ИСТИНА

Proposed presentation addresses the theme of decolonising Myanmar research and will look at the ways state- and Myanmar-centered histories of Upper Burma were constructed since the nineteenth century. It will discuss the processes of appropriation and deployment of local evidence for crafting the narratives of a nation in the making. More specifically, the presentation will look at several areas that arguably had a durable impact on the writing of history, namely, the collection of evidence for the purpose of writing of national history under the auspices of Burma Historical Commission, acquisition and cataloging of manuscripts by institutions operated by Myanmar ministries of culture, education, and religious affairs, writing of local Buddhist histories by Burmese monks, publications produced by researchers based at regional universities of Myanmar, and, finally, digitization, transcription, and publication of sources sponsored by Japanese and Korean scholars. These cumulative initiatives would be contextualized against the backdrop of practices of record-keeping and history-writing prevalent in precolonial and colonial Myanmar. I am arguing that any attempt at decolonising historical and historically-grounded research would require dismantling biases that emerged as much as a part of postcolonial as of colonial developments in Myanmar history-writing.