The military’s decision to change the name of the country from ‘Burma’ to ‘Myanmar’, which was announced on 18 June 1989, caused a great deal of confusion. The military claimed that ‘Burma’ was a name given to the country by the British colonial power. ‘Myanmar’, on the other hand, was said to be a more indigenous name and, it was later claimed, it encompassed all the 135 ‘national races’ of the country. In Burmese, however, the country has since independence in 1948 been called ‘Myanmar Naing-Ngan’, or ‘the State of Myanmar’ and, in more colloquial usage, ‘Bama-Pyi’, ‘the Land of the Bama’.
The two names have been used interchangeably throughout history, and the national anthem, which was sung at official functions and in schools from 1948 to 1989, contained the lines Gaba ma kyae, bama-pyi, do bo bwa a mwae sit mo chit myat no bae, ga ba ma kyae,bama-pyi, do bo bwa a mwae sit mo chit myat no bae, or, in English ‘Until the world crumbles, bama-pyi, the land of our ancestors, our true inheritance, the land we cherish, the land of our ancestors.’
If ‘Myanmar’ meant all the different nationalities within the country’s present borders, how could there be, according to the Myanmar Language Commission, a ‘Myanmar language’? Adding to the confusion was that the name bama was still retained after 1989 for the country’s main ethnic group, the Bamars, or Burmans or Burmese in English.
The best explanation of the difference between myanmar (or more correctly myanma, since there is no ‘r’ sound in modern Burmese) and bama is found in the old Hobson-Jobson dictionary, which despite its rather unorthodox name remains a useful source of information: ‘The name [Burma, Burmah] is taken from Mran-ma, the national name of the Burmese people, which they themselves generally pronounce Bam-ma, unless speaking formally and emphatically. Evidently, Burma and Myanmar mean exactly the same thing, and one name does not include any more ethnic groups than the other.
But the confusion is an old one and, when the Burmese nationalist movement, called the Dohbama Asiayone, was established in the 1930s, there was a debate among the young activists as to what name should be used for the country: the formal, old royal term myanma or the more colloquial bama, which the British had corrupted into ‘Burma’ and made the official name of their colony. The nationalists concluded:
Since the Dohbama was set up, the movement always paid attention to the unity of all the nationalities of the country…and the thakins noted that myanma naingngan…meant only the part of the country where the Burmese lived. This was the name given by the Burmese kings to their country. But this is not correct usage. Bama naingngan is not the country where only the myanma people live. It is the country where different nationalities such as the Kachins, Karens, Kayahs, Chins, Pa-Os, Palaungs, Mons, Myanmars, Rakhines, Shans reside. Therefore, the nationalists did not use the term myanma naingngan or myanmapyi, but bama naingngan or bamapyi. All the nationalities who live in bama naingngan are called bama.
Thus, the movement became the Dohbama Asiayone (‘Our Burma Association’) and not the Dohmyanma Asiayone. The slogans of the Dohbama were (in English translation): ‘Bama-pyi is our country, bama-sar is our literature, bama-saka is our language, love our country, raise the standards of our literature, respect our language.’
Half a century later, the country’s military decided that the opposite was true. All those contradictions reflect an inescapable fact that many Burmese rulers, and others, are still reluctant to acknowledge: there is no term in any language that covers both the majority Bamars (or Burmese) and the minority peoples, since no such entity existed before the arrival of the British in the nineteenth century. Burma, or Myanmar, as we know it with its present boundaries, is a colonial creation rife with internal contradictions and divisions.
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Myanmar may not have as many as 135 ‘national races’, but the country is nevertheless the home of a multitude of ethnic groups, and successive post-independence governments—as well as forces that for decades have resisted central authority—have all failed to create the shared sense of nationhood and belonging that everyone has been talking about since even before independence. And the figure ‘135’ has more to do with numerology than reality, as the digits add up to nine, the military’s lucky number, which also symbolises fulfilment and unity. The army was founded on 27 March 1945, and the military stepped in to reassert power after crushing the 1988 pro-democracy uprising on 18 September. The name change occurred on 18 June 1989, and the first election was held on 27 May 1990. Ceasefire talks between the military and some ethnic rebel armies began in Naypyitaw at 9am on 9 September 2015. From 1987 to 1989, Burma even had banknotes in denominations of 45 and 90 Kyats.
And then it is unclear what the military means by ‘national race’. The concept of 135 (1 + 3 + 5 = 9) national races was first advanced in the early 1990s, but those precise ethnicities were not specifically identified at the time. Myanmar expert Martin Smith wrote in his 1994 study ‘Ethnic Groups in Burma: Development, Democracy and Human Rights’ that the then junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, mentioned ‘135 national races’ but ‘has produced no reliable data or list of names’.
One of the earliest references to 135 national races was in an article written by an unnamed ‘Tatmadaw officer’ in the 7 August 1991 issue of the official organ Working People’s Daily. ‘The fact that there are 135 national races living in Myanmar…is a hindrance to the idea of drafting a constitution based on the “big concept”,’ the officer wrote. The seminal article’s underlying, though not overly stated, premise was that all major ethnic groups should be split into smaller subgroups to avoid recognition of and negotiations with ‘big races’ such as the Shan, Karen, Kachin, Chin, Mon, Rakhine and Kayah (Karenni). Those groups have their own ‘ethnic’ states within the Union of Myanmar, but there was no difference in status between them and the ethnic Burman Divisions, which now are called Regions.
The first official list of the 135 national races was produced just prior to the 2014 election, but it does not, as some military spokesmen asserted at the time, date back to the British colonial era. The 1931 Census of India, the last census conducted during British rule and while Burma was still a province of British India, lists nineteen ethnic groups, including people of Indian and Chinese descent, plus ‘others’.
The 2014 list is a major undertaking of ingenuity. There are supposed to be a dozen different ‘national races’ in Kachin State, nine in Kayah State, eleven in Karen (now called Kayin) State, fifty-three in Chin State, thirty-three in Shan State, seven in Rakhine State, one in Mon State and nine separate Bamar groups. Ethnic lines are blurred in nearly all the classifications. The Shan State list, for instance, has a group called ‘Tai Long’ and another identified as ‘Shan Gyi’. But Tai Long is Shan for ‘big Shan’ and Shan Gyi is Burmese for—‘big Shan’.
In Kachin State, the Hkakhu is classified as a separate ethnic group, although it refers to people living ‘up the river’, or above the confluence of the Mali Hka and Nmai Hka Rivers, which form the Irrawaddy. Gauri is a clan rather than a separate ‘race’. The list of fifty-three national races in Chin State is an actual compilation of various dialects spoken among the Chins. The rest of the racial list is similarly fanciful in its creation of separate races from coherent ethnic groups. And all of them are ostensibly ‘Myanmars’.
But all this wrangling with names and terms is not just a matter of semantics. Apart from splitting up major ethnic nationalities into an abundance of smaller groups, the military has also, somewhat contradictorily, tried to create an entirely new, purportedly unifying ‘Myanmar’ identity.
The Dutch academic Gustaaf Houtman calls this development the ‘Myanmafication of Burma’, and describes it as a move away from the original idea of a ‘unity in diversity’, and the establishment of a federation based on ethnic lines, which was agreed upon between independence hero Aung San and the leaders of the ethnic minorities in talks in the 1940s. The military has now replaced that idea with their own interpretation of the meaning of the name ‘Myanmar’ and what it entails for the various peoples of the country.
It was not only the country that was given a new, official name, in 1989. There were name changes in the ethnic minority areas, especially in Shan State, as well. Pang Tara, Kengtung, Laihka, Hsenwi and Hsipaw, place names that have a meaning in Shan, were renamed Pindaya, Kyaington, Laycha, Theinli and Thibaw, which sound Burmese but have no meaning in any language. The spelling of names of Kachin, Karen and other non-Burmese personalities in official documentation follows the same pattern. It is obvious that ‘Myanmafication’ equals Burmanisation. And that is precisely what it is meant to be.
Even if the correct number of nationalities in Myanmar is closer to twenty than 135, the British still left behind an ethnically diverse country with artificial borders and where the peoples in the periphery have throughout history tended to perceive the Burmese kingdoms as hostile powers which have always tried to conquer them.
No authoritative history of the country’s many ethnic nationalities has ever been written, but most historians accept the theory that the Burmans, or Burmese, migrated south from the Tibetan plateau and settled in the Irrawaddy plain between the ninth and eleventh centuries. The Burmese migrants were an agrarian people who established small, relatively self-sufficient villages but, in the beginning, no kingdoms or empires.
This excerpt from ‘Golden Land Ablaze’ by Bertil Lintner has been published with permission from Westland Books.
Source: https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/military-created-myanmars-135-national-races-numerology/2596974/
