Armed Rural Folknities), the purpose of the fighting (were they ritualized affairs or actual
violence over control of resources), their relationship to the conduct of
larger campaigns (were the large royal armies really something unique
in the hands of the royal court or were they merely collections of bands
of rural warriors), and what was gained from the fighting (we know what
kings were after or what was said they were after in war – what do we
learn about what rural folk in war took or did not take back home (and,
even if they survived, did they choose to go back “home” at all?).
The present analysis uses both local written sources and artistic
representations to shift the perspective of what warfare and armies
looked like from that of the court and royal scribes to that of the rural
peasant who became the average warrior for Burmese royal armies. In
doing so, this chapter increases the magnification of the historian’s lens
to more accurately consider how pre-colonial warfare in Burma looked
on the ground to those who fought it. The chapter will choose a rather
unconventional ground for historical analysis of pre-colonial warfare in
the region by looking for evidence not in periods for which royal sources
are plentiful (and territorial in their monopolization of perspective), but
instead in a period during which the royal court did not have authority to
enable it to regulate access to historical materials, either oral or written,
because it had been toppled. This period occurred between the fall of
the Burmese court in 1885 and the end of the 1880s, after which colonial
rule was firmly established in Upper Burma. Although focusing on this
particular period involves looking at local-level warfare extremely late in
the pre-colonial period (the 1880s), additional supplementary attention
will be paid to other inter-dynastic periods, however brief, during which
royal authority in Burma had broken down, to broaden the applicability
of the chapter’s argument.
Royal Court Depictions of WarfareBefore turning to the kinds of sources that can help the historian look
around royal chronicles and court murals depicting warfare, however, it
would be useful to consider why, as it is argued here, royal sources fail to
say much beyond large campaigns (and arguably misrepresented these
campaigns as well). The absence of rural folk in depictions of mainland
warfare is due to our view having been artificially skewed by the legacy
of pre-colonial court scribes. The latter left behind the most commonly