Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  In Mandalay itself, there were constant rumours of plots to overthrow the British. At the beginning of January 1887, a young prince of the royal family was brought to Mandalay and entrusted to the care of a senior Buddhist priest, the Sadaw (abbot) of the Modi Monastery. On the day the young Prince arrived a fire started in the monastery. The fire consumed about 200 houses in the southern quarter of Mandalay. This fire was interpreted by the monks as a sign of the Prince’s supernatural powers. The next week messages were sent out to the Prince’s supporters, who were invited to attend a meeting at the monastery, in a building untouched by the fire. The meeting was to take place on 16 January, but was postponed for two days because not everyone could make the earlier appointment. At nine in the morning of the 18th, the meeting started. One monk held a book which contained a list of the conspirators. A charmed image, said to be bullet-proof, and a horoscope were handed round.

  At this bizarre gathering, plans for an attack on Mandalay were discussed. The conspirators took an oath of allegiance to the Prince. A wooden image of Buddha was steeped in a jar of water and each of the conspirators, drinking a cupful of the sacred water, took an oath, saying, ‘If I fail in my allegiance to the young prince or swerve from it, may I die by the cut of a sword or the thrust of a spear.’ About half the conspirators had taken the oath when the monastery was stormed by Burmese police. Twenty-three people, including the Prince and the Sadaw and six of the monks, were arrested; five escaped but one was arrested again almost immediately. Another four people, implicated in the plot, were arrested later. The police found the torn-up list of conspirators, the wooden image, the horoscope and the jar of sacred water, which was still half full. The Sadaw and nineteen of his fellow conspirators were tried and found guilty. They were sentenced to transportation for life.41

  This failed conspiracy reflects the intense, almost mystical atmosphere that surrounds so much of the ‘pacification’ of Burma. The country was dominated by religion and folk superstitions. In Mandalay itself there were more than 13,000 monks, which represented nearly 10 per cent of the entire population of the city. It was against this background of rebellion, conspiracies and plots that Charles Crosthwaite became chief commissioner in March 1887. He was systematic and thorough. The measures he used to suppress or, in his own word, ‘subjugate’ the Burmese were harsh but effective. Looking back at his role from the relative comfort of his Surrey villa in 1912, Crosthwaite could feel satisfied that the subjugation was a job well done. The ‘pacification of the country’ took four years, from 1886 to 1890, and, in Crosthwaite’s memory, it was ‘certainly arduous work done under great difficulties of all kinds and, from the nature of the case, with less chance of recognition or distinction than of disease or death’.42 He imposed a system of fining villages which harboured dacoits. Relatives of suspected bandits were deported. ‘I have several times’, commented Crosthwaite, ‘brought in the wives and families of dacoits with excellent effect. As soon as these relatives were cleared out of a village, that village more or less came over to the British side and, in many cases, as soon as the relatives were sent off, the Bos [Burmese warrior-bandits] related to them surrendered unconditionally with their arms.’43 The forced removal of relatives of combatants was a technique that would be used in the concentration camps in which Britain housed women and children during the Boer War, twelve years after the Burma campaign. Crosthwaite himself saw the direct connection between the techniques used in Burma and those used later in South Africa. He wrote to Herbert Thirkell White, his younger colleague: ‘has it not struck you often how completely this S. African business has followed the different turnings of the conquest of Upper Burma? They have had to follow the methods that circumstances forced on us. Only everything is on so much larger a scale in S. Africa.’ More particularly, Crosthwaite commended the use of the ‘Blockhouse’ system in South Africa which he had used in Burma, by which a series of simple military fortifications were used to divide the open countryside into sectors with fortified lines.44

  More notoriously, the burning of villages was a technique which ensured that the annexation of Burma was one of the most ruthless episodes in the British imperial story. This drastic measure had been employed in the second Burma campaign of the early 1850s. Thirkell White quoted the government of India’s orders, given in the 1850s, on this delicate subject: ‘If a band of freebooters . . . have stockaded or fortified in any way a village, the special necessity of preventing it being turned to an evil use again will justify . . . the measure of destroying it.’ This was an oblique, rather tortuous, legalistic formula which enjoined British soldiers literally to smoke out the enemy.45

  The campaign against the Burmese was long drawn out and bitter, and many of the brutalities had absolutely no effect on the Burmese insurgents. Some of the descriptions of incidents in the campaign are striking for their cool, articulate and clear-eyed tone. Geary, the journalist, described how a ‘detachment of the Naval Brigade having captured a dozen dacoits, proceeded to execute them one by one, so as to make a deeper impression on the Burmese mind than the shooting of the whole batch at a volley might produce’. Geary continued: ‘The first man was placed standing with his back to a wall; a conical ball striking him between the eyes, carried off the whole top of his head, which disappeared in a strange, grotesque, unexpected way.’ The reaction of the Burmese to this execution surprised the soldiers of the Naval Brigade. The executed man’s comrades, ‘standing near, awaiting their turns, screamed with laughter at the sight; they laughed as they went one after the other to be shot in rotation’. They treated ‘the whole affair as an extraordinary joke’. The naval men ‘returned to their station, much disappointed and not a little indignant’; ‘shooting these dacoits, they said, was of no use, for they did not mind it in the least, they thought it great fun’.46

  Crosthwaite’s techniques were more systematic and, ultimately, more effective. The thoroughness of his work was demonstrated in a circular of 4 December 1888 to the effect that no village of fewer than twenty houses would be permitted to exist and that all such villages must be moved into the larger ones. Under this policy, about 6,000 houses were actually dismantled and re-erected; small hamlets merged into larger villages.47 Yet there was some method in this apparent madness given that, in Crosthwaite’s phrase, ‘the pacification of Upper Burma was virtually complete by 1890’.48 Resistance continued in the Chin hills till the late 1890s, but, effectively, Burma was quiet during that decade.49 Annexation had been hugely expensive. The Liberals were right. The total cost of the annexation was about £5 million, more than sixteen times the initial estimate of £300,000.50 The human cost was also significant. To Kipling, who first saw the Irrawaddy in 1889, it was the ‘River of the Lost Footsteps–the road that so many many men of my acquaintance had travelled, never to return, within the past three years’.51 For the Burmese the annexation was a national tragedy.

  As for Lord Randolph Churchill, his brief tenure at the India Office was followed by the chancellorship of the exchequer when the Conservatives returned to power in July 1886. In Burma, British officials could only express relief that he would no longer shape their destinies. ‘I see that Lord Randolph Churchill will be Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ one official wrote home at the end of July. ‘I hope so as it will keep him from the India Office, where we don’t want him, especially we in Burma.’52 Now chancellor, at the age of only thirty-seven, Churchill seemed an inevitable Conservative prime minister. He overreached himself, however, by offering to resign over increases in government expenditure in 1887. Salisbury accepted his resignation. Churchill never held office again and died of syphilis eight years later. The annexation of Burma was undoubtedly his enduring legacy.

  10

  Twilight over Burma

  The society that the British found in Burma was static. Upper Burma had lived under a monarchy for centuries. The Buddhist priests were numerous and well respected. After subduing the ‘natives’ in a tough campaign, the British had imposed thems
elves on Burma and now a Pax Britannica reigned over the country. In the memoirs of retired British civil servants the half-century from 1890 to 1940 was remembered as a period of ‘peace and good government’.1 Burma, in the constellation of British possessions, was no shining star. If India was the jewel in the imperial crown, Burma was nothing more than a bauble, a slight embarrassment, without glamour or pretences. To the English writer George Orwell, who served as a policeman in Burma in the 1920s, the type of British civil servant who ended up in Burma was generally socially inferior. The ‘all-important thing’, Orwell later wrote, ‘in Burma was not whether you had been to one of the right schools but whether your skin was technically white. As a matter of fact most of the white men in Burma were not the type who in England would be called “gentlemen”, although they lived like gentlemen’ and ‘called their evening meal “dinner”’.2

  For the British, Burma was always a backwater. While the best and brightest Oxbridge graduates competed to get into the Indian Civil Service, Burma had little glamour or even, in Orwell’s view, respectability. It was, in the words of a modern Burmese historian, ‘never a place where great family fortunes or political careers were made’.3 The British in Burma were not sentimental about their mission. Herbert Thirkell White had been involved in the pacification of Burma and was a friend of Charles Crosthwaite, the man who had completed that operation. He ended up being the lieutenant governor of Burma between 1905 and 1910, in which role he had been categorical about Britain’s mission in Burma. The Burmese, he felt, were a subject people with basic political ideas. ‘In Burma there is a comparatively simple social organization,’ he noted in his memoirs. It was no use trying ‘prematurely to impose representative institutions on people who neither demand nor understand them’. This was the eloquent voice of the imperialist in 1913, when Thirkell White’s account, A Civil Servant in Burma, was published. ‘Above all’, Thirkell White warned, ‘let us avoid the pernicious cant of thinking that our mission in Burma is the political education of the masses.’ Bringing democracy to Burma was not part of the plan for people like Thirkell White. The British mission in Burma was ‘to conserve, not to destroy, their social organism, to preserve the best element of their national life; by the maintenance of peace and order to advance the well-being of the Burmese people’.4 This point of view would have been shared by many in British India in 1913. In 1912, Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy, had confidently stated that there could be ‘no question as to the permanency of British rule in India’.5

  This attitude was not conducive to the spreading of liberal democracy among the population. Imperialists before 1914 were, to put it mildly, often condescending about the attributes and character of the people they had been called upon to conquer and govern. To Thirkell White, the ‘Burman’ lacked ‘restraint’. He liked to gamble, although the lotteries which were ‘exceedingly popular’ were promoted for the most part by ‘the intelligent Chinaman to the detriment of the guileless Burman’. Despite their guilelessness and lack of self-restraint, the ‘Burmans’ were ‘good swimmers’. In the midst of their ‘national character’, which was a ‘mass of inconsistencies’, ‘kindness and compassion’ were ‘noticeable virtues’. No orphan was left destitute in Burma. No stranger asked in vain for food and shelter. There was, however, always the threat of violence. The Burmese were ‘quick in quarrel’; the use of the knife in these quarrels was ‘lamentably common’. These ‘good people’ had a ‘mixture of original sin’, being ‘gay, careless, light-hearted, with a strong if uncultured sense of humour’, but ‘they can be cruel and revengeful’.6 This description echoes, perhaps unconsciously, Kipling’s famous phrase in the poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ in which he notoriously described the ‘new-caught sullen peoples’ as being ‘half devil and half child’, while urging the ‘best’ of the imperial race to take up the ‘White Man’s burden’:Take up the White Man’s burden–

  Send forth the best ye breed–

  Go, bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need;

  To wait, in heavy harness,

  On fluttered folk and wild–

  Your new-caught sullen peoples,

  Half devil and half child.7

  The idea that Britain would provide the law and order for Burma was a reason given for the annexation in 1885, fourteen years before Kipling’s poem was first published in 1899. The benefits of British rule were obvious: ‘If riches and personal comfort, protection of property, just laws, incorruptible judges and rulers, are blessings as a set-off against Utopian dreams of freedom, then Jack Burman has a happy future.’ The Burmese citizen, or ‘Jack Burman’, now a subject of the British Crown, had no need for ‘Utopian dreams of freedom’.8 He needed law and order. The image of the Burmese as helpless children would persist right up to the granting of independence in 1948. Sir Arthur Bruce, the commercial adviser to the Governor of Burma in the 1940s, remembered that everyone thought the ‘Burman, on the whole, was a happy-go-lucky sort of chap, the Irishman of the East, free with his smiles . . .’9 British officials commented favourably on the treatment of women in Burmese society, when compared, so they believed, to other ‘Eastern’ cultures. To the journalist Grattan Geary, the Burmese were ‘free from caste prejudices, tolerant in manners and habits’. More particularly, they allowed ‘women their rightful place in social and family life’. Thirkell White observed with approval that ‘many girls, especially of the richer classes, learn to read and write’, making Burmese women, in his opinion, more literate than women among ‘other Eastern people’. He also welcomed the fact that ‘no Burmese girl marries except to please herself’.10

  The relaxed, open nature of Burmese women meant that another danger often presented itself in the eyes of the colonial administrators. As early as 1881, Charles Bernard, the Chief Commissioner in Rangoon, was complaining that ‘the habit of keeping Burmese concubines has been rife among civil officers in Burma for many years past’. The ostensible reason for prohibiting this was the smoothness of administration. In 1867, the then Chief Commissioner, Colonel Albert Fytche, had been pressured by the Bishop of Rangoon into circulating a memorandum condemning ‘the practice of concubinage among civil officers’ on the ground that it was ‘baneful to the administration’. This circular, as is often the case, had absolutely no effect. Bernard felt that the practice could not be ‘tolerated’. No officer indulging in it would be promoted. Reports were to be made of any officers ‘who infringed the rule in this matter’. The problem was that these Burmese women were not hidden away: ‘I am afraid that the practice of regular open concubinage still obtains among civil officers in Burma.’ So young officers who came ‘fresh to the province’ saw what their seniors were doing and were ‘apt to fall into the same habits’.11 The threat of no promotion was actually carried out by Charles Bernard, who passed over three senior district superintendents for the job of inspector general of police, one of them–a Major Litchfield–because had ‘formed and maintained immoral connections with a native of the country’. The British tended to be pragmatic about such things, however. There is no hint, in the official papers at least, of any of the ‘scientific racism’ or fears of ‘miscegenation’ which were common elsewhere in the later part of the nineteenth century. Sir Charles Crosthwaite, the arch-Conservative, who thought that Lloyd George and Churchill were cads and loathed the 1909 ‘People’s Budget’, was typically practical on the issue. Writing at the end of 1888 to Herbert Thirkell White, Crosthwaite was frank: ‘There is no doubt that many men in Burma keep Burman women.’ He then, in his common-sense way, pointed out that ‘many men in England keep English women, and many men in India consort with Indian women but as there are more English women and as society is stronger in India than at our small stations, it is not so openly done’. Crosthwaite, perhaps unaware of Fytche’s pragmatic argument against concubinage, insisted that it was not ‘the duty of Government to enforce morality’. As an officer who was leading the tough campaign to pacify the country, he sho
wed a more tender side in dealing with the issue of sexual relations between British officers and Burmese women. It was, he felt, a ‘very difficult question’. The ‘real evil of it’ was the ‘injury done to the children who are deserted in cold blood’. Crosthwaite was certain that the men needed to give ‘adequate provision’ for the children they sired on Burmese women. Yet it was for the ‘women to complain’.12

  The racial attitudes of the British were not based on any scientific reasoning. British imperialists were not systematic racists like the Nazis. The racism and social ostracism were reflected in crude ways such as by ‘colour bars’ at clubs, where only Europeans could join or be served. U Tin Tut’s experience in one incident showed the petty humiliations sometimes inflicted on the natives. U Tin Tut had been educated in England at Dulwich College and Cambridge before the First World War. In the early 1920s, the Gymkhana Club at Rangoon were playing their only opponents, the garrison, at rugby football. The garrison were unable to find fifteen Europeans to make up their team, so they asked U Tin Tut to play for them. Having been commissioned into the army during the Great War and later being called to the London Bar, he was now a civil servant in Burma. More importantly, from the garrison’s point of view, he had played scrum-half for Cambridge and Dulwich. During the game, everyone acknowledged that he was the best player. Afterwards, U Tin Tut was refused the use of the showers on the grounds that only Europeans could use the clubhouse.13