HISTORY OF BURMA AS I REMEMBER Part 9.

လူထုေအာင္သံ

လူထုေအာင္သံဆိုသည္မွာ အာဏာကို လက္နက္ျဖင့္ သိမ္းရမယ္ဆုိသည့္ အယူ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီး

ေခါင္းေထာင္ထဖုိ႔ အခ်ိန္ယူေနသည့္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ လြတ္လပ္ေရးရစအခ်ိန္ ၁၉၅၀ ခုႏွစ္ခန္႔ပတ္၀န္းက်င္က ဦးႏုကိုယ္တုိင္ ေရးသားခဲ့သည့္ ျပဇာတ္႐ွည္ၾကီး ျဖစ္သည္။

 
ထုိအယူ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီး ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္ တည္ျမဲသည့္အခါ တိုင္းျပည္ ဘယ္လုိေနမလဲဆုိသည္ကို မွန္းၾကည့္ႏုိင္ေအာင္ႏွင့္ လက္နက္ အာဏာ႐ူးသမားမ်ား လက္ေအာက္တြင္ တုိင္းသူျပည္သားမ်ား ဘယ္လုိဘယ္ပုံျဖစ္ၾကကုန္မည္ကို
သိရွိႏုိင္ေစရန္ ေရးသားရျခင္းျဖစ္သည္ဟု မူရင္းစာေရးသူ ၀န္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္း ဦးႏုကဆုိထားသည္။

 မူရင္းျပဇာတ္သည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ တစ္ခ်ိန္က စာသင္ေက်ာင္းမ်ားတြင္ ျပ႒ာန္းစာအုပ္အျဖစ္ သင္ၾကားရန္
သတ္မွတ္ျခင္းခံခဲ့ရသလုိ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံတြင္လည္း ျပဇာတ္အျဖစ္ စင္တင္ကျပျခင္း ခံခဲ့ရသည္အထိ ေအာင္ျမင္ခဲ့သည္။

အေမရိကန္ ကုမၸဏီတစ္ခုကလည္း ႐ုပ္ရွင္အျဖစ္႐ုိက္ကူးခဲ့သည္။

ထိုရုပ္ရွင္ကို ကြယ္လြန္သူ ဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္း၊ စာေရးဆရာ ဦးႏု၏ ၁ဝ၇ ႏွစ္ေျမာက္ ေမြးေန႕ျဖစ္ေသာ

 ေမလ ၂၅ရက္ ၂၀၁၄ တြင္ ”U Nu of Burma group“ ႏွင့္ “ဒီမုိကရက္တစ္ ညီညြတ္ တိုးတက္ေရးအင္အားစု(ဒညတ)” မွ ျပန္လည္ စီစဥ္တင္ျပထားပါသည္္္။

 

အပိုင္း (၁)

အပိုင္း (၂)

အပိုင္း (၃)

အပိုင္း (၄) ဇတ္သိမ္း

U NU AS DRAMATIST

By: Prof: JOSEPH A. WITHEY

On: The People Win Through

Asian Studies, Hanover College, Hanover, Indiana;

published in August 1980 in the South East Asian Review, Vol. V, No. 1.

U NU, born on Saturday, May 25, 1907 -- a time corresponding to the full moon of Nayon in the year 1269 of the Burmese calendar -- refers to himself as "Tartay" or "Saturday's Son" in his autobiography. According to Burmese belief, he writes, "a first child born on such a day stirs up woe like fire," and "if the first to arrive is a Saturday-born, the father must carry a sword and cross back and forth over the child seven times to ward off evil." Nu's father, San Tun, did indeed follow this ritual, but, even so, Nu has succeeded in stirring up some tempests in his lifetime as politician, social critic and playwright.

However, The People Win Through and The Wages of Sin, Nu's English language plays and the principal concern of this study, aimed not at unsettling Burmese society but at restoring it to a satisfactory equilibrium. More, they demonstrate a sensitivity to the flow of ideas from the West, ideas associated primarily with democracy and socialism, though the The Wages of Sin one clearly sees the influence of the Eastern ethic of Buddhism. Both plays, in fact, seek to solve political problems of a newly independent country by the application of ideas current in the society at the time of their writing.

In 1927, while a student at Rangoon University, Nu encountered a professor who advised him to read the plays of Bernard Shaw. Particularly fascinated by the wit and social criticism abundantly displayed in Candida and Caesar and Cleopatra he found these plays to be "eyeopeners". Satisfied formerly with writing playlets and verses, he now discovered a social dialectic congenial to his taste, which prompted him to concentrate on play-writing, sometimes at the expense of his studies.

At war's end, when Nu became Prime Minister of the Union of Burma after the assassination of Aung San, his most urgent problem was to effect a political union in fact as well as in name. In pursuit of this goal he launched in 1950-51 a drive "From Peace to Stability," touring the delta and speaking to the people. Among his speeches at this time is one delivered on the occasion of the awarding of the Sa-pay-beik-mun prize for the best Burmese novel. In it he described the writer as contributing to a cultural renaissance of a certain kind, in which he "effectively deals with the problems of human life," to produce an authentic work of art. "Such novels," he went on, "reflect the real condition of one's own society, and they help us to know our own selves, our own strength and our own weakness, and we get an opportunity to ponder over our own problems."

In an Introduction to Nu's play The People Win Through the late U Thant tells how Nu applied his expertise in playwriting to the solution of one of these problems, that of armed insurrection. In June of 1950 several of Nu's associates met with him to discuss the possibility of writing a play which would communicate to the people "the evils of attempting to wrest political power by means of force." At first the group decided U Nya Na should write the play, and that it should be a three act play with acts one and two devoted to events in the past where force produced unfortunate consequences, while the third act would show the Communist use of force equally deplorable. However, when the group met again two months later, they agreed it was more feasible to concentrate on the single theme of act three, and Nu was persuaded to do the writing himself. In September, according to Thant, Nu completed the play, it was approved by the necessary government agencies, and then passed on to the Society for the Extension of Democratic Ideals for publication. Among those who checked the final manuscript were J. S. Furnivall and Peter Murray, while U Khin Zaw undertook the task of translation into English.

Its episodic structure being well-suited to the medium The People Win Through was made into a Burmese film, then staged by the Pasadena Playhouse in the United States in October 1951, and finally published in English in Rangoon in 1952. Taplinger brought out an American edition in 1957 with an Introduction by Edward Hunter replacing Thant's. Testimony from those who viewed the film in Burma at the time suggests a generally favourable reception by Burmese audiences. More specific reaction comes from the Playhouse premiere, where the Pasadena Star News reviewer thought the play "a stimulus to patriot emotions, a challenge to the mind and delight to the eye," expressing the conviction that it "should be seen by every American who can squeeze in the theatre in the next three weeks. It will bring a better understanding of the people of Asia." In his comments on Nu's playwriting the same reviewer refers to the play's "dignity, coherence and suspense" and concludes that The People Win Through "puts over the high aims of proper self-government." In his Introduction for the Rangoon edition U Thant had noted that "writers like T. S. Eliot and Maurice Collis were equally impressed with the narrative of the play." In the context of the times spokesmen for the West praised both the staged and published versions of the English translation.

We have discussed Nu's general goal as a writer; now we can examine his specific intent in writing The People Win Through, and the means he employs. In a Prologue to be spoken before the dramatic action begins Nu writes:

Our Union of Burma is standing at cross-roads. One way leads to the seizing of power by force. The other leads to the willing delegation of power by the people to their representatives elected by fair democratic methods. This evil (taking power by force) is now rearing its ugly head in Burma. If this wickedness…. takes hold of our fair country, it will reduce her to a state of abject misery and subjection to tyranny that would beggar description. So we have staged this play, which I hope, will help you decide which way to choose.

In the final sentence Nu not only expresses his intent but also predicts the form of the play -- argument or debate, followed by fictional evidence clothed as dramatic action. A summary of the dramatic action will clarify Nu's use of the medium to achieve his end.

Presented by U Aung

4/9/2014 4:16:49 PM