Since the protracted ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya (episodes in the 1950s, 1978, 1992-94, 2012, 2017) recently became an object of scholarly attention, the Rohingya’s standing as an ethnic group has generated intense scrutiny. The same attention, sadly, has not always been focused on other ethnic groups in Myanmar, resulting in the Rohingya appearing to be a “political” identity when the others are simply “natural.” The Rakhine, for instance, are often taken as existing since time immemorial.

Kyaw Minn Htin’s PhD dissertation challenges that presumption, examining the historical processes of ethnogenesis that have led to the construction of the Rakhine. As he argues, “In the not-so-distant past, Burmese from Myanmar proper and Arakanese-speaking peoples themselves considered the Arakanese to be Myanmar (Mranmā) or ‘Burmese.’ In pre-colonial Arakan, these Arakanese speakers assumed various local identities depending on their place of dwelling, and it was in later colonial descriptions that the people who lived within the boundary of the map of Arakan were | collectively categorised as ‘Arakanese’” (13-4). This provocative thesis also includes arguments about the pre-colonial Muslim populations in Arakan (proto-Rohingya) and what happened to that identity after successive waves of in-migration from Chittagong during the colonial era.

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