The Sudhamma Reformation and the Negotiation of Time in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Burmese Texts

In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, Burma underwent a political, religious, and social reformation that put monks and laymen from a particular textual community on the periphery of the country into the kingdom’s major positions of political and religious power. In the space of a few decades they remade Burma’s literary heritage and masked their local role in a new national or proto-national imaginary.  These elites from the Chindwin region of Burma, on the frontier with India and Manipur, were skilled in texts of Pali, Sanskrit, and Burmese origin, giving them an advantage in providing textual evidence that would support their claims to authority over historical and religious knowledge. Ultimately, to secure their place in the court and over the sangha, new authoritative versions of key texts, histories and canonical literature were produced which would much later become viewed as the main “national” texts of post-1885 Burma by colonial and indigenous scholars alike. In the race for texts, as sources or as targets for destruction, that soon consumed the whole kingdom, the architects of the Sudhamma Reformation found themselves challenged with a multitude of competing and contradictory temporal imaginaries. This paper examines, through an examination of their religious and secular texts, how these men struggled with various temporal schemes that would not be in disagreement with either canonical texts nor with physical evidence. These involved the creation of new mythologies, often remade from borrowings from India, to provide convenient segues, connect people and events, and to fill in obvious gaps in the historical narrative, giving Burma what came to be accepted as, by contrast to the history of kings by U Kala in the 1730s, its first “national” history.