A history of Myanmar that sidelines the present
In February 2021, unrest in Myanmar once again reached the news. Following their electoral success, members of the National League for Democracy were deposed, and a military junta installed. It was another moment of tragic disruption for a country which, since its independence from Britain in 1948 and first military coup in 1962, has been riven by violence, civil war, and religious persecution.
A new exhibition at the British Museum – timed to mark the country’s 75th anniversary of independence – wants to display the history of Myanmar “behind its headlines” from the nation’s pre-colonial and ancient history (shown here with silver coins from 400 AD) to its subsequent post-colonial isolation in the latter part of the 20th century.
It’s not just the sheer scale of the chronology that sets a challenge for the exhibition. The curation has to deal with the nation’s changing boundaries and, of course, its name. In 1989, at the behest of the military dictatorship, Burma became “Myanmar”: an erasure of the colonial past that still rankles for some, who see the new name as tied to military rule.
How does any show deal with such a huge swathe of time and changing history? The British Museum seems to not entirely know the answer. It begins, rather arbitrarily, with a room that focuses on natural resources.
Over the centuries, Myanmar has been plundered for everything from gems to the rare metals needed to make mobile phones: a fact that only goes some way to linking a disparate set of artefacts. The opening room presents objects from King Alaungpaya’s letter to George II written on a sheet of ruby-inlaid gold, to a late-19th century oil worker’s helmet.
Many of these objects are fascinating – a 1907 letter written to the British colonial governor asking for better infrastructure is written on silk, and bound within a giant shell – but it’s hard not to feel that this is a historical jumble: with changing centuries and stories all introduced together.
The exhibition also covers the effects of British colonialism from the initial annexation in 1826 and suggests that British rule, with the introduction of a census that led to racial stereotyping, set the stage for Myanmar’s later problems of religious persecution. There is evidently some truth in this, as an early 20th-century book of detailed categorisations of the Burmese people reveals.
But, despite arguing about the historical causes of contemporary divisions, the show manages to make little mention of the plight of the Rohingya, the predominantly Muslim victims of a genocide in Myanmar in 2017.
Pre-2017, an estimated 1.4 million Rohingya lived in Myanmar, but their only explicit inclusion in the exhibition’s curation is Ro Mehrooz’s small, solemn photograph Lost in Reflection: A Rohingya’s Gaze into Hope’s Abyss (2022). After exhibits that reveal the historical presence of Muslims in the country, this feels like a clanging exclusion.
Burma to Myanmar rightly tries to reach the history of a country behind its most recent headlines, but it’s hard not to think that important contemporary issues have been sidelined.
Until Feb 11; britishmuseum.org
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