By Dr. Habib Siddiqui
As we have noted elsewhere there are other records, including
British, which mention the name Rohingya. Consider, for instance, the
account of the English surgeon to Embassy of Ava, Dr. Francis Buchanan
(1762-1829 CE), who visited Burma decades before the British occupied
the territory.
He published his major work “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the
Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire” in 1799, in the fifth volume of
Asiatic Researches, which provides one of the first major Western
surveys of the languages of Burma. What is more important is that his
article provides important data on the ethno-cultural identities and
identifications of the various population groups in the first half of
Bodawpaya’s reign (1782-1819).
He wrote, “I shall now add three dialects, spoken in the Burma
Empire, but evidently derived from the language of the Hindu nation. The
first is that spoken by the Mohammedans, who have long settled in
Arakan, and who call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan. The
second dialect is that spoken by the Hindus of Arakan. I procured it
from a Brahmen [Brahmin] and his attendants, who had been brought to
Amarapura by the king’s eldest son, on his return from the conquest of
Arakan. They call themselves Rossawn, and, for what reason I do not
know, wanted to persuade me that theirs was the common language of
Arakan.
Both these tribes, by the real natives of Arakan, are called
Kulaw Yakain, or stranger Arakan. The last dialect of the Hindustanee
which I shall mention is that of a people called, by the Burmas,
Aykobat, many of them are slaves at Amarapura. By one of them I was
informed, that they had called themselves Banga; that formerly they had
kings of their own; but that, in his father’s time, their kingdom had
been overturned by the king of Munnypura [Manipur], who carried away a
great part of the inhabitants to his residence. When that was taken last
by the Burmas, which was about fifteen years ago, this man was one of
the many captives who were brought to Ava. He said also, that Banga was
seven days’ journey south-west from Munnypura: it must, therefore, be on
the frontiers of Bengal, and may, perhaps, be the country called in our
maps Cashar [Cachar].” [Notes: 1. In the above account, the word
Rohingya is spelled as Rooinga.. 2. Cachar district, part of the state
of Assam in India, is located north-east of Sylhet in Bangladesh; it is
located between the Indian state of Manipur and Bangladesh.]
Dr. Buchanan’s above statement is very revealing in that it shows
that before the British occupied Arakan and the rest of Burma there were
already Muslims living there who had identified themselves as the
Rohingya, and that it was not an invented term. This observation
squarely contradicts the current campaign by ultra-nationalist Rakhines
and Burman racists that the Rohingyas settled in the Arakan only after
the British occupation.
In his massive work - A Geographical, Statistical, and Historical
Description of Hindostan and the Adjacent Countries in Two Volumes,
published in London in 1820, Walter Hamilton wrote about Arakan (the
Rakhine state), “The Moguls know this country by the name of Rakhang,
and the Mahommedans, who have been long settled in the country, call
themselves Rooinga, or the natives of Arracan.”
Thus, we can draw the conclusion that before the British even entered
Arakan, the Muslim inhabitants called themselves by that name and were
known as such by others.
These revelations about the Rohingya people
from Buchanan and Hamilton should not come as a surprise to any genuine
researcher of Arakanese and Burmese history. Numerous research works
have demonstrated that a substantial portion of Arakan’s Muslim
population was made up of descendants of Muslims who had lived in Arakan
for centuries.
In his first hand account of the Arakanese Muslims, Charles Paton,
wrote, “The Musselman Sirdars generally speak good Hindustani, but the
lower orders of that class, who speak a broken sort of Hindustani, are
quite unintelligible to those who are not thoroughly acquainted with the
jargon of the southern parts of the Chittagong district.” It is not
difficult to understand why the elites (Sirdars or Sardars) within the
Arakanese Muslim society - the descendants of those attached to royalty
and those in high offices - were more familiar with Hindustani, which is
closer to Farsi, than the less educated cultivator class. Many of the
forefathers of those elites came as the soldiers of generals Wali Khan
and Sandi Khan who came to restore the kingdom of Nara-meik-hla in the
early 15th century, and courtiers, ministers and administrators – as we
shall see below - that later attached themselves with the Arakanese
royalty in Mrohaung.
In his travelogue, the Augustine monk Friar Sebastian Manrique
mentioned Arakanese king’s coronation ceremony in the early 17th century
in which the parade was opened by Muslim cavalry unit of Rajputres from
India, which was led by its cavalry leader.
Michael Charney in his doctoral dissertation (under the supervision
of Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan) mentions about the
emergence of Muslim ‘cultivator’ class in Arakan from at least the 17th
century when large number of Bengalis were kidnapped by Maghs and
Portuguese slave traders to work in the Kaladan valley. Quoting
Manrique, he says that from 1622 to 1634, some 42,000 Bengali captives
were brought in by the Portuguese pirates. By 1630, there were probably
11,000 Bengali families living in rural areas of Danra-waddy. The actual
number is, however, significantly higher since there were also
royal-sponsored campaigns to bring Bengalis as captives. Charney
estimates that between 1617 and 1666, the total number of those Bengali
captives could be 147,000. He also mentions about Bengali captives
brought from Chittagong to Arakan as late as 1723 during the reign of
Sanda-wizaya-raza. Those captives were called Kala-douns in the
Arakanese chronicles, “who were then donated as pagoda-slaves in the
ordination halls and monasteries, including the Maha-muni shrine
complex.”
As noted by Professor Moshe Yegar of the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, the capture and enslavement of prisoners was one of the
most lucrative types of plunder of Bengal by joint Magh and Portuguese
pirates. In his article, “The Crescent in the Arakan”, Yegar wrote,
“Half the prisoners taken by the Portuguese and all the artisans among
them were given to the king; the rest were sold on market or forced to
settle in the villages near Mrohaung. A considerable number of these
captives were Muslims.” It is not difficult to surmise that those
abducted slaves and their descendants would identify themselves as the
Rohingya.
Charney writes, “It is not surprising that in the late 1770s, as
observers based in Chittagong explained, ‘Almost three-fourths of the
inhabitants of Rekheng [Danra-waddy] are said to be natives of Bengal,
or descendants of such… In short, despite the lack of complete data, it
is still apparent that the demographic contribution of Bengali captives
to Danra-waddy’s population is considerable.”
Charles Paton, similarly, mentioned the reason why the Rohingya
Muslims were traditionally employed in farming: “The Mugs being
particularly fond of hunting and fishing, do not make such good farmers
as the Musselmans; however, as Banias and shop-keepers, they surpass the
Bengalis in cunning, and, on all occasions try, and very often
successfully, to overreach their customers: stealing is a predominant
evil amongst them …” The Arakanese (Rohingya) Muslims and Hindus, as
children of the indigenous people of the soil, were mostly involved in
wet farming since time immemorial, a tradition which they retained
before and after the British moved into Arakan.
Charney also mentions
about the existence of a small group of Muslims dating as far back as
the 9th century. He also cites Arakan traditions which hold that
ship-wrecked Muslims had settled in Arakan as early as the 8th century.
The Muslim population grew significantly with the Mrauk-U dynasty. Even
Muslim mercenaries were brought in to fight in special campaign or to
solve special problems within Arakan. He writes, “It is unlikely that
these mercenaries had no influence in terms of advertising Islam to the
Arakanese. After all, the Muslim mercenaries who helped restore
Nara-meik-hla to his throne seem to have built the Santikan mosque in
Mrauk-U in about 1430. There was also certainly a small Muslim presence
among the intermediary service elites in the royal city during the early
Mrauk-U period… At the beginning of the seventeenth century, there were
many Muslims in the Arakanese court, including a Turkish courtier … who
seems to have become a kind of royal adviser.”
There was also a small, but wealthy and influential community of
Muslim traders in Arakan. “Even higher status Muslims arrived as
political refugees from Bengal with Shah Shuja in the mid-seventeenth
century. Together, Muslims in the royal city formed a special social
group with a privileged and unique socio-political role than their rural
counterparts enjoyed, with different connections to the Muslim world,”
notes Charney. Suffice it to say that before Bodawpaya’s invasion of
Arakan, Arakanese Muslims (also known as the Rohingya) were employed in
various professions: from high ranking courtiers in the capital city to
non-elites and agriculturalists into the countryside.
Quoting British
census, Charney says that in 1891 there were 126,586 Muslims in Arakan
(most of whom were concentrated in Danra-Waddy, wherein sat the
capital), comprising roughly 19% of the total population. This figure
should not come as a surprise given the fact that in the 1830s, at least
30% of Arakan’s general population was Muslim. For the original number
to increase to the 1891 number, only a growth rate of 2.24% was
necessary. This annual growth rate is below what was prevalent in those
days amongst the Muslim population in Bengal and Arakan suggesting
rather strongly that to grow to that size it did not require an influx
from outside.
As I have pointed out in an earlier work on demography
in Arakan, a rational basis for understanding the size of the Rohingya
population in Burma during the British period lies in Charles Paton’s
data when the East India Company colonized Arakan. As the
Sub-commissioner in Aracan (Arakan), he was able to estimate the
population soon after Arakan came under British rule. He said, “The
population of Aracan and its dependencies, Ramree, Cheduba, and
Sandoway, does not, at present, exceed a hundred thousand souls, and may
be classed as follows: Mugs, six-tenths; Musselmans, three-tenths;
Burmese, one-tenth; total, 100,000 souls.”
The questions that an unbiased researcher, therefore, has to ask are:
what happened to those 30,000 Arakanese Muslims whom Paton called
Musselmans? During the British period in 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911,
1921, 1931 and 1941 or thereafter what was the size of their population?
Ignoring
such obvious signs and records of presence, many Rohingya-deniers
continue to say that the Rohingyas are not an ethnic group in Myanmar.
And in recent months we have witnessed quite a few state-managed
demonstrations, which even included highly politicized pro-government,
ultra-racist monks carrying placards that demanded that the 1982
constitution – responsible for making the Rohingya people stateless -
should be strictly followed by the government so that they can be
removed from Myanmar. Claims and demands of this kind are symptomatic of
the depth of racism and bigotry that has penetrated the Buddhist
society inside Myanmar. Consequently, the latest genocidal campaign to
ethnically cleanse the Rohingya which began in June of 2012 has already
succeeded in uprooting more than a hundred thousand Rohingya people who
are now forced to live in concentration camps, unless they choose to
settle for a life of uncertainty elsewhere. They cannot go out to fetch
livelihood. As al-Jazeera’s documentary film ‘The Hidden Genocide’
revealed, they are starving to death. It is a slow death camp for them!
