Ko Gyi Kyaw

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The whisky goes back in one long pull, and the crowd leans in. A cheroot is lit and clenched at the corner of the mouth; a fighting-cockerel worked in painted wood and a shallow gambler’s bowl are set at the feet of the image. A follower folds a banknote into the band of the medium’s hat, and the medium — carrying the spirit for these hours — bends down to tip liquor into an upturned, laughing mouth. Nothing here is penitent. The drums and gongs of the hsaing waing drive underneath it, and the figure being honored, the spirit wearing a dead man’s appetites, is not a wronged saint come back to be pitied. He arrives drunk, generous, and glad, and this is exactly why the room has been waiting for him. Of the Thirty-Seven Great Nats of Burma he is the one who was never good, and he is among the most beloved of them all.

The names and how he reaches the record

His commonest name is a term of rough affection. Ko Gyi Kyaw reads out as something close to “Big Brother Kyaw” — ko, the word a Burmese speaker uses for an elder brother, and gyi, big or great, wrapped around the personal name Kyaw. It is the name a drinking companion would use, and it fits him. The same figure carries a fistful of grander titles that the record and the cult use interchangeably: U Min Kyaw and U Min Gyaw, prefixing the honorific U; Min Kyaw Zaw; and the fullest form, Min Kyawzwa (မင်းကျော်စွာ), which is how the colonial catalogs entered him and how the printed lists still number him. In the standard published roster of the Thirty-Seven he stands at number thirty-two, between the deified King Alaungsithu and the female nats who follow.

He reaches the written record the way the whole cult does — threaded through the chronicles of the Burmese kings and then gathered up, at the turn of the twentieth century, into the colonial archive of the pantheon. Sir Richard Carnac Temple’s The Thirty-Seven Nats, printed in London in 1906 with William Griggs’s chromolithographic plates, fixed a pictorial canon of the spirits for the imperial catalog, and there Ko Gyi Kyaw is plate thirty-two: a young man in high court dress, mounted and riding hard, the horse in the old plate colored a startling green. Maung Htin Aung, reading the lists from within the living religion in Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (1962), and Melford Spiro, setting the legends beside the working village cult in Burmese Supernaturalism (1967), both return to the same feature of this figure that Temple had already met: he does not have one story. He has several at once, and the tradition has never chosen among them.

That variability is not a defect in the record; it is the shape of the thing. The Burmese Nat sacred world carries its greatest spirits in more than one telling, and the men behind the names blur where the chronicles and the shrine-lore disagree. For Ko Gyi Kyaw the tradition offers at least four faces. In one he is a son of King Theinhko of Bagan, murdered by his own brother — the telling Temple’s catalog leans toward, in which two royal brothers quarrel and the younger, Kyawzwa, is killed and rises as a nat. In another he is an adviser to King Alaungsithu of Bagan who drank himself to death. A third identifies him with a genuinely historical man, the crown prince Minye Kyawswa of Ava, who fell in action in the long dynastic struggle that Burmese history calls the Forty Years’ War — a distinct figure whose name the cult has drawn toward its drunkard-lord without the two being simply the same person. And a fourth, the version the shrine-tellers favor most, makes him a lordly son of the ruler of Pyay, born to Min Sithu and Kuni Devi, a chief of cavalry and headman of the town of Pakhan, a man remembered flatly as “a drunkard and cock fighter and also a good rider,” killed by two men, Hkuncho and Hkuntha, who themselves became nats.

Whatever the human thread — and whether any single mortal lies behind him at all is exactly the kind of question scholars hold open — the figure who steps out of the tangle is singular and stable. He is the reckless prince who lived on drink and horses and the fighting pit, burned out young, and carried every bit of it across the boundary of death. The list-membership is a matter of record; the man’s historicity is contested; the character is fixed. He rode violently in life, and in the plate he rides violently still.

Min Kyawzwa (Ko Gyi Kyaw), plate 32 of the pantheon, from Sir Richard Carnac Temple’s The Thirty-Seven Nats (1906). Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The lord of the raffish

To grasp what Ko Gyi Kyaw means, one has to see him against the company he keeps. Almost all of the Thirty-Seven were mortals who met violent or untimely ends — the nat sein, the spirits who “died green,” cut down unripe by execution, murder, or grief, and venerated ever after precisely for the injustice of the way they went. Min Mahagiri the blacksmith was burned alive on a tree; the Shwepyin brothers were beaten to death as boys over two missing bricks; their mother, Popa Medaw, died of a broken heart on her mountain. The pantheon is largely a company of the wronged, and the cult that serves them is in one register a long act of restitution — feeding and honoring the spirits of those the powerful destroyed.

Ko Gyi Kyaw does not fit that mold, and the difference is the whole of his appeal. He was not wronged. He was not, by any telling, a good man cut down before his time. He drank, he gambled, he raced horses, he set cocks to fight, and he died of the life he had chosen — young, but by his own hand as much as anyone’s. Where the other nats keep the grievance of their deaths, he keeps the pleasures of his life. He is, in the sacred logic of the cult, the beloved rogue: the lord of the pantheon who is loved not despite being no saint but because he is none.

His powers follow from his character. He is venerated as the guardian and patron of drinkers and gamblers — and, past them, of cock-fighters, horsemen, and the many people who live at the loose edges of respectable life. To those he favors he is said to grant wealth and luck, the sudden fortune of the winning bet, so that the same man who patronizes the gambler is petitioned by the gambler for the win. This is not a marginal or embarrassed corner of Burmese devotion. Ko Gyi Kyaw is among the most popular of all the nats, and his popularity rests on the plain fact that he understands appetite and misfortune from the inside. Buddhism counsels the renunciation of exactly the cravings he embodies; the drink, the dice, the heat of the fighting pit are the very attachments a devout life is meant to loosen. He meets those weaknesses not with judgment but with recognition. A person carrying a habit they cannot put down, or a run of bad luck they cannot break, comes to a nat who will not ask them to reform, and finds themselves understood.

His iconography states all of this without a word. He is shown mounted — the horse a dark bay, a brown, or a black-and-gold steed in the shrine images, the green horse of the old colonial plate — because he was a horseman and a cavalry chief, and because a nat who rides arrives, comes to his people from somewhere else. At the feet or the flank of his image stand his two emblems: the fighting cockerel, for the pit; and the shallow gambler’s bowl, for the dice. His offerings are, with an honesty that startles anyone expecting incense and flowers, simply his own pleasures given back to him. Devotees bring rum and whisky, roasted or fried chicken, cheroots, and cash, and lay them before an image that promises no improvement and asks for none. The alcohol is the constant — shrines to him are hung and heaped with bottles — and it is the alcohol, in the end, that the medium will pour.

Offerings of alcohol to U Min Kyawzwa (Ko Gyi Kyaw) at a spirit-festival in Amarapura; the raffish tribute — rum, whisky, cheroots, chicken, cash — is the plain shape of his cult. ‘vive le vélo’, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Not everyone he touched was the better for it. The tradition binds to him a second nat, the woman Ma Ngwe Taung, whose story is the shadow his throws. In life, the telling goes, she was seduced by him and then abandoned; in her shame and grief her own brother pushed her from a cliff, and she died and rose as a nat who now watches over women cast off by husbands and lovers. The pairing is telling. The cult keeps him beloved and keeps her too, and does not pretend the rogue was harmless. He is served as what he was.

His nature is at its most vivid not in the still image but in the dance. When the nat kadaw — the spirit-mediums — call him down at a nat pwe, his possession-dance is one of the most anticipated moments of the whole festival, and it is a performance of his whole turbulent life. The medium, carrying the nat, drinks, smokes, staggers, jokes, wagers, and rides an imagined horse through the crowd, wild and drunken and comic and open-handed. A 2021 ethnomusicological study by Lorenzo Chiarofonte, analyzing the spirit-song Do Ko Gyi Kyaw in performance, traces how the interlocking drums and the melodic line of his song build and steer the possession — how the sound itself triggers and carries and finally controls the dance of a drunkard nat. What passes between the medium and the spirit in those minutes is the cult’s own, and belongs to those who keep it; from the outside one sees the room give itself over to a joy that is entirely his.

The synthesis and the living festival

Ko Gyi Kyaw lives, as every nat does, inside the great settlement that Burmese tradition credits to King Anawrahta of Bagan, whose reign from 1044 to 1077 is documented history. Unable to abolish the older spirit-lords his people would not give up, the king absorbed them — gathering the Thirty-Seven under the frame of Theravada Buddhism, setting their images at the Shwezigon Pagoda as devotees paying homage to the Buddha, and placing at their head Thagyamin, a Buddhicized form of Sakka, king of the nats. That calculated and lasting order — the spirit religion kept inside the Buddhist order, the nats served with the Buddha, not opposed to him — is told in full where it was made, at the Shwezigon and in the life of the Burmese people who keep both devotions as a single practice. It is the ground Ko Gyi Kyaw stands on: a Burmese Buddhist who leaves a bottle of rum for the drunkard-lord is not a lapsed Buddhist, and the offering and the refuge in the Buddha are one life.

His documentary afterlife runs from that synthesis through the colonial catalogs and into modern scholarship. Temple’s 1906 catalog set his plate; Maung Htin Aung read him from within the living cult; Spiro placed him in the working religion of the villages; and Chiarofonte’s 2021 analysis carried him into the fine grain of ethnomusicology, taking his spirit-song apart bar by bar. But the catalogs are the least of his reception. His real life is the festival, and the festival is enormous.

His principal shrine stands in his shrine-town of Pakhan, near Pakokku in the Magway Region of central Burma, and there — and at the well-known celebration in the nearby Yaysagyo area — his great festival is held each year, generally around the Burmese month of Tabaung, in February and March. Thousands pour in, arriving by boat along the river and by bullock-cart down the dry-season roads, for days that answer to everything the nat is. There is cock-fighting, which is his; there is gambling, which is his; and there is dancing, which is most of all his. The mood is frankly festive, devotional and commercial and joyous at once — a fair as much as a rite, with the drunkard-lord at its center.

The living heart of it is the nat kadaw. The mediums who embody the nats have long been often women, the office in many lines passed from mother to daughter; and since the 1980s the profession has drawn, notably and openly, transgender women and gay men — the acault, who have a recognized and respected standing in the cult and are servants of the spirits, not figures of anyone’s mockery. When one of them carries Ko Gyi Kyaw, the embodiment is total and unabashed: the medium drinks whisky, eats the chicken, draws on the cheroot, and turns to the followers pressing close — tipping liquor into their open mouths as they laugh, while they push folded banknotes into the band of the medium’s hat. It is the scene the festival exists for. The commerce and the crowds have their strains, and the shrines of the nat cult have not been spared the hardships of Myanmar’s recent decades; but the devotion is older and more stubborn than any of that, and it does not read the drinking and the gambling as a lower or embarrassed faith. It reads them as the way this particular spirit is loved.

That is the singular thing about him. The pantheon is full of the wronged, and the cult that serves them is largely a long consolation of the unjustly dead. Ko Gyi Kyaw asks for no consolation and offers none. He was a hard-living man who wasted himself young and never repented of a minute of it, and the people made him a god of exactly that — of the appetite the sermons warn against, the luck that will not come, the bottle that will not stay corked. When the drums start his song and the medium reaches for the whisky, the crowd is not welcoming back a saint. They are welcoming back the one who never left them: the big brother who drinks what they drink, bets what they bet, and rides in, still mounted, still holding his cup, to sit down among them and stay.

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