It is the year 1644. The ruler of a leading kingdom of South and Southeast Asia is holding court to discuss the large-scale relocation of people from his Bengali province of Chatigan (16th century Portuguese name for Chittagong) to the centre of his ethnically distinct country on the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal.The issue has divided royal advisors. King Narapati-kri wants to bring Bengali craftsmen to start cloth manufacturing in Arakan (now Myanmar’s Rakhine state). Opponents say this would deprive the kingdom of sizeable revenue, destroy Bengal’s fabled cotton industry while the human influx would lead to food shortages in Arakan.Among those opposing the move is Arent van der Helm, chief representative of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company in Arakan. Van der Helm has been honoured by Narapati-kri with a golden umbrella and a golden cushion on which the VOC official sits during his almost daily presence at court discussions.Using hitherto unexamined primary sources in the VOC archives in the Netherlands, including Van der Helm’s 17th-century diary entries and letters to VOC headquarters in Batavia (Jakarta), Stephan van Galen’s ground-breaking 2008 dissertation on 17th century Arakan-Bengal ties offers a first-hand account of historical processes linked to the ethno-religious humanitarian crisis in Myanmar today.Also Read: ‘Textbook Example of Ethnic Cleansing’: A Timeline of the Rohingya CrisisIt shows, for the first time, how economic and human resources extracted from Bengal underpinned Arakan’s power which, in its heyday, was held in awe by neighbours, including the mighty Mughal Empire.Its capital Mrauk-U, the ‘Golden City’ that Portuguese and Dutch merchants likened to Lisbon and Amsterdam, showcased a precocious cosmopolitanism, its rulers promoting a vibrant ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, in sharp contrast to today’s racial and national identity constructs.The past takes on poignant resonance with the 21st-century flight from Rakhine of nearly a million Bengali-Muslims, who identify as Rohingya and Nay Pyi Taw’s rejection of the Bengali-Muslim claim to a historical home in Rakhine.Rohingya refugees who crossed the border from Myanmar near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Photo: Reuters/Jorge Silva/FileRichard Forster’s study of early modern Arakan highlights the “tendency in nationalist historical consciousness to deny those aspects of the past, which would otherwise unsettle dominant national narratives”. Van Galen, Thibaut d’Hubert & Jacques P. Leider, Michael W. Charney, and Rishad Choudhury corroborate Forster’s critique that the “post-colonial nationalist view of the Arakanese past fails to account for the diverse, cosmopolitan and indeed multicultural nature of Arakan in the early modern period”.“When Arakan’s early modern history is viewed in terms of its connectivities to other parts of the Bay of Bengal via the sea, the parochial excesses of tropes of Arakan’s Buddhist purity become impossible to sustain.”Bengal: the ‘jewel’ in the cosmopolitan Arakan royal court Straddling South and Southeast Asia, Rakhine’s past is uniquely syncretic. According to D.G.E. Hall’s classic A History of South-East Asia, Myanmar’s main ethnic group, the Burmans did not arrive in Arakan till over a millennia ago and “earlier dynasties are thought to have been Indian, ruling over a population similar to that of Bengal”.The early modern Arakan kingdom was founded in 1430 at Mrauk-U, some 60 km inland from the Bay of Bengal, by King Narameikla with support from the Bengal Sultanate which sheltered him for two decades after his ouster by the Burmese.For over two centuries, the Arakan royal court embraced Indo-Islamic norms as a modernising influence. Starting with Narameikla’s successor, Man Khari, also known as Ali Khan, the kings had Muslim titles besides Buddhist and Hindu ones and issued coins inscribed with the Kalima, the Islamic declaration of faith. Silver coins of the warrior king Min Yazagyi, aka Salim Shah, had his Buddhist and Islamic names in the Arakanese, Perso-Arabic and Bengali scripts.Min Yazagyi or Salim Shah. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Arezarni CC BY SA 4.0“The Arakanese king … was identified as a Buddhist dhamaraja, as a Hindu maharaja, and as an Islamic sultan all at the same time. In Arakanese chronicles, the Arakanese king is often called ‘Thura-tan,’ or sultan,” says Charney. In a 1614 letter to the Dutch governor-general in Batavia, King Man Khamaung introduced himself as “Sultan Husayn.”The Buddhist kingdom of Arakan “decked itself with the trappings of the typical Indo-Islamic court. And though Arakanese in culture, it patronized a rich corpus of Bengali literature partial to Persian precedents,” says Choudhury.“It is fairly clear,” says Forster, “that elite Arakanese society adopted many of the symbols, if not the substance, of the Islamic culture of their neighbours in the Bay of Bengal… high offices in Arakan were occupied by individuals of Bengali descent, most of whom, judging from their names, were Muslims.” These included Ashraf Khan, King Thirithudhamma’s Lashkar Wazir (defence minister). King Narapati-kri’s Lashkar Wazir was Bara Thakur, a Muslim (despite the name) descended from the first Caliph Abu Bakr. Thakur’s son, Magan was Wazir-e-Azam (prime minister) in the same court and was followed by Sayid Musa and Nabaraj Majlis.Bengali poets like Qazi Daulat and Sayyid Alaol patronised by the royal court, wrote in Urdu, Bengali and Persian, drawing on Arabic-Persian and Sanskrit literary aesthetics. “(The) respect and deference of the Bengali Muslim dignitaries towards their Buddhist king” is evident in “the comparison of (King) Candasudhammarājā with the Hindu royal figures Yudhisthira and Vikramāditya, the Buddha and the pre-Islamic Sassanian king Anushirwan, the embodiment of worldly justice in the Arabic and Persian mirror for princes genre,” say Thibaut and Leider.Also Read: The Rohingya Crisis Is Another Colonial LegacyAccording to the Augustinian friar Sebastião Manrique who lived for some time in Mrauk-U in the 17th century, the royal bodyguard comprised Afghans, Portuguese, Japanese Christians, Dutch, English and French.Manrique’s Itinerario de las Missiones de l’India Oriental gives first-hand insight into the tolerance of the Arakan court. Even a 20th century Westerner, British official M.S. Collis was moved to wonderment in his early 1920s translation of the Portuguese priest’s account:“A Catholic priest tells an eastern King in his own palace that the abstruse philosophy he has inherited from a remote antiquity is merely the worship of demons. The King with an almost superhuman politeness suggests that the priest must be feeling tired. The unique architecture of the Mrauk-U dynasty does not afford a stronger proof than this of their urbane civilization.”Manrique was encouraged to set up a church in Mrauk-U and provided with slaves customarily assigned by the palace for the upkeep of Buddhist temples. Marvelling at the religious freedom enjoyed by Europeans in 17th century Mrauk-U, Collis observes:“There, united and refreshed, they were able to practise, thanks to the tolerance of the authorities, their Catholic rites in a Buddhist City. In what city of Europe at that date could a community of Buddhists have done the same?”City walls of Mrauk-U. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Go-Myanmar CC BY SA 3.0Bengal: the financial and human resource ‘treasury’For 90 years after arriving in Bengal in the 1570s, the Mughals were denied control of the economic heart of the province by the Arakanese. “Arakan thrived because the Arakanese kings were able to exploit the riches of Bengal from the strategic fortress at Chittagong. These riches consisted of its land revenue, taxes from trade and human resources,” says Van Galen.The notorious Arakanese slave raids which terrorised Bengal in the 16-17th centuries, were led by Portuguese mercenaries and fed the demand for artisans and labour in Arakan and Dutch colonial plantations in Indonesia. “Year after year the feringhi (Portuguese) armada returned … bringing thousands of Bengali slaves. Before long not a house was left inhabited on either side of the rivers between Chittagong and Dacca,” says Hall.VOC merchant Hendrick Lambrechts recorded that in 1623 the Arakan king returned from a campaign in Bengal with 30,000 slaves. Van der Helm’s diary notes that thousands of weavers, dyers and other skilled workers from Bengal arrived in Arakan, sometimes within a week. A major goal of the slave raids was to “develop a weaving industry in Arakan itself with the expertise of Bengal craftsmen,” says van Galen. The VOC was allowed to buy only unskilled slaves.The mass deportation of Bengalis to Arakan by King Narapati-kri, described in the opening of this piece, led to famine and sharp price rises in Arakan, VOC records show. Moreover, settling Bengalis in separate villages “served to emphasize ethnic identities,” says Van Galen.Also Read: ‘The Frictions in the Rakhine State Are Less About Islamophobia Than Rohingya-Phobia’Rupture in Arakan’s social fabricEvents following the arrival in Arakan of Aurangzeb’s brother Shah Shuja, the subahdar of Bengal, who was given refuge by King Candasudhammaraja after Shuja fled the fratricidal succession to the Mughal throne, presage today’s ethno-religious rupture in Rakhine.The killing of Shuja and his sons culminated in anti-Muslim violence in 1663. “The (VOC) diary of the riots following the attempted coup d’état by Mughal soldiers from Shah Shuja’s retinue confirms tensions between on the one hand Arakanese and on the other hand Muslims and Bengalis had increased to reach boiling point,” says van Galen. “The mobs that were seen coming down the river targeted Muslim and Bengali settlements.”However, van Galen and Charney question the statement by 17th century European visitor Gautier Schouten that Candasudhammaraja had “a natural aversion for Bengalis”. Not only did the king’s bodyguard and ministers include Bengali-Muslims, Candasudhammaraja ordered an end to the 1663 riots “when he realised that this would have cost the external Muslim trade”, according to contemporary VOC reports.From an usurper’s family, Candasudhammaraja feared his Bengali-Muslim subjects would help restore the ousted dynasty. According to the Alamgirnama, (Aurangzeb’s court history), the rightful heir, living in exile in Bengal, accompanied the Mughal army that marched on Arakan after the killing of Shuja’s children. He was to have been restored to the throne if Aurangzeb’s troops had reached Mrauk-U.Pagodas in Mrauk U. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/By TunTun4WiKi CC BY SA 4.0Continuing cosmopolitanism Historians mark the end of Arakan’s golden age with the fall of Chittagong to the Mughals in 1666. Over a century of ensuing internal conflict ended with Burmese annexation of Arakan in 1784.The Burmese continued with the syncretic cosmopolitanism. The “punnas (court brahmins and ceremonial specialists who came all {sic} from Bengal) were collectively deported to Amarapura (the Burmese capital) and became a new elite,” says Leider. “The king appointed Abhisha Husseini, the head of the Rakhine (Arakan) Muslims as head of all the Muslims of Myanmar.”Mass migration from Bengal during British rule changed the demographic profile of northern Rakhine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading to Rakhine-Buddhist animosity against the new arrivals from Chittagong.Also Read: Timeline: Being Rohingya in Myanmar, from 1784 to NowCriticising the post-colonial national perspective’s emphasis on the recent Bengali origins of most Muslims in Rakhine, Khin Zaw Win, advisor to the Myanmar foreign ministry’s Institute for Strategic and International Studies, says:“Many developed countries are embracing diversity, multiculturalism and the value of immigrants. Myanmar does not have to be rich or developed to understand and accept this fundamental, undeniable historical fact.”Rakhine’s cosmopolitan past defies today’s notion of the “nation state and the reified categories of ethnicity and religion”, says Forster. “…the vibrancy and cosmopolitanism of this early modern polity can offer lessons for us today in how to imagine a world in which identities might be constructed without reliance on such divisive and antagonistic categories.”Mahesh Uniyal is a Bangkok-based UN consultant.