by Norman Lewis
It is remarkable how intimate a part religion plays in the life and thought of the Burmese, when there is no attempt to canalise it into public observances restricted to one day in the week. U Tun Win attacked the Land Nationalisation Act because, quite sincerely, I believe, he considered it contrary to Buddhist teaching. Thakin Nu, the Prime Minister, found it necessary to invoke precisely the same religious authority when the bill was submitted to parliament. His speech on this occasion was nothing less than a lengthy sermon, with immense quotations from the Buddhist scriptures and a searching analysis from the religious point of view of the illusion of wealth. One can imagine the consternation, the exchange of embarrassed glances, if the present Prime Minister of Great Britain took it into his head to engage in a fervent advocation of primitive Christianity, including the quotation in extenso of the Sermon on the Mount, during, say, the debate on the Steel Nationalisation Act.
However, much as U Tun Win could not agree with the action that had been taken, he agreed that something drastic had to be done. Following in the footsteps of the English, a horde of hereditary Indian moneylenders – the Chettyars – came to Burma. With centuries of moneylending technique behind them, they found the Burmese an easy prey. Agents were sent into villages to induce Burmese farmers to accept loans. Enchanted at the prospect of being able to give parties and pay for pwès out of harvests they had yet to reap, the farmers rushed to take the money at two per cent per month. By 1945 sixty per cent of the petty rice lands of Southern Burma had fallen by foreclosure into the hands of the Chettyars, who had increased their capital ten times since their arrival in the country. The Indian community, as a whole, owned two-thirds of Burmese agricultural land. The interests of the Chettyars were purely financial, and as the weight of custom prevented them from leaving their traditional avocation and becoming farmers, they let the lands to the highest bidder, but without security of lease. This rack-renting brought about a steady decline in the fertility of the soil, because the tenant farmer, who could not be sure of keeping his land for more than a season, took no pains to improve it, and did not even trouble to keep the bunds (water-retaining dykes) in repair. Land at Moulmein, said U Tun Win, which in the time of their forefathers had yielded sixty bags of paddy per acre, was now down to a yield of twenty-five. What was worse, free and comparatively prosperous Burmese farmers had been turned into a landless agricultural proletariat, from whose ranks the bandit and insurgent forces were readily recruited. ‘Thus, if property is not given to those without property much misery is caused,’ said the Buddha, in the Çakkravatti Sermon.
Still, U Tun Win would not go so far as confiscation. What should be done, he said, was to compel landowners by law to improve their land, and only if they failed to do this should the land be resumed by the government. You would get the land all the same, he said (with the suspicion of a wink), because nothing would ever make the Chettyars work, and they would have to go. But there would be no outright injustice, no flagrant conflict with religious principle.
The morning was lustrous. We were about half a mile off shore, approaching Moulmein, and the sun gleamed on a landscape brilliant with the fresh greens of marshy vegetation. There was a narrow coastal plain, with oxen feeding in the grass down by the many creeks that intersected it. Gondola-like sampans were moored at the mouths of inlets, their double sterns painted in red, white and orange geometrical shapes. Inland four junks in line, showing only the burnt umber triangular fins of their sails, passed shark-like along some unseen waterway. An occasional tall tree among the luminous serration of water palms by the shore was silhouetted against a soft, watercolour smear of hills. From each hill’s summit protruded the white nipple of a pagoda. Butterflies came floating out to the ship; the sombrely splendid ones of the South-East Asian forests. Blown up against the deck-houses and derricks they were held there for an instant, flattened as if for exhibition, before fluttering away.
We passed a headland tipped with sand, on which egrets swarmed like white maggots. A junk reeled by in the glassy billows; a black, raffish silhouette, with delicately tapering bows, and a tiered poop with the passengers in their coloured silks crowding to the balustrade. Its great, blood-red sail was carried like a banner. Had I known it, I could have had a stylish passage down to Mergui in one of these craft, and thus have avoided the stifling bourgeois atmosphere of the Menam.
My favourite descriptive writer on Burma, the Reverend Mr Malcolm, an American Baptist missionary, was much impressed with this prospect when, in 1835, he visited Moulmein. ‘The scenery is rendered romantic and peculiar’, he notes, ‘by small mountains, arising abruptly from the level fields to the height of four, five and six hundred feet; the base scarcely exceeding the size of the summit.’ The worthy man’s aesthetic satisfaction is blighted, however, by another feature (which I have already mentioned) of this otherwise peerless landscape. ‘… On the summits of many of them, apparently inaccessible to human feet, Buddhist zeal has erected pagodas, whose white forms, conspicuous far and near, remind the traveller every moment that he surveys a region covered with the shadows of spiritual death. Some of the smaller hills I ascended. My heart sickened as I stood beside the dumb gods of this deluded people … nothing is left to prove they have been, but their decayed pagodas, misshapen gods, and unblessed graves.’
I find books by early Victorian missionaries extremely readable. These vigorous men showed an unquenchable curiosity about every aspect of the countries in which they struggled for the salvation of souls. As a result they are full of exact information about the geology, the natural history, products, commerce and customs of the people. Their pages are naturally salted with quotations from the more ferocious books of the Old Testament and they are scandalised by almost everything they see; but the main thing is that, whether they disapprove or not, they write it all down. With all their arrogant fanaticism, their stupid condemnation of all they do not understand, how much more one can learn about the country from them than from so many modern collections of impressions, with their amused tolerance, their tepid, well-mannered sympathy.
Malcolm went to Moulmein to combat polygamy, establish a native seminary, and – rather remarkably – to put into practice a plan for giving English names to the native children. Although he never ceases to insist that the people of Moulmein are ‘perishing in their sins’ for ‘Buddhists have no idea of the remission of sins in any way. Their only hope is to balance them with merit’ – he seems to have come off rather well at the hands of the benighted heathen. ‘Wherever we stopped to eat, we entered a house freely and were immediately offered clean mats, and treated with the utmost hospitality … they sometimes expostulated with the servant, as he was cooking our meals, that he had brought rice and fowls, instead of allowing them to furnish our table. They [the missionaries] are bountifully supplied, even where their message meets only with opposition.’ On the whole the reverend gentleman seems to find this display of apparent virtue in the heathen a source of irritation. It is an imposture, he decides. ‘Though, in this world, hypocrites mingle with God’s people, and resemble them,’ he moralises, ‘the Great Shepherd instantly detects them, and, at the appointed time, will unerringly divide them.’ This comforting thought expressed, the author feels entitled to call a truce to sermonising and launches into a most exact description of Brahminy cattle.
Moulmein came into sight beyond a headland; the twin Mogul towers of a mosque rising above a spinney of masts, the receding planes of corrugated iron roofs, palms brandished like feather-dusters held at many angles, the tarnished gold of pagodas on the skyline.
As the ship approached the shore the details took recognisable shape. There were the decaying houses of vanished commercial dynasties, perhaps more noble in their decline than in their heyday. An old warehouse with a baroque, eau-de-nil façade had become a cinema. On a ribbon of sand at the water’s edge a few vultures spread their wings furtively over what the sea had surrendered to them. The colours of this town were old and faded, degraded
and washed out: the red of rust, the greens and greys of patinas and stains. A stench of mud and decomposing vegetation lowered itself like a blanket over the ship.
It was still early morning when we tied up alongside the wharf, and about an hour later I was just about to sit down to breakfast when an exceedingly handsome young Burman came to my table and introduced himself as U Tun Win’s son. U Tun Win had mentioned vaguely that he expected me to be his guest as long as the ship stayed at Moulmein, but I had taken this no more seriously than a European invitation of the ‘do look in and see us any time you happen to be round our way’ variety. Since the old man had gone ashore without saying goodbye, I did not expect to see him again. I now learned from his son – who told me to call him by his familiar name of Oh-oh – that the invitation had been seriously meant indeed. In fact an intensive programme of sightseeing had been arranged in the hour U Tun Win had been ashore. Beyond the wharf-gate a canary-coloured jeep awaited us. In this, said Oh-oh, we would first see the sights of the town. At eleven o’clock we were invited to a party given by a family whose son had just entered the Buddhist novitiate. Then we would breakfast, after which he proposed an excursion into the surrounding countryside, since I should naturally want to visit the principal pagodas of the Moulmein district. The suggestion of breakfasting at about midday was my first introduction to the Burmese custom of taking one’s first meal of the day – universally known as breakfast – at any time between dawn and three-thirty in the afternoon. Somewhat alarmed at this suggestion – although otherwise, of course, enchanted – I insisted on Oh-oh’s joining me there and then at the bacon and eggs.
* * *
Moulmein was a town of strong baroque flavour. It was as if the essence of the Renaissance had finally reached it via Portugal, and after careful straining through an Indian mesh. There was a spaciousness of planning; an evidence of studied proportion about the old stone houses. Doors and windows were often flanked with heavy double columns. Much crudely stained glass was to be seen. Balconies were of wrought iron and from the eaves depended stalactites of fretted woodwork. The original roofs had been replaced by corrugated iron. It was as if an Indian architect had been responsible for this style, after spending perhaps a week in Goa. Crows alighted and perched swaying on the potted sunflowers put out on balconies. Rows of coconuts had been suspended from the eaves for the tutelary spirits’ accommodation.
The Indians were here in strength and had brought with them their sacred cows, their ‘medical halls’, their ‘select recommended gents’ oriental tailors’. Business was done beneath fascia boards painted with ferocious tigers, firing howitzers and bombing planes. The cinema with the fine old façade was showing ‘The Good Earth’ and had distributed its advertising boards in various parts of the town. One leaned against one of the multiple trunks of a huge banyan tree, which was the home of one or more nats, for shrines were attached to it, and votive wooden horses hung from its boughs. Girls sat in a streamer-decorated shop and sewed shirts while a musician played to them on a mandoline. In the town lock-up, a little further down the street, a single prisoner balanced on one leg in a bamboo cage. At the other end of the town there had been an attempt at road repairs, but this had clearly been abandoned several years ago. Now the steamroller, which had been left where it stood, was already sunken to its axles. In a few more years it would probably have disappeared from sight, a rich find for the archaeologist of future centuries.
There was, of course, a festival going on, with booths and pavilions filling all the side streets and open spaces. Some of the citizens, anticipating the distractions of the evening, already carried hydrogen-filled balloons as they went about their business. The main street was jammed with bullock-carts and jeeps. All the latter had been vividly repainted and carried such names as ‘Hep-Cat’ and ‘Lady for a Night’. Oh-oh’s was called ‘Cupid’.
Above the cheerful animation of this scene rose in majestic aloofness, the fabulous, almost unearthly, golden shape of the Old Moulmein Pagoda; so hateful to Malcolm, so nostalgically romantic to Kipling. It was all that remained without change of the magnificence of the East.
* * *
The novitiate party was held over U Sein’s pawnshop. Although the Burmese are less interested in money than most other races, it is usual to announce the cost of such celebrations. In honour of their son’s coming of age and his automatically entering a monastery for a short period, the U Sein family had spent five thousand rupees – say four hundred pounds. The reception would last three days, and, in the biblical manner, guests were to be brought in from the highways and byways. The U Seins had also paid for an open-air theatrical show for the three nights.
It called for a high order of organising ability to deal with the crush of guests, but when the Burmese felt like it they could be very efficient. You went in by one door and left by another, passed in the interim through the successive stages of the U Sein hospitality. Just by the entrance, the members of the family, in gorgeous turn-out, awaited new arrivals. Only the son, the raison d’être of the party, was not present, for he had already, with shaven head and in yellow robes, made his token renunciation of the world. In the background lurked a pair of young ladies, as bejewelled as Eastern queens, whose office it was to collect the shoes. It was at this point that the organisation was so noticeable, because in exchange for the shoes you received a numbered fan, and a slip bearing a corresponding number was put in the shoes themselves. There was a room full of them, all arranged in numerical order.
The first part of the reception took place on the first floor. Here, in a room which was as big as a small dance-hall, about two hundred guests were seated on mats on the polished floor. As each new party appeared at the top of the staircase, hostesses floated towards them and shepherded them across the room to the patches of vacant floor space. These girls had developed a kind of cinema-usherette technique, signalling to each other with their hands as usherettes do with torches. Once the party was seated other lady-helps materialised, gliding up with silver trays set with the impedimenta of betel-chewing (clearly a convention, since no one chewed), and others containing saucers heaped with such Burmese hors d’oeuvres as pickled tea-leaves, salted ginger, fried garlic, sesamum seeds, roasted peas and dried, shredded prawns. It was the accepted thing to sit round this refection for about an hour, by which time ‘breakfast’ would be ready.
Fortunately, Orientals are not obsessed by the necessity of keeping up polite conversation. It is sufficient to contribute an occasional remark; to produce for the benefit of those sitting opposite, a smile, which, indeed, tends after a time to stiffen into the kind of grimace produced at the demand of the old-fashioned photographer. It seems, even, that the European capacity for sustained conversation is found rather wearisome in the Far East. There we sat with unexerted sociability, nibbling occasionally at the tea-leaves or prawns, speculating on the fee the principal actor would demand that evening, and admiring the furnishings of the room. One of these was a three-dimensional picture, a grotto bespangled with fragments of mirror-glass and adorned with artificial flowers in which cut-out figures knelt in adoration of the Virgin Mary. There was a coronation of King George V, charged with the flat detail and oppressive colours of such works of art, and a collection of portraits of American film-stars, about a hundred of them, all stuck side by side in a frame. In the corner a Buddhist shrine had been fixed up on a platform. It was a standard commercial product put out by a Burmese manufacturing firm, and available in several sizes – of which this was the largest – all in identical style and furnishings. In addition to concealed lighting supplied by the makers, the pawnshop had added, as befitted a successful enterprise, fluorescent tubes of alternate pink and green.
Representatives of all the races of Moulmein had come to the party; Indians, Malays and, of course, Anglo-Burmese, who wore European clothes, and with a certain difficulty forced their thoughts into an English linguistic mould. The Burmese women were resplendent as brides, with their halos of w
hite blossoms. I wondered how many pledges the pawnshop had temporarily relinquished to decorate for an hour those much braceleted arms, those pearl-adorned throats.
Music had been provided, so a notice said, by the New Electric Photographic Studio, which evidently sold gramophones and radio sets as well. They blasted us from several loudspeakers, playing without pause or remission a resounding medley of swing and the national music of which Malcolm said, ‘it is keen and shrill … although I never heard pleasant tunes from it.’
After the customary hour had passed, our group became a little fidgety. Oh-oh leaned across to tell me, in his hesitant English, that by this time breakfast should have been ready. It seemed that the great influx of guests had strained the organisation. The sign that food was prepared for us would be given by the arrival of one of the young lady helpers, who would present each of us with a flower. Soon after, in fact, she arrived; cool, correctly aloof and imperturbable, despite the heat and the enforced speeding up of her normal pace. As promised, we received our flowers; white orchids – artificial, of course, since it would have been demeaning to the house to have offered anything so ordinary as a genuine blossom.
Trooping downstairs we presented our flowers for inspection to more helpers, who, after a glance at them, led us to our table. In a matter of seconds we were served plain and fancy cake, ice-cream and sago pudding flavoured with coconut and various seeds. Following the example of the others I added these ingredients together, stirred them up and swallowed the result with a spoon. Eating took perhaps ten minutes. After that it was in order to leave. We passed out, after showing our fans and collecting our shoes, by the exit door. On one side a maiden waited holding out foot-long cheroots. On the other stood a large tub filled with paper bags containing gifts for each departing guest. Mine was an aluminium basin.
