Rakhine Erotic

The Rakhine are a Theravada Buddhist people of the eastern Bay of Bengal coast, concentrated in what is now Rakhine State on Myanmar's western flank. The mountainous Arakan Yoma range walls them off from the Burmese heartland on one side; the sea opens them outward on the other. That geography is the single most useful fact about them. For most of their recorded history they faced west and south — toward Bengal, toward Chittagong, toward the maritime trade routes of the Bay — far more than they faced inland Burma. Their kings minted coins with Persian inscriptions. Their court borrowed Mughal etiquette. Arakanese fleets raided as far as the Sundarbans. The Rakhine sense of themselves as a coastal, cosmopolitan, slightly separate people predates modern Myanmar by several centuries and has not really gone away.

The language reflects all of this. Arakanese is close enough to standard Burmese that the two are sometimes treated as dialects of one another, but the divergence is real — Arakanese preserves an older r sound that Burmese has softened into y, so a speaker from Yangon and a speaker from Sittwe will hear each other across a noticeable gap. Older loanwords from Bengali and Persian sit in the vocabulary. The Marma, a related branch, live across the border in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, descendants of populations who moved or were pushed out during successive wars; they speak a variety so close to Arakanese that the two communities still understand each other.

Theravada Buddhism is the through-line of Rakhine identity, and the Mahamuni image — long held to be a likeness of the Buddha cast in his own lifetime — was the spiritual center of the kingdom until the Burmese carried it off to Mandalay in 1784. The conquest that year ended the independent Arakanese state and is the inflection point Rakhine still measure their history against. British colonial rule, Japanese occupation, and incorporation into independent Burma followed in quick succession, none of them resolving the underlying question of how a coastal, formerly sovereign people fit inside a Bamar-majority nation-state. The recent decades of conflict in Rakhine State — between the military, Rakhine nationalist movements, and the Rohingya Muslim population that also calls the region home — sit on top of that older unanswered question, not separately from it.