The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  The various parts of the country were administered separately, less of a divide-and-rule policy and more of a cheap and easy policy. After Thibaw’s overthrow the men on the spot found that the low country (the Burmese areas) was traditionally ruled by hereditary chiefs, but that the authority of these chiefs had weakened in recent times and that in any case many were actively leading the resistance against them. They would be of little use, and their power and position were broken within a generation. In the highlands, though, and in particular in the Shan hills to the east, there were hereditary chiefs of a different nature—the sawbwas—who were much less directly ruled from the Court of Ava and were still very much in charge of their own domains. The cheap and easy thing to do was to keep them in place, organize them properly, and simply let them carry on as before, provided they accepted British suzerainty and the occasional guidance of the superintendent of the Shan States, based at a little hill station nearby.

  Different still were the various peoples of the mountain regions. The Kachins, for example, were a medley of people who lived in the far north, just below the Himalayan range. They were never part of the Burmese government system and in the late nineteenth century had taken to raiding and looting frontier towns like Bhamo along the China border. They eventually accepted British overlordship, and American missionaries converted nearly all to one form of Christianity or another.

  The few British army men and officials who spent time in the hills liked the people they found, perhaps not surprisingly as they were usually outdoor types happy not to have desk-bound jobs. They decided that the Kachins and others were “martial races” along the lines of the Gurkhas in Nepal or the Pathans of the North-West Frontier and good soldier material. Though the Kachins and other upland groups were only a tiny fraction of the population (perhaps 2 percent), they became the majority of the army in Burma. In this scheme the Burmese themselves, the people who had actually conquered by fire and sword half the Southeast Asian mainland, were seen as not martial enough and left out. It was a policy choice that rankled deeply in the Burmese imagination, eating away at their sense of pride and turning the idea of a Burmese army into a central element of the nationalist dream.

  It was the British also who began to think carefully about where the Burmese “came from” and how they were related to other peoples. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the heyday of race theory. Ethnology was born as a colonial enterprise, and there were energetic attempts to categorize the peoples of the empire and understand how ancient migrations and more recent history might have led to their current conditions and characteristics. Though there were genuine attempts at science, much was also a way to show how the English were on top. Some ideas did not seem to have much supportive evidence at all. In the 1901 Census, for example, an essay by one Dr. Mc-Namara, entitled “Origins and Character of the Burmese People,” proposed a common ethnic origin of the Irish and Burmese, through Cornish tin miners who had sailed east.25

  Other ideas, more long-lasting, were based on existing Burmese notions of race and caste. The scholars and pundits of the Court of Ava had over time produced numerous systems for classifying the people of the world, with five overarching classes, each with its own subclasses: the Burmese themselves; the Chinese; the Mons; the Shans or Thais; and the kalas. The kala traditionally referred to all the peoples to the west—the Indians, Persians, Arabs, Europeans, and so forth. The British picked up some of these ideas and merged them with the new study of comparative languages.

  By the turn of the century the idea of language families had become well known and well accepted. The eighteenth-century Calcutta judge and polymath Sir William Jones, who had mastered thirteen languages and knew twenty-seven others “reasonably well,” had long ago proposed an Indo-European language family, one that connected many living Indian and European languages, including English, with Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek and traced them all to a common, now dead, source. Now all the languages of the world were being clumped together into families, with the idea that they derived from a single protolanguage that had become fractured and dispersed through ancient and modern migrations. Burmese and Arakanese were placed within the Tibeto-Burman family, whereas Mon, the language of Pegu, was considered entirely separate and related to Cambodian. Shan and its near relatives Thai and Lao were also set apart, and in this way the notion developed that all the various peoples of Burma were of different origins and came to the country at different times. Language and ethnicity became closely linked.

  The British also liked the idea of chaotic and sweeping migrations, in the manner of the barbarian hordes of the Dark Ages, having peopled Burma in aeons past. According to Sir James Scott, in his authoritative Burma: A Handbook of Practical Information, “there poured swarm after swarm of Indo-Chinese invaders, crowding down from North-western China, from Tibet, the Pamirs, and from Mongolia, following the course of the great rivers … the first invading horde was that of the Mon-Hkmer [sic] sub-family. These were followed by the Tibeto-Burmans who drove their predecessors before them—many up into the hills … Upon these warring bands there came down finally the peoples of the Siamese-Chinese sub-family—the Karens and the Tai, or Shans—who crushed and thrust and wedged themselves in where they might.” The practical handbook continued: under British rule “bands are still poured from the teeming loins of the frozen north,” but “they are marshaled like the orderly queue entering a public meeting.”26

  These are ideas now firmly rooted in people’s imaginations; I remember visiting in 1989 a rebel camp belonging to the Mon National Liberation Army and being told how the Mons were a “Mon-Khmer” people, entirely different from the Burmese. For the Burmese it tended to increase their sense of difference from other groups in the country and perhaps make harder the emergence of a single national identity.

  *

  So what did all this mean? Thibaw’s court had vanished, and there was no going back to the old ways. The old aristocracy had quit government service, content for now to harbor quietly its resentments and frustrations while merging every day into ordinary village life. In places like Pantanaw, many benefited from the peace and prosperity of early colonial times, anxious only to enter the new and dynamic modernity showcased for them in Rangoon. But the new and dynamic modernity was resolutely alien, uncompromisingly British at the top and with an assortment of Indian communities, energetic and entrepreneurial, creating the country’s new urban class. Soon a powerful ethnic nationalism, based narrowly on the idea of a Buddhist and Burmese-speaking people, one that saw little need to accommodate minority peoples, took root. At the center of this nationalism would be a desire for a new martial spirit.

  Notes – 8: TRANSITIONS

  1. Paul Edmonds, Peacocks and Pagodas (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1924), 96–100.

  2. On U Thant, I have relied largely on family oral history as well as an unpublished autobiographical paper written shortly before his death in 1974; see also Thant, View from the UN: The Memoirs of U Thant (1978; repr., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2005); as well as June Bingham, U Thant: The Search for Peace (New York: Knopf, 1966); Ramses Nassif, U Thant in New York 1961–71: A Portrait of the Third UN Secretary-General (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Kaba Sein Tin, Nyeinchanyay Bithuka U Thant (Rangoon: Tagaung Press, 1967); Brian Urquhart, A Life in War and Peace (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), chapters 15 and 16.

  3. Imperial Gazetteer of India 19 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 403.

  4. Michael Adas, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).

  5. There is no accepted way of determining today’s value of old money; different methods will arrive at different conclusions, in this case from just over three million pounds to more than twenty-three million pounds. See Lawrence H. Officer, “What Is Its Relative Value in UK Pounds?” Economic History Services, 30 October 2004, http://www.eh.net.

  6.
Rangoon Times, 3 January 1928; Pantanaw U Thant, “We Burmans,” New Burma, 8 September 1939.

  7. J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948).

  8. Harvey, History of Burma, 85–86.

  9. On Thibaw in exile, see W. S. Desai, Deposed King Thibaw of Burma in India, 1885–1916 (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1967).

  10. Norman Lewis, Golden Earth: Travels in Burma (London: Cape, 1952), 100.

  11. Kaung, “A Survey of the History of Education in Burma Before the British Conquest and After,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 46:2 (1963), 1–124.

  12. N. R. Chakravarti, The Indian Minority in Burma (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1971).

  13. Sean Turnell, “The Chettiars in Burma,” Macquarie Economics Research Papers, no. 12/2005 (July 2005).

  14. Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel (1889), vol. 1, no. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1914).

  15. John Cady, A History of Modern Burma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958); F. S. V. Donnison, Public Administration in Burma: A Study of Development During the British Connexion (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1953); G. E. Harvey, British Rule in Burma, 1824–42 (London: Faber and Faber, 1946); A. Ireland, The Province of Burma, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907).

  16. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), chapter 5.

  17. On the life of British civil servants in the later colonial period, see especially Maurice Collis, Trials in Burma (London: Faber, 1938) and Leslie Glass, The Changing of the Kings: Memories of Burma 1934–1949 (London: Owen, 1985).

  18. Alister McCrae, Scots in Burma: Golden Times in a Golden Land (Edinburgh: Kiscadale, 1990).

  19. On British life in Burma in colonial times, see B. R. Pearn, A History of Rangoon (Rangoon: American Baptist Mission Press, 1939); James George Scott, Burma, A Handbook of Practical Information (London: Daniel O’Conner, 1906).

  20. Noel F. Singer, Old Rangoon: City of the Shwedagon (Gartmore, Scotland: Kiscadale, 1995), 109.

  21. Maung Htin Aung, “George Orwell and Burma,” in The World of George Orwell, ed. Miriam Gross (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 26–27.

  22. H. Fielding Hall, A People at School (London: Macmillan, 1906), 22–23.

  23. Joseph Dautremer, Burma Under British Rule, trans. George Scott (London: T. F. Unwin, 1913), 78.

  24. Herbert Thirkell White, A Civil Servant in Burma (London: E. Arnold, 1913), 129.

  25. H. H. Risely and E. A. Gait, Census of India 1901, vol. 1, part 1 (General Report) (Calcutta: Government of India, 1903).

  26. Scott, Burma: A Handbook of Practical Information, 61–62.

  NINE

  STUDYING IN THE AGE

  OF EXTREMISM

  Modern Burmese politics and Burmese nationalism come of age in the 1930s and a generation of anticolonial leaders are seduced by the militant ideologies of the time

  Soon after the Great Mutiny was crushed in 1858, the British government decided to establish direct rule over its Indian possessions. The East India Company, which had governed the expanding empire since its earliest beginnings in Surat and Madras more than two hundred years before, amassing fortunes and making war, was dissolved, and Company territory from Rawalpindi to Moulmein and seven hundred princely states from Kashmir to Cochin were transferred to the sovereign rule of Victoria as the new empress of India.

  It was in the decade that followed that there emerged new Indian leadership, later with names like Gandhi and Nehru, that would eventually challenge colonial rule and show the way to independence. On a cool December day in 1885, just as the Burmese kingdom was about to be annexed to British India, seventy-three lawyers and educators and other professional men met in Bombay to found the Indian National Congress. They all were part of an up-and-coming well-to-do middle class and desired a better future for themselves in a new and modern India. The congress had no special ideology and no base of popular support and in the early years met simply to express support for the Raj and pass fairly harmless resolutions on nonthreatening issues, like civil service reform.

  But things began heating up in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1905 the viceroy, Sir George Nathaniel Curzon, divided the province of Bengal for what he said were reasons of administrative efficiency, but this inflamed Bengali opinion makers, the most vocal and politically articulate in the empire, who suspected a clear-cut divide-and-rule tactic. A cycle of unrest and repression followed. After a long period of relative quiet, Indian politics had lurched toward violence and less patient desires for self-government.

  The British reacted in part with limited reform, reuniting Bengal and including more moderate Indians into the workings of the colonial administration, but also with what they regarded as a proper Oriental spectacle. At the end of 1911 the king-emperor, George V, visited the country for a grand durbar in the old Mughal seat of Delhi, appearing before a vast, gorgeously costumed and impeccably choreographed audience of eighty thousand princes and virtually every person of note in the Indian Empire, all there to pay obeisance to their sovereign in person. With a background of bespoke music by Sir Edward Elgar, Victoria’s grandson bestowed honors and titles on the assembled maharajas and nawabs, wearing a specially designed crown and acting his role as the heir to the House of Babur.

  It was an opportune time to try to cement a degree of loyalty from the empire’s Indian subjects, for in three years the Indian Army, all voluntary, would be sent out to fight in every major theater of the First World War, suffering over forty thousand dead and sixty thousand wounded on battlefields from Flanders to Mesopotamia. This was an immense sacrifice and naturally made Indian politicians more confident in their demands for self-government. In December 1916, just after the battle of the Somme had left a million casualties and in the months before the Russian Revolution, a joint session of the Congress Party and its eventual foe, the Muslim League, met at Lucknow to demand constitutional change. A formal pact was agreed upon. The British felt compelled to respond, and the following summer the government in London announced a new policy of eventual home rule within the British Empire.

  In 1919 Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu and the viceroy, Viscount Chelmsford, introduced legislation that gave considerable authority to partly elected provincial councils. It was a system called dyarchy. Some government departments like agriculture and education were placed under ministers responsible to these new councils. But others, including the really important ones like finance and home affairs (which controlled the police), were kept under officials appointed by the (usually British) governor.

  For some in India this was far from satisfactory. But at least there was some change and some discussion of further reform. But one part of the Indian Empire was to be deliberately left out of the change process altogether: Burma. In British eyes Burma was “the most placid province in India,”1 and no political reform there was expected or required. The British Parliament’s joint committee on Indian constitutional reform said: “Burma is not India. Its people belong to another race in another stage of political development, and its problems are altogether different … The desire for elective institutions has not developed in Burma … the problems of political evolution of Burma must be left for separate and future consideration.”2 It was to be a rude shock.

  CAMBRIDGE, 1905

  By the First World War a new generation of English-educated Burmese had grown up, uncertain of their place in the world and far less politically experienced than the professional classes in Bombay and Calcutta, but increasingly anxious not to be left behind. One of them was a young lawyer named Ba U, who would one day become president of independent Burma.3

  In 1905 Ba U, two of his cousins, and a friend were on their way to a new life as university students in England. They traveled on the SS Herefordshire, a plush pas
senger ship of the Bibby Line, which took them from Rangoon to Liverpool via Colombo, the Suez Canal, and Marseilles. But as soon as the big ship set sail and they left Burma for the first time, they were not happy; they felt they were being discriminated against. Alone among all the passengers, their cabins were at the aft of the steamer, next to the ship’s surgeon’s rooms and close to the lavatories. They protested to the chief steward, who laughed. At dinner they were given a little table in the corner and were served by a steward from Goa, while they noticed that all the white passengers were waited on by white stewards. They had tried to live up to English standards and had gone out of their way to find the best European tailor in Rangoon. But when the ship’s surgeon saw them for the first time in their new suits, he snickered as well. Their coats were too short, their trousers were too tight, and they had put on caps that were too small for their heads. “We looked liked dressed-up monkeys.” The tailor knew they were just Burmese students and hadn’t bothered to do a proper job. It was the start of a difficult few years.

  Ba U was a young man proud of his family background. He was descended from a princess of the old royal house through her son the lord of Henzada. Henzada had run afoul of court intrigues around the middle of the nineteenth century and had run away to British territory. Like many other aristocratic families at the time, Henzada and his children made the transition from grandees at Ava to members of a small but increasingly prosperous middle class. Ba U’s grandfather joined a Scottish rice-trading firm and married the daughter of another displaced nobleman. His father became a deputy commissioner, one of very few Burmese at the time to make it into the ranks of the official elite; his uncle was to be one of only four Burmese granted a king’s commission after the First World War. On his mother’s side, Ba U was part of an important local family that had, for generations, supplied magistrates and governors for the towns of the Irrawaddy Delta. He had gone to school in Maubin, next to Pantanaw, and then to University College, Rangoon, where he studied hard and won a place at Cambridge. It was his dream and his parents’ dream. To the extent that there was an Anglicized class expected to be loyal to the empire, Ba U was part of it.