Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom by Alexandra Kaloyanides (review)

The nineteenth-century American Baptist mission to Burma (now Myanmar), which began when Adoniram and Ann Judson arrived in Rangoon (now Yangon) in July 1813, converted comparatively few of the Bamar Buddhist majority. It was spectacularly successful, however, among some of Burma's marginalized ethnic groups, particularly the Karen, the Chin, and the Kachin. Now, Burmese Baptists form both the largest Christian community in the country and the largest religious minority group.

A number of accounts have been written of this Baptist mission. Some are insider accounts that touch on the hagiographical; others locate themselves either within mission studies or historical studies. Kaloyanides does something different. She analyzes the mission through material objects that throw light on religious change in Burma before the Third Anglo-Burmese War of 1885 and during British colonialism. This change was characterized by collisions, contestations, defensive strategies, correlations, and complementarities. Her approach complexifies normative accounts of a binary struggle between Buddhists and "a monolithic Western enemy" by presenting Burma as ethnically diverse and consequently host to multiple, sometimes competing, religious expressions and religious identities—"a place of entangled empires and reimagined religious worlds" (4). The result is an evocative tapestry that does not open to one key.

Kaloyanides brings to her study knowledge of some of the vernacular languages of Burma and a determination to move beyond Western records of the Baptist mission through recording oral histories from contemporary Baptists in what is now Myanmar. She does this with empathy and sensitivity. Her choice to concentrate on material religion is informed not only by contemporary concerns within religious studies but also by the importance of the visual in the religious cultures of Burma in the period she studies, before the textualization of Buddhism within Buddhist modernism.

The book contains four chapters, each focusing on a different religious object. "The book" comes first as a shaper of proselytization, variously used as an object of devotion, means of defense, protection-giving amulet and ornament, and inspiration for evangelism. The chapter weaves a complex history of competing and complementary re-imagined pasts among the Karen, the American missionaries themselves, and Burmese Buddhists, each featuring a book. The Karen, eager to assert themselves against the Buddhist majority and to challenge the stereotype that they possessed neither texts nor history, embraced, in the nineteenth century, a romanticized myth that they had once lost a sacred book, which would be returned to them by White people. Of uncertain provenance, this myth helped them grow in self-confidence, hone their identity, and explain their widespread conversion to Christianity. A similar narrative had inspired the Judsons and other American missionaries to travel across the world, namely that ancient Indian Sanskrit texts existed that spoke of Jesus and the Christian narrative. Claudius Buchanan (1766–1815), an East India Chaplain to Bengal, had argued this in "The Star in the East," a sermon preached in Britain in 1809, to convince the West that it was time for Christianity to return to the East. Most eventually rejected this romantic vision as they came to recognize the importance of other books in the Buddhist imaginary.

At the heart of this chapter is a cameo of Judson taking the Bible, in six volumes, decorated in lavish Burmese style, to the new King, to ask for permission to proselytize. The King withholds his permission and rejects Judson's gift (45), in effect refusing to endorse a relationship between the royal house and Christianity. Kaloyanides then examines the Buddhist book that sealed the relationship between Buddhism and governance—the Burmese Kammavāca, containing rituals essential for the continuance of the monastic sangha and, consequently, the realm. The author demonstrates that the production of Kammavāca manuscripts changed in nature as the threat to Burma's borders increased in the decades before 1885. Guardian spirits holding defensive and protective swords, for instance, appeared on them "conscripted to protect a kingdom at war with the British" (51). Many were commissioned by...