Arakanese History

I am in the beginning stages of establishing the Southeast Asian Numismatics Digital Archive (NOTE: An early proof-of-concept site can be found at seanda.omeka.net. A proposal currently under consideration would adopt the numisdata platform of dedalo.dev, the best example of which is monedaiberica.org). The main objective of SEANDA is to be an ever-evolving authoritative curated database of coinage produced in Southeast Asia from the fifth century CE to the beginning of the modern era. Initially, the project will focus on pre-Islamic coin series from mainland and island Southeast Asia, with Islamic and post-1400 CE material added as organizational resources become available.

SEANDA will include full descriptions of all coin series, types, and varieties produced in the region together with high-quality digital images of the best examples available to researchers. Entries will be based upon the study of institutional holdings, private collections, previous research, dealer catalogues, auction offerings, and archaeological excavation reports among other resources. A full bibliographic apparatus will be supplied, together with links to additional online resources. To assist in their detection, modern forgeries, fakes, and fantasy pieces will be included as well.

Analysis of representative coin specimens and associated artifacts will assist in understanding design choices and symbolism, weight standards and denominations, mint practice, metallurgical content, as well as their function within Southeast Asian prestige, tribute, and trading networks. The inclusion of hoards and individual coin finds will be used to determine the numismatic geography for each series, type, and variety. Seals, sealings, seal impressions, renderings of coin motifs found in various media, copper-plate and stone inscriptions, as well as other related  historical documents, will be included in the database as well.

The objectives of SEANDA are three-fold. First, to provide a standard for describing and identifying Southeast Asia's numismatic heritage by archaeologists, researchers, museum professionals and collectors. Second, to bring together in a single location all reliable information regarding coin finds in the region. And third, to present that information in a readily accessible format. For more information, see USING THIS SITE.

SEANDA is dedicated to honoring the numismatic contributions of Jan Wisseman Christie (1947-2021), Pamela Gutman (1944-2015), Vasilijs Mihailovs (1978-2015), B.N. Mukherjee (1932-2013), M. Harunur Rashid (1925-2010) and Nicholas Rhodes (1946-2011).

If you are interested in contributing to this effort, please contact me:
Robert S. Wicks, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Miami University Art Museum, Director (2000-2021)
Oxford, OH 45056
wicksrs@miamioh.edu

Etnik çatışmalar ve anlaşmazlıklar, insan hakları ihlalleri
ve azınlıklara uygulanan baskılar Myanmar'da istikrarı olumsuz etkileyen unsurlar arasındadır. Ülkede kendi tarihi, dili ve kültürüne sahip 135 etnik unsurun olduğu bilinmektedir. Fakat hükümet Müslüman olan Arakanlıları dışarıda tutmak istemekte ve Myanmar’ın etnik ulusu olarak tanımamaktadır.
Bu sebeple belki de en kötü ayrımcılık örneklerinden birine şahit olan Müslüman Arakanlılar insan hakları ihlalleri sebebiyle ülkelerini terk etmek zorunda kalmaktadır. Tahmini olarak 2 milyon Müslüman Rakhine bölgesinde, birçoğu da Myanmar’ın baskılarından kaçarak geldikleri Bangladeş gibi komşu ülkelerde yaşam mücadelesi vermektedir. Birçok Arakanlı ise kaçış yolunda hayatını kaybetmektedir.

Highlights the problems with the historiography that has attempted to question the historicity of the Rohingya ethnic identity. I had originally published the document with Buchanan's reference to the Rooinga (Rohingya) in 1799 in 2003 in the SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research (it can still be downloaded on the internet) and presented this research at a conference in 2005 in Bangkok on Arakan attended by many indigenous Arakanese and EFEO scholars. The present talk, at Oxford University on 23 November 2017, mainly highlights the abuse by colonial scholars of Rakhine history and their contributions to the Buddhist Yakhaing imaginary and the idea of National Races.When the paper is rendered into an article I will post the text for this talk as well.

« Southeast Asian Buddhist Monks in the Peregrinação: Tracing the “Rolins” of Fernão Mendes Pinto in the Eastern Bay of Bengal », Jorge M. dos Santos Alves (ed.), Fernão Mendes Pinto and the Peregrinação. Studies, Restored Text, Notes and Indexes, Lisbonne, Fundação Oriente et Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, vol. 1, p. 145-162.

In the Shade of the Golden Palace explores the work of the prolific Bengali poet Ālāol (fl. 1651-71), who translated five narrative poems and one versified treatise from medieval Hindi and Persian into Bengali. The book maps the genres, structures, and themes of Ālāol's works, paying special attention to his discourse on poetics and his literary genealogy, which included Sanskrit, Avadhi, Maithili, Persian, and Bengali authors. D'Hubert focuses on courtly speech in Ālāol’s poetry, his revisiting of classical categories in a vernacular context, and the prominent role of performing arts in his conceptualization of the poetics of the written word. The foregrounding of this audacious theory of meaning in Ālāol’s poetry is a crucial contribution of the book, both in terms of general conceptual analysis and for its significance in the history of Bengali poetry.

This book shows how multilingual literacy fostered a variety of literary experiments in the remote kingdom of Arakan, which lay between present-day southeastern Bangladesh and Myanmar, in the mid-17th century. D'Hubert also presents a detailed analysis of Middle Bengali narrative poems, as well as translations of Old Maithili, Brajabuli, and Middle Bengali lyric poems that illustrate the major poetic styles in the regional courts of eastern South Asia. In the Shade of the Golden Palace therefore fulfills three functions: it is a unique guide for readers of Middle Bengali poetry, a detailed study of the cultural history of the frontier region of Arakan, and an original contribution to the poetics of South Asian literatures.

The Jesuit father Nicolas Pimenta's report mentions one of the first Christian missions to Bengal (1598–1604). Based on fresh translations of the chapters in the report describing the Bengal mission, this article examines interreligious relations in contemporary Bengal characterised by the dialectic of coexistence and disjunction. Local kingship or lordship was the keystone in the structure of interreligious coexistence in Bengal. The Christian preachers carried an incompatibilist and exclusivist approach to interreligious relations that was at odds with the inclusivist and com-patibilist approach prevalent among the Bengal lords. The welcome accorded to the preachers by the lords reflected the inclusive approach. The eventual persecution and expulsion of the fathers was due to political exigencies rather than interreligious antagonism.

The name Rohingya denotes an ethnoreligious identity of Muslims in North Rakhine
State, Myanmar (formerly Burma). The term became part of public discourse in the late
1950s and spread widely following reports on human rights violations against Muslims in
North Rakhine State during the 1990s, and again after 2012. Claims for regional Muslim
autonomy emerged during World War II and led to the rise of a Rohingya ethnonationalist
movement that drew on the local Muslim imaginaire, as well as regional history and
archaeology.

Contributors: Robert Brown, Tun Aung Chain, Sylvia Fraser-Lu, Jacques Leider, Patrick Pranke, Adriana Proser, Donald Stadtner and Heidi Tan. The catalogue accompanied an exhibition at the Asia Society, NY.  (Feb. 10 - May 10, 2015). The majority of the 71 objects were borrowed from Myanmar.  Guest Curators and Co-Editors: Sylvia Fraser-Lu, Donald Stadtner

This article makes two main arguments. First, it argues that due to the imperial roots of Area Studies the views of many contemporary states and many scholars on the Rohingya, Rakhine, and Myanmar have been shaped by colonial perspectives. Second, it argues that the Rohingya were erased historically from Rakhine by the British colonial state and this erasure has been reinforced by the country focus of US Area Studies during the Cold War and after. It concludes that societies in the global south may also have to decolonize how they construct and organize knowledge, and what their governments do with it in terms of policy, so they can escape the continual problems caused originally by the colonial administrative convenience.

The name Rohingya denotes an ethnoreligious identity of Muslims in North Rakhine State, Myanmar (formerly Burma). The term became part of public discourse in the late 1950s and spread widely following reports on human rights violations against Muslims in North Rakhine State during the 1990s, and again after 2012. Claims for regional Muslim
autonomy emerged during World War II and led to the rise of a Rohingya ethnonationalist movement that drew on the local Muslim imaginaire, as well as regional history and archaeology.

In 2016, Aman Ullah did me the honor of typing in and posting online on the "Stateless Rohingya" website as an article a chapter from my unpublished dissertation from 1999, entitled "Michael Charney and Muslims in Arakan". Given that this was of interest, I am posting this here, but does not indicate that I will not revise this for publication elsewhere (and I retain full copyright).

This article is an attempt to address the scholarly vacuum by drawing attention to the role of history and the writing of history that have been missing in the current representation of the conflict. It supports the argument that Buddhists and Muslims uphold mutually exclusive sets of identities based on competing claims to the history and geography of the country. The communities do not share a national narrative about Arakan as their homeland, as the role of Muslims is not acknowledged in the Buddhist narrative and the role of the predominantly Buddhist civilization of Arakan is ignored in the Rohingya Muslim retelling of history.

The earliest phase of Arakan history, between about the fifth and the tenth centuries, has to be written on the basis of inscriptions and related material such as coins bearing Sanskrit texts, as well as sculpture and architecture. These show Arakan to have had strong ties to Southeastern Bengal (the Samataṭa and Harikela regions) and beyond this with the Buddhist communities of Northeastern India using Sanskrit as preferential medium of expression. A first batch of Arakan Sanskrit inscriptions was studied by E.H. Johnston and published posthumously in 1943. Since then, this field has moved forward thanks mainly to three articles by D. C. Sircar that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, no further epigraphic material of early Arakan has been published. The Sanskrit inscriptions of Arakan are often in deplorable state of preservation. But even fragmentary material can throw new light on the past, especially when studied in combination with epigraphical and numismatic discoveries made in Southeast Bengal over the past half-century. This article deals with three such fragmentary inscriptions, all previously unpublished. It presents the discovery that the ancient name of Arakan was Kāmaraṅga, discusses aspects of the history of Buddhism in Arakan during the first millennium, and discusses the problem of the chronology of early Arakan based on a detailed palaeographic analysis of the inscriptions published here.

One occasionally meets people in Myanmar who describe with a subdued voice, as if they were about to break a kind of taboo, how there used to be monasteries in Burma where boxing was taught, alchemy was practised, monastic doctors exercised their medical skills, monks sought to obtain supernatural powers and some even engaged in drumming or making fireworks. The wide-spread existence of such
monasteries in pre-colonial Theravāda Burma and
Arakan appears in stark contrast to what little research has been done on such monasteries.....

The concepts of Human rights have become most crucial and also momentous issues of the current history in Muslim as well as western countries. In all respects, the history, as well as the philosophy of human rights, has been to confirm the human reverence, religion, impartial of a nation, race and also colour. Articles, Theories, and also some conduct have been introduced to assure initial ethics and morality.  On the other hand, There is one of the groups in the world has been deprived of their basic human rights like Rohingya refugee Muslims. The Rohingya are Muslim communities who have encountered overwhelming disparity of Myanmar since their countries turn to autocracy in 1962. However, Rohingyas are one of the most oppressed minorities in the world. Their situation has impoverished by Myanmar’s current prejudiced democratization and to rebuild ‘Buddhism’, whereas a newly opened public space has been unfortunately filled with persecutions, unrestricted arrests, using religion to escalate oppression, oppression, and also assassination have been repeated again and again against this minority group. For this reason, Most of the Rohingya people try to escape from their motherland, searching for a new and better life, but most of them die at the sea area and some of them coming to Bangladesh. This lachrymose news made the world commiserate with the Rohingya as well as alleged Human rights infractions in Rakhine State are a reason for anxiety at the world’s community. UNO, EU, NAM, SAARC and also ASEAN international organizations only denounce this matter. But, Most of the Imperialist countries like the US, UK, China, Russia, and India are directly stoking with supporting to Myanmar because of their self-interest to controlling South Asia, Australia, and Africa continents even though Turkey is the main partner of Bangladesh for dealing Rohingya issues along with a proactive approach since 1990. Another reason is that there is a plethora of natural resources in Arakan like iron, uranium, coal, petroleum as well as the maritime line about of 300 Kilometers and also a strategic area for military whatever they want to control itself. However, OIC, D8 and also Muslim International organizations should build up as a strong platform to ensure basic human rights in the United Nations about this. This research tries to show that an overview of the Rohingya crisis from the Human rights perspective including the role of Turkey and Bangladesh. Therefore, this research will highlight that the residence place of Rohingyas like an independent Arakan state might be a proper solution to this Rohingya refugee crisis.

Keywords: Rohingya, Human rights, Social rights, Challenges Facing Religion Especially Islam, Refugee Crisis, Security Implications, Southeast Asian and Myanmar.
JEL Codes: R5, R580, R520, Q58, Q560, I31, I320, I38, K4, K420.

A 19 th century archaeological and historical report on the kingdom of Arakan, in western Burma (Myanmar), contains a list of buildings that are meant to be imbued with magico-religious powers that will be strong enough to defend against or conquer various enemies of the kingdom. This paper reviews the data in the report, and asks whether any of these buildings might have been actually constructed, and where. So far evidence has been found to suggest that two on the list might still exist. Locating the remaining 15 buildings will take further research into old Arakanese documents, inscriptions and architectural remains.

Violence in Rakhine State of Myanmar in 2012 and 2013 caused up to 1,000 deaths and forced the long-term displacement of entire communities. Using evidence from interviews, media coverage and secondary literature, this article explores recent events and considers contextual factors behind the unrest. The conflict is a symptom of long-term historical tensions between Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims, and contemporary political changes that reinvigorated anti-Muslim sentiment across Myanmar. Rigid ethnic classifications that are enshrined in Myanmar’s laws and political system have encouraged territorial attitudes and furthered discrimination against Muslims and others perceived as migrants. This environment generates incentives for local politicians to strengthen group identity and present themselves as the guardians of their electorate. Raised tensions and a background of violence made it easier for Rakhine politicians to promote identity-based voting and to ensure that most Muslim voters in Rakhine State were disenfranchised, paving the way for some local success in the national elections of November 2015. Following the elections, Aung San Suu Kyi’s new government indicated that past policies would continue, rapidly disappointing those hoping for rapid change and demonstrating the entrenched nature of Rakhine State’s problems.

Since the late 1990s, the public representation of the Muslim minority of Rakhine State (Myanmar), widely known as Rohingyas after the 2012 communal violence, has focused on their status as victims of state oppression following an extended track record of human rights violations. As Rohingyas form huge migrant and refugee communities in several countries of the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, victimhood has increasingly come to define their identity as a persecuted minority. The present article argues that, while victimhood does not preclude agency, the hegemonic role of a postulated passive victimhood invariably posits one community (and the state) against the other and hampers the possibility of open conversations about rivaling perceptions of the past and ultimately the prospect of political dialogue. I n today's world, the immediacy of humanitarian crises tends to bar a deeper interest in the complexity of the historical roots of a conflict. The deteriorating situation of the Muslim minority in the Rakhine State of Myanmar, a group now widely known as the Rohingya, is a case in point. They have been presented as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world due to a track record of human rights violations, while the local Islamic history and the emergence of Muslim nationalism at the margins of Muslim Bengal (East Pakistan/ Bangladesh) and Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) has barely begun to inform international understanding of the regional conflict. The present article argues in favor of historical research as a prerequisite both for understanding the nature of the conflict and for keeping opportunities for competing historical interpretations alive. It also contributes to the ongoing question of collective representations of " voiceless " non-Western victims as deprived of political agency. 1 The article supports the argument that victimhood is a form of agency, but, as in the case of the Rohingya crisis since 2012, it bears the risk of encapsulating people and isolating them from their historical context. The Rohingya entered the awareness of a global audience in 2012 when communal violence led to the internal displacement of tens of thousands of Muslims

The policy brief contextualizes the foundational period of the Rohingya movement between approximately 1947 and 1964. It presents political and cultural aims, mobilization, achievements, and implications of the territorialization and selfidentification process. The brief does not aim at giving an exhaustive account, but puts forward a concatenation of contexts and events as a basis for further discussion.

This report is the first by an organization that specializes in indigenous rights. It provides verbatim the accounts of Rohingya refugees interviewed in March of 2018.  1. The 2017 crisis should not be isolated, but placed in the context of a long-lasting series of conflicts that have been occurring since the 40s.  2. From the 25th of August 2017, the Burmese army (Tatmadaw) sought to clear out the townships of (1) Maungdaw and of (2) Buthidaung (both in the Maungdaw District), as well as a (3) micro-region of Rathedaung (Sittwe District) that is adjacent to Maungdaw of their majority Muslim populations. It conducted a campaign of terror that included group executions, rape, atrocities, and at least two massacres. 3. The modus operandi for the violence generally follows a pattern: (1) the army enters into a village, shoots at the villagers, sets areas afire, and sometimes commits atrocities; (2) the villagers then flee and hide themselves in one or several muro (forests, mountains) for several days; (3) the army does not follow them; (4) finally, the villagers set off walking, sometimes for many days, to the Bangladeshi border. 4. The campaign of terror's main targets have been men; young men between 20 and 30 years of age are disproportionately the main victims of this mass violence. Eliticide is another dimension of the repression. 5. The lack of representation, leadership, and interlocution from the Rohingya is a significant anthropological fact that is politically detrimental to them under current circumstances.

The document presented in this article is a quasi-ethnographic account of the religious customs of the Magh (i.e. Arakanese), which was most probably collected on the basis of firsthand observations made in the region of Chittagong, in southeastern Bengal, sometime in the 1780s, or early 1790s. The commissioner of the document is John Murray-MacGregor (1745–1822), a Scottish officer of the British East India Company, who remained in Bengal for about three decades and brought back with him one of the largest private collections of Persian manuscripts, as well as some bilingual Sanskrit–Persian texts, and twenty-two bundles of Pali and Arakanese manuscripts collected in eastern Bengal.

This is a story that will appeal to all scholars involved with the interpretation of rock art. Figures depicted on rock surfaces in jungle terrain patrolled by soldier ants were thought in the nineteenth century to record an otherwise unknown early episode of invasion and resistance – and were widely published as such. A recent survey by a Myanmar-Australian team has made more correct records of the earlier forms and now offers fresh interpretations: the carvings are due to fifteenth to nineteenth
century artisans working at quarries producing objects for the town of Mrauk-U, and they evoke local creatures and architectural echoes of the town and temples on which they worked.

The present essay contributes to the investigation of the historical background of the Rakhine State crisis which, since 2012, has attracted wide international attention for the Muslim Rohingyas.  Arguing that the changes in names used by and for Muslims in the frontier region of Bengal/Bangladesh and Burma/Myanmar reflect the political, social and demographic development, the essay calls for an archive of naming practices as a pool of references and information to be included in the ongoing debate.

Muslim Chittagonians formed the dominant group of seasonal labourers and new settlers in north and central Arakan (now Rakhine State in My-anmar) during British colonial rule in Burma (1826–1948). The consider-able growth of their settlements in the late nineteenth century was the de-fining factor which transformed Arakan’s small pre-colonial Muslim community into the biggest Muslim group in Burma, concentrated in a densely populated border zone. The present chapter looks at these signifi-cant demographic and social changes, and responds to Morten Bergsmo’s observation that the International Criminal Court Prosecution’s legal ap-proach in its request for a designated pre-trial chamber to authorize an investigation into alleged crimes in Rakhine State of 4 July 2019 “turns the spotlight on the demographic background of the conflict in northern Rakhine”

With a coherent general survey of early western Burmese art and architecture and a very absorbing body of photographic material, this volume will appeal to a wide audience. While its usefulness for researchers is limited, for the reasons mentioned above, those desiring an introduction to western Burma will find this to be an interesting book.