Burma/Myanmar

There’s a lot of renaming of place names these days, and Burma is no exception. I don’t like it anyway – for me, Mumbai will always be Bombay, Beijing will always be Peking and so on. I don’t understand the thinking behind it – the new names, just like the old ones, must be approximations, so who’s to say that one approximation is better than another?

In the case of Burma/Myanmar, however, it goes further. Burma was the old name given by the British, of course, and could I suppose be considered an imperialist relic for that reason. But the ruling military junta changed its name to Myanmar in 1989, a year after thousands were killed in the suppression of a popular uprising. Rangoon also became Yangon. The Adaptation of Expression Law also introduced English language names for other towns, some of which were not ethnically Burmese. So in this case, the motivation was clearly political, and part of the military regime’s repressive policies.

For this reason I continue to call the country Burma. For the same reason I call the capital Rangoon, even though the name was changed to Yangon – and the capital is now the ridiculous, hubris-ridden, invented city of Naypyidaw. I’m sure British rule had its shortcomings, but nothing as intense and repressive as the military regime that eventually replaced it.

So for me, it’s Burma. That’s what my family called it and that’s what I call it.

Oh, and one last thing – if you must refer to it as Myanmar, do please pronounce the word correctly! There is no emphasis on the beginning of the first syllable, “My”. It isn’t MYanmar. It’s MYANmar. Think of “Yam” and add an M at the beginning. For the whole word, think of “jamjar”. That’s a much better approximation!