Excising the ‚Mon Paradigm’ from Burmese historiography

Abstract

The mists of Ramanna: The legend that was Lower Burma By MICHAEL A. AUNG-THWIN Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 432. Maps, Figures, Photographs, Notes, Bibliography, Index. This is a consistently ambitious, frequently brilliant, basically successful attempt to reconfigure early Burmese historiography. Michael Aung-Thwin, author of earlier revisionist inquiries into Burmese historiography, sets out in this book to destroy root and branch what he terms the cMon Paradigm'. This is the thesis, propounded by British colonial historians, that from the mid-eleventh century the Theravada Buddhist culture of the Mon people in what is now coastal Burma civilised the Burmese-speaking population of the interior. The Mons of Lower Burma were credited with introducing to the charter civilisation of Pagan in Upper Burma not only Theravada Buddhism, but also basic notions of kingship, Pagan's temple architecture and fine arts, and the system of Burmese writing. And because Pagan provided the foundation for all subsequent culture, the 'Mon Paradigm' implies that Mons were the ultimate creators of Burmese civilisation in its most general sense. Such a view, Aung-Thwin argues, was consistent with the colonial project to minimise the achievement of the Burman majority,1 to exalt ethnicity and to divide the general population along ethnic lines, and thus to solidify British political control. This colonial-derived, ethnicised interpretation, he argues, continues to distort our understandings of Burma's pre-colonial past. According to The mists of Ramanna, virtually every tenet of received wisdom on early Mon-Burman relations is wrong. That is to say, there was no Mon kingdom in Lower Burma prior to the development of Pagan. There was no conquest of the Mon city of Thaton by the Burman King Aniruddha in 1057. And there was no civilising of Upper Burma from the coast. On the contrary, the coast imported basic motifs from the interior: Pagan was responsible for developing a writing system, an advanced culture and