Burma in the Southeast Asia Peninsula Games, 1950-1970: Buddhism, Bodhisattvas, Decolonization, and Nation Making through Sport

Abstract

Histories of transnational sports in Southeast Asia remain largely unexamined for multiple reasons. To date, the history of transnational sporting events in the Burmese context has not been explored, making this essay a small but valuable contribution to this growing subfield. Transnational competitive sports, like the Southeast Asian Peninsular Games, performed critical roles in Burma’s nation-building and decolonization agendas. The state used these platforms to dismantle racist cultural conceptions, remnants of persistent hierarchies of colonial culture and politics. Moreover, athletic participation in such events communicated Burma’s sovereign status to the world at large. For internal Burmese audiences the state and its presses developed a transformative narrative of modernization around transnational sports and celebrated athletes as the ideal modern citizen. Foreign notions of modernity were refracted through indigenous Buddhist epistemologies. Athletes were cast into the role of bodhisattvas, authorized to disseminate modern knowledge. Through the National Fitness Movement and the Sports Month Programme, the Burmese state capitalized on transnational sports and athletes’ celebrity, and marketed their vision of ideal, embodied, modern citizenship to the Burmese public. Transnational sports became a vehicle, not only to introduce foreign notions of modernity to Burma, but also to make modernity compatible with being Burmese.