http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140814/jsp/opinion/story_18717358.jsp#.U-wWafmSxqo
Mukul Kesavan
Arriving in Myanmar in early July, I expected to find a country mothballed by decades of isolation, given that it was only in 2011 that military rule formally ended and the West eased its sanctions. I had cast Yangon in the role of an eastern Havana, complete with finned cars creaking through its streets like grumpy sharks. I found, instead, a solidly built colonial city with unbroken pavements, roads dense with late model Japanese cars and an air of quiet well-being.
The locals wore straw hats against the sun, most women wore square patches of pink-brown paste on their faces and snugly wrapped laungyis and, as a token of Myanmar’s integration into the global economy, everyone accepted dollar bills so long as they came unfolded, uncreased and in large denominations. But given that home for me was the belligerent chaos of Delhi, it was the civility of everyday transactions that was striking.
A tourist’s generalizations based on car-borne observations aren’t worth much, but as we rushed around Myanmar, from Yangon to Bagan to Mandalay to Lake Inle, this sense of travelling amongst friendly, unpredatory people was reinforced. Till 1937, Burma was administratively a part of British India, but Myanmar didn’t seem like India at all: the girls that tried to sell us things at tourist sites were happy to take no for an answer and carry on chatting and in a week’s worth of travelling I didn’t once see a man leaving his sign on a wall or against a tree.
Walking on the wooden boardwalk that borders Kandawgyi lake in Yangon, I noticed, as any desi would, the absence of plastic waste and assorted garbage. There was a sense of déjà vu about this because I remembered observing the same absence while travelling in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago and I felt the same sense of demoralization. How did a neighbouring country, not conspicuously more prosperous or ‘modern’ than India, manage to sidestep the insanitary squalor that is urban India’s defining brand and every Indian’s birthright?
This isn’t really a question, more a self-flagellatory ritual that gives middle-class Indians an excuse to despise their countrymen and fleetingly transcend the badness of India. But if we suppress for a moment our instinct for self-loathing, the contrast between Burmese cleanth and Indian filth raises a real, if old-fashioned, question. Why do Indians lack the civic sense that would allow them to respect common spaces by not littering or peeing in public, and that, more generally, might help them be impersonally civil to strangers?
Travelling through Myanmar, it was tempting to locate this difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ in religion and culture. The really startling difference between India and Myanmar is the extent to which faith seems to regulate and define society. This might sound like an odd thing to say given the pervasiveness of religious belief in India, but there is no equivalent in India to the massive presence of Buddhism in Burma’s public domain.
The skyline everywhere is defined by gilded pagodas and temples. This isn’t dissimilar to the ubiquity of churches in European cities, but unlike the churches of western Europe, these Buddhist sacred places aren’t relics of a religious past; they are living monuments to the Burmese enthusiasm for Theravada Buddhism.
The Shwedagon pagoda’s courtyards and pavilions were crowded with worshippers but in a way that was different from the way people gathered in churches and temples and mosques. It wasn’t congregational nor were there intermediating priests; the faithful were sitting in ones and twos, either reading small religious texts or gazing intently at the Buddha images or ministering to small religious niches scattered around the campus. Pagodas and temples seemed part of the normal routine of daily life in Myanmar. I saw young couples in every pagoda, just sitting there, hanging out.
The pile-it-on redundancy of pagodas in Myanmar has to be seen to be believed. Between the 10th and the 13th century, in the great ruined city of Bagan, 3,000 pagodas and temples were built in an area about as large as Lutyens’s New Delhi. In Inthein, a small settlement off Lake Inle, literally thousands of Buddhist shrines lie higgledy-piggledy in various states of ruination, built on account of some spasm of faith in the 17th century and then inexplicably abandoned.
The belief that individuals, through acts of devotion and pagoda building and charity, can accumulate merit over a lifetime and inch closer to enlightenment, seems to shape life in a very public way. In Mandalay, at the Mahamuni Pagoda, I watched young men climb up a plinth till they were level with a larger-than-life Buddha image so that they could press squares of gold leaf on to its torso. The image was bulbous and swollen with the quantities of gold that had been pressed on to it over the years. In Mandalay there was a large cottage industry devoted to producing the gold leaf for which there was an insatiable market amongst the devout. Every Buddha image or pagoda spire of any consequence in Myanmar was slathered with 24 carat gold.
Monks in airport lounges were treated with great deference and they were always the first to board, ushered in by bowing flight attendants. We saw little troupes of monks wrapped in maroon, carrying their lacquer bowls, being given cooked food by lay believers at certain hours in the morning, everywhere in Myanmar. There was a solemn, yet practiced, routine to it. Every man in Myanmar is meant to set aside some time in his life during which he is meant to live the routines of a monk.
It’s tempting for the tourist to connect the enormous, structuring influence of Buddhism in Myanmar to the way in which its people set about their public lives: the civic discipline that keeps Burmese cities clean, the grace with which they deal with others. Slippery though culturalist explanations are for social behaviour, the sheer ubiquity of Buddhism in Burma nudges you in that direction.
And so does the government of that country. Myanmar is as Buddhist a nation as it is possible for its State to make it. Its military rulers have done everything they can to bolster this sense of Burma as a cohesive Buddhist idyll. Given that 80 per cent of Myanmar’s population is Buddhist, this wasn’t hard to do. For decades, then, the Burmese State has helped its Buddhist majority live out this dream of sameness, this ideal of a perfectly homogeneous Buddhist nation.
It is, of course, a fantasy, played out at the expense of those citizens of Myanmar who aren’t Buddhist. The day we arrived in Mandalay there was a nine o’clock curfew imposed because of communal riots between Buddhists and Muslims in that city. Christians in the Shan country resist what they see as the Buddhist majoritarianism of the Bamar people. A hundred thousand Rohingyas live in camps in Burma, classified as stateless, internally displaced people, denied citizenship and civic rights. Radical Buddhist monks lead campaigns of persecution against this Muslim community. Pro-democracy activists who might have been expected to defend basic civil rights, are reluctant to recognize the Rohingyas as citizens of Myanmar. Even Aung San Suu Kyi, the embodiment of the Burmese struggle for liberty, equivocates about the status of the Rohingyas with one eye on her principally Buddhist constituency.
Walking through the crowded streets of Yangon near the famous Scott Market, I notice a few Indian shops manned by familiar desi faces and the little knots of Muslim women, conspicuous in their burqas. They seem like marginal people, stragglers in this unselfconsciously Buddhist nation. Abruptly, I feel a nostalgia for home; there mightn’t be much to be said for a country of public widdlers, but we have one great thing going for us: our claim on our nation isn’t founded on faith.
Mukul Kesavan
Arriving in Myanmar in early July, I expected to find a country mothballed by decades of isolation, given that it was only in 2011 that military rule formally ended and the West eased its sanctions. I had cast Yangon in the role of an eastern Havana, complete with finned cars creaking through its streets like grumpy sharks. I found, instead, a solidly built colonial city with unbroken pavements, roads dense with late model Japanese cars and an air of quiet well-being.
The locals wore straw hats against the sun, most women wore square patches of pink-brown paste on their faces and snugly wrapped laungyis and, as a token of Myanmar’s integration into the global economy, everyone accepted dollar bills so long as they came unfolded, uncreased and in large denominations. But given that home for me was the belligerent chaos of Delhi, it was the civility of everyday transactions that was striking.
A tourist’s generalizations based on car-borne observations aren’t worth much, but as we rushed around Myanmar, from Yangon to Bagan to Mandalay to Lake Inle, this sense of travelling amongst friendly, unpredatory people was reinforced. Till 1937, Burma was administratively a part of British India, but Myanmar didn’t seem like India at all: the girls that tried to sell us things at tourist sites were happy to take no for an answer and carry on chatting and in a week’s worth of travelling I didn’t once see a man leaving his sign on a wall or against a tree.
Walking on the wooden boardwalk that borders Kandawgyi lake in Yangon, I noticed, as any desi would, the absence of plastic waste and assorted garbage. There was a sense of déjà vu about this because I remembered observing the same absence while travelling in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago and I felt the same sense of demoralization. How did a neighbouring country, not conspicuously more prosperous or ‘modern’ than India, manage to sidestep the insanitary squalor that is urban India’s defining brand and every Indian’s birthright?
This isn’t really a question, more a self-flagellatory ritual that gives middle-class Indians an excuse to despise their countrymen and fleetingly transcend the badness of India. But if we suppress for a moment our instinct for self-loathing, the contrast between Burmese cleanth and Indian filth raises a real, if old-fashioned, question. Why do Indians lack the civic sense that would allow them to respect common spaces by not littering or peeing in public, and that, more generally, might help them be impersonally civil to strangers?
Travelling through Myanmar, it was tempting to locate this difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ in religion and culture. The really startling difference between India and Myanmar is the extent to which faith seems to regulate and define society. This might sound like an odd thing to say given the pervasiveness of religious belief in India, but there is no equivalent in India to the massive presence of Buddhism in Burma’s public domain.
The skyline everywhere is defined by gilded pagodas and temples. This isn’t dissimilar to the ubiquity of churches in European cities, but unlike the churches of western Europe, these Buddhist sacred places aren’t relics of a religious past; they are living monuments to the Burmese enthusiasm for Theravada Buddhism.
The Shwedagon pagoda’s courtyards and pavilions were crowded with worshippers but in a way that was different from the way people gathered in churches and temples and mosques. It wasn’t congregational nor were there intermediating priests; the faithful were sitting in ones and twos, either reading small religious texts or gazing intently at the Buddha images or ministering to small religious niches scattered around the campus. Pagodas and temples seemed part of the normal routine of daily life in Myanmar. I saw young couples in every pagoda, just sitting there, hanging out.
The pile-it-on redundancy of pagodas in Myanmar has to be seen to be believed. Between the 10th and the 13th century, in the great ruined city of Bagan, 3,000 pagodas and temples were built in an area about as large as Lutyens’s New Delhi. In Inthein, a small settlement off Lake Inle, literally thousands of Buddhist shrines lie higgledy-piggledy in various states of ruination, built on account of some spasm of faith in the 17th century and then inexplicably abandoned.
The belief that individuals, through acts of devotion and pagoda building and charity, can accumulate merit over a lifetime and inch closer to enlightenment, seems to shape life in a very public way. In Mandalay, at the Mahamuni Pagoda, I watched young men climb up a plinth till they were level with a larger-than-life Buddha image so that they could press squares of gold leaf on to its torso. The image was bulbous and swollen with the quantities of gold that had been pressed on to it over the years. In Mandalay there was a large cottage industry devoted to producing the gold leaf for which there was an insatiable market amongst the devout. Every Buddha image or pagoda spire of any consequence in Myanmar was slathered with 24 carat gold.
Monks in airport lounges were treated with great deference and they were always the first to board, ushered in by bowing flight attendants. We saw little troupes of monks wrapped in maroon, carrying their lacquer bowls, being given cooked food by lay believers at certain hours in the morning, everywhere in Myanmar. There was a solemn, yet practiced, routine to it. Every man in Myanmar is meant to set aside some time in his life during which he is meant to live the routines of a monk.
It’s tempting for the tourist to connect the enormous, structuring influence of Buddhism in Myanmar to the way in which its people set about their public lives: the civic discipline that keeps Burmese cities clean, the grace with which they deal with others. Slippery though culturalist explanations are for social behaviour, the sheer ubiquity of Buddhism in Burma nudges you in that direction.
And so does the government of that country. Myanmar is as Buddhist a nation as it is possible for its State to make it. Its military rulers have done everything they can to bolster this sense of Burma as a cohesive Buddhist idyll. Given that 80 per cent of Myanmar’s population is Buddhist, this wasn’t hard to do. For decades, then, the Burmese State has helped its Buddhist majority live out this dream of sameness, this ideal of a perfectly homogeneous Buddhist nation.
It is, of course, a fantasy, played out at the expense of those citizens of Myanmar who aren’t Buddhist. The day we arrived in Mandalay there was a nine o’clock curfew imposed because of communal riots between Buddhists and Muslims in that city. Christians in the Shan country resist what they see as the Buddhist majoritarianism of the Bamar people. A hundred thousand Rohingyas live in camps in Burma, classified as stateless, internally displaced people, denied citizenship and civic rights. Radical Buddhist monks lead campaigns of persecution against this Muslim community. Pro-democracy activists who might have been expected to defend basic civil rights, are reluctant to recognize the Rohingyas as citizens of Myanmar. Even Aung San Suu Kyi, the embodiment of the Burmese struggle for liberty, equivocates about the status of the Rohingyas with one eye on her principally Buddhist constituency.
Walking through the crowded streets of Yangon near the famous Scott Market, I notice a few Indian shops manned by familiar desi faces and the little knots of Muslim women, conspicuous in their burqas. They seem like marginal people, stragglers in this unselfconsciously Buddhist nation. Abruptly, I feel a nostalgia for home; there mightn’t be much to be said for a country of public widdlers, but we have one great thing going for us: our claim on our nation isn’t founded on faith.
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