http://localhost:8080/johnson-mandalay Senior Fellow, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, Writer and Historian Wed, 21 Aug 2024 16:54:55 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 http://localhost:8080/johnson-mandalay#comment-77004 Wed, 21 Aug 2024 07:33:35 +0000 https://richardlangworth.com/?p=8675#comment-77004 I am a Myanmar Buddhist and wish to make two points. (1) Kipling’s poem “Mandalay” does not upset me unduly; it was in colonial times (during which my parents grew up). But Myanmar people fluent in English like me (the poem has not been translated yet) find the characterization about Lord Buddha’s image and Buddhism as practiced in my country offensive. And not withstanding your remark, “Did he think Myanmar’s leaders study Kipling?” enough still read English poetry. (2) You comment about “our modern haste to call Burma by its new name Myanmar—proclaimed in 1989 by the ruling military junta.* This is patently false. It had always been Myanmar in our temple inscriptions of the 12th century. Myanmar is named after the main ethnic group, just as Thailand takes its name from the Thai. Ignorant foreigners do not realize this and try to politicize the name because Aung San Suu Kyi had refused to use it. It is neither new nor invented by any military government. “Burma” is simply the British colonialist mispronunciation of the word “Bamar” (actually pronounced B’mah), which in itself is the vernacular form of our national language, while the official form is called “Myanmar” (pronounced Mia-Mah) and has been thus so since the Bagan era, as documented in our stone inscriptions.
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Thank you for your observations. (1) I think you are quite right to consider Kipling’s 1890 poem in the context of its time. Likewise its ignorant wisecrack by a British soldier: as I said, the only offensive line in the poem. As a whole the poem expresses admiration for the country and its people, comparing them favorably to the British, which must have been off-putting to certain Victorians. Perhaps we all should step back from taking “offense” at trivia. (2) I did not say “Myanmar” was “new” or “invented” by the ruling junta, but they certainly did proclaim it, in 1989, although a third of the country is not Bamar. As you point out, “Burma” and “Myanmar” amount to the same thing, but perhaps the 1989 change was proclaimed for political rather than etymologic purposes. -RML

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