Armed Rural Folkincluded cavalry or mounted infantry as well.^14 But no matter how large
armies grew, the bulk of their numbers remained assemblies of armed
rural folk. Moreover, armed rural folk brought to the enemy the kind of
warfare that was waged at the local level whenever competition among
rural settlements over resources led them to violence in rural Burma.
The determining factor for this kind of warfare was a low population-
to-land ratio, on the one hand, and a distant state centre challenged by
weak transportation infrastructure, on the other.
It is thus necessary to reconsider the average pre-colonial warrior to
see how warfare was fought. Most warriors were certainly rural folk first.
When they were gathered for campaigns, they came as rural folk; in the
royal army, which involved no system of centralized training for levies
until late in the pre-colonial period, they remained rural folk; and when
they went into the field they fought as rural folk. In some cases, they
were merely picked up as levies en route to the battlefield.^15 Ever yday
Southeast Asian experience with warfare was not with the warfare im-
aginary found in royal sources, but warfare as experienced first-hand or
by their fathers and grandfathers in years past. When they went back
to their homes they brought experience and booty that then entered
local, rural mythologies and oral traditions that court scribes would
have never been aware. And when state rule was weak, indirect, or ab-
sent on occasion, or when adverse intervention from the state through
normal channels was expected, there was likely some attraction for
inter-settlement fighting over local squabbles. And, by contrast to court
depictions of warfare, when the state collapsed, and lowland rural folk
came to the lead, some things – usually depicted as being common to
highland warfare – came to the fore as well, such as the taking of heads.
- On these regiments and their emergence see Michael W. Charney, Powerful
Learning : Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last Dynasty, 1752–1885
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Centers for South and Southeast Asian
Studies, 2006): 65–66. - In 1719, for example, the Arakanese ruler Sanda-wizaya-raza organized an army
and marched against Burma, gathering war levies from Arakanese rural settlements
along the way. Nga Mi, “Rakhine Razawin”, [palm-leaf manuscript, number 3465a]
AMs, n.d. [circa 1840], Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library,
London, 209a–209b; See also Aun-doun-pru, “Rakhine Raza-poun” [palm-
leaf manuscript, number 6453D] AMs, 1833, Oriental and East India Office
Collection, British Library. London, United Kingdom, 216a.