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Towards a Burma-inclusive South Asian Studies: A Roundtable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2022

Christoph Emmrich
Affiliation:
Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Joseph McQuade*
Affiliation:
Asian Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Sana Aiyar
Affiliation:
Department of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Thibaut d'Hubert
Affiliation:
South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
*
*Corresponding author. Email: joseph.mcquade@utoronto.ca

Abstract

Burma, or Myanmar as it was renamed in 1989, is largely ignored within the discipline of South Asian Studies, despite its cultural, religious, economic, and strategic significance for the wider worlds of Asia. Burma is often studied either in isolation or alongside Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, despite its equally important historical and cultural connections to communities, states, and networks across what is now India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or Nepal. In this Roundtable, four scholars of South Asia discuss Burma's erasure within the discipline, the origins and limitations of traditional area studies frameworks, and the possibilities afforded by Burma's inclusion within a more expansive conception of South Asia.

Type
Roundtable Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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6 The concept of ‘disturbed areas’ also has pre-colonial antecedents, a point for which I am grateful to Bhavani Raman.

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56 Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 28, 104.

57 Saha, ‘Is it India?’.

58 Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 9–10, and Saha, ‘Is it India?’, p. 25.

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60 Quoted in Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 109–10.

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67 For details, see ‘Burma Riot Inquiry (Braund) Committee: Final report and appendices’ (Rangoon, 1939), and Bowser, ‘“Buddhism has been Insulted”’.

68 Kyaw, ‘Role of Myth’, p. 207.

69 Chettiar bankers and Tamil and Telugu labour remained in Burma long after separation in 1937. See Ramnath, Kalyani, ‘Intertwined Itineraries: Debt, Decolonization, International Law in Post-World War II South Asia’, Law and History Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2020CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kalyani Ramnath, ‘Boats in a Storm: Law, Politics, Jurisdiction in Postwar South Asia’, PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2018; and Emma Meyer, ‘Resettling Burma's Displaced: Labor, Rehabilitation, and Citizenship in Visakhapatnam, India, 1937–1979’, PhD thesis, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, 2020; and Tin Maung Maung Than, ‘Some Aspects of Indians in Rangoon’ and ‘Indians in Burma: Problems of an Alien Subculture in a Highly Integrated Society’, in Indian Communities in Southeast Asia, (eds) K. S. Sandhu and A. Mani (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993).

70 For details, see Chie Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2012); Chie Ikeya, ‘Colonial Intimacies in Comparative Perspective: Intermarriage, Law, and Cultural Difference in British Burma’, Special issue, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 14, no. 1, 2013; Chie Ikeya, ‘Belonging across Religion, Race, and Nation in Burma and Myanmar’, in The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification, (eds) Z. L. Rocha and P. J. Aspinall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Tin Tin Htun, ‘Mixed Marriage in Colonial Burma: National Identity and Nationhood at Risk’, in Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation, (eds) Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Bowser, ‘“Buddhism has been Insulted’”; Kyaw, ‘Role of Myth’; and Crouch, Melissa, ‘Constructing Law by Religion in Myanmar’, Review of Faith and International Affairs, vol. 13, no. 4, 2015, pp. 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 See Turner, Alicia, ‘Colonial Secularism Built in Brick: Religion in Rangoon’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2021, pp. 2648CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ikeya, ‘Belonging across Religion’.

72 For details, see Ikeya, ‘Colonial Intimacies’.

73 Hindu Outlook, 17 August 1938 and 18 January 1939.

74 On the long afterlives of partition and the making of refugees and citizens, see Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Antara Datta Refugees and Borders in South Asia: The Great Exodus of 1971 (New York and London: Routledge, 2012); Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); and Haimanti Roy, Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–65 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

75 Saha, ‘Is it India?’, p. 24.

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77 For a recent discussion, see ‘Looking Back and Forward—Developments, Challenges, and Visions for the Future of Global History’, Toynbee Prize Foundation, 2020, available https://toynbeeprize.org/posts/ghi-conference/ , [accessed 4 April 2022]. See also Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Amitava Chowdhury, ‘Diaspora as Global History’, in Between Dispersion and Belonging: Global Approaches to Diaspora in Practice, (eds) Amitava Chowdhury and Donald H. Akenson (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016), pp. 254–62. This is to say nothing of more recent ‘planetary’ visions of history that aim to step beyond the global to decentre not only nations, but humans themselves. See Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Tim Harper and Sunil Amrith (eds), Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks, and Mobility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For a discussion of these connections grounded in the urban development of Rangoon, see Michael Sugarman, ‘Reclaiming Rangoon: (Post-)Imperial Urbanism and Poverty, 1920–62’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 52, no. 6, 2018, pp. 1–32.

79 Asitabha Das (ed.), Rashbehari Bose Collected Works: Autobiography, Writing and Speeches (Kolkata: Kishaloy Prakashan, 2006), p. 33.

80 For more about the political imaginary of Rash Behari Bose and Pan-Asianism, see Joseph McQuade, ‘The New Asia of Rash Behari Bose: India, Japan, and the Limits of the International, 1912–1945’, Journal of World History, vol. 27, no. 4, 2016, pp. 641–67.

81 Sophie-Jung Kim, Alastair McClure and Joseph McQuade ‘Making and Unmaking the Nation in World History: Introduction’, History Compass, vol. 15, no. 2, 2017.

82 See, for example, James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

83 Sanghamitra Misra, Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India (New Delhi; New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 1.

84 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

85 The most recent and compelling examination of how liberal ideas of history shaped and were shaped by British imperialism is provided by Priya Satia, Time's Monster: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA: Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

86 For a critique of global histories that prioritize mobility at the expense of place, see Shruti Kapila, ‘Global Intellectual History’, in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, (eds) Samuel Moyn and Darrin McMahon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 253–74.

87 Thant Myint-U, The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2020), pp. 232–33.

88 Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar's Hidden Genocide (London: Hurst and Co., 2016), pp. 24–26.

89 Thibaut D'Hubert, In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Alaol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). For colonial and counter-colonial entanglements across the Arakan-Chittagong region, see also Barua, D. Mitra, ‘Thrice-Honored Sangharaja Saramedha (1801–1882): Arakan Chittagong Buddhism across Colonial and Counter-Colonial Power’, The Journal of Burma Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2019, pp. 3785CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90 ‘Address Presented by Jamiat Ul Ulema on Behalf of the People of North Arakan to the Hon'ble Prime Minister of the Union of Burma’, 25 October 1948, Government of the Union of Burma, Foreign Office, available at http://www.networkmyanmar.org/ESW/Files/J-U-25-October-1948.pdf, [accessed 21 April 2022].

91 Myint-U, Making of Modern Burma, pp. 83–84.

92 ‘Language of Rohingya to be Digitized: “It Legitimizes the Struggle”’, The Guardian, 19 December 2017, available https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/19/language-rohingya-digitised-legitimises-struggle-emails , [accessed 4 April 2022].

93 Matthew J. Walton, Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 144.

94 Francis Wade, Myanmar's Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ (London: Zed Books, 2017).

95 Ranabira Samddara and Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury (eds), The Rohingya in South Asia: People without a State (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

96 For a thorough discussion, see Baruah, In the Name of the Nation, pp. 47–75.

97 ‘Bangladesh Moves Nearly 2,000 Rohingya Refugees to Remote Island’, Al Jazeera, 29 December 2020, available https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/29/new-group-of-rohingya-refugees-moved-to-bangladesh-remote-island , [accessed 4 April 2022].

98 Wai Wai Nu, ‘What crimes did they commit to be sent to die? Where is protection for these #genocide survivors and refugees?’ (tweet), Twitter, 15 August 2021, available at https://twitter.com/waiwainu/status/1426997948706066435, [accessed 4 April 2022].

99 For the history of statelessness as a category of international law, see Mira L. Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019).

100 Michael Charney has pointed this out in the context of the larger divide between white and non-white scholarship, but the ethnic diversity and power imbalances within Myanmar necessitate a more nuanced attention to which voices we are hearing and not hearing, even when these voices are ‘Burmese’. See Charney, ‘How Racist is your Engagement with Burma Studies’.

101 Jacob Goldberg, ‘When the Story Comes before the Survivor’, Columbia Journalism Review, 21 February 2019, available https://www.cjr.org/analysis/rohingya-interviews.php, [accessed 4 April 2022].

102 Mabel H. Bode, The Pali Literature of Burma (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909), p. x.

103 Anne Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Alexey Kirichenko, ‘The Itineraries of “Sīhaḷa Monk” Sāralaṅka: Buddhist Interactions in Eighteenth-Century Southern Asia’, in Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia. Comparative Perspectives, (eds) R. Michael Feener and Anne M. Blackburn (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019), pp. 48–74.

104 Heinz Bechert, Buddhismus, Staat und Gesellschaft in den Ländern des Theravāda-Buddhismus (Frankfurt/M.: Alfred Metzner Verlag, 1966).

105 Hartmann, Jens-Uwe, ‘Heinz Bechert (1932–2005)’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, vol. 158, 2008, pp. 17Google Scholar; see especially p. 4. See also Hinüber, Oskar von, ‘Heinz Bechert 1932–2005: Obituary’, Indologica Taurinensia, vol. 32, 2006, pp. 197202Google Scholar.

106 Donald K. Swearer, The Buddhist World of Southeast Asia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

107 John C. Holt, Theravada Traditions. Buddhist Ritual Cultures in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka (Honolulu: Hawaiʻi University Press, 2017).

108 Stephen C. Berkwitz, South Asian Buddhism. A Survey (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2010).

109 Anne M. Blackburn, ‘Textual After-Lives of Scholar Monks in Later Medieval Pali-land’, I. B. Horner Lecture, September 2011.

110 Kate Crosby, Theravada Buddhism. Continuity, Diversity, and Identity (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014).

111 Heinz Bechert, Der Buddhismus in Süd- und Südostasien. Geschichte und Gegenwart, (ed.) Ernst Steinkellner (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2013), published posthumously on the basis of a lecture series, moves in the same direction.

112 Heinz Bechert, Eine regionale hochsprachliche Tradition in Südasien: Sanskrit-Literatur bei den buddhistischen Singhalesen (Wien: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005) is a reworked version of his Habilitationsschrift from 1964.

113 Heinz Bechert, ‘Contemporary Buddhism in Bengal and Tripura’, Educational Miscellany, vol. 4, 1967/68, pp. 1–25; Heinz Bechert and Richard Gombrich (eds), The World of Buddhism (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1984), pp. 278–79.

114 Heinz Bechert, Daw Khin Khin Su and Daw Tin Tin Myint, Heinz Braun and Anne Peters (comps), Burmese Manuscripts, 8 vols (Wiesbaden; Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1979–2014).

115 Heinz Bechert and Georg von Simson (eds), Einführung in die Indologie. Stand—Methoden—Aufgaben, 2nd edn (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, [1979] 1993).

116 Eugène Burnouf, Introduction to the History of Buddhism, (trans) Katia Buffetrille and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2010), p. 74.

117 Alexander Wynne, ‘A Preliminary Report on the Critical Edition of the Pāli Canon Being Prepared at Wat Phra Dhammakāya’, Thai International Journal of Buddhist Studies, vol. 4, 2013, pp. 135–70.

118 Personal communication with Michael Witzel, Cambridge, MA, 18 November 2017.

119 Emanuel Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965).

120 Uta Gärtner, ‘Myanmar-Studien. Ein Überblick’, Asia, vol. 71, no. 1, 2017, pp. 377–87, specifically p. 382.

121 Feener and Blackburn, Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia.

122 William Pruitt, Étude linguistique de nissaya birmans. Traduction comentée de textes bouddiques (Paris: Presses de l’École Française d'Extrême-Orient, 1994).

123 William Pruitt, Yumi Ousaka and Sunao Kasamatsu (eds), The Catalogue of Manuscripts in the U Pho Thi Library, Thaton, Myanmar (Bristol: The Pali Text Society, 2019). See also Peter Nyunt (trans.), Catalogue of the Piṭaka and Other Texts in Pāḷi, Pāḷi-Burmese, and Burmese (Piṭakat-tō-sa-muiṅ:) (Bristol: The Pali Text Society, 2012).

124 Heinz Bechert and Heinz Braun (eds), Pāli Nīti Texts of Burma. Dhammanīti, Lokanīti, Mahārahanīti, Rājanīti (London: The Pali Text Society, 1981).

125 Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

126 Lammerts, Christian, ‘Review of Anne Peters, Birmanische Handschriften, Teil 8 (Stuttgart 2014)’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, vol. 165, no. 2, 2015, pp. 513–16Google Scholar.

127 Houtman, Gustaaf. ‘How a Foreigner Invented “Buddhendom” in Burmese: From Tha-tha-na to Bok-da Ba-tha’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, vol. 21, no. 1, 1990, pp. 113–28Google Scholar.

128 Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, ‘An Overview of the Field of Religion in Burmese Studies’, Asian Ethnology, vol. 68, no. 2, 2009, pp. 185–210.

129 Michael Edwards, ‘People Are Obsessed with Religion: The Definitional Dissonance of Evangelical Encounters in Myanmar’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2021, pp. 49–66.

130 Andrew Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism. Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (New York: University of Columbia Press, 2021).

131 For example, Peter A. Jackson and Benjamin Baumann (eds), Deities and Divas. Queer Ritual Specialists in Myanmar, Thailand and Beyond (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2022).

132 Lauren Leve, The Buddhist Art of Living in Nepal (London; New York: Routledge, 2016).

133 Peter Skilling, ‘The Place of South-East Asia in Buddhist Studies’, in Buddhism and Buddhist Literature of South-East Asia, (ed.) Claudio Cicuzza (Lumbini and Bangkok: Fragile Palmleaf Foundation; Lumbini International Research Institute, 2009), pp. 46–68.

134 Alexey Kirichenko, ‘From Thathanadaw to Theravāda Buddhism: Constructions of Religion and Religious Identity in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Myanmar’, in Casting Faiths, (ed.) T. D. DuBois (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 23–45, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235458_2.

135 Thibaut d'Hubert and Jacques P. Leider, ‘Traders and Poets at the Mrauk U Court: On Commerce and Cultural Links in Seventeenth-Century Arakan’, in Pelagic Passageways: Dynamic Flows in the Northern Bay of Bengal World before the Appearance of Nation States, (ed.) Rila Mukherjee (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2011), pp. 345–79.

136 Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Southeast Asia as Seen from Mughal India: Tahir Muhammad's “Immaculate Garden” (ca. 1600)’, Archipel, vol. 70, no. 1, 2005, pp. 209–37.