Indian Antiquary Vol 58

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 233

DECEMDER, 1929 )
A KACHIN .FOREST SHRINE
225
A KACHIN FOREST SHRINE.
BY SIR R. C. TEMPLE; Br.. THERE are three races inhabiting Burma--the Tibeto-Burman (Burmese), the Siamese. Chinese (Shans), and the Mon-Annam (Talaings). The Tibeto-Burman race can be divided into three groups with many subdivisions : the Burmese (Burmese, Arakanese, Tavoyan), the Kachin (Chingpaw, Singpho) and the Kuki-Chin. All these races immigrated southwards at some time or other from the western highlands of China, so tho Kachins thus belong to a people of the Chinese type and more immediately to the Tibeto-Burman variety. They are situated on the extreme north-western boundary of the country now politically known as Upper Burma, where it impinges on Assam, now classed as a part of India proper. Some of them are in Burma and some in Assam. They are the latest race to migrate southwards, and consequently still retain many of the ideas and practices of their original home. To quote from an old paper read by myself before the Royal Society of Arts in June 1910 (vol. LVIII, 701), they are "to the ethnologist a specially interesting people, as relics of a post Mon-Annam irruption of Tibeto-Burmans left in the northern hills of Burma, after the branches that subsequently became the Tibetans, Nagas, Burmans and Kuki-Chins had passed onwards. Their most interesting feature is that they are still following the ancient instinct of the main race and spreading steadily southwards, showing all the old fight and turbulence that no doubt served to bring success to their ancestors in their emigrations of long ago."
Enough has been written above to show that the people of Burma consist of a great number of tribes of the Chinese variety of mankind spreading themselves over the country in successive waves and occupying for the most part pockets of it in their individual varieties. But the history of Burma “is that of a struggle for supremacy among the Burmans, the Shans, and the Talaings, lasting through all historical times, without practically any intervention on the part of alien races until the arrival of the English in 1824. The story is a verit. able tangle of successive conquests and reconquests of the whole or part of the country by those races, and for considerable periods each has been supreme over the whole country." The main point to grasp in all the resulting confusion of struggle is that the conquerors for the time being usurped the chief influence over the population, and did their best to destroy the individuality of the conquered, with varying success almost up to the point of extinction, as in the case of the Talaings by the Burmans after 1757.
The result has been to mix up the ethics, and to a certain extent the nationality of the civilised portions of the three races. This process has been greatly helped by the introduction of Buddhism from India as the dominant professed religion, which has created a distinct tendency to amalgamate and distribute equally over the whole country the prominent indi. genous religious notions of the various peoples as portions of a general ethical practice. At the same time the highly mountainous nature of the country, and the difficulty, amounting almost to an impossibility, of wandering far, has brought about an isolation as regards individual tribes and subdivisions of tribes that has resulted in the preservation of local domestio practices apparently intact from the earliest times. So that we have presented to us in the present day, as the result of the historical occurrences known to us, amalgamated ethics on the part of the cultured, combined with highly differentiated ethics on the part of the uncultured ; amalgamation and differentiation being obeervable among families and individuals living practi. cally side by side. This is the governing principle of what I may call the human phenomena nowadays exhibited by the native population of Burma, and if an old student may presume to guide research into any given channel. I would say to the enquirer : Keep always clearly before you in Burma the principle of variety in unity. At any rate that is the star I wish to follow while glancing at the ethics of the people : what they think, and how their thoughts guide their actions in daily life domestic actions, often intensely interesting to the anthropologist, because they offer illuminating explanations of those of other varieties of human beings.