Arakan Library - SOURCES OF “FOLK TALES OF ARAKAN”

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

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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.

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research papers on OLD ARBY - U SAN SHWE BU

SOURCES OF “FOLK TALES OF ARAKAN”

J.B.R.S. Vol.XIII, Part 2. 1923

Dear Sir,

Mr. Grant Brown is quite justified in making the remarks he did especially in regard to the “Story of the Turtle” (J.B.R.S vol. part). But if ever he brought in a suggestion that I manufactured the story for Arakan, the people here would only laugh at him because it is known to every individual Arakanese. I am not sure if it is known in Burma as well; but the last story I sent you, that of the Hamadryad, is quite familiar to the Burmese also.

When I was a little boy I used to be sent to bed early, and my aunt used to tell me these stories which were then familiarly known to every house-hold and employed with the sole object of inducing children to fall off to sleep. A few years back the late U Htoon Chan once causally remarked to me that these stories gradually forgotten by the people owing to their increasing struggle for existence. It was then that I convinced for the first time the idea of writing up these stories in English and thereby preserving them for posterity. My subsequent investigations have proved the truth of what U Htoon Chan then said. In the town of Akyab there is at present not a single person, man or woman, who remembers more than three or four of such stories. Whenever I make enquiries I am always told, “Oh I used to know a lot when I was young; but those who really knew them are now dead. If you want to listen to these stories you should go to some secluded village in the district where there are still preserved and handed down from generation to generation.”

So far as I remember, these stories form a very large collection. Some are short and some long; and like the Fables of Aseop a few of them contain some useful moral lesson. The majority of these stories are orally handed down; there are also others, lengthy ones, which have been preserved in the form of E-gyin, Linga, Tha-gyin (omjcif;) and Phwe (zJG@). Some of these latter are That-ta-hta-nu, Kaw-Kaw-nu, Wun-thu-daw, Ranaung, Hta-ma-ra, U-ga, Gro-gra, Shwe-ma-la and Mra-ke-tha phwe and so on.

It is my intention to write up these oral stories first as they are more easily forgotten and lost. When the series is complete, or rather when I have recorded as many as possible, I shall next take up the written ones in which are some of the best in the whole collection.

Folk tales are common to every country. Sometimes some of them travel great distances either in the wake of trade and commerce or due to the impact of civilizations. Thus we observe that some of the stories in the Jatakas are reproduced, with certain modifications, in the fables of Aesop. But even if this is not conceded it has been ascertained that in the first century A.D. a collection of about a hundred of Indian fables came to Alexandria. According to Mr.Jacobs the so-called “Fables of Kasyapa” were taken to Ceylon, and that it was by means of an embassy from that Island that they reached the Egyptain centre of learning, where they were translated and were subsequently known as the “Libyan Fables”. Then again there are certain scholars who favour the belief that the Jakatas inspired the “box arrangement” of the Arabian Nights, which in turn produced in the West the well known works called the Decameron and the Heptameron. My task does not lie in finding out the origin of our stories but simply in recording all those that are found to be in common use by the political relations between Arakan and Burma in the past, and there is hardly any necessity for us to be surprised when we find some of these stories to be common to both countries.

Yours faithfully,

San Shwe Bu