It was at university that Thant first met John Sydenham Furnivall, a onetime colonial officer turned anthropologist, who had left government to teach and write and encourage a generation of young Burmese students. He was to write seminal books on colonial Burma and Indonesia and introduced to the world the concept of a plural society (with Burma as the archetype), a society where different communities with different religions, cultures, and languages live side by side, but separately and in the same political unit.7 He had a modernizing vision of Burma and knew the country intimately, being fluent in Burmese and having served long years touring hundreds of villages as a district officer in the 1890s and 1900s. He was probably considered an oddball by many of the other Europeans in Rangoon, being as interested as he was in the country and its history; in the late 1920s, in addition to lecturing at the university, he had set up his Burma Book Club. Thant was one of the club’s main patrons and contributed often to the bimonthly magazine The World of Books, founded by Furnivall with one of Thant’s younger brothers. Another of Furnivall’s students was Thant’s good friend Nu, who was to become the first prime minister of independent Burma.
Furnivall encouraged Thant to continue at university and compete in the civil service exams and said he would help make sure he received a good posting. Thant may have been tempted, but felt too strongly his responsibilities at home. He was also increasingly interested in pursuing writing as a career and thought he could do this from anywhere. And so, at the ripe old age of nineteen, Thant returned home and landed a position as senior master at the local national school.
The next many years were spent back at Pantanaw, in his family’s old teak house under the shade of the big tamarind tree. New books were added to his father’s library—Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski and H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell—and evenings were spent reading by candlelight, usually after a postprandial game of billiards at a house nearby. At age twenty-four, Thant won a nationwide Secondary Teachership Exam, and was made the youngest headmaster in the country. In second place was another denizen of Pantanaw, his own former English teacher K. Battacharya, a Bengali with a strong passion for Russian literature. He had introduced Thant and his other prize students to Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gogol and was delighted to hear of his protégé’s success. By chance, Thant’s best friend, Nu, a few years older, was appointed the school’s superintendent.
*
As a young writer in his twenties, my grandfather chose the pen name Thilawa, after a fourteenth-century swashbuckling nobleman best remembered for having laughed only three times in his life,8 perhaps not for Thilawa’s violent successes but for his reputation as a man of few words and calm disposition. Thant was apparently attracted to serious and somber men as opposed to the rowdy and colorful Burmese politicians who were making their names in those days. While some young Burmese looked up to Mussolini or Chiang Kai-shek, Thant’s personal favorite was Sir Stafford Cripps, the severe and humorless Socialist lawyer and safe pair of hands, the man who would one day head last-minute diplomatic efforts leading up to Indian independence. It was an interesting choice of role model for a small-town Burmese headmaster.
He worked diligently to be a good teacher and taught history and English, his two subjects at university. His school was a so-called national school. It was different from the few government schools paid for by the British Burma administration and the private schools run by missionaries. The national schools were an outgrowth of protests in the early 1920s against colonial education policies; they received only minimal official funding and depended heavily on voluntary support. Their aim was to provide boys and girls with well-rounded educations and to instill in them a sense of pride in Burma and being Burmese. The Pantanaw National School was one of the few still surviving in the early 1930s, with about three hundred students in all, many of whom were too poor to pay any fees. Thant started out with a very modest salary of 175 rupees a month, and from this would routinely donate at least 40 or 50 rupees toward the upkeep of the school.
His wish to be a good teacher was more than matched by his desire to follow a career as a journalist. He wrote for his father’s old paper The Sun and an English-language journal titled New Burma as well as a number of Burmese-language magazines. In Furnivall’s The World of Books, he wrote a monthly editorial as well as an occasional column entitled “From My School Window.” From the verandah of his wooden house, with wild orchids all around, set a few yards back from a wide dirt road and surrounded by the smells and sounds of the Irrawaddy Delta, he tried to connect to the wider world. He became the first Burmese member of the British Left Book Club and was proud of owning all the published works of Cripps as well as John Strachey, the Webbs, and George Orwell. He also wrote several books, the first being a translation of The Story of the League of Nations—Told for Young People.
It was a happy time, and in November 1934 he married my grandmother, Thein Tin, whom he had met two years before. The only daughter of a small-town lawyer, she was originally from Tada-U, near Mandalay. When her father died, she and her mother moved to Pantanaw, where they had relatives, and her mother became quite the successful businesswoman, owning and managing a very profitable cigarmaking firm. It had been a long and formal courtship, with my grandfather spending countless evenings with his future mother-in-law in a sort of yearlong interview. It was then that he picked up his cigarsmoking habit, becoming a chain-smoker until he was diagnosed with cancer at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital in 1973. His first son died in infancy (child mortality rates were and still are shockingly high), but he and his wife had two more children in the 1930s, a son (who also died, but much later in a traffic accident) and a daughter, my mother.
The year my grandfather was appointed headmaster was the same year that the Reichstag made Adolf Hitler dictator of Germany and the year that Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and launched its ferocious campaigns on the mainland of China. In America, Franklin D. Roosevelt had just succeeded Herbert Hoover and was launching his New Deal to end the Great Depression. There were many signs of the instability to come, but few would have guessed that the violence and upheaval would soon devastate Burma as well. The Depression was already wreaking havoc on the lives of farmers across the Irrawaddy Delta. Within a few years the little town of Pantanaw itself would be burned to the ground and its people forced out as refugees, many never to return. Burma was ill prepared for what lay ahead.
NO MORE ROADS TO MANDALAY
The house was not difficult to find. It was a very large, rambling brick house in the pukka English style of the 1920s and 1930s, and the lawn was overgrown, the small side entrance to the compound almost entirely covered by long grass and weeds. A woman was bathing near a well in the back, a darkly colored sarong wrapped around her shoulders. A few big geese were feeding nearby. Just on the pavement outside, an old vendor sold bananas, and across the street a brand-new Chinese temple in bright yellow was being built, bamboo scaffolding propped up against the newly painted walls. It was the house of His Royal Highness Hteiktin Taw Hpaya, the eldest grandson of King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat and heir to the Konbaung throne, and I had come up from Mandalay to visit on Boxing Day 1997. Dressed comfortably for home in a pair of gray trousers and a red and black lumberjack flannel shirt, the prince warmly ushered me to a reception area just inside. A young, neatly dressed woman silently appeared with a tray of tea and biscuits.
We spoke for much of the afternoon. The prince was very charming and friendly, with a ready smile and a cheerfulness that made him seem much younger than his seventy-two years. He spoke with an old-fashioned British India accent and had been living here in Maymyo for much of his life at this house on Forest Road. Maymyo is a former British hill station, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive up a winding road from Mandalay, the place where European officials and their wives retreated during the hot months of March and April and tried to re-create what they could of home. It’s named after a Colonel May of the Fifth Bengal Infantry (myo means “town�
� in Burmese). It was always cool, even cold at night, and in this pretend facsimile of English summer weather (without the clouds or the rain) the British had built mock Tudor homes and a beautifully landscaped botanical garden, in large part the handiwork of Turkish prisoners during the First World War. There were (and are) fields of strawberries and gardens of larkspur, hollyhock, and petunia and houses with names like Fairview and Primrose Cottage. The old chummery, or bachelor residence, of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation is today a hotel, still with a huge fireplace and hot baths and less than tempting roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. The main street is like something out of a Wild West film except for all the people in sarongs, with horse-drawn carriages and wooden shopfronts and the big Purcell Clock Tower at the very center. Though the British have all left, many others who came in their wake remain, including a strong Gurkha community, descendants of old Indian Army soldiers who decided to make this their new home.
The prince was familiar with people calling on him to discuss his grandparents, the events of the 1880s, and the fate of the royal family. He didn’t seem at all displeased to talk about these things and instead energetically waded into different topics. He said that his family had wanted to repatriate Thibaw’s remains from India to Burma after independence, but the British embassy had intervened and made sure it did not happen. They were afraid, he said, that it would inflame anti-British feeling.
The prince was keen in his relaxed way to explain how important the royal family still was in the hearts of the Burmese people. He recounted a story from the 1960s or 1970s when he had been asked by the army to appear at an anti-Communist rally in Shwebo, the capital of his ancestor Alaungpaya, only never to be asked again to appear in public after the strength of popular feeling that had been shown that day. He was a man strangely dislocated, in his own country yet from an entirely different Burma, both the Burma of royal times and the British Burma of his boarding school years. When he saw how interested I was to talk about the old dynasty and court, he gained an energy, a brightness.
He said that over the years many people, claiming to be doing research or writing a book, both Burmese and foreigners, had come to visit him and he had lent them pictures and other mementos, but they had never been returned. He mentioned an Australian man who had come a few years back, taken some papers, promising to come back a week later, but never did.
It was a way of explaining why he had very little to show. Still, he went into a back room and proudly brought out what he did have, a huge paper, all rolled up, with the genealogy of his entire family. He also brought out the few photographs he had left, including one of a wedding in 1922 that he said was the very last occasion which brought together members of the royal family and the surviving members of the court. The prince was most animated when talking about the restrictions on his life and the unfair way in which his family had been treated over the past century.
“You know, the British wouldn’t even allow us to travel to Mandalay. We all had to live in Rangoon or places farther south. When I was a student in Moulmein, I was on the football team and my team was invited to play against St. Paul’s in Mandalay. But you know what? The Brits told me I couldn’t go!” He laughed but was bitter.
He said he had never really had a profession. For all his seventy-two years, he was, first and foremost, a prince of the deposed royal family. The short war of 1885, Randolph Churchill’s hope that a Burma victory would help the Conservatives win the elections, Lord Dufferin’s decision to abolish the monarchy altogether—these things had defined his entire life. I asked him what he had done earlier, say, in his twenties and thirties. Had he been able to work at all? “Well, I was quite into bodybuilding,” he said, and laughed again. He still had a stocky frame. “This was my big thing. And so when U Nu was prime minister, he made me the head of the Council on Physical Fitness!”
*
My host’s grandfather had arrived in India in early 1886, first at Madras and then at the muggy seaside town of Ratnagiri on the Konkan coast, just south of Goa. Thibaw was given a substantial house, and he and Supayalat had brought with them a number of servants, mainly young girls from the Kachin hills. Later he was allowed to build his own small palace, which still stands today, set on twenty-three acres of land on a promontory overlooking the green Arabian Sea, with teak finishings and Italian colored glass placed against the setting sun. They had also brought Supayalat’s mother, but relations between the ex-king and the ex-Mistress of the White Elephant were not good, and the British presumably thought that after taking away his country and abolishing his throne, the least they could do was let him live apart from his mother-in-law. The old woman, once a formidable power at the Court of Ava, was eventually allowed to sail back to Burma, and she lived the rest of her days in seclusion on the beach at Tavoy.9
By all accounts Thibaw and his family lived a life of intense boredom. He seemed never to have accepted his fate and, hoping for some sort of improvement in his status, wrote several memorials to the viceroy. At the very beginning this amounted to a request to return to Mandalay and rule as a British puppet. This would of course have been more than acceptable back in 1880 but was now out of the question. In later times Thibaw’s requests became more modest, asking, for example, to attend the 1905 durbar with King George together with the other Indian princes.
Money was a constant problem. Thibaw and Supayalat had brought with them precious stones as well as other valuables, which over the 1890s were almost all sold to local merchants. Their pensions were small. Again and again Thibaw petitioned his captors for more funds. They in turn worried that he was being irresponsible, and a number of tiresome attempts were made to better supervise Thibaw’s spending, as if the former king were a young child with an allowance.
Thibaw led an immobile life. He wasn’t, however, a prisoner in any normal sense. He had, by anything other than kingly standards, an impressive residence and staff and extensive grounds and even a car, a Model T Ford, which he could send on errands into town. His daughters and other members of his household were allowed to wander in the neighborhood, but apparently Thibaw and Supayalat did not or were not allowed to leave the immediate area around the house. But from the records of his British minders, he never asked to venture out and see things. He appeared singularly without intellectual curiosity or an interest in sports or other hobbies of any kind. His monastic training and early achievements as a Buddhist scholar were not borne out by any later requests for religious books (though Buddhist monks were often on hand for private ceremonies), and his physical activity was seemingly limited to his movements around the house. He also seemed to have few vices. Despite antebellum British propaganda to the contrary, he did not drink alcohol. His only soft spot was for fried pork, which he ate in generous amounts.
The royal couple had arrived at Ratnagiri with three young daughters (one had just been born en route in Madras), and Supayalat gave birth to another in their new home. In the early years of the century all
four were young women. In Burma, and at the royal court, an unmarried woman in her late teens or twenties or even older was not a strange thing. Spinsters were not uncommon, and many princesses never married by choice or for want of a suitable husband. But the late Victorian officials whose job it was to tend to the Burmese royals did worry. A list was produced with the names of unmarried Burmese princes. Thibaw dismissed everyone on the list, saying he knew them and they were all a bunch of good-for-nothings. Eventually the matter was taken up by the viceroy himself. Though the Burmese royal family was generally endogamous, it would have been in the contemporary Indian tradition to marry into another family of similar rank. As the Burmese were Buddhist, one possibility was the royal family of Sikkim, the tiny Himalayan state sandwiched between Nepal and Bhutan. The people were allied to the Tibetans and were Mahayana Buddhists. Close enough, the British must have thought. The crown prince of Sikkim, the future Chogyal, was approached. He agreed to meet with the two elder daughters. In the end he found them
unsuitable, saying that their English was not fluent.
And then there was a scandal during the hot weather of 1906. The first princess became pregnant with the child of the Indian durwan, the gatekeeper. He was already married and with a family of his own. Everyone was shocked. But in the end it seems the British were more shocked than the Burmese. Thibaw and Supayalat soon reconciled themselves to the situation, and their first granddaughter became their new focus of attention. She was nicknamed Baisu.
Then something happened that the royal couple could not accept. The second princess, always known for being strong-willed, fell in love with a man named Khin Maung Gyi. He was Burmese and had served as a minor official at Mandalay. Here Thibaw drew the line. The father and daughter had a row. The second princess then left, to the house of Mrs. Head, the wife of the British district collector. When Thibaw heard what had happened, he ordered his car and driver to fetch the wayward princess. When the driver and the Model T Ford returned a while later, with no princess, the erstwhile king of Burma had a heart attack. Within weeks the last of the Konbaung monarchs was dead.
Thibaw was only fifty-six years old when he died in 1916. His death was barely noted at home, except within ever-shrinking aristocratic circles at Mandalay. One wonders what would have happened if Thibaw had led a healthier life. At the start of the Second World War he would have been eighty-one. Would he have become a king under the Japanese? Would he have outlasted the British and become the first head of state of a newly independent Burma in 1948, sending his permanent representative to the new United Nations at New York?
What did happen was that with the end of the Great War the British relaxed their grip and allowed the various Burmese royals in India to return to Burma, though not to Mandalay itself. The first princess stayed behind with her little daughter, Baisu, and slowly fell into poverty. Baisu herself married and had a sizable family, with several children and grandchildren, moved to the city, and merged into the great urban poor of Bombay’s slums. She was still alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century, then in her late nineties, and journalists who went to visit her spoke of her generosity and kind manners, a little picture of Thibaw and Supayalat tacked onto the wall of her shack and a hint of Upper Burman features being the only thing to distinguish her from her neighbors.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 23
