by Alex Wagner
They were shuttled into this dark misery by the scores: A report of the Rangoon municipality noted one home where inspectors “found in one room 23 inmates—the dimension being only 18 × 14 feet.”19 Opiate and alcohol addiction surrounded by filth and open fornication: This all formed what was described (not necessarily hyperbolically) as “a tragic total complex of their slum life.”20
So it was grim, and though the British took notice, they remained mostly bloodless in their assessments. Speaking at the annual dinner of the Rangoon Trade Association in 1930, British governor Sir Charles Innes diagnosed the problem thusly: “No one can read what the Rangoon Health Committee wrote in its report about the lodging houses of Rangoon without a feeling of shame, but also of apprehension, for these lodging houses must be hotbeds of tuberculosis and other diseases.”
Translation: These bottom dwellers might be carriers. Shouldn’t we do something to make sure they don’t infect us all?
I don’t know about whether our family’s gifted curry maker lived in squalor, but the fact that many (if not most) of his countrymen and -women did adds context to his thievery. And while the disappearance of baubles and gemstones was grounds for dismissal from the family home, perhaps there were more nefarious forces that cemented his fate. In other words, the cook may have stolen those family jewels, but one doesn’t imagine that his termination was hard to come by. Indians, after all, were regarded as lower caste—my grandmother had no compunction referring to them as kalas for the rest of her life. It was very clear that he wasn’t deemed a valued part of the family, even if his dal was sublime.
The Indians in Burma were like Mexicans in America or the Senegalese in France—marked with the scarlet O of “outsider,” despite the fact that there existed webs of connections weaving their homelands together with their destination countries. This part of Burma’s—and my family’s—history surprised me (though it shouldn’t have): how very precisely history repeated itself. My ancestral spelunking had not simply revealed a more squalid story than I’d imagined, but—more jarring than that—that story paralleled the moment that we were now living through, and indeed had lived through.
I’d always presumed that that we, my Burmese folk, had been the oppressed: forced to flee our homeland to reboot in America, a gang of brown exiles who created a new life on Western shores. But as the tortured reality of Burma’s history unfolded in my research, I realized that we outsiders were once insiders, perched atop a rickety system of class and caste. Turns out, we the marginalized had once marginalized a whole class of our own—we’d just done it on the other side of the globe and left it out of the stories we told ourselves in later months and years.
Inevitably, this was true for families and their ancestors everywhere, but the real mistake everyone made was in pretending that these behaviors and sins and denials weren’t a reliable pattern in our collective history, and in telling one another and our children that back then it was just great times and golden oldies, simmering curries and shiny new cars.
Even in Burma’s halcyon days, the problems were the same as they were today: the powerful versus the powerless; tensions around immigration and labor and dark skin. How did a society react when forced to grapple with an influx of people from elsewhere, people who happened to be driving the economy of a country but were nonetheless relegated to its lower miseries? Shame and marginalization!
History has no real beginning or ending, we simply choose points that are most convenient for the narrative, especially as it concerns the stories about our success. In other words, a lot gets left out.
The legacy of the Indians in Burma spanned wars and marriages and dinner plates, but any public accounting of their number and density was (and remains) further complicated by class distinctions among the Indians and, of course, the divide-and-conquer manipulation that the British Empire perfected among its colonies. Upper-class Indians were the soldiers of the British during the Anglo-Burmese wars and therefore deemed forevermore the patsies of colonial rule in the eyes of the conquered Burmese. Up until Burma formally separated from India in 1937, Indians often took the high-ranking positions in the British government of Burma, and the country’s army was composed largely of Indian soldiers.
In a 1938 pamphlet on Indo-Burman conflict, a young Communist leader named Thein Pe Myint put it bluntly: “When the British attacked and occupied Lower Burma as well as Upper Burma by unlawful force, their work was done mainly by the Indian Sepoys. For this reason, we Burmese hate them.” (Emphasis mine.)21
Indian officials lived and drank and dined largely among themselves (or with the British), rather than with their brown brethren, and therefore the relationship of immigrants in Burma to the middle- and upper-class Burmans especially—my family, for example—was not one of Brown Solidarity, but of intrusion and of oppression. U Myint Kaung may have gone to British schools and worked for the British monarchy, but he was still a Burmese Buddhist. He knew exactly who had conquered his country and with what assistance.
My family was still living in Mandalay when the Rangoon riots of 1930 began at the docks as a fight between Burmese laborers and Indian dockworkers. Indian workers—pressing for higher wages from their employers—struck on May 8,1930, and the largely British firms that hired them opted instead to break the picket lines with Burmese workers. Seventeen days later, the shipping masters cut a deal with their Indian dockworkers by agreeing to four pence extra per head in daily wages—and the Indians ended up paying for this paltry raise in blood.
The lately employed Burmese scabs didn’t appreciate being replaced once contract negotiations had been completed and the strike was over—keep in mind this was the beginning of the Great Depression—and they took to the streets of Rangoon with swords and iron bars and anything else that could inflict maximum pain. For nearly three days, Indian workers and shops were targeted, and because the capital city was an Indian city, not much of Rangoon functioned during what was termed a riot, but was really a rampage: no sanitation systems, few public services, and no business activity to speak of.22
In the end, there was no full accounting of how many people died, but most estimates place the figure in the nebulous “hundreds” of deaths and “thousands” of injuries.23 For these three days of terror, there was very nearly no response. Accounts vary, but only two arrests seem to have been made—neither one for murder or destruction of property.24
No compensation was doled out to the families of the slaughtered. Rangoon’s Indians mostly just hid, then shut their mouths and went on about their business. They stayed in the city, a seemingly inextricable part of its fabric, until a formal separation between India and Burma was announced in 1937, and Burma was made a separate, autonomous colony under the British crown.
But this didn’t stop the bloodletting. Burma remained under the British thumb, and nationalism was on the upswing. The Indian minority in Burma had few (if any) protections under the law, despite what had happened to them in the decade prior, and their complicated history fighting the Burmese on behalf of the British made them prime targets for a restive, angry citizenry. The burgeoning nationalist movement—led by Burmese Communists—played a not-insignificant role in this.
This is Thein Pe’s assessment of the situation at that time:
The Indians never consider the interests of the Burmese. They are always seeking their own benefit. They never dream of working together with the Burmese for better or worse; instead they segregate themselves into a privileged minority. On many occasions in national politics as well as in district and urban administration, they make alliances with the Europeans just to oppose the Burmese.25
My grandmother was just finishing her studies at the university in 1938 when the tension came to a head—again. A small booklet, printed in 1931 by a Burmese Muslim named Shwe Hpi, was highly critical of the Buddhist priesthood. Almost no one had heard of Shwe Hpi or read his pamphlet, but seven years later, a
s Burmese nationalism was cresting, several nationalist papers picked up old excerpts and printed them for general consumption.26
If you didn’t grow up in a predominantly Buddhist nation, or with a Buddhist parent (especially my Buddhist parent), it’s hard to conceive of the role that monks play in society. In Burma, they are the very embodiment of piety and enlightenment, and as such are accorded the utmost respect. On my first visit to Rangoon in 2008, my mother would make me cross the street to avoid the monks who were strolling around the city in the early mornings, begging for alms. This was a sign of obeisance—a word that nobody used as often as my mother (in fact, apart from my mother, I’ve never even heard anybody use the word “obeisance”).
The rest of the world came to understand the importance of Burma’s monks during the Saffron Revolution of 2007—so named because of the saffron-colored robes worn by the thousands of monks who took to the streets to protest the oppressive military regime that had run their country into the ground and put their democratically elected leader under house arrest for more than a decade.
These monks weren’t only wizened old vegetarians, or men with dusty bones accustomed to incense-filled prayer halls. Yes, the 2007 revolution featured a selection of wise old abbots, but most of the images beamed back to the West were of virile young men who looked more like freedom fighters than the elders of holy cloth common to the increasingly aged churches of America and Europe. These monks meant business; they were men of action. That the government summarily cut them down and drove them into hiding was not just an affront to democracy; it was a rebuke of Burmese values. For exiles and citizens alike, the image of a military officer wielding a baton against a monk was a sign that things—already pretty awful—had reached the very bottom of the dung heap.
But in 1938, Shwe Hpi’s pamphlet decrying the previously unassailable monk took on outsized importance. Nationalist broadsheets such as The New Light of Burma and New Burma inflamed the situation by printing editorials targeting the Indian Muslim minority. This begat public apologies from Burma’s Indian population, which seemed to do little to stem the tide of anti-Muslim anger.
Also in 1938, racial and religious hostilities reached a crisis point during a demonstration at the country’s holiest Buddhist shrine: the Shwedagon Pagoda.
Amid the pagoda’s gold-leafed spires and tinkling bells, violent anti-immigrant rhetoric fired up an unruly mob of protesters—who then descended the hill and launched an “indiscriminate attack on Indians…on a scale very much larger than that witnessed in 1930 and 1931, including cold-blooded murders, grievous hurts, looting, arson, etc.”27
Once again, the government proved mostly useless, and once again, there was no full accounting of the lives taken or interrupted by injury, nor did anyone determine how much business was lost or destroyed. This period of marauding and aggression stretched from July to September 1938 and was described as “a long period of horror” for Rangoon’s Indians—one that likely wounded and claimed lives into the thousands.
Little was done by almost anyone in the wake of this bloodshed. The government response—even in India—consisted mostly of unanimous and official public indignation, rather than any measurable action to protect the people who had built Rangoon and were being crushed in its racist rampages.
The Burmese account insisted that Indians had instigated the violence by stabbing a Buddhist monk—and later spearing a Burman to death. Thein Pe did, however, concede that “the Burmese being more hot-blooded, reckless and impetuous than the Indians can easily turn the tables against their aggressor.” And so they did.
The Indian Legislative Assembly asserted that its government—as well as the British and Burmese—had been criminally negligent in protecting Indians’ interests in Burma. But the Burmese had no interest in curbing the movement that gave rise to the chaos: nationalism. In fact, the outrage in India over the violence against Indians in Burma had the awful, circular effect of further inflaming Burmese tempers. Nationalists “considered it an uncalled-for interference in Burma’s internal affairs and threatened to take retaliatory measures if the Indian agitation was not stopped.”28
It was sickening, the rage and destruction, hell-bent nationalism run amok—but also familiar to anyone raised in the twentieth-century West. Why did we keep doing this to ourselves, over and over again? I’d thought, or hoped, that Burma before its fall had been somehow different, exempt from the cruelties of the masses, free from the bloody entitlements of power. It was not.
And as I learned about all of this from Mr. Chakravarti’s little yellowed out-of-print library book, I began to wonder: Where was my family when Rangoon was being torn apart? How had no one ever mentioned this to me? Fine, the Indian curry was magnificent, but somehow the violent oppression of Indians in our own backyard never made it onto the family radar. The Burmese public was not in the dark: Fifty thousand copies of Thein Pe’s pamphlet detailing what had happened were distributed to the Burmese public—the highest recorded circulation of that type of material in Burmese history.29
My grandmother graduated from Rangoon University in 1938 with honors in Pali and a minor in Sanskrit—the sacred language of Hinduism that formed the basis of the Indian language and Burmese holy texts. She understood well the fact that one culture had a very great deal in common with the other, especially in the realm of the devout—but in all her recollections about those golden years, she never made mention of this carnage.
It wasn’t just Mya Mya Gyi, or the rest of our family, that conspicuously avoided this chapter. It was like amnesia, or maybe even a cultural lacuna: Burma had erased from its collective memory what had happened to these people, or, more specifically, what the country’s most virulent strains had done in the name of body purification. So much so that my grandmother—nearly seventy-five years later—still felt free to refer to the race of the punished as caste men, black men, outsiders, the house negroes of the good old days, never once mentioning that they had been subject to abuses and assaults too numerous to catalogue. How weird this seemed in retrospect, and how strangely disgusting that she would focus on the loss of rubies and pearls and lamb vindaloo as the Seriously Traumatic Event Involving an Indian that befell her and our family, rather than this insane, terrifying chapter of violence that she had presumably borne witness to.
With this history in the near background, much of Burma’s Indian population fled the country following Japanese occupation in World War II; those that remained were expelled in 1962—a not-surprising (though still foul and heartbreaking) decision on the part of the ruling military junta, which was intoxicated with nationalist fervor. For the most part, this forced exodus of Indians from Burma was better documented as a chapter of great shame. There were too many Indian exiles who remembered too much about all the things they had lost in departure—businesses, friends, lives. There was so much detritus in the wake of this expulsion that Rangoon was never the same again.
I began now to see the outlines of a noxious pattern in the accusations and amnesia. In Burma, it had been the targeting and expulsion of Indians—while here in the United States, it was Mexicans and Muslims and Guatemalans and Hondurans and Sudanese and Syrians (they were most certainly darker, whoever they were). It was the very same fracturing, along the very same lines—sad confirmation that animus and violence and expulsion always end up screwing everyone, even the people doing the expelling. (Ask the Burmese of today whether the expulsion of the Indian minority was a good thing for their economy, to say nothing of their reputations.)
This was an important development, in and of itself: I could point to this Burmese tragedy as evidence that the xenophobes here and elsewhere were on the wrong side of history, but what was perhaps more noteworthy—what all of this research revealed—was that my folks may have been the ones wearing the MAKE BURMA GREAT AGAIN trucker hats, with Shwe Hpi standing in as their Trump. At the very least, they were the ones turning a blind
eye to the chaos, a blindness that carried over even into our new start in America, where the Indians remained kalas—even half a century later—just as the Mexicans will probably remain wetbacks to some other, privileged set of future Americans.
The self-loathing didn’t end there. As it turns out, it wasn’t very hard to find the truth, or at least the context behind all of my grandmother’s lovely stories. Yes, it took reading a few books and a fair amount of Googling and the deployment of a (somewhat) fine-toothed bullshit comb, but not much else. As far as my great family project was concerned, this was merely scratching the surface, and yet how easily it gave way! How swiftly the picture dissolved from “bananas at teatime” to something much more complex and sad and violent. I felt like a sucker for having indulged in the old-timey elegance of her stories, for not having questioned what was really going down mere blocks from the light-filled house on Shan Road. I felt like a simpleton for having believed our family mythmaking—I, who prided myself on having some sort of magical, twenty-first-century gimlet eye. Was this any better than the tourist of the American South visiting the old plantation houses, marveling at the china and the gowns and the sweeping staircases, never once glancing past the big house to the slave quarters just beyond?
As all this historic information shook my conception of self and family in the here and now, so, too, did this research throw a mammoth-sized wrench in the narrative of repression and exile that my family had been spinning for much of the past few decades. I’d boasted throughout my adolescence about my grandmother’s status as a pro-democracy activist, her zeal for the righteous cause of Aung San Suu Kyi, and her personal fight for democracy in Burma. But that fervent patriotism, it turned out, was born of a darker strain of ethnic nationalism.
In July 2013, Time magazine, arbiter of newsworthiness and chronicler of international trends, ran as its cover story a picture of the monk Ashin Wirathu, under the headline “The Face of Burmese Terror.” Wirathu is headquartered in Mandalay, in central Burma, and some people refer to him as the “Burmese Bin Laden” (something he apparently accepts without compunction), the figurehead for a growing violent Buddhist movement that seeks to destroy the presence of Islam inside Burma’s borders. But the language he uses is basically torn from the pages of the Burmese nationalist papers of the 1930s:
