The Hidden History of Burma Read online

  Rangoon was remade as a cosmopolitan business center, with comfortable hotels, clubs, and restaurants to keep happy the few thousand Europeans, Indians, and Chinese who were at the top of the pecking order. A small Burmese elite evolved, which appreciated and mimicked the English style. There were ocean liners (and, from 1933, Imperial Airways flights) to London, well-stocked department stores, brothels and opium dens, churches of every conceivable denomination, literary occasions with visiting writers like Rabindranath Tagore and H. G. Wells, jazz performances at the Gymkhana, and afternoons at the racetrack. All went well for a while.

  Indian labor was a crucial part of the mix. There was, as always, a need for people to work the fertile land, as well as a need for people to perform new types of menial labor and become the new Rangoon proletariat. Throughout the colonial period, Burma was richer than the rest of British India. The Burmese were healthier and better fed, enjoyed far higher rates of literacy, and commanded bigger incomes than the average person in India. And so British companies encouraged immigration. Millions came, hoping for a new and better life—not just laborers but businessmen and professionals as well. Most returned to their native countries after making some money, but many stayed on. For a period in the 1920s Rangoon rivaled New York as the biggest immigrant port in the world. Burma was, in the words of Indian-American writer Mira Kamdar, “our first America.”9 By 1931 Indians comprised 7 percent of the country’s population of around 14 million, a mix of approximately one million Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and others. Most came by ship, except the Muslims from Chittagong who came overland to Arakan. Rangoon became a majority Indian city. The migration of Indians to Burma was one of the largest human migrations of the 20th century.

  J. S. Furnivall called the result a “plural society.” He was the first to use the term. Furnivall was a senior civil servant in Burma who, on his retirement in 1923, stayed on to become a distinguished scholar as well as a friend and supporter of many politically active young Burmese. He wrote that in a plural society the constituent ethnic groups interact in the marketplace but otherwise stay separate: “There is division of labor along racial lines, Natives, Chinese, Indians and Europeans all have different functions, and within each major group subsections have particular occupations.10 He argued that in Burma this plural society worked to serve an “unfettered capitalism far more complete and absolute than in the homogenous western lands.” There was, he said, “a total absorption in the exchange and market.” Whereas in Western capitalist societies there was “production for life,” in Burma there was “life for production.”11

  George Orwell, who was a policeman in Burma in the mid-1920s, put it more simply: “If we are honest, it is true that the British are robbing and pilfering Burma quite shamelessly.” Writing a few years later in London, he thought that Burma had indeed developed “to a certain extent” but that the Burmese themselves were now poorer, as wages were not keeping up with the cost of living and the weight of colonial taxation was ever harder to bear. “The reason is that the British government has allowed free entry into Burma for veritable hordes of Indians, who come from a land where they were literally dying of hunger, work for next to nothing and are, as a result, fearsome rivals for the Burmese.”12

  For centuries India had been a source of inspiration. Indians coming to Burma often enjoyed high prestige as bearers of a respected culture. Under colonialism, they were viewed by the Burmese as either exploitative moneylenders and landlords or poverty-stricken workers living in slums, menial servants, and stick-thin seasonal laborers. They alone were now called kala, a word that took on increasingly negative connotations. Europeans, on the other hand, were now referred to as bo, which literally means a military officer but became a racial category. Bo-lo-pyaw, “to speak like a bo,” meant to speak English. Formerly grouped together with Indians in Burmese race-thinking, Europeans as rulers became a race apart. And the Burmese themselves, bereft of their monarchy and local hereditary leaders, had few internal gradations left by the early 1900s. Race became the chief cleavage in the new society.

  Burma was born as a military occupation and grew up as a racial hierarchy. “Europeans” were accorded the highest rank and for a long time monopolized the uppermost jobs in government. For the British as for the Burmese, “European” was a racial category, never to be confused with Indians. The British in Burma referred to themselves as “European,” a category which included all the peoples of the British Isles (Scots were far and away the biggest single group, dominating trade) as well as Burma’s smattering of Germans, Swedes, Frenchmen, and other western Europeans. It did not include the significant Jewish community—a mix of Baghdadi and Ashkenazi Jews who felt excluded from “European” society and which in the 1930s numbered over 2,000 in Rangoon alone (the city’s population was approximately 400,000). Nor did it include the Armenian community, which had been in the country since the 1600s, whose members also found themselves in a limbo between rulers and “natives.”

  Lower in status were the Indian, Chinese, and Burmese businessmen, landowners, professionals, and civil servants, who came from the more prosperous sections of their own societies. The Chinese immigration, mainly from Canton and Fujian, was far smaller than the Indian but substantial nonetheless, its leading merchants connecting Rangoon to Singapore and Hong Kong. Some well-to-do Indians, Chinese, and Burmese were schooled in England and were even wealthier than their European counterparts. Still, however rich or well bred, all were excluded on racial grounds from the upper echelons of Rangoon society; membership in the Pegu Club, the city’s apex social club, was strictly for whites only. Lowest of all were other non-European peoples, either immigrants from India or people from far-flung regions within Burma, who were seen as belonging to backward or inferior castes and tribes.

  In the early 20th century, the British, who already had fairly well-established views of the different peoples of India, made a spirited attempt to analyze their new racial landscape in Burma. Some had strange ideas, which seemed far-fetched even at the time. N. C. MacNamara, in his Origin and Character of the British People, tried to make a connection between the Irish and Bronze Age Burmese. The British, he wrote, liked to see the Burmese as “the Irish of the East,” and to explain this affinity in character he proposed a prehistoric movement of Asian traders who, attracted to the tin mines of Ireland, settled down, mixed with the “aboriginal Iberian population,” and produced the “lazy, rollicking merry Irishmen of caricature.” The 1911 census report considered this theory before concluding: “The fact that [the] free-and-easy, jovial disposition [of the Burmese] has been reproduced on the further side of St. George’s Channel is the purest chance.”

  A key part of colonial race thinking was skin color. A detailed examination in 1931 offered an India-wide scale ranging from “the dead black of the Andamanese, the colour of a black-leaded stove before it has been polished” to “the flushed ivory skin of the traditional Kashmiri beauty” which the anthropologist Emil Schmidt compared to “milk just tinged with coffee.”13

  Some, wanting more precision, turned to skull and other measurements. “A brachycephalic mongoloid type” was found to be “the dominant element in Burma,” though in the hills was “a second Mongoloid strain characterized by medium stature, longish head and medium nose” that appeared to incorporate “an element of Caucasian stock which penetrated S.E. Asia” in ancient times.14 A “nasal index” was also employed. Those at the cutting edge of race science even utilized a new “Co-efficient of Racial Likeness” or “C.R.L.” to judge the connections between various Burmese types.

  Linguistics were also used to determine who was who. In 1786, Sir William Jones, of the Asiatick Society of Bengal, first proposed the existence of an Indo-European language family. One hundred years later, British scholars attempted to sort the many and extremely varied languages found in Burma. They realized that Burmese was closely related to Tibetan; some local languages were incorporated into a “Tibeto-Burman” language family, others we
re not. In 19th-century censuses, the British tried first to slot Burmese into the caste categories that defined people in India, listing most as “semi-Hindooized aboriginees,” before giving up and deciding instead to use language as the basis for racial distinctions. The Tibeto-Burman language family became the Tibeto-Burman race, with a common origin deep in a primordial past.

  To some extent, the British were drawing on Burmese antecedents. The Burmese of the old royal court did not think of racial classification in the early 19th-century way, as a scientific endeavor, but they did classify the various lu-myo (“kinds of people”) they encountered. Almost all populations were placed in one of five overarching categories: Myanma, Shan, Mon, Kala, and Tayok. The first three are peoples in Burma. Kala, before the British conquest, meant Indian and other similar-looking people from the West. “Tayok” is a word likely derived from “Turk,” which by the 20th century referred to the Chinese.

  From the 1910s the Burma Research Society, a learned body in Rangoon, was producing regular essays on early history and the country’s ethnic origins. Scholars, primarily British but also Burmese and others, merged older thinking from the royal court, the extant royal chronicles (which formed the core of Sir Arthur Phayre’s seminal History of Burma, first published in 1883), linguistics, and the new science of race. The story that emerged told of various tribes—ancestors of the modern races of Burma—appearing at the dawn of time somewhere in the far north, perhaps the Gobi Desert, wandering over mountain passes and finally reaching the Irrawaddy valley or the nearby hills, reaching different stages of civilization, and interacting over the centuries with alien Indians and Chinese.

  Colonial officials in the countryside understood that the truth might be a little messier. Those in charge of the 1911 imperial census viewed Burma with dread, as a zone of “racial instability,” fretting that the distinctions between races in Burma were “neither definite, nor logical, nor permanent, nor easy to detect . . . they are unstable from generation to generation, the racial designation of a community sometimes changes so rapidly that its elders consider themselves as belonging to one race whilst their descendants claim to belong to another.”15 Census-takers also realized that people in Burma, especially immigrants, tended to make themselves out to be something other than “who they really were.” One of the biggest immigrant groups were Pariahs (now usually spelled Paraiyar) from south India, a low caste who came to do menial work, especially in Rangoon. Perhaps not surprisingly, once in Burma, they often listed themselves as belonging to some other, higher, caste or simply as Christian. Many Indians stopped mentioning their old caste altogether and called themselves “Hindustani.”

  Interracial sex and marriage blurred the lines further and created new tensions. In the Irrawaddy valley in pre-British times, marriage was an informal affair. Men and women who were living together were considered married. If they split up, property was divided equally as a matter of custom. Neither the state nor Buddhist authorities were involved. From the beginnings of British rule, there was a large influx of foreign men: British, Indian, and Chinese. A good number of British men took Burmese mistresses. In 1890 the Chief Commissioner (the highest authority in Burma) issued a confidential circular declaring that this must end; that weekend at the Turf Club, one horse was named CCCC, for “Chief Commissioner’s Confidential Circular,” and another was named Physiological Necessity. The practice continued.

  Burmese women were often unsatisfied with this arrangement, appreciating that only a formal marriage contract offered them adequate protection. Somerset Maugham, on a trip across Burma in 1922, met an Englishman who had two young children with a Burmese woman. The relationship had been an extremely happy one, the Englishman said, until one day she demanded they marry. After a tortuous year of indecision, he refused and she left with the children. He explained his reasoning:

  If I married her I’d have to stay in Burma for the rest of my life. Sooner or later I shall retire and then I want to go back to my old home and live there. I don’t want to be buried out here. I want to be buried in an English churchyard. . . . Sometimes I get sick of this hot sunshine and these garish colors. I want grey skies and a soft rain falling and the smell of the country. I want to feel under my feet the grey pavement of an English country town, I want to be able to go and have a row with the butcher because the steak he sent me in yesterday was tough and I want to browse about second-hand bookshops . . .

  As D. D. Nanavati, a leading barrister in Bombay, wrote: “I have often heard people when talking of Burma ask with a snigger, ‘Oh isn’t that the place where you can marry for a month or two?’ ”16

  By the early 20th century, Burma had a sizable population of people of recently mixed ancestry, including the highest percentage of “Eurasians” in the empire. Though most were of Scottish and Burmese descent, all were called Anglo-Burman or Anglo-Indian (“Scoto-Burman” was proposed and rejected as too complicated for the census). Their presence, in the tens of thousands by the 1920s, was particularly vexing for British authorities, as some “not handicapped by excessive pigmentation” tended to classify themselves on official forms as “European.” The 1931 census offered various ways of determining the truth, suggesting for example that “a Presbyterian born in India or Burma and having a lowly paid occupation and claiming himself to be English (not Scotch) is more likely to be an Anglo-Indian.”17 Up close, British officials knew identity could be a slippery thing.

  Though identity was not as straightforward as some might have liked, it seemed clear to more or less everyone that Burma was not India and that the Burmese were not Indians. This was never questioned. That the borders drawn after the Anglo-Burmese wars were somewhat arbitrary was not considered, mainly because so few had any personal experience of places in between, such as Assam, Arakan, and Manipur. Rudyard Kipling visited for all of three days in 1889 and noted on arrival, “And this is Burma, and it will be quite unlike any land you know about . . . not India at all.”18

  With this distinction came the need to classify the many different ethnic communities in Burma as either “indigenous” or not. The 1921 census decided: “Races which are associated particularly closely with Burma, even if the greater part of their people live elsewhere, have been regarded as Indigenous Races, and have been classified in fifteen Race-groups” (italics in original). What this meant was that people like the Lisu, who lived mainly in China but who were present in the northern hills of Burma, spoke a language similar to Burmese, and appeared akin to a Burmese racial type, were classed as “indigenous.” Tamils, who were of different complexion and physiognomy, were, despite millennia-old connections between south India and Burma, foreigners pure and simple.19

  In this dichotomy, Burma’s Muslims were difficult to pin down. There were several, very different Muslim communities. The Muslims who had originated in the Chinese province of Yunnan were of partly Turkic, Persian, and Central Asian ancestry; they had fled Manchu repression in the mid-19th century and settled in Mandalay and the towns of the northeast. Older communities of Muslims in the middle Irrawaddy valley were descendants of cavalrymen and artillerymen from the Deccan in India who had fought for 17th- and 18th-century Burmese kings and were gifted land in return. The most recent arrivals were the hundreds of thousands of Muslims, nearly all men, who came from across the subcontinent, from Bengal to the Afghan frontier, as part of the broader Indian migration.

  Some Muslims, like the descendants of 17th-century Deccani cavalry (and their Burmese wives), had become “Burmese” in all but religion; others had just arrived and had no intention of staying long. Added to the mix, by the 1930s, were tens of thousands of children of recent Muslim immigrant fathers and Burmese mothers, sometimes known collectively as Zerbadi.

  Categorizing the Muslims of Arakan—the site of 21st-century violence and the Rohingya exodus—proved particularly troublesome. For millennia people had moved across the Naf River as soldiers, pirates, traders, and slaves. To the north, most people spoke dialects of Benga
li and were Muslim; to the south, most people spoke Arakanese, a dialect of Burmese, and were Buddhist. To the north people were darker-complexioned and looked more “Indian” to both British and Burmese eyes, while to the south people had the East Asian appearance of people elsewhere in Burma. But there were also Arakanese Buddhists far to the north of the river, and Muslims speaking either a Bengali dialect or a Burmese dialect well to the south. There were many mixed communities and many people with mixed ancestries.

  When the British took Arakan in 1824, much of what is today northern Arakan (now called Rakhine) was depopulated. Arakanese refugees who had fled toward Chittagong during the Burmese occupation came back. Over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Muslims speaking the Chittagong dialect of Bengali came from north of the border as well. In 1871, Muslims were approximately a fifth of the population in Arakan. By 1911, they were more than a third. In the northern areas they were the majority. At the same time, Burmese from the Irrawaddy valley had settled in the southern part of Arakan, and by 1911 comprised 15 percent of the overall population of Arakan. Racial, linguistic, and religious frontiers, between Arakanese, Burmese, Bengali, and Indian, and between Buddhist and Muslim, intertwined.

  The British never used the term “Rohingya.” It was the word some Muslims, especially in the north of Arakan, used to refer to themselves in their own Bengali-related language. It simply meant “of Rohang,” their name for Arakan. It implied that Arakan was their home. In the same way, people just across the border, speaking a mutally intelligible Bengali dialect, called themselves Chatgaya, “of Chittagong.”