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Callahan, Mary. 2004. “Making Myanmars: Language, Territory,

and Belonging in Post-Socialist Burma,” pp99-120 in Joel S
5 Migdal ed., Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in
the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices, Cambridge
University Press.
Making Myanmars
Language, Territory, and Belonging in Post-Socialist Burma

Mary P. Callahan

In the 1990s, an elite-level struggle over political power in Burma remapped

the politics of belonging and language in the country for the first time in
over a century. National borders did not change, but an internal divider
that marked off the unquestioned political center from its attendant margins
suddenly became permeable and contentious. First established as a colo-
nial administrative simplification in the late nineteenth century, this bound-
ary between the central areas and what became known as the “Frontier”
or “Excluded” areas demarcated where politics happened, who could be
what kind of citizen or subject, and which language would animate struggles
for power throughout the twentieth century. After political independence in
1948, the colonial-established distinction between center and margins per-
sisted until just after the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, which sprang up
mostly in the central region. The uprising toppled the weak Burma Social-
ist Program Party regime, but the struggle for control over the successor
state took several years to play out. Along the way, the seemingly solid bar-
rier between the center and frontier became porous, destabilizing the spatial
logic that had characterized and pacified political conflict in the modern era.
After 1988, ethnic minority populations long held in ambivalent categories
of lesser citizenship and territory that rarely crossed the central state’s radar
screen became potentially formidable threats to those in power in the center.
As a result, populations in these formerly more marginal areas began to find
their behavior and language under the optic of the central state, and the
century of the latter’s disinterestedness was replaced by the demands and
commands of citizenship in an authoritarian political system. This process
has produced a range of new kinds of contacts, negotiations, enterprises,

The author appreciates the insights of Elizabeth Angell, Vincent Boudreau, Kyaw Yin Hlaing,
Patrick McCormick, Joel Migdal, and the participants in the September 2000 Workshop on
Boundaries and Belonging. They read an earlier draft of this paper and offered helpful advice.
Any remaining weaknesses are solely the responsibility of the author.

99
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100 Mary P. Callahan

trespasses, and struggles, all of which challenge the spatial logic of power
that mapped politics in Burma in the colonial and postcolonial eras.
Among these new interactions and struggles is an unprecedented state-
engineered redefinition of the terms of belonging in Burma. This redefinition
entails the most concerted government effort at minority assimilation and
disempowerment in the twentieth century and has at times endangered those
who conduct their affairs outside the home in an indigenous language other
than Burmese (the language the regime now calls “Myanmar”), the language
of the centrally based ethnic-majority group that comprises about 65 percent
of the national population. This state’s language requirement has become
especially clear in the realm of education. For example, in the 1990s, the
teaching of the ethnic minority, Mon language in southern Burma, an area
where a former rebel group (the New Mon State Party (NMSP)) concluded
a cease-fire agreement with the military junta in 1995, became a danger-
ous enterprise. Thein Lwin writes that “the teachers of the Mon language
and literature run the risk to be punished by the [Rangoon] government au-
thorities. Some teachers have been arrested.” In 1998, the government shut
down 120 Mon schools, stranding 6,000 students. Subsequent negotiations
between the New Mon State Party’s education committee and the junta led
to the reopening of the schools, but “the teaching of the Mon language and
literature was not officially allowed.”1 In most regions beyond the center
where the government has established any kind of authority, non-Burmese
languages may be studied only in the first few years of education, but not
after fourth grade or outside of school hours. Religion, too, has been a tar-
get of this linguistic intolerance by the regime. For example, in 1991, two
Mon Buddhist monks and a Rangoon University lecturer were arrested for
trying to promote usage of Mon, a historic language by which Buddhism
was introduced to Burma.
Until the 1990s, the central state may have proclaimed the intention of
making Burmese the only public language across the territory that spanned to
the British-drawn borders, but it never committed any significant resources,
political will, or criminal sanctions to back up such a proclamation in geo-
graphical areas beyond the colonially designated central region. This chapter
attempts to explain why all this changed after the pro-democracy uprising in
1988. The chapter begins by explaining how the elite-level political struggle

1 Thein Lwin, “The Teaching of Ethnic Language and the Role of Education in the Con-
text of Mon Ethnic Nationality in Burma: Initial Report of the First Phase of the Study on
the Thai-Burma Border, November 1999–February 2000,” available online at http://www.
students.ncl.ac.uk/thein.lwin (accessed May 29, 2000). The Mon case is the most documented
of minority-language persecution, in part because of the ongoing research of one graduate
student. There are also reports of the military regime eliminating other minority languages
from school curricula. See coverage of the issue in Chin schools in Burmanet News, issue 405,
May 12, 1996; the issue of language repression is highlighted more generally in Amnesty
International, Myanmar Ethnic Minorities: Targets of Repression, ASA 16/014/2001, June 2001.
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Language, Territoriality, and Belonging in Burma 101

in Rangoon after 1988 destabilized the predictable, century-old, territorially

bound mode of power politics, leaving the military exposed and vulnerable
in the absence of a clearly defined set of rules as to how to consolidate and to
maintain its power. I argue that in its effort to impose form and order over
the political chaos in the center, the military elevated language affairs to a
national agenda, newly mapped all the way out to the borders drawn around
the country by British surveyors. Language became one tool in the regime’s
broader efforts to rebuild the post-1988 state and pacify the population.
The chapter then steps back and considers why language in these remote
regions never appeared on a Rangoon regime’s agenda before 1988 and
considers the way the evolution of language policy was conditioned by ter-
ritorially defined ideas about and practices of politics. The following section
analyzes the military’s response to the 1988 political crisis, which was to
deploy a series of counterinsurgency-type tactics to try to reorder the prac-
tices of politics and to create new boundaries to define and enforce the terms
under which the population throughout the country could belong, be left
alone, or be heard. At the heart of the regime’s reconstruction process was
its attempt to create, to deploy, and to animate a new racialized definition
of citizenship. This new Myanmar citizen was to be born out of programs
of homogenization and differentiation, both of which aimed at rebuilding
the state and pacifying the population. In this process, the regime’s activities
established new markers for how language could (and could not) be used
by native Burmese speakers and new demands for linguistic homogeneity
among those whose first languages were different. Drawing new boundaries
around who belongs, what one can belong to, and how one can express be-
longing, however, inevitably produces unintended consequences, which are
covered in the conclusion of the chapter.
Before proceeding, it is important to note the limitations of the argument
here. The chapter does not attempt to impute subjective feelings of belonging
to any populations – elite or otherwise – in Burmese territory. Given that
very little systematic anthropological research has been conducted among
any populations inside or outside the center in more than fifty years, the
essay cannot even assume any integrity to the categories of ethnicity and
linguistic identity long assumed to be “real” or “natural” by scholars and
practitioners of Burmese ethnic politics. Instead, this chapter analyzes the
quite serious and equally unprecedented attempt by a Rangoon regime to
fabricate a monolingual body politic mapped across spaces long considered
beyond the realm of politics in pre-1988 Burma.

Why Non-Burmese Languages Became Dangerous

The political struggle between the military regime established in 1988 and
the opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi
brought ethnic minority cultural and language politics into dangerous new
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102 Mary P. Callahan

terrain for the first time in modern history. Prior to 1988, postcolonial pol-
itics, belonging, and citizenship mapped to the central plains, Irrawaddy
Delta, and southeastern archipelagic areas – all constituent parts of the re-
gion originally targeted for direct rule by British colonial officials, who called
this territory “Burma Proper” or “Ministerial Burma.” In the colonial and
early postcolonial eras, struggles over who would rule and who would be
disenfranchised pitted various groups of ethnic Burmans against Chinese,
Indian, and other lowland indigenous groups all living in these central re-
gions. There was never much more than lip service paid to populations living
in the territory beyond, which the British called by a number of evocative
names, including the “frontier fringe” or the “Excluded Areas.”2 By the
1960s, ethnic minorities living in the central region had been eliminated
from political contention, but various ethnic Burman elites continued to
compete among themselves for the power, resources, and prestige associated
with the independent state. These intra-elite struggles remained remarkably
fixed in their central territorial domain. Centrally based contenders rarely
recruited ethnic minorities who lived beyond the colonial-designated cen-
ter in any notable fashion. On the rare occasions that Burman politicians
sought support from non-Burman leaders outside the center, they built nei-
ther durable nor successful coalitional forces.3 From the viewpoint of elites
in the center, there were neither potential political allies nor equal citizens in
the regions beyond. This perception was reinforced in the 1950s and 1960s,
when separatist insurgencies broke out in the remote, former frontier regions,
capturing the attention and sacrificing the young of the tatmadaw (Burmese
for “armed forces” of the national state) without ever really threatening the
spatial logic of national-level politics. Since none of these “rebel” groups
considered Rangoon a target or a prize to be won, remote territory and its
inhabitants rarely stirred the imaginations of political rivals and contenders
in Rangoon and environs.
All this changed in 1989, when opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi be-
gan touring the country and crossing the seemingly impermeable boundary
between center and margin that only the tatmadaw had crossed before. In
trips and speeches to ethnic minority communities far from Rangoon, be-
yond the center, she canvassed this “new” terrain for political allies, along
the way inspiring the creation of local incarnations of her political party,
the National League for Democracy (NLD). Appearing at times in ethnic

2 This territorial hierarchy of administration persisted in postcolonial constitutions. For ex-

ample, under the 1974 constitution, the former frontier areas (mapped almost identically to
the colonial “frontier”) was divided into “states” comprised mostly of ethnic minority pop-
ulations. Under that constitution, central Burma – which was populated mostly by ethnic
Burmans – was divided into administrative units called “divisions.”
3 The only significant attempts at legal multiethnic political coalitions came in 1958 and 1960,
when Prime Minister U Nu promised concessions to Arakanese and Mon politicians in return
for support for his flailing government and subsequent electoral campaign, respectively.
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Language, Territoriality, and Belonging in Burma 103

minority costumes – a Karen htamein (sarong) or a Shan khamauk (conical

peasant hat) – she captured the attention and affections of long-ignored pop-
ulations. Perhaps most evocative was her party’s decision to use a drawing
of that Shan khamauk as the ballot pictogram indicating a candidate’s mem-
bership in the NLD; the symbolism of the khamauk connecting Aung San
Suu Kyi to populations beyond the center was lost on no one.4 Of course,
on these tours, Aung San Suu Kyi spoke in Burmese, and just like the army
in its past counterinsurgency campaigns in these regions, she also employed
translators to convey at least parts of her message to non-Burmese-speaking
populations. It worked, and in the 1990 election, the NLD won 392 out of
the 425 seats it contested for the new parliament. Nineteen ethnic minority
parties also won parliamentary seats, with most of the victors sympathetic
to the goals of the NLD.
This parliament was never permitted to meet, as the military regime
quickly began disqualifying, arresting, or chasing out of the country many of
the victorious opposition candidates. Ultimately, the junta – called the State
Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC; in 1997 renamed the State
Peace and Development Council, or the SPDC) – squashed the opposition’s
attempts to build a multiethnic political coalition that crossed the bound-
ary between center and margins. SLORC came to view that experiment in
coalition building as the single greatest threat to the military’s power and to
Burma’s continued existence as a unitary state spreading to the British-drawn
borders. The military’s response does not suggest that Aung San Suu Kyi and
the opposition had in fact built an integrated multiethnic coalition of forces
that successfully rendered irrelevant the old interior divide between center
and frontier. But it does highlight the panic that the mere possibility of such
an alliance inspired in the military. In the aftermath of the bloody, divisive
1988 uprising, military leaders calculated correctly that the army did not
have the capability to fight battles in border regions and in Rangoon should
an alliance develop between the NLD in central Burma and armed, ethnic
minority rebels beyond the center. In the new order of post-Socialist politics,
the SLORC/SPDC5 no longer could afford to concede border regions as ir-
relevant to struggles for power in Rangoon but could less afford to move
troops away from the rebellious central region to deal with tensions beyond.
As a result, the junta tried to drive a wedge between potential allies in
the center and frontiers by launching a somewhat coordinated political cam-
paign to march peripheral populations into national formation according to

4 Pictograms of every party appeared on the ballot, in recognition of the population’s multilin-
gual nature as well as of the quite serious problem of illiteracy nationwide.
5 The conflation of the two names of the regimes from 1988–97 and post-1997 into
“SLORC/SPDC” is deliberate. While the SPDC reorganization of November 1997 did rep-
resent some realignment of power among particular generals in Burma, on the surface, the
post-1997 SPDC has not shown any serious deviation from previous policies of SLORC.
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104 Mary P. Callahan

the military’s security-focused terms. For the SLORC/SPDC, the populations

of the border areas had to be embraced and remade into “Myanmars,” and it
accordingly launched a singular cultural heritage industry along with devel-
opment and educational initiatives in both the center and the former frontier
areas. While this attempt to fabricate “Myanmar” and “Myanmar” speak-
ers is analyzed more carefully below, here it is important to note that this
component of the regime’s response to the transethnic oppositional threat
sent a warning to minorities living beyond the center: They will belong to the
nation-state on the terms set in Rangoon, at regional military headquarters,
and by local military garrisons. The warning instructed minorities that they
are, always have been, and always will be “Myanmars,” the new putatively
biological, racial category constructed by the regime. As a regime spokesper-
son noted on the educational components of these identity-producing cam-
paigns in the border regions, “National races [i.e., ethnic minorities] residing
in the border areas will then be able to think correctly and work together
resolutely for reconsideration of national races through common awareness
and objective and correct belief and conviction.”6
This emphasis on teaching citizens to “think correctly” is not new in the
history of Burmese politics, but what is new is the fervor with which this cam-
paign has been carried out over more than a decade. Over the last fifty years,
Rangoon regimes always have framed their formal policies toward ethnic
minorities living beyond the central region as programs aimed at teaching
“backward” peoples how to think correctly – that is, to think with a Union
mentality (1950s), as Socialists (1962–88), and now (since 1988) as authen-
tic and pure “Myanmars.” During the first two time periods, however, one
could think, speak, read, and write correctly in any indigenous language, as
long as the content of one’s utterances were pro-Union and later pro-Socialist.
Since 1988, however, the regime’s cultural homogenization programs suggest
that thinking correctly must be done in “Myanmar” language; any diversity
threatens all “Myanmars.” Thinking incorrectly is dangerous, as is teaching
and preaching in non-Burmese indigenous languages.

Language, Boundaries, and Belonging before 1988

Burma is quite unusual by Southeast Asian standards in that until 1995, its
postcolonial governments had never directly promulgated any coordinated
or systematic set of regulations regarding language policy.7 By “language
policy” or “language administration,” I mean actions by state officials at all

6 Lt. Col. Thein Han, “Human Resource Development and Nation Building in Myanmar: Unity
in Diversity,” in Human Resource Development (Yangon: Ministry of Defence, 1998), p. 218.
7 For comparisons with Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, see the
case studies in Michael Brown and Sumit Ganguly, Fighting Words: Language Policies and Ethnic
Conflict in Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
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Language, Territoriality, and Belonging in Burma 105

levels of the state administrative hierarchy that explicitly compel social and
political actors to communicate in the public sphere in a specific language.
Nonetheless, language has always been an integral component of the for-
mal government regulations, popular and elite prejudices, and force-backed
commands that have constituted and enforced citizenship and belonging in
this country. Hence, it is necessary to trace the often uncoordinated and not
terribly calculated actions of government and social forces toward adminis-
tration of language and “correct” thinking.
Before the 1990s, the politics of language were limited to the central arena
in which struggles for national power transpired. Throughout the entire ter-
ritory of Burma’s nation-state, more than a hundred languages are spoken,
although precise numbers of speakers, dialects, and language families are
unknown. In fact, the last attempt to collect statistics on numbers of home
speakers or mother-tongue speakers of each language was in 1931, when
the British Census of India attempted to group populations into categories
according to language. One census official noted with great consternation
that “some of the races or tribes in Burma change their language almost
as often as they change their clothes.”8 Census takers confronting this be-
wildering and fluid ethnolinguistic pastiche in 1931 created dozens of new
racial categories, finally settling on a figure of 135 races. Until recently, post-
independence governments downplayed difference and from 1948 to 1988
recognized only seven major “nationalities” (minorities) in the country. The
fact that no subsequent government has seen fit to collect information on
languages and their speakers presumably arises from this postindependence
political project aimed at discounting the diversity of the population while
promoting instead its unity-building programs.9 Somewhat surprisingly, this
data avoidance was continued by the post-1988 military junta, even while
it reinvigorated the 135-race framework of the 1931 census in its attempt to
divide ethnic minority groups from each other and block political alliances
among them and other regime opponents.
This variance in the numbers of ethnolinguistic categories created and
embraced by colonial and postcolonial governments before 1988 did not
affect the mapping or substance of language politics in Burma throughout
the first ninety years of the twentieth century. Throughout this period, the
politics of language centered on the territory mapped to “Burma Proper”
and focused on a singular and contentious programmatic ambition: to es-
tablish one language as the language of administration in the colonial pe-
riod and of the nation-state after independence in 1948. During British rule,

8 Census Commissioner, Government of India, Census of India, 1931, vol. 11, part 1, p. 245.
9 Anna Allott, “Language Policy and Language Planning in Burma,” in David Bradley, ed.,
Language Policy: Language Planning and Sociolinguistics in South-East Asia (Canberra: Depart-
ment of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1985),
p. 131.
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106 Mary P. Callahan

anticolonial, nationalist organizations pressed for the recognition and ele-

vation of Burmese to official status, along with the associated demotion of
the languages of colonial collaborators, the Indians and Chinese. Conflict
over language in the central region was less between speakers of English
and Burmese than it was between Burmese speakers and other non-English-
speaking populations. At stake was who would hold postcolonial political
power. After independence in 1948, Burmese-speaking elites launched in
the central regions a new industry of language “modernization” – that is,
unification, standardization, and translation – aimed at elevating Burmese
to the status of “national language.” Under parliamentary rule in the 1950s,
the newly independent, ethnic Burman–dominated government supported
the founding of the Burma Translation Society (BTS) in 1948. Later the Uni-
versity of Rangoon opened a Translation and Publications Department. The
BTS formed committees on history, science, and the creation of a dictionary
and an encyclopedia and by 1965 had produced more than 5 million copies of
books in fields such as science, arts, history, Burmese culture, and education.
The Vocabulary Committee’s forty terminology subcommittees boasted of
translating 65,000 technical terms from sixteen specialized subjects and as-
signing them standardizable Burmese equivalents for a “vocabulary bank.”10
Commissioned in 1949, the Burmese Encyclopedia began appearing volume
by volume in the early 1960s. The Socialist government (1962–88) contin-
ued and expanded on these language-enhancement programs. During the
Socialist period, the aim of policies that affected language usage was to turn
everyone – especially Burmans but also non-Burmans – into Socialists first
and foremost, or at least to provide everyone with linguistic tools that would
allow them to express Socialist ideology in public. Notably, other identity or
community linkages were politically irrelevant as long as Socialism came first.
Inside central Burma, language policies did not provoke much resis-
tance.11 In fact, a Burmese dictionary, vocabulary bank, and translated
texts constituted the logical elements of an official language, which for all
elite-level political contenders was one uncontested requirement for a mod-
ern nation-state. Given that no significant elites in the central region were
excluded from access to this language, this “modernization” of Burmese was

10 Howard Hayden, Higher Education and Development in South-East Asia: Country Profiles,
vol. 2 (Paris: UNESCO, 1967), p. 56.
11 There was remarkably little debate about which regional dialect should be designated the
“official” language, which is probably a reflection of how few major differences exist among
the dozen or so dialects of Burmese. Moreover, no one seriously questioned the idea that one
dialect should be crowned “official.” On regional dialects, see John Okell, A Reference Gram-
mar of Colloquial Burmese, part I (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), and his “Three
Regional Dialects,” in David Bradley, ed., Studies in Burmese Languages, Papers in Southeast
Asian Languages No. 13 (Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Australian National Univer-
sity, 1995), pp. 1–138; and Minn Latt Yekhaun, Modernization of Burmese (Prague: Oriental
Institute in Academia, 1966), pp. 62–3.
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Language, Territoriality, and Belonging in Burma 107

seen as a “natural” and unproblematic step in the decolonization process.12

Prior to 1988, this modernization project spurred conflict only once, when
in the 1960s, the Upper Burma Writers’ Association in Mandalay which ar-
gued in favor of simplifying the quite formal writing style.13 These writers
called for abandoning this inaccessible literary style entirely and replacing
it with the colloquial style of Burmese. The writers argued that this reform
would accelerate the social revolution under way in Burma, by making lit-
eracy more achievable for uneducated peasants and workers. The Burma
Socialist Program Party government, backed by the Rangoon-based literati,
rejected this proposal, claiming that serious matters of state simply cannot
be expressed in a lowly colloquial language. The latter was said to have
lacked the prestige, dignity, and authority required of an official language of
a modern nation-state.14
It is important to note that throughout the postcolonial era leading up to
1988, national leaders’ concerns about the politics, cultures, and languages
of the frontier regions remained of secondary significance, while the major
struggles that dominated national-level politics were still over control of the
state based in Rangoon. Because the map of political contention was lim-
ited to the center, language policy and administration rarely spilled very far
over the internal boundary between center and margin. By drawing borders
that became internationally recognized, the colonial state had assigned eth-
nic minorities in remote locations to the territory that became the Burmese
nation-state after 1948. That these populations were equally mapped out of
the political struggles and imaginations of the center by the colonial state’s
internal territorial/administrative grid made it unlikely that Rangoon-based
elites would ever care about delivering on the goods of citizenship to these
territorially and linguistically distinct populations.
From the frontier areas, however, the view of central proclamations about
officializing Burmese and forging national unity was one of threat, intrusion,

12 During the first decade after independence, non-Burman political and economic elites in
the central regions did not consider the elevation of Burmese to be terribly onerous. Most
Chinese and Indians spoke Burmese as a second language, and they were still able to send their
children to private schools where their mother tongues were used in instruction. Moreover,
Martin Smith notes that minority presses “thrived” during this era, and at least eleven
newspapers were published in minority languages in central Burma. See his “Unending War,”
Index on Censorship 23, no. 3 (July/August 1994): 113–18.
13 Burmese language is communicated in two very different styles – one is formal, literary,
written Burmese and the other is spoken, colloquial Burmese. In general, literary style is
used in formal writing, nonfiction books, newspapers, school readers, comic books, and the
narrative portions of serious novels, while colloquial style is used in everyday conversation,
classroom lectures, informal letters, and in the dialogue sections of novels. There is “a
considerable degree of variation between usages, grammatical forms, and constructions”
appropriate to each style. See Okell, A Reference Grammar of Colloquial Burmese, p. xii.
14 Allott, “Language Policy”; Julian Wheatley, “Burmese,” in Bernard Comrie, ed., The World’s
Major Languages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 834–55.
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108 Mary P. Callahan

and belonging-by-command. This outlook contributed to the emergence in

the late 1950s of armed separatist movements seeking political concessions
that ranged from increased cultural, economic, and political autonomy from
Rangoon to outright political independence. There also emerged a legal
united front of representatives of several frontier populations, which many
called the “Federal Movement.” This group formulated demands to replace
the Burman-dominated “Union” constitutional framework with a more ex-
plicitly and substantively federal one and forced the issue on to the agenda
of the government in Rangoon. When the Federal Movement held a se-
ries of high-profile meetings in the capital in 1962, the military accused the
civilian-led government of preparing to give away territory to Federal Move-
ment leaders. This became the justification for the military’s coup d’etat in
1962. In fact, movement leaders, who negotiated and argued in English and
Burmese, demanded not that they separate their territory and administra-
tion from Burma but that minority populations simply obtain greater access
to the decisions that affected the definitions and methods of belonging to
the postcolonial national society. They wanted to be heard in Rangoon.
When this movement was crushed by the army in its 1962 coup, many of
its backers went into armed rebellion against the government. The military’s
Revolutionary Council (which initiated the transition to the Socialist govern-
ment) immediately embarked on a propaganda campaign to broadcast the
Socialists’ unity theme in the border regions where separatist violence was
escalating. As F. K. Lehman argued, many in these regions interpreted the
propaganda as a warning that “adherence to a minority cultural tradition is
treated as tantamount to subversion of the nation and is branded as a mark
of group inferiority within the nation.”15
Even more directly confrontational was the Socialist government’s revi-
sion of citizenship laws in 1982, which created three categories of citizens:
full, associate, and naturalized. The new requirements made it very diffi-
cult for many indigenous minorities throughout the former frontier areas
to qualify for anything better than “associate” citizenship.16 Full citizenship
required presentation of government identification cards, which in many
cases had never been issued in large parts of rebel-held or even government-
held territory where minority populations could not communicate in the
language required for the application. Josef Silverstein notes that in a large
number of cases, these minorities “lost their equal standing with other indige-
nous peoples of Burma and were treated as stateless.”17 Such people were

15 F. K. Lehman, “Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems,” in Peter
Kunstadter, ed., Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1967), p. 104.
16 Josef Silverstein, “Fifty Years of Failure in Burma,” in Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly,
eds., Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1997), pp. 167–96.
17 Ibid., p. 182.
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Language, Territoriality, and Belonging in Burma 109

required to hold a Foreigners’ Registration Card, which effectively barred

them from many occupations and disqualified their children from entrance
to the university. Hence, while the Socialist regime preached the necessity for
unity throughout the nation-state’s territory, its practices and policies neither
questioned nor allowed any public reflection over the boundary between the
center and its margins. The center was where politics happened, full citizens
lived, and Burmese was the currency of public life; in the margins, social
affairs were considered “local,” lesser citizens lived out “primitive” exis-
tences, and language was by definition not a public activity, since the public
had been territorially limited to the center.
To summarize, until the 1990s, all postcolonial regimes in Burma ex-
pressed formal concerns and issued proclamations about the populations
inhabiting the former frontier areas, but these matters were always of sec-
ondary importance to intra-elite struggles over who controlled state power
in the central region. Even the literacy campaign of the 1960s, which could
have been the perfect tool for assimilating a wide swath of citizens across
the British-drawn territorial divide between center and periphery, took more
than fifteen years to stumble into minority terrain and ultimately had little
impact. Despite the center’s apparent neglect of these frontier regions, the ac-
tivities of ethnic Burman elites regarding language and identity were viewed
by populations beyond the center as anything but benign or neutral. Many
in these regions saw themselves under political, cultural, and linguistic siege
from Rangoon. The monolingual bent to all colonial and postcolonial lan-
guage policy universalized standards and requirements for public language
without universalizing access to channels through which large numbers of
citizen speakers and writers could have some say over the new requirements.
As Bourdieu writes, this involved “the imposition of the dominant language
and culture as legitimate and . . . the rejection of all other languages into in-
dignity (thus demoted as patois or local dialects). By rising to universality,
a particular culture or language causes all others to fall into particularity.”18
Until the 1990s, no postcolonial regime deliberately forced Burmese on the
frontier peoples, but the official functionality of Burmese certainly endowed
it with a kind of prestige and potentially a financial payoff that non-Burmese
mother tongues would not be able to match in the era of monolingual nation-
states.

Language and Belonging in the “Myanmar” Era

As noted above, of all the criticism and resistance that the junta has
faced since 1988, it clearly found most threatening Aung San Suu Kyi’s
1989–90 popularity with minority populations, in both rebel-held and

18 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1998), p. 46.
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110 Mary P. Callahan

government-held territory. The threat of an alliance between opposition

groups in the center and in the border regions pushed the military into quite
dramatic responses. First, not surprisingly, it carried out a massive expan-
sion of the army and an unprecedented arms modernization plan, so that
the tatmadaw would never be vulnerable to an onslaught from armed rebels
allied across the old center-margins divide. More surprising was SLORC’s
creative engineering of nonmilitary ways to come between the urban-based
NLD and its potential allies in the frontier regions. Toward this end, Lt. Gen.
Khin Nyunt initiated cease-fire negotiations with ethnic rebel groups in 1989.
Over the next several years, seventeen of the twenty-one major antigovern-
ment forces with as many as 50,000 troops concluded cease-fire agreements
with SLORC. These arrangements should not be taken to indicate a shift
toward center-frontier reconciliation. Instead, these are nothing more than
temporary, ad hoc solutions to the political conflict between Rangoon and
the minority populations scattered throughout the border regions. The cease-
fires merely bought the junta the opportunity to redirect troops to the center,
where the 1988 crisis was felt more deeply. Notably, the cease-fires already
have broken down in a number of regions.
As these cease-fire agreements began to fall into place, the shape of the
government’s strategy for imposing order over what appeared to be the
breakdown of the long-manageable, territorialized order of national poli-
tics began to emerge. For the first time since the British established the two
administrative zones in this colony, a Rangoon regime launched a somewhat
coordinated campaign to deal with the centrifugal impulses created by the
century-old spatial logic of politics. This campaign entailed the most con-
certed government effort at minority assimilation and disempowerment in
the twentieth century. It started with a number of makeshift, not terribly
well-thought-out solutions to what the military defined as the national crisis
of 1988. Over the last decade and a half, these practices and proclamations
have evolved into an unparalleled obsession with producing cultural homo-
geneity and purity, while at the same time exoticizing and infantilizing the
ethnic minority populations. It might seem contradictory to be pressing for
homogeneity and unity among the citizenry of Burma, while also differen-
tiating groups within the population as primitive, tourist-attracting, exotic
creatures. But for this military, homogenization and differentiation were in-
tegral parts of the same offensive against the disintegration of political order.
The 1988 crisis, in the view of the tatmadaw, was caused by national dis-
unity. The junta’s offensive against disunity had two spatially demarcated
objectives: to purify the polluted oppositional politics in the center that
brought on the 1988 crisis and to render legible (and hence controllable)
the formerly excluded populations in the remote regions.19 Homogenization

19 On the concept of legibility, see James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
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Language, Territoriality, and Belonging in Burma 111

and differentiation strategies carried slightly different messages to popula-

tions in the center and the margins, but these activities all aimed at producing
manageable citizens across both these spaces.

Differentiation
The emphasis on exoticizing minorities and differentiating identity-produc-
ing association is not entirely new in Burma, nor at all unusual among
Burma’s neighbors. During the Socialist era, the Burma Socialist Program
Party routinely dragged representatives of the major nationality (i.e.,
minority) groups into Rangoon on Union Day every February to perform
folk dances at the National Theatre, while also supporting the translation of
some minority folklore into English or Burmese for publication. And next
door in Thailand, the government’s emphasis on promoting tourism beyond
simply its sex resorts resulted in windfall profits for those who tapped into
the most “authentic” hill tribes to whom western tourists pay to be intro-
duced. What was unusual about the differentiation programs carried out by
SLORC/SPDC in the 1990s was that their scale and complexity was so much
grander than the annual theatrical productions of previous postcolonial
regimes. Moreover, their target appeared to be domestic audiences (in both
the center and beyond), not dollar-laden foreign tourists as in Thailand.
The first expansion on this scale of differentiation came during the negoti-
ations over cease-fires with former ethnic minority insurgents, when the then-
SLORC Chairman Sr. Gen. Saw Maung reinvigorated the colonial catego-
rization of indigenous peoples into 135 races. The latter probably appealed to
Saw Maung as a classic counterinsurgency (and colonial) divide-and-conquer
strategy to limit the size of the groups that might make common claims on
the government, so as to weaken their bargaining positions. Over the next
decade, the regime brought thousands of actors, musicians, artists, dancers,
and writers not just for Union Day but for celebrations of any national hol-
iday, as well as a whole range of new state productions, competitions, and
spectacles. Government-authorized textbooks for schools and universities
inserted images of ethnic minority figures alongside tatmadaw soldiers into
drawings representing significant events in Burmese history. In the 1990s, the
high-circulation, pop-culture magazine, Myet-khin-thet (published by the mil-
itary intelligence directorate), routinely carried what must have been costly
full-color photos of the most exotic of Burma’s minority populations, such
as the Pao or Palaung. The first nightclubs authorized to open in Rangoon
in 1992 all included stage shows in which dancers and musicians (often eth-
nic Burmans wearing minority costumes) performed “traditional” minority
dances, songs, or acts; many foreigners and Burmese in the audiences were
not sure which minority was being depicted, and there were often discussions
about what the “real” name of the group was that was on display onstage.
Traffic in this differentiation has been two-way across the century-old
internal boundary between center and periphery, but the traffickers in each
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112 Mary P. Callahan

direction are quite different groups of people and are carrying out quite differ-
ent parts of the regime’s program to rebuild the state and pacify the post-1988
society. The regime has tightly controlled the route from the border areas to
the center, allowing a trickle of ethnic minority representatives (artists, musi-
cians, former-insurgents-turned-drug-warlords) hand-picked by the regime.
The endpoint for them has been some kind of regime spectacle, wherein
they played roles ranging from the primitive, childish tribesperson displayed
in a festival or competition to the expensively attired, well-armed drug-
lords who proclaim their allegiance to SLORC/SPDC at opening ceremonies
for their new banks, toll roads, and office buildings. The audience for these
spectacles has been strictly limited to the territory of the center and, more
specifically, the performances target those who marched in the streets in
1988 (or were sympathetic to the marchers) but have gone back to quiet
lives since the crackdown. The message has been a warning: “These peo-
ple from beyond the center are not like you; we (the military) will keep
the uncivilized primitives and dangerous druglords under control on your
behalf.” In a sense, then, this warning tries to shore up the old colonial in-
ternal boundary, in an effort to keep potential allies territorially separate
and, more importantly, incapable of thinking of each other as equal political
partners.
By contrast, the traffic from the center out to the margins has been more
crowded, mainly with military officers and foot soldiers, as well as a handful
of Chinese, Burman, and other entrepreneurs looking for economic oppor-
tunities. As in the case of a hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency operation,
the military typically has arrived in the remote areas championing the cause
of a particular kind of differentiation. What it has wanted the local popu-
lations to hear and process was this: “We respect you, and encourage you
to escape whatever oppression you may have encountered at the hands of
your distant ethnic cousins; you deserve separate recognition.” The fact that
the message has been conveyed in Burmese, the language of the ethnic ma-
jority population long suspected of expansionism by many in the border
regions, undoubtedly has reinforced suspicions and inspired intransigence
to the tatmadaw’s new mapping and identity production in national poli-
tics. But there have been signs that some groups embraced the parts of this
message that suited their purposes and along the way thwarted the regime’s
overall aim of consolidating the power of the military over the polity. For
example, the new emphasis on the existence of 135 nationalities in Burma re-
portedly derailed the regime’s progress toward finalizing a new constitution
back in 1996, according to one member of a National Convention commit-
tee assigned to deal with political arrangements for ethnic minorities. This
army colonel reported, “We have to accept the 135 races theory, but now all
135 want their own states.”20

20 Interview, September 22, 1997.

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Language, Territoriality, and Belonging in Burma 113

Homogenization
Along the same lines, the regime’s homogenization strategy also has aimed
at both purifying the center and increasing the regime’s control over popu-
lations in border regions. For the former to be accomplished, the power of
Aung San Suu Kyi and her political party had to be diminished. The regime’s
cultural homogenization programs have subsequently emphasized the way
impure, heterogeneous, foreign influences (ranging from Aung San Suu Kyi’s
imperialist British husband to western neo-imperialist governments that col-
onized Burma and that recognized the NLD’s victory in the 1990 election)
have destroyed stability and prosperity in Burma over the last two centuries.
In this attempt to construct a homogeneous “we,” the regime has deployed
quite extraordinary language in its attempt to recast Aung San Suu Kyi as
both contaminated “other” and a contaminant who is dangerous to those
around her. For example, in newspapers and public pronouncements, regime
spokespersons have called Aung San Suu Kyi an “axehandle” (she was the
handle that foreign oppressors wield to chop up and destroy Burma), “puppet
girl,” “puppet princess,” and “Mrs. Race Destructionist” (by mixing her
blood with that of her British husband, her mixed race sons destroyed the
purity of the Burmese bloodline). Notably, there is little evidence that these
clumsy psychological warfare–inspired initiatives have made any dents in
Aung San Suu Kyi’s popularity in central Burma.
Beyond the center, the regime’s concern was with making potential allies of
the NLD more legible and hence more controllable. To accomplish this, the
populations in the old “excluded” areas had to be regrouped, and assigned
new names and categories of belonging. Most importantly, these names – all
135 of them – were generated, defined, and enforced by the tatmadaw, which
simultaneously laid out a unifying, genealogical theory of how all 135 were
connected via a common and glorious ancestry, called “Myanmar.” Under
this theory, every Shan, Pao, Chin, Karen, and Lushai is fundamentally a
“Myanmar.”
Hence, the junta’s solution to the political chaos that surrounded 1988
combined the entire population – in the center and in the margins – into
a single target of this strategy of cultural homogenization, albeit for differ-
ent reasons and toward different ends in each territorial space. At the core
of this homogenization strategy was an optimistic, no-holds-barred assault
on the everyday language and conceptual referents to be used throughout
the country and beyond. The government renamed the country “Myanmar”
and renamed some of the major cities, allegedly to eliminate vestiges of im-
perialism. English-language books were republished with all references to
“Burma” whited out and replaced with “Myanmar.” After twenty-six years
of rewriting history to explain the teleology of Burmese socialism, SLORC in
1989 launched a new growth industry in writing the sacred and ancient his-
tory of the singular national race called the “Myanmar.” The junta assigned
various government bodies responsibility for conjuring a highly improbable
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114 Mary P. Callahan

unilineal, unified, and peaceful history of a single, millennia-old national-

ity divided only by the trickery and brute force of the British imperialists.
Perhaps most representative of this campaign was the 1997–8 Pondaung
Primate Fossil Exploration archaeological project. With little archaeological
expertise, the army-led dig has produced specious claims that fossils found
in the Pondaung region prove that “human civilization began in our moth-
erland.”21 The government claims the fossils “prove” that harmony among
all ethnic groups existed in Burma all the way back to the Neolithic period:
This irrefutable conclusion is drawn from the very fact that all over the land which
now constitutes the Union of Myanmar, there is a surprising consistency and unifor-
mity or rather similarities observed on the Neolithic pottery, . . . common ideas and
similar techniques that were responsible for all inventions and evolution in material
cultures during the Neolithic period. . . .
[A]mong the Neolithic peoples then, is a total lack of any evidence as to indicate
mass mortality or mass burial that could have arisen out of inter-ethnic conflicts; for
this reason, divisive inter-racial disharmony and enmity seemed an anathema to the
national groups in those days of yore.22

Similarly, SLORC/SPDC sponsored numerous large-scale “Myanmafica-

tion”23 performances that revealed the unity campaign’s dual purposes: keep-
ing out foreign influences (thus “purifying” Myanmar culture and purging
the “impure” (i.e., Aung San Suu Kyi)) and papering over differences among
indigenous populations and cultures. The purification and homogenization
purposes are reflected in the regime’s founding of new versions of historicized
“Myanmar” festivals – including annual regatta, equestrian, and music com-
petitions – aimed at “strengthening the national pride of being a Myanmar
citizen as a unifying bond.”24 At annual Exhibitions to Revitalize and Foster
the Spirit of Patriotism, junta Secretary 1, Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt, enjoins atten-
dees to study “the origins of the Myanmar race, the flowering of Myanmar
patriotic spirit during the Bagan, Pinn-Ya, Inn-wa, Taungu, Nyaung-Yan and
Konbaung dynasties, the 3 Anglo-Myanmar wars.”25 Additionally, over the
last decade, science, cultural, and national and local history museums have
popped up all over Rangoon and the rest of the country. Built by particular

21 May May Aung, “National Museum, the Symbol of Myanmar Pride and Honour,” Myanmar
Information Sheet, December 29, 1997, available online at http://homepages.go.com/
∼myanmarinfosheet/1997/1997.htm (accessed June 11, 1999).
22 Myanmar Perspectives (March 1999).
23 This is Gustaaf Houtman’s evocative terminology. See his Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis
Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (Tokyo: Institute for the
Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1999).
24 Uta Gartner, “Old Festivals Newly Adorned,” Conference on Tradition and Modernity in
Myanmar, Berlin, Fakultatsinstitut fur Asien- and Afrikawissenschaften, 1993, p. 360; Gavin
Douglas, “State Patronage of Burmese Traditional Music,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Washington, 2001.
25 New Light of Myanmar, October 30, 1998.
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Language, Territoriality, and Belonging in Burma 115

ministries, regional commands, or armed forces directorates, all of them re-

vere the “Myanmar” race as the sacred core of their narratives of progress
and history.

Making Myanmar Speakers

In this cultural heritage industry, language has taken center stage, and it has
done so by crashing through the old substantive and territorial boundaries
that had limited the reach of the monolingual state since the early twentieth
century. SLORC’s earliest moves were typical of previous centrally fo-
cused initiatives: The junta quickly ordered the Myanmasa Ahpwe (Burmese
Language Commission) to rewrite the official monolingual Burmese dictio-
nary in order to strip out Socialist terminology and English loan words.
Here, as in the previous ninety years, the audience for this language initia-
tive was the population living in the central regions. However, very quickly,
language manipulation activities began to spill across the old boundary be-
tween center and margins. As the regime has attempted to reassemble the
remnants of the Socialist state into one under more direct military control, it
has appointed waves of new committees – all under the direction of military
officers – that have been charged with addressing the weaknesses of national
unity that caused (in the army’s view) the 1988 crisis. One of these commit-
tees came straight out of the army’s forty years of counterinsurgency combat:
the Committee for Writing Slogans for Nationals, established on April 16,
1989. From this committee emerged “Our Three Main National Causes”:
(1) nondisintegration of the Union, (2) nondisintegration of solidarity, and
(3) perpetuation of national sovereignty. These slogans and others – such
as “Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common en-
emy” – have appeared in Burmese and English in every publication produced
in Burma after 1989, and on red-and-white signs in all public places. The
slogans all emphasize the urgency of maintaining national unity, at any cost.
This unity crusade has moved language politics into new arenas for a
Rangoon regime, starting with the June 18, 1989, Adaptation of Expressions
Law. The law and the subsequent renaming campaign that came out of it have
attempted to regulate two things: First, the regime has tried to standardize
the terms Burmese language speakers would use to discuss their public iden-
tities, and, second, SLORC has tried to dictate what non-Burmese speakers –
inside and outside the country – would call the country and its public insti-
tutions (including the official language). The regime also has decreed a new
romanized orthography for these names. For example, the 1989 law renamed
the country, “Myanmar,” while “Rangoon” was henceforth “Yangon.”
According to one regime spokesman, “The term ‘Myanmar’ has been used
as the name of the nation and the people for years countable by the thou-
sands.”26 The junta appears to be harkening back at least to twelfth-century

26 Tekkatho Myat Thu, “Call Us Myanmar,” New Light of Myanmar, April 23, 2000.
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116 Mary P. Callahan

Old Burmese inscriptions, wherein “Myanmar” was the written term for the
domain of the kings at Pagan and, later, at Pegu and Mandalay. There is
some conceptual slippage here, given that for most of these eras, a king’s
domain was defined by claims not over territory but over scarce labor and
populations. Under SLORC/SPDC, the political unit called “Myanmar” has
come to refer only to territory. There is also linguistic inventiveness at play
here. In modern Burmese language usage, “Mranma/Myanma/Myanmar”27
has been the formal, written, literary term for the modern nation-state’s
territory since independence in 1948, while “Bama/Bamar” (from which
“Burma” is derived) has been the spoken or colloquial language equivalent
for the sovereign domain of the government, that is, the name of the coun-
try. Under SLORC’s language reforms, Burmese speakers and non-Burmese
speakers have been directed to use “Myanmar” as the name of the country,
its citizens and the official language, and to use “Bamar” to refer to the eth-
nic majority group. Speakers of this diglossic language have been directed
to scrap the old formal-versus-colloquial distinction and deploy these new
terms regardless of setting.
In a sense, the junta’s renaming project represents a continuation of the
four-decade-old postcolonial – and centrally focused – project of codifying
and officializing the Burmese language to enhance its prestige as a language
of a nation-state. However, whether or not it was intended, the renaming
project represents one of the more naked assertions of the supremacy of
the ethnic-majority Burmans over the minorities in the country. Gustaaf
Houtman points out, “Neither Myanma nor Bama, from which Myanmar
and Burma are derived, are neutral terms, as both are strongly associated with
the Burmese language, the language of the ethnic majority.”28 For speakers
of Burmese as a second or third language, the formal, written style – from
which “Myanmar” and almost all the other new names are derived – is even
more inaccessible than the colloquial style and perhaps most identified with
the ethnicity and associated chauvinism of its mother-tongue speakers. One
critic writes of the renaming project:

[It is] clear proof that the Myanmar [i.e., ethnic majority group] want to dominate
over all other ethnic groups, and is practising the policy of a great nation of Myanmar,
i.e., in the course of time there would be no Shan, Chin, Kachin, Karen, Mon and
Arakanese, all would eventually merge into Myanmar. It will be a monolithic whole
with one country, Myanmar, instead of the Union of Burma, one religion, Buddhist,
and one race, the Myanmarnese [sic].29

27 These are common transcriptions, transliterations, and romanizations of the Burmese lan-
guage term. No single romanization scheme has gained widespread acceptance, which ac-
counts for this variation.
28 Houtman, Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics, p. 49.
29 Kanbawza Win, An Appeal to the UN and US (Bangkok: CPDSK Publications, 1994), p. 44.
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Language, Territoriality, and Belonging in Burma 117

Beyond the renaming campaign, there is further evidence that Rangoon

cares about everyday politics, social relations, and language in the former
frontier regions a great deal more than did any previous regimes. From a
century-old policy of malignant neglect, the postcolonial central government
has shifted demonstrably into a more invasive, assimilationist set of policies
toward these populations. As noted above in this chapter, schoolteachers
and monks in widely dispersed border regions have been arrested for con-
ducting instruction in languages other than Burmese. In the regions where
cease-fires have been reached with former insurgent groups, Rangoon has
deployed the Ministry for the Development of the Border Areas and the
National Races (later renamed the “Ministry for the Progress of Border Areas
and National Races and Development Affairs”) to build roads, Burmese-
language schools, hospitals, power plants, telecommunications relay sta-
tions, and other institutions aimed at both modernizing and subjugating
former rebel-held territory. These border-areas projects, which are on a scale
never seen in Burmese history, are carried out by soldiers, officers and local
residents conscripted into labor gangs by the tatmadaw. This army likewise
exists on a scale unprecedented in modern history. Growing from 170,000
in 1988 to over 400,000 (mostly Burman) soldiers in 2000 and expanding
its materiel and technology at a similarly breakneck pace, this tatmadaw
has a capacity to deploy soldiers, guns, trucks, teachers, doctors, nurses,
and other resources in ways the unity-conscious Socialist government never
could. The Socialists’ clumsy attempts to integrate these ethnic minority
groups into a Socialist Union of Burma never succeeded because of the ut-
ter incapacity of the central government to offer any compelling incentives
to locals to work, cooperate, and negotiate with Rangoon. There is little
doubt that some local populations still consider the tatmadaw an occupy-
ing force representing Rangoon’s continued attempts at internal colonial-
ism. Nonetheless, these border areas development activities bring new re-
sources and incentives to bear on negotiations over political and economic
power that now routinely transcend the old divide between center and the
margins.

Conclusion: The Making (or Unmaking?) of Myanmars

and Myanmar Speakers
Language policy in modern Burma has come a long way from its original
territorially bounded focus on the creation of a monolingual public sphere in
the central regions. Rangoon-based regimes throughout the twentieth cen-
tury dedicated resources and personnel to the task of creating all the trap-
pings of a modern, standardized language in these regions. At stake was how
power was to be articulated in styles that favored one elite group over an-
other and that elevated the status of that elite group within the international
community as well. Out of intra-elite power struggles, various postcolonial
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118 Mary P. Callahan

coalitions of ethnic Burmans grasped the reins of rule and generated an

extensive array of programs aimed at codifying, empowering, and modern-
izing their own mother tongue. These programs have been quite successful in
their transformation of the Burmese language. Indeed, the latter now seems
inevitably and naturally the language of this nation-state. No one in central
Burma with any serious claims on ruling power would ever question the
status of Burmese as the official language of the public sphere – a significant
change since the colonial era, when English was paramount. For those in the
center, belonging is now unquestionably a process that can be practiced and
imagined only in Burmese.
During the entire twentieth century, it was only in these spatially limited
central regions that any explicit language policy materialized in formal policy
pronouncements. However, this does not mean that the impact of the policy
to “modernize” Burmese – as well as other outcomes of intra-elite strug-
gles in Rangoon – did not have far-reaching implications for populations
living, speaking, struggling, and thinking beyond the central regions. From
the colonial era onward, cultural, symbolic, and political capital became
centralized in Rangoon’s environs. This centralization led to a hierarchical
ordering of territory and populations that located sophistication, civilization,
and power in the center. Distance from Rangoon was associated with po-
litical insignificance and social backwardness. Reinforced by deeply rooted
Social Darwinist views about the evolution of civilizations, this systematic
and tidy ordering of state and society placed at a distinct disadvantage the
territorially distant, linguistically distinct populations that lived in the ju-
ridically “excluded” areas. After independence in 1948 and especially after
the takeover by the military-Socialist regime in 1962, central politics became
increasingly contestable only in Burmese, which turned thinkers, writers,
and speakers of other languages into lesser citizens in the roster of the mod-
ern nation-state.
From the point of view of populations living in the former “excluded”
areas, postcolonial military, political, and cultural power has been displayed
in Burmese language and narrated according to putative ethnic Burman tra-
ditions. Minority populations have viewed postcolonial, national-level pol-
itics as a series of theatrical acts pitting arrogant, intolerant, expansionist,
and often incomprehensible Burmans against increasingly self-identifying,
oppressed, indigenous minorities. Little has changed since independence
in 1948 to inspire revisions of this interpretation. In areas where the
SLORC/SPDC concluded cease-fire agreements in the 1990s, local popu-
lations have gained little from integration with Rangoon, although some
of their leaders – especially those involved in the production of heroin and
methamphetamines for the global market – may find easier access to money-
laundering services in Rangoon. Few villages and towns view the “border
areas development” programs as anything but a new, more invasive round
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Language, Territoriality, and Belonging in Burma 119

of Rangoon expansionism;30 the fact that the army carries them out and
does so exclusively in Burmese language reinforces this view. As a result of
decades of exclusionary state practices, anything Rangoon does is automati-
cally suspect among populations living in many of the more remote regions.
Importantly, this may not change when the state is no longer in the hands of
the military.
Despite the hostile reception to development and Burmanization pro-
grams in remote areas, the use of Burmese language therein nonethe-
less is probably spreading. In terms of language policy in the border ar-
eas, the SLORC/SPDC regime did not promulgate an explicit Burmese- or
“Myanmar”– only policy, but local and regional commanders handling day-
to-day law and order affairs have consistently made it difficult for educators,
monks, and other public figures to operate in anything but Burmese. As a
matter of survival interest, many people living in these remote regions –
confronting the presence of tens of thousands of recently arrived Burman
soldiers – have a range of incentives to speak and to understand Burmese
so as to navigate the new power corridors of their localities. Fluency or
comfort with Burmese language allows the possibility of negotiating with
the soldiers who claim the locals’ husbands, sons, rice, land, or bullocks
for use in development or counterinsurgency projects. A generation from
now, this bilingualism may lead to what SLORC feared most after 1988:
the ability of ethnic minorities to communicate fluently enough in Burmese
language that they can team up with the monolingual Burman opposition. In
other words, the post-1988 regime’s state-building and pacification practices
pushed language manipulation beyond the old boundaries of Central, Min-
isterial Burma, where these practices may end up empowering social forces
that could destabilize the Rangoon military junta.
Considerations of the regime’s differentiation, homogenization, and lan-
guage practices highlight both the new permeability of the century-old terri-
torialized logic of politics and the remarkable durability of that boundary-
generating logic. The regime itself exhibits mixed feelings about this. In the
central region, the regime wants ethnic Burmans – who have not thought
of the former border regions as political spaces inhabited by equal fellow
citizens – to sustain the colonial demarcation between center and periphery.
It wants to rehabilitate practices and images of differentiation that ensure
a disjuncture between politics and nonpolitics, center and margins, civilized
and primitive populations, the NLD and potential allies in border regions.

30 The use of forced labor to carry out the “development” projects has created not only local
hardships and hostility among ethnic minority villagers, but also waves of displaced people
as rural populations flee the depredations of the military labor recruiters. See, for example,
the report of the International Labour Organisation, Forced Labour in Myanmar (Burma)
(Geneva, July 1998).
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120 Mary P. Callahan

The regime also wants to make populations on the periphery legible enough
that they cannot slip through the permeable border and politically ally with
centrally based opposition. Creating this legibility has entailed an explosion
of state building in territory beyond the center, which asserts a bureaucratic
impulse toward administrative uniformity across the two spaces. Quite un-
intentionally, these state-building projects require and in some ways force
the internal boundary to become increasingly permeable and irrelevant.