Article Outline
The major population groups in Myanmar migrated into the Irrawaddy River Valley from the north, bringing their spoken languages, their gender roles, and several varieties of food and medicine. From India on the west came the institutions of religion and government, but without the Indian caste system of social hierarchy. India was also the source of Pali, the sacred language, and of the devanagari script in which the popular language is written, along with astrology and some kinds of food. The firm grounding of Buddhism in Myanmar culture contributed over the years to the building of many pagodas (towering temples) throughout Myanmar.
The Burmese language lends itself well to poetry and puns since words are usually one syllable long, beginning and ending with consonants, while the vowel in the middle carries one of several tones—low, high, high and short, or high and falling. Classical poems of four lines with four syllables in each line followed a complex rhyme scheme. A wealth of satirical puns play on exchanging vowels. For instance, the public switched the title of a government welfare program known as pyi-daw-tha (a royal, happy land) to pya-daw-thi (a pile of royal ashes). With the end of the monarchy in the late 1800s, nationalist aspirations were carried forward in an indigenous literature. Particularly notable in the post-World War II era were the poetry and essays of Thakin Kodaw Hmaine and stories of Thakin Thein Pe Myint, whose Tet Pongyi (written from 1936-1938) ridiculed the corruption of the modern monastic orders. An outstanding critical novelist of the independent period and publisher of an independent newspaper was Ludu U Hla. In recent years the military government has exercised severe censorship, though some short-story writers in popular magazines are still published, under duress of the law.
Secular art is rare in Myanmar; most sculpture and painting is confined to a Buddhist context. Many large pagodas were constructed by kings and rich people seeking to earn religious merit. These pagodas consist of a massive central spire decorated with plant and animal designs and lesser shrines around the base; they are often topped by a jewel-encrusted hti, or umbrella. There are thousands of ancient pagodas in the old capital at Pagan, others in the area of the former capital at Mandalay, and the grand, gold-encased Shwedagon Pagoda atop the central hill in today’s capital, Yangon. Architecture, as well as other art forms, display a dominant Indian influence. Artisans are known for their woven silks and lacquerware (boxes and bowls made of woven bamboo frames and covered with a hard resin).
Formal libraries and museums, as such, are limited in number and facilities in Myanmar. The thousands of Buddhist temples, however, serve as repositories for books and religious artifacts. The National Museum of Art and Archaeology (1952) is in Yangon, and state museums are in Kyaukpyu, Mandalay, and Moulmein.
Myanmar is primarily an agricultural country. Some 63 percent of the working population is engaged in growing or processing crops, while another 12 percent works in industry. Before World War II began in 1939, Myanmar was the world’s major rice exporter. After the war ended in 1945, the area of land devoted to agriculture slowly recovered, but as the population grew the surplus available for export never reached the earlier level.
From 1962 to 1988 the government attempted to develop the economy following a “Burmese Way to Socialism,” with nationalization of most industries. The policy was a failure, however, and in the 1990s the government opened the economy to market forces, particularly inviting foreign investment. Still, many state economic enterprises continue to lose money, the black market flourishes, and the heavy government spending for the growing military budget feeds inflation. By the mid-1990s, after several years of significant growth, the levels of gross domestic product (GDP), agricultural output, consumption, and investment in Myanmar were about one-tenth higher than they had been in 1985-1986, the best year before the military coup d’état and political unrest of 1988. Since the population had grown in the interim, this means that the average person remained worse off than a decade before. In 1997 the United States imposed strong economic sanctions on Myanmar to express disapproval of the military government’s human rights record. That same year Asia suffered a regional economic downturn. These developments affected Myanmar’s economy, slowing foreign investment and raising inflation.
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