by Norman Lewis
The Shwepyi brothers became the most popular and the second most powerful of all the members of the Burmese nat-pantheon. They are still worshipped at Taungbyon, with a corps of female mediums in attendance to transmit their oracles. Their annual festival is the most important of Burmese animistic ceremonies, and draws huge crowds from all parts of the country.
* * *
Since frequent reference to nats is unavoidable in any work dealing with Burma, I must attempt to define the nature of these powerful supernatural entities. The word is used in a loose, generic sense to cover all members – whether ghosts, ghouls, vampires, or merely lost and starving souls – of the spectral world. There were nats called into existence by an intellectual effort, such as Alaungpaya’s gun nat. This modernistic demiurge was reverenced in the form of the king’s first three-pounder, which, scented, coated with gold-leaf, and wrapped in silk, was propitiated with bottles of liquor. But besides this déclassé and miscellaneous ghostly riff-raff a category of sentient beings exists, having its own fairly elevated place in the Buddhist hierarchy of souls. These are the local tutelary spirits, whose worship preceded (and in the case of the Vietnamese, actually outlasted and replaced) Buddhism. Of these there are many thousands; although only thirty-seven, the indigenous Burmese gods, are adored – or rather, propitiated – on a national scale.
According to the cosmogony which the Burmese borrowed from India, there are eleven principal stages or levels of the ‘corporeal and generating’ soul; four being unhappy, and seven happy. Unhappy souls are those confined in hell, or existing as miscellaneous ghosts, or incarnated in animals. Until recently souls imprisoned in the bodies of foreigners were included in this last category. At the bottom of the scale of happiness come human beings, and immediately above them in the soul’s evolution are located the true nats. The situation of a nat is preferable to that of the most fortunate human being, although it is still far removed from the felicity of the ultimate heavens. Nats, although exempt from the ills of humanity, are still subject to sensual passion, which sometimes leads them even to form unions with human beings. From such attachments – whether temporary or otherwise – arises the recognised class of nat-ka-daws – spirit mediums or wives – so numerous that it has been seriously suggested that in the forthcoming census of the population of Burma they should be described as a separate occupational class.
The land of the nats, then, is a kind of Mohammedan paradise, whose occupants are able to make the best, such as it is, of both worlds. With the soul’s progress upwards, however, the intellectual pleasures begin to assert themselves, and the more typically human distractions to lose their appeal. Finally, after passage through numerous heavens, a formless and incorporeal state is attained when the soul, imagined as an immaterial sun, hovers on the threshold of Nirvana, a strange, archaic version of the Shavian Life-Force, the pure intellect functioning in the void.
From an examination of the attributes of the thirty-seven nats the influence of the thirty-three devas of the Hindus may be suspected; but it is also evident that their legends enshrine memories of Mongol heroes of great antiquity, some of them shared with the Thais, the Cambodians and even the Vietnamese, and the peoples of Southern China. The legends are confused and vary from district to district. U Shin Gyi, for example, the guardian spirit of Rangoon and the lower Irrawaddy, is there known as the greatest harpist of all time, who, having fatally charmed the sirens of the river, was drowned by them. In Northern Burma he is no more than the son of a king of Pagan, who was killed by a fall from a swing while at play. To enter this pantheon of the nats, a tragic death seems, above all, to have been essential. Many of the thirty-seven were kings while they lived, but no king who died comfortably in his bed could enter this magic circle. This strange immortality was only to be achieved by touching in some unpredictable way a chord of popular imagination. Of an ancient tyrant’s memory nothing remains but the legend of his perfidious handling of a blacksmith, who became the most powerful of all the nats and the guardian spirit of every Burmese house.
Those who became nats died by murder, of grief or fright, from snakebite, an overdose of opium or the unlucky smell of onions. Among their numbers was a general who took up cockfighting when he should have been leading the armies, and was buried to the waist and left to die. There was also a politician who, when the king’s wrath turned against him, tried to get away on a marble elephant, which, however, he failed to vivify by well-tried magical methods. The Burmese people never forgot this picturesquely tragic episode. Nor were they able to forget the grotesque end of King Tabinshweti, the conqueror who united all Burma and left it at the height of its prosperity in the days when the Portuguese first entered the country. Tiring of the panoply of power, Tabinshweti took to drink and was finally assassinated. According to one tradition he was killed while seated upon a close stool, suffering from an attack of dysentery. Of this king nothing has come down to the Burmese man in the street but this one foolish fact. The marchings and the counter-marchings, the sack of towns and devastations of provinces, have all been forgotten. This founder of the Burmese Empire, this scourge of God, is now no more than a man who died ridiculously while on a lavatory-seat, a dysentery nat, who receives offerings of fruit and flowers from sufferers from that disease, and even used to be worshipped in effigy in the ludicrous posture in which he died.
This strange reversing process, that makes clowns of kings, and that in death takes ordinary unlucky mortals and places them in the ranks of the heroes, is no better exemplified than in the case of Nga Pyi, a messenger, a silly man, who while riding, about eight hundred years ago, a bearer of bad news, to the camp of his prince, dared to break his journey to sleep. For this delay he was executed, becoming the Spirit Rider of the White Horse, a national champion, a Burmese Santiago. White horse-puppets are offered at his shrines all over Burma, and he has made frequent historical appearances like the Angels at Mons, brandishing his sword at the head of the armies, when the issue of the day has been in doubt. Lately he was reported in the Rangoon press to have been in action against the Karens.
Thus Burmese history is seen, dreamlike and inconsequent, in the popular imagination, just as the average Englishman remembers little of King Alfred but the story of the burnt cakes, and nothing of Robert the Bruce but his encounter with a spider.
* * *
My friend, Tok Galé, thought that a visit to Taungbyon could be arranged through the good offices of the Superintendent of Police; so when in accordance with my instructions I paid a routine call on this gentleman, the matter was mentioned.
The Superintendent was an Anglo-Burman, of a type frequently to be met with, which takes after the English father in an almost exaggerated way. This variation is tall and of military bearing, favours a close-clipped moustache, and possesses a bluff inhibition of manner to be found in England among minor executives of substantial insurance companies, or army officers of field rank. It seemed impossible that a tiny Burmese mother could have produced so stalwart a son as this.
Smiling shyly, the Superintendent held out a huge hand. There would be no trouble in going to Taungbyon. Absolutely no trouble, old boy. Lay on an escort just in case; but actually things were pretty quiet. Touch wood, and all that. The Superintendent was a man of few words, and one felt a habit of understatement might be concealed by these clipped and unemphatic utterances.
A large map of the Mandalay area covered half of the walls. It was patterned with interpenetrating colours, swirling contours and isolated blotches. By reference to the key I learned that Communists, either the ‘Red’ or ‘White’ Flag varieties, held the country immediately to the northeast, east and southeast of the city. The centre of Mandalay itself was described as ‘under effective Government administration’, which, however, did not extend to the suburbs, where administration was admitted to be ‘non-effective’. Across the Irrawaddy, to the west, the situation seemed to be vague, or ‘liquid’ as the military euphemism usually puts it. This area was left uncolo
ured. To the north and south a hideous yellow stain was spreading, flecked here and there with a red rash of Communism. Here the ‘White’ People’s Volunteer Organisation held sway; the once patriotic force which had been raised to fight the Japanese, and then, with the war at an end, had refused to be disarmed, and turned to banditry. There were also, said the Superintendent casually, a few ‘Yellow’ PVOs who, after surrendering to the government, had revolted again, and gone underground. In some sectors the PVOs were supposed to have accepted temporary Communist leadership, and in other places they were fighting them. There, where the map was striped so garishly, the ‘White’ and ‘Red’ Communists had united, dissolved their association and reunited again. The present situation was uncertain. The map-makers hadn’t bothered to mark in a few villages held by army deserters, who might quite well by now have thrown in their lot with any of the other organisations.
So there it was, said the Superintendent, with a suspicion of boredom. A bit of a mess, and so on, and so forth, but nothing that couldn’t be put right in the end. Taungbyon, I might have noticed, was deeply embedded in PVO territory; but nothing was to be thought of it. With a wave of the hand, the map and all it represented was dismissed. An escort would call for us at eight in the morning.
* * *
And at eight precisely the escort was there; but instead of the cheroot-smoking private I had expected, a three-ton lorry had arrived with a squad of tommy-gunners, and a Bren gun mounted on the roof. A spruce young lieutenant came over, saluted and clambered into the back of our jeep, and we were off. This display of force was in flagrant opposition to the advice I had always been given in Rangoon; never to travel with the police or the military. To do so, said my informants, was to run the risk of falling into an ambush, whereas by travelling alone or with unarmed companions, one increased the possibility of robbery, but very much lessened that of sudden death.
Out through the southern suburbs of Mandalay we went, plunging and bucking painfully, through the dust curtain already raised by the thousand bullock carts of the morning. Away to the left lay the abandoned pagodas of Amarapura, glinting dragon’s teeth sown thickly in a stony plain. In 1857 this capital city was deserted by order of King Mindon, because its luck was supposed to have become exhausted, and also because the king felt himself drawn towards the sacred Mandalay Hill, of which he had dreamed on two successive nights. In a few years all the lay buildings, constructed of wood, had mouldered away completely, and now only these gleaming cones remained.
Our road floundered on through the exhausted earth. This plain had endured ten kingdoms and a hundred generations, and now it was sapped and vanquished. We were encircled by a ghostly decrepitude, roads that lead to nowhere, canals holding pools of brilliant, stinking water, a few nat-haunted banyan trees, grotesque with old muscled trunks and bearded roots. A row of sickly flamboyants wept their blossoms into a swamp, in which a stork waded away, as if through blood, on our approach. Having taken the wrong road many times, we stopped to ask the way from a girl in a green silk longyi who had come down to a canal for water. As she dipped her petrol cans, first one then the other, into the slime, the whole stagnant expanse suddenly boiled into life as frogs went leaping and splashing away. Before turning back she cupped her hands and drank some water from one of her cans.
* * *
Two enormous leogryphs guarded the approach to Taungbyon. They were as large as the monsters that stand before the Shwedagon Pagoda at Rangoon, but painted stark white, and eerie and forbidding in these cheerless surroundings. Beyond, reared up Anawrahta’s pagoda.
We roared into the village and pulled up by a structure like a roofed-over marketplace in an English country town. The soldiers came tumbling out of the lorry, cocked their Sten guns and formed a widely spaced circle round us and the sacred places. Beyond them we could see the villagers, temporary dependants of the PVO, gathered at the doors of their huts and watching us without either hostility or enthusiasm. It was correct first to visit the pagoda. With our shoes respectfully removed, we were led by a guardian to the entrance and shown the two spaces still left vacant for the bricks of the Shwepyi brothers.
Apart from building pagodas, the ancient Burmese seem to have set extraordinary store by the act of completing them. Just as in biblical times battles were sometimes decided by individual combat between champions, there are many examples in Burmese history of conflicts being settled without fighting in favour of the side which could first complete a pagoda. The chroniclers relate with relish the obvious and childish stratagems practised by the victors, who usually had a canvas imitation finished while the incredibly gullible adversary was still busy with the foundations of a traditional building of brick. Perhaps, after all, there was something in the nature of high treason about the Shwepyis’ defection.
One of the soldiers now brought up the guardian of the nat shrine, which was in a building under the market-like structure. Padlocks were unfastened and heavy double trellis gates slid back. It was like being let into a bank after hours. In an interior lit by strings of electric fairy-lights and behind a bank of flowers sat two gaudy dolls, with high spiked helmets, and drawn swords carried upon their shoulders. They were quite unmartial in appearance, and yet, in some way, sinister. Unlike the Buddha images with their placid, even smug expressions, these golden faces were shrewd and scheming. What a decline attends the mighty after death! These great captains who had fought their way to China and back, and had plagued Anawrahta after their killing by catching at the rudder of the royal raft so that it could not move (a classical Burmese form of haunting), were now a couple of slightly disreputable Don Juans of the inferior heavens. Legend remembered that they had died by castration, and appeared to attach some tortuous and topsy-turvy significance to this. By a kind of logic in reverse the king who is supposed to have died as a result of an attack of dysentery is worshipped by dysentery sufferers, and the castrated heroes become the patrons of sly amours. At their annual ceremony the chief mediums, who are females, dress themselves in the special costumes attributed to the brothers; in waist-cloths with an ornamental border, wide-sleeved jackets, white scarves thrown over the shoulder, and light red helmets on their heads. They are attended by junior mediums dressed as Burmese princesses. The ceremony begins with the chanting of the traditional song in which the brothers’ lives and deaths are briefly described. This ends with the words: ‘Now all ye pretty maidens, love ye us, as ye were wont to do while yet we were alive.’ In this lies a hint of the mild element of the saturnalia that appears to enter into this feast. As the lieutenant put it, on our way back, ‘to accomplish this celebration we proceed not with our wives, as there are many pretty ladies assembled there, also not in company with their spouses’.
CHAPTER 11
By Lorry to Lashio
AT EIGHT next morning I climbed into the gharry called Ford, setting in brisk motion its resident gnats, and ordered the driver to take me to the airport. In accordance with my declared itinerary I was to fly to Myitkyina, leaving Mandalay on approximately the third of March and returning, by river, on the eighth. On the ninth I was to set out for Lashio by road. One day was allowed for this considerable journey; but the War Office had generously allotted five days to get to Taunggyi, which was hardly farther. There was some vague talk of occasional caravans of lorries plying by stages between these two towns, but no suggestion had ever been made that there was any way of getting from Taunggyi to Mandalay, a section for which three days had been prescribed. Having reached Mandalay again, I was to board a boat, which the General Staff Department seemed to imagine would be waiting for me with steam up – since no delay was assumed in the city – reaching Rangoon seven days later, the minimum, taken by the trip, in favourable circumstances. It had seemed to me at the time ambitious, when allowing for Burma’s condition, to try to draw up an exact timetable, in the way one might have done in preparation for a Cook’s tour in the Dolomites. And now at the airport it soon became evident that an immediate breakdown in
the original planning was likely.
Nothing had been heard of the plane that was due to arrive at nine o’clock. Nor did the airport staff seem in any way surprised. The plane that had been due four days before, on the Monday, had not arrived either. At that season, thick ground mists often prevented the planes taking off at Rangoon in the early hours, and unless they could make an early start there was no time to go to Myitkyina and back during the day. But there was still hope, and I was invited to make myself at home in the picturesque huts which served as waiting-rooms. One of these had a notice across it which said it was a restaurant. Here in surroundings to which a Hindu ascetic would not have objected I seated myself and ordered breakfast. I was soon joined by a police official, who began to probe me in the most urbane fashion, between mouthfuls of eggs and chips, as to my intentions. Refusing, perhaps through irritation caused by the delay and the heat, to enter into the conventions of the game, I silently produced and spread across the table the whole of my many documents. The officer was hurt at such bluntness, and said that he was only trying to do his job in the most reasonable way. There was no gainsaying this; I apologised, put the permits away uninspected, allowed myself to be drawn forth in a civilised manner, and our interview terminated cordially.
