Burma or Myanmar?

When a country decides to change its name, rest of the world usually goes along. Upper Volta said, henceforth, it wanted to be called Burkina Faso, and so Burkina Faso it was. Cambodia switched to Kampuchea and back to Cambodia, and the world obediently switched with it.

Yet, when the military junta in Burma decided to go Myanmar in 1989, the world was divided. Except for the United Nations, multinational companies that value their business links with Rangoon (Yangon) and the Indian press, just about everyone else kept on calling Burma Burma.

True, the Burmese people have called their country Myanmar in the past. European colonizers called it Burma or Birma, and its people Burman or Birman. In the pre-colonial days, what is now Burma used to be made up of four rival kingdoms: the Mon in the southeast, the northern Shan, the central Myanmar and the eastern Arakan (Arakan is the name given by British India to Rakhine.)

By 1557, the Shan and the Mon had been subdued by an expansionist dynasty based in Shwebo near Mandalay. The Arakan fell in 1784, and the occupation of Manipur and incursions into Assam brought the kings into direct conflict with British India. The Mons, Arakans and other minorities, sided with the British in the three Anglo-Burmese wars, from 1825 to 1842, at the end of which the British had conquered a big chunk of Burma.

The British rewarded the minorities for their support, which the independence-minded Burmans considered part of the colonisers' divide-and-rule policy. At independence, the 1947 constitution gave the country its official name: The Union of Burma, while the minorities made it clear they would have preferred 'federation' instead of 'union.'

Tensions between Rangoon and the minorities remained unresolved after independence, and the civil war that broke out in 1948, continues to this day throughout the eastern border regions.

Today, the minorities feel more comfortable with 'Burma' than with 'Myanmar,' since they considered Myanmars their equal partners in the Union of Burma. They suspect SLORC is trying to ignore the existence of Burma's cultural diversity. Changing the name to Myanmar is seen as a part of that attempt.

On the other hand, the changes from Rangoon to Yangon, Moulmein to Mawlamyine, and the Irrawady to Ayeyarwady, are less problematic and represent the indigenous phonetics of anglicized names, much in the same way Bombay is going back to Mumbai.