Texts and Images: Glimpses Of Myanmar History

Preface

In this paper, I would like to define Myanmar traditional texts very broadly as the corpus o writing produced by Myanmar scholars before the colonial period. This corpus is a large and diverse one and I am certain that I shall be doing less than justice to my subject. Nevertheless, I would like to give some indication here of the nature of Myanmar traditional texts and their significance for us in the present.

I am classifying the texts on the basis of their medium. This is because there is a close relationship between the medium and the type of text: the nature of the medium- the facility of its use, its durability, etc- has a bearing on the type of text which it conveys. In this paper, I shall be dealing with five media in which Myanmar traditional texts appear: stone, metal, brick plaster, palm leaf, and paper.

First, taking stone, it is a medium which is bulky and durable and, therefore, very suitable for texts which require general viewing and are intended to endure for a long time. But working on stone is laborious and expensive, and therefore stone does not lend itself easily to lenghty texts.

Next is metal, a medium which is durable like stone but is less bulky. It is much more expensive than stone, especially if it is precious metal, and therefore, it is reserved only for special texts. Its most common use is as the medium for religious texts which are enshrined together with other relics in the relic-chamber of pagodas.

We now come to the less durable media in which texts are written. Brick plaster is one of these media, with many inner walls of temples bearing texts written in ink. Plaster provides a fairly easy surface to write upon, but it is not the preferred medium for writing. There is not that inextricable link between medium and text as there is in case of stone, which durability and bulkiness makes it the ideal medium for short religious texts. With plaster, the writtings are, as it were, incidental to the medium.

The next medium is palm leaf, the preferred medium for most texts. It is more easily worked on and less expensive than most of other media. Palm leaf is comparatively thin and both of its sides can be used for writing. The nature of this medium makes for compactness and portability, and that is probably why it is the preferred medium for lengthy texts. The palm leaves are held together by two wooden boards at its ends. The board are called kyan in Myanmar. But kyan also denotes a “treatise”, a text which is serious and weighty and which bears the stamp of authority. Perhaps it may be said that palm leaf confers weight and authority on a text and that is probably why letters of appoinment of royal officials are also written on palm leaf.

Finally, we come to paper, a medium which easy to work upon and which is also inexpensive. It is bulkier than palm leaf and the size of the script on paper is generally larger than that on palm leaf. To accord with this, the text on paper are short texts. Paper manuscripts are folded in concertina fashion and are called parabaik in Myanmar language. There are two kinds of parabaik, white and black, with each kin used for a different purpose. The white parabaik, which is rarer than the black, is used for illustrations while the black parabaik is used to keeping records of all kinds.