Burmese Literature

The Nu regime (1948-1962), threatened with intervention by both the PRC and the
United States, and its supporters successfully reimagined the Cold War in ways that
masked its concerns and sought to weaken the more direct threat of military
intervention by the PRC. While the superpowers were able to configure conventional
maps in ways that yielded propagandic value, Burma’s Cold War terrain was more
difficult to render cartographically in ways that would aid the Burmese government.
The Nu regime thus turned to the project of creating, through a play, an “imagined”
Cold War landscape. This imagined landscape made it possible to hide from the
Burmese the PRC threat and isolate the government’s domestic enemies from the
global Cold War context. This Burmese version of the Cold War was so successful in
doing so that it would continue to inform the military’s policies after the latter took
power in 1962.

Submitted as my master's thesis at Oxford, this paper addresses a lacuna in contemporary postcolonial and world literary scholarship by focusing on the under-articulated area of Burmese representation in the novel form during the post-British empire period. Focusing on two novels of modern Burma produced in two different historical and literary contexts by Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone, my analysis draws on the theoretical frameworks of Partha Chatterjee and Walter D. Mignolo to identify how multiple iterations of Burmese modernities and identities have been imagined and produced in negotiation with dominant discourses of Western hegemony and the versions of history they promulgate.

Submitted as my BA dissertation at York, this paper revisits two key literary texts that are seldom analysed together in order to draw out some key themes and influences in the representation and depiction of Burma and the Burmese subaltern subject. With the ongoing fundamental changes that are occurring in contemporary Burma, it is now an urgent matter for the field of literary postcolonial studies to begin to draw Burma and Burmese literature into the critical fold, from which it has been relatively absent. As a corollary, those texts produced in the West that have in some way depicted or ‘imagined’ Burma should be re-examined and this paper focuses on a novel produced in the ‘colonial’ period – George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) – and a literary work produced almost seventy years later – Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2002). The driving force of this analysis is the concern with how each text interacts with the realities of colonialism in Burma and their effect on the consciousness of the human subject, on the lives of ordinary individuals; be they European, Burmese or Indian. It also marks out a surprising influence upon Ghosh’s work which originates from Burma itself – Mya Than Tint’s On the Road to Mandalay: Tales of Ordinary People (1996) – and which is suggestive of a potential future methodology in drawing Burmese literature into the critical fold. I argue that it is through a concern for the power of communication and an interest in the everyday lives of ordinary people that both Ghosh and Tint figure human resistance to overbearing political structures, and that it is in this same arena that the poignancy of Orwell’s tragic hero’s failure is felt in its fullest force.

The development of indigenous Burmese historiography was heavily influenced by the Pali and Sanskrit literatures, developing what amounts to an artha-shastra folk political science tradition thoroughly integrated with indigenous historiography. Like recombinant DNA passing traits between living beings, literary lists or “repetitive, chant-like lists of epithets and qualities” facilitated the passage of ideas between literary genres.

The Abhiraja/Dhajaraja story, the most important origin myth legitimizing Burmese kingship, is widely viewed as a central Burmese (Burman) tradition. Based on evidence from available pre-eighteenth century historical texts, many previously unexamined by scholars, this article finds that the Abhiraja/Dhajaraja origin myth developed in western Burma over three centuries before its appearance in central Burma in a 1781 court treatise. This analysis demonstrates that during a significant period of cultural borrowing, from the 1780s until the 1820s, central Burmese (Burman) literati inserted western Burmese (Arakanese) myths and historical traditions into an evolving central Burmese historical perspective with which most scholars are more familiar.

In the 1970s, U Nu engaged in numerous activities in a context other than that of the Cold War. His removal from office, his imprisonment and exile, and his efforts to gather antigovernment forces under his banner all occurred as part of a struggle against military rule and were treated with ambivalence by the major Cold War powers, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China. From that perspective, the dangers Burma faced during the Cold War faded from view and old allies in the 1950s, such as Ne Win, were now long-entrenched enemies. In this chapter, I seek to understand the ways in which the Nu government reacted to the Cold War in the 1950s, independently of the post-1962 Cold War context, under the shadow of the eventual military takeover.

In this article, I will look at some of the Burman texts of Konbaung-era (1752- 1885) Burma and how their authors anachronistically posited in them Burman authority in pre-Burman conquest Arakan. That is, these texts contain stories legitimizing a superior-inferior cultural hierarchy and history of Burman rule into the history of Arakan, especially for the period corresponding to Ava’s height in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This ‘embedding’ of Burman authority, I will suggest, involved creating, in fact, a new history for Arakan of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. According to the “Burman” history of Arakan during these centuries, the Arakanese invited the Burmans to rule their land and a string of Burman-sponsored kings sat on the Arakanese throne. Arakanese chronicles which have survived, inscriptions, and architectural records, however, tell us a different story. These accounts suggest that the Burmans did not rule Arakan at all in the late fourteenth century, and when they did come to Arakan, the Burmans came as invaders who were repeatedly repulsed. Finally, I will suggest, it may have been Arakan that provided Upper Burma with the concepts and people who made the Ava kingdom, and thus the Ava period, what it was, rather than vice versa.

Antologia poetica "Oh foglia appassita del Fiume Mekong ed altre poesie" di U Soe Nyunt - Htilar Sitthu

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In this chapter, I approach Asia from Asia. Some scholars, for example,
have stressed that East Asian history (and by implication, Asian trade) needs to be examined in East Asian terms.5 This will be the second goal of this paper: I seek to contribute to this growing body of work by identifying and contextualizing some historical developments that may not have played a fundamental role in European- ordered historiography, and have thus slipped out of the historical narrative (but not necessarily out of European documents), but would be important to Asian-ordered historical narratives. My case study is the Chinese trade in early nineteenth century coastal Burma.

In the 1970s, U Nu engaged in numerous activities in a context other than that of the Cold War. His removal from office, his imprisonment and exile, and his efforts to gather antigovernment forces under his banner all occurred as part of a struggle against military rule and were treated with ambivalence by the major Cold War powers, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China. From that perspective, the dangers Burma faced during the Cold War faded from view and old allies in the 1950s, such as Ne Win, were now long-entrenched enemies. In this chapter, I seek to understand the ways in which the Nu government reacted to the Cold War in the 1950s, independently of the post-1962 Cold War context, under the shadow of the eventual military takeover.

In this chapter, I approach Asia from Asia. Some scholars, for example, have stressed that East Asian history (and by implication, Asian trade) needs to be examined in East Asian terms.5 This will be the second goal of this paper: I seek to contribute to this growing body of work by identifying and contextualizing some historical developments that may not have played a fundamental role in European- ordered historiography, and have thus slipped out of the historical narrative (but not necessarily out of European documents), but would be important to Asian-ordered historical narratives. My case study is the Chinese trade in early nineteenth century coastal Burma.

European Network of Comparative Literary Studies (REELC/ENCLS) 6th Biennial Congress. Organised in collaboration with CLAI (Comparative Literature Association of Ireland)
Themes: “Longing and Belonging”
Places: Dublin City University and National University of Ireland, Galway
Dates: 24-28 August 2015