Chapter 4 - Battlefields to Borderlands: Rohingyas between Global War and Decolonization

Summary

Abstract This chapter examines the transformation of borderlands into bordered lands, mediated by the spectacular violence of the Second World War and partitions, which made Arakanese Muslims (or Rohingyas, as they are known today) minorities in their own lands. First courted by the Japanese, and later trained and armed by the British Military Administration of Arakan, Rohingyas emerged out of the war with new dreams of political futures that had no place in the formal decolonization and partition(s) of South Asia. Designated as smugglers and insurgents, they responded, albeit unsuccessfully, to the carceral regimes of borders and checkpoints with scriptal politics as their strategies of belonging.

Key words: Rohingya, Arakan, Rakhine, Second World War, borderlands, decolonization

Omra Meah was a schoolteacher in his early 30s in Maungdaw, a township and district on the banks of the Naf River that separated Arakan from Chittagong, and Burma from Bengal. In May 1942, Meah gave up teaching to establish the Maungdaw Central Peace Committee. Together with Nur Ahmed and Munif Khan, fellow Arakanese Muslims (or Rohingyas, as they are known today), Meah established a court, a police station, and even a rent collection agency, countering Japanese-backed wartime governance of Northern Arakan. His peace committee collected rent from abandoned properties of Arakanese Buddhists, who sought refuge south of Cox's Bazaar in the Chittagong district of Bengal after being driven out by the Muslims during the Second World War.3 Six years later, Omra Meah would re-emerge as one of the militant leaders of the separatist Arakan Mujahed Party, rising in armed rebellion against the independent Burmese state. Hardened by the War, not least by guerilla training from the British military, and with access to ammunition dumps left behind by departing Allied forces, the mujaheds, or freedom fighters, such as Meah would become a force to contend with. The newly independent Burmese government, in response, would arm the Arakanese Buddhists against Muslims as early as 1948.

The Arakan frontier where Burma ended and India began was a menacing place during the Second World War. Its deltaic topography and inland hills made its terrain difficult to travel without local knowledge. Watercrafts such as the flat-bottomed wooden sampans were the main mode of transportation through the intricate web of rivers and canals. Monsoon rains on the soft soil made the watery landscape even harder to traverse.