Who are the Rohingyas? Burma gained independence from Great Britain in 1948 and this issue is a problem that Burma has had to grapple with since that time. The people who call themselves Rohingyas are the Muslims of Mayu Frontier area, present-day Buthidaung and Maungdaw Townships of Arakan (Rakhine) State, an isolated province in the western part of the country across Naaf River as boundary from Bangladesh. Arakan had been an independent kingdom before it was conquered by the Burmese in 1784.
Maungdaw-Butheetaung region of Arrakan.
Rohingya historians have written many treatises in which they claim for themselves an indigenous status that is traceable within Arakan State for more than a thousand years. Although it is not accepted as a fact in academia, a few volumes purporting to be history but mainly composed of fictitious stories, myths and legends have been published formerly in Burma and later in the United States, Japan and Bangladesh. These, in turn, have filtered into the international media through international organizations, including reports to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
In light of this, it is important to reexamine the ethnicity of the ‘Rohingyas’ and to trace their history back to the earliest presence of their ancestors in Arakan. And history tells us that we do not have to go back very far. In the early 1950s that a few Bengali Muslim intellectuals of the northwestern part of Arakan began to use the term “Rohingya” to call themselves. They were indeed the direct descendants of immigrants from the Chittagong District of East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh), who had migrated into Arakan after the province was ceded to British India under the terms of the Treaty of Yandabo, an event that concluded the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-1826). Most of these migrants settled down in the Mayu Frontier Area, near what is now Burma’s border with modern Bangladesh. Actually, they were called “Chittagonians” in the British colonial records.
In light of this, it is important to reexamine the ethnicity of the ‘Rohingyas’ and to trace their history back to the earliest presence of their ancestors in Arakan. And history tells us that we do not have to go back very far. In the early 1950s that a few Bengali Muslim intellectuals of the northwestern part of Arakan began to use the term “Rohingya” to call themselves. They were indeed the direct descendants of immigrants from the Chittagong District of East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh), who had migrated into Arakan after the province was ceded to British India under the terms of the Treaty of Yandabo, an event that concluded the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-1826). Most of these migrants settled down in the Mayu Frontier Area, near what is now Burma’s border with modern Bangladesh. Actually, they were called “Chittagonians” in the British colonial records.
The Muslims in the Arakan State can be divided into four different groups, namely the Chittagonian Bengalis in the Mayu Frontier; the descendents of the Muslim Community of Arakan in the Mrauk-U period (1430-1784), presently living in the Mrauk-U and Kyauktaw townships; the decendents of Muslim mercenaries in Ramree Island known to the Arakanese as Kaman; and the Muslims from the Myedu area of Central Burma, left behind by the Burmese invaders in Sandoway District after the conquest of Arakan in 1784.
Mass Migration in the Colonial Period (1826-1948)
As stated above, the term “Rohingya” came into use in the 1950s by the educated Bengali residents from the Mayu Frontier Area and cannot be found in any historical source in any language before then. The creators of that term might have been from the second or third generations of the Bengali immigrants from the Chittagong District in modern Bangladesh; however, this does not mean that there was no Muslim community in Arakan before the state was absorbed into British India.
When King Min Saw Mon, the founder of Mrauk-U Dynasty (1430-1784) regained the throne with the military assistance of the Sultan of Bengal, after twenty-four years of exile in Bengal, his Bengali retinues were allowed to settle down in the outskirts of Mrauk-U, where they built the well-known Santikan mosque.
These were the earliest Muslim settlers and their community in Arakan did not seem to be large in number. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Muslim community grew because of the assignment of Bengali slaves in variety of the workforces in the country. The Portuguese and Arakanese raids of Benga (Bengal) for captives and loot became a conventional practice of the kingdom since the early sixteenth century. The Moghal historian Shiahabuddin Talish noted that only the Portuguese pirates sold their captives and that the Arakanese employed all of their prisoners in agriculture and other kinds of services.
Furthermore there seem to have been a small group of Muslim gentry at the court. Some of them might have served the king as Bengali, Persian and Arabic scribes. Because the Mrauk-U kings, though of being Buddhist, adopted some Islamic fashions such as the maintaing of silver coins that bore their Muslim titles in Persian and occasionally appearing in Muslim costumes in the style of the Sultan of Bengal. Accordingly there were Muslim servants at the court helping the king perform these Islamic conventions.
Arthur Phayre, the first deputy commissioner of Arakan, after the British annexation, reported about the indigenous races of Akyab District and the Muslim descendents from the Arakanese days as:
The inhabitants are, In the Plains – 1. Ro-khoing-tha (Arakanese)-2. Ko-la (Indian) – 3. Dôm(Low Caste Hindu). In theHills – 1. Khyoung-tha – 2.Kumé or Kwémwé – 3. Khyang – 4. Doing–nuk, Mroong, and other tribes… While the Arakanese held these possessions in Bengal, they appear to have sent numbers of the inhabitants into Arakan as slaves, whence arose the present Ko-la population of the country.
During the four decades of Burmese rule (1784-1824), because of ruthless oppression, many Arakanese fled to British Bengal. According to a record of British East India Company, there were about thirty-five thousand Arakanese who had fled to Chittagong District in British India to seek protection in 1799.
The following report by Francis Buchanan provides a vivid picture of the atrocities committed by the Burmese invaders in Arakan:
In one day soon after the conquest of Arakan the Burmans put 40,000 men to Death: that wherever they found a pretty Woman, they took her after killing the husband; and the young Girls they took without any consideration of their parents, and thus deprived these poor people of the property, by which in Eastern India the aged most commonly support their infirmities. Puran seems to be terribly afraid, that the Government of Bengal will be forced to give up to the Burmans all the refugees from Arakan.
A considerable portion of Arakanese population was deported by Burmese conquerors to Central Burma. When the British occupied Arakan, the country was a scarcely populated area. Formerly high-yield paddy fields of the fertile Kaladan and Lemro River Valleys germinated nothing but wild plants for many years.
Thus, the British policy was to encourage the Bengali inhabitants from the adjacent areas to migrate into fertile valleys in Arakan as agriculturalists. As the British East India Company extended the administration of Bengal to Arakan, there was no international boundary between the two countries and no restriction was imposed on the emigration. A superintendent, later an assistant commissioner, directly responsible to the Commissioner of Bengal, was sent in 1828 for the administration of Arakan Division, which was divided into three districts respectively: Akyab, Kyaukpyu, and Sandoway with an assistant commissioner in each district.
Dead on the streets in 1943 Bengal Famine.
The migrations were mostly motivated by the search of professional opportunity. During the Burmese occupation there was a breakdown of the indigenous labor force both in size and structure. Arthur Phayre reported that in the 1830s the wages in Arakan compared with those of Bengal were very high. Therefore many hundreds, indeed thousands of coolies came from the Chittagong District by land and by sea, to seek labor and high wages.
R.B. Smart, the deputy assistant commissioner of Akyab, wrote about the ‘flood’ of immigrants from Chittagong District as follows: Since 1879, immigration has taken place on a much larger scale, and the descendants of the slaves are resident for the most part in the Kyauktaw and Myohaung (Mrauk-U) townships. Maungdaw Township has been overrun by Chittagonian immigrants. Buthidaung is not far behind and new arrivals will be found in almost every part of the district.
At first most of them came to Arakan as seasonal agricultural laborers and went home after the harvest was done. R. B. Smart estimated the number at about twenty-five thousand during the crop-reaping season alone. He added that about the same number came to assist in plowing operations, to work at the mills and in the carrying trades. A total of fifty thousand immigrants coming annually were probably not far from the mark.
Moreover, hunger for land was the prime motive for the migration of most of the Chittagonians. The British judicial records tell us of an increase in the first decade of the twentieth century in lawsuits of litigation for the possession of land. The Akyab District Magistrate reported in 1913 that in Buthidaung Subdivision, the Chittagonian immigrants stand to native Arakanese in the proportion of two to one, but six sevenths of the litigation for land in the court was initiated by the Chittagonians.
A starving man in 1943 Bengal Famine.
Another colonial record delivers about a striking account of the settlements of the Bengali immigrants from Chittagong District as: “Though we are in Arakan, we passed many villages occupied by Muslim settlers or descendents of the settlers, and many of them Chittagonians”.
The colonial administration of India regarded the Bengalis as amenable subjects while finding the indigenous Arakanese too defiant, rising in rebellion twice in 1830s. The British policy was also favorable for the settlement of Bengali agricultural communities in Arakan. A colonial record says:
Bengalis are a frugal race, who can pay without difficulty a tax that would press very heavily on the Arakanese….(They are) not addicted like the Arakanese to gambling, and opium smoking, and their competition is gradually ousting the Arakanese.
The flow of Chittagonian labor provided the main impetus to the economic development in Arakan within a few decades along with the opening of regular commercial shipping lines between Chittagong and Akyab. The arable land expanded to four and a half times between 1830 and 1852 and Akyab became one of the major rice exporting cities in the world.
Indeed, during a century of colonial rule, the Chittagonian immigrants became the numerically dominant ethnic group in the Mayu Frontier. The following census assessment shows the increase of population of the various ethnic/religious groups inhabiting Akyab District according to the census reports of 1871, 1901 and 1911. There was an increase of 155 percent in the population in the district. According to the reports, even in an interior township Kyauktaw, the Chittagonian population increased from 13,987 in 1891 to 19, 360 in 1911, or about seventy-seven percent in twenty years. At the same time the increase of the Arakanese population including the absorption of the hill tribes and the returning refugees from Bengal was only 22.03 percent.
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British Burma Census of 1872 (Akyab Town)
Group Male Female Total
Hindu 1,884 28 1,911
Mohomendan 3,516 1,502 5,018
Buddhist 5,892 5,627 11,519
Christian 216 109 325
Others 387 70 457
Grand Total 11,895 7,335 19,230
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The Assessment of the Census Reports for 1871, 1901, and 1911
Races 1871 1901 1911
Mahomedan 58,255 154,887 178,647
Burmese 4,632 35,751 92,185
Arakanese 171,612 230,649 209,432
Shan 334 80 59
Hill Tribes 38,577 35,489 34,020
Others 606 1,355 1,146
Total 276,671 481,666 529,943
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It should be noted that all the Chittagonians and all the Muslims are categorized as Mohamedan in the census reports. There was an increase of 206.67 percent in Mahomedan population in the Akyab District and it was clear that only a few numbers of the transient agricultural laborers went home after the plowing and harvesting seasons and most of them remained in Arakan, making their homes.
The heyday of the migration was in the second half of the nineteenth century after opening of the Suez Canal, for the British colonialists needed more labor to produce rice which was in growing demand in the international market. In the 1921 Census, many Muslims in Arakan were listed as Indians.
Communal Violence
During the colonial period the anti- Indian riots broke out in Burma because of the resentment against unhindered Indian settlements particularly in Arakan, Tenasserim and Lower Burma. But those riots that took place in Rangoon and other major cities in 1926 and 1938 never had had any effects on the peoples of Arakan. A peaceful coexistence was possible for the two different religious/ethnic groups in the Mayu Frontier till the beginning of the World War II.
At the beginning of colonial era the establishment of bureaucratic administration by the British repealed the traditional patron-client relationship in the Arakanese villages. The elected village headman had little influence on the elected village council. As John F. Cady wrote, the government policy of forbidding the village headman to take part in the activities related to the nationalist movements weakened the position of the headman as the leader of village community, and as well as his connection with the Buddhist monastery because most of the Buddhist monks were vigorously active in the movements.
On the other hand British administration to a certain extent gave the Muslim village communities religious and cultural autonomy. Maung Nyo, a kyunok (headman of the village tract) of Maungdaw Township recorded how the new comers from the Chittagong District set up their village communities in the frontier area. They occupied the villages deserted by the Arakanese during the Burmese rule and established purely Muslim village communities.
The village committee authorized by the Village Amendment Act of 1924 paved the way for the Imam (moulovi) and the trusteeship committee members of the village mosque to be elected to the village council. They were also allowed to act as the village magistrates and shariah was somewhat in effect in the Muslim villages.
At least the Islamic court of village had the jurisdiction over familial problems such as marriage, inheritance and divorce. There was no internal sense of unrighteousness and presence of nonbelievers in their community, and accordingly they believe no internecine struggle was for the time being necessary.
However, the ethnic violence between Arakanese Buddhists and those Muslim Chittagonians brought a great deal of bloodshed to Arakan during the World War II and after 1948, in the opening decade of independent Burma. Some people of the Mayu Frontier in their early seventies and eighties have still not forgotten the atrocities they suffered in 1942 and 1943 during the short period of anarchy between the British evacuation and the Japanese occupation of the area.
In this vacuum there was an outburst of the tension of ethnic and religious cleavage that had been simmering for a century. One of the underlying causes of the communal violence was the Zamindary System brought by the British from Bengal.
By this system the British administrators granted the Bengali landowners thousands of acres of arable land on ninety-year-leases. The Arakanese peasants who fled the Burmese rule and came home after British annexation were deprived of the land that they formerly owned through inheritance. Nor did the Bengali zamindars (landowners) want the Arakanese as tenants on their land. Thousands of Bengali peasants from Chittagong District were brought to cultivate the soil.
Most of the Bengali immigrants were influenced by the Farai- di movement in Bengal that propagated the ideology of the Wahhabis of Arabia, which advocated settling ikhwan or brethren in agricultural communities near to the places of water resources.
The peasants, according to the teaching, besides cultivating the land should be ready for waging a holy war upon the call by their lords. In the Maungdaw Township alone, there were, in the 1910s, fifteen Bengali Zamindars who brought thousands of Chittagonian tenants and established Agricultural Muslim communities, building mosques with Islamic schools affiliated to them.
However, all these villages occupied by the Bengalis continued to be called by Arakanese names in the British records.
For the convenience of Chittagonians seasonal laborers the Arakan Flotilla Company constructed a railway between Buthidaung and Maungdaw in 1914. Their plan was to connect Chittagong by railway with Buthidaung, from where the Arakan Flotilla steamers were ferrying to Akyab and other towns in central and southern Arakan.
In the period of the independence movement in Burma in 1920s and 1930s the Muslims from the Mayu Frontier were more concerned with the progress of Muslim League in India, although some prominent Burmese Muslims such as M.A. Rashid and U Razak played an important role in the leadership of the Burmese nationalist movement.
In 1931, the Simon Commission was appointed by the British Parliament to enquire the opinion of Burmese people for the constitutional reforms and on the matter of whether Burma should be separated from Indian Empire. The spokeman of the Muslim League advocated for fair share of government jobs, ten percent representation in all public bodies, and especially in Arakan the equal treatment for Muslims seeking agricultural and business loans.
In education, the Chittagonians were left behind the Arakanese throughout the colonial period. According to the census of 1901 only 4.5 percent of the Bengali Muslims were found to be literate while the percentage for the Arakanese was 25.5. Smart reported that it was due to the ignorance of the advantages of the education among the Chittagonian agriculturists. Especially Buthidaung and Maungdaw were reported to be most backward townships because the large Muslim population in that area mostly agriculturalists showed little interest in education.
In 1894 there were nine Urdur schools with 375 students in the whole district. The British provincial administration appointed a deputy inspector for Muslim schools and in 1902 the number of schools rose to seventy-two and the students increased to 1,474. Consequently, more Arakanese and Hindu Indians were involved in the ancillary services of the colonial administration.
Towards the middle of twentieth century a new educated and politically conscious younger generation had superseded the older, inactive ones. Before the beginning of the Second World War a political party, Jami-a-tul Ulema-e Islam was founded under the guidance of the Islamic scholars. Islam became the ideological basis of the party.
Regarding the beginning of the ethnic violence in Arakan, Moshe Yegar wrote that when the British administration was withdrawn to India in 1942 the Arakanese hoodlums began to attack the Muslim villages in southern Arakan and the Muslims fled to the north where they took vengeance on the Arakanese in Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships.
Old Buddhist man with throat cut-off by Muslims (2012).
However, an Arakanese record says: When the British administration collapsed by the Japanese occupation, the village headman of Rak-chaung village in Myebon Township and his two younger brothers were killed by the kula (Muslim) villagers. Although the headman was an Arakanese, some of the villagers were kulas. The two Arakanese young men, Thein Gyaw Aung and Kyaw Ya, organized a group and attacked the kula villages and some inhabitants were killed.
It is certain that hundreds of Muslim inhabitants of Southern Arakan fled northward, and that there were some cases of robbing the Indian refugees on the Padaung-Taungup pass over the Arakan Yoma mountain ranges after the retreat of the British from the Pegu Division and southern Arakan.
But the news of killing, robbery and rape was exaggerated when it reached Burma India border. The British left all these areas to the mercy of both Burmese and Arakanese dacoits. However, N.R. Chakravati, an Indian scholar, gives a brief account of the flights of Indian refugees from the war zone in the Irrawady valley across the Arakan Yoma.
Most of the estimated 900,000 Indians living in Burma attempted to walk over to India…100,000 died at the time… or were utterly helpless, began to move from place to place in search of safety and protection until they could reach India.
The estimated number of Chakravarti includes all the Indian refugees from the whole Burma proper excluding Arakan. The number of Chittagonian refugees put by Yegar was close to twentytwo thousand. However, the leaders of ANC (Arakan National Congress), formed in 1939 and that later becoming the Arakan branch of Anti-Fascist Organization (AFO) formed a de-facto government, before the Japanese troops and Burma Independence Army (BIA) reached there.
The ANC announced that anybody or any organization looting or killing the refugees would be brought before the justice and would be severely punished. Japanese air force attacked Akyab on 23 March 1942 and the British moved their administrative headquarter to India on March 30. The administration by martial law began in Akyab District on 13 April 1942 and with this racial tension burst to the surface, giving way to the public disorder.
British officers of Bengali V Force in Arrakan (1942).
For all the bloody communal violence experienced by the Arakanese Buddhists in the Western frontier, I feel strongly that it is reasonable to blame the British colonial administration for arming the Chittagonians in the Mayu Frontier as the Volunteer Force.
The V Force, as it is called by the British Army, was formed in 1942 soon after the Japanese operations threatened the British position in India. Its principal role was to undertake guerrilla
operations against Japanese, to collect information of the enemy’s movements and to act as interpreters. But the British Army Liaison Officer, Anthony Irwin wrote that the participation of the local V Forces in the skirmishes with the Japanese in Arakan was discredited by the British commanders.
The V Forces’ Bengali-Muslim volunteers, instead of fighting the Japanese, destroyed Buddhist monasteries and Pagodas and burnt down the houses in the Arakanese villages. They first killed U Kyaw Khine, the deputy commissioner of Akyab District, left behind by the British government to maintain law and order in the frontier area; they then massacred thousands of Arakanese civilians in the towns and villages.
V Force in the Arrakan jungle (1942).
A record of the Secretary of British governor of Burma in exile dated 4 February 1943 reads: I have been told harrowing tales of cruelty and suffering inflicted on the Arakanese villages in the Ratheedaung area. Most of the villages on the West bank of the Mayu River have been burnt and destroyed by the Chittagonian V forces…. The enemy never came to these villages. They had the misfortune of being in the way of our advancing patrols. Hundreds of villagers are said to be hiding in the hills… It will be the Arakanese who will be ousted from their ancestral land and if they cannot be won over in time, then there can be no hope of their salvation.
After the Japanese occupation of Akyab (Sittwe), Bo Yan Aung, the member of the Thirty Comrades and commander of a BIA column, set up the administrative body in Akyab District and attempted to cease the violence in the frontier area. Bo Yan Aung discussed the matter with both Arakanese and Muslim leaders. He sent his two lieutenants, Bo Yan Naung and Bo Myo Nyunt to Maungdaw to negotiate with the radical Muslim leaders. They tried to persuade the Muslims to join in anti-imperialist and nationalist movement. But both of them were killed in Maungdaw and Bo Yan Aung was called back to Rangoon by the BIA headquarters.
Bo Yan Aung (Front Left) and BIA officers (1942).
For most of the Chittagonians it was a religious issue that would necessarily lead to the creation of a Dah-rul-Islam, or at least to being united with their brethren in the west. It also aimed at the extirpation of the Arakanese or being forced them to migrate to the south where there were overwhelming majority of Arakanese Buddhists. The events during the war contributed the Chittagonians’ fervent sense of alienation from the heterogeneous community of the Arakan.
Anthony Irwin called the whole area a “No Man’s Land” during the three years of Japanese occupation. Irwin explained how the ethnic violence divided the Arakan State between Arakanese and Chittagonians: As the area then occupied by us was almost entirely Mussulman Country … (from) that we drew most of our “Scouts” and Agents. The Arakan before the war had been occupied over its entire lenghth by both Mussulman and Maugh (Arakanese). Then in 1941 the two sects set to and fought.
The result of this war was roughly that the Maugh took over the southern half of the country and the Mussulman the North. Whilst it lasted it was a pretty bloody affairs…My present gun boy a Mussulman who lived near to Buthidaung, claims to have killed two hundred Maughs (Arakanese).
In the words of the historian, Clive J. Christie, the “ethnic cleansing in British controlled areas, particularly around the town of Maungdaw,” was occurring till the arrival of Japanese troops to the eastern bank of Naaf River.
The British forces began to take offensive in the warfare against the Japanese in northern Arakan in December 1944. The Arakanese troops of AFO maintained law and order in the areas from which Japanese forces withdrew. Of course there were some prominent Arakanese guerrilla leaders who cooperated with the Japanese during the war.
British Battalion 65 occupied Akyab, the capital city of Arakan on 12 December 1944. As soon as Akyab was captured the British Army began arresting the Arakanese guerrilla leaders. U Ni, a leader of AFO in Akyab was accused of one hundred and fifty-two criminal offenses and sentenced to forty-two years in prison. Another leader, U Inga was condemned to death by hanging five times, as well as forty-two-year imprisonment. Consequently many guerrilla fighters escaped into hideouts in the forests.
On the contrary, Anthony Irwin praised the Chittagonian V Forces as follows: It is these minorities that have most helped us in throughout the three years of constant fighting and occupation and it is these minorities who are most likely to be forgotten in the rush of Government. They must not be. It is the duty of all of us, for whom they fought, to see this.
During the early post-war years both Arakanese and Bengali Muslims in the Mayu Frontier looked at each other with distrust. As the British Labor Government promised independence for Burma, some Muslims were haunted by the specter of their future living under the infidel rule in the place where the baneful Arakanese are also living.
In 1946 a delegation was sent by the Jami-atul Ulema-e Islam to Karachi to discuss with the leaders of the Muslim League the possibility of incorporation of Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Ratheedaung townships into Pakistan, but the British ignored their proposal to detach the frontier area to award it to Pakistan.
The failure of their attempts ended in an armed revolt, with some Muslims, declaring a holy war on the new republic. The rebels called themselves “Mujahid.” A guerrilla army of 2700 fighters was organized.
In fact the Arakanese were well on their way to rebellion. Under the leadership of two prominent and politically active Buddhist monks, U Pinnyathiha and U Seinda, a guerrilla force of four hundred to five hundred men was raised and assisted the Japanese in occupying the northern Arakan. U Pinnyathiha even announced that the Japanese government had agreed to his proposal for a separate Arakanese unit of Burma Independence Army.
Later his force was known as the Arakan Defense Force, under the command of Kra Hla Aung, the protégé of U Pinnyathiha. Later two monks became leaders of Arakan Branch of AFO (Anti-Fascist Organization), turning their guns on the Japanese. At the middle of 1944 they were supported by the British with certain amount of arms to fight the Japanese.
Brigadier Richard Gordon Prescott, Deputy Director of Civil Affairs reported to the governor: As result of arming certain members of AFO under the leadership of U Pinnyathiha and Kra Hla Aung, the AFO (in Arakan) are endeavoring to set up a parallel government to that of the British Administration and in fact repeating their modus operandi at the time of Japanese invasion of Arakan.
In the meantime the AFO changed its name to AFPFL (Anti-Fascist and People’s Freedom League) with U Aung San, the ultimate hero of the Burmese independence movement, as its leader. When the AFPFL accepted the proposal of the governor of Burma to join the Executive Council, U Pinnyathiha remained as the AFPFL leader in Arakan while U Seinda was actively preparing a revolt.
U Sein Da’s group was acting as a local government, controlling a number of villages in the Myebon township of Kyaukpyu District and Minbya township of Akyab District. The fact of the matter was that U Seinda was persuaded by the radical communists of Thakhin Soe’s faction of the Communist Party of Burma to choose the way to independence by violence.
When the Aung San-Attlee Agreement was signed, U Seinda denounced it publicly. An All Arakan Conference was held in Myebon on 1 April 1947 and about ten thousand people from all parties in Arakan attended. U Aung San was openly assailed to his face as an opportunist by some people attending the conference, using rebellious slogans.
U Seinda with the communists behind him moved forward to the rebellion. Actually, Thakhin Soe’s Red Flag Communists took advantage of the misunderstanding between U Seinda and AFPFL. It was in fact an ideological struggle in the AFPFL, the national united front of Burma that was under the leadership of the charismatic leader U Aung San.
On the other side some Arakanese intellectuals led by U Hla Tun Pru, a Barrister-at-Law, held a meeting in Rangoon and demanded the formation of “Arakanistan” for the Arakanese people.
All these movements of the Arakanese might have alarmed Muslims from the Mayu Frontier. In the wake of independence most of the educated Muslims felt an overwhelming sense of collective identity based on Islam as their religion and the cultural and ethnic difference of their community from the Burmese and Arakanese Buddhists.
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The ethnic conflict in the rural areas of the Mayu frontier revived soon after Burma celebrated independence on 4 January 1948. Rising in the guise of Jihad, many Muslim clerics (Moulovis) playing a leading role, in the countryside and remote areas gave way to banditary, arson and rapes.
Moshe Yeagar wrote that one of the major reasons of Mujahid rebellion was that the Muslims who fled Japanese occupation were not allowed to resettle in their villages. In fact, there were more than two hundred Arakanese villages in Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships before the war began. In the post-war years only sixty villages were favorable for the Arakanese resettlement. Out of these sixty, forty-four villages were raided by the Mujahids in the first couple of years of independence. Thousands of Arakanese villagers sought refuge in the towns and many of their villages were occupied by the Chittagonian Bengalis.
Armed Bengali Muslims training.
The Mujahid uprising began two years before the independence was declared. In March 1946 the Muslim Liberation Organization (MLO) was formed with Zaffar Kawal, a native of Chittagong District, as the leader. A conference was held in May 1948 in Garabyin Village north to Maungdaw and the name of the organization was changed to “Mujahid Party.”
Some Chittagonian Bengalis from nearby villages brought the weapons they had collected during the wartime to the mosques in Fakir Bazaar Village and Shahbi Bazaar Village. Jaffar Kawal became the commander in chief and his lieutenant was Abdul Husein, formerly a corporal from the Akyab District police force.
The Mujahid Party sent a letter written in Urdur and dated 9 June 1948 to the government of Union of Burma through the sub-divisional officer of Maungdaw Township. Their demands are as follows :
(1) The area between the west bank of Kaladan River and the east bank of Naaf River must be recognized as the National Home of the Muslims in Burma.
(2) The Muslims in Arakan must be accepted as the nationalities of Burma.
(3) The Mujahid Party must be granted a legal status as a political organization.
(4) The Urdur Language must be acknowledged as the national language of the Muslims in Arakan and be taught in the schools in the Muslim areas.
(5) The refugees from the Kyauktaw and Myohaung (Mrauk-U) Townships must be resettled in their villages at the expense of the state.
(6) The Muslims under detention by the Emergency Security Act must be unconditionally released.
(7) A general amnesty must be granted for the members of the Mujahid Party.
Muslim Enclave demanded by Mujahid.
Calling themselves “the Muslims of Arakan” and “the Urdur” as their national language indicated their inclination towards the sense of collective identity that the Muslims of Indian subcontinent showed before the partition of India into two independent states.
When the demands were ignored the Mujahids destroyed all the Arakanese villages in the northern part of Maungdaw Township. On 19 July 1948 they attacked Ngapruchaung and nearby Villages in Maungdaw Township and some villagers and Buddhist monks were kidnapped for ransoms.
On 15 and 16 June 1951 All Arakan Muslim Conference was held in Alethangyaw Village, and “The Charter of the Constitutional Demands of the Arakani Muslims” was published. It calls for “the balance of power between the Muslims and the Maghs (Arakanese), two major races of Arakan.”
The demand of the charter reads: North Arakan should be immediately formed a free Muslim State as equal constituent Member of the Union of Burma like the Shan State, the Karenni State, the Chin Hills, and the Kachin Zone with its own Militia, Police and Security Forces under the General Command of the Union.
Here it is again noticeable that in the charter these peoples are mentioned as the Muslims of Arakan. The word “Rohingya” was first pronounced by the Mr Abdul Gaffar, an MP from Buthidaung, in his article “The Sudeten Muslims,” published in the Guardian Daily on 20 August 1951.
However, the new democracy in the independent Burma induced some Muslim leaders to remain loyal to the state. The free and fair elections were held and four Muslims were elected to the legislature from Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships. Meanwhile the Mujahid insurgency threw the frontier area into turmoil for a decade.
During his campaign for the 1960 elections, Burmese Prime Minister U Nu who succeeded U Aung San after the independence hero was assassinated, promised the statehood for Arakanese and Mon peoples. When he came to the office after a landslide victory the plans for the formation of the Arakan and Mon states were affected. Naturally the Muslim members of parliament from Buthidaung and Maungdaw Townships denounced the plan and called for the establishment of a Rohingya State.
General Ne Win took power in a coup d’etat in 1962, and almost all the Rohingya movement went underground. The first step of Ne Win’s Burmese Way to Socialism was the nationalization of the private enterprises in 1964. The plan was clearly aimed at the transfer of private assets owned by the Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs into state ownership in the form of the public corporations.
Most of the Indian and Pakistani businesspeople, living in the major cities of Burma, left Burma. In the two years following the decision to nationalize the retail trade, some 100,000 Indians and some twelve thousand Pakistanis left Burma for their homeland. The flow of Indians returning to India as a result of these policies began in 1964.
But the Muslim agriculturists from Northern Arakan, most of them, holding the national registration cards issued by the Department of National Registration in the post-war decade, were not concerned with the event and remained in the frontier areas till the Citizenship Law of 1982 was enforced in 1987.
In 1973, Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council sought public opinion for drafting a new constitution. The Muslims from the Mayu Frontier submitted a proposal to the Constitution Commission for the creation of separate Muslim state or at least a division for them. Their proposal was again turned down. When elections were held under the 1974 Constitution the Bengali Muslims from the Mayu Frontier Area were denied the right to elect their representatives to the “Pyithu Hlut-taw” (People’s Congress).
After the end of the Independence War in Bangladesh some arms and ammunitions flowed into the hands of the young Muslim leaders from Mayu Frontier. On 15 July 1972 a congress of all Rohingya parties was held at the Bangladeshi border to call for the “Rohingya National Liberation”.
Burma’s successive military regimes persisted in the same policy of denying Burmese citizenship to most Bengalis, especially in the frontier area. They stubbornly grasped the 1982 Citizenship Law that allowed only the ethnic groups who had lived in Burma before the First Anglo-Burmese War began in 1824 as the citizens of the country. By this law those Muslims had been treated as aliens in the land they have inhabited for more than a century.
According to the 1983 census report all Muslims in Arakan constituted 24.3 percent and they all were categorized as Bangladeshi, while the Arakanese Buddhists formed 67.8 percent of the population of the Arakan (Rakhine) State.
In the abortive 1988 Democracy Uprising, those Muslims again became active, hoisting the Rohingya banner. Subsequently when the military junta allowed the registration of the political parties they asked for their parties to be recognized under the name “Rohingya.”
Taliban-trained Bengali-Muslim militants.
Their demand was turned down and some of them changed tactics and formed a party, the National Democratic Party for Human rights (NDPHR) that won in four constituencies in 1990 elections as eleven candidates of the Arakan League for Democracy (ALD) were elected to the legislature.
However, the Elections Commission abolished both the ALD and the NDPHR in 1991. Some of the party members went underground and into exile. Recently, the main objectives of the movement of some groups have been to gain the recognition of their ethnic entity in the Union of Burma and to obtain the equal status enjoyed by other ethnic groups. But some elements have adopted the radical idea of founding a separate Muslim state.
The following are the Rohingya organizations currently active on the Burma-Bangladesh border:
1. RSO (Rohingya Solidarity Organization)
2. ARIF (Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front)
3. RPF (Rohingya Patriotic Front)
4. RLO (Rohingya Liberation Organization)
5. IMA (Itihadul Mozahadin of Arakan)
Conclusion
After Burma gained independence, a concentration of nearly ninety percent of the area’s population, the distinguishing characteristics of their own culture and the Islamic faith formed an ethnic and religious minority group in the western fringe of the republic. For successive generations their ethnicity and Islam have been practically not distinguishable. At the beginning they adopted the policy of irredentism in favor of joining East Pakistan with the slogan, “Pakistan Jindabad,” (Victory to Pakistan).
This policy faded away when they could not gain support from the government of Pakistan. Later they began to call for the establishment of an autonomous region instead. Pakistan’s attitude toward the Muslims in Arakan was different from the Islamabad’s policy toward Kashmiris.
During the Independence War in Bangladesh most of the Muslims in Arakan supported West Pakistan. After Bangladesh gained independence Dhaka followed the policy of disowning those Chittagonians. Consequently they had to insist firmly on their identity as Rohingyas.
Their leaders began to complain that the term “Chittagonian Bengali” had arbitrarily been applied to them. But the majority of the ethnic group, being illiterate agriculturalists in the rural areas, still prefers their identity as Bengali Muslims.
Although they have showed the collective political interest for more than five decades since Burma gained independence, their political and cultural rights have not so far been recognized and guaranteed. On the contrary the demand for the recognition of their rights sounds a direct challenge to the right of autonomy and the myth of survival for the Arakanese majority in their homeland.
A symbiotic coexistence has so far been inconceivable because of the political climate of mistrust and fear between the two races and the policy of the military junta. The Muslims from the other parts of Arakan kept themselves aloof from the Rohingya cause as well. Thus the cause of Rohingyas finds a little support outside their own community, and their claims of an earlier historical tie to Burma are insupportable.
Burma Census of 1881 (Arakan Division)
Birth Place Male Female Total
Akyab Dist. 144,746 132,131 276,877
Bassein 721 518 1,239
Hanthawaddy 178 157 335
Henzada 230 232 471
Kyauk Pyu 79,487 79,180 158,667
Mergui 3 2 5
Moulmein town 24 23 47
North Arakan 7,138 6,853 13,991
Prome 805 628 1,433
Rangoon Town 112 75 187
Sandoway 27,410 27,363 54,773
Shway Gyin 1 4 5
Tavoy 17 1 18
Tharawaddy 4 9 13
Thayetmyo 704 599 1,303
Thone Gwa 6 5 11
Toungoo 9 3 12
Assam 8 8
Bengal 49,374 19,435 68,809
Bombay 5 3 8
Central 2 1 3
Diu 27 27
Goa 5 5
Madras 1,823 31 1,854
Nepal 49 10 59
N-W Provinces 246 14 260
Oudh 2 2
Punjab 63 6 69
Afganistan 4 4
Arabia 3 3
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REFERENCES
Primary Sources
Ba Maw. 1958. Breakthrough in Burma, memoirs of a revolution, 1939-46. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bennison, J.J.1931. Census of India of 1931, Volume XI, Part I, Burma. Rangoon: Government Press.
Buchanan, Francis. 1992. Francis Buchanan in Southeast Bengal (1798): His Journey to Chittagong, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Noakhali and Comilla. Dhaka: Dhaka University Press.
Census Commissioner of India. Census of India, 1881. Calcutta: 1896
Department of Defense Service Archives. Rangoon. CD 1016/10/11
Department of Defense Service Archives. Rangoon. CD 495(56)
Department of Defense Service Archives. Rangoon. DR 1016/10/13
Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce 1875.The Census of British Burma. Rangoon: Government Press
Government of British Burma. 1875. Report on the Census of British Burma. Rangoon: Government Press
Government of British Burma. 1888. Report on the Settlement Operations in Akyab District 1887-88. Rangoon: Government Press.
Government of India. 1943. Records of the Governor’s Secretary Office. India Office Records 8/9. London: British Library.
Government of the Union of Myanmar. 1987. Rakhine State 1983 Population Census. Rangoon: Immigration and Manpower Department, Ministry of Home Affairs.
Grantham, S and Lat, Maung. 1956. Burma Gazetteer: Akyab District, Volume (B). Rangoon: Government Press.
Forchhammer, Emil. 1892. Papers on Subjects Relating to the Archaeology of Burma: A Report on the History of Arakan. Rangoon: Government Press.
Irwin, Anthony. 1945. Burmese Outpost (Memoirs of a British Officer who fought in Arakan with the Arakanese V Forces during the Second World War).
London: Collins.
SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420
Myanma-Alin Daily, September 25, 1945. Rangoon: Myanmaralin Press.
Owen, Frank. 1946. The Campaigns in Burma. London: His Majesty Stationary Office.
Phayre, Arthur. 1841. “Account of Arakan.” Journal of the Asiatic Society, 10: 629 – 712.
Smart, R.B.1957. Burma gazetteer: Akyab District, Volume (A). Rangoon: Government Press.
Talish, Shihabuddin. 1907. “The Frengi Pirates of Chatagaon.” Jadunath Sakar (tr.). Journal Asiatic Society of Bengal (3): 419-425
Tha Gyaw, Bonebauk. 1971. Tawhlanyay-khayeeway (On the Road to Revolution). Rangoon: Thandar Aung Sarpay
Walker, H.B. 1891. “Journey on the Ann Pass.” Records of the Intelligence Department. Rangoon: Government Press
Secondary Sources
Ba Tha. 1959. “Shah Shuja in Arakan.” The Guardian Magazine, 6(9): 26-28
Ba Tha. 1960. “Rowengyas in Arakan.” The Guardian Magazine, 7(5): 33-36
Charney, Michael W. 1999. Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan (Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries). PhD Dissertation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Charter, Langhan.1938. “The Archives of Arakanese Families,” Journal of Burma Research Society (38): 34-38
Christie, Clive J. 1996. A Modern History of Southeast Asia: Decolonization, Nationalism and Separatism. London: I. B. Tauris Publishers
Donison, F.S. 1970. Burma. London:Ernest Benn
Furnivall, J.S. 1957. Colonial Policy and Practice. London: Cambridge University Press.
Gaffar, Abdul. 1951. “The Sudeten Muslims.” The Guardian Daily, August 20, 1951, Rangoon: Guardian Press.
Khin Gyi Pyaw. 1960. “Who Are the Mujahids in Arakan?” Rakhine Tazaung Magazine. Rangoon: Rangoon University Arakanese Culture Association.
DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420
Kyaw Zan Tha, U. 1995. “Background of the Rohingya Problem.” Rakhine Tazaung Magazine. Rangoon: Rangoon University Arakanese Culture Association.
Mya Win. 1992. “If We Appraise the Attempts Made to Sow Enmity against Myanmar Naing-ngan.” Working Peoples’ Daily: January 25, 1992.
Rahman, Fazlur. 1979. Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rakhine State People’s Council. 1986. Pyinay-phyitsin-thamaing (Chronological ecords of Arakan State) A type-written Manuscript for circulation. Akyab (Sittwe).
Rahman, Fazlur.1979. Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Razzaq, Abdur & Haque, Mahfuzul. 1995. A Tale of Refugees: Rohingyas in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Center for Human Rights.
Yeagar, Moshe.1972. The Muslims of Burma: A Study of Minority Group. Wiesbaden.
Dr Aye Chan, a former Rangoon University lecturer, was arrested in May 1990 when two student leaders, who were being followed by military intelligence, came to his house to seek refuge. He was sentenced under to 15 years' imprisonment and spent 7 years in Insein and Tharawaddy prisons, mostly in solitary confinement. He fled Burma a year after his release and resettled in Japan where he is now a Professor at Kanda University.
Victim Ma Thidar Htwe 26 year old(http://www.arakanlaywaddy.com/)
Rambree: Three suspected culprits who allegedly committed the crimes of rape and murder in Rambree in Arakan State were reported to be arrested by the police on the night of 29th May after the local peoples gathered at the local police station and demanded them to reveal and arrest the culprits.
The arrested are identified as Htak Htak (23), Rafique (18) and Luyub (21) from Kyaukhtaran Muslim Village in Rambree Township.
Htak Htak was said to be arrested with the victim’s jewelries in downtown Rambree first and his two other associates in the crime were also arrested on the same night from their residences in Kyaukhtaran Village.
“All three culprits are already arrested. People from 11 villages in our area marched to police station in Kyauknimaw and staged a demonstration demanding immediate identification and arrest of the culprits. So, the police immediately identified and arrested the culprits”, said a resident from Kyauknimaw.
He said nearly 1,000 villagers from eleven nearby villages participated in the demonstration demanding police action against the culprits who committed the crime.
“That’s the most heinous crime that may lead to a big problem in our area. The people are raged with anger and indomitable spirit. Not only the police, but also district and township administrations had to prevent the people. Otherwise the crime could spark a very big communal unrest”, he said.
The source also said the police forces had to save two other Muslim youths as the angry crowd tried to get rid of them, believing them to be the offenders of the crime while they were being interrogated on suspicion of the crime in the residence of Kyauknimaw Villager Administrator, U Than Tun.
Those three arrestees were said to be sent to Kyaukpru district prison on the same night they were arrested because of the worrisome situations for them in Rambree.
http://www.arakanlaywaddy.com/
Police in Kyauknimaw police station confirmed the arrest of three youths but denied to tell details about the case.
Kyauknimaw Village is today quiet and its market that used to be crowded is dry without people. There is no traffic between the nearby villages and especially no Muslim dares to go out from their homes in the area.
The victim is identified as 26 year old Ma Thidar Htwe from Thapraychaung Village in Rambree Township. She was said to be raped and killed by those three Muslim youths on her way back home after working in Kyauknimaw Village around 5 pm on May 28. According to the eye-witnesses, her dead body bears a slice at the throat, several stabs on the chest, and stabs and cuts on the vagina and pubic region.
The victim’s dead body will be cremated in the afternoon on the 30th of May under the supervision of the local authorities reportedly to avoid any social unrest in the area.
Reportedly said that Kyaukhtayan village is a place where a number of Bengali reside, experts on immigration issues view the case that it has a very high possibility of social conflicts if police and civil administrators can't control the situation very well. Meanwhile, a Rakhine activist claims that such cases are likely to be due to weaker control and corruption of regional police forces on immigration problems. Bengali immigrants are also called as Rohingyas.
Sources;
Rambree: Three suspected culprits who allegedly committed the crimes of rape and murder in Rambree in Arakan State were reported to be arrested by the police on the night of 29th May after the local peoples gathered at the local police station and demanded them to reveal and arrest the culprits.
The arrested are identified as Htak Htak (23), Rafique (18) and Luyub (21) from Kyaukhtaran Muslim Village in Rambree Township.
Htak Htak was said to be arrested with the victim’s jewelries in downtown Rambree first and his two other associates in the crime were also arrested on the same night from their residences in Kyaukhtaran Village.
“All three culprits are already arrested. People from 11 villages in our area marched to police station in Kyauknimaw and staged a demonstration demanding immediate identification and arrest of the culprits. So, the police immediately identified and arrested the culprits”, said a resident from Kyauknimaw.
He said nearly 1,000 villagers from eleven nearby villages participated in the demonstration demanding police action against the culprits who committed the crime.
“That’s the most heinous crime that may lead to a big problem in our area. The people are raged with anger and indomitable spirit. Not only the police, but also district and township administrations had to prevent the people. Otherwise the crime could spark a very big communal unrest”, he said.
The source also said the police forces had to save two other Muslim youths as the angry crowd tried to get rid of them, believing them to be the offenders of the crime while they were being interrogated on suspicion of the crime in the residence of Kyauknimaw Villager Administrator, U Than Tun.
Those three arrestees were said to be sent to Kyaukpru district prison on the same night they were arrested because of the worrisome situations for them in Rambree.
Police in Kyauknimaw police station confirmed the arrest of three youths but denied to tell details about the case.
Kyauknimaw Village is today quiet and its market that used to be crowded is dry without people. There is no traffic between the nearby villages and especially no Muslim dares to go out from their homes in the area.
The victim is identified as 26 year old Ma Thidar Htwe from Thapraychaung Village in Rambree Township. She was said to be raped and killed by those three Muslim youths on her way back home after working in Kyauknimaw Village around 5 pm on May 28. According to the eye-witnesses, her dead body bears a slice at the throat, several stabs on the chest, and stabs and cuts on the vagina and pubic region.
The victim’s dead body will be cremated in the afternoon on the 30th of May under the supervision of the local authorities reportedly to avoid any social unrest in the area.
Victim Ma Thidar Htwe 26 year old
Htak Htak was said to be arrested with the victim’s jewelries in downtown Rambree first and his two other associates in the crime were also arrested on the same night from their residences in Kyaukhtaran Village.
“All three culprits are already arrested. People from 11 villages in our area marched to police station in Kyauknimaw and staged a demonstration demanding immediate identification and arrest of the culprits. So, the police immediately identified and arrested the culprits”, said a resident from Kyauknimaw.
He said nearly 1,000 villagers from eleven nearby villages participated in the demonstration demanding police action against the culprits who committed the crime.
“That’s the most heinous crime that may lead to a big problem in our area. The people are raged with anger and indomitable spirit. Not only the police, but also district and township administrations had to prevent the people. Otherwise the crime could spark a very big communal unrest”, he said.
The source also said the police forces had to save two other Muslim youths as the angry crowd tried to get rid of them, believing them to be the offenders of the crime while they were being interrogated on suspicion of the crime in the residence of Kyauknimaw Villager Administrator, U Than Tun.
Those three arrestees were said to be sent to Kyaukpru district prison on the same night they were arrested because of the worrisome situations for them in Rambree.
Police in Kyauknimaw police station confirmed the arrest of three youths but denied to tell details about the case.Kyauknimaw Village is today quiet and its market that used to be crowded is dry without people. There is no traffic between the nearby villages and especially no Muslim dares to go out from their homes in the area.
The victim is identified as 26 year old Ma Thidar Htwe from Thapraychaung Village in Rambree Township. She was said to be raped and killed by those three Muslim youths on her way back home after working in Kyauknimaw Village around 5 pm on May 28. According to the eye-witnesses, her dead body bears a slice at the throat, several stabs on the chest, and stabs and cuts on the vagina and pubic region.
The victim’s dead body will be cremated in the afternoon on the 30th of May under the supervision of the local authorities reportedly to avoid any social unrest in the area.
Mrauk-U, the ancient capital city in northeastern Arakan State in Burma, is one of the most endangered cultural heritage sites in Asia, according to a report of the Global Heritage Fund.
In its report titled “Asia’s Heritage in Peril: Saving Our Vanishing Heritage” that was released on 3 May, Global Heritage Fund has listed Mrauk-U, “Capital City of the First Arakanese Kingdom”, in its highlights of the ten most significant archaeological and heritage sites facing irreparable loss and destruction in Asia.
The report said those sites are being threatened by five accelerating man-made threats, including development pressure, unsustainable tourism, insufficient management, looting, and war and conflict.
The other sites listed in the report are Ayutthaya, the former Siamese capital in Thailand; Fort Santiago and Intramuros, the historic fortress in the Philippines; Kashgar, one the last intact silk road cities in China; Mahasthangarh, one of South Asia’s earliest urban archaeological sites in Bangladesh; Mes Aynak, an ancient Buddhist monastery complex on the Silk Road in Afghanistan; Plain of Jars, megalithic archaeological landscape with mysterious origins in Laos; Preah Vihear, picturesque masterpiece of Khmer architecture in Cambodia; Rakhigari, one of the largest and oldest Indus sites in the world in India; and Taxila, former crossroads of industry in the ancient Middle East in Pakistan.
When asked about the report and identification of Mrauk-U as one of the most endangered sites, U Kyaw Tun Aung, a retired archaeologist as well as a resident of Mrauk-U, made the following comments:
“The construction of the railroad through the main archaeological zone in Mrauk-U has destroyed many cultural and historic heritage in the city. The earthen city walls have been bulldozed for the earth to be in-fill in highway construction near the city. There are also big hotels being built within the zone and any well-wishers are allowed to restore or renovate the ancient pagodas or religious structures with in the zone as they like without regard for the original design of the structures. What is the ugliest is the bus stations are allowed to build within the palace site in the city. The destruction of archaeological heritage is increasing without an prevention or preservation because anyone can do whatever they wish in the city. That is why the city has become the most endangered site,” said U Kyaw Tun Aung.
He said many valuable heritage sites, including city walls and pagodas in the ancient cities of Danyawady and Vesali were also damaged as the railroad to connect Sittwe and Ann was constructed to cross through the middle of those cities last year.
U Tun Aung Kyaw also said that the cultural heritage in Mrauk-U is historically very important not only for the Arakanese but also for people around the world. “There are four prominent periods that began from 3325 BCE that are known as Danyawady, Vesali, Laymro, and Mrauk-U. All civilizations in the former periods converged in the Mrauk-U period and Mrauk-U emerged as the golden city with the vast stone-sculptured architecture that includes magnificent Buddha statues, stupas, and pagodas. Now Mrauk-U offers some of the richest archaeological sites in the world and it is very significant not only for the Arakanese but also people around the world,” said U Kyaw Tun Aung.
Mrauk-U, the last capital of the independent Arakanese kingdom, was founded by King Monn Saw Mon in 1430 CE. It was stable for over 300 years and it is now an ancient city rich in historical heritage.
U Kyaw Tun Aung, however, said that heritage has been destroyed by natural disasters as well as the lack of systematic preservation and maintenance.
“There are still great weaknesses in the preservation and maintenance of our ancient historical heritage. That is why the ancient historic and cultural monuments have been ruined by natural disasters such as earthquakes, storms, and heavy rain. For example, the Shwegutaung Pagoda, the Barbutaung Pagoda, and Haritaung Pagoda collapsed during heavy rains. And there are also so many monuments being destroyed by creepers like the banyan trees,” he said.
When asked how the archaeological department is working to prevent the damages of ancient cultural heritage sites, U Kyaw Tun Aung said, “When I was serving in the archeological department, there was yearly distribution of funds, but as the funds were so small and there were so many monuments, no preservation work could be properly done.”
To the question of how Mrauk-U could still be saved, he said, “There are archaeological zones recognized by the national government in Mrauk-U. Those zones should be protected exactly in line with the laws. There is also a need for systematic and scientific preservation of the heritage sites. It is also important to preserve the original design and structure while restoring or repairing damaged or deteriorating heritage sites. And then Mrauk-U will reach a curable situation from being endangered.”
There is widespread criticism among the local people that the successive Burmese regimes have not only abandoned the ancient cities of Arakan, including Mrauk-U, Danyawady, and Vesali without preservation, but extensively destroyed those city sites by constructing railroads and highway crossings through them under the guise of regional development.
An ancient Amyaint Taung fortress in Mrauk U destroyed by Bulldozer for railway
In its report titled “Asia’s Heritage in Peril: Saving Our Vanishing Heritage” that was released on 3 May, Global Heritage Fund has listed Mrauk-U, “Capital City of the First Arakanese Kingdom”, in its highlights of the ten most significant archaeological and heritage sites facing irreparable loss and destruction in Asia.
The report said those sites are being threatened by five accelerating man-made threats, including development pressure, unsustainable tourism, insufficient management, looting, and war and conflict.
The other sites listed in the report are Ayutthaya, the former Siamese capital in Thailand; Fort Santiago and Intramuros, the historic fortress in the Philippines; Kashgar, one the last intact silk road cities in China; Mahasthangarh, one of South Asia’s earliest urban archaeological sites in Bangladesh; Mes Aynak, an ancient Buddhist monastery complex on the Silk Road in Afghanistan; Plain of Jars, megalithic archaeological landscape with mysterious origins in Laos; Preah Vihear, picturesque masterpiece of Khmer architecture in Cambodia; Rakhigari, one of the largest and oldest Indus sites in the world in India; and Taxila, former crossroads of industry in the ancient Middle East in Pakistan.
When asked about the report and identification of Mrauk-U as one of the most endangered sites, U Kyaw Tun Aung, a retired archaeologist as well as a resident of Mrauk-U, made the following comments:
“The construction of the railroad through the main archaeological zone in Mrauk-U has destroyed many cultural and historic heritage in the city. The earthen city walls have been bulldozed for the earth to be in-fill in highway construction near the city. There are also big hotels being built within the zone and any well-wishers are allowed to restore or renovate the ancient pagodas or religious structures with in the zone as they like without regard for the original design of the structures. What is the ugliest is the bus stations are allowed to build within the palace site in the city. The destruction of archaeological heritage is increasing without an prevention or preservation because anyone can do whatever they wish in the city. That is why the city has become the most endangered site,” said U Kyaw Tun Aung.
He said many valuable heritage sites, including city walls and pagodas in the ancient cities of Danyawady and Vesali were also damaged as the railroad to connect Sittwe and Ann was constructed to cross through the middle of those cities last year.
U Tun Aung Kyaw also said that the cultural heritage in Mrauk-U is historically very important not only for the Arakanese but also for people around the world. “There are four prominent periods that began from 3325 BCE that are known as Danyawady, Vesali, Laymro, and Mrauk-U. All civilizations in the former periods converged in the Mrauk-U period and Mrauk-U emerged as the golden city with the vast stone-sculptured architecture that includes magnificent Buddha statues, stupas, and pagodas. Now Mrauk-U offers some of the richest archaeological sites in the world and it is very significant not only for the Arakanese but also people around the world,” said U Kyaw Tun Aung.
Mrauk-U, the last capital of the independent Arakanese kingdom, was founded by King Monn Saw Mon in 1430 CE. It was stable for over 300 years and it is now an ancient city rich in historical heritage.
U Kyaw Tun Aung, however, said that heritage has been destroyed by natural disasters as well as the lack of systematic preservation and maintenance.
An ancient corridor in Mrauk U is totally damaged for railway
“There are still great weaknesses in the preservation and maintenance of our ancient historical heritage. That is why the ancient historic and cultural monuments have been ruined by natural disasters such as earthquakes, storms, and heavy rain. For example, the Shwegutaung Pagoda, the Barbutaung Pagoda, and Haritaung Pagoda collapsed during heavy rains. And there are also so many monuments being destroyed by creepers like the banyan trees,” he said.
When asked how the archaeological department is working to prevent the damages of ancient cultural heritage sites, U Kyaw Tun Aung said, “When I was serving in the archeological department, there was yearly distribution of funds, but as the funds were so small and there were so many monuments, no preservation work could be properly done.”
To the question of how Mrauk-U could still be saved, he said, “There are archaeological zones recognized by the national government in Mrauk-U. Those zones should be protected exactly in line with the laws. There is also a need for systematic and scientific preservation of the heritage sites. It is also important to preserve the original design and structure while restoring or repairing damaged or deteriorating heritage sites. And then Mrauk-U will reach a curable situation from being endangered.”
There is widespread criticism among the local people that the successive Burmese regimes have not only abandoned the ancient cities of Arakan, including Mrauk-U, Danyawady, and Vesali without preservation, but extensively destroyed those city sites by constructing railroads and highway crossings through them under the guise of regional development.
INTRODUCTION
Largely unknown to the Western world for much of its tur¬bulent history, Arakan played a pivotal role in the exchange of cultures and religions between India and Southeast Asia. For over a thousand years the region which now forms the Rakhine State of the Union of Myanmar (Burma) was an inde¬pendent state whose rich history is only slowly being paid the attention it deserves. Stretching along the Bay of Bengal, from the Naaf River which separates it from Bangladesh to Cape Negrais in southern Burma, it occupies the narrow strip of land to the west of the mountains of the Arakan Yoma (Range). Land and sea routes connected it with Bengal to the west and Burma proper to the east, routes that were travelled by peo¬ples, religions and cultures. When its neighbours were weak, Arakan was able to expand its influence along the coast to the east, west and south. At other times strong and aggressive neigh¬bouring states would drive the Arakanese back to their home¬land in the north or, at times, seek to conquer them.
Arakan's heartland was in its north, based on the rich alluvial flood plains of the adjoining Kaladan and Le-mro valleys. The earliest cities were in the Kaladan valley, backed by hills and facing west, and were thus open to influence from India and beyond. Subsequently cities were founded west of the Le-mro River, more accessible to Burma proper. The greatest city, Mrauk-U, bestrides the gap between these two valleys and thus could control both. All these cities were accessible to the Bay of Bengal through the tidal Mayu, Kaladan and Le-mro Rivers and their tributaries.
From the early centuries of the present era Arakan was ruled by kings who adopted Indian titles and traditions to suit their own environment. Indian Brahmins conducted the royal cer¬emonial, Buddhist monks spread their teachings, traders came and went and artists and architects used Indian models for in¬spiration. In the later period, there was also influence from Islamic courts of Bengal and Delhi. As an important centre for trade and as a goal of Buddhist pilgrims it was also the recipi¬ent of influence from other cultural centres in Southeast Asia. But the peoples of Arakan - like their counterparts elsewhere In the region - also followed older traditions connected with their land and the spirits which guarded it. Many of these still survive in fertility and spirit cults, or have been absorbed into the Buddhist Pantheon.
Arakan was discovered and forgotten by the rest of the world as its power rose and fell. In the first century AD the Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy knew it as Argyre, the land of silver, which was visited by merchants from southern India. Chinese Buddhist pilgrims of the seventh century knew it and the area of east Bengal within its cultural sphere as A-li-ki-lo or Harikela. The Burmese inscriptions of Pagan and Ava from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries refer to the Country as Rakhaing, the Tibetan historians Rakhan, and the Sri Lankan chronicles Rakhanga. Portuguese explorers from the fifteenth century call it Rachani and Aracan, and were followed in this by the later Dutch and English traders. The spelling 'Arakan' became standard in the eighteenth century.
After Arakan was annexed to India by the British in 1826 a number of scholar-administrators began to study in antiqui¬ties, and in 1889 Dr Emil Forchhammer, a Swiss Pali scholar employed by the Government of India, undertook a survey of the sites of the old cities and the major monuments. His com¬prehensive account remains the best to date. Later archaeolo¬gists found sites like Pagan in central Burma more accessible and attractive than those in remote and malarial Arakan, al¬though the region was visited briefly by Charles Duroisclle all 1920 and by U Lu Pe 'Will in 1940, Nevertheless, the sites always attracted Arakanese scholars, especially U San Shwe Bu who worked with British colleagues in the writing, of Arakanese history. A resurgence of interest led by key Arakanese in the Burmese central government in the 1970s led to further study being undertaken by Professor of architecture U Myo Myint Sein and to the present writer's work on the cultural history of the early period. Some Vesali sites were excavated in the 1980s by the present Director-General of the Department of Archae¬ology in Myanmar, U Nyunt Han. Recognising the tourist potential of the region, the government declared the old city of Mrauk-U a Heritage area in 1996. It is now committed to funding restoration of key shrines, and excavation of the place sites of Vesali and Mrauk-U underway.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
We cannot be sure who the earliest inhabitants of Arakan were. Most probably they included some minor¬ity groups still surviving in the remoter areas: the Chin, the Mro and the Sak. The dominant group today, the Rakhaing, appear to have been an advance guard of Burmans who began to cross the Arakan Yoma in the ninth century. The traditional histories of the country claim the origins of the Arakanese people in a remote past when the legendary hero-ancestor of the Arakanese, Marayu, founder of the first city, Dhanyawadi, is said to have married the daughter of a Mro chief and to have cleared the country of Bilus, demon-like creatures who may have been Chills. These histories incorporate earlier traditions and legends.
From around the 4th century other sources begin to contrib¬ute to our interpretation of the history of the country. Most important are the art and architecture which tell the story of the development of religious ideas and beliefs and help us lo¬cate the origins of these through all analysis of their style. The political history is outlined in the inscriptions of the rulers, notably those of the Shit-thaung pillar, a great stone stele in¬scribed by kings from the 6th century and carried from capital to capital until it reached Mrauk-U in the 16th. The lists of kings the inscriptions contain are verified by coins bearing their names. And we have local histories, mostly written by Bud¬dhist clergy, recounting stories of kings and shrines and draw¬ing in part from an earlier oral tradition.
Buddhist traditions are the most important in the formation of Arakan's culture, as indeed, is the case in the rest of Burma. As with other sites in Burma and in the rest of Southeast Asia, these traditions tell of the Buddha flying to the city of Dhanyawadi, accompanied by his disciples, and converting King Candrasuriya ("Sun-and-Moon"), after which he con¬sented to have an image of himself made in commemoration of the event. This was the famous Mahamuni ("Great Sage") image, known throughout the Buddhist world and desired by kings who sought to conquer the country in order to carry away this powerful prize. The history of this image is entwined with that of Arakan.
The tradition of the origin of the Mahamuni image can be interpreted as an allegorical account of the introduction of Buddhism to Arakan. The first evidence we have of Buddhism is in the early sculpture of the Mahamuni shrine at Dhanyawadi.
DHANYAWADI
CIRCA MID-4TH TO EARLY 6TH CENTURIES AD
Dhanyawadi (Pali Dhannavati, "grain-blessed") was a city typical of the earliest phase of urbanization in Southeast Asia during the first centuries of the Christian era. While ele¬ments of its culture undoubtedly derived from India, it shares many characteristics with other centres in mainland Southeast Asia linked by the sea, the Pyu polities of present-day Burma, and the Mon of Dvaravati in Thailand and Oc-Eo in southern Vietnam.
Located in country with the capacity to produce three crops of paddy rice a year, Dhanyawadi had access to the hills and the products of the hill tribes such as beeswax and stick-lac, as well as to the sea via the Tharechaung, a tributary of the Kaladan River. During the early centuries of the present era maritime trade between China, India and Europe was stimulated by the interruption of the central Asian overland trade routes. India's demand for gold, and the Roman empire's demand for the ex¬otic products of the Orient, led traders from India and the Middle East - often Arabs - to explore alternative sources. This brought Arakan into new trading networks. Contact with In¬dia brought new ideas. Later inscriptions and local historical traditions remember ancestors who were probably local chiefs, who adopted Indian religion and statecraft to increase their power and become kings.
This process, generally referred to as "Indianization" was an extension of the spread of certain aspects of south Asian civili¬zation which had been taking place for over a millennium in India itself, diffusing eastward and southward from its centre in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent until it finally reached western Southeast Asia: what is now Burma, Thailand, Southern Vietnam, Cambodia and the western sectors of Indo¬nesia. The concept of divine kingship, which had been im¬plicit in the Indian tradition, became explicit in Southeast Asia where the rulers sought to validate their hold over different ethnic groups and to control the means of production in a context wider than the traditional village.
Professor Paul Wheatley has described the transformation of village culture to the civilization of the city-state in terms of the changes in society which this "Indianization" brought about. The maintenance of a state appropriate to kingship required the ministrations of increasing numbers of craftsmen and arti¬sans, the most skilled of whom were often accommodated within the royal compound. It required the labour of a peas¬antry who contributed the surplus produce of their fields as a tax in kind for the support of the court, and a band of armed retainers who acted as household guards, organised the peas¬antry as militia and enforced the authority of the ruler. Mate¬rial defences - walls and moats protecting the palace and the city - were constructed and the city-state, the nagara, evolved. These transformations saw the tribal chieftain replaced by a divine king, shaman by brahmin priest, tribesmen as cultiva¬tors by peasants, tribesmen as warriors by an army, and fa¬voured the development of occupational specialisation. They were reflected in the conversion of the chief's hut into a pal¬ace, the spirit house into a temple, the object of the spirit cult into the palladium of the state, and the boundary spirits which previously had protected the village into Indianized Lokapalas presiding over the cardinal directions.
This process can clearly be traced in Arakan, which received Indian culture by land from Bengal and by sea from other parts of India. The Anandacandra inscription on the Shit-thaung stele, after listing the ancestral monarchs, says that a king called Dvan Candra, possessed of righteousness and fortune, conquered 101 kings and built a city "which laughed with heavenly beauty" sur¬rounded by walls and a moat. From the inscription we can de¬duce that Dvan Candra ruled from around 370-425AD, and that he was the founder of the Dhanyawadi of the chronicles.
Lying, west of the ridge between the Kaladan and Lc-mro riv¬ers, Dhanyawadi could be reached by small ships from the Kaladan Via the its tributary, the Tharechaung. Its city walls were made of brick, and form an irregular circle with a perimeter of about 9.6 kilometres, enclosing an area of about 4.42 square kilometres. Beyond the walls, the remains of a wide moat, now silted over and covered by paddy fields, are still visible in places. The re¬mains of brick fortifications can be seen along the hilly ridge which provided protection from the west. Within the city, a similar wall and moat enclose the palace site, which has an area of 0.26 square kilometres, and another wall surrounds the palace itself.
As was the case in the contemporary Pyu cities of central Burma, the majority of the population would have lived within the outer city, whose walls also enclosed the fields in which they worked. At times of insecurity, when the city was subject to raids from the hill tribes or attempted invasions from neigh¬bouring powers, there would have been an assured food supply enabling the population to withstand a siege. The city would have controlled the valley and the lower ridges, supporting a mixed wet-rice and taungya (slash and burn) economy, with local chiefs paying allegiance to the king.
From aerial photographs we can discern Dhanyawadi's irri¬gation channels and storage tanks, centred at the palace site. Throughout the history of Arakan, and indeed the rest of early Southeast Asia, the king's power stemmed from his control of irrigation and water storage systems to conserve the monsoon rains and therefore to maintain the fertility and prosperity of the land. In ceremonies conducted by Indian Brahmins the king was given the magic power to regulate the celestial and terrestrial forces in order to control the coming of the rains which would ensure the continuing prosperity of the kingdom.
The renowned Mahamuni shrine is situated on a hill north¬east of the palace site. This may have been the location of an earlier fertility cult, controlled by local chiefs and absorbed into Buddhism as Indian influence strengthened. The shrine was to become the centre of a Buddhist cult but would incorporate earlier beliefs surrounding the spirits of the earth and the pro¬tectors of the land. While the shrine was attacked, destroyed and rebuilt many times over the centuries, and its holy image finally transported to the Burmese capital of Mandalay after the conquest of Arakan in 1784, many ancient and now badly dam- Sculptures still remain. Traditionally regarded as deities protecting the central image, they are stylistically comparable to the art of the late Gupta period in India, from around the fifth and sixth centuries AD. There are indications that the dei¬ties they represent belong to the Mahayana Buddhist pantheon.
VESALI
- CIRCA 6TH TO 8TH CELNI LRIES AD
Some nine kilometres south of Dhanyawadi is the next im¬portant city, Vesali (Wethali), founded around the begin¬ning of the sixth century and named after the Indian city of Vaisali, famous in Buddhist tradition. We do not know pre¬cisely when the centre of power moved to Vesali, but inscrip¬tions and sculptures found in the vicinity of the city can be dated from around the sixth century. Vesali is flanked by the Rann-chaung, a tributary of the Kaladan, to the west, and the ridge between the Kaladan and Le-mro Rivers to the east. As at Dhanyawadi we find an oval-shaped city wall encompassing an area of seven square kilometres, protected by a moat which still fills with water in the wet season. In its centre the palace site, also surrounded by a moat, contains a royal lake. More easily reached by the overland route from India, it also took advantage (if increased trade in the Bay of Bengal at the time and its influence spread to southeast Bengal. Its material re mains show that it was in contact not only with the Pyu of central Burma but also the pre-Angkorian cultures further east. As was the case at Dhanyawadi, there was a large temple com¬plex to the northeast of the palace. Excavations in the 1980s unearthed the remains of a Buddhist monastic complex and a royal shrine containing the stone image of a bull. This was the royal insignia of the Candra dynasties which ruled at both Dhanyawadi and Vesali and who claimed to belong to the lin¬eage of the Hindu god Siva, although they themselves pro¬fessed Buddhism, probably of the Mahayanist persuasion. Such religious synthesis was not unusual in Southeast Asia, where Brahmins of Indian origin have traditionally conducted the royal ceremonial which Buddhism, disdaining class hierarchy, did not aspire to, even in Buddhist courts.
Our knowledge of the history of this period is based not only on the archaeological remains, but also on inscriptions, impor¬tantly those on the pillar now preserved at the Shit-thaung tem¬ple at Mrauk-U. The Shit-thaung pillar inscription of Anandracandra, who ruled Vesali in the 8th century, records a genealogy of some 22 kings ruling from the late 4th century, the earlier kings probably at Dhanyawadi. Anandacandra is described as a Buddhist who established monasteries, caused images to be made, and welcomed monks from other lands including the Buddhist clergy of Sri Lanka, to whom he sent an elephant and robes. He did not neglect other religions, repairing "deva" shrines, probably Hindu in character which were erected by former kings, and establishing buildings for the local Brahmins, whom he also provided with land, servants and musicians. Amongst the sculptural remains from Vesali there are stone and bronze votive stupus which give us an idea of the architec¬ture of the time, Buddha images showing contact with the Pvu of central Burma and the monastic establishments of Bengal, and a remarkable series of Visnu images, indicating the impor¬tance of that sect.
Although the extent of the lands controlled by the Dhanvawadi, Vesali, Le-mro and Mrauk-U kings would have changed under differing political and economic circumstances, the spread of historical remains indicates that from around the 6th century most of the Kaladan and Le-mro valleys came within their influence. So, for example, the discovery of a Vesali period Hindu shrine within the walls of Mrauk-U, for instance, gives an indication of the extent of the lands controlled by that city. Contact with the Pyu of central Burma is evidenced by a Pall inscription found in Mrauk-U, and another in Pyu script from Thandwe (Sandoway).
From the middle of the 8th century east Bengal, Arakan and the Pyu cities of central Burma were disrupted by waves of incursions of Tibeto-Burman-speaking peoples. These were the Mranma (in modern Burmese, Myanmar) who were eventu¬ally to make Pagan their capital, and the people who were to rule Arakan and call themselves Rakhuin (Rakhaing).
In the 9th or 10th century the administrative centre may have moved to the Mrauk-U area. The chronicles record the building of two new cities on the Mrauk-U plain, the last over¬run by invaders from the west. Some recent discoveries dating from this period show that close links with Eastern India had been maintained.
CITIES OF THE LE-MRO VALLEY
- 11TH-15TH CENTURIES
With the rise of the Burmese capital at Pagan a series of small Arakanese cities, Sambawak, Parein, Hkrit, and Launggret, succeeded each other on the lowlands west of the Le-mro River, while Toungoo Neyinzara was on its eastern side. This location gave these cities more access to Burma than their predecessors had. Smaller than their predecessors, almost noth¬ing remains of their walls and palaces.
The first capital, Sambawak was believed to have been founded by a descendant of the Candra kings of Vesali in 1018 AD. The power of Pagan was reaching its zenith at the time, and though access was difficult across the Arakan Yoma, Pagan kings often attempted to raid Arakan and to carry away its palladium, the Mahamuni image. Instead of being a country whose influence was felt in Bengal, Arakan became a tributary of Pagan and her power curtailed. Her cities were small and her hold on more remote territories weak. According to the chronicles, a usurper ultimately ascended- the throne and the royal family had to take refuge at the Burmese king Kyanzittha's court at Pagan. When the rightful line was restored with the assistance of the Burmese, King Letya-min-nan moved the capi¬tal to Parein in 1 118 AD. Launggret was founded in 1237 AD, at a time when Pagan's power was beginning to wane, and after a few years managed to become independent and began to again expand its authority to Bengal to the west and Cape Negrais to the south. The art of this period is strongly influenced by that of Pagan and reflects increasing religious contact with Sri Lanka, then the centre of Theravadin Buddhism.
In 1404 AD Burmese forces occupied Launggret and drove out the king, Min Saw Mun, who fled to.the Sultanate of Gaur in Bengal. Islam had been taking hold in Bengal from the 13th century, and the Bengal Sultanate, independent of Delhi, was founded in the mid-14th century. It was natural that Arakan, threatened from the west, should turn to its eastern neighbour with which it had centuries of contact. Weak but strategically desirable, it became a pawn in the struggle for power between the Burmans, now with their capital at Ava, and the Mons of lower Burma, with their capital at Pegu.
It is said that Min Saw Mun returned to Arakan with the assistance of an armed levy from the Sultan of Gaur. Following the advice of his astrologers he left the ill-omened Launggret and founded the last of the old great capitals, Mrauk-U, in 1433.
MRAUK-U 1433-1785 AD
The Portuguese Jesuit, Father A. Farrinha, SJ, who trav¬elled to Mrauk-U in 1639, wrote Mrauk-U, called Arakan by the many foreigners who visited it, occupies a unique site. Situated in low land within a series of parallel ranges it commands both the Kaladan and Le-mro valleys and has access to the two main rivers, and therefore the Bay of Bengal, by both land and water.
After Min Saw Mun's return, the country remained tributary to the Bengal Sultanate for a hundred years. The kings, though Buddhists, used Mohammedan titles in addition to their own names, some issuing coins bearing the kalima, the Muslim dec¬laration of faith, in Persian script. Min Saw Mun's brother, All Khan, managed to occupy the Bengali coastal town of Ramu and his son Ba Saw Pru, also known as Kalimah Shah, is said to have occupied Chittagong.
The twelfth king of the line, Min Bin, who ruled from 1531 to 1553 saw Arakan reach the height of its power. Two factors assisted him in this: the arrival of the Portuguese and civil war in Bengal.
In the sixteenth century the Portuguese were the world's fin¬est mariners. They arrived in the Bay of Bengal seeking to con¬vert the heathen to Catholicism, and in doing so to promote trading opportunities. The Arakanese saw that by granting ter¬ritorial concessions and trade openings, they could benefit through the Portuguese mastery of seamanship and their mod¬ern knowledge of arms and fortification. Min Bin thus turned Mrauk-U into the strongest fortified city of the Bay of Bengal, employing Portuguese to lay out his walls and moats and to forge and mount his cannon. He appointed them as military officers to train and equip a mercenary army of many races, and built, with their aid, a large fleet manned with his own men. It was during his reign that the Mrauk-U architectural style, draw¬ing on Burmese, Mon and Bengali prototypes, developed. The Rakhaing navy became the scourge of the Bay of Ben¬gal, taking slaves from up and down the coast as well as trad¬ing rice for luxury products for its aristocracy. The Portuguese recorded that the navy comprised three hundred and fifty ves¬sels. Ships coming from the Bay of Bengal usually approached via the Mayu River. There was a customs checkpoint at Kwede, at the beginning of the river of that name which joins the Mayu with the Kaladan. Upriver were trading posts for the produce of the region, cotton goods and rice.
That Mrauk-U controlled the economy of the Kaladan and Lc-mro valleys and their hinterlands can be seen not only in the widely scattered remains of religious buildings and Bud¬dha images of the period but also in signs of occupancy of other centres essential for trade and the defence of the city. In 1630 the Portuguese traveller Sebastian Manrique found a massive image of the Buddha at the head of a pass guarding the land route to Bengal. Punnakvun, on the left bank of the Kaladan River, was strategically placed to control access by water to Mrauk-U, and was the site of its naval base. The Urittaung pagoda stands on a low, but steep and rocky hill opposite Punnyakyun. To the west of the pagoda are two large and several smaller tanks. The ground here is strewn with earth¬enware shards indicating a long period of settlement.
Meanwhile, in Bengal, the Mughals had arrived. The emperor Humayan conquered the Sultanate of Gaur, thus initiating a long period of civil war. Min Bin took advantage of this opportunity and occupied east Bengal with a combined fleet and army movement. The province remained a vassal of Arakan for the next one hundred and twenty years, till 1666. Its administra¬tion was left in the hands of twelve local rajas, who paid an annual tribute to the Arakanese king's viceroy at Chittagong.
From the west, Min Bin was threatened by the powerful Bur¬mese king 'Tabinshweti, who had already conquered the Mon country and was making war against the Thais at Ayuthia. Tabinshweti invaded Arakan in 1546-7 with the help of his Portuguese mercenaries and Mon levies. When the Burmese penetrated the eastern defences of the city, Min Bin opened the sluices of his great reservoirs and halted their advance. The Arakanese chronicles tell us that the Burmese, unable to make headway, accepted the intercession of the Buddhist monks. The opposing leaders met, had amicable discussions and the Bur¬mese returned home.
The Portuguese Jesuit Sebastian Manrique, describing a simi¬lar procession before the coronation of King Sanda-thu¬dhamma wrote The Nobles and the other men of rank gather at the palace whence, amongst music of all kinds, a huge elephant emerged, richly caparisoned, with his ivory tusks adorned with rings of gold and jewels. He carried on his back a howdah made of silver. It was open on all four sides except for curtains of green and gold silver veiling. Inside it was a tray of gold set with precious stones of immense value, which bore the royal order containing the proclamation of the coronation. Just in front, before the howdah, sat the Chique, or chief-justice at the Court, clothed in white silver cloth covered with plaques of gold. In front of him was the elephant-driver or cornaca in his usual place. He was dressed in red damask and carried in his hand the accustomed implement with which that land vessel is guided, in his instance of the finest gold. He was followed in due order by thirty-two war elephants, dressed in silken cloths and ornamented with gold, bearing the usual uncovered howdahs on their backs, made of wood but covered with silver plates. They carried huge silver bells around their necks and had rings of this same metal on their tusks. Each elephant had four silken banners of various colours fastened to the howdah which trembled in the light breeze and acted as flapping fans for their heated bodies.
When, in the east, the Mughal Emperor Akbar consolidated his hold on central and western Bengal, Min Bin's successor Raza-gri protected his eastern frontier with the aid of a menac¬ing group of Portuguese slavers and adventurers settled near Chittagong, to whom he gave trade concessions.
In 1595 the Arakanese besieged and conquered the Mon capital of Pegu, deporting 3,000 households, and taking back a white elephant and a daughter of the fallen king, bronze cannon and the thirty bronze images which the Burmese king Bayin-naung had earlier seized when he conquered Ayuthia. They left in charge Felipe de Britoy Nicote, one of their Portuguese merce-naries. For a short period Arakan extended from Dacca to Moulmein, a narrow coastal strip some thousand miles long.
But the causes of Arakan's greatness were also the causes of its downfall. The thousands of Mughal, Burmese, Mon, Siamese and Portuguese mercenaries and prisoners of war did not bear a strong allegiance to the king. With mercenary support a pre¬tender, Narapati, came to the throne in 1638, and Arakan's power began to decline. The influence of the Portuguese also waned as the Dutch gained commercial advantage in the Bay of Bengal. King Sanda-thudamma temporarily restored the country's glory by allowing the Dutch to settle at Mrauk-U. Wanting to strike at Catholicism in Ceylon, the European new¬comers facilitated the sending of Arakanese monks there to revive the Buddhist ordination rites which had been in decline under the Portuguese.
Father Sebastian Manrique recorded that ......the city of Arracan according to general opinion must have contained one hundred and sixty thousand Inhabitants, excluding foreign merchants, of whom there was a great influx owing to the large number of-ship trading with this port from Bengala, Musulipattam,Tenasserim, Martaban,Achem and Jacatara. There were some other foreigners, too, some being merchants and some soldiers, the latter being enlisted oil salaries, and were, as 1 have said, Portuguese, Pegus, Burmese and Mogors .Besides these there were many Christians of Japanese, Bengal and other nationalities.
Meanwhile, in India, Shah Shuja, the Mughal pretender who had been provincial viceroy in Bengal, was defeated by his brother Aurangzeb who became Emperor at Delhi. Shah Shuja sought refuge at the Arakanese court, where King Sanda¬thudhamma is said to have lusted not only after his immense treasure but also his daughter. Shuja in desperation attempted to overthrow the city, but was defeated and executed along with his family. In retaliation the Mughals broke the power of the Arakanese in east Bengal, enslaving many who had been slav-ers and inducing the Portuguese to change their allegiance.
Many of Shuja's Indian followers are said to have remained in Arakan, where they were employed as archers of the guard and proceeded to murder and set up kings at will. Mrauk-U's decline continued for a century. The country was beset with civil war and by a series of natural disasters such as awesome earthquakes, although the Arakanese continued to raid the Bengal coast as late as the middle of the eighteenth century. As soon as the kings of Burma regained their power under the Alaungpaya dynasty, the Peguan territories were lost and Arakan's southern borders were withdrawn to Cape Negrais.
After Sanda-thudhamma Arakan survived as a polity only because it had no aggressive neighbour. The Moghuls had ceased to be an expanding power, and Burma was becoming preoccu¬pied with the British. The power of the last of the many kings of this period could extend only a few miles beyond the walls of Mrauk-U. It came to an end in 1784 when the Burmese king Bodawpaya invaded and removed the protector of the country, the Mahamuni image, to his capital at Amarapura. Two hundred thousand Arakanese are said to have fled to In¬dia. These events laid the seeds for the first Anglo-Burmese war, fought in Arakan in 1825. The conquerors found the old city of Mrauk-U pestilential to its troops, and removed them to a small fishing village at the mouth of the Kaladan River, which today remains the capital of Rakhaing State of Sittwe.
Largely unknown to the Western world for much of its tur¬bulent history, Arakan played a pivotal role in the exchange of cultures and religions between India and Southeast Asia. For over a thousand years the region which now forms the Rakhine State of the Union of Myanmar (Burma) was an inde¬pendent state whose rich history is only slowly being paid the attention it deserves. Stretching along the Bay of Bengal, from the Naaf River which separates it from Bangladesh to Cape Negrais in southern Burma, it occupies the narrow strip of land to the west of the mountains of the Arakan Yoma (Range). Land and sea routes connected it with Bengal to the west and Burma proper to the east, routes that were travelled by peo¬ples, religions and cultures. When its neighbours were weak, Arakan was able to expand its influence along the coast to the east, west and south. At other times strong and aggressive neigh¬bouring states would drive the Arakanese back to their home¬land in the north or, at times, seek to conquer them.
Arakan's heartland was in its north, based on the rich alluvial flood plains of the adjoining Kaladan and Le-mro valleys. The earliest cities were in the Kaladan valley, backed by hills and facing west, and were thus open to influence from India and beyond. Subsequently cities were founded west of the Le-mro River, more accessible to Burma proper. The greatest city, Mrauk-U, bestrides the gap between these two valleys and thus could control both. All these cities were accessible to the Bay of Bengal through the tidal Mayu, Kaladan and Le-mro Rivers and their tributaries.
From the early centuries of the present era Arakan was ruled by kings who adopted Indian titles and traditions to suit their own environment. Indian Brahmins conducted the royal cer¬emonial, Buddhist monks spread their teachings, traders came and went and artists and architects used Indian models for in¬spiration. In the later period, there was also influence from Islamic courts of Bengal and Delhi. As an important centre for trade and as a goal of Buddhist pilgrims it was also the recipi¬ent of influence from other cultural centres in Southeast Asia. But the peoples of Arakan - like their counterparts elsewhere In the region - also followed older traditions connected with their land and the spirits which guarded it. Many of these still survive in fertility and spirit cults, or have been absorbed into the Buddhist Pantheon.
Arakan was discovered and forgotten by the rest of the world as its power rose and fell. In the first century AD the Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy knew it as Argyre, the land of silver, which was visited by merchants from southern India. Chinese Buddhist pilgrims of the seventh century knew it and the area of east Bengal within its cultural sphere as A-li-ki-lo or Harikela. The Burmese inscriptions of Pagan and Ava from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries refer to the Country as Rakhaing, the Tibetan historians Rakhan, and the Sri Lankan chronicles Rakhanga. Portuguese explorers from the fifteenth century call it Rachani and Aracan, and were followed in this by the later Dutch and English traders. The spelling 'Arakan' became standard in the eighteenth century.
After Arakan was annexed to India by the British in 1826 a number of scholar-administrators began to study in antiqui¬ties, and in 1889 Dr Emil Forchhammer, a Swiss Pali scholar employed by the Government of India, undertook a survey of the sites of the old cities and the major monuments. His com¬prehensive account remains the best to date. Later archaeolo¬gists found sites like Pagan in central Burma more accessible and attractive than those in remote and malarial Arakan, al¬though the region was visited briefly by Charles Duroisclle all 1920 and by U Lu Pe 'Will in 1940, Nevertheless, the sites always attracted Arakanese scholars, especially U San Shwe Bu who worked with British colleagues in the writing, of Arakanese history. A resurgence of interest led by key Arakanese in the Burmese central government in the 1970s led to further study being undertaken by Professor of architecture U Myo Myint Sein and to the present writer's work on the cultural history of the early period. Some Vesali sites were excavated in the 1980s by the present Director-General of the Department of Archae¬ology in Myanmar, U Nyunt Han. Recognising the tourist potential of the region, the government declared the old city of Mrauk-U a Heritage area in 1996. It is now committed to funding restoration of key shrines, and excavation of the place sites of Vesali and Mrauk-U underway.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
We cannot be sure who the earliest inhabitants of Arakan were. Most probably they included some minor¬ity groups still surviving in the remoter areas: the Chin, the Mro and the Sak. The dominant group today, the Rakhaing, appear to have been an advance guard of Burmans who began to cross the Arakan Yoma in the ninth century. The traditional histories of the country claim the origins of the Arakanese people in a remote past when the legendary hero-ancestor of the Arakanese, Marayu, founder of the first city, Dhanyawadi, is said to have married the daughter of a Mro chief and to have cleared the country of Bilus, demon-like creatures who may have been Chills. These histories incorporate earlier traditions and legends.
From around the 4th century other sources begin to contrib¬ute to our interpretation of the history of the country. Most important are the art and architecture which tell the story of the development of religious ideas and beliefs and help us lo¬cate the origins of these through all analysis of their style. The political history is outlined in the inscriptions of the rulers, notably those of the Shit-thaung pillar, a great stone stele in¬scribed by kings from the 6th century and carried from capital to capital until it reached Mrauk-U in the 16th. The lists of kings the inscriptions contain are verified by coins bearing their names. And we have local histories, mostly written by Bud¬dhist clergy, recounting stories of kings and shrines and draw¬ing in part from an earlier oral tradition.
Buddhist traditions are the most important in the formation of Arakan's culture, as indeed, is the case in the rest of Burma. As with other sites in Burma and in the rest of Southeast Asia, these traditions tell of the Buddha flying to the city of Dhanyawadi, accompanied by his disciples, and converting King Candrasuriya ("Sun-and-Moon"), after which he con¬sented to have an image of himself made in commemoration of the event. This was the famous Mahamuni ("Great Sage") image, known throughout the Buddhist world and desired by kings who sought to conquer the country in order to carry away this powerful prize. The history of this image is entwined with that of Arakan.
The tradition of the origin of the Mahamuni image can be interpreted as an allegorical account of the introduction of Buddhism to Arakan. The first evidence we have of Buddhism is in the early sculpture of the Mahamuni shrine at Dhanyawadi.
DHANYAWADI
CIRCA MID-4TH TO EARLY 6TH CENTURIES AD
Dhanyawadi (Pali Dhannavati, "grain-blessed") was a city typical of the earliest phase of urbanization in Southeast Asia during the first centuries of the Christian era. While ele¬ments of its culture undoubtedly derived from India, it shares many characteristics with other centres in mainland Southeast Asia linked by the sea, the Pyu polities of present-day Burma, and the Mon of Dvaravati in Thailand and Oc-Eo in southern Vietnam.
Located in country with the capacity to produce three crops of paddy rice a year, Dhanyawadi had access to the hills and the products of the hill tribes such as beeswax and stick-lac, as well as to the sea via the Tharechaung, a tributary of the Kaladan River. During the early centuries of the present era maritime trade between China, India and Europe was stimulated by the interruption of the central Asian overland trade routes. India's demand for gold, and the Roman empire's demand for the ex¬otic products of the Orient, led traders from India and the Middle East - often Arabs - to explore alternative sources. This brought Arakan into new trading networks. Contact with In¬dia brought new ideas. Later inscriptions and local historical traditions remember ancestors who were probably local chiefs, who adopted Indian religion and statecraft to increase their power and become kings.
This process, generally referred to as "Indianization" was an extension of the spread of certain aspects of south Asian civili¬zation which had been taking place for over a millennium in India itself, diffusing eastward and southward from its centre in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent until it finally reached western Southeast Asia: what is now Burma, Thailand, Southern Vietnam, Cambodia and the western sectors of Indo¬nesia. The concept of divine kingship, which had been im¬plicit in the Indian tradition, became explicit in Southeast Asia where the rulers sought to validate their hold over different ethnic groups and to control the means of production in a context wider than the traditional village.
Professor Paul Wheatley has described the transformation of village culture to the civilization of the city-state in terms of the changes in society which this "Indianization" brought about. The maintenance of a state appropriate to kingship required the ministrations of increasing numbers of craftsmen and arti¬sans, the most skilled of whom were often accommodated within the royal compound. It required the labour of a peas¬antry who contributed the surplus produce of their fields as a tax in kind for the support of the court, and a band of armed retainers who acted as household guards, organised the peas¬antry as militia and enforced the authority of the ruler. Mate¬rial defences - walls and moats protecting the palace and the city - were constructed and the city-state, the nagara, evolved. These transformations saw the tribal chieftain replaced by a divine king, shaman by brahmin priest, tribesmen as cultiva¬tors by peasants, tribesmen as warriors by an army, and fa¬voured the development of occupational specialisation. They were reflected in the conversion of the chief's hut into a pal¬ace, the spirit house into a temple, the object of the spirit cult into the palladium of the state, and the boundary spirits which previously had protected the village into Indianized Lokapalas presiding over the cardinal directions.
This process can clearly be traced in Arakan, which received Indian culture by land from Bengal and by sea from other parts of India. The Anandacandra inscription on the Shit-thaung stele, after listing the ancestral monarchs, says that a king called Dvan Candra, possessed of righteousness and fortune, conquered 101 kings and built a city "which laughed with heavenly beauty" sur¬rounded by walls and a moat. From the inscription we can de¬duce that Dvan Candra ruled from around 370-425AD, and that he was the founder of the Dhanyawadi of the chronicles.
Lying, west of the ridge between the Kaladan and Lc-mro riv¬ers, Dhanyawadi could be reached by small ships from the Kaladan Via the its tributary, the Tharechaung. Its city walls were made of brick, and form an irregular circle with a perimeter of about 9.6 kilometres, enclosing an area of about 4.42 square kilometres. Beyond the walls, the remains of a wide moat, now silted over and covered by paddy fields, are still visible in places. The re¬mains of brick fortifications can be seen along the hilly ridge which provided protection from the west. Within the city, a similar wall and moat enclose the palace site, which has an area of 0.26 square kilometres, and another wall surrounds the palace itself.
As was the case in the contemporary Pyu cities of central Burma, the majority of the population would have lived within the outer city, whose walls also enclosed the fields in which they worked. At times of insecurity, when the city was subject to raids from the hill tribes or attempted invasions from neigh¬bouring powers, there would have been an assured food supply enabling the population to withstand a siege. The city would have controlled the valley and the lower ridges, supporting a mixed wet-rice and taungya (slash and burn) economy, with local chiefs paying allegiance to the king.
From aerial photographs we can discern Dhanyawadi's irri¬gation channels and storage tanks, centred at the palace site. Throughout the history of Arakan, and indeed the rest of early Southeast Asia, the king's power stemmed from his control of irrigation and water storage systems to conserve the monsoon rains and therefore to maintain the fertility and prosperity of the land. In ceremonies conducted by Indian Brahmins the king was given the magic power to regulate the celestial and terrestrial forces in order to control the coming of the rains which would ensure the continuing prosperity of the kingdom.
The renowned Mahamuni shrine is situated on a hill north¬east of the palace site. This may have been the location of an earlier fertility cult, controlled by local chiefs and absorbed into Buddhism as Indian influence strengthened. The shrine was to become the centre of a Buddhist cult but would incorporate earlier beliefs surrounding the spirits of the earth and the pro¬tectors of the land. While the shrine was attacked, destroyed and rebuilt many times over the centuries, and its holy image finally transported to the Burmese capital of Mandalay after the conquest of Arakan in 1784, many ancient and now badly dam- Sculptures still remain. Traditionally regarded as deities protecting the central image, they are stylistically comparable to the art of the late Gupta period in India, from around the fifth and sixth centuries AD. There are indications that the dei¬ties they represent belong to the Mahayana Buddhist pantheon.
VESALI
- CIRCA 6TH TO 8TH CELNI LRIES AD
Some nine kilometres south of Dhanyawadi is the next im¬portant city, Vesali (Wethali), founded around the begin¬ning of the sixth century and named after the Indian city of Vaisali, famous in Buddhist tradition. We do not know pre¬cisely when the centre of power moved to Vesali, but inscrip¬tions and sculptures found in the vicinity of the city can be dated from around the sixth century. Vesali is flanked by the Rann-chaung, a tributary of the Kaladan, to the west, and the ridge between the Kaladan and Le-mro Rivers to the east. As at Dhanyawadi we find an oval-shaped city wall encompassing an area of seven square kilometres, protected by a moat which still fills with water in the wet season. In its centre the palace site, also surrounded by a moat, contains a royal lake. More easily reached by the overland route from India, it also took advantage (if increased trade in the Bay of Bengal at the time and its influence spread to southeast Bengal. Its material re mains show that it was in contact not only with the Pyu of central Burma but also the pre-Angkorian cultures further east. As was the case at Dhanyawadi, there was a large temple com¬plex to the northeast of the palace. Excavations in the 1980s unearthed the remains of a Buddhist monastic complex and a royal shrine containing the stone image of a bull. This was the royal insignia of the Candra dynasties which ruled at both Dhanyawadi and Vesali and who claimed to belong to the lin¬eage of the Hindu god Siva, although they themselves pro¬fessed Buddhism, probably of the Mahayanist persuasion. Such religious synthesis was not unusual in Southeast Asia, where Brahmins of Indian origin have traditionally conducted the royal ceremonial which Buddhism, disdaining class hierarchy, did not aspire to, even in Buddhist courts.
Our knowledge of the history of this period is based not only on the archaeological remains, but also on inscriptions, impor¬tantly those on the pillar now preserved at the Shit-thaung tem¬ple at Mrauk-U. The Shit-thaung pillar inscription of Anandracandra, who ruled Vesali in the 8th century, records a genealogy of some 22 kings ruling from the late 4th century, the earlier kings probably at Dhanyawadi. Anandacandra is described as a Buddhist who established monasteries, caused images to be made, and welcomed monks from other lands including the Buddhist clergy of Sri Lanka, to whom he sent an elephant and robes. He did not neglect other religions, repairing "deva" shrines, probably Hindu in character which were erected by former kings, and establishing buildings for the local Brahmins, whom he also provided with land, servants and musicians. Amongst the sculptural remains from Vesali there are stone and bronze votive stupus which give us an idea of the architec¬ture of the time, Buddha images showing contact with the Pvu of central Burma and the monastic establishments of Bengal, and a remarkable series of Visnu images, indicating the impor¬tance of that sect.
Although the extent of the lands controlled by the Dhanvawadi, Vesali, Le-mro and Mrauk-U kings would have changed under differing political and economic circumstances, the spread of historical remains indicates that from around the 6th century most of the Kaladan and Le-mro valleys came within their influence. So, for example, the discovery of a Vesali period Hindu shrine within the walls of Mrauk-U, for instance, gives an indication of the extent of the lands controlled by that city. Contact with the Pyu of central Burma is evidenced by a Pall inscription found in Mrauk-U, and another in Pyu script from Thandwe (Sandoway).
From the middle of the 8th century east Bengal, Arakan and the Pyu cities of central Burma were disrupted by waves of incursions of Tibeto-Burman-speaking peoples. These were the Mranma (in modern Burmese, Myanmar) who were eventu¬ally to make Pagan their capital, and the people who were to rule Arakan and call themselves Rakhuin (Rakhaing).
In the 9th or 10th century the administrative centre may have moved to the Mrauk-U area. The chronicles record the building of two new cities on the Mrauk-U plain, the last over¬run by invaders from the west. Some recent discoveries dating from this period show that close links with Eastern India had been maintained.
CITIES OF THE LE-MRO VALLEY
- 11TH-15TH CENTURIES
With the rise of the Burmese capital at Pagan a series of small Arakanese cities, Sambawak, Parein, Hkrit, and Launggret, succeeded each other on the lowlands west of the Le-mro River, while Toungoo Neyinzara was on its eastern side. This location gave these cities more access to Burma than their predecessors had. Smaller than their predecessors, almost noth¬ing remains of their walls and palaces.
The first capital, Sambawak was believed to have been founded by a descendant of the Candra kings of Vesali in 1018 AD. The power of Pagan was reaching its zenith at the time, and though access was difficult across the Arakan Yoma, Pagan kings often attempted to raid Arakan and to carry away its palladium, the Mahamuni image. Instead of being a country whose influence was felt in Bengal, Arakan became a tributary of Pagan and her power curtailed. Her cities were small and her hold on more remote territories weak. According to the chronicles, a usurper ultimately ascended- the throne and the royal family had to take refuge at the Burmese king Kyanzittha's court at Pagan. When the rightful line was restored with the assistance of the Burmese, King Letya-min-nan moved the capi¬tal to Parein in 1 118 AD. Launggret was founded in 1237 AD, at a time when Pagan's power was beginning to wane, and after a few years managed to become independent and began to again expand its authority to Bengal to the west and Cape Negrais to the south. The art of this period is strongly influenced by that of Pagan and reflects increasing religious contact with Sri Lanka, then the centre of Theravadin Buddhism.
In 1404 AD Burmese forces occupied Launggret and drove out the king, Min Saw Mun, who fled to.the Sultanate of Gaur in Bengal. Islam had been taking hold in Bengal from the 13th century, and the Bengal Sultanate, independent of Delhi, was founded in the mid-14th century. It was natural that Arakan, threatened from the west, should turn to its eastern neighbour with which it had centuries of contact. Weak but strategically desirable, it became a pawn in the struggle for power between the Burmans, now with their capital at Ava, and the Mons of lower Burma, with their capital at Pegu.
It is said that Min Saw Mun returned to Arakan with the assistance of an armed levy from the Sultan of Gaur. Following the advice of his astrologers he left the ill-omened Launggret and founded the last of the old great capitals, Mrauk-U, in 1433.
MRAUK-U 1433-1785 AD
The Portuguese Jesuit, Father A. Farrinha, SJ, who trav¬elled to Mrauk-U in 1639, wrote Mrauk-U, called Arakan by the many foreigners who visited it, occupies a unique site. Situated in low land within a series of parallel ranges it commands both the Kaladan and Le-mro valleys and has access to the two main rivers, and therefore the Bay of Bengal, by both land and water.
After Min Saw Mun's return, the country remained tributary to the Bengal Sultanate for a hundred years. The kings, though Buddhists, used Mohammedan titles in addition to their own names, some issuing coins bearing the kalima, the Muslim dec¬laration of faith, in Persian script. Min Saw Mun's brother, All Khan, managed to occupy the Bengali coastal town of Ramu and his son Ba Saw Pru, also known as Kalimah Shah, is said to have occupied Chittagong.
The twelfth king of the line, Min Bin, who ruled from 1531 to 1553 saw Arakan reach the height of its power. Two factors assisted him in this: the arrival of the Portuguese and civil war in Bengal.
In the sixteenth century the Portuguese were the world's fin¬est mariners. They arrived in the Bay of Bengal seeking to con¬vert the heathen to Catholicism, and in doing so to promote trading opportunities. The Arakanese saw that by granting ter¬ritorial concessions and trade openings, they could benefit through the Portuguese mastery of seamanship and their mod¬ern knowledge of arms and fortification. Min Bin thus turned Mrauk-U into the strongest fortified city of the Bay of Bengal, employing Portuguese to lay out his walls and moats and to forge and mount his cannon. He appointed them as military officers to train and equip a mercenary army of many races, and built, with their aid, a large fleet manned with his own men. It was during his reign that the Mrauk-U architectural style, draw¬ing on Burmese, Mon and Bengali prototypes, developed. The Rakhaing navy became the scourge of the Bay of Ben¬gal, taking slaves from up and down the coast as well as trad¬ing rice for luxury products for its aristocracy. The Portuguese recorded that the navy comprised three hundred and fifty ves¬sels. Ships coming from the Bay of Bengal usually approached via the Mayu River. There was a customs checkpoint at Kwede, at the beginning of the river of that name which joins the Mayu with the Kaladan. Upriver were trading posts for the produce of the region, cotton goods and rice.
That Mrauk-U controlled the economy of the Kaladan and Lc-mro valleys and their hinterlands can be seen not only in the widely scattered remains of religious buildings and Bud¬dha images of the period but also in signs of occupancy of other centres essential for trade and the defence of the city. In 1630 the Portuguese traveller Sebastian Manrique found a massive image of the Buddha at the head of a pass guarding the land route to Bengal. Punnakvun, on the left bank of the Kaladan River, was strategically placed to control access by water to Mrauk-U, and was the site of its naval base. The Urittaung pagoda stands on a low, but steep and rocky hill opposite Punnyakyun. To the west of the pagoda are two large and several smaller tanks. The ground here is strewn with earth¬enware shards indicating a long period of settlement.
Meanwhile, in Bengal, the Mughals had arrived. The emperor Humayan conquered the Sultanate of Gaur, thus initiating a long period of civil war. Min Bin took advantage of this opportunity and occupied east Bengal with a combined fleet and army movement. The province remained a vassal of Arakan for the next one hundred and twenty years, till 1666. Its administra¬tion was left in the hands of twelve local rajas, who paid an annual tribute to the Arakanese king's viceroy at Chittagong.
From the west, Min Bin was threatened by the powerful Bur¬mese king 'Tabinshweti, who had already conquered the Mon country and was making war against the Thais at Ayuthia. Tabinshweti invaded Arakan in 1546-7 with the help of his Portuguese mercenaries and Mon levies. When the Burmese penetrated the eastern defences of the city, Min Bin opened the sluices of his great reservoirs and halted their advance. The Arakanese chronicles tell us that the Burmese, unable to make headway, accepted the intercession of the Buddhist monks. The opposing leaders met, had amicable discussions and the Bur¬mese returned home.
The Portuguese Jesuit Sebastian Manrique, describing a simi¬lar procession before the coronation of King Sanda-thu¬dhamma wrote The Nobles and the other men of rank gather at the palace whence, amongst music of all kinds, a huge elephant emerged, richly caparisoned, with his ivory tusks adorned with rings of gold and jewels. He carried on his back a howdah made of silver. It was open on all four sides except for curtains of green and gold silver veiling. Inside it was a tray of gold set with precious stones of immense value, which bore the royal order containing the proclamation of the coronation. Just in front, before the howdah, sat the Chique, or chief-justice at the Court, clothed in white silver cloth covered with plaques of gold. In front of him was the elephant-driver or cornaca in his usual place. He was dressed in red damask and carried in his hand the accustomed implement with which that land vessel is guided, in his instance of the finest gold. He was followed in due order by thirty-two war elephants, dressed in silken cloths and ornamented with gold, bearing the usual uncovered howdahs on their backs, made of wood but covered with silver plates. They carried huge silver bells around their necks and had rings of this same metal on their tusks. Each elephant had four silken banners of various colours fastened to the howdah which trembled in the light breeze and acted as flapping fans for their heated bodies.
When, in the east, the Mughal Emperor Akbar consolidated his hold on central and western Bengal, Min Bin's successor Raza-gri protected his eastern frontier with the aid of a menac¬ing group of Portuguese slavers and adventurers settled near Chittagong, to whom he gave trade concessions.
In 1595 the Arakanese besieged and conquered the Mon capital of Pegu, deporting 3,000 households, and taking back a white elephant and a daughter of the fallen king, bronze cannon and the thirty bronze images which the Burmese king Bayin-naung had earlier seized when he conquered Ayuthia. They left in charge Felipe de Britoy Nicote, one of their Portuguese merce-naries. For a short period Arakan extended from Dacca to Moulmein, a narrow coastal strip some thousand miles long.
But the causes of Arakan's greatness were also the causes of its downfall. The thousands of Mughal, Burmese, Mon, Siamese and Portuguese mercenaries and prisoners of war did not bear a strong allegiance to the king. With mercenary support a pre¬tender, Narapati, came to the throne in 1638, and Arakan's power began to decline. The influence of the Portuguese also waned as the Dutch gained commercial advantage in the Bay of Bengal. King Sanda-thudamma temporarily restored the country's glory by allowing the Dutch to settle at Mrauk-U. Wanting to strike at Catholicism in Ceylon, the European new¬comers facilitated the sending of Arakanese monks there to revive the Buddhist ordination rites which had been in decline under the Portuguese.
Father Sebastian Manrique recorded that ......the city of Arracan according to general opinion must have contained one hundred and sixty thousand Inhabitants, excluding foreign merchants, of whom there was a great influx owing to the large number of-ship trading with this port from Bengala, Musulipattam,Tenasserim, Martaban,Achem and Jacatara. There were some other foreigners, too, some being merchants and some soldiers, the latter being enlisted oil salaries, and were, as 1 have said, Portuguese, Pegus, Burmese and Mogors .Besides these there were many Christians of Japanese, Bengal and other nationalities.
Meanwhile, in India, Shah Shuja, the Mughal pretender who had been provincial viceroy in Bengal, was defeated by his brother Aurangzeb who became Emperor at Delhi. Shah Shuja sought refuge at the Arakanese court, where King Sanda¬thudhamma is said to have lusted not only after his immense treasure but also his daughter. Shuja in desperation attempted to overthrow the city, but was defeated and executed along with his family. In retaliation the Mughals broke the power of the Arakanese in east Bengal, enslaving many who had been slav-ers and inducing the Portuguese to change their allegiance.
Many of Shuja's Indian followers are said to have remained in Arakan, where they were employed as archers of the guard and proceeded to murder and set up kings at will. Mrauk-U's decline continued for a century. The country was beset with civil war and by a series of natural disasters such as awesome earthquakes, although the Arakanese continued to raid the Bengal coast as late as the middle of the eighteenth century. As soon as the kings of Burma regained their power under the Alaungpaya dynasty, the Peguan territories were lost and Arakan's southern borders were withdrawn to Cape Negrais.
After Sanda-thudhamma Arakan survived as a polity only because it had no aggressive neighbour. The Moghuls had ceased to be an expanding power, and Burma was becoming preoccu¬pied with the British. The power of the last of the many kings of this period could extend only a few miles beyond the walls of Mrauk-U. It came to an end in 1784 when the Burmese king Bodawpaya invaded and removed the protector of the country, the Mahamuni image, to his capital at Amarapura. Two hundred thousand Arakanese are said to have fled to In¬dia. These events laid the seeds for the first Anglo-Burmese war, fought in Arakan in 1825. The conquerors found the old city of Mrauk-U pestilential to its troops, and removed them to a small fishing village at the mouth of the Kaladan River, which today remains the capital of Rakhaing State of Sittwe.
