THE ROLE OF CHRISTIANITY IN CHIN SOCIETY
By Salai Za Uk Ling
Lakehead University
Culture and religion together form an important part of Chin society. As such, historically these two elements are closely and inseparably intertwined with one another. In modern times, Christian religion is deeply rooted in Chin society. Since the first Chin conversion in the late 1800s following the arrival of American Baptist missionaries to the Chin Hills, Christianity gradually became accepted by a large majority of Chin populations who had practiced traditional animism for centuries. A century later, Christianity has evolved into almost a second culture of the Chin people. Because many Chin traditional and cultural practices prior to Christianity were thought to be inconsistent with Christian beliefs, these practices were abandoned with acceptance of the new faith. The “Christian way of life” gradually replaced the “old life”. [1]
Because the Chin traditional religion was inseparably linked with the Chin way of life, transition to a new religion also meant changing some of cultural practices to make them consistent with the new Chin religion. In other word, they adopted Christianity not only as their new religion but also as part of their new culture. For example, the newly Christian converts would stage what is called “cleansing of the house,”[2] which involved removing of altars and “skulls of animals [they hung above their doors] that have been sacrificed in days past to appease evil spirits”.[3] At the same time, Chin Christians abandoned many of their traditional feasts and sacrificial ceremonies which were associated with their past religion. These were “the key social and ritual activities through which the transformation of identities and communities are accomplished.”[4] Over the last century, the new “identity” or Christianity has become deeply entrenched in the Chin society.
The impact of Christianity was not only confined within the spiritual and cultural contexts of the Chin people. It manifested itself as a uniting force for different Chin communities who had been deeply divided and antagonistic to one another due to differences in traditional clan systems and isolated from one another by geographical barriers. With their conversion to Christianity, the notion of acceptance replaced their traditional mindset of exclusionism, and Christian Chins embraced one another as members of a community of faith in Christ. At the same time, there developed a new self-consciousness and political awareness of Chin cultural homogeneity, thus providing a new framework for Chin nationalism. Moreover, early missionaries introduced modern education and written communication to the Chin people.
When Chin leaders signed the Panglong Agreement on February 12, 1947 to join the newly independent Union of Burma as an equal constituent state, from a religious point of view, it was more than merely becoming a political unit of a new modern state: it also meant having to live together with other religious groups within a greater political collective. As there is a correlation between ethnicity and religion in Burma, “political identification with Christianity, with the Church, gave the Chin a basis for treating the Burman on more or less equal footing.”[5] According to Salai Lian Hmung Sakhong, a prominent Chin scholar and an authority on the study of Chin religion and politics, the movements of Chin Christian institutions in pre-independence period have “inspired the new Chin [political] self-consciousness within the Union of Burma.”[6]
In the post-independence era, through Christian religious associations such as Chin Hills Baptist Association (CHBA), also known inter-changeably with All Chin Baptist Association,[7] and now reformed as Zomi (Chin)[8] Baptist Association, Christianity continues to provide a venue for the Chin to develop their bonds and strengthen their relationships with one another.
Although some of their old cultural practices were discontinued, many Chin traditions were preserved by slightly modifying them to conform to Christianity. For example, because “there was no worship without feasts”[9] in old Chin culture, this tradition is carried on to the “new faith.” “Christmas (Khrismas), New Year (Kumthar) and Easter (Tho) became the most important social feasts and festivals for the new Chin Christian community.”[10] Accordingly, as a cultural and religious practice, gathering and sharing with members of the community are important activities for the Chin people, functions that, in many parts of Chin State and in areas populated by Chin Christians, are now either restricted or disallowed under the present military regime.
In the late1970s, the Zomi Baptist Convention (ZBC), the highest religious institution of the Chin, launched an indigenous missionary program, Chin for Christ in One Century (CCOC), aimed at making the entire Chin people become Christians by the end of the twentieth century. Under the program, the ZBC recruited volunteer missionaries and evangelists from various parts of Chin State to carry out its mission in certain parts of Chin State, especially the northern part, and other adjoining areas inhabited by many non-Christian Chins. By the end of the program in late 1990s, the CCOC converted a large proportion of non-Christians, despite several restrictions and persecution suffered by the missionaries from the Burmese authorities, including coercion, intimidation and physical attacks by the army.
Christian pastors and ministers secure high reverence and respect among the Chin people. They are highly respected as intermediaries between God and the congregations. Even outside of the Church, they play significant leadership role on occasions such as death, birth or marriage in the community. Also, because there are no Chin people represented in the local or state administration under the Burmese military regime, even in a secular setting, they receive high degrees of respect as leaders of the community. Today, their dignitary position has attracted the attention and jealousy of the ruling military regime, making them the first targets in the regime’s campaign against Christianity and Chin people.
[1] Lian H. Sakhong, Religion and Politics among the Chin People in Burma. Uppsala University: 2000, p 340
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid., 342
[4] Ibid., 344
[5] Lehman, F.K, The Structure of Chin Society. Urbana: Illinois University Press, p 5
[6] Lian Hmung Sakhong’s Ph.D. dissertation: Religion and Politics among the Chin People in Burma, 1986-1949, was published by Uppsala University, Sweden in May 2000.
[7] Ibid., 337
[8] Zomi is synonymous name for Chin
[9] Ibid., 348
[10] Ibid.,349
[Salai Za Uk Ling is Associate Editor of CHRO publication Rhododendron Human Rights News. He is also co-author of CHRO's publication "RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION: A Campaign of Ethnocide Against Chin Christian in Burma"]
Friday, September 7, 2007
A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-DETERMINATION IN BURMA:Ethnic Nationalities Perspective
A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-DETERMINATION IN BURMA:Ethnic Nationalities Perspective
By Lian H. Sakhong¨
[Note: A speech delivered at “Conference on Indo-Burma Relation”, India International Centre on September 16-17, 2004.]
Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to speak about our struggle for self-determination in Burma. The concept of self-determination, as we all know, is rather a new phenomenon in world history; it came into being only after French Revolution, together with the idea of the “nation” as the whole people, as the object of ultimate political loyalty, and as endowed with an alienable right to self-determination and separate statehood. When the “League of Nations” was founded after the First World War, the right of self-determination has become an international phenomenon, especially when “minority protection scheme” was formulated on the principle of “national self-determination”, according to which, as Woodrow Wilson put it, “every people have a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live”.
The concept of “self-determination” was a very useful tool for the peoples who tried to free themselves from colonial powers. For them, the right of self-determination was defined mostly in terms of “sovereignty”, “separate statehood” and “independent nation-sate”.
During the cold war, however, both camps of Liberal West and Socialist East put greater emphasis on “territorial integrity” rather than on “national self-determination”. The consensus among the major power was that anti-colonial movement was a particular category of conflict, which provided a potential dilemma and challenge in terms of self-determination. They argued that the goal in the decolonization process was the creation of new states from the territories legally and militarily held by colonial powers. The issue, they argued, was to control over territory within what was, formally speaking, one state.
So, if we looked back the cold war period, it was very obvious that international communities and bodies, including the United Nations, followed the lead given by the two super powers. We can also see that there was relatively little recognition in international law for substantive minority rights, let alone the rights of self-determination. When the United Nations adopted its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all references to the rights of ethnic minorities were deleted. The hope was that the new emphasis on “human rights” and the principle of non-discrimination would resolve minority conflicts. Rather than protecting vulnerable groups directly, through special rights for the members of particular groups, they argued that cultural and ethnic minorities would be protected indirectly, by guaranteeing basic civil and political rights to all individuals, regardless of group membership.
However, it has become increasingly clear that existing human rights standards are simply unable to resolve some of the most important and controversial questions relating to cultural and ethnic minorities. As Kymlicka argues,
The right to free speech does not tell us what an appropriate language policy is; the right to vote doesn’t tell us how political boundaries should be drawn, or how powers should be distributed between levels of government; the right to mobility doesn’t tell us what an appropriate immigration and naturalization policy is. These questions have been left to the usual process of majoritarian decision-making within each state. The result has been to render cultural [and ethnic] minorities vulnerable to significant injustice at the hands of the majority, and to exacerbate ethno-cultural conflict.
Since the end of the cold war, there has been increasing interest at the international level in supplementing traditional human rights principles with a theory of minority rights and collective rights. For example, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe adopted a declaration on the Rights of National Minorities in 1991, and established a High Commissioner on National Minorities in 1993. The United Nations has debated both a Declaration on Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1993) and a Draft Universal Declaration on Indigenous Rights (1998). In 1992, the Council of Europe adopted a declaration on minority language rights (the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages). This new development, after the collapsed of Soviet Union, is the most encouraging sign for our struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma.
On the other hands, as the changing world demands, we have to re-define the term “self-determination” accordingly. After Maastricht Treaty in 1992, most scholars tend to define the right of “self-determination” in terms of two categories; “internal self-determination” and “external self-determination”. While “internal self-determination” is concerned mainly with “collective rights” of a group of people(s) within the boundary of modern “nation-state”; “external self-determination” refers to sovereignty, separate statehood and independent nation-state. A combination of the term “internal self-determination” and the meaning of “collective rights” reflect the fact that “collective rights” is not merely cultural, religious, linguistic, and identity rights, etc., it also includes political rights with its full extend of powers, that is., legislative, administrative and judiciary powers.
Against this theoretical background, let me argue that what we—ethnic nationalities in Burma— are fighting for is a kind of “internal self-determination”, and we are struggling for our collective rights, including political rights and autonomous status for our respective homelands; and we strongly believe that these are our alienable rights but denied so long by the successive governments of the Union of Burma since independence in 1948. So, let me be very clear that individual rights is not enough for us; we need our collective rights as a people, as an ethnic group, as a nationality who speak different language, who practice different culture, who worship different religion and who also has different historical background and, above all, all of us have territorially clearly defined homelands and nations since time immemorial. And the simple fact is: We want to rule our homeland by ourselves. But we also know that we have to live together with other peoples and other ethnic groups who practice different religions and cultures and speak different languages. So, the challenge here is to find a political and legal system which will allow us to rule our respective homelands by ourselves, and at same time living peacefully together with others. In other words, this is the question of how we are going to find a political system which can combine and balance between “self-rule” for different ethnic groups and “shared-rule” for all the peoples in the Union of Burma.
We believe that the best means to combine and balance between “self-rule” for ethnic national homelands and a “shared-rule” for the Union is federal system, or Pyi-daung-suu, in Burmese. As we all know, federalism can generally be defined as an approach to government that divides public powers not only horizontally, i.e. separation of powers between legislative, administrative and judiciary; but vertically, i.e. division of powers between two or more levels of government. In other words, federalism is a constitutional device which provides for a secure, i.e. constitutional, division of powers between ‘central’ and ‘states’ authorities in such a way that each is acknowledged to be the supreme authority in specific areas of responsibility. The basic essence of federalism, therefore, is the notion of two or more orders of government combining elements of ‘shared rule’ for some purposes and ‘self-rule’ for the other. As such, federalism is seen as a constitutionally established balance between ‘shared rule’ and ‘self-rule’; ‘shared rule’ through common institutions and ethnic homeland or regional ‘self-rule’ through the governments of the constituent units or states. The federal principles of ‘self-rule’ and ‘shared rule’, on the other hand, is based on the objective of combining unity and diversity, i.e. of accommodating, preserving and promoting distinct identities within a larger political union.
We, therefore, claims that the ultimate goal of our struggle is to establish a genuine Federal Union of Burma, which will guarantee democratic rights for all citizens, political equality for all nationalities and the rights of self-determination for all member states of the Union. We openly declared that democracy without federalism would not solve the political crisis in Burma, including the civil war, which has already been fought for five long decades. So, let me repeat that for us, the ultimate goal of the democratic movement in present Burma is not only to restore democratic government but to establish a genuine federal union. In other words, we ethnic nationalities in Burma view the root cause of political crisis in Burma today as a constitutional problem rather than a purely ideological confrontation between democracy and dictatorship.
As part of our preparation for the establishment of a genuine federal union, we—the UNLD-LA and NDF, two of the largest ethnic political alliances—have undertaken state constitutions drafting process since 2001. We view state constitutions drafting process as a long term process, through which we are engaging inter and intra ethnic dialogue; we encourage all ethnic nationalities in Burma to discuss among themselves and with other ethnic groups what their problems are and how they want to solve, empower them to define their own political future in preparing for political structures that they wish to establish, and create conditions to safeguard and promote democratic system and federal union that we all aim to establish. We now have seven states constitution drafting committees for the Arankan, Chin, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon and Shan. We also have a study group for Burman State Constitution, a group which is preparing for the future Burman State Constitution. All these state constitution committees are working, helping and networking each other through “Supporting Committee for State Constitutions Drafting Process” (SCSC), a committee formed by UNLD-LA and NDF. The SCSC is working closely also with Federal Constitution Drafting Committee, which is formed under the supervision of NCUB.
In order to achieve our ultimate goal of establishing federal union, we are opting for “tripartite dialogue” as our grand strategy. The term “tripartite dialogue” was first used in the 1994 United Nations General Assembly’s resolution, which called for a negotiated settlement through negotiation amongst three parties: the military government known as “State Peace and Development Council” (SPDC), the 1990 election winning party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), and ethnic nationalities—who are the founding nations or national groups of the Union.
The essence of tripartite dialogue is “inclusiveness” and “recognition” which, in concepts, includes all the major political stakeholders, or conflict parties in Burma: military junta, democratic forces led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and ethnic nationalities. Moreover, the UN’s tripartite dialogue resolution recognizes the 1990 election results which have been denied by the military government for 14 years, and recognizes the indispensable participation of ethnic nationalities in the political transition and national reconciliation process in Burma.
The UN resolution also acknowledges the very nature of political crisis in Burma which, as mentioned above, is a “constitutional problem” rather than solely an ideological confrontation between democracy and military rule or totalitarianism. It is not a “minority” problem, or even an ethnic problem which some Burman or Myanmar ethnic politicians argue can be solved later, once democracy is established. The question of democracy, military rule and the constitutional arrangement with special reference to the non-Myanmar (non-Burman) ethnic nationalities—comprising close to 40 percent of the total population—are intrinsically intertwined and cannot be solved one without the other. This is the meaning behind the call for a “tripartite dialogue”.
As we adopted a “tripartite dialogue” as our grand strategy, we have undertaken pro-active and constructive actions to bring about a peaceful resolution to the political conflict in Burma through a dialogue process. As part of our preparation for tripartite dialogue, the “Ethnic Nationalities Solidarity and Cooperation Committee” (ENSCC) was formed in 2001, and worked hard to co-ordinate the following non-Burman political groupings:
(i) Political parties under the leadership of United Nationalities League for Democracy (UNLD)
(ii) Armed groups which are members of National Democratic Front (NDF),
(iii) Armed groups but not members of NDF, such as Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP) and Shan State Army (SSA-South).
(iv) Ceasefire groups.
After two years of hard works, the ENSCC now is transformed as a working committee of “Ethnic Nationalities Council” (ENC), which was formed in January 2004, at the 3rd Ethnic Nationalities Conference. The ENC has been entrusted with task of fostering unity and cooperation between all ethnic nationalities forces and promotes peaceful political settlement in Burma through tripartite dialogue. It was also resolved that the ENC would:
¨ Promote the profile of the Ethnic Nationalities on the international stage.
¨ Coordinate and work for tripartite dialogue.
¨ Reviving the Panglong Spirit, based on the principles of democracy, equality and self-determination.
¨ Build or facilitate unity and cohesion among all ethnic nationalities forces, inside and outside, including promoting and supporting political actions inside.
I must also mention that the “Ethnic Nationalities Council – Union of Burma” is the largest non-Burman ethnic political alliance in Burma, which includes all the political parties under the leadership of UNLD, armed groups which are members of NDF, armed groups but not members of NDF, and some members of CF. The main political objectives of ENC are as follows:
(i) To end military dictatorship,
(ii) To establish a genuine democratic federal union,
(iii) To ensure democracy, human rights and self-determination.
For peace in the country, the flourishing of democracy, the establishment of a federal system, and the speedy and timely emergence of democratic transition, the ENC is determined to launch the “The New Panglong Initiative: Rebuilding the Union of Burma”, initiative consisting of the following points:
(i) To hold, at the earliest date, the tripartite dialogue, as called for by the UN resolutions annually since 1994;
(ii) To form an interim government comprising of representatives, proportionally, of the SPDC, the NLD and other political parties, victorious in the 1990 elections, and the ethnic nationalities, based on the agreement arrived at the tripartite dialogue;
(iii) The interim government is to convene a legitimate “National Convention”;
(iv) To form various commissions, with approval of the National Convention, to draft constitutions of the Federal Union and the constituent States;
(v) To hold national referendum for adoption of the Federal Constitution and to hold referendum in various constituent States for adoption of respective State Constitutions;
(vi) To hold elections at national level and state level for the formation of Federal government and State governments in various States in accordance with the newly adopted Federal and respective State Constitutions;
(vii) Subsequent to the elections, the Federal and State parliaments (legislatures) are to be convened and the respective election-winning parties are to form the Federal and various State governments;
The ENC does not believe that the SPDC’s 7-stages “road map” and its National Convention will lead to democratization and establishment of a federal union. The sole purpose of SPDC’s National Convention is to sustain a military dictatorship and transform itself from De Facto Government to De Jure Government through constitution. The ENC, therefore, issued a statement on 14 May 2004, in support of CF groups’ letter to the SPDC. Part of the statement read as follows:
(i) The National Convention procedural rules should be discussed and revised;
(ii) Objective No. 6 of the National Convention (military role in politics) is not compatible with democracy. It should be discussed and revised;
(iii) The 104 Articles adopted by the previous National Convention are not compatible with democracy. It should be discussed and revised.
(iv) Law No. 5/96, which was enacted on 7 June 1996 to protect the 1993-96 National Convention, should be repealed.
The ENC is willing to cooperate and find ways to bring about a transition if above are met. Politics is about making compromises and the ENC is willing to discuss options if the SPDC considers modifying its 7- points Road Map. And, the ENC still believes that the best means to solve our country problem is through a negotiated settlement; and we, therefore, strongly demands a tripartite dialogue as called for by the UNGA since 1994.
In conclusion, I would like to stress again that the right of “self-determination” that we are struggling for is what we call “internal self-determination”: which will guarantees our collective rights; the right to rule our homeland by ourselves, the right to practice our religious teaching and culture freely, the right to teach, learn and promote our language freely, and the right to up-hold our identity without fear and live peacefully together with others. I can assure you that we are not separatists. We are for a united Union of Burma, but what we want is a genuine federal union where all ethnic groups in Burma can live peacefully together.
Thank you!
Dr. Lian H. Sakhong
General Secretary
United Nationalities League for Democracy UNLD-LA), and
Ethnic Nationalities Council – Union of Burma (ENC)
2004-09-09
¨ Dr. Lian H. Sakhong is General Secretary of “United Nationalities League for Democracy – Liberated Areas” (UNLD-LA) and of “Ethnic Nationalities Council – Union of Burma” (ENC). He was post-graduate student at History Department in Rangoon University when student-led democracy movement erupted in 1988. He quickly joined the movement and was arrested, interrogated and even tortured by military junta for three separate occasions between 1988 and 1990. He fled from his country in 1990 and resettled in Sweden since 1991. He has published numerous articles on Chin history, traditions and politics in Burma, including his Ph.D. dissertation: Religion and Politics in Burma (Uppsala University, 2000) and his book, In Search of Chin Identity: A Study in Religion, Politics and Ethnic Identity in Burma (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2003). He also edited a series of eight books under the title of Peaceful-coexistence: Towards Federal Union of Burma (Chiang Mai: UNLD Press, between 1999 and 2004).
By Lian H. Sakhong¨
[Note: A speech delivered at “Conference on Indo-Burma Relation”, India International Centre on September 16-17, 2004.]
Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to speak about our struggle for self-determination in Burma. The concept of self-determination, as we all know, is rather a new phenomenon in world history; it came into being only after French Revolution, together with the idea of the “nation” as the whole people, as the object of ultimate political loyalty, and as endowed with an alienable right to self-determination and separate statehood. When the “League of Nations” was founded after the First World War, the right of self-determination has become an international phenomenon, especially when “minority protection scheme” was formulated on the principle of “national self-determination”, according to which, as Woodrow Wilson put it, “every people have a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live”.
The concept of “self-determination” was a very useful tool for the peoples who tried to free themselves from colonial powers. For them, the right of self-determination was defined mostly in terms of “sovereignty”, “separate statehood” and “independent nation-sate”.
During the cold war, however, both camps of Liberal West and Socialist East put greater emphasis on “territorial integrity” rather than on “national self-determination”. The consensus among the major power was that anti-colonial movement was a particular category of conflict, which provided a potential dilemma and challenge in terms of self-determination. They argued that the goal in the decolonization process was the creation of new states from the territories legally and militarily held by colonial powers. The issue, they argued, was to control over territory within what was, formally speaking, one state.
So, if we looked back the cold war period, it was very obvious that international communities and bodies, including the United Nations, followed the lead given by the two super powers. We can also see that there was relatively little recognition in international law for substantive minority rights, let alone the rights of self-determination. When the United Nations adopted its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all references to the rights of ethnic minorities were deleted. The hope was that the new emphasis on “human rights” and the principle of non-discrimination would resolve minority conflicts. Rather than protecting vulnerable groups directly, through special rights for the members of particular groups, they argued that cultural and ethnic minorities would be protected indirectly, by guaranteeing basic civil and political rights to all individuals, regardless of group membership.
However, it has become increasingly clear that existing human rights standards are simply unable to resolve some of the most important and controversial questions relating to cultural and ethnic minorities. As Kymlicka argues,
The right to free speech does not tell us what an appropriate language policy is; the right to vote doesn’t tell us how political boundaries should be drawn, or how powers should be distributed between levels of government; the right to mobility doesn’t tell us what an appropriate immigration and naturalization policy is. These questions have been left to the usual process of majoritarian decision-making within each state. The result has been to render cultural [and ethnic] minorities vulnerable to significant injustice at the hands of the majority, and to exacerbate ethno-cultural conflict.
Since the end of the cold war, there has been increasing interest at the international level in supplementing traditional human rights principles with a theory of minority rights and collective rights. For example, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe adopted a declaration on the Rights of National Minorities in 1991, and established a High Commissioner on National Minorities in 1993. The United Nations has debated both a Declaration on Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1993) and a Draft Universal Declaration on Indigenous Rights (1998). In 1992, the Council of Europe adopted a declaration on minority language rights (the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages). This new development, after the collapsed of Soviet Union, is the most encouraging sign for our struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma.
On the other hands, as the changing world demands, we have to re-define the term “self-determination” accordingly. After Maastricht Treaty in 1992, most scholars tend to define the right of “self-determination” in terms of two categories; “internal self-determination” and “external self-determination”. While “internal self-determination” is concerned mainly with “collective rights” of a group of people(s) within the boundary of modern “nation-state”; “external self-determination” refers to sovereignty, separate statehood and independent nation-state. A combination of the term “internal self-determination” and the meaning of “collective rights” reflect the fact that “collective rights” is not merely cultural, religious, linguistic, and identity rights, etc., it also includes political rights with its full extend of powers, that is., legislative, administrative and judiciary powers.
Against this theoretical background, let me argue that what we—ethnic nationalities in Burma— are fighting for is a kind of “internal self-determination”, and we are struggling for our collective rights, including political rights and autonomous status for our respective homelands; and we strongly believe that these are our alienable rights but denied so long by the successive governments of the Union of Burma since independence in 1948. So, let me be very clear that individual rights is not enough for us; we need our collective rights as a people, as an ethnic group, as a nationality who speak different language, who practice different culture, who worship different religion and who also has different historical background and, above all, all of us have territorially clearly defined homelands and nations since time immemorial. And the simple fact is: We want to rule our homeland by ourselves. But we also know that we have to live together with other peoples and other ethnic groups who practice different religions and cultures and speak different languages. So, the challenge here is to find a political and legal system which will allow us to rule our respective homelands by ourselves, and at same time living peacefully together with others. In other words, this is the question of how we are going to find a political system which can combine and balance between “self-rule” for different ethnic groups and “shared-rule” for all the peoples in the Union of Burma.
We believe that the best means to combine and balance between “self-rule” for ethnic national homelands and a “shared-rule” for the Union is federal system, or Pyi-daung-suu, in Burmese. As we all know, federalism can generally be defined as an approach to government that divides public powers not only horizontally, i.e. separation of powers between legislative, administrative and judiciary; but vertically, i.e. division of powers between two or more levels of government. In other words, federalism is a constitutional device which provides for a secure, i.e. constitutional, division of powers between ‘central’ and ‘states’ authorities in such a way that each is acknowledged to be the supreme authority in specific areas of responsibility. The basic essence of federalism, therefore, is the notion of two or more orders of government combining elements of ‘shared rule’ for some purposes and ‘self-rule’ for the other. As such, federalism is seen as a constitutionally established balance between ‘shared rule’ and ‘self-rule’; ‘shared rule’ through common institutions and ethnic homeland or regional ‘self-rule’ through the governments of the constituent units or states. The federal principles of ‘self-rule’ and ‘shared rule’, on the other hand, is based on the objective of combining unity and diversity, i.e. of accommodating, preserving and promoting distinct identities within a larger political union.
We, therefore, claims that the ultimate goal of our struggle is to establish a genuine Federal Union of Burma, which will guarantee democratic rights for all citizens, political equality for all nationalities and the rights of self-determination for all member states of the Union. We openly declared that democracy without federalism would not solve the political crisis in Burma, including the civil war, which has already been fought for five long decades. So, let me repeat that for us, the ultimate goal of the democratic movement in present Burma is not only to restore democratic government but to establish a genuine federal union. In other words, we ethnic nationalities in Burma view the root cause of political crisis in Burma today as a constitutional problem rather than a purely ideological confrontation between democracy and dictatorship.
As part of our preparation for the establishment of a genuine federal union, we—the UNLD-LA and NDF, two of the largest ethnic political alliances—have undertaken state constitutions drafting process since 2001. We view state constitutions drafting process as a long term process, through which we are engaging inter and intra ethnic dialogue; we encourage all ethnic nationalities in Burma to discuss among themselves and with other ethnic groups what their problems are and how they want to solve, empower them to define their own political future in preparing for political structures that they wish to establish, and create conditions to safeguard and promote democratic system and federal union that we all aim to establish. We now have seven states constitution drafting committees for the Arankan, Chin, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon and Shan. We also have a study group for Burman State Constitution, a group which is preparing for the future Burman State Constitution. All these state constitution committees are working, helping and networking each other through “Supporting Committee for State Constitutions Drafting Process” (SCSC), a committee formed by UNLD-LA and NDF. The SCSC is working closely also with Federal Constitution Drafting Committee, which is formed under the supervision of NCUB.
In order to achieve our ultimate goal of establishing federal union, we are opting for “tripartite dialogue” as our grand strategy. The term “tripartite dialogue” was first used in the 1994 United Nations General Assembly’s resolution, which called for a negotiated settlement through negotiation amongst three parties: the military government known as “State Peace and Development Council” (SPDC), the 1990 election winning party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), and ethnic nationalities—who are the founding nations or national groups of the Union.
The essence of tripartite dialogue is “inclusiveness” and “recognition” which, in concepts, includes all the major political stakeholders, or conflict parties in Burma: military junta, democratic forces led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and ethnic nationalities. Moreover, the UN’s tripartite dialogue resolution recognizes the 1990 election results which have been denied by the military government for 14 years, and recognizes the indispensable participation of ethnic nationalities in the political transition and national reconciliation process in Burma.
The UN resolution also acknowledges the very nature of political crisis in Burma which, as mentioned above, is a “constitutional problem” rather than solely an ideological confrontation between democracy and military rule or totalitarianism. It is not a “minority” problem, or even an ethnic problem which some Burman or Myanmar ethnic politicians argue can be solved later, once democracy is established. The question of democracy, military rule and the constitutional arrangement with special reference to the non-Myanmar (non-Burman) ethnic nationalities—comprising close to 40 percent of the total population—are intrinsically intertwined and cannot be solved one without the other. This is the meaning behind the call for a “tripartite dialogue”.
As we adopted a “tripartite dialogue” as our grand strategy, we have undertaken pro-active and constructive actions to bring about a peaceful resolution to the political conflict in Burma through a dialogue process. As part of our preparation for tripartite dialogue, the “Ethnic Nationalities Solidarity and Cooperation Committee” (ENSCC) was formed in 2001, and worked hard to co-ordinate the following non-Burman political groupings:
(i) Political parties under the leadership of United Nationalities League for Democracy (UNLD)
(ii) Armed groups which are members of National Democratic Front (NDF),
(iii) Armed groups but not members of NDF, such as Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP) and Shan State Army (SSA-South).
(iv) Ceasefire groups.
After two years of hard works, the ENSCC now is transformed as a working committee of “Ethnic Nationalities Council” (ENC), which was formed in January 2004, at the 3rd Ethnic Nationalities Conference. The ENC has been entrusted with task of fostering unity and cooperation between all ethnic nationalities forces and promotes peaceful political settlement in Burma through tripartite dialogue. It was also resolved that the ENC would:
¨ Promote the profile of the Ethnic Nationalities on the international stage.
¨ Coordinate and work for tripartite dialogue.
¨ Reviving the Panglong Spirit, based on the principles of democracy, equality and self-determination.
¨ Build or facilitate unity and cohesion among all ethnic nationalities forces, inside and outside, including promoting and supporting political actions inside.
I must also mention that the “Ethnic Nationalities Council – Union of Burma” is the largest non-Burman ethnic political alliance in Burma, which includes all the political parties under the leadership of UNLD, armed groups which are members of NDF, armed groups but not members of NDF, and some members of CF. The main political objectives of ENC are as follows:
(i) To end military dictatorship,
(ii) To establish a genuine democratic federal union,
(iii) To ensure democracy, human rights and self-determination.
For peace in the country, the flourishing of democracy, the establishment of a federal system, and the speedy and timely emergence of democratic transition, the ENC is determined to launch the “The New Panglong Initiative: Rebuilding the Union of Burma”, initiative consisting of the following points:
(i) To hold, at the earliest date, the tripartite dialogue, as called for by the UN resolutions annually since 1994;
(ii) To form an interim government comprising of representatives, proportionally, of the SPDC, the NLD and other political parties, victorious in the 1990 elections, and the ethnic nationalities, based on the agreement arrived at the tripartite dialogue;
(iii) The interim government is to convene a legitimate “National Convention”;
(iv) To form various commissions, with approval of the National Convention, to draft constitutions of the Federal Union and the constituent States;
(v) To hold national referendum for adoption of the Federal Constitution and to hold referendum in various constituent States for adoption of respective State Constitutions;
(vi) To hold elections at national level and state level for the formation of Federal government and State governments in various States in accordance with the newly adopted Federal and respective State Constitutions;
(vii) Subsequent to the elections, the Federal and State parliaments (legislatures) are to be convened and the respective election-winning parties are to form the Federal and various State governments;
The ENC does not believe that the SPDC’s 7-stages “road map” and its National Convention will lead to democratization and establishment of a federal union. The sole purpose of SPDC’s National Convention is to sustain a military dictatorship and transform itself from De Facto Government to De Jure Government through constitution. The ENC, therefore, issued a statement on 14 May 2004, in support of CF groups’ letter to the SPDC. Part of the statement read as follows:
(i) The National Convention procedural rules should be discussed and revised;
(ii) Objective No. 6 of the National Convention (military role in politics) is not compatible with democracy. It should be discussed and revised;
(iii) The 104 Articles adopted by the previous National Convention are not compatible with democracy. It should be discussed and revised.
(iv) Law No. 5/96, which was enacted on 7 June 1996 to protect the 1993-96 National Convention, should be repealed.
The ENC is willing to cooperate and find ways to bring about a transition if above are met. Politics is about making compromises and the ENC is willing to discuss options if the SPDC considers modifying its 7- points Road Map. And, the ENC still believes that the best means to solve our country problem is through a negotiated settlement; and we, therefore, strongly demands a tripartite dialogue as called for by the UNGA since 1994.
In conclusion, I would like to stress again that the right of “self-determination” that we are struggling for is what we call “internal self-determination”: which will guarantees our collective rights; the right to rule our homeland by ourselves, the right to practice our religious teaching and culture freely, the right to teach, learn and promote our language freely, and the right to up-hold our identity without fear and live peacefully together with others. I can assure you that we are not separatists. We are for a united Union of Burma, but what we want is a genuine federal union where all ethnic groups in Burma can live peacefully together.
Thank you!
Dr. Lian H. Sakhong
General Secretary
United Nationalities League for Democracy UNLD-LA), and
Ethnic Nationalities Council – Union of Burma (ENC)
2004-09-09
¨ Dr. Lian H. Sakhong is General Secretary of “United Nationalities League for Democracy – Liberated Areas” (UNLD-LA) and of “Ethnic Nationalities Council – Union of Burma” (ENC). He was post-graduate student at History Department in Rangoon University when student-led democracy movement erupted in 1988. He quickly joined the movement and was arrested, interrogated and even tortured by military junta for three separate occasions between 1988 and 1990. He fled from his country in 1990 and resettled in Sweden since 1991. He has published numerous articles on Chin history, traditions and politics in Burma, including his Ph.D. dissertation: Religion and Politics in Burma (Uppsala University, 2000) and his book, In Search of Chin Identity: A Study in Religion, Politics and Ethnic Identity in Burma (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2003). He also edited a series of eight books under the title of Peaceful-coexistence: Towards Federal Union of Burma (Chiang Mai: UNLD Press, between 1999 and 2004).
THE ORIGIN OF THE CHIN
THE ORIGIN OF THE CHIN
By Lian H Sakhong
As the title indicates, this paper investigates, by applying a comprehensive approach of ethno-symbolic theory, who the Chin are? Why can they be described as separate ethnic group? What are their chief features that distinguish the Chin as separate ethnic nationalities from other human collectives or ethnic groups? And what criteria make it possible for them to be recognized as a distinctive people and nationality in Burma?
Anthropologists such as A. D. Smith, suggest that there are six main features, which serve to define “ethnic nationality”. These are: (i) a common proper name, (ii) a myth of common descent, (iii) a link with a homeland, (iv) collective historical memories, (v) one or more elements of common culture, and (vi) a sense of solidarity. [1] A causal link between the “ethnicity” and the formation of an “independent homeland” or “Autonomous State within the Union” — which the Chin and other non-Burman nationalities in the Union of Burma today are fighting so hard for — is the search for what Clifford Geertz called “primordial identities”, that is, the search for the past to find the evidence of the existence of “collective memories, symbols, values and myths, which so often define and differentiate” the Chin as a distinctive people and nationality throughout history. [2] However, since I am going to opt for a comprehensive approach, I shall not limit myself within any single theory of either “primordialism” or “circumstantialism” but apply both theories when they are deemed to be appropriate the context of the study as I explain the ethnicity of the Chin.
One of the main arguments in this paper is that the word “Chin” is not a foreign tongue but the Chin in its origin, which comes from the root word “Chin-lung”. According to the myth of the origin, the Chin people emerged into this world from the bowels of the earth or a cave or a rock called “Chin-lung”, [3] which is spelled slightly differently by different scholars based on various Chin dialects and local traditions, such as “Chhinlung”, “Chinn-lung”, “Chie'nlung”, “Chinglung”, “Ciinlung”, “Jinlung”, “Sinlung”, “Shinlung”, “Tsinlung”, and so on. In doing this, I am going to differentiate between national name of “Chin” and tribal names such as Asho, Cho, Khuami, Laimi, Mizo and Zomi. In other words, I shall argue that term “Chin” is the national name of the Chin, and the terms such as Asho, Cho, Khuami, Laimi, Mizo and Zomi are tribal names under their national name of “Chin”.
In this study, I shall therefore define the Chin people as a ‘nationality’ or ‘ethnic nationality’, and Chinland or Chinram [4] as a ‘nation’, but not as a nation-state, based on already well-recognized theories but also based on the traditional Chin concepts of Miphun, Ram, and Phunglam. The meaning and concept of Miphun is an ‘ethnie’ or a ‘race’ or a ‘people’ who believe that they come from a common descent or ancestor. Ram is a homeland, a country or a nation with well-defined territory and claimed by a certain people who have belonged to it historically; and the broad concept of Phunglam is ‘ways of life’, which includes almost all cultural and social aspects of life, religious practices, belief and value systems, customary law and political structure and the many aesthetic aspects of life such as dance, song, and even the customs of feasts and festivals, all the elements in life that ‘bind successive generations of members together’ as a people and a nationality, and at the same time separate them from others.
The Chin Concept of Miphun
A Collective Name of “Chin”
The tradition of ‘Chinlung’ as the origin of the “Chin” has been kept by all tribes of the Chin in various ways, such as folksongs, folklore and legends known as Tuanbia. For people with no writing system, a rich oral tradition consisting of folksong and folklore was the most reliable means of transmitting past events and collective memories through time. The songs were sung repeatedly during feasts and festivals, and the tales that made up Chin folklore were told and retold over the generations. In this way, such collective memories as the origin myth and the myth of common ancestors were handed down. Different tribes and groups of Chin kept the tradition of ‘Chinlung’ in several versions; the Hmar group of the Mizo tribe, who now live in Mizoram State of India, which I refer in this study as West Chinram, have a traditional folk song:
Kan Seingna Sinlung [Chinlung] ram hmingthang
Ka nu ram ka pa ram ngai
Chawngzil ang Kokir thei changsien
Ka nu ram ka pa ngai.
In English it translates as: ‘Famous Sinlung [Chinlung] is my motherland and the home of my ancestors. It could be called back like chawngzil, the home of my ancestors’ (Chaterjee 1990: 328).
This folksong also describes that the Chins were driven out of their original homeland, called ‘Chinglung’. Another folksong, traditionally sung at the Khuahrum sacrificial ceremony and other important occasions, reads as follows:
My Chinland of old,
My grandfather’s land Himalei,
My grandfather’s way excels,
Chinlung’s way excels (Kipgen 1996: 36).
Modern scholars generally agree with the traditional account of the origin of the name ‘Chin’, that the word comes from ‘Chinlung’. Hrang Nawl, a prominent scholar and politician among the Chin, confirms that the term ‘Chin ... come(s) from Ciinlung, Chhinlung or Tsinlung, the cave or the rock where, according to legend, the Chin people emerged into this world as humans’ (Vumson 1986: 3). Even Vumson could not dispute the tradition that the Chin ‘were originally from a cave called Chinnlung, which is given different locations by different clans’ (1986: 26).
In addition to individual scholars and researchers, many political and other organizations of the Chin accepted the Chinlung tradition not only as myth but as historical fact. The Paite National Council, formed by the Chin people of Manipur and Mizoram States, claimed Chinlung as the origin of the Chin people in a memorandum submitted to the Prime Minister of India. The memorandum stated, ‘The traditional memory claimed that their remote original place was a cave in China where, for fear of enemies, they hid themselves, which is interpreted in different dialects as “Sinlung” [Chinlung] in Hmar and Khul in Paite and others.’ [5] In this memorandum, they suggested that the Government of India take initiative to group all Chin people inhabiting the Indo-Burma border areas within one country as specified and justified for the safeguard of their economic, social and political rights.
The literal meaning of Chin-lung is ‘the cave or the hole of the Chin’, the same meaning as the Burmese word for Chindwin, as in ‘Chindwin River’, also ‘the hole of the Chin’ or ‘the river of the Chin’ (Lehman 1963: 20). However, the word Chin-lung can also be translated as ‘the cave or the hole where our people originally lived’ or ‘the place from which our ancestors originated’ (Z. Sakhong 1983: 7). Thus, the word Chin without the suffix lung is translated simply as ‘people’ or ‘a community of people’ (Lehman 1999: 92–97). A Chin scholar, Lian Uk, defines the term Chin as follows:
The Chin and several of its synonymous names generally means ‘People’ and the name Chinland is generally translated as ‘Our Land’ reflecting the strong fundamental relationship they maintain with their land (Lian Uk 1968: 2).
Similarly, Carey and Tuck, who were the first to bring the Chin under the system of British administration, defined the word Chin as ‘man or people’. They recorded that the term Chin is ‘the Burmese corruption of the Chinese “Jin” or “Jen” meaning “man or people”’ (Carey and Tuck 1896: 3).
Evidently, the word ‘Chin’ had been used from the very beginning not only by the Chin themselves but also by neighboring peoples, such as the Kachin, Shan and Burman, to denote the people who occupied the valley of the Chindwin River. While the Kachin and Shan still called the Chin as ‘Khyan’ or ‘Khiang’ or ‘Chiang’, the Burmese usage seems to have changed dramatically from ‘Khyan’ (c†if;) to ‘Chin’ (csif;). [6] In stone inscriptions, erected by King Kyanzittha (1084–1113), the name Chin is spelled as ‘Khyan’ ( c†if; ) (Luce 1959: 75–109). These stone inscriptions are the strongest evidence indicating that the name Chin was in use before the eleventh century.
Prior to British annexation in 1896, at least seventeen written records existed in English regarding research on what was then called the ‘Chin-Kuki linguistic people’. These early writings variously referred to what is now called and spelled ‘Chin’ as ‘Khyeng’, ‘Khang’, ‘Khlang’, ‘Khyang’, ‘Khyan’, ‘Kiayn’, ‘Chiang’, ‘Chi’en’, ‘Chien’, and so on. Father Sangermono, an early Western writer, to note the existence of the hill tribes of Chin in the western mountains of Burma, lived in Burma as a Catholic missionary from 1783 to 1796. His book The Burmese Empire, published in 1833 one hundred years after his death, spells the name Chin as ‘Chien’ and the Chin Hills as the ‘Chein Mountains’. He thus recorded:
To the east of Chein Mountain between 20’30’ and 21’30’ latitude is a petty nation called ‘Jo’ (Yaw). They are supposed to have been Chien, who in the progress of time, have become Burmanized, speaking their language, although corruptly, and adopting their customs. [7]
In Assam and Bengal, the Chin tribes – particularly the Zomi tribe who live close to that area – were known as ‘Kuki’. The term Kuki is Bengali word, meaning ‘hill-people or highlanders’, which was, as Reid described in 1893:
(O)riginally applied to the tribe or tribes occupying the tracks immediately to the south of Cachar. It is now employed in a comprehensive sense, to indicate those living to the west of the Kaladyne River, while to the west they are designated as Shendus. On the other hand, to anyone approaching them from Burma side, the Shendus would be known as Chiang, synonymous with Khyen, and pronounced as ‘Chin’ (Reid 1893: 238).
The designation of Kuki was seldom used by the Chin people themselves, not even by the Zomi tribe in what is now Manipur State of India, for whom the word is intended. Soppit, who was Assistant Commissioner of Burma and later Sub-Divisional Officer in the North Cacher Hills, Assam, remarked in 1893 in his study of Lushai-Kuki:
The designation of Kuki is never used by the tribes themselves, though many of them answer to it when addressed, knowing it to be the Bengali term for their people (Soppit 1893: 2).
Shakespear, an authority on the Chin, said in 1912 that:
The term Kuki has come to have a fairly definite meaning, and we now understand by it certain ... clans, with well marked characteristics, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman stock. On the Chittagong border, the term is loosely applied to most of the inhabitants of the interior hills beyond the Chittagong Hills Tracks; in the Cachar it generally means some families of the Thado and Khuathlang clans, locally distinguished as new Kuki and old Kuki. Now-a-days, the term is hardly employed, having been superseded by Lushai in the Chin Hills, and generally on the Burma border all these clans are called Chin. These Kuki are more closely allied to the Chakmas, and the Lushai are more closely to their eastern neighbours who are known as Chin.
He concluded by writing:
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Kukis, Lushais and Chins are all of the same race (Shakespear 1912: 8).
In 1826, almost one hundred years before Shakespear published his book, Major Snodgrass, who contacted the Chin people from the Burma side, had already confirmed that Kukis and Lushai were of the Chin nation, but he spelled Chin as Kiayn. He also mentioned Chinram as ‘Independent Kiayn Country’ (Snodgrass 1827: 320, on map) in his The Burmese War, in which he detailed the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1824–26. Sir Arthur Phayer still spelt Chindwin as ‘Khyendweng’ in his History of Burma, first published in 1883 (Phayer 1883: 7). It was in 1891 that the term ‘Chin’, to be written as ‘CHIN’, was first used by Major W.G. Hughes in his military report, and then by A.G.E. Newland in his book The Images of War (1894); the conventional spelling for the name became legalized as the official term by The Chin Hills Regulation in 1896.
The Myth of Common Descent
Traditional accounts of the origin of the Chin people have been obscured by myths and mythologies that together with symbols, values and other collective memories, are important elements of what Clifford Geertz called ‘primordial identities’, which so often define and differentiate the Chin as a distinctive people and nationality throughout history (Geertz 1973: 255–310). As noted already, one such myth handed down through generations describes how the Chin ‘came out of the bowels of the earth or a cave called Chin-lung or Cin-lung’ (Gangte 1993: 14). According to some it was located somewhere in China (Cf. Zawla 1976: 2), others claimed it to be in Tibet (Cf. Ginzathang 1973: 7) and some suggested that it must be somewhere in the Chindwin Valley since the literal meaning of Chindwin is ‘the cave or the hole of the Chin’ (Gangte 1993: 14). I shall come back to the debate on the location of ‘Chinlung’, but here I shall concentrate only on the traditional account of the origin of the Chin.
Almost all of the Chin tribes and clans have promulgated similar but slightly different versions of the myth, which brings the ancestors of the Chin out from the hole or the bowels of earth. The Ralte clan/group of the Mizo tribe, also known as the Lushai, who now live in Mizoram State in India, have a tradition now generally known as ‘Chinlung tradition’ that brings their progenitors from the bowels of the earth. The story was translated into English and recorded by Lt Col J. Shakespear in 1912 as follows:
[Once upon a time when the great darkness called Thimzing fell upon the world,] many awful things happened. Everything except the skulls of animals killed in the chase became alive, dry wood revived, even stones become alive and produced leaves, so men had nothing to burn. The successful hunters who had accumulated large stocks of trophies of their skill were able to live using them as fuel. After this terrible catastrophe, Thimzing, the world was again re-peopled by men and women issuing from the hole of the earth called ‘Chhinlung’ (1912: 93–94).
Shakespear described another similar story:
The place whence all people sprang is called ‘Chinglung’. All the clans came out of that place. The two Ralte came out together, and began at once chattering, and this made Pathian [The Supreme God] think there were too many men, and so he shut down the stone (1912: 94).
Another similar story of the origin of the Chin, also connected with the “Chinlung tradition” as handed down among the Mara group of the Laimi tribe – also known as the Lakher – was recorded by N. E. Parry in 1932:
Long ago, before the great darkness called Khazanghra fell upon the world, men all came out of the hole below the earth. As the founder of each Mara group came out of the earth he call his name. Tlongsai called out, ‘I am Tlongsai’; Zeuhnang called out, ‘I am Zeuhnang’; Hawthai called out, ‘I am Hawthai’; Sabeu called out, ‘I am Sabeu’; Heima called out, ‘I am Heima.’ Accordingly God thought that a very large number of Mara had come out and stopped the way. When the Lushai came out of the hole, however, only the first one to come out called out, ‘I am Lushai’, and all the rest came out silently. God, only hearing one man announce his arrival, thought that only one Lushai had come out, and gave them a much longer time, during which Lushais were pouring out of the hole silently in great numbers. It is for this reason that Lushais to this day are more numerous than Maras. After all men had come out of the hole in the earth God made their languages different, and they remain so to this day (Parry 1932: 4).
All sources of Chin traditions maintain that their ancestors originated from ‘Chinlung’ or ‘Cin-lung’. Sometimes the name for ‘Chinlung’ or ‘Cin-lung’ differs, depending on the specific Chin dialect – such as Khul, Khur and Lung-kua, – but it always means ‘cave’ or ‘hole’ no matter what the dialect. The reason Chin-lung was abandoned, however, varies from one source to another. Depending on the dialect and local traditions, some said that Chin-lung was abandoned as a result of an adventure, or because of the great darkness called Khazanghra, Thimzing or Chunmui. In contrast to the stories above, some traditions maintain that their original settlement was destroyed by a flood. The Laimi tribe from the Haka and Thlantlang areas had a very well-known myth called Ngun Nu Tuanbia, which related the destruction of human life on Earth by the flood. The Zophei also had their own version of the story about the flood, called Tuirang-aa-pia (literal meaning: ‘white water/river is pouring out or gushing’), which destroyed their original settlement. The story goes as follows:
Once upon a time, all the humankind in this world lived together in one village. In the middle of the village there was a huge stone, and underneath the stone was a cave that in turn was connected with the endless sea of water called Tipi-thuam-thum. In this cave dwelt a very large snake called Pari-bui or Limpi, which seized one of the village children every night and ate them. The villagers were in despair at the depredations committed by the snake, so they made a strong hook, tied it on the rope, impaled a dog on the hook and threw it to the snake, which swallowed the dog and with it the fish hook. The villagers then tried to pull out the snake, but with all their efforts they could not do so, and only succeeded in pulling out enough of the snake to go five times round the rock at the mouth of the hole, and then, as they could not pull out any more of the snake, they cut off the part that they pulled out, and the snake’s tail and the rest of the body fell back into the deep cave with a fearful noise. From that night water came pouring out of the snake’s hole and covered the whole village and destroyed the original settlement of mankind. Since then people were scattered to every corner of the world and began to speak different languages. And, it was this flood, which drove the ancestors of the Chin proper to take refuge in the Chin Hills (Ceu Mang 1981: 12–19).
Many Chin tribes called the Chindwin River the ‘White River’, Tui-rang, Tuikhang, Tirang, Tuipui-ia, etc; all have the same meaning but differ only in dialect term. Thus modern historians, not least Hutton, Sing Kho Khai and Gangte, believe that the traditional account of the flood story, which destroyed the Chin’s original settlement, might be the flood of the Chindwin River. They therefore claim that the Chin’s original settlement was in the Chindwin Valley and nowhere else.
The Chin Concept of Ram
For the Chin, Miphun cannot exist without Ram. They therefore define themselves as a Miphun with a strong reference to Ram – the original homeland, a particular locus and territory, which they all collectively claim to be their own. At the same time, they identify members of a community as ‘being from the same original homeland’ (A. Smith 1986: 29). The inner link between the concepts of Miphun and Ram was strengthened in Chin society through the worship of Khua-hrum at the Tual ground. As Anthony Smith convincingly argues, ‘Each homeland possesses a center or centers that are deemed to be “sacred” in a religio-ethnic sense’. In Chin society, the Tual grounds, the site of where they worshipped the guardian god Khuahrum, were the sacred centers, which stood as protectors of both men and land.
For the Chin, the concept of Ram, or what Anthony Smith calls the ‘ethnic homeland’, refers not only to the territory in which they are residing, i.e. present Chinram, but also the ‘original homeland’ where their ancestors once lived as a people and a community. What matters most in terms of their association with the original homeland is that ‘it has a symbolic geographical center, a sacred habitat, a “homeland”, to which the people may symbolically return, even when its members are scattered ... and have lost their [physical] homeland centuries ago’ (ibid.: 28). Ethnicity does not cease to exist simply because the Chin were expelled from their original homeland, or because they are artificially divided between different countries, ‘for ethnicity is a matter of myths, memories, values and symbols, and not material possessions or political powers, both of which require a habitat for their realization’ (ibid.). Thus the Chin concept of Ram as ‘territory’ and ‘original homeland’ are relevant to Miphun. The relevance of the ‘original homeland’ is:
Not only because it is actually possessed, but also because of an alleged and felt symbiosis between a certain piece of earth and ‘its’ community. Again, poetic and symbolic qualities possess greater potency than everyday attributes; a land of dream is far more significant than any actual terrain (ibid.: 28).
I shall therefore trace the history of the Chin’s settlements, not only in present Chinram but also in their original ‘homeland’ in the Chindwin Valley, in the following sections.
Migration Patterns
Chin tradition maintains that the ancestors of the Chin people originated from a cave called ‘Chinlung’, but in the absence of written documents, it is difficult to locate the exact site of ‘Chinlung’. Scholars and researchers therefore give various opinions as to its location.
K. Zawla, a Mizo historian from the Indian side of Chinram, or West Chinram, suggests that the location of Chinlung might be somewhere in modern China, and the ‘Ralte group [of the Mizo tribe] were probably one of the first groups to depart from Chhinlung’ (Zawla 1976: 2). Here, Zawla quoted Shakespeare and accepted the Chin legend as historical fact. He also claimed that the Chin came out of Chinlung in about 225 B.C., during the reign of Emperor Ch’in Shih Huang, whose cruelty was then at its height during construction of the Great Wall. Zawla relates the story of the Ch’in ruling dynasty in Chinese history in a fascinating manner. He uses local legends known as Tuanbia (literally: ‘stories or events from the old-days’) and many stories which are recorded by early travelers and British administrators in Chinram, as well as modern historical research on ancient China. Naturally, this kind of compound story-telling has little or no value in a historical sense, but is nevertheless important in terms of socially reconstructing collective memories as identity-creating-resources.
Other theories have been advanced in this connection, more noticeably by Sing Kho Khai (1984) and Chawn Kio (1993). Both believe that the Chin ancestors are either the Ch’ing or Ch’iang in Chinese history, which are ‘old generic designations for the non-Chinese tribes of the Kansu-Tibetan frontier, and indicate the Ch’iang as a shepherd people, the Ch’ing as a jungle people’ (Sing Kho Khai 1984: 53). Thus, according to Chinese history, both the Ch’iang and Ch’ing were regarded as ‘barbarian tribes’ (Cited in Sing Kho Khai 1984: 21). Gin Za Tuang – in a slightly different manner than Zawla, Sing Kho Khai and Chawn Kio – claims that the location of ‘Chinlung’ was believed to be in Tibet (Cf. Ginzathang 1973: 5; Sing Kho Khai 1984: 10; Gangte 1993: 14). Gin Za Tuang, nevertheless, maintains that the Chin ancestors were Ch’iang, but he mentions nothing about the Ch’ing.
Gin Za Thang simply follows Than Tun’s and G. H. Luce’s theory of the origin of Tibeto-Burmans and other groups of humans, believed to be the ancestors of the Southeast Asian peoples. According to Professors Than Tun and Gordon Luce, [8] the Ch’iang were not just the ancestors of the Chin but of the entire Tibeto-Burman group, and they ‘enjoyed a civilization as advanced as the Chinese, who disturbed them so much that they moved south’ (Than Tun 1988: 3). Regarding this, Professor Gordon Luce says:
With the expansion of China, the Ch’iang had either the choice to be absorbed or to become nomads in the wilds. It was a hard choice, between liberty and civilization. Your ancestors chose liberty; and they must have gallantly maintained it. But the cost was heavy. It cost them 2000 years of progress. If the Ch’iang of 3000 BC were equals of the Chinese civilization, the Burmans [and the Chin] of 700 AD were not nearly as advanced as the Chinese in 1300 BC (Cited in Than Tun 1988: 4).
Before they moved to the wilderness along the edges of western China and eastern Tibet, the ancient homelands of Ch’iang and all other Tibeto-Burman groups, according to Enriquez, lay somewhere in the northwest, possibly in Kansu, between the Gobi and northwestern Tibet (Eriquez 1932: 7–8). It is now generally believed that the Tibeto-Burman group and other Mongoloid stock who now occupy Southeast Asia and Northeast India, migrated in three waves in the following chronological order:
The Mon-Khmer (Talaing, Palaung, En Raing, Pa-o, Khasi, Annimite.)
The Tibeto-Burman (Pyu, Kanzan, Thet, Burman, Chin, Kachin, Naga, Lolo.)
The Tai-Chinese (Shan, Saimese, Karen.)
The Tibeto-Burman group initially moved toward the west and thereafter subdivided themselves into several groups. They follow different routes, one group reaching northern Tibet, where some stayed behind, while others moved on until they reached Burma in three waves. These people were:
The Chin-Kachin-Naga group
The Burman and Old-Burman (Pyu, Kanzan, Thet) group
The Lolo group (Enriquez 1932: 8).
This migration pattern theory, as mentioned above, has mainly been adopted by historians like Than Tun and Gordon Luce. However, anthropologists like Edmund Leach believe that ‘the hypothesis that the Southeast Asian peoples as known today immigrated from the region of China is a pure myth’ (Lehman 1963: 22). The main difference between the historical approach and the anthropological approach is that while historians begin their historical reconstruction with the origins and immigration of the ancestors, anthropologists start with ‘the development within the general region of Burma of symbiotic socio-cultural systems: civilizations and hill societies’ (ibid.: 22). However, both historians and anthropologists agree – as historical linguistics, archaeology and racial relationships definitely indicate – that the ancestors of these various peoples did indeed come from the north. But, anthropologists maintain their argument by saying that, ‘they did not come as the social and cultural units we know today and cannot be identified with any particular groups of today’ (ibid.: 23). Their main thesis is that the hill people and plain’s people are now defined by their mutual relationships in present sites, because, for anthropologists, ethnicity was constructed within the realm of social interaction between neighbouring reference groups.
The anthropological approach could be very helpful, especially when we investigate the pre-historical context of the Chin people, with no written documents existing. Thus, based on ethnic and linguistic differentiation, not on written documents, Lehman demonstrated that ‘the ancestors of the Chin and the Burman must have been distinct from each other even before they first appeared in Burma’. And he continues:
Undoubtedly, these various ancestral groups were descended in part from groups immigrating into present Burma, starting about the beginning of the Christian era. But it is also probable that some of these groups were in Burma in the remote past, long before a date indicated by any present historical evidence. We are not justified, however, in attaching more than linguistic significance to the terms ‘Chin’ and ‘Burman’ at such dates.
And he concludes, by saying:
Chin history begins after A.D. 750, with the development of Burman civilization and Chin interaction with it (ibid.: 22).
Chin anthropologists like T. S. Gangte seem eager to agree with Leach and Lehman. Like Leach and Lehman, Gangte rejects hypothetical theories proposed by Zawla and Gin Za Tuang, who locate ‘Chinlung’ somewhere in China and Tibet, respectively, as myths. ‘In the absence of any written corroboration or the existence of historical evidence to support them,’ he said, ‘such hypothetical theories are considered highly subjective and conjectural. They are, therefore, taken with a pinch of salt. They remain only as legends’ (Gangte 1993: 17). He nevertheless accepted the ‘Chinlung’ tradition as the origin of the Chin and even claims that the Chindwin Valley is where Chin history begins. Similar to Gangte, the ‘Khuangsai source of Chin tradition mentions that the location of Chin-lung was somewhere in the Chindwin area’ (Sing Kho Khai 1984: 10).
The Chin’s Homeland of Chindwin
Professor Than Tun claims that Tibeto-Burman groups of the Burman came down into present Burma via the Salween and Nmai’kha Valleys, and reached the northern Shan State before AD 713. But before they were able to settle themselves in the delta area of the Irrawaddy Valley, ‘the rise of Nanchao checked their movements soon after 713’ (Than Tun 1988: 3). The Nanchao made continuous war with neighbouring powers such as the Pyu who had founded the Halin Kingdom in central Burma. In 835 the Nanchao plundered the delta areas of Burma, and in 863 they went further east to Hanoi. However, by the end of the ninth century the Nanchao power collapsed because, according to Than Tun, they had exhausted themselves. Only after the collapse of the Nanchao were the Burman able to move further South into the plains of Burma.
The Chin, according to Professor Luce, descended from ‘western China and eastern Tibet into the South via the Hukong Valley’ (1959 (b): 75–109), a completely different route than the Burman had taken. Thus Lehman’s theory is quite convincing that the ancestors of the Chin and the Burman were distinct from each other even when they first appeared in Burma. There is ample evidence that the Chin were the first to settle in the Chindwin Valley. The Pagan inscriptions dating from the eleventh century onward refer to the Chin of the Chindwin Valley. There is also persistent reference in the legends of almost all the Chin tribes to a former home in the Chindwin Valley. Chin myths uniformly refer to the ruling lineage when speaking of the original homeland in the valley (Cf. Lal Thang Lian 1976: 9). Archeological evidence supports this interpretation. [9] Sing Kho Khai therefore claims that:
The literal meaning of the name ‘Chindwin’ definitely suggests that the Chindwin area was primarily inhabited by a tribe called the Chin (1984: 36).
Vumson goes even further by saying:
When the Burman descended to the plains of central Burma, during the ninth century, they [the Chin people] were already in the Chindwin Valley (1986: 35).
Concerning historical evidence of the Chin settlement in the Chindwin Valley, reliable sources come from the Burman inscriptions erected by King Kyanzzittha and other kings during the peak of the Pagan dynasty. According to Professor Luce, an expert on Pagan inscription, ‘Chins and Chindwin (‘Hole of the Chins’) are mentioned in Pagan inscriptions from the thirteenth century’ (Luce 1959 (a): 19–31). The earliest Pagan inscriptions put the Burman in upper Burma in roughly the middle of the ninth century. Professor Luce suggested that the Chin settlement in the Chindwin Valley began in the middle of the eighth century, while allowing for the possibility of a date as far back as the fourth century. Lal Thang Lian, a Mizo historian, also gives the eighth century as the possible date for Chin settlement in the Chindwin Valley (Cf. 1976: 71).
Before the Chin settled in the Chindwin Valley, kingdoms of the Mon and the Pye existed in the major river valley of Burma, Sak or Thet and Kandu in Upper Burma, and also the Shan in the eastern country, but no one occupied the Chindwin Valley until the Chin made their home there. The Burman fought against the other occupants of the area, such as Thet, Mon and Pyu, but they did not fight the Chin. G. H. Luce writes;
The Pagan Burman had wars with the Thets (Sak), the Kandu (Kantú), the Mons, the Shans and the Wa-Palaungs, but he called the Chins ‘friends’. Moreover, while he pushed far up the Yaw, the Mu and the Irrawaddy, he apparently did not go up the Chindwin. I cannot identify any old place of the Chindwin much further north than Monywa. From all this I infer that in the Pagan period the home of the Chin was mainly in the Chindwin Valley above Monyaw (1959 (a): 21).
In his major work, ‘Old Kyakse and the Coming of the Burmans’, Professor Luce also mentioned the Chin settlement in Chindwin and their relation with the Burman as follows:
If the Chins had joined the Thet peoples in opposing the Burmans, the latter’s conquest of the central plains might have been precarious. But the Thets probably hated the Chins, whose descent from the Hukong Valley had cut off their western tribes in Manipur, and overwhelmed their tenure of Chindwin. Burman strategy here was to conciliate the Chins. They advanced up the Lower Chindwin only as far as Monywa and Alone, called the Chins Khyan, ‘friends’, and seem to have agreed to leave them free to occupy the whole Upper Chindwin Valley. There is no mention of any fighting between the Chins and the Burmans; and whereas the Pagan Burmans soon occupied the M’u Valley at least as far as Mliytú (Myedu) and the Khaksan, Yaw and Krow Valleys as far as the Púnton (Póndaung) Range and perhaps Thilin, I know of no place up the Chindwin much beyond Munrwa (Monywa) and the Panklà 10 tuik (ten ‘taik’ of Bagyi), mentioned in Old Burmese (1959 (b): 89).
Based on the Burman inscriptions of the Pagan Kingdom, which refer to the Chin as comrades and allies in the Chindwin Valley, Prof. G. Luce even suggested that the word ‘Chin’ might come from the Burmese word Thu-nge-chin ‘friend’. But this is very unlikely, because the word ‘Chin’ had already been well recognized by the Burman and other peoples, such as Kachin and Shan, even before the Chin made their settlement in the Chindwin Valley. The Kachin, for instance, who never came down to the Chindwin Valley but remained in the upper Hukong Valley and present Kachin Hills, called the Chin Khiang or Chiang. So did the Shan. Thus, it is obvious that the term ‘Chin’ had been used to denote the Chin people long before the Chindwin Valley became their homeland. And the term Chindwin comes from ‘Chin’, as in ‘the hole of the Chin’ or ‘the river of the Chin’, but not the other way around.
Collective Memories of Chindwin
Over the course of time, the Chin people moved up from the eastern bank of the Chindwin River to the Upper Chindwin of the Kale Valley. Although we do not know exactly when and why, the date can be set approximately to the final years of the thirteenth century or beginning of the fourteenth century. Until the fall of the Pagan dynasty in 1295, the Pagan inscriptions continuously mentioned that the Chins were in between the eastern bank of the Upper Chindwin and west of the Irrawaddy River. Thus, it can be assumed that the Chin settlement in the Kale Valley began just before the end of the thirteenth century. The reason is equally unknown. Perhaps a flood destroyed their settlement as oral traditions remembered it; or as Luce has suggested, ‘the Chin were left to themselves in Upper Chindwin’ (Luce 1959 (b): 89). As far as linguistic evidence is concerned, traditional accounts of the flood story seem more reasonable than Professor Luce’s suggestion. The traditional Chin account from the Zophei group of the Laimi tribe has recounted that the flood from the low valley had driven their ancestors to the mountains on other side of the river, in Chin: Khatlei, Khalei or Khale. It is believed that the root word of Kale is Khalei, and the meaning is ‘other side of the river.’ [10]
After their original settlement in the Chindwin Valley was destroyed by the flood, according to the traditional account, the Chin moved to the Upper Chindwin, and some groups such as the Asho went as far as the Pandaung Hills and other hills near the western part of the Chindwin River. Since then the Chin have been broken into different tribes speaking different dialects. Many myths and legends exist to explain why they broke into distinct tribes and speak different dialects. One such story is recorded by B. S. Carey and N. N. Tuck:
They (the Chin) became very powerful and finding no more enemies on earth, they proposed to pass their time capturing the Sun. They therefore set about a sort of Jacob’s ladder with poles, and gradually mounted them higher and higher from the earth and nearer to their goal, the Sun. However, the work became tedious; they quarreled among themselves, and one day, when half of the people were climbing high up on the pole, all eager to seize the Sun, the other half below cut it down. It fell down northwards, dashing the people beyond the Run River on the Kale border and the present site of Torrzam. These people were not damaged by the fall, but suddenly struck with confusion of tongues, they were unable to communicate with each other and did not know the way home again. Thus, they broke into distinct tribes and spoke different languages (Carey and Tuck 1986: 146).
Another story from the Zophei area, also known as the “Leather Book”, relates not only the story of the Chins being broken up into distinct tribes but also how their written language came into being:
In the beginning, when the stones were soft, all mankind spoke the same language, and there was no war on earth. But just before the darkness called Chun-mui came to the earth, God gave different languages to different peoples and instructed them to write on something else. While the Chin ancestors carefully inscribed their language on leather, the Burman ancestors, who were very lazy, wrote their language on stone, which was soft. However, soon after they had made the inscription of their languages, the ‘darkness’ came and the Sun disappeared from the earth. During the ‘darkness’ the stone became hard but the leather got wet. Before the Sun came back to the earth, and while the wet leather was still very smelly, a hungry dog ate up the leather, and in this way, the Chin ancestors lost their written language.
When the Sun came back to the earth, the Chin ancestors realized that while they had lost their written language, the Burman language which was written on the stone had turned into ‘the magic of letters’. Moreover, while the sons of Burman spoke the same language, the sons of Chin spoke different dialects because their common language was eaten up together with the leather by the hungry dog. Thus, the ancestor of the Chin prepared to make war against the Burman in order to capture ‘the magic of letters’. Although the Burmans were weaker and lazier, the Chin did not win the war because ‘the magic of letters’ united all the sons of the Burman. Since the sons of Chin spoke different dialects, their fathers could not even give them the war order to fight the Burman. It was for this reason that the Chin broke into distinct tribes and speak different dialects (Pu Sakhong 1969: 11–12).
Another story connected with the ‘magic of letters’ comes from the tradition of the Mizo tribe, which was recorded by Shakespear in 1912. According to Mizo tradition, God gave mankind not only different languages but different talents as well: ‘to the ancestor of the Poi [Laimi] tribe he gave a fighting sword, while the ancestor of the Lushai tribe only received a cloth, which is the reason that the Poi tribes are braver than the Lushais’ (Shakespaer 1912: 95). In contrast to the Zophei tradition, the Mizo story tells that ‘the magic of letters’ was given to the white man, not to the Burman. Shakespeare therefore concludes by saying that ‘I was told he (the white man) had received the knowledge of reading and writing – a curious instance of the pen being considered mightier than the sword’ (1912: 95).
From the Chindwin Valley to Present Chinram
Historical evidence indicates the Chin lived peacefully in Upper Chindwin of the Kale-Kabaw Valley for at least a hundred years, from the fall of Pagan in 1295 to the founding of the Shan’s Fortress City of Kale-myo in 1395. There is no historical evidence that, between those periods, the Chin’s life in the Kale Valley was disturbed either by natural disaster or by political events. During that period, the Chin founded their capital at Khampat in the Kabaw Valley. Lal Thang Lian, a Mizo historian, and M. Kipgen, a Zomi historian, both claim that the Khampat era was ‘the most glorious period’ in Chin history. ‘Most of the major clans, who now inhabit the Chin State of Burma, Mizoram, Manipur, Cachar and Tripura, are believed to have lived together there under a great chief having the same culture and speaking the same language’ (Kipgen 1996: 39).
But in 1395 when ‘the Shan built the great city of Kalemyo with double walls’ at the foot of what is now called the Chin Hills, twenty miles west of the Chindwin River, a century of peaceful life in the Kale Valley came to an end (Luce 1959 (a): 26–27). The Shan had become the rising power in the region of what is now called ‘Upper Chindwin’ and ‘Central Burma’ by the middle of the thirteenth century. Before they conquered the Chin country of the Kale Valley, the Shan had already dominated the regions by conquering the then most powerful kingdom of Pagan in 1295. They continued to fight among themselves and with the Burman kingdom of Ava, which was founded after the fall of Pagan by King Thadominphya in 1364. The Shan finally conquered Ava in 1529. Although Ava was recaptured by the Burman King Bayinnaung in 1555, the Kale Valley remained under the rule of Shan until the British period. In the century after they had conquered the Chin country of the Kale Valley, the Shan also annexed Assam and established the Ahong dynasty, which lasted for more than two centuries.
According to Sing Kho Khai and Lal Thang Lian, the Chin did not leave the Kale Valley after the Shan conquest. The Chin traditions of the Zomi and Mizo tribes, which were accepted as historical facts by Sing Kho Khai (1984) and Lal Thang Lian (1976), mentioned that the Chins lived in the Kale Valley side by side with the Shan for a certain period. Zomi tradition, as noted by Sing Kho Khai, goes on to relate that ‘while they were living in the Kale Valley, a prince came up from below and governed the town of Kale-myo. During the reign of that prince the people were forced to work very hard in the construction of the fortress and double walls of the town’ (Sing Kho Khai 1984: 43). The hardship of the forced labor was said to be so great, according to Naylor, that ‘the fingers of workers, which were accidentally cut-off, filled a big basket’ (Naylor 1937: 3). The tradition continues to relate that the Chins, unable to bear the hardship of manual labour, moved up to the hills region to establish such a new settlement as ‘Chin New’, which was located in the present township of Tiddim of the Chin State in Burma (Carey and Tuck 1986: 127). Historian D. G. E. Hall confirms that the Shans ‘drove the Chin out of the Chindwin Valley into the western hills’ of present Chinram (Hall 1968: 158).
According to a legend, which Lal Thang Lian accepted as historical fact, the Chin planted a banyan sapling at the site of an altar where they used to worship their Khua-hrum, [11] just before they were forced to abandon Khampat. They took a pledge at the sacrificial ceremony to their Khua-hrum that ‘they would return to Khampat, their permanent home, when the sapling had grown into a tree and when its spreading branches touched the earth’ (Kipgen 1996: 40–41). [12]
We do not know exactly when the Chin left Khampat and the Kale-Kabaw Valley to settle in the hilly region of Chinram. But we can trace the periods, approximately, from the Shan and the Burma chronicles from the east and the Manipur chronicles from the west. The Manipur chronicles first mentioned the Chin people, known to them as Kuki, in 1554 (Cf. Shakespear 1955: 94–111; Lehman 1963: 25). It is therefore certain that the Chin settlement in present Chinram began only after the founding of Kale-myo in 1395, and reached the furthest northern region of their settlement in present Manipur State of India in about 1554.
According to Sing Kho Khai, the first settlement made in present Chinram was called ‘Chin Nwe’, or ‘Cinnuai’ as he spelt it. Carey and Tuck, however, spelt ‘Chin Nwe’(1896: 127). The Chins lived together in ‘Chin Nwe’ for a certain period. But they split into tribal groups because of ‘their struggle against each other for political supremacy’ (Sing Kho Khai 1984: 41). Economics may have been the compelling reason, because ‘Chin Nwe’, a rather small, hilly region, could not provide enough land for the self-sufficient agriculturally-oriented economic system of peasant society. Thus, one group made their new settlement in ‘Lai-lung’, located in the present township of Falam, and eventually became the ‘Laimi tribe’ (Z. Sakhong 1983: 5). Another group who first settled in ‘Locom’ eventually became the Mizo tribe who now populate part of Mizoram State in India. From ‘Chin Nwe’ some groups moved up to the north, and they are now known as ‘Zomi’, meaning northern people, or highlanders. Prior to these settlements, there is no historical evidence that differentiates the Chin into the Liami, Mizo and Zomi tribes, etc. Only the national name of ‘Chin’ is represented in the records. Until that time, there were no such tribal names as Asho, Chó, Khuami, Laimi, Mizo and Zomi. B. S. Carey, who knew very well the Biblical story of the fall of mankind, [13] described ‘Chin Nwe’ as ‘the Chin Garden of Eden’, which indicated ‘before the fall came upon the Chin people’, to use the symbolic term (Carey and Tuck 1896: 127).
Some Chin tribes, however, did not move to the hills but remained in the Chindwin Valley, especially in remote areas like the Gankaw Valley and the Kale-Kabaw Valley of Upper Chindwin. They are still called today by their original name but with suffixes like Chin-pun, Chin-me, etc., because of their old-fashioned tattooed faces. Asho groups, as mentioned earlier, split away from the main groups even before they moved to Upper Chindwin. They first lived in the Pandaung Hills and then scattered around the Irrawaddy Delta, Pegu Yoma, Arakan Yoma; some of the Asho tribe even reached the Chittagong Hill Tracks in what is now Bangladesh (Lian Uk 1968: 7). In Arakan and Chittagong they are still known by their old name, ‘Khyeng’.
The Chin Split into Tribal Groups and Tual Communities
Historical evidence shows that the Chin were known by no other name than CHIN until they made their settlement in ‘Chin Nwe’. However, after they were expelled from their original homeland, the Kale Valley in Upper Chindwin, by the flood as oral traditions recounts – or conquered by the Shan as modern scholars have suggested – the Chin split into different tribal groups speaking different dialects, with different tribal names.
Undoubtedly, a vast majority of the Chin people moved over to the hill regions of present Chin State in Burma, Mizoram and Manipur States in India, and the Chittagong Hill Tracks in Bangladesh. But some groups, as mentioned, remained in their original homeland of the Chindwin Valley and later scattered into such areas as the Sagaing, Maqwi, Pakukko and Irrawaddy divisions of present Burma.
Linguistically, according to the 1904 Linguistic Survey of India, the Chin dialects are divided into four major groups: Northern, Central, Old Kuki and Southern.
1. The Northern Group: Thado, Kamhau, Sokte (Sukte), Siyin (Sizang), Ralte, Paite.
2. The Central Group: Tashon (Tlaisun), Lai, Lakher (Mara), Lushai (Mizo), Bangjogi (Bawmzo), Pankhu.
The Old-Kuki Group: Rangkhol, Kolren, Kom, Purum, Hmar, Cha (Chakma).
The Southern Group: Chin-me, Chin-bok, Chin-pun, Khyang (Asho), M’ro (Khuami), Shendus (Yindu), and Welaung (Grierson 1904: 67).
Scholars generally agree that there are six major tribal groups of the Chin, namely the 1) Asho, 2) Chó or Sho, 3) Khuami or M’ro, 4) Laimi, 5) Mizo (Lushai) and 6) Zomi (Vumson 1986: 40).
For the Chin, the term ‘tribal group’ is a social group comprising numerous families, clans or generations together with slaves, dependents or adopted strangers. In other words, it is a group of the same people whose ancestors made their settlement in a certain place together, after their common original homeland in the Kale Valley was destroyed. The Laimi tribe, for instance, is made up of the descendents of the group who made their settlement at Lai-lung, after being forced to leave the Kale Valley. Thus, the term ‘tribe’ as a Chin concept does not refer to common ancestors or common family ties but to a social group of the same ethnic nationality, who settled in a certain place. As the names imply, the tribal groups among the Chin rather denote geographical areas and the ownership of the land; for example, Asho means the plain dwellers, Cho means southerners, Khuami may be translated as ‘the native people’, Laimi means descendent of the Lai-lung or the ‘central people’, as Stevenson (1943) defines it, Zomi or Mizo means the northern people, and so on. The tribal group therefore is not a divisive term, it only denotes how the Chin are split into various groups, having lost their original homeland of Chindwin.
In the course of time, different tribal groups gradually developed their own tribal dialects and identities, which in turn were integrated through the ritual systems of Khua-hrum worship. Because of difficulties in communication between the different groups, different local dialects and customs gradually developed. This level of group can be called a sub-tribal group, or Tual community in Chin. The Tual community was usually begun by the same family or clan, settling in the same village. However, as the community became larger and newcomers increased, they would also establish satellite settlements and villages, although they all shared the principle Tual village when they worshiped their guardian god, called Khua-hrum. I shall discuss further details of the nature of the Tual community in the next chapter. This kind of sub-tribal group, or Tual community, was usually ruled by a single chief or the patriarch of the clan and his descendents. The Lautu group of the Laimi tribe, for instance, was ruled by the Lian Chin clan, who worshiped the Bawinu River as their guardian Khua-hrum. The entire community of Lautu – some fifteen villages – shared the Tual of their principle village Hnaring. Likewise, the Zophei group of the Laimi tribe, with more than twenty villages shared the Tual worship of their principal village Leitak, and so on.
The significance of different Tual communities is that although they developed their own local spoken dialect, they all used the same ‘mother tongue’ tribal dialect when composing a song or epic. To give an example, among the Laimi tribe there are several sub-tribal groups, such as the Zophei, Senthang, Lautu, etc. All these groups have their own local spoken dialects; some are quite different from the main Lai dialect. But when they composed traditional songs and epics, called Hla-do, Hla-pi and others, they all used their mother dialect, the Lai dialect, and sang in it. However, because of communication difficulties, feelings of close kinship between tribal groups were no longer strong, sometimes replaced by Tual community-oriented sub-tribal group or clan identities. Because of this, the British administrators adopted the Tual community of sub-tribal groups as the basic structure for what they called the ‘Circle Administration’.
Concluding Remarks
Prior to British annexation in 1896, the Chins were independent people ruled by their own traditional tribal and local chiefs called Ram-uk and Khua-bawi, respectively. Surrounding kingdoms like Burman or Myanmar, Bengal and Assam (India) never conquered the Chin people and their land, Chinram. As a result, Buddhism, Muslim and Hinduism never reached the Chin. The Chin traditional religion was the only social manifestation of people’s faith, which bound the community together. Although all the tribes and villages followed the same pattern of belief systems, the ritual practices in traditional Chin religion—called Khua-hrum worship—were very much mutually exclusive, and could not serve to unite the entire Chin people under a single religious institution. Thus, until the British occupation, the Chin society remained in a tribal society and the people's identification with each other was tribally exclusive, and their common national identity remained to be searched.
By the turn of twentieth century, however, Chin society was abruptly transformed by powerful outside forces of change. The British conquered Chinram, and the Christian missionaries followed the colonial powers and converted the people. Within this process of change, the Chin people found themselves in the midst of multi-ethnic and multi-religious environments, which they did not welcome. They also realized that their country was not the central of the universe but a very small part of a very big British Empire. After the colonial period, they found themselves again being separated into three different countries—India, Burma, and Bangladesh—without their consent. While West Chinram of present Mizoram State became part of India, East Chinram of present Chin State joined the Union of Burma according to the Panglong Agreement signed in 1947. The smaller part of Chinram became part of what they then called East Pakistan, that is, present Bangladesh.
Primary agent of change, as I have argued elsewhere, [14] was modern political systems represented by British colonial power and its successors—namely, independent India and Burma. The political development, of course, was the only agent with necessary power to force change. In tribal society, ‘distinction cannot easily be made between religious, social, cultural and political elements’ (Downs 1994: 4). Anything that effects one aspect of life can strongly affect every aspect of life. In fact, ‘tribal society can only be maintained through traditional instruments of integration, if they remain in fundamental isolation from other societies’ (ibid.). When centuries-old isolationism in Chinram was broken up by the British colonial power, the traditional way of maintaining the tribal group’s identity was no longer effective, and the process of de-tribalization had begun.
The process of de-tribalization could be a dangerous moment because that process could either become what Frederick Downs called the process of “dehumanization,” or a process of what Swedish scholar Eric Ringmar called a “formative moment”(1995: 145). If the process became a process of dehumanization, that is, ‘to rob them of their essential life of the people's soul’, as Down puts it, then the existence of tribal peoples could really be endanger. There are many examples, according to Dawns, in the Americas, Africa, other parts of Asia and India where many tribal peoples extinct to exist. On the other hand, the process of de-tribalization could become a “formative moment” if the people could find any other alternative, instead of seeking ‘to revitalize the old culture’ (Downs 1994: 24).
The process of de-tribalization in Chin society became a process of “formative moment”, that is—at a time in which new meaning became available and people suddenly were able to identify themselves with something meaningful. It was Christianity, which provided the Chin people the new meanings and symbols within this process of “formative moment”, but without ‘a complete break with the past’ (ibid.). Christianity indeed helped the Chin people—no longer as a divided tribal groups, but as the entire nationality of Chin ethnicity—to maintain their identity, and Christianity itself became a new creating-force of national identity for the Chin people within this “formative” process of powerful changes.
However, in order to understand this “formative” process of the Chin response to the new religious challenge and how did they become Christians, it is not enough to investigate purely institutional development of the Chin churches. It is important to see gradual shift from traditional Chin religion to Christianity as an integrating factor in the development of Chin self-awareness from the Chin local perspective, and then analyze how the local stories that people tell about their society and about the past, especially events personified in ancestors and other historic figures. Through such stories, both small and large, personal and collective, the Chin people do much of their “identity work” together. In other words, such ‘stories hold history and identity together’ (White 1995: 5).
The most prominent and frequently repeated local stories are, of course, about the moment of first confrontation with colonial power and the Christian mission, and subsequent conversion to Christianity. The stories of conversion are repeatedly told and retold, often in narrative accounts as writings, songs, sermons, and speeches passed on during such occasions as religious feasts, celebrations, and worship services. These are times when people engage in exchange practices that define social and political relations. Although the wars against British annexation (1872-1896), the Anglo-Chin War (1917-1919), the Second World War and Japanese invasion (1939-1945), and the Independence of Burma (1948) are also significant junctures in temporal consciousness, the events of Christian conversion are uniquely important in the organization of a socio-historical memory.
In present Chin society, telling dramatic versions of the conversion stories has become almost a ritual practice during Sunday worship services and the annual Local and Association meetings called Civui, where villages and communities commonly gather to recall the past. Narratives of shared experience and history do not simply represent identity and emotion, they even constitute them. In other words, histories told and remembered by those who inherit them are discourses of identity, just as identity is inevitably a discourse of history. Thus, ‘history teaching’, as Appleby claims, ‘is identity formation’ (1998: 1-14). Especially for the people who live in communities transformed by powerful outside forces, the common perception of a threat to their existence as well as the narrative accounts of socio-religio-cultural contact with the outside world had created identity through the idiom of shared history. However, just as history is never finished, neither is identity. It is continually refashioned as people make cultural meaning out of shifting social and political circumstances. In present Chinram, it is Christianity that provides a means of preserving and promoting the self-awareness of Chin identity through its theological concepts and ideology and its ecclesiastical structure, and the Chin people are gradually adjusted to Christianity through an accelerated religious change in their society.
By Lian H Sakhong
As the title indicates, this paper investigates, by applying a comprehensive approach of ethno-symbolic theory, who the Chin are? Why can they be described as separate ethnic group? What are their chief features that distinguish the Chin as separate ethnic nationalities from other human collectives or ethnic groups? And what criteria make it possible for them to be recognized as a distinctive people and nationality in Burma?
Anthropologists such as A. D. Smith, suggest that there are six main features, which serve to define “ethnic nationality”. These are: (i) a common proper name, (ii) a myth of common descent, (iii) a link with a homeland, (iv) collective historical memories, (v) one or more elements of common culture, and (vi) a sense of solidarity. [1] A causal link between the “ethnicity” and the formation of an “independent homeland” or “Autonomous State within the Union” — which the Chin and other non-Burman nationalities in the Union of Burma today are fighting so hard for — is the search for what Clifford Geertz called “primordial identities”, that is, the search for the past to find the evidence of the existence of “collective memories, symbols, values and myths, which so often define and differentiate” the Chin as a distinctive people and nationality throughout history. [2] However, since I am going to opt for a comprehensive approach, I shall not limit myself within any single theory of either “primordialism” or “circumstantialism” but apply both theories when they are deemed to be appropriate the context of the study as I explain the ethnicity of the Chin.
One of the main arguments in this paper is that the word “Chin” is not a foreign tongue but the Chin in its origin, which comes from the root word “Chin-lung”. According to the myth of the origin, the Chin people emerged into this world from the bowels of the earth or a cave or a rock called “Chin-lung”, [3] which is spelled slightly differently by different scholars based on various Chin dialects and local traditions, such as “Chhinlung”, “Chinn-lung”, “Chie'nlung”, “Chinglung”, “Ciinlung”, “Jinlung”, “Sinlung”, “Shinlung”, “Tsinlung”, and so on. In doing this, I am going to differentiate between national name of “Chin” and tribal names such as Asho, Cho, Khuami, Laimi, Mizo and Zomi. In other words, I shall argue that term “Chin” is the national name of the Chin, and the terms such as Asho, Cho, Khuami, Laimi, Mizo and Zomi are tribal names under their national name of “Chin”.
In this study, I shall therefore define the Chin people as a ‘nationality’ or ‘ethnic nationality’, and Chinland or Chinram [4] as a ‘nation’, but not as a nation-state, based on already well-recognized theories but also based on the traditional Chin concepts of Miphun, Ram, and Phunglam. The meaning and concept of Miphun is an ‘ethnie’ or a ‘race’ or a ‘people’ who believe that they come from a common descent or ancestor. Ram is a homeland, a country or a nation with well-defined territory and claimed by a certain people who have belonged to it historically; and the broad concept of Phunglam is ‘ways of life’, which includes almost all cultural and social aspects of life, religious practices, belief and value systems, customary law and political structure and the many aesthetic aspects of life such as dance, song, and even the customs of feasts and festivals, all the elements in life that ‘bind successive generations of members together’ as a people and a nationality, and at the same time separate them from others.
The Chin Concept of Miphun
A Collective Name of “Chin”
The tradition of ‘Chinlung’ as the origin of the “Chin” has been kept by all tribes of the Chin in various ways, such as folksongs, folklore and legends known as Tuanbia. For people with no writing system, a rich oral tradition consisting of folksong and folklore was the most reliable means of transmitting past events and collective memories through time. The songs were sung repeatedly during feasts and festivals, and the tales that made up Chin folklore were told and retold over the generations. In this way, such collective memories as the origin myth and the myth of common ancestors were handed down. Different tribes and groups of Chin kept the tradition of ‘Chinlung’ in several versions; the Hmar group of the Mizo tribe, who now live in Mizoram State of India, which I refer in this study as West Chinram, have a traditional folk song:
Kan Seingna Sinlung [Chinlung] ram hmingthang
Ka nu ram ka pa ram ngai
Chawngzil ang Kokir thei changsien
Ka nu ram ka pa ngai.
In English it translates as: ‘Famous Sinlung [Chinlung] is my motherland and the home of my ancestors. It could be called back like chawngzil, the home of my ancestors’ (Chaterjee 1990: 328).
This folksong also describes that the Chins were driven out of their original homeland, called ‘Chinglung’. Another folksong, traditionally sung at the Khuahrum sacrificial ceremony and other important occasions, reads as follows:
My Chinland of old,
My grandfather’s land Himalei,
My grandfather’s way excels,
Chinlung’s way excels (Kipgen 1996: 36).
Modern scholars generally agree with the traditional account of the origin of the name ‘Chin’, that the word comes from ‘Chinlung’. Hrang Nawl, a prominent scholar and politician among the Chin, confirms that the term ‘Chin ... come(s) from Ciinlung, Chhinlung or Tsinlung, the cave or the rock where, according to legend, the Chin people emerged into this world as humans’ (Vumson 1986: 3). Even Vumson could not dispute the tradition that the Chin ‘were originally from a cave called Chinnlung, which is given different locations by different clans’ (1986: 26).
In addition to individual scholars and researchers, many political and other organizations of the Chin accepted the Chinlung tradition not only as myth but as historical fact. The Paite National Council, formed by the Chin people of Manipur and Mizoram States, claimed Chinlung as the origin of the Chin people in a memorandum submitted to the Prime Minister of India. The memorandum stated, ‘The traditional memory claimed that their remote original place was a cave in China where, for fear of enemies, they hid themselves, which is interpreted in different dialects as “Sinlung” [Chinlung] in Hmar and Khul in Paite and others.’ [5] In this memorandum, they suggested that the Government of India take initiative to group all Chin people inhabiting the Indo-Burma border areas within one country as specified and justified for the safeguard of their economic, social and political rights.
The literal meaning of Chin-lung is ‘the cave or the hole of the Chin’, the same meaning as the Burmese word for Chindwin, as in ‘Chindwin River’, also ‘the hole of the Chin’ or ‘the river of the Chin’ (Lehman 1963: 20). However, the word Chin-lung can also be translated as ‘the cave or the hole where our people originally lived’ or ‘the place from which our ancestors originated’ (Z. Sakhong 1983: 7). Thus, the word Chin without the suffix lung is translated simply as ‘people’ or ‘a community of people’ (Lehman 1999: 92–97). A Chin scholar, Lian Uk, defines the term Chin as follows:
The Chin and several of its synonymous names generally means ‘People’ and the name Chinland is generally translated as ‘Our Land’ reflecting the strong fundamental relationship they maintain with their land (Lian Uk 1968: 2).
Similarly, Carey and Tuck, who were the first to bring the Chin under the system of British administration, defined the word Chin as ‘man or people’. They recorded that the term Chin is ‘the Burmese corruption of the Chinese “Jin” or “Jen” meaning “man or people”’ (Carey and Tuck 1896: 3).
Evidently, the word ‘Chin’ had been used from the very beginning not only by the Chin themselves but also by neighboring peoples, such as the Kachin, Shan and Burman, to denote the people who occupied the valley of the Chindwin River. While the Kachin and Shan still called the Chin as ‘Khyan’ or ‘Khiang’ or ‘Chiang’, the Burmese usage seems to have changed dramatically from ‘Khyan’ (c†if;) to ‘Chin’ (csif;). [6] In stone inscriptions, erected by King Kyanzittha (1084–1113), the name Chin is spelled as ‘Khyan’ ( c†if; ) (Luce 1959: 75–109). These stone inscriptions are the strongest evidence indicating that the name Chin was in use before the eleventh century.
Prior to British annexation in 1896, at least seventeen written records existed in English regarding research on what was then called the ‘Chin-Kuki linguistic people’. These early writings variously referred to what is now called and spelled ‘Chin’ as ‘Khyeng’, ‘Khang’, ‘Khlang’, ‘Khyang’, ‘Khyan’, ‘Kiayn’, ‘Chiang’, ‘Chi’en’, ‘Chien’, and so on. Father Sangermono, an early Western writer, to note the existence of the hill tribes of Chin in the western mountains of Burma, lived in Burma as a Catholic missionary from 1783 to 1796. His book The Burmese Empire, published in 1833 one hundred years after his death, spells the name Chin as ‘Chien’ and the Chin Hills as the ‘Chein Mountains’. He thus recorded:
To the east of Chein Mountain between 20’30’ and 21’30’ latitude is a petty nation called ‘Jo’ (Yaw). They are supposed to have been Chien, who in the progress of time, have become Burmanized, speaking their language, although corruptly, and adopting their customs. [7]
In Assam and Bengal, the Chin tribes – particularly the Zomi tribe who live close to that area – were known as ‘Kuki’. The term Kuki is Bengali word, meaning ‘hill-people or highlanders’, which was, as Reid described in 1893:
(O)riginally applied to the tribe or tribes occupying the tracks immediately to the south of Cachar. It is now employed in a comprehensive sense, to indicate those living to the west of the Kaladyne River, while to the west they are designated as Shendus. On the other hand, to anyone approaching them from Burma side, the Shendus would be known as Chiang, synonymous with Khyen, and pronounced as ‘Chin’ (Reid 1893: 238).
The designation of Kuki was seldom used by the Chin people themselves, not even by the Zomi tribe in what is now Manipur State of India, for whom the word is intended. Soppit, who was Assistant Commissioner of Burma and later Sub-Divisional Officer in the North Cacher Hills, Assam, remarked in 1893 in his study of Lushai-Kuki:
The designation of Kuki is never used by the tribes themselves, though many of them answer to it when addressed, knowing it to be the Bengali term for their people (Soppit 1893: 2).
Shakespear, an authority on the Chin, said in 1912 that:
The term Kuki has come to have a fairly definite meaning, and we now understand by it certain ... clans, with well marked characteristics, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman stock. On the Chittagong border, the term is loosely applied to most of the inhabitants of the interior hills beyond the Chittagong Hills Tracks; in the Cachar it generally means some families of the Thado and Khuathlang clans, locally distinguished as new Kuki and old Kuki. Now-a-days, the term is hardly employed, having been superseded by Lushai in the Chin Hills, and generally on the Burma border all these clans are called Chin. These Kuki are more closely allied to the Chakmas, and the Lushai are more closely to their eastern neighbours who are known as Chin.
He concluded by writing:
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Kukis, Lushais and Chins are all of the same race (Shakespear 1912: 8).
In 1826, almost one hundred years before Shakespear published his book, Major Snodgrass, who contacted the Chin people from the Burma side, had already confirmed that Kukis and Lushai were of the Chin nation, but he spelled Chin as Kiayn. He also mentioned Chinram as ‘Independent Kiayn Country’ (Snodgrass 1827: 320, on map) in his The Burmese War, in which he detailed the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1824–26. Sir Arthur Phayer still spelt Chindwin as ‘Khyendweng’ in his History of Burma, first published in 1883 (Phayer 1883: 7). It was in 1891 that the term ‘Chin’, to be written as ‘CHIN’, was first used by Major W.G. Hughes in his military report, and then by A.G.E. Newland in his book The Images of War (1894); the conventional spelling for the name became legalized as the official term by The Chin Hills Regulation in 1896.
The Myth of Common Descent
Traditional accounts of the origin of the Chin people have been obscured by myths and mythologies that together with symbols, values and other collective memories, are important elements of what Clifford Geertz called ‘primordial identities’, which so often define and differentiate the Chin as a distinctive people and nationality throughout history (Geertz 1973: 255–310). As noted already, one such myth handed down through generations describes how the Chin ‘came out of the bowels of the earth or a cave called Chin-lung or Cin-lung’ (Gangte 1993: 14). According to some it was located somewhere in China (Cf. Zawla 1976: 2), others claimed it to be in Tibet (Cf. Ginzathang 1973: 7) and some suggested that it must be somewhere in the Chindwin Valley since the literal meaning of Chindwin is ‘the cave or the hole of the Chin’ (Gangte 1993: 14). I shall come back to the debate on the location of ‘Chinlung’, but here I shall concentrate only on the traditional account of the origin of the Chin.
Almost all of the Chin tribes and clans have promulgated similar but slightly different versions of the myth, which brings the ancestors of the Chin out from the hole or the bowels of earth. The Ralte clan/group of the Mizo tribe, also known as the Lushai, who now live in Mizoram State in India, have a tradition now generally known as ‘Chinlung tradition’ that brings their progenitors from the bowels of the earth. The story was translated into English and recorded by Lt Col J. Shakespear in 1912 as follows:
[Once upon a time when the great darkness called Thimzing fell upon the world,] many awful things happened. Everything except the skulls of animals killed in the chase became alive, dry wood revived, even stones become alive and produced leaves, so men had nothing to burn. The successful hunters who had accumulated large stocks of trophies of their skill were able to live using them as fuel. After this terrible catastrophe, Thimzing, the world was again re-peopled by men and women issuing from the hole of the earth called ‘Chhinlung’ (1912: 93–94).
Shakespear described another similar story:
The place whence all people sprang is called ‘Chinglung’. All the clans came out of that place. The two Ralte came out together, and began at once chattering, and this made Pathian [The Supreme God] think there were too many men, and so he shut down the stone (1912: 94).
Another similar story of the origin of the Chin, also connected with the “Chinlung tradition” as handed down among the Mara group of the Laimi tribe – also known as the Lakher – was recorded by N. E. Parry in 1932:
Long ago, before the great darkness called Khazanghra fell upon the world, men all came out of the hole below the earth. As the founder of each Mara group came out of the earth he call his name. Tlongsai called out, ‘I am Tlongsai’; Zeuhnang called out, ‘I am Zeuhnang’; Hawthai called out, ‘I am Hawthai’; Sabeu called out, ‘I am Sabeu’; Heima called out, ‘I am Heima.’ Accordingly God thought that a very large number of Mara had come out and stopped the way. When the Lushai came out of the hole, however, only the first one to come out called out, ‘I am Lushai’, and all the rest came out silently. God, only hearing one man announce his arrival, thought that only one Lushai had come out, and gave them a much longer time, during which Lushais were pouring out of the hole silently in great numbers. It is for this reason that Lushais to this day are more numerous than Maras. After all men had come out of the hole in the earth God made their languages different, and they remain so to this day (Parry 1932: 4).
All sources of Chin traditions maintain that their ancestors originated from ‘Chinlung’ or ‘Cin-lung’. Sometimes the name for ‘Chinlung’ or ‘Cin-lung’ differs, depending on the specific Chin dialect – such as Khul, Khur and Lung-kua, – but it always means ‘cave’ or ‘hole’ no matter what the dialect. The reason Chin-lung was abandoned, however, varies from one source to another. Depending on the dialect and local traditions, some said that Chin-lung was abandoned as a result of an adventure, or because of the great darkness called Khazanghra, Thimzing or Chunmui. In contrast to the stories above, some traditions maintain that their original settlement was destroyed by a flood. The Laimi tribe from the Haka and Thlantlang areas had a very well-known myth called Ngun Nu Tuanbia, which related the destruction of human life on Earth by the flood. The Zophei also had their own version of the story about the flood, called Tuirang-aa-pia (literal meaning: ‘white water/river is pouring out or gushing’), which destroyed their original settlement. The story goes as follows:
Once upon a time, all the humankind in this world lived together in one village. In the middle of the village there was a huge stone, and underneath the stone was a cave that in turn was connected with the endless sea of water called Tipi-thuam-thum. In this cave dwelt a very large snake called Pari-bui or Limpi, which seized one of the village children every night and ate them. The villagers were in despair at the depredations committed by the snake, so they made a strong hook, tied it on the rope, impaled a dog on the hook and threw it to the snake, which swallowed the dog and with it the fish hook. The villagers then tried to pull out the snake, but with all their efforts they could not do so, and only succeeded in pulling out enough of the snake to go five times round the rock at the mouth of the hole, and then, as they could not pull out any more of the snake, they cut off the part that they pulled out, and the snake’s tail and the rest of the body fell back into the deep cave with a fearful noise. From that night water came pouring out of the snake’s hole and covered the whole village and destroyed the original settlement of mankind. Since then people were scattered to every corner of the world and began to speak different languages. And, it was this flood, which drove the ancestors of the Chin proper to take refuge in the Chin Hills (Ceu Mang 1981: 12–19).
Many Chin tribes called the Chindwin River the ‘White River’, Tui-rang, Tuikhang, Tirang, Tuipui-ia, etc; all have the same meaning but differ only in dialect term. Thus modern historians, not least Hutton, Sing Kho Khai and Gangte, believe that the traditional account of the flood story, which destroyed the Chin’s original settlement, might be the flood of the Chindwin River. They therefore claim that the Chin’s original settlement was in the Chindwin Valley and nowhere else.
The Chin Concept of Ram
For the Chin, Miphun cannot exist without Ram. They therefore define themselves as a Miphun with a strong reference to Ram – the original homeland, a particular locus and territory, which they all collectively claim to be their own. At the same time, they identify members of a community as ‘being from the same original homeland’ (A. Smith 1986: 29). The inner link between the concepts of Miphun and Ram was strengthened in Chin society through the worship of Khua-hrum at the Tual ground. As Anthony Smith convincingly argues, ‘Each homeland possesses a center or centers that are deemed to be “sacred” in a religio-ethnic sense’. In Chin society, the Tual grounds, the site of where they worshipped the guardian god Khuahrum, were the sacred centers, which stood as protectors of both men and land.
For the Chin, the concept of Ram, or what Anthony Smith calls the ‘ethnic homeland’, refers not only to the territory in which they are residing, i.e. present Chinram, but also the ‘original homeland’ where their ancestors once lived as a people and a community. What matters most in terms of their association with the original homeland is that ‘it has a symbolic geographical center, a sacred habitat, a “homeland”, to which the people may symbolically return, even when its members are scattered ... and have lost their [physical] homeland centuries ago’ (ibid.: 28). Ethnicity does not cease to exist simply because the Chin were expelled from their original homeland, or because they are artificially divided between different countries, ‘for ethnicity is a matter of myths, memories, values and symbols, and not material possessions or political powers, both of which require a habitat for their realization’ (ibid.). Thus the Chin concept of Ram as ‘territory’ and ‘original homeland’ are relevant to Miphun. The relevance of the ‘original homeland’ is:
Not only because it is actually possessed, but also because of an alleged and felt symbiosis between a certain piece of earth and ‘its’ community. Again, poetic and symbolic qualities possess greater potency than everyday attributes; a land of dream is far more significant than any actual terrain (ibid.: 28).
I shall therefore trace the history of the Chin’s settlements, not only in present Chinram but also in their original ‘homeland’ in the Chindwin Valley, in the following sections.
Migration Patterns
Chin tradition maintains that the ancestors of the Chin people originated from a cave called ‘Chinlung’, but in the absence of written documents, it is difficult to locate the exact site of ‘Chinlung’. Scholars and researchers therefore give various opinions as to its location.
K. Zawla, a Mizo historian from the Indian side of Chinram, or West Chinram, suggests that the location of Chinlung might be somewhere in modern China, and the ‘Ralte group [of the Mizo tribe] were probably one of the first groups to depart from Chhinlung’ (Zawla 1976: 2). Here, Zawla quoted Shakespeare and accepted the Chin legend as historical fact. He also claimed that the Chin came out of Chinlung in about 225 B.C., during the reign of Emperor Ch’in Shih Huang, whose cruelty was then at its height during construction of the Great Wall. Zawla relates the story of the Ch’in ruling dynasty in Chinese history in a fascinating manner. He uses local legends known as Tuanbia (literally: ‘stories or events from the old-days’) and many stories which are recorded by early travelers and British administrators in Chinram, as well as modern historical research on ancient China. Naturally, this kind of compound story-telling has little or no value in a historical sense, but is nevertheless important in terms of socially reconstructing collective memories as identity-creating-resources.
Other theories have been advanced in this connection, more noticeably by Sing Kho Khai (1984) and Chawn Kio (1993). Both believe that the Chin ancestors are either the Ch’ing or Ch’iang in Chinese history, which are ‘old generic designations for the non-Chinese tribes of the Kansu-Tibetan frontier, and indicate the Ch’iang as a shepherd people, the Ch’ing as a jungle people’ (Sing Kho Khai 1984: 53). Thus, according to Chinese history, both the Ch’iang and Ch’ing were regarded as ‘barbarian tribes’ (Cited in Sing Kho Khai 1984: 21). Gin Za Tuang – in a slightly different manner than Zawla, Sing Kho Khai and Chawn Kio – claims that the location of ‘Chinlung’ was believed to be in Tibet (Cf. Ginzathang 1973: 5; Sing Kho Khai 1984: 10; Gangte 1993: 14). Gin Za Tuang, nevertheless, maintains that the Chin ancestors were Ch’iang, but he mentions nothing about the Ch’ing.
Gin Za Thang simply follows Than Tun’s and G. H. Luce’s theory of the origin of Tibeto-Burmans and other groups of humans, believed to be the ancestors of the Southeast Asian peoples. According to Professors Than Tun and Gordon Luce, [8] the Ch’iang were not just the ancestors of the Chin but of the entire Tibeto-Burman group, and they ‘enjoyed a civilization as advanced as the Chinese, who disturbed them so much that they moved south’ (Than Tun 1988: 3). Regarding this, Professor Gordon Luce says:
With the expansion of China, the Ch’iang had either the choice to be absorbed or to become nomads in the wilds. It was a hard choice, between liberty and civilization. Your ancestors chose liberty; and they must have gallantly maintained it. But the cost was heavy. It cost them 2000 years of progress. If the Ch’iang of 3000 BC were equals of the Chinese civilization, the Burmans [and the Chin] of 700 AD were not nearly as advanced as the Chinese in 1300 BC (Cited in Than Tun 1988: 4).
Before they moved to the wilderness along the edges of western China and eastern Tibet, the ancient homelands of Ch’iang and all other Tibeto-Burman groups, according to Enriquez, lay somewhere in the northwest, possibly in Kansu, between the Gobi and northwestern Tibet (Eriquez 1932: 7–8). It is now generally believed that the Tibeto-Burman group and other Mongoloid stock who now occupy Southeast Asia and Northeast India, migrated in three waves in the following chronological order:
The Mon-Khmer (Talaing, Palaung, En Raing, Pa-o, Khasi, Annimite.)
The Tibeto-Burman (Pyu, Kanzan, Thet, Burman, Chin, Kachin, Naga, Lolo.)
The Tai-Chinese (Shan, Saimese, Karen.)
The Tibeto-Burman group initially moved toward the west and thereafter subdivided themselves into several groups. They follow different routes, one group reaching northern Tibet, where some stayed behind, while others moved on until they reached Burma in three waves. These people were:
The Chin-Kachin-Naga group
The Burman and Old-Burman (Pyu, Kanzan, Thet) group
The Lolo group (Enriquez 1932: 8).
This migration pattern theory, as mentioned above, has mainly been adopted by historians like Than Tun and Gordon Luce. However, anthropologists like Edmund Leach believe that ‘the hypothesis that the Southeast Asian peoples as known today immigrated from the region of China is a pure myth’ (Lehman 1963: 22). The main difference between the historical approach and the anthropological approach is that while historians begin their historical reconstruction with the origins and immigration of the ancestors, anthropologists start with ‘the development within the general region of Burma of symbiotic socio-cultural systems: civilizations and hill societies’ (ibid.: 22). However, both historians and anthropologists agree – as historical linguistics, archaeology and racial relationships definitely indicate – that the ancestors of these various peoples did indeed come from the north. But, anthropologists maintain their argument by saying that, ‘they did not come as the social and cultural units we know today and cannot be identified with any particular groups of today’ (ibid.: 23). Their main thesis is that the hill people and plain’s people are now defined by their mutual relationships in present sites, because, for anthropologists, ethnicity was constructed within the realm of social interaction between neighbouring reference groups.
The anthropological approach could be very helpful, especially when we investigate the pre-historical context of the Chin people, with no written documents existing. Thus, based on ethnic and linguistic differentiation, not on written documents, Lehman demonstrated that ‘the ancestors of the Chin and the Burman must have been distinct from each other even before they first appeared in Burma’. And he continues:
Undoubtedly, these various ancestral groups were descended in part from groups immigrating into present Burma, starting about the beginning of the Christian era. But it is also probable that some of these groups were in Burma in the remote past, long before a date indicated by any present historical evidence. We are not justified, however, in attaching more than linguistic significance to the terms ‘Chin’ and ‘Burman’ at such dates.
And he concludes, by saying:
Chin history begins after A.D. 750, with the development of Burman civilization and Chin interaction with it (ibid.: 22).
Chin anthropologists like T. S. Gangte seem eager to agree with Leach and Lehman. Like Leach and Lehman, Gangte rejects hypothetical theories proposed by Zawla and Gin Za Tuang, who locate ‘Chinlung’ somewhere in China and Tibet, respectively, as myths. ‘In the absence of any written corroboration or the existence of historical evidence to support them,’ he said, ‘such hypothetical theories are considered highly subjective and conjectural. They are, therefore, taken with a pinch of salt. They remain only as legends’ (Gangte 1993: 17). He nevertheless accepted the ‘Chinlung’ tradition as the origin of the Chin and even claims that the Chindwin Valley is where Chin history begins. Similar to Gangte, the ‘Khuangsai source of Chin tradition mentions that the location of Chin-lung was somewhere in the Chindwin area’ (Sing Kho Khai 1984: 10).
The Chin’s Homeland of Chindwin
Professor Than Tun claims that Tibeto-Burman groups of the Burman came down into present Burma via the Salween and Nmai’kha Valleys, and reached the northern Shan State before AD 713. But before they were able to settle themselves in the delta area of the Irrawaddy Valley, ‘the rise of Nanchao checked their movements soon after 713’ (Than Tun 1988: 3). The Nanchao made continuous war with neighbouring powers such as the Pyu who had founded the Halin Kingdom in central Burma. In 835 the Nanchao plundered the delta areas of Burma, and in 863 they went further east to Hanoi. However, by the end of the ninth century the Nanchao power collapsed because, according to Than Tun, they had exhausted themselves. Only after the collapse of the Nanchao were the Burman able to move further South into the plains of Burma.
The Chin, according to Professor Luce, descended from ‘western China and eastern Tibet into the South via the Hukong Valley’ (1959 (b): 75–109), a completely different route than the Burman had taken. Thus Lehman’s theory is quite convincing that the ancestors of the Chin and the Burman were distinct from each other even when they first appeared in Burma. There is ample evidence that the Chin were the first to settle in the Chindwin Valley. The Pagan inscriptions dating from the eleventh century onward refer to the Chin of the Chindwin Valley. There is also persistent reference in the legends of almost all the Chin tribes to a former home in the Chindwin Valley. Chin myths uniformly refer to the ruling lineage when speaking of the original homeland in the valley (Cf. Lal Thang Lian 1976: 9). Archeological evidence supports this interpretation. [9] Sing Kho Khai therefore claims that:
The literal meaning of the name ‘Chindwin’ definitely suggests that the Chindwin area was primarily inhabited by a tribe called the Chin (1984: 36).
Vumson goes even further by saying:
When the Burman descended to the plains of central Burma, during the ninth century, they [the Chin people] were already in the Chindwin Valley (1986: 35).
Concerning historical evidence of the Chin settlement in the Chindwin Valley, reliable sources come from the Burman inscriptions erected by King Kyanzzittha and other kings during the peak of the Pagan dynasty. According to Professor Luce, an expert on Pagan inscription, ‘Chins and Chindwin (‘Hole of the Chins’) are mentioned in Pagan inscriptions from the thirteenth century’ (Luce 1959 (a): 19–31). The earliest Pagan inscriptions put the Burman in upper Burma in roughly the middle of the ninth century. Professor Luce suggested that the Chin settlement in the Chindwin Valley began in the middle of the eighth century, while allowing for the possibility of a date as far back as the fourth century. Lal Thang Lian, a Mizo historian, also gives the eighth century as the possible date for Chin settlement in the Chindwin Valley (Cf. 1976: 71).
Before the Chin settled in the Chindwin Valley, kingdoms of the Mon and the Pye existed in the major river valley of Burma, Sak or Thet and Kandu in Upper Burma, and also the Shan in the eastern country, but no one occupied the Chindwin Valley until the Chin made their home there. The Burman fought against the other occupants of the area, such as Thet, Mon and Pyu, but they did not fight the Chin. G. H. Luce writes;
The Pagan Burman had wars with the Thets (Sak), the Kandu (Kantú), the Mons, the Shans and the Wa-Palaungs, but he called the Chins ‘friends’. Moreover, while he pushed far up the Yaw, the Mu and the Irrawaddy, he apparently did not go up the Chindwin. I cannot identify any old place of the Chindwin much further north than Monywa. From all this I infer that in the Pagan period the home of the Chin was mainly in the Chindwin Valley above Monyaw (1959 (a): 21).
In his major work, ‘Old Kyakse and the Coming of the Burmans’, Professor Luce also mentioned the Chin settlement in Chindwin and their relation with the Burman as follows:
If the Chins had joined the Thet peoples in opposing the Burmans, the latter’s conquest of the central plains might have been precarious. But the Thets probably hated the Chins, whose descent from the Hukong Valley had cut off their western tribes in Manipur, and overwhelmed their tenure of Chindwin. Burman strategy here was to conciliate the Chins. They advanced up the Lower Chindwin only as far as Monywa and Alone, called the Chins Khyan, ‘friends’, and seem to have agreed to leave them free to occupy the whole Upper Chindwin Valley. There is no mention of any fighting between the Chins and the Burmans; and whereas the Pagan Burmans soon occupied the M’u Valley at least as far as Mliytú (Myedu) and the Khaksan, Yaw and Krow Valleys as far as the Púnton (Póndaung) Range and perhaps Thilin, I know of no place up the Chindwin much beyond Munrwa (Monywa) and the Panklà 10 tuik (ten ‘taik’ of Bagyi), mentioned in Old Burmese (1959 (b): 89).
Based on the Burman inscriptions of the Pagan Kingdom, which refer to the Chin as comrades and allies in the Chindwin Valley, Prof. G. Luce even suggested that the word ‘Chin’ might come from the Burmese word Thu-nge-chin ‘friend’. But this is very unlikely, because the word ‘Chin’ had already been well recognized by the Burman and other peoples, such as Kachin and Shan, even before the Chin made their settlement in the Chindwin Valley. The Kachin, for instance, who never came down to the Chindwin Valley but remained in the upper Hukong Valley and present Kachin Hills, called the Chin Khiang or Chiang. So did the Shan. Thus, it is obvious that the term ‘Chin’ had been used to denote the Chin people long before the Chindwin Valley became their homeland. And the term Chindwin comes from ‘Chin’, as in ‘the hole of the Chin’ or ‘the river of the Chin’, but not the other way around.
Collective Memories of Chindwin
Over the course of time, the Chin people moved up from the eastern bank of the Chindwin River to the Upper Chindwin of the Kale Valley. Although we do not know exactly when and why, the date can be set approximately to the final years of the thirteenth century or beginning of the fourteenth century. Until the fall of the Pagan dynasty in 1295, the Pagan inscriptions continuously mentioned that the Chins were in between the eastern bank of the Upper Chindwin and west of the Irrawaddy River. Thus, it can be assumed that the Chin settlement in the Kale Valley began just before the end of the thirteenth century. The reason is equally unknown. Perhaps a flood destroyed their settlement as oral traditions remembered it; or as Luce has suggested, ‘the Chin were left to themselves in Upper Chindwin’ (Luce 1959 (b): 89). As far as linguistic evidence is concerned, traditional accounts of the flood story seem more reasonable than Professor Luce’s suggestion. The traditional Chin account from the Zophei group of the Laimi tribe has recounted that the flood from the low valley had driven their ancestors to the mountains on other side of the river, in Chin: Khatlei, Khalei or Khale. It is believed that the root word of Kale is Khalei, and the meaning is ‘other side of the river.’ [10]
After their original settlement in the Chindwin Valley was destroyed by the flood, according to the traditional account, the Chin moved to the Upper Chindwin, and some groups such as the Asho went as far as the Pandaung Hills and other hills near the western part of the Chindwin River. Since then the Chin have been broken into different tribes speaking different dialects. Many myths and legends exist to explain why they broke into distinct tribes and speak different dialects. One such story is recorded by B. S. Carey and N. N. Tuck:
They (the Chin) became very powerful and finding no more enemies on earth, they proposed to pass their time capturing the Sun. They therefore set about a sort of Jacob’s ladder with poles, and gradually mounted them higher and higher from the earth and nearer to their goal, the Sun. However, the work became tedious; they quarreled among themselves, and one day, when half of the people were climbing high up on the pole, all eager to seize the Sun, the other half below cut it down. It fell down northwards, dashing the people beyond the Run River on the Kale border and the present site of Torrzam. These people were not damaged by the fall, but suddenly struck with confusion of tongues, they were unable to communicate with each other and did not know the way home again. Thus, they broke into distinct tribes and spoke different languages (Carey and Tuck 1986: 146).
Another story from the Zophei area, also known as the “Leather Book”, relates not only the story of the Chins being broken up into distinct tribes but also how their written language came into being:
In the beginning, when the stones were soft, all mankind spoke the same language, and there was no war on earth. But just before the darkness called Chun-mui came to the earth, God gave different languages to different peoples and instructed them to write on something else. While the Chin ancestors carefully inscribed their language on leather, the Burman ancestors, who were very lazy, wrote their language on stone, which was soft. However, soon after they had made the inscription of their languages, the ‘darkness’ came and the Sun disappeared from the earth. During the ‘darkness’ the stone became hard but the leather got wet. Before the Sun came back to the earth, and while the wet leather was still very smelly, a hungry dog ate up the leather, and in this way, the Chin ancestors lost their written language.
When the Sun came back to the earth, the Chin ancestors realized that while they had lost their written language, the Burman language which was written on the stone had turned into ‘the magic of letters’. Moreover, while the sons of Burman spoke the same language, the sons of Chin spoke different dialects because their common language was eaten up together with the leather by the hungry dog. Thus, the ancestor of the Chin prepared to make war against the Burman in order to capture ‘the magic of letters’. Although the Burmans were weaker and lazier, the Chin did not win the war because ‘the magic of letters’ united all the sons of the Burman. Since the sons of Chin spoke different dialects, their fathers could not even give them the war order to fight the Burman. It was for this reason that the Chin broke into distinct tribes and speak different dialects (Pu Sakhong 1969: 11–12).
Another story connected with the ‘magic of letters’ comes from the tradition of the Mizo tribe, which was recorded by Shakespear in 1912. According to Mizo tradition, God gave mankind not only different languages but different talents as well: ‘to the ancestor of the Poi [Laimi] tribe he gave a fighting sword, while the ancestor of the Lushai tribe only received a cloth, which is the reason that the Poi tribes are braver than the Lushais’ (Shakespaer 1912: 95). In contrast to the Zophei tradition, the Mizo story tells that ‘the magic of letters’ was given to the white man, not to the Burman. Shakespeare therefore concludes by saying that ‘I was told he (the white man) had received the knowledge of reading and writing – a curious instance of the pen being considered mightier than the sword’ (1912: 95).
From the Chindwin Valley to Present Chinram
Historical evidence indicates the Chin lived peacefully in Upper Chindwin of the Kale-Kabaw Valley for at least a hundred years, from the fall of Pagan in 1295 to the founding of the Shan’s Fortress City of Kale-myo in 1395. There is no historical evidence that, between those periods, the Chin’s life in the Kale Valley was disturbed either by natural disaster or by political events. During that period, the Chin founded their capital at Khampat in the Kabaw Valley. Lal Thang Lian, a Mizo historian, and M. Kipgen, a Zomi historian, both claim that the Khampat era was ‘the most glorious period’ in Chin history. ‘Most of the major clans, who now inhabit the Chin State of Burma, Mizoram, Manipur, Cachar and Tripura, are believed to have lived together there under a great chief having the same culture and speaking the same language’ (Kipgen 1996: 39).
But in 1395 when ‘the Shan built the great city of Kalemyo with double walls’ at the foot of what is now called the Chin Hills, twenty miles west of the Chindwin River, a century of peaceful life in the Kale Valley came to an end (Luce 1959 (a): 26–27). The Shan had become the rising power in the region of what is now called ‘Upper Chindwin’ and ‘Central Burma’ by the middle of the thirteenth century. Before they conquered the Chin country of the Kale Valley, the Shan had already dominated the regions by conquering the then most powerful kingdom of Pagan in 1295. They continued to fight among themselves and with the Burman kingdom of Ava, which was founded after the fall of Pagan by King Thadominphya in 1364. The Shan finally conquered Ava in 1529. Although Ava was recaptured by the Burman King Bayinnaung in 1555, the Kale Valley remained under the rule of Shan until the British period. In the century after they had conquered the Chin country of the Kale Valley, the Shan also annexed Assam and established the Ahong dynasty, which lasted for more than two centuries.
According to Sing Kho Khai and Lal Thang Lian, the Chin did not leave the Kale Valley after the Shan conquest. The Chin traditions of the Zomi and Mizo tribes, which were accepted as historical facts by Sing Kho Khai (1984) and Lal Thang Lian (1976), mentioned that the Chins lived in the Kale Valley side by side with the Shan for a certain period. Zomi tradition, as noted by Sing Kho Khai, goes on to relate that ‘while they were living in the Kale Valley, a prince came up from below and governed the town of Kale-myo. During the reign of that prince the people were forced to work very hard in the construction of the fortress and double walls of the town’ (Sing Kho Khai 1984: 43). The hardship of the forced labor was said to be so great, according to Naylor, that ‘the fingers of workers, which were accidentally cut-off, filled a big basket’ (Naylor 1937: 3). The tradition continues to relate that the Chins, unable to bear the hardship of manual labour, moved up to the hills region to establish such a new settlement as ‘Chin New’, which was located in the present township of Tiddim of the Chin State in Burma (Carey and Tuck 1986: 127). Historian D. G. E. Hall confirms that the Shans ‘drove the Chin out of the Chindwin Valley into the western hills’ of present Chinram (Hall 1968: 158).
According to a legend, which Lal Thang Lian accepted as historical fact, the Chin planted a banyan sapling at the site of an altar where they used to worship their Khua-hrum, [11] just before they were forced to abandon Khampat. They took a pledge at the sacrificial ceremony to their Khua-hrum that ‘they would return to Khampat, their permanent home, when the sapling had grown into a tree and when its spreading branches touched the earth’ (Kipgen 1996: 40–41). [12]
We do not know exactly when the Chin left Khampat and the Kale-Kabaw Valley to settle in the hilly region of Chinram. But we can trace the periods, approximately, from the Shan and the Burma chronicles from the east and the Manipur chronicles from the west. The Manipur chronicles first mentioned the Chin people, known to them as Kuki, in 1554 (Cf. Shakespear 1955: 94–111; Lehman 1963: 25). It is therefore certain that the Chin settlement in present Chinram began only after the founding of Kale-myo in 1395, and reached the furthest northern region of their settlement in present Manipur State of India in about 1554.
According to Sing Kho Khai, the first settlement made in present Chinram was called ‘Chin Nwe’, or ‘Cinnuai’ as he spelt it. Carey and Tuck, however, spelt ‘Chin Nwe’(1896: 127). The Chins lived together in ‘Chin Nwe’ for a certain period. But they split into tribal groups because of ‘their struggle against each other for political supremacy’ (Sing Kho Khai 1984: 41). Economics may have been the compelling reason, because ‘Chin Nwe’, a rather small, hilly region, could not provide enough land for the self-sufficient agriculturally-oriented economic system of peasant society. Thus, one group made their new settlement in ‘Lai-lung’, located in the present township of Falam, and eventually became the ‘Laimi tribe’ (Z. Sakhong 1983: 5). Another group who first settled in ‘Locom’ eventually became the Mizo tribe who now populate part of Mizoram State in India. From ‘Chin Nwe’ some groups moved up to the north, and they are now known as ‘Zomi’, meaning northern people, or highlanders. Prior to these settlements, there is no historical evidence that differentiates the Chin into the Liami, Mizo and Zomi tribes, etc. Only the national name of ‘Chin’ is represented in the records. Until that time, there were no such tribal names as Asho, Chó, Khuami, Laimi, Mizo and Zomi. B. S. Carey, who knew very well the Biblical story of the fall of mankind, [13] described ‘Chin Nwe’ as ‘the Chin Garden of Eden’, which indicated ‘before the fall came upon the Chin people’, to use the symbolic term (Carey and Tuck 1896: 127).
Some Chin tribes, however, did not move to the hills but remained in the Chindwin Valley, especially in remote areas like the Gankaw Valley and the Kale-Kabaw Valley of Upper Chindwin. They are still called today by their original name but with suffixes like Chin-pun, Chin-me, etc., because of their old-fashioned tattooed faces. Asho groups, as mentioned earlier, split away from the main groups even before they moved to Upper Chindwin. They first lived in the Pandaung Hills and then scattered around the Irrawaddy Delta, Pegu Yoma, Arakan Yoma; some of the Asho tribe even reached the Chittagong Hill Tracks in what is now Bangladesh (Lian Uk 1968: 7). In Arakan and Chittagong they are still known by their old name, ‘Khyeng’.
The Chin Split into Tribal Groups and Tual Communities
Historical evidence shows that the Chin were known by no other name than CHIN until they made their settlement in ‘Chin Nwe’. However, after they were expelled from their original homeland, the Kale Valley in Upper Chindwin, by the flood as oral traditions recounts – or conquered by the Shan as modern scholars have suggested – the Chin split into different tribal groups speaking different dialects, with different tribal names.
Undoubtedly, a vast majority of the Chin people moved over to the hill regions of present Chin State in Burma, Mizoram and Manipur States in India, and the Chittagong Hill Tracks in Bangladesh. But some groups, as mentioned, remained in their original homeland of the Chindwin Valley and later scattered into such areas as the Sagaing, Maqwi, Pakukko and Irrawaddy divisions of present Burma.
Linguistically, according to the 1904 Linguistic Survey of India, the Chin dialects are divided into four major groups: Northern, Central, Old Kuki and Southern.
1. The Northern Group: Thado, Kamhau, Sokte (Sukte), Siyin (Sizang), Ralte, Paite.
2. The Central Group: Tashon (Tlaisun), Lai, Lakher (Mara), Lushai (Mizo), Bangjogi (Bawmzo), Pankhu.
The Old-Kuki Group: Rangkhol, Kolren, Kom, Purum, Hmar, Cha (Chakma).
The Southern Group: Chin-me, Chin-bok, Chin-pun, Khyang (Asho), M’ro (Khuami), Shendus (Yindu), and Welaung (Grierson 1904: 67).
Scholars generally agree that there are six major tribal groups of the Chin, namely the 1) Asho, 2) Chó or Sho, 3) Khuami or M’ro, 4) Laimi, 5) Mizo (Lushai) and 6) Zomi (Vumson 1986: 40).
For the Chin, the term ‘tribal group’ is a social group comprising numerous families, clans or generations together with slaves, dependents or adopted strangers. In other words, it is a group of the same people whose ancestors made their settlement in a certain place together, after their common original homeland in the Kale Valley was destroyed. The Laimi tribe, for instance, is made up of the descendents of the group who made their settlement at Lai-lung, after being forced to leave the Kale Valley. Thus, the term ‘tribe’ as a Chin concept does not refer to common ancestors or common family ties but to a social group of the same ethnic nationality, who settled in a certain place. As the names imply, the tribal groups among the Chin rather denote geographical areas and the ownership of the land; for example, Asho means the plain dwellers, Cho means southerners, Khuami may be translated as ‘the native people’, Laimi means descendent of the Lai-lung or the ‘central people’, as Stevenson (1943) defines it, Zomi or Mizo means the northern people, and so on. The tribal group therefore is not a divisive term, it only denotes how the Chin are split into various groups, having lost their original homeland of Chindwin.
In the course of time, different tribal groups gradually developed their own tribal dialects and identities, which in turn were integrated through the ritual systems of Khua-hrum worship. Because of difficulties in communication between the different groups, different local dialects and customs gradually developed. This level of group can be called a sub-tribal group, or Tual community in Chin. The Tual community was usually begun by the same family or clan, settling in the same village. However, as the community became larger and newcomers increased, they would also establish satellite settlements and villages, although they all shared the principle Tual village when they worshiped their guardian god, called Khua-hrum. I shall discuss further details of the nature of the Tual community in the next chapter. This kind of sub-tribal group, or Tual community, was usually ruled by a single chief or the patriarch of the clan and his descendents. The Lautu group of the Laimi tribe, for instance, was ruled by the Lian Chin clan, who worshiped the Bawinu River as their guardian Khua-hrum. The entire community of Lautu – some fifteen villages – shared the Tual of their principle village Hnaring. Likewise, the Zophei group of the Laimi tribe, with more than twenty villages shared the Tual worship of their principal village Leitak, and so on.
The significance of different Tual communities is that although they developed their own local spoken dialect, they all used the same ‘mother tongue’ tribal dialect when composing a song or epic. To give an example, among the Laimi tribe there are several sub-tribal groups, such as the Zophei, Senthang, Lautu, etc. All these groups have their own local spoken dialects; some are quite different from the main Lai dialect. But when they composed traditional songs and epics, called Hla-do, Hla-pi and others, they all used their mother dialect, the Lai dialect, and sang in it. However, because of communication difficulties, feelings of close kinship between tribal groups were no longer strong, sometimes replaced by Tual community-oriented sub-tribal group or clan identities. Because of this, the British administrators adopted the Tual community of sub-tribal groups as the basic structure for what they called the ‘Circle Administration’.
Concluding Remarks
Prior to British annexation in 1896, the Chins were independent people ruled by their own traditional tribal and local chiefs called Ram-uk and Khua-bawi, respectively. Surrounding kingdoms like Burman or Myanmar, Bengal and Assam (India) never conquered the Chin people and their land, Chinram. As a result, Buddhism, Muslim and Hinduism never reached the Chin. The Chin traditional religion was the only social manifestation of people’s faith, which bound the community together. Although all the tribes and villages followed the same pattern of belief systems, the ritual practices in traditional Chin religion—called Khua-hrum worship—were very much mutually exclusive, and could not serve to unite the entire Chin people under a single religious institution. Thus, until the British occupation, the Chin society remained in a tribal society and the people's identification with each other was tribally exclusive, and their common national identity remained to be searched.
By the turn of twentieth century, however, Chin society was abruptly transformed by powerful outside forces of change. The British conquered Chinram, and the Christian missionaries followed the colonial powers and converted the people. Within this process of change, the Chin people found themselves in the midst of multi-ethnic and multi-religious environments, which they did not welcome. They also realized that their country was not the central of the universe but a very small part of a very big British Empire. After the colonial period, they found themselves again being separated into three different countries—India, Burma, and Bangladesh—without their consent. While West Chinram of present Mizoram State became part of India, East Chinram of present Chin State joined the Union of Burma according to the Panglong Agreement signed in 1947. The smaller part of Chinram became part of what they then called East Pakistan, that is, present Bangladesh.
Primary agent of change, as I have argued elsewhere, [14] was modern political systems represented by British colonial power and its successors—namely, independent India and Burma. The political development, of course, was the only agent with necessary power to force change. In tribal society, ‘distinction cannot easily be made between religious, social, cultural and political elements’ (Downs 1994: 4). Anything that effects one aspect of life can strongly affect every aspect of life. In fact, ‘tribal society can only be maintained through traditional instruments of integration, if they remain in fundamental isolation from other societies’ (ibid.). When centuries-old isolationism in Chinram was broken up by the British colonial power, the traditional way of maintaining the tribal group’s identity was no longer effective, and the process of de-tribalization had begun.
The process of de-tribalization could be a dangerous moment because that process could either become what Frederick Downs called the process of “dehumanization,” or a process of what Swedish scholar Eric Ringmar called a “formative moment”(1995: 145). If the process became a process of dehumanization, that is, ‘to rob them of their essential life of the people's soul’, as Down puts it, then the existence of tribal peoples could really be endanger. There are many examples, according to Dawns, in the Americas, Africa, other parts of Asia and India where many tribal peoples extinct to exist. On the other hand, the process of de-tribalization could become a “formative moment” if the people could find any other alternative, instead of seeking ‘to revitalize the old culture’ (Downs 1994: 24).
The process of de-tribalization in Chin society became a process of “formative moment”, that is—at a time in which new meaning became available and people suddenly were able to identify themselves with something meaningful. It was Christianity, which provided the Chin people the new meanings and symbols within this process of “formative moment”, but without ‘a complete break with the past’ (ibid.). Christianity indeed helped the Chin people—no longer as a divided tribal groups, but as the entire nationality of Chin ethnicity—to maintain their identity, and Christianity itself became a new creating-force of national identity for the Chin people within this “formative” process of powerful changes.
However, in order to understand this “formative” process of the Chin response to the new religious challenge and how did they become Christians, it is not enough to investigate purely institutional development of the Chin churches. It is important to see gradual shift from traditional Chin religion to Christianity as an integrating factor in the development of Chin self-awareness from the Chin local perspective, and then analyze how the local stories that people tell about their society and about the past, especially events personified in ancestors and other historic figures. Through such stories, both small and large, personal and collective, the Chin people do much of their “identity work” together. In other words, such ‘stories hold history and identity together’ (White 1995: 5).
The most prominent and frequently repeated local stories are, of course, about the moment of first confrontation with colonial power and the Christian mission, and subsequent conversion to Christianity. The stories of conversion are repeatedly told and retold, often in narrative accounts as writings, songs, sermons, and speeches passed on during such occasions as religious feasts, celebrations, and worship services. These are times when people engage in exchange practices that define social and political relations. Although the wars against British annexation (1872-1896), the Anglo-Chin War (1917-1919), the Second World War and Japanese invasion (1939-1945), and the Independence of Burma (1948) are also significant junctures in temporal consciousness, the events of Christian conversion are uniquely important in the organization of a socio-historical memory.
In present Chin society, telling dramatic versions of the conversion stories has become almost a ritual practice during Sunday worship services and the annual Local and Association meetings called Civui, where villages and communities commonly gather to recall the past. Narratives of shared experience and history do not simply represent identity and emotion, they even constitute them. In other words, histories told and remembered by those who inherit them are discourses of identity, just as identity is inevitably a discourse of history. Thus, ‘history teaching’, as Appleby claims, ‘is identity formation’ (1998: 1-14). Especially for the people who live in communities transformed by powerful outside forces, the common perception of a threat to their existence as well as the narrative accounts of socio-religio-cultural contact with the outside world had created identity through the idiom of shared history. However, just as history is never finished, neither is identity. It is continually refashioned as people make cultural meaning out of shifting social and political circumstances. In present Chinram, it is Christianity that provides a means of preserving and promoting the self-awareness of Chin identity through its theological concepts and ideology and its ecclesiastical structure, and the Chin people are gradually adjusted to Christianity through an accelerated religious change in their society.
he Historical and Societal Dimension of the Ethnic Issues in Burma
The Historical and Societal Dimension of the Ethnic Issues in Burma
By Mandy Sadan, SOAS, London University
I have been asked to make some comments on the subject of historical and societal dimensions of ethnic issues in Burma. This is no easy thing to do, not least because both of these subjects are vast in themselves. When we consider the broader historical and societal relations that minority ethnic communities have had with the Burmese centre, as well as with each other and in their internal dynamics, we can see that the limited range of communities represented here today are in themselves very complex and diverse historical and societal entities. In this case, to what extent is it even possible to define what common ethnic issues might be at a historical and societal level? There are multiple centres, and multiple peripheries, and many intersecting vectors of historical and societal experience. When we compare the history of the Mon peoples with that of the Naga peoples on the north-western borders with India, is it possible to talk about a common societal or ethnic historical experience, and, if so, to what extent can this then be transposed to an analysis of contemporary ‘issues’? Are there commonalities in the social relations of Kachin and Rakhine polities historically with the Burmese state, or should we pay more attention to the specificities of each situation, which privilege the distinctiveness of particular groups and perhaps force us to think of other qualifying terms than ‘ethnicity’ alone?
Of course, at a contemporary political level it is perhaps easier to construct ‘ethnic issues’ as being derived from relatively homogeneous experiences. We can conceive that there is a political centre in relation to various peripheries, and the policies of that centre towards those peripheries are relatively common and have common effects; indeed, much of the present political analysis of Burma and its ‘minorities’ is predicated on this kind of analytical polarisation. Even at a societal level, the politicisation of minority cultures, for example, can perhaps be understood primarily through contemporary socio-political experiences effected by policies introduced by the Burmese state. Thus we can with good reason compare the impact that the promotion of Burmese language and culture in the state education system, and the inhibition on formal minority language tuition in schools, can have across all groups; we can consider the inhibition on teaching the histories of minority communities at high-school level and the censorship of higher degrees on these subjects as common ‘ethnic’ issues; the Buddhification of non-Buddhist cultures and the Burmanisation of Buddhist ones might also be illuminated best by this centre-periphery paradigm; similarly the responses shown to these societal issues by ethnic nationalist organisations, such as the reification of notions of ethnic category, the standardisation of expressions of internal group cultural diversity, internal ‘ethnic’ socio-cultural debates relating to language, history and social difference, the re-interpretation of the meaning of ethnonymic labels used to identify ethnic categories, and the way that ethnic minority community social memory seems generally to be enframed by a nationalist agenda, all seem to reflect that there is a common experience that could be labelled ‘ethnic’.
Yet these issues relating to ‘ethnic’ histories and societies are the end of the road when it comes to the more difficult problem posed here, which relates to understanding historical and societal dimensions of ethnic issues rather than just their contemporary manifestations. Ever since the 1980s, when Robert Taylor wrote his influential article questioning the prescriptive ethno-political model of the Burmese state, the role that notions of ‘ethnicity’ should play in political discourse, and in political negotiation, has been contested. [1] One argument charges that ethnicity is a fallacious construct which impedes the true expression of historical and societal relations between the ‘so-called’ ethnic groups and their Burman neighbours. This is usually considered a position that ultimately assists the expansion of Maha Bamar. Another position, typically voiced by opposition groups frustrated by the discontinuity and incoherence of multiple ‘ethnic’ voices, even when supposedly in concert, questions how it might be that underlying concepts of ‘ethnic identity’ might be transcended or rendered neutral in the rhetoric of opposition. It is the contention of this paper that both of these positions are ultimately flawed. In the first case, historical propositions on the irrelevance of ethnicity tend to be extrapolated from a limited set of geographical and historical experiences to a much broader historical and geographical stage, which coincides with territory to which the modern Burmese state lays claim. In the latter case, the desire to transcend notions of ethnic identity as a rhetorical tool in political discourse underestimates the degree to which this can only happen when there is fuller recognition of the historical and societal complexity of these communities, when they feel secure enough in the protection of key facets of ethnic identity within the state (for example, language, pluralistic constructs of state history etc.) for these issues not to present themselves as foci of political discourse. This latter issue obviously requires an engagement with the historical and societal complexity of each of these ethnic formulations separately. Furthermore, nationalist ethnic organisations themselves will only reluctantly relinquish some of their prescriptive interpretations of ethnic identity, and their controlling definitions of the domain of social memory, when recognition of diversity within categories does not make them feel vulnerable to internal fragmentation and ‘divide and rule’ by an aggressive state.
There are no easy answers to any of these problems and ultimately they can be found only in very detailed research relating to different historical and societal formations in diverse geographical regions, which is obviously more the concern of academia than that of NGOs and other donors gathered here today. However, NGOs and other donors can assist in this process by recognising the impact that homogenising discourses relating to ethnicity, as well as to simplified accounts of specific ethnic categories, can have in perpetuating this dilemma. This is perhaps most pertinent in the present situation where many donors are revising their approach to funding, and are looking for opportunities to fund projects inside Burma, rather than just on her borders. In this situation, funding ‘the ethnic minorities’ is perhaps relatively easier to accommodate as it appears less vulnerable to manipulation from the central regime as in some cases minority communities even lay claim to an independently constituted and functioning notion of civil society. Where funding is to be given in this way, it would seem essential from what has been said that donors avoid a simplified rhetoric in relation to particular groups, avoid tokenism as their funding strategies are realigned, and encourage those projects which both address issues of historical and societal diversity at a sub-category level in ways which are both engaged yet sensitive to fears of fragmentation.
The rest of this paper, therefore, will attempt to show how it was historically that notions of ethnic category were transmitted to the political centre and became fixed as simplifying and homogenising labels. This will be done by considering one category label in particular, ‘Kachin’, as this relates to my own research. Following this, the historical impact of inappropriate NGO activity on the Kachin community in the past will be considered. This activity promoted a discourse of ‘development’ without proper engagement with the societal formulation of Kachin communities in relation to health care. This continues to have an impact today on the reception of HIV/Aids programmes, and shows how our contemporary discourses on these issues, however well-meaning, can sometimes resonate differently to what we might expect.
The historical transmission of labels of ethnic category to the Burmese political centre
One reason why it is so difficult to progress the political aspects of ethnic issues in Burma relates to how the historical nature of ‘ethnic’ relations with the Burmese state have been problematized, as mentioned previously. The fact that the experience of British colonialism effected significant changes to ‘ethnic’ relations in Burma does not seem to be too controversial a proposition.
It is usually stated that it was the colonial period that transformed what were principally societal formations into ethnic categories predicated upon western notions of race, and that these ethnic categories had new political implications in the colonial Burmese state. This interpretation of the transformation of ethnicity from a societal to a political entity fixed into geographic domains, sometimes leads to the argument that the modern ethno-political state is pure artifice, and that, therefore, its associated ethno-political categories are just an invention of the British administration. This is certainly the position adopted by those who support the consolidation of Maha Bamar. However, it is clearly not this simple when we recall that the ethnic category labels themselves (as well as many of their primary ethnographic associations with respect to notions of civilisation and so on) were acquired by the British administrators and military officers in the first instance from contact with the Burmese court. [2] The notion of social and geographic domains occupied by ‘other’ was not invented by the British, nor even, it would appear, did it develop in the colonial state very gradually over time. Rather they seem to have become consolidated fairly rapidly after the first associations with the Burmese court at the outset of the new colonial era in Burma. Their later development involved modifications and additions to these category labels, rather than their abandonment or large scale readjustment. One of the principle changes effected by the colonial period, therefore, was not the invention of the labels themselves, nor even the drawing of an ethnographic map of this region, but the political implications of the reimagination of ethnic category within new political contexts -- how people understood these labels, how they used them in social, historical and political discourse, and how they related to them as internal or external identifiers. This cognitive aspect is very important and is rarely taken into account when we look at the political map and still requires a great deal more detailed research before we can fully understand the significance of this for the development of ‘ethnicity’ in the British colonial state.
However, by picking up a highly partial notion of ethnic category from the Burmese centre, the triangulation of the discourse ‘ethnic’ problem from a historical perspective began. The colonial authorities could claim in their development of the political ethnic state to be simply reifying the realities of social formation ‘on the ground’ into a political and administrative structure. However, the nationalist Burmese state could declare that the political structure was a colonial fabrication -- many of these categories did not represent polities historically, just social groupings, and where they were clearly identifiable as polities such as in the Mon and Rakhine case, they could be categorised as ‘former’ rather than ‘present’ entities, or ‘related but subservient’ polities as in the Shan case. Either way, they should not automatically be privileged by autonomous political status in a centralised independent Burma. These constructions have been fiercely contested by the respective ethnic nationalist movements of these peoples. For their part, ethnic nationalist leaders adhered to the labels that had been adopted by the colonial state for the advantages that they offered in the political sphere, whilst knowing that at a societal and cognitive level that there were serious discrepancies between these labels and the internal formation and dynamics of the particular categories they stood for. If the imminent prospect was of political autonomy, then to some extent this lack of understanding of the real nature of these categories by the state did not matter. Tehse communities had, of course, long been familiar with this need to accommodate themselves to the construction that ‘other’ made of them in relations with both the Burman and non-Burman polities with whom they came into contact. However, where autonomy was denied, this assimilation to an overly-simplified construction of ethnic category created internal problematics relating to how the homogenising category should, or could, reflect complexity at a sub-category level without succumbing to fears of fragmentation.
An example can be given of how the ethnic category ‘Kachin’was transmitted to the political centre in the colonial state. First direct contact with substantial numbers of ‘Kachin’ chiefs and elders began in the 1820s and was relatively extensive by the 1830s. However, it was not long before the governmental archive recorded accounts from local ‘Kachin’ elites in which they contested use of this term. The term that they most commonly sought to privilege instead was Singpho, a variant pronunciation of Jinghpaw (usually transcribed during the colonial period as Chingpaw or Chinghpaw). The term Jinghpaw, and historically that of Singpho, relates to the largest of the modern Kachin subgroups, and is deemed to constitute a matrix of lineages which together form affinal kinship relationships. It also describes the dominant linguistic and cultural space of the Kachin region.
Initially there was a tendency to conflate the terms Kahkyen and Singpho in the colonial archive, but it is also clear that distinctions were made between these two terms as they were transferred to the colonial domain. The 1830s were times of considerable Jinghpaw inter-community rivalry and ‘Singpho’ chiefs, residing from Mogaung westwards to the trans-border region with Assam, utilised the term Kakhyen as a label of alterity in reference to their more easterly kin when in discussion with colonial officials. They apparently assimilated to the intellectual construction of the term Kachin as ‘other’, seemingly aware of and indeed supporting the somewhat derogatory connotations of that term in relation to their more easterly kin to their own advantage. This was a political tactic to advance their claims to status as the political structure of the North East Frontier was being delineated.
Over the course of the next forty years the dramatic development of the Assamese tea industry led to the geo-political separation of those groups labelled Singpho, who came to be considered a minority within India, and those labelled Kachin, a term which was understood solely as a Burma-oriented ethnographic trope. Only by the 1880s, when the separation between the Singpho of Assam and the Kachin of Burma had become an administrative reality for an entire generation of colonial officials, was close enough direct contact established again with Kachin communities in the east and south of the Kachin hills region for them again to proffer their preferred terms of self-reference. However, developments in transcription systems now led to a new orthography for the term previously known as Singpho – Chingpaw -- so that the Singpho of Assam and the Chingpaw of Burma appeared in the colonial archives as relating to two different ethnicities with supposedly ‘different’ names. What had commenced as a linguistic and administrative confusion had become consolidated as a political, geographic and ethnographic fact.
As the British colonial administration established itself in skeleton form in this region, the term Kachin remained as a functioning general administrative category but it came to have far wider connotations than the Jinghpaw communities to whom it had originally been applied as more hill-dwelling communities were brought within its administrative orbit. Greater contact, however, merely led to the emergence of a series of ethnic appendages to the label Kachin, and the development of a series of sub-groups based on an ethnographic distinction of hill dwelling as opposed to lowland dwelling communities.
Sub-categories of Kachin began to be formalised after 1895, following the ‘pacification’ of the Kachin Hills and the implementation of the Kachin Hills Regulation. Some sub-categories were framed linguistically and were consolidated by the need to develop criteria for the categorisation of communities in the official census. Language was interpreted in this context as a signifier of the primordial ethnic origins of peoples, which was then transposed to an ethnographic present of 'race'. This classificatory strategy reconfigured the social and historical significance of polyglotism in this region and underestimated its anthropological value.
The military also developed generalised categories of ethnic group, defined by stereotypes of social ‘ethos’ and physical characteristics which were used to delineate suitable recruiting fields and to classify recruits entering the Indian Army. The need to expand recruiting fields from the ‘traditional’ Kachin-designated domain in the environs of Bhamo meant that the first regular Kachin recruits included Jinghpaw, Lisu, Zaiwa and Nung soldiers. Significantly some of these, such as the Nung soldiers, lived beyond the boundaries of the Kachin Hills Regulation and were not, therefore, affiliated to the term Kachin in any other official capacity.
There were, however, some significant ambiguities in this development of Kachin sub-groups: some groups included under the Kachin umbrella by the army or by the administration were separated from it in linguistic classifications. In particular this affected the classification of speakers of other branches of Tibeto-Burman language than Jinghpaw, such as Nung, Maru, and Lisu peoples. Not classified as Kachin by linguistic descent, and thus by implication neither by ethnicity (or ‘race’ as this was interpreted in the colonial state), but called Kachin by the administration and in the army, and thus deemed to possess a certain ethnic ‘ethos’ that was deemed racially grounded, a tension developed in the various applications of the term – whether it referred to one community and one language, many communities but one language, to a geographical place or space and so on. These inconsistencies still have ramifications today because contradictory colonial constructions are used as ‘evidence’ to undermine the multi-group identity Kachin as being no more than a political model.
The new constitution of independent Burma written in 1947 consolidated the term ‘Kachin’ as a primary ethnic category and geo-political boundary. Yet it was in 1947 a constitutionally undifferentiated term juxtaposed straightforwardly with that of ‘non-Kachin’. Paragraph 166 of the 1947 Constitution states that of the 12 seats in the Kachin State Council, 6 are for ‘Kachins’ and 6 are for ‘non-Kachins’. The Minister for the Kachin State was to be ‘Kachin’ but half of his cabinet had to comprise ‘non-Kachins’. Non-Kachins were principally Shan and Burmese communities, whilst the Kachin community was an undefined catch-all for ‘upland other’. Therefore, immediately following independence from the British the term Kachin had a degree of political malleability within the new state.
As the colonial taxonomy of the Kachin ethnic category was neither wholly prescriptive nor wholly consistent, there was still much to be played for in how the ethnic composition of this category should be defined. For example, in 1955 the new administrative unit of North Hukawng in the Myitkyina District was created, which stated that Naga peoples living there were now to be known as ‘Kachin-Nagas’. This would help the state to diminish the authority of predominantly Jinghpaw interests in defining the political agenda of Kachin State, as well as separate these from other Naga communities which were declaring their support of an armed independence movement. [3] The appellation did not stick, but again demonstrates the elasticity that ethnic categories were deemed to have in the political sphere.
The discrepancy between ‘Kachin’ as an officially sanctioned geography and the term as an ethnonym created difficulties. On the one hand, the creation of a region of Burma known as Kachin State in 1948 seemed to legitimate the claims that Kachin nationalists made concerning their ‘possession’ of this territory if they could consolidate the idea that it also referred to the dominant ethno-political community of this region. This community would therefore expect to have a dominant role to play in the political determination of this region. On the other hand, in being forced to accept the use of the term ‘Kachin’ on the broader political stage of Burma, a tension was created between the local understandings of identity, place, and cross-group relationships of the groups which came under this umbrella and that which the colonial period had structured. Such a tension might not have had much significance if the desired level of local political autonomy from the Burmese centre had been established following independence in 1948. However, as the failure to establish a federal structure in Burma became apparent, and Kachin State was increasingly considered as just the northernmost region of an expanded Burmese state, the problems inherent to the dual usage of the term became apparent.
As the model of the independent national ethno-state was very quickly contested by both military and political ethnic minority groups, defining the specific ethnic as well as geographical boundaries of the term within the state became an increasing concern in the face of what was seen as Burmese nationalist Buddhification policies and geographical redefinitions of ‘Kachin’.
There is also a difficulty relating to historical documentation that could be used to contest some of these simplifying constructions. Some ethnic communities have very substantive and significant historical and literary traditions, such as with the Rakhine, Mon and Shan peoples, but for others who lack longstanding literary traditions, who instead relied upon complex oral and ritual cosmologies of time and space to define their presence, as with the Kachin, it is difficult to find ways of authenticating their historical and societal position in line with the conventions of academic or ‘western’ research discourse. Indeed, even the Shan, Rakhine, Mon and Karen communities find it difficult to construct interpretive parallels between their own historical paradigms expressed through traditional texts and those defined through ‘documentation’ of the kind demanded by political analysts. Without the ‘right kind’ of text-based historical documentation in their own languages by which they can present their own cognitive model of the past, locating some of these communities, such as those termed ‘Kachin’, and determining their historical relations with a Burman centre becomes to a great extent dependent upon the documentation of ‘other’. This raises two principal concerns: 1) establishing the nature of ethnic relations through the historical record of ‘other’ will unduly emphasise the historical integrity of the greater Burmese state, depending as it would do upon Burmese sources to validate and legitimate a ‘Kachin’ historical presence; conversely 2) that by highlighting the relative lack of data concerning the category Kachin, support will be given to the contention that this category as a political and geographical construct is merely an invention of the British colonial period and that it otherwise has no historical validity. Both interpretations are considered highly damaging to political claims for the autonomy of this ethnic category in the present, which are based on the idea that it did in fact function as a discrete political, economic, social, cultural and geographic entity over an extended historical period. Lack of documentation in some cases causes historical discourse to become highly symbolic and centres on ‘proving’ the authenticity of local ethnonyms, of fixing the meaning of ritual or cultural forms in line with contemporary political concerns, and so on. This again seems to create a disjuncture between the historical and societal models of many ethnic categories, which also vindicate the underlying ‘truth’ of these categories, and those demanded by the modern state and western research paradigms.
Ethnic nationalist groups, therefore, in some cases feel somewhat bound to accommodate themselves to these representations in the political sphere, which employed generalizing labels, whilst the underlying societal and historical realities of their groupings, as well as their internal structures and dynamics, remained largely unpacked by the intellectual apparatus of both the pre-colonial colonial and post-colonial state. It is no coincidence that simplified cultural representations of ethnic category on the state stage, such as on Union Day, continue to be the main referent towards a notion of this societal and historical complexity, but without the implications of this ever being explored.
We can see from the above, therefore, that the notion of ethnic category was transmitted to the political centre, and became a tool of political discourse, predicated upon a very simplistic set of societal and historical relationship. This in turn both concealed and inhibited meaningful interpretations of sub-category diversity and contributed to the notion of diversity being equated with fears of fragmentation in times of conflict.
Funding initiatives and development discourse in the Kachin Hills in the 1930s
Given that talking about ‘ethnic minorities’ as a homogeneous group becomes more difficult in this analysis has led some to say that a broader historical contextualisation of ethnic issues is unnecessary as it merely complicates the principal political objectives of the moment. Whilst there is certainly a logic to this position in some respects, as stated, the danger of this approach is that it tends to undermine the desire of many of these groupings themselves for fuller recognition of their historical presence in Burma, for an acknowledgement that they have substantive histories deserving of full consideration. Recognising this wherever possible is a step towards overcoming the simplification of so-called ‘ethnic’ issues in the political and public sphere. Many of the issues that we use to mark our concern for the ‘ethnic dimension’ of Burma’s situation today -- environmental concerns, forced migration and resettlement, land rights, militarization, the epidemiology of transmittable diseases – are rarely discussed in this way, even though they have historical contexts or historical precedents that could indeed help to illuminate our contemporary approaches. HIV/AIDS is a case in point. On the one hand, this issue seems so undeniably contemporary, global public awareness of the illness coinciding more or less with the 1988 uprising, that its epidemiology seems rightly to act as a marker of the dire socio-political and socio-economic situation of many marginal communities in Burma in recent years. For example, appalling HIV/AIDS statistics are often referenced iconically in discourses relating to Kachin State as a symptom of its desperate social and economic condition. Yet even this issue should perhaps not be so disconnected from a broader historical perspective. Discourses about sexual health have a relatively long history in the Kachin Hills region. Historical discourses on syphilis promoted throughout the 1920s and 1930s were similarly related to notions of development, to the apparent political disengagement of Kachin youth, and to the introduction of inappropriate social welfare initiatives. However, what is perhaps even more noteworthy in comparison with our present discourses, is that these health concerns and initiatives tended always to surface at times of key political transition, such as in 1937 when Burma was separated from India, and immediately after the second war when they figured in debates on the state of the Kachin region leading up to independence. Significantly, these discourses, which stated that the Kachin peoples were about to die out because of what was deemed a degenerating social framework, became implicated in the interpretive apparatus used to support the notion that the Kachin peoples were not yet ready to govern themselves in an independent state. At a societal level also, the campaigns and, crucially, the discourses associated with them, had a marked impact on important aspects of Kachin social organisation, on traditional gender roles in some localities, and they continue to be significant in the contemporary historical imagination relating to notions of development as constructed by church sermons and the receptivity towards condom use. Even with an irrefutably contemporary issue such as the spread of HIV/AIDS, we lose significant insight if we do not extend our historical and societal perspective to assess the impact of well-intentioned policies on the communities with which we are dealing, and just as importantly, the way in which we talk about them as well as what we do.
There are a host of terms that we tend to use in relation to ‘ethnic issues’ which are deemed to have either a historical or societal justification. Some of these terms relate to biophysical relationships with the environment, and those such as ‘isolated’, ‘wilderness’, ‘remote’ are particularly prevalent in discourses about minorities. However, we perhaps lack historical awareness if we do not note that in the past these terms became further justifications for the alienation of land rights. The unquestioned perpetuation of such terms also denies the fact that there must scarcely have been a hill or stream in these regions that was not cognitively mapped by the traditional routes and paths of oral culture, by the recitation funeral routes, migration routes and such like, as well as by the detailed ethnobotanical knowledge which gave meaning to the most minor of details in the natural environment. From whom were such communities remote when we see the integration of expansive kinship lineages in cosmological models of space and time spanning from India to China, and have further proof of this integration in regional trade routes by the study of complex material cultures which demonstrate ongoing culture contact? Terms such as ‘traditional’ enter our discourses to demonstrate the challenges that many ethnic cultures face in the contemporary situation, but without appropriate explanation of this term it too often becomes an unrealistic representation of communities that caricatures them in the same way that the Union Day festival does on the state stage. Essentially, therefore, it is very easy to perpetuate discourses about ethnic groups in Burma that are appropriate politically because they are intended ultimately to address a main problem of non-equality, but which over-simplify and in the process do little to assist these communities with dealing with the internal societal and historical dilemmas that are increasingly coming to light as post-ceasefire situations allow some of the problems of nationalist structuring of ethnic categories to come to the surface.
Conclusion
This paper has ranged over a number of issues, none of which has an apparent or easy solution. NGOs and other donors must determine the extent to which they want, or are able, to engage with some of the implications of these comments. However, what is clear is that funding which perpetuates tokenistic approaches to ‘ethnic issues’, a policy which might seem tempting in the present situation when funding initiatives are being hesitantly refocused to projects inside Burma, should be avoided. Where donors are unable to undertake appropriate forms of research themselves for lack of time or resources, they too should be encouraged to cross bridges with the small but growing academic community who are engaged in such research and who would, in many cases, be happy to play a part in the delineation of historical and societal implications of funding projects. Ultimately, both the academic and donor communities must share a joint responsibility to engage with research and development projects that engage with the need to support pluralistic developments within ethnic categories, and not just between them, and do not shy away from some of the complexities and difficulties that might arise as a result.
By Mandy Sadan, SOAS, London University
I have been asked to make some comments on the subject of historical and societal dimensions of ethnic issues in Burma. This is no easy thing to do, not least because both of these subjects are vast in themselves. When we consider the broader historical and societal relations that minority ethnic communities have had with the Burmese centre, as well as with each other and in their internal dynamics, we can see that the limited range of communities represented here today are in themselves very complex and diverse historical and societal entities. In this case, to what extent is it even possible to define what common ethnic issues might be at a historical and societal level? There are multiple centres, and multiple peripheries, and many intersecting vectors of historical and societal experience. When we compare the history of the Mon peoples with that of the Naga peoples on the north-western borders with India, is it possible to talk about a common societal or ethnic historical experience, and, if so, to what extent can this then be transposed to an analysis of contemporary ‘issues’? Are there commonalities in the social relations of Kachin and Rakhine polities historically with the Burmese state, or should we pay more attention to the specificities of each situation, which privilege the distinctiveness of particular groups and perhaps force us to think of other qualifying terms than ‘ethnicity’ alone?
Of course, at a contemporary political level it is perhaps easier to construct ‘ethnic issues’ as being derived from relatively homogeneous experiences. We can conceive that there is a political centre in relation to various peripheries, and the policies of that centre towards those peripheries are relatively common and have common effects; indeed, much of the present political analysis of Burma and its ‘minorities’ is predicated on this kind of analytical polarisation. Even at a societal level, the politicisation of minority cultures, for example, can perhaps be understood primarily through contemporary socio-political experiences effected by policies introduced by the Burmese state. Thus we can with good reason compare the impact that the promotion of Burmese language and culture in the state education system, and the inhibition on formal minority language tuition in schools, can have across all groups; we can consider the inhibition on teaching the histories of minority communities at high-school level and the censorship of higher degrees on these subjects as common ‘ethnic’ issues; the Buddhification of non-Buddhist cultures and the Burmanisation of Buddhist ones might also be illuminated best by this centre-periphery paradigm; similarly the responses shown to these societal issues by ethnic nationalist organisations, such as the reification of notions of ethnic category, the standardisation of expressions of internal group cultural diversity, internal ‘ethnic’ socio-cultural debates relating to language, history and social difference, the re-interpretation of the meaning of ethnonymic labels used to identify ethnic categories, and the way that ethnic minority community social memory seems generally to be enframed by a nationalist agenda, all seem to reflect that there is a common experience that could be labelled ‘ethnic’.
Yet these issues relating to ‘ethnic’ histories and societies are the end of the road when it comes to the more difficult problem posed here, which relates to understanding historical and societal dimensions of ethnic issues rather than just their contemporary manifestations. Ever since the 1980s, when Robert Taylor wrote his influential article questioning the prescriptive ethno-political model of the Burmese state, the role that notions of ‘ethnicity’ should play in political discourse, and in political negotiation, has been contested. [1] One argument charges that ethnicity is a fallacious construct which impedes the true expression of historical and societal relations between the ‘so-called’ ethnic groups and their Burman neighbours. This is usually considered a position that ultimately assists the expansion of Maha Bamar. Another position, typically voiced by opposition groups frustrated by the discontinuity and incoherence of multiple ‘ethnic’ voices, even when supposedly in concert, questions how it might be that underlying concepts of ‘ethnic identity’ might be transcended or rendered neutral in the rhetoric of opposition. It is the contention of this paper that both of these positions are ultimately flawed. In the first case, historical propositions on the irrelevance of ethnicity tend to be extrapolated from a limited set of geographical and historical experiences to a much broader historical and geographical stage, which coincides with territory to which the modern Burmese state lays claim. In the latter case, the desire to transcend notions of ethnic identity as a rhetorical tool in political discourse underestimates the degree to which this can only happen when there is fuller recognition of the historical and societal complexity of these communities, when they feel secure enough in the protection of key facets of ethnic identity within the state (for example, language, pluralistic constructs of state history etc.) for these issues not to present themselves as foci of political discourse. This latter issue obviously requires an engagement with the historical and societal complexity of each of these ethnic formulations separately. Furthermore, nationalist ethnic organisations themselves will only reluctantly relinquish some of their prescriptive interpretations of ethnic identity, and their controlling definitions of the domain of social memory, when recognition of diversity within categories does not make them feel vulnerable to internal fragmentation and ‘divide and rule’ by an aggressive state.
There are no easy answers to any of these problems and ultimately they can be found only in very detailed research relating to different historical and societal formations in diverse geographical regions, which is obviously more the concern of academia than that of NGOs and other donors gathered here today. However, NGOs and other donors can assist in this process by recognising the impact that homogenising discourses relating to ethnicity, as well as to simplified accounts of specific ethnic categories, can have in perpetuating this dilemma. This is perhaps most pertinent in the present situation where many donors are revising their approach to funding, and are looking for opportunities to fund projects inside Burma, rather than just on her borders. In this situation, funding ‘the ethnic minorities’ is perhaps relatively easier to accommodate as it appears less vulnerable to manipulation from the central regime as in some cases minority communities even lay claim to an independently constituted and functioning notion of civil society. Where funding is to be given in this way, it would seem essential from what has been said that donors avoid a simplified rhetoric in relation to particular groups, avoid tokenism as their funding strategies are realigned, and encourage those projects which both address issues of historical and societal diversity at a sub-category level in ways which are both engaged yet sensitive to fears of fragmentation.
The rest of this paper, therefore, will attempt to show how it was historically that notions of ethnic category were transmitted to the political centre and became fixed as simplifying and homogenising labels. This will be done by considering one category label in particular, ‘Kachin’, as this relates to my own research. Following this, the historical impact of inappropriate NGO activity on the Kachin community in the past will be considered. This activity promoted a discourse of ‘development’ without proper engagement with the societal formulation of Kachin communities in relation to health care. This continues to have an impact today on the reception of HIV/Aids programmes, and shows how our contemporary discourses on these issues, however well-meaning, can sometimes resonate differently to what we might expect.
The historical transmission of labels of ethnic category to the Burmese political centre
One reason why it is so difficult to progress the political aspects of ethnic issues in Burma relates to how the historical nature of ‘ethnic’ relations with the Burmese state have been problematized, as mentioned previously. The fact that the experience of British colonialism effected significant changes to ‘ethnic’ relations in Burma does not seem to be too controversial a proposition.
It is usually stated that it was the colonial period that transformed what were principally societal formations into ethnic categories predicated upon western notions of race, and that these ethnic categories had new political implications in the colonial Burmese state. This interpretation of the transformation of ethnicity from a societal to a political entity fixed into geographic domains, sometimes leads to the argument that the modern ethno-political state is pure artifice, and that, therefore, its associated ethno-political categories are just an invention of the British administration. This is certainly the position adopted by those who support the consolidation of Maha Bamar. However, it is clearly not this simple when we recall that the ethnic category labels themselves (as well as many of their primary ethnographic associations with respect to notions of civilisation and so on) were acquired by the British administrators and military officers in the first instance from contact with the Burmese court. [2] The notion of social and geographic domains occupied by ‘other’ was not invented by the British, nor even, it would appear, did it develop in the colonial state very gradually over time. Rather they seem to have become consolidated fairly rapidly after the first associations with the Burmese court at the outset of the new colonial era in Burma. Their later development involved modifications and additions to these category labels, rather than their abandonment or large scale readjustment. One of the principle changes effected by the colonial period, therefore, was not the invention of the labels themselves, nor even the drawing of an ethnographic map of this region, but the political implications of the reimagination of ethnic category within new political contexts -- how people understood these labels, how they used them in social, historical and political discourse, and how they related to them as internal or external identifiers. This cognitive aspect is very important and is rarely taken into account when we look at the political map and still requires a great deal more detailed research before we can fully understand the significance of this for the development of ‘ethnicity’ in the British colonial state.
However, by picking up a highly partial notion of ethnic category from the Burmese centre, the triangulation of the discourse ‘ethnic’ problem from a historical perspective began. The colonial authorities could claim in their development of the political ethnic state to be simply reifying the realities of social formation ‘on the ground’ into a political and administrative structure. However, the nationalist Burmese state could declare that the political structure was a colonial fabrication -- many of these categories did not represent polities historically, just social groupings, and where they were clearly identifiable as polities such as in the Mon and Rakhine case, they could be categorised as ‘former’ rather than ‘present’ entities, or ‘related but subservient’ polities as in the Shan case. Either way, they should not automatically be privileged by autonomous political status in a centralised independent Burma. These constructions have been fiercely contested by the respective ethnic nationalist movements of these peoples. For their part, ethnic nationalist leaders adhered to the labels that had been adopted by the colonial state for the advantages that they offered in the political sphere, whilst knowing that at a societal and cognitive level that there were serious discrepancies between these labels and the internal formation and dynamics of the particular categories they stood for. If the imminent prospect was of political autonomy, then to some extent this lack of understanding of the real nature of these categories by the state did not matter. Tehse communities had, of course, long been familiar with this need to accommodate themselves to the construction that ‘other’ made of them in relations with both the Burman and non-Burman polities with whom they came into contact. However, where autonomy was denied, this assimilation to an overly-simplified construction of ethnic category created internal problematics relating to how the homogenising category should, or could, reflect complexity at a sub-category level without succumbing to fears of fragmentation.
An example can be given of how the ethnic category ‘Kachin’was transmitted to the political centre in the colonial state. First direct contact with substantial numbers of ‘Kachin’ chiefs and elders began in the 1820s and was relatively extensive by the 1830s. However, it was not long before the governmental archive recorded accounts from local ‘Kachin’ elites in which they contested use of this term. The term that they most commonly sought to privilege instead was Singpho, a variant pronunciation of Jinghpaw (usually transcribed during the colonial period as Chingpaw or Chinghpaw). The term Jinghpaw, and historically that of Singpho, relates to the largest of the modern Kachin subgroups, and is deemed to constitute a matrix of lineages which together form affinal kinship relationships. It also describes the dominant linguistic and cultural space of the Kachin region.
Initially there was a tendency to conflate the terms Kahkyen and Singpho in the colonial archive, but it is also clear that distinctions were made between these two terms as they were transferred to the colonial domain. The 1830s were times of considerable Jinghpaw inter-community rivalry and ‘Singpho’ chiefs, residing from Mogaung westwards to the trans-border region with Assam, utilised the term Kakhyen as a label of alterity in reference to their more easterly kin when in discussion with colonial officials. They apparently assimilated to the intellectual construction of the term Kachin as ‘other’, seemingly aware of and indeed supporting the somewhat derogatory connotations of that term in relation to their more easterly kin to their own advantage. This was a political tactic to advance their claims to status as the political structure of the North East Frontier was being delineated.
Over the course of the next forty years the dramatic development of the Assamese tea industry led to the geo-political separation of those groups labelled Singpho, who came to be considered a minority within India, and those labelled Kachin, a term which was understood solely as a Burma-oriented ethnographic trope. Only by the 1880s, when the separation between the Singpho of Assam and the Kachin of Burma had become an administrative reality for an entire generation of colonial officials, was close enough direct contact established again with Kachin communities in the east and south of the Kachin hills region for them again to proffer their preferred terms of self-reference. However, developments in transcription systems now led to a new orthography for the term previously known as Singpho – Chingpaw -- so that the Singpho of Assam and the Chingpaw of Burma appeared in the colonial archives as relating to two different ethnicities with supposedly ‘different’ names. What had commenced as a linguistic and administrative confusion had become consolidated as a political, geographic and ethnographic fact.
As the British colonial administration established itself in skeleton form in this region, the term Kachin remained as a functioning general administrative category but it came to have far wider connotations than the Jinghpaw communities to whom it had originally been applied as more hill-dwelling communities were brought within its administrative orbit. Greater contact, however, merely led to the emergence of a series of ethnic appendages to the label Kachin, and the development of a series of sub-groups based on an ethnographic distinction of hill dwelling as opposed to lowland dwelling communities.
Sub-categories of Kachin began to be formalised after 1895, following the ‘pacification’ of the Kachin Hills and the implementation of the Kachin Hills Regulation. Some sub-categories were framed linguistically and were consolidated by the need to develop criteria for the categorisation of communities in the official census. Language was interpreted in this context as a signifier of the primordial ethnic origins of peoples, which was then transposed to an ethnographic present of 'race'. This classificatory strategy reconfigured the social and historical significance of polyglotism in this region and underestimated its anthropological value.
The military also developed generalised categories of ethnic group, defined by stereotypes of social ‘ethos’ and physical characteristics which were used to delineate suitable recruiting fields and to classify recruits entering the Indian Army. The need to expand recruiting fields from the ‘traditional’ Kachin-designated domain in the environs of Bhamo meant that the first regular Kachin recruits included Jinghpaw, Lisu, Zaiwa and Nung soldiers. Significantly some of these, such as the Nung soldiers, lived beyond the boundaries of the Kachin Hills Regulation and were not, therefore, affiliated to the term Kachin in any other official capacity.
There were, however, some significant ambiguities in this development of Kachin sub-groups: some groups included under the Kachin umbrella by the army or by the administration were separated from it in linguistic classifications. In particular this affected the classification of speakers of other branches of Tibeto-Burman language than Jinghpaw, such as Nung, Maru, and Lisu peoples. Not classified as Kachin by linguistic descent, and thus by implication neither by ethnicity (or ‘race’ as this was interpreted in the colonial state), but called Kachin by the administration and in the army, and thus deemed to possess a certain ethnic ‘ethos’ that was deemed racially grounded, a tension developed in the various applications of the term – whether it referred to one community and one language, many communities but one language, to a geographical place or space and so on. These inconsistencies still have ramifications today because contradictory colonial constructions are used as ‘evidence’ to undermine the multi-group identity Kachin as being no more than a political model.
The new constitution of independent Burma written in 1947 consolidated the term ‘Kachin’ as a primary ethnic category and geo-political boundary. Yet it was in 1947 a constitutionally undifferentiated term juxtaposed straightforwardly with that of ‘non-Kachin’. Paragraph 166 of the 1947 Constitution states that of the 12 seats in the Kachin State Council, 6 are for ‘Kachins’ and 6 are for ‘non-Kachins’. The Minister for the Kachin State was to be ‘Kachin’ but half of his cabinet had to comprise ‘non-Kachins’. Non-Kachins were principally Shan and Burmese communities, whilst the Kachin community was an undefined catch-all for ‘upland other’. Therefore, immediately following independence from the British the term Kachin had a degree of political malleability within the new state.
As the colonial taxonomy of the Kachin ethnic category was neither wholly prescriptive nor wholly consistent, there was still much to be played for in how the ethnic composition of this category should be defined. For example, in 1955 the new administrative unit of North Hukawng in the Myitkyina District was created, which stated that Naga peoples living there were now to be known as ‘Kachin-Nagas’. This would help the state to diminish the authority of predominantly Jinghpaw interests in defining the political agenda of Kachin State, as well as separate these from other Naga communities which were declaring their support of an armed independence movement. [3] The appellation did not stick, but again demonstrates the elasticity that ethnic categories were deemed to have in the political sphere.
The discrepancy between ‘Kachin’ as an officially sanctioned geography and the term as an ethnonym created difficulties. On the one hand, the creation of a region of Burma known as Kachin State in 1948 seemed to legitimate the claims that Kachin nationalists made concerning their ‘possession’ of this territory if they could consolidate the idea that it also referred to the dominant ethno-political community of this region. This community would therefore expect to have a dominant role to play in the political determination of this region. On the other hand, in being forced to accept the use of the term ‘Kachin’ on the broader political stage of Burma, a tension was created between the local understandings of identity, place, and cross-group relationships of the groups which came under this umbrella and that which the colonial period had structured. Such a tension might not have had much significance if the desired level of local political autonomy from the Burmese centre had been established following independence in 1948. However, as the failure to establish a federal structure in Burma became apparent, and Kachin State was increasingly considered as just the northernmost region of an expanded Burmese state, the problems inherent to the dual usage of the term became apparent.
As the model of the independent national ethno-state was very quickly contested by both military and political ethnic minority groups, defining the specific ethnic as well as geographical boundaries of the term within the state became an increasing concern in the face of what was seen as Burmese nationalist Buddhification policies and geographical redefinitions of ‘Kachin’.
There is also a difficulty relating to historical documentation that could be used to contest some of these simplifying constructions. Some ethnic communities have very substantive and significant historical and literary traditions, such as with the Rakhine, Mon and Shan peoples, but for others who lack longstanding literary traditions, who instead relied upon complex oral and ritual cosmologies of time and space to define their presence, as with the Kachin, it is difficult to find ways of authenticating their historical and societal position in line with the conventions of academic or ‘western’ research discourse. Indeed, even the Shan, Rakhine, Mon and Karen communities find it difficult to construct interpretive parallels between their own historical paradigms expressed through traditional texts and those defined through ‘documentation’ of the kind demanded by political analysts. Without the ‘right kind’ of text-based historical documentation in their own languages by which they can present their own cognitive model of the past, locating some of these communities, such as those termed ‘Kachin’, and determining their historical relations with a Burman centre becomes to a great extent dependent upon the documentation of ‘other’. This raises two principal concerns: 1) establishing the nature of ethnic relations through the historical record of ‘other’ will unduly emphasise the historical integrity of the greater Burmese state, depending as it would do upon Burmese sources to validate and legitimate a ‘Kachin’ historical presence; conversely 2) that by highlighting the relative lack of data concerning the category Kachin, support will be given to the contention that this category as a political and geographical construct is merely an invention of the British colonial period and that it otherwise has no historical validity. Both interpretations are considered highly damaging to political claims for the autonomy of this ethnic category in the present, which are based on the idea that it did in fact function as a discrete political, economic, social, cultural and geographic entity over an extended historical period. Lack of documentation in some cases causes historical discourse to become highly symbolic and centres on ‘proving’ the authenticity of local ethnonyms, of fixing the meaning of ritual or cultural forms in line with contemporary political concerns, and so on. This again seems to create a disjuncture between the historical and societal models of many ethnic categories, which also vindicate the underlying ‘truth’ of these categories, and those demanded by the modern state and western research paradigms.
Ethnic nationalist groups, therefore, in some cases feel somewhat bound to accommodate themselves to these representations in the political sphere, which employed generalizing labels, whilst the underlying societal and historical realities of their groupings, as well as their internal structures and dynamics, remained largely unpacked by the intellectual apparatus of both the pre-colonial colonial and post-colonial state. It is no coincidence that simplified cultural representations of ethnic category on the state stage, such as on Union Day, continue to be the main referent towards a notion of this societal and historical complexity, but without the implications of this ever being explored.
We can see from the above, therefore, that the notion of ethnic category was transmitted to the political centre, and became a tool of political discourse, predicated upon a very simplistic set of societal and historical relationship. This in turn both concealed and inhibited meaningful interpretations of sub-category diversity and contributed to the notion of diversity being equated with fears of fragmentation in times of conflict.
Funding initiatives and development discourse in the Kachin Hills in the 1930s
Given that talking about ‘ethnic minorities’ as a homogeneous group becomes more difficult in this analysis has led some to say that a broader historical contextualisation of ethnic issues is unnecessary as it merely complicates the principal political objectives of the moment. Whilst there is certainly a logic to this position in some respects, as stated, the danger of this approach is that it tends to undermine the desire of many of these groupings themselves for fuller recognition of their historical presence in Burma, for an acknowledgement that they have substantive histories deserving of full consideration. Recognising this wherever possible is a step towards overcoming the simplification of so-called ‘ethnic’ issues in the political and public sphere. Many of the issues that we use to mark our concern for the ‘ethnic dimension’ of Burma’s situation today -- environmental concerns, forced migration and resettlement, land rights, militarization, the epidemiology of transmittable diseases – are rarely discussed in this way, even though they have historical contexts or historical precedents that could indeed help to illuminate our contemporary approaches. HIV/AIDS is a case in point. On the one hand, this issue seems so undeniably contemporary, global public awareness of the illness coinciding more or less with the 1988 uprising, that its epidemiology seems rightly to act as a marker of the dire socio-political and socio-economic situation of many marginal communities in Burma in recent years. For example, appalling HIV/AIDS statistics are often referenced iconically in discourses relating to Kachin State as a symptom of its desperate social and economic condition. Yet even this issue should perhaps not be so disconnected from a broader historical perspective. Discourses about sexual health have a relatively long history in the Kachin Hills region. Historical discourses on syphilis promoted throughout the 1920s and 1930s were similarly related to notions of development, to the apparent political disengagement of Kachin youth, and to the introduction of inappropriate social welfare initiatives. However, what is perhaps even more noteworthy in comparison with our present discourses, is that these health concerns and initiatives tended always to surface at times of key political transition, such as in 1937 when Burma was separated from India, and immediately after the second war when they figured in debates on the state of the Kachin region leading up to independence. Significantly, these discourses, which stated that the Kachin peoples were about to die out because of what was deemed a degenerating social framework, became implicated in the interpretive apparatus used to support the notion that the Kachin peoples were not yet ready to govern themselves in an independent state. At a societal level also, the campaigns and, crucially, the discourses associated with them, had a marked impact on important aspects of Kachin social organisation, on traditional gender roles in some localities, and they continue to be significant in the contemporary historical imagination relating to notions of development as constructed by church sermons and the receptivity towards condom use. Even with an irrefutably contemporary issue such as the spread of HIV/AIDS, we lose significant insight if we do not extend our historical and societal perspective to assess the impact of well-intentioned policies on the communities with which we are dealing, and just as importantly, the way in which we talk about them as well as what we do.
There are a host of terms that we tend to use in relation to ‘ethnic issues’ which are deemed to have either a historical or societal justification. Some of these terms relate to biophysical relationships with the environment, and those such as ‘isolated’, ‘wilderness’, ‘remote’ are particularly prevalent in discourses about minorities. However, we perhaps lack historical awareness if we do not note that in the past these terms became further justifications for the alienation of land rights. The unquestioned perpetuation of such terms also denies the fact that there must scarcely have been a hill or stream in these regions that was not cognitively mapped by the traditional routes and paths of oral culture, by the recitation funeral routes, migration routes and such like, as well as by the detailed ethnobotanical knowledge which gave meaning to the most minor of details in the natural environment. From whom were such communities remote when we see the integration of expansive kinship lineages in cosmological models of space and time spanning from India to China, and have further proof of this integration in regional trade routes by the study of complex material cultures which demonstrate ongoing culture contact? Terms such as ‘traditional’ enter our discourses to demonstrate the challenges that many ethnic cultures face in the contemporary situation, but without appropriate explanation of this term it too often becomes an unrealistic representation of communities that caricatures them in the same way that the Union Day festival does on the state stage. Essentially, therefore, it is very easy to perpetuate discourses about ethnic groups in Burma that are appropriate politically because they are intended ultimately to address a main problem of non-equality, but which over-simplify and in the process do little to assist these communities with dealing with the internal societal and historical dilemmas that are increasingly coming to light as post-ceasefire situations allow some of the problems of nationalist structuring of ethnic categories to come to the surface.
Conclusion
This paper has ranged over a number of issues, none of which has an apparent or easy solution. NGOs and other donors must determine the extent to which they want, or are able, to engage with some of the implications of these comments. However, what is clear is that funding which perpetuates tokenistic approaches to ‘ethnic issues’, a policy which might seem tempting in the present situation when funding initiatives are being hesitantly refocused to projects inside Burma, should be avoided. Where donors are unable to undertake appropriate forms of research themselves for lack of time or resources, they too should be encouraged to cross bridges with the small but growing academic community who are engaged in such research and who would, in many cases, be happy to play a part in the delineation of historical and societal implications of funding projects. Ultimately, both the academic and donor communities must share a joint responsibility to engage with research and development projects that engage with the need to support pluralistic developments within ethnic categories, and not just between them, and do not shy away from some of the complexities and difficulties that might arise as a result.
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