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WHO ARE THE ROHINGYAS
A few weeks ago, it was announced on a broadcast of BBC
Burmese program that a Burmese national of the Rohingya
ethnic group had been granted political asylum in Japan. We
should be pleased with this sign of the Japanese
government’s humanitarian attitude towards people who could
face various kinds of dangers in their homeland, including
death, regardless of their race, religion or nationality.
However what concerns me in this case, as a native historian
of Burma, is the ethnicity of the so-called Rohingyas. Who
are the Rohingyas? This issue has been a problem for Burma
since it gained independence from Great Britain.
The person who was granted asylum in Japan is Mr. Zaw Min
Htut, the author of a book titled “The Union of Burma and
Ethnic Rohingyas,” published in Japan in 2001. The book
deals with the history of the so-called Rohingya people of
Arakan State, presently called Rakhine State, in the Union
of Myanmar. An article of mine was given special reference
in his book. However, I am not happy with the way it was
referred to. Zaw Min Htut has clearly abused the academic
platform for political purposes, producing a false picture
of the Arakenese history. The bizarre phenomenom created by
Zaw Min Htut and his precursors is the literary wing of the
political scheme that aims at changing the northwestern part
of Arakan(Rakhine) State of Union of Myanmar, the original
homeland of Arakanese (Rakhine) people into the Rohingya
State.
In this article, I want to discuss whether the Rohingyas are
an indigenous ethnic group of Burma or not. Being a scholar,
I want to handle this matter without any prejudice or
misconception. In this regard, I can confidently say that
there has never been such an ethnic group throughout the
history of Burma. The people called Rohingyas by Zaw Min
Htut and his mentors are direct descendents of immigrants
from the Chittagong District of East Bengal (present day
Bangladesh). The British colonial officials called them
Chittagonians in their administrative records. They migrated
into Arakan after the province was ceded to British India
under the terms of Treaty of Yandabo concluded at the end of
the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826. Most of them settled
down in the Buthidaung and Maungdaw Districts of Arakan
State, the frontier areas near Burma’s border with
Bangladesh. This, of course does not mean that they do not
deserve the equal rights that the other ethnic groups of
Burma should enjoy regardless of whether or not democracy is
restored in the country.
Probably Zaw Min Htut is an activist of younger generation.
However, the movement of his precursors brought great
bloodsheds to Arakan in the wartime and the opening decade
of independent Burma. Some Arakanese people of that region
in their early seventies and eighties have still not
forgotten the atrocities they suffered in 1942 during the
short period of anarchy between the British evacuation and
the Japanese occupation of the area. For all these public
disorders experienced by both of the Arakanese Buddhists in
the western frontier and the Muslims in the Arakan proper (Mrauk-U
and Kyauktaw townships), I certainly feel much reasonable to
blame British Governor Sir Dorman Smith’s colonial
administration for arming those Chittagonians in frontier
area as the volunteer forces to deter the Japanese
incursions and create a buffer between the Japanese occupied
Burma and British India. An intelligence report said that
the volunteers, instead of fighting the Japanese, destroying
the Buddhist monasteries and pagodas, massacred thousands of
innocent Arakanese civilians. It also expressed the grave
concern among the authoritiesof British administration in
exile about the holocaust of Arakanese community in the
western fringe of Burma by those Chittagonians [British
Library:IOR : B/8/9].
The Arakanese folk in rural areas again became the victims
of the rebellion which those intrusive settlers launched
against the Union of Burma in the 1950s.These innocent
Arakanese people faced killing, kidnapping, arson, plunder
and rape for a decade after the independence. We should
recall what the great archeologist Emile Forchhammer, seeing
the persistent flights of the immigrants from the adjacent
areas of the British India, predicted:” This land of strange
prophesies, Arakan, the Palestine of the Farther East.” [Forchhammer:
1892: 1]
If Zaw Min Htut calls his work a history, he seems to be a
poorly trained historian. He not only lacks knowledge of
research methodology but also knowledge of the background
history of Southeast Asia. He does not seem to have learned
about the Indianization of Southeast Asia nor that there
were some dynasties in Southeast Asia, who assumed Indian
titles, for instance the Varman dynasty in Cambodia, the
Vikrama and Varman dynasties in the Irrawaddy Valley of
Pre-Pagan Burma, and the Chandra dynasty in Arakan in the
first millennium of Christian era. He is completely ignorant
of folk migrations that have taken place in the Southeast
Asia since the pre-historic times. The forerunners of the
Tibeto-Burman races arrived in the Irrawaddy Valley around
the beginning of the Christian era and some of them entered
the Arakan coastal strip. The presence of Tibeto-Burman
races, such as the Chakma in the Chittagong Hill Tract of
modern Bangladesh and the Tripuris (known as Mrun to the
Arakanese) in Tripura State in modern India, is a proof of
the waves of ethnic migration from central Burma to the
Arakan coast and then to the northeastern parts of the
Indian subcontinent.
Furthermore Zaw Min Htut does not know how epigraphy and
paleography affords conclusive evidence that northern Arakan
owes its Buddhist and somewhat Hindu traditions to India. At
the same time, there is strong presumption that southern
Arakan had cultural contacts with the states of Irrawaddy
Valley or perhaps even farther eastward to Dvaravati [Paul
Wheatly: 1983:184]. The Pyu inscriptions found in Sandoway
District and the silver coins of Chandra dynasty found
everywhere in Arakan State demonstrate the close cultural
and ethnic relationships of the inhabitants of Arakan in
Dynnyawaddy and Wethali periods (c. AD 400-1000) with their
cousins in the contemporary Irrawaddy Valley. There are four
Sanskrit stone inscriptions datable to the AD fourth to
tenth centuries found in Arakan, and all of them tell about
the Buddhist rituals and ceremonies performed by the people
of nobility and gentry. The elite groups of the old Arakan,
like those of other Indianized kingdoms of mainland and
island Southeast Asia used Sanskrit as court language.
Zaw Min Htut’s book attempts to prove that the so-called
Rohingyas are the descendents of Arab castaways from
shipwrecks on the Arakan coast in the ninth century and that
they had been inhabitants in Arakan at least two centuries
before the Arakanese people of Tibeto-Burman family reached
Arakan. This illogical spectulation is based on an account
of the Arakanese chronicle, written by Sara Nga Mei in 1826
[Nga Mei: 1826:so-ob 5-8; so-re 1-5]. Following the
chronicle, R.B.Smart, the Deputy Commissioner of Akyab
District, wrote that in the ninth century several ships were
wrecked on Ramree Island and the Muslim crews placed in the
villages in Arakan [R.B.Smart:1957:86]. Other chronicles
also tell the story of some shipwrecks; however none of them
say that the crews were Arabs or Muslim. The word for Arab
and Persian in archaic Burmese and Arakanese is Pathi. The
chroniclers do not say that there were any Pathis (Arabs or
Persians) sent to Wethali, the capital city of Arakan, or
that they were allowed to build mosques for their community.
All these sentences, plus the word “Arab castaways,” and the
statement that those Arabs were allowed to settle down in
Wethli were intentionally added by Zaw Min Hut and his
precursor, Ba Tha, one of the Rohingya storytellers [Ba Tha
: 1964].
In the field of research methodology, he does not seem to
grasp the importance of primary sources of information in
historical research. Although he does give reference to some
works of the authorities on Burmese history, his way of
quoting from scholarly writings shows an explicit
insincerity. In his bibliography, either the date of
publication or the title of the article or the name of the
publisher is not given for some works. Furthermore, his
style of writing is logically weak, for while he confidently
asserts that the language spoken by the Rohigya people is
similar to the Bengali and Sanskrit, linguistically of the
Indo-Aryan languages family, he cannot bring forward any
linguistic affinities of their language with the Semitic
languages that Arabic belongs to.
Altogether eight paragraphs from one of my articles were
excerpted in his book with a forwarding statement that he
was citing an original text of mine [Aye Chan: 1975:56-7].
However, when I carefully examined them, I found that he
dropped some sentences of mine and substituted them with his
own, using them to draw a conclusion that the people whom he
called Rohingyas had been the earlier settlers of the Mayu
Frontier area in the northwest Arakan, namely present day
Buthidaung and Maungdaw Districts. My research presented in
that article had nothing to do with the migration of the
Bengali people from Chittagong District of modern Bangladesh
into Arakan. The intent of my article was to examine the
fall of Wethali dynasty in the last decades of the tenth
century.
If Zaw Min Htut asks me about the people of Old Arakan in
the Dynnyawaddy and Wethali Periods (c.A.D.400-1000), I will
answer with certainty that they were of Mongoloid stock, not
very distant cousins of the Pyus of Irrawaddy Valley. Every
student of Burmese history knows that the Anandachandra
Inscription in Sanskrit is the only source of Arakanese
chronology before the Lemro period (AD1018-1406) and also
that the information and list of the kings of the
Dynnyawaddy and Wethali dynasties given by the chronicles
contain much legend and are not reliable for historical
research. This is because the tradition of writing
chronicles began in the early eighteenth century, and most
of the works of Arakanese chroniclers were brought to the
Burmese capital, Amarapura after the Burmese conquest of the
country in 1784. The numismatic evidences have proved the
reigns of some kings of the Chandra dynasty as mentioned by
the inscription in the later half of the AD first
millennium. The sculptural scrutiny of leading archeologists
and art historians has proved that the earliest inhabitants
of Arakan were of Mogoloid stock [Pamela Gutman: 2001:5].
The other sources we can rely for the study of early
Arakanese history are the Buddhist pagodas, the Buddha
images, and the variety of artifacts thus far unearthed.
Unfortunately no archaeological evidence to prove the
presence of the Muslim community in Arakan prior to the
beginning of the fifteenth century has been found yet.
However, I do not mean there was no Muslim community in
Arakan before the state was absorbed into British India.
Some Bengali retinues of King Saw Mun (r.1430-1433) who
regained the throne with the military aid from Sultanate of
Bengal were allowed to settled down in the suburban area of
Mrauk-U, the new royal capital. They were the earliest
Muslim settlers who do not seem to count many. There had
been a minor Muslim presence mostly made up of Muslim
mercenaries, itinerant merchants from Persia and Golkonda
and some Bengali captives of the Arakanese and Portuguese
pirates sold into slavery. The descendants of those people
can be found in the vicinity of Royal capital Mrauk-U and
Kyauktaw Township. [R.B. Smart: 1957: 87] Professing the
Islamic faith, they have lived in Arakan since the early
seventeenth century, where their way of life pertains to
their lands of origin. Speaking Arkanese dialect, they never
claim themselves being Rohingyas. They want to be called
themselves Arakanese Muslims.
It is obvious that the term “Rohingya” was created in 1950s
by the educated Chittagonian descendants from Mayu Frontier
area (present day Buthidaung and Maungdaw Districts) and
that it cannot be found in any historical source materials
in any language till then. The creators of that term might
be of the second or third generations of the Bengali
immigrants from the Chittagong District in modern
Bangladesh. R.B. Smart wrote:
“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 [R.B. Smart: 1957: 87].
It is not a painstaking work to write a well documented
piece of research on the migration of those Chittagonians
into Arakan State in the nineteenth century. Plenty of
primary source materials are available at the Oriental and
India Office Collection at British Library in London,
Department of National Archives in Rangoon, and the Rangoon
University Central Library. It will be my pleasure to help
with some source materials from my own collection if Zaw Min
Htut and his colleagues want to rewrite the history of their
people with the objective reality. If they stubbornly refuse
to accept the truth I am ready for a debate in the
publicity.
Title: Who Are the Rohingyas
Author: Dr. Aye Chan
About Author: Dr. Aye Chan
Date: 12/28/2008
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