In our junior school years, Burmese Socialist Government prescribed
history textbooks for us that were flatter than the slate of a modern Apple’s
proud product, the iPad Mini. Fearing the dividend to my knowledge of history
delivered by these lovely minions of the government’s curriculum was distorted,
I explored beyond the fences and intellectually wandered in different
directions, learning a number of dense history books written by private
historians.
My interest at that time was the detailed history of Burma’s
independence movements against the British Raj. It was particularly fascinating
to read Thakin Lay Maung’s Burma’s Political History that narrated the
story of Burma’s final separation from India in 1937. Burma had a general
election in 1932 for its people to determine whether they were willing to
remain as a province in India or become a separate nation. Some Buddhists, steeped
in textual studies emphasized that the Buddha was an Indian and that our Burmese’s
ancestors were related to the blood of the Buddha, Kshatriyas, the caste of
India into which Buddhas are born, supported the vote that Burma remain a part
of India. In opposition, the separatists’ campaign emphasized the distinct
social status of Burmese women from their Indian and Chinese counterparts. If
Burma were to remain with India, the superior social status of Burmese women,
even a higher status than in the democratic West, would be downgraded.
I felt proud to discover our nation had a distinct idea – that of the very
high social status of women. “Burmese guys are gentlemen to treat their ladies
as their equal”, I believed. I had brave Arab lady friends who were fighting
for women’s rights in their doctrinaire nations. I often made them feel jealous
by saying:” our Burmese housewives are exchequers in their married life. The
guy has to give all his monthly income to the lady and she authorizes his daily
expenses. The ladies are the higher sex in our tradition”. In my simple
assumption, I thought the higher social role of Burmese women compared to
Arabs-Muslims, Chinese-Confucians and Indians-Hindus was significantly
correlated with our Buddhist tradition.
A closer examination can reveal that this assumed correlation could
be highly confounded with the inelastic military rule that generally laid down
protective walls for its social classes. The change into a democratic system got
rid of these walls and in the middle of last year, along with the response of
Aung San Su Kyi to Wairathu’s proposal of restricting interfaith marriage of
Buddhist women, “You can not treat women unfairly like that, ” the evidence of
the fall of the military’s protective wall for the women became evident.
In particular, when a large number of Buddhist monks become
involved in the mass campaigns for supporting Wairathu’s proposal, it is a time
to reconsider our assumption of the higher social status of Burmese women that
we think it is being privileged from our Buddhist tradition.
My observation is that this assumption is at the least inconsistent.
The point raised by Ma Khin Lay, a former political prisoner and gender
activist, illuminated this inconsistency, “ Burmese women were discriminated
within our Buddhist tradition. We are not given access to the upper square of
the pagodas as our male counterparts do,” she said in her recent interview with
the Irrawaddy. In contrast, Chinese temples allow women equal access to
any public place.
P Moe Ninn, the leading thinker of our colonial time, contrasted the married
life of a Chinese wife and a Burmese wife in this way: “when Chinese husbands go
back home from work, he does remember to purchase food to feed his wife and
children; Burmese husbands, these would-be-Buddhas, getting drunk in coming
back home, beat his poor wife for she does not know how to cook good food for
him”.
In our ‘Buddhist’ tradition, “inferiority” of women was widely
acknowledged. The Buddhist scriptures laid down a monastic rule that a female
disciple can never be raised to the status of the Bhikkhu (venerable monk).
This rule has become relaxed, in some ways, in Sri Lanka and Thailand but the
State Sangha Council of Burma so far has enforced that no woman can be ordained
as a Bhikkhu in Burma.
The scholarly Buddhist literature demanded that girls should ask
their patrons for permitting their marriage and accordingly, even her younger
brother has his ‘Buddhist’ legitimacy in imposing the ban on her marriage with
a person he doesn’t agree. Not surprisingly, Buddhist monks feel their
legitimate role for taking part in current anti-miscegenation
campaigns. In their formative education period, they have been ingrained to
think women, being of inferior sex, seriously lack of the judgmental capability
to choose what is right for her.
Perhaps, the strongest evidence of discrimination against women for
their ‘poor’ judgmental ability was the rise of anti-miscegenation movements
during the colonial period and their current resurgence in modern times. The popular
literature published in 1930s had a number of discussions to condemn the
‘degenerative’ marriage of Burmese women to Indians. Most discussions had a
similar theme that Kalars (Indians) were seducing Burmese women. Lacking capacity
to resist the seduction, a Burmese woman chose to marry a Kalar. Her children
were all half-caste, and these ‘impure’ children would degenerate the race and tradition.
During the colonial period, Buddhist monks were high-handed in treating
women. They were used to wandering about, holding sticks with a hook in them to
tear down the clothes of women in public places if they were not wearing ‘safely’
according to the Burmese tradition.
These colonial features offered us strong counterfactual evidence to the
1930s politicians’ claim of “freedom of Burmese Buddhist women”. While it might
be true that Burmese women have enjoyed some equality status in their education
and profession, the above examples demonstrate convincingly that they are not
necessarily related to our Burmese ‘Buddhist tradition’ and Burmese women don’t
have a real higher social status as many have been deluded to believe.
In fact, our past sentiments
against “Indianization” of Burma by the British made our anti-colonial
politicians claim that Burmese women are much more equal compared to their
Indian-Chinese peers. The alleged superiority of Burmese women had become their
testament to claim to autonomy of Burma from India. It also reaffirmed anticolonial
politicians a legitimate feeling for the particularity of the “Burmese Buddhist
Tradition”. As evident, the claimed particular superiorities are fictional
rather than practical accomplishments.
The modern Burmese monks, following the similar fictional
reasoning line, warrant their current anti-miscegenation movements to preserve
their “particularly accomplished tradition” that ‘protects’ the freedom of
Buddhist women. I found two imminent problems in this fictional superiority of
our ‘race’ (Amyo), ‘religion’ (Batar), and ‘tradition’ (Sasana).
The first problem is we are ignoring the real huge challenges in society, like
the long-established discriminatory practices against women and pretend as if
our Buddhist tradition has addressed all problems that our foreign societies
are still struggling to achieve. The second problem is while modern Burma is a
nation of diverse multi-ethnic groups, and it indeed is a country composed by
considerably large groups of Indians (Kalars) and Chinese (Tayoke) migrants, we
like to exclude these other groups in our socio-political scenarios solely
based on the reason that we have a particular superior tradition compared to
“bad” traditions of those people.
During the decades of her house
arrest, the military government launched numerous attacks on the Lady’s
personal life. Their accusation was mainly based on her “woman-ness” and
marriage to Michael Aris, a British Buddhist scholar from the University of Oxford.
“Suu Kyi failed to safeguard her own race, after she has married a British
foreigner. Not only her, but her future generation is the ones responsible for
the ruination of our race and our tradition”. Currently, we can also observe
Wirathu’s line of reasoning to retain the Article 59(f), has its consensus with
the military’s past justification of protecting against the ‘unhealthy’
children’s ruination of our “superior” tradition.
My conclusion is that we, the people
of modern Burma, have imprisoned ourselves in the fictional accomplishments
that the past anti-colonial politicians created and consequently we have failed
to observe the real challenges of our imminent discriminatory practices. This
fictionally accomplished “tradition” has spoiled us in a sense that we
fail to see our multi-racial and multi-traditional diversity as strengths of
the nation. Instead we Burmese have come to mistrust all “other” people, or whoever
is from a foreign tradition.
A saying by Confucius is “ how can I
talk with such a person who claims himself as superior-minded but he does not
want to speak in the same table with the person in poor clothes?” I think our
democratic reform process has to overcome this psychological barrier of
condescending the others that Confucius alerted. We shall no longer be
moonlighting by making our avowal of superior accomplishments in our tradition
and retaining the contradictions of our prominent discriminatory ailments. We
shall drop our infatuation for the fictional achievements and we need to
develop an extensively inclusive socio-political tradition in Burma.
[Please check out the abridged version at http://www.dvb.no/analysis/the-link-between-gender-and-racial-inequality-in-burma-myanmar/39936 ]
[Please check out the abridged version at http://www.dvb.no/analysis/the-link-between-gender-and-racial-inequality-in-burma-myanmar/39936 ]