Connected and Local Histories of Arakan: New Textual and Epigraphic Studies: Introduction

Scholarship has long attended to the connected histories of sociocultural domains bordering the Bay of Bengal and the important role played by spaces within Arakan (Rakhine) in pre- and early-modern economic, literary, religious, and political geographies.¹ However, Arakan’s place within such itineraries has been mapped largely from the perspective of European (especially Portuguese, Dutch, and British) or Indo-Persian records.² Scholars who have worked with vernacular or Indic language documents produced locally in Arakan have remarked on the poor documentation and availability of such materials.³ The reason for this state of affairs is certainly not a dearth of local cultural production—inscriptions, manuscripts, or archaeological and art historical evidence. Rather, it is a result of the continued neglect of Arakan and Arakanese archives by preservationists, archaeologists, epigraphists, philologists, and historians, both within and outside Burma. There are, to be sure, some exceptions, particularly in the fields of archaeology, numismatics, and epigraphy.⁴ Yet in other fields, for example concerning research on literature writt en in pre-colonial Arakan, very few recent studies of consequence can be noted.⁵

This special issue of the Journal of Burma Studies comprises four essays that engage epigraphic, numismatic, and manuscript archives for Arakan Studies.⁶ Most of the sources in question are presented here in publication for the first time, or are otherwise poorly known and have long been in need of reassessment. By engaging such texts—in Sanskrit, Arakanese, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Burmese, and Pali—compiled in and around Arakan between roughly the sixth and nineteenth centuries ce, these essays allow us to refine our understandings of local Arakanese cultural, religious, and political histories. On this basis, we are able to critically assess old and more recent views of the histories that connect Arakan with central Burma and beyond in Southeast Asia, on the one hand, as well as with Bengal and beyond in South Asia, on the other.

The contribution by Arlo Griffiths presents an edition, translation, and study of three newly discovered Sanskrit donative inscriptions from Arakan. It unmasks a sweeping range of misconceptions about Arakanese history during the latt er half of the first millennium ce, while also sett ing that history on a more stable foundation. Griffiths demonstrates that the toponym Kāmaraṅga mentioned in an inscription of Dharmavijaya—the first edict of this king to appear in publication—plausibly refers to an Arakan-centered polity attested elsewhere in Sanskrit literary sources (and perhaps also in later Old Burmese epigraphy). He examines Buddhist practice and identity as reflected in these inscriptions, leading to a reconsideration of long held assumptions that early Buddhism in Arakan was committed to Mahāyāna orientations. Griffiths’ analysis of the paleography and dating of the inscriptions, which takes into account especially important comparisons with epigraphic and numismatic evidence from neighboring Bengal (Harikela and Samataṭa), substantially revises widely accepted views of the political history of early Arakan and its chronological framework.

The essay by Thibaut d’Hubert examines textual and paleographic features of a corpus of coins minted under the authority of Arakanese kings and governors in Chittagong and Ramu between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries ce. The earliest among his numismatic materials bear statements in Arabic together with royal titles in Persian. D’Hubert demonstrates that these coins have suggestive physical and textual parallels with Islamic coinage minted elsewhere, arguing that they reveal a degree of continuity with the Bengali Sultanate period and that their manufacture was directed toward the export trade with Muslim networks outside Arakan-governed territories. He shows that despite their prominent use of a supra-regional Islamicate idiom, the texts of these coins incorporate local elements. D’Hubert offers an inventive reading of the Persian rendering of the well-known royal title “Lord of the Elephant,” a formulation that on his account could lend itself to alternative Buddhist or Muslim interpretations. From the mid-sixteenth century, this local adaptation becomes more pronounced, and coins begin to incorporate Bengali and Sanskrit...