Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. xix, 301 pp. (B&W photos.) US$98.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-8179-5.
In 2013, I helped organize an exhibition of Greg Constantine’s evocative and heartrending photographs of the Rohingya, Exiled to Nowhere, at the Australian National University. At that time, early on in Myanmar’s flawed shift towards a more democratic government, there was already a sad appreciation of the hardships facing Myanmar’s loneliest minority. Sadly, conditions have not improved. For those seeking a deeper appreciation of this multi-generational tragedy, we now have John Holt’s stand-out appraisal and analysis, shaped by a long-term conversation with a varied selection of often conflicting voices. Holt is a renowned and prolific scholar of Theravada Buddhism whose research has primarily focused on Sri Lanka and, to some extent, Laos. In this unusually personal and poignantly presented account, Holt makes the most of his decades of careful attention to Theravada Buddhist societies and the complex ethnic politics that shape so much of their shared experience. To get to grips with Myanmar’s conditions and the long histories that fuel them is to face, ultimately, the capacity for inhumanity that shapes political action at local, regional, and global levels.
Holt is comfortable drawing on examples and perspectives from well outside the standard purview of Myanmar, or Southeast Asia-focused analysis. His experience of Sri Lanka and Thailand loom significantly in assessing the dire conditions facing the Rohingya in Myanmar. He listens carefully to a selection of local perspectives, always watching for echoes from other places or other times.
The book is somewhat unconventionally structured around a series of long, usually multi-episode, conversations—each stitched together to form a chapter. The style is appealing. Holt shares his increased understanding openly. He also reminds readers of his unease and growing dismay. Much of what emerges in his notes about discussions in Yangon, Mandalay, and Sittwe highlights the serious problems that came to the fore during Myanmar’s recent failed efforts to develop more democratic and inclusive political institutions.
Holt’s interlocutors are a broad group in terms of ethnic and religious backgrounds, and he has done an admirable job of highlighting such a range of perspectives. For each he gives a title—an archetype such as The Historian, The Gadfly, The Neglected, The Teacher, or The Rector—and goes to some lengths to weave these different perspectives together in the book’s conclusion.
Even for those of us who have interacted, often more fleetingly than Holt, with some of his interlocutors, the result is refreshing and eye-opening. He is adept at curating the key biographical elements and does a masterful job highlighting the contrasts in tone and ambition. Everyone gets a chance to tell their own story with generous quotations. Holt also uses some of his 300-pages to put the individual stories in a broader context by emphasizing his wide reading—often of contemporary analysis drawn from places like Frontier, The Irrawaddy, and New Mandala—to explain the range of challenging issues that lurk in, and next to, his conversations.
Holt also takes some time to explain what might be judged limitations; the voices he summarizes and analyzes are from the elite, and he conducts his interviews in English. In practice, he gets very close to the range of discourses that flowed through Myanmar over the past decade as the country adjusted to a vast array of cultural, economic, and political upheavals. He also takes time with local concepts: the book ends with a comprehensive glossary of mostly Arabic, Pali, and Sanskrit terms. Holt explains his delight at the increased vibrancy he finds in Yangon and states a stern preference against Naypyitaw, the military’s tailor-made capital. Holt’s attention to the positive elements of this story reflects some of the optimism expressed, at least on occasion, in the book’s conversations.
Yet there should be no hiding from the dark and dismal story of the abuses of the Rohingya in Myanmar over decades. Holt explains the contradictions but, more importantly, gives plenty of time for his interlocutors to offer their impressions of how and why the Rohingya are excluded, and how and why Buddhist worldviews—what he calls an “umbrella”—were mobilized in specific ways. The further tragedy for Myanmar, of course, is that since the publication of Holt’s book, the national conversation has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The coup of February 2021 has obliterated most of the promising signals that some of his conversations imply. In the long run, what the coup means for the Rohingya is less clear. Indeed, some of Holt’s interlocutors are now active in shifting prevailing stories about Muslims in Myanmar. Elements within the National Unity Government are dissatisfied with the reluctance of the former democratic regime to do more to protect and assist vulnerable minorities.
With this sad history echoing on, Holt has offered a skillful analysis, based on the insights of these different voices, to tell the story of Myanmar society’s abuses of the Rohingya. With the current state of the world and Myanmar politics, his book deserves wider attention. It should spark further conversations and lead us to consider how the Rohingya could “perhaps” (to use Holt’s final word) find more space in Myanmar and with it, one day, a chance to have a place to finally call home.
Nicholas Farrelly
University of Tasmania, Hobart