The Peoples of Burma

OUR country takes its name from that of the largest ethnic group in our Union — the Barmans — but to understand Burmese society today it is important to bear in mind that our State is a federal union of many different peoples, most of them with their own languages and distinct, if sometimes related, cultures.

About three-fourths of the Union’s total population of roughly eighteen millions are Barmans. Burmese is their home language, they are almost all Buddhists, they wear Burmese dress, and inhabit the central part of the country (see map on last page).

Except for slightly over a million Chinese, Indians, and Pakistanis, the rest of our population are minorities, long indigenous to Burma, who inhabit an elongated horseshoe of hill country encircling the Irrawaddy and Sittang river valleys. Our constitution has provided semiautonomous states for the Shans, Kachins, Karens, and Kayahs, and a Chin Hills Special Division, while these and many other of the fifty-odd tribes and subgroups are proportionally represented in the House of Nationalities, the upper house of our parliament.

The Shans, who number about a million and a half, have dominated the high plateaux of east Burma since the thirteenth century, but they and their kinsmen, such as the Thais, are found in great numbers all over Southeast Asia. Buddhists in religion and practicing wet rice cultivation, the Shans early developed a strong social system, based on small feudal principalities ruled by hereditary sawbwas, who are only now gradually surrendering their powers of local government. Most of the Shans are farmers who work the small valleys, with colorful and far less advanced peoples such as the Pa-os and Palaungs living on the hills.

The Karens, over a million strong, are scattered all over southern Burma, and only about a third of them live in the Karen State which they fought to obtain in 1954. Many of the Karens were converted by Christian missionaries and won distinction as soldiers. They are mainly agriculturalists, although a number have moved to the cities.

Some 300,000 Kuchins have lived in northern Burma since the fifteenth century. The Kachins are animists, with a complex social structure based on clans, chieftainships, and small villages. They usually farm small hilly tracts cut from the forest. The Chins, of whom there are some 200,000 living in the hills on the western side of Burma, have a simple existence at about the same cultural level.

Neither the Mons in the south nor the Arakanese on the western coastal strip have a state of their own, but both groups have developed high cultures in the past, supplied many leaders to the Civil Services, and are proud of their identities.

To blend so many heterogeneous traditions into a single nation is no easy task, either socially or politically, but all of us are keenly aware of the need for protecting minority interests and correcting economic and educational inequalities. In this spirit of tolerance and mutual assistance we are creating a happy and cohesive Union of Burma.