books and research articles that date mostly from the British colonial period. The following paragraphs provide a critical review of some of these older texts.

There is a strong contrast between the general perception of Arakan's history by English, Burmese, and Arakanese authors on the one hand, and the interpretation of Arakan's rise on the fringes of Eastern Bengal by Indian and especially Bengali authors on the other. The reason for this lies both in the particular coverage of events by different indigenous sources.

English or Burmese/Arakanese authors based their accounts on Arakanese and Burmese palm leaf manuscripts and the few available Western references. They showed little interest in Arakan was seen as a minor, not particularly interesting kingdom on the periphery of the greater and more impressive Burmese empire. Besides a limited survey done in the 1880s (Forchhammer 1891), the ruins of its major sixteenth and seventeenth-century temples remained hidden under a dense jungle vegetation and were never systematically explored. Bengali historians have paid little attention to Arakan's particular place in the Burmese context. They explored Bengali and Persian language sources and used textbook histories of Burma only to keep track of the chronology of kings and political events. They emphasized the magnificence of those Arakanese kings who patronized Bengali literature at the court of Mrauk-U, but their portrait of the Arakanese, scornfully called Maghs, was generally negative. Focusing on the devastating raids against southeastern Bengal, they concluded that piracy and slave-raiding were the major occupations carried out by the Arakanese to enrich their king. As a result, the picture of Arakan's history available to a modern reader appears either biased or incomplete.

A readable through outdated account of Arakan's history is found in Arthur P.Phayre's History of Burma (1883).Phayre was one of the first British governors of Arakan and developed a special interest in the country. His narrative summarizes the above mentioned chronicle written in the early 1840s at the express demand of phayre himself by a local scholar called Na Mi G.E. Harvey's well-known History of Burma dealt with Arakan in the context of Burma's general history. As a consequence, Harvey disregarded Arakan's own political development, focusing on a few episodes relating to Arakan's expansion into Lower Burma and Bengal. D.G.E Hall (1936) explored the printed sources (notably the Dagregister ) of the Dutch VOC and made an interesting study of Arakan's exports of rice and slaves to Batavia. In his History of Burma (1967), Maung Htin Aung strongly claimed the Burmese identity of the sixteenth-century Arakanese (“the Arakanese remained nationalistic and proud of their Burmese origin”). Arakan gets recognition as one among other Burmese kingdoms competing for the control of power in Lower Burma, but the author pays virtually no attention to historical developments in Arakan itself. The histories by Harvey and Maung Htin Aung focus above all on Burma's major political centres, such as Pagan, Ava, or Pegu. Though his chapter on Arakan is less detailed than Phayre's , we should mention that Harvey consulted Arakanese manuscript sources (and seemingly had a broader access to then Phayre). Maung Htin Aung does not refer to any Arakanese sources at all.

Readers of the Journal of the Burma Research Society may be familiar with more than a dozen articles that Maurice Collis and two Arakanese authors, San Baw U and San Shwe Bu, published on diverse topics of Arakanese history between 1913 and 1933 (e.g. San Shwe Bu 1918, 1919, 1921; San Baw U 1921; Collis 1923a, 1923b, 1923c, 1925). They contain valuable contributions to what the authors called “legendary history” and the oral traditions that complement the historiographical tradition. Though Maurice Collis was not a historian, he had a tremendous influence inside and outside of Burma on what people came to think about Arakan and its kings. His popular romance about Friar Sebastiao Manrique's stay in Mrauk-U during Sirisudhammaraja's reign (The Land of the Great Image) was first published in 1943 and reprinted in Thailand just a few years ago. In his article “Arakan's Place in the Civilisation of the Bay,” Collis (1925, 39-40) asserted without any scientific rationale that Mrauk-U's civilization in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was the result of turning away from a backward East and exposing itself to a civilizing Muslim world. Not much more convincingly, Maung Htin Aung explained that Arakan became a “worthy rival of Pegu” because it had copied “Bayinnaung's enlightened policies with regard to commerce, religion and culture.” Interestingly, Harvey is much less condescending about the “real aptitudes” of the Arakanese who, he says, “were usually quite able to look after themselves” and “in several respects less backward than the Burmese.” Beside the cultural influences and complex relationships that Arakan entertained with neighbouring counties, Harvey (1967, 138, 140, 146) notes their competence on the sea, their use of coins, and the business-like attitude of their seventeenth-century kings. This is a rare positive appreciation of Arakanese kingship.

In the writings of Bengali historians (Bhattachaya 1927; Siddiq Khan 1936; Habibullah 1945; abdul 1952; Ghosh 1960; Askari 1960), three major themes are prominent: the attacks of Arakanese fleets and the slave raids against south and southeast Bengal Muslim influence on the court of Arakan; and finally, Arakan's control over the port of Chittagone. Most articles fail to provide any socio-cultural, economic, or political background to get a balanced view of Arakan's expansion, the economic importance of the slave trade, and the complex relations of Arakan with the Muslim world. Mauvli Hamidullah Khan (1873) analyzed Arakanese policy as an “aggressive move for territorial acquisition of the kings” who “took advantage of the internal troubles and political complications following Akbar's nominal conquest of Bengal to extend their authority over a large portion of southeastern Bengal” (quoted by Ghosh 1960, 58). But most Bengali historians do not make a clear difference between the wars that the Arakanese kings fought in southeast Bengal to enlarge their territories to the north, on the one hand, and the slave raids masterminded and organized by the Luso-Asian communities in the Chittagong area with the help of Arakanese manpower, on the other . Atul Chandra Roy (1972, 72-3) writes that “at the beginning of Jahangir's reign, most of the strategic naval forts in Bengal were in the possession of the Bhuiyas [bharab bhuyan, independent landlords] and the Magh-Feringhi pirates.” These naval forts were described as “depredations of the pirates,” and Mughal expeditions are called “conquests.” The construction of naval forts is hardly consistent with piracy. In Mirza Nathan's Baharistan i-Ghaybi , a Mughal general's account of events in Bengal between 1608 and 1624, the Maghs are referred to as “rebellious” and “accursed,” but never as pirates. Nathan notes the numerical strength of the Arakanese (though his numbers seem much inflated ) and explains that “the Raja of the Mags” who, in 1617, after “repeatedly raiding Bhalwa” and suffering “defeat after defeat,” “busied himself in repairing his fleet and in organizing his army” (Nathan 1936, 1:404). Another seventeenth-century Muslim source is Shiab-ud-Din Talish's Fathya i-Ibriyya which describes the Mughal conquest of Chittagong in 1666. In Talish's opening paragraph (“The Rajah appointed the Feringhi pirates to plunder Bengal and hence he did not send the Arracan fleet for this purpose”), he refers to the change in Arakanese policy toward Bengal when , approximately in the 1630s, the Arakanese kings gave up their attempts at conquering more land. But in Jamini M.Ghosh's Magh Raiders in Bengal , a curious patchwork of quotations from primary and secondary sources, the reader gets only a vague sense of the difference between piracy and conquest. A feeling of Muslim superiority, seemingly shared by the historians themselves , is perceptible in the characterization of the Arakanese. In the authoritative History of Bengal (Dacca University), S.N. Bhattacharya thus speaks of the “quaint features, manners and customs of these half civilized Mongoloid hordes,” while Alamgir Serrajuddin thinks that the “superior culture” of Bengal was a cultural challenge for the “primitive society” of the “turbulent,” “tribal and backward” Arakanese people. The Bangladeshi scholar even rejects the common argument that the adoption of Muslim titles betrayed a manifestation of Muslim influence on the Arakanese court (Ghosh 1960, 58; Serrajuddin 1986, 17-8).

B. Bhattachrya further emphasized Collis' argument of the civilizing influence of Muslim India on Arakan and concluded that the tolerant Buddhist dynasty ” (Bhattachaya 1927, 144). Phayre had stated, on his own interpretation of the Na Mi rajawan , that the founder of the Mrauk-U dynasty, King Man Co Mwan, “agreed to be tributary to the king of Bengal” after the sultan of Bengal's presumed military support around 1426-28. This is a very debatable clain.” Not a single Bengal source claims that a sultan of Bengal became the overlord of Arakan and A.B.M. Habibullah could not find any “proofs of Arakan's continued vassalage,” noting that Bengal after 1433 was not “in a position to demand its fulfillment ” (Phayre 1883, 78; Habibullah 1945, 35). Bengali historians praised the reigns of Sirisudhammaraja (1622-1638) and Satuidhammaraja (1645-1638) when two famous Bengali poets, Dawlat Qazi and Al Awwal , were patronized at the Arakanese court, but this fact went unnoticed by other authors.

After Burma's independence (1948), the political situation made Arakan an isolated area and interest in the country was frustrated by severe restrictions on travel. In the 1950s, Denise and Lucien Bernot did research in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of former East Pakistan on the language and civilization of the Marma (Arakanese migrated to southeast Bengal). Some twenty years later, Pamela Gutman (1976) started her work on Arakan's Vesali art and history. Over the last forty years, a small number of Arakanese writers, like the monk Ashin Sakkinda, have published popular articles on Arakan's culture in local magazines that have a very limited circulation and are practically unknown abroad. U San Tha Aung, a dedicated amateur historian, had some of his books on old Arakan, coins, and iconography translated into English (e.g. San Tha Aung 1979). They became a reference for people looking for information on Arakan beside the odd textbook history.

It was only in the 1990s that Arakan started to attract a winder interest from scholars originally doing research on the Portuguese presence in the Bay of Bengal or on the early Konbaung period. Indian historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1990, 1993), in his remarkable work on the Portuguese communities on the Coromandel coast and his overlapping interest in the eastern coast of the Bay, followed G.Winius (1983) and vastly contributed to our understanding of the Luso-Asia communities in southeast Bengal. Ana Marques Guedes (1994) dug out new material in the Portuguese archives that throws further light on Portuguese activities, and also enriches our perception of power structures in the area. For the eventful period between 1580 and 1630, she interpreted the Portuguese presence in the eastern Bay of Bengal as a link between two rival polities, Arakan and Lower Burma, but underestimated the divisiveness of Luso-Asian society. At the University of Michigan, Michael Charney (1993, 1994, 1997) shifted his perspective from the Portuguese mercenaries to the Arakanese kings. Catherine Raymond (1995), a French art historian, followed in the footsteps of the earth goddess Vesantara and Arakan's relations with Sri Lanka. French anthropologist A. de Mersan is currently doing extensive field research on Arakanese religious practices. In the Dutch VOC archives in The Hague, Stephan van Galen (1998) found first-hand accounts from VOC traders based in Mrauk-U which contribute to our understanding of the slave trade and the importance of the port of Chittagong. My own interest in Arakan began in 1984 while I was working on the Burmese manuscript collection at the Biblotheque national in Paris and has since focused on the history of the Mrauk-U period (Leider 1998c). Research on Arakan is still in its infancy, but it on longer evolves in isolation. Arakanese students of history at the University of Yangon have also contributed a small number of academic papers. Their research on indigenous sources is likely to bear fruit once a greater flow of academic exchange takes place. Hopefully the emergence of Arakanese studies in Myanmar will generate a greater awareness of Arakan's autonomous existence as a former Buddhist kingdom on the fringes of both South and Southeast Asia.

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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Email : arakanactionassociation@walla.com , +66—089-637-4383, +66—053-409-577