Notes on a series of cultural and historical articles about Arakan written between 1959 and 1966 by Mohammed A Tahir Ba Tha of Buthidaung

Derek Tonkin

U Ba Tha was a Muslim scholar and banker from Buthidaung in Rakhine State who between 1959 and 1966 wrote several articles on the peoples, culture and history of Arakan. He was known to be living in retirement in Yangon in 2014. He examined most of the main sources of migration into Arakan historically, except for the permanent migration from 1870 onwards of agricultural labour from the Chittagong region of Bengal, to which he makes no reference at all, although Chittagonian migrants outnumbered all other Muslim residents of Arakan by the time of the 1931 Census by at least four to one.

In his contribution “Competing ideologies and the hybridized history of the Rohingyas” to Metamorphosis September 2015, Jacques P Leider, historian and member of the École Française d’Extrême Orient, commented: “Ba Tha (and following him, other Rohingya writers) drew his claims of a separate Muslim ethnic identity in Arakan from historical interpretations which may be described in the entirety of its various forms and arguments as Rohingya ideology”.

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