The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (33 page)

He said that over the years many people, claiming to be doing research or writing a book, both Burmese and foreigners, had come to visit him and he had lent them pictures and other mementos, but they had never been returned. He mentioned an Australian man who had come a few years back, taken some papers, promising to come back a week later, but never did.

It was a way of explaining why he had very little to show. Still, he
went into a back room and proudly brought out what he did have, a huge paper, all rolled up, with the genealogy of his entire family. He also brought out the few photographs he had left, including one of a wedding in 1922 that he said was the very last occasion which brought together members of the royal family and the surviving members of the court. The prince was most animated when talking about the restrictions on his life and the unfair way in which his family had been treated over the past century.

“You know, the British wouldn’t even allow us to travel to Mandalay. We all had to live in Rangoon or places farther south. When I was a student in Moulmein, I was on the football team and my team was invited to play against St. Paul’s in Mandalay. But you know what? The Brits told me I couldn’t go!” He laughed but was bitter.

He said he had never really had a profession. For all his seventy-two years, he was, first and foremost, a prince of the deposed royal family. The short war of 1885, Randolph Churchill’s hope that a Burma victory would help the Conservatives win the elections, Lord Dufferin’s decision to abolish the monarchy altogether—these things had defined his entire life. I asked him what he had done earlier, say, in his twenties and thirties. Had he been able to work at all? “Well, I was quite into bodybuilding,” he said, and laughed again. He still had a stocky frame. “This was my big thing. And so when U Nu was prime minister, he made me the head of the Council on Physical Fitness!”

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My host’s grandfather had arrived in India in early 1886, first at Madras and then at the muggy seaside town of Ratnagiri on the Konkan coast, just south of Goa. Thibaw was given a substantial house, and he and Supayalat had brought with them a number of servants, mainly young girls from the Kachin hills. Later he was allowed to build his own small palace, which still stands today, set on twenty-three acres of land on a promontory overlooking the green Arabian Sea, with teak finishings and Italian colored glass placed against the setting sun. They had also brought Supayalat’s mother, but relations between the ex-king and the ex-Mistress of the White Elephant were not good, and the British presumably thought that after taking away his country and abolishing his throne, the least they could do was let him live apart from his mother-in-law. The old woman, once a formidable power at the Court of Ava,
was eventually allowed to sail back to Burma, and she lived the rest of her days in seclusion on the beach at Tavoy.
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By all accounts Thibaw and his family lived a life of intense boredom. He seemed never to have accepted his fate and, hoping for some sort of improvement in his status, wrote several memorials to the viceroy. At the very beginning this amounted to a request to return to Mandalay and rule as a British puppet. This would of course have been more than acceptable back in 1880 but was now out of the question. In later times Thibaw’s requests became more modest, asking, for example, to attend the 1905 durbar with King George together with the other Indian princes.

Money was a constant problem. Thibaw and Supayalat had brought with them precious stones as well as other valuables, which over the 1890s were almost all sold to local merchants. Their pensions were small. Again and again Thibaw petitioned his captors for more funds. They in turn worried that he was being irresponsible, and a number of tiresome attempts were made to better supervise Thibaw’s spending, as if the former king were a young child with an allowance.

Thibaw led an immobile life. He wasn’t, however, a prisoner in any normal sense. He had, by anything other than kingly standards, an impressive residence and staff and extensive grounds and even a car, a Model T Ford, which he could send on errands into town. His daughters and other members of his household were allowed to wander in the neighborhood, but apparently Thibaw and Supayalat did not or were not allowed to leave the immediate area around the house. But from the records of his British minders, he never asked to venture out and see things. He appeared singularly without intellectual curiosity or an interest in sports or other hobbies of any kind. His monastic training and early achievements as a Buddhist scholar were not borne out by any later requests for religious books (though Buddhist monks were often on hand for private ceremonies), and his physical activity was seemingly limited to his movements around the house. He also seemed to have few vices. Despite antebellum British propaganda to the contrary, he did not drink alcohol. His only soft spot was for fried pork, which he ate in generous amounts.

The royal couple had arrived at Ratnagiri with three young daughters (one had just been born en route in Madras), and Supayalat gave birth to another in their new home. In the early years of the century all

four were young women. In Burma, and at the royal court, an unmarried woman in her late teens or twenties or even older was not a strange thing. Spinsters were not uncommon, and many princesses never married by choice or for want of a suitable husband. But the late Victorian officials whose job it was to tend to the Burmese royals did worry. A list was produced with the names of unmarried Burmese princes. Thibaw dismissed everyone on the list, saying he knew them and they were all a bunch of good-for-nothings. Eventually the matter was taken up by the viceroy himself. Though the Burmese royal family was generally endogamous, it would have been in the contemporary Indian tradition to marry into another family of similar rank. As the Burmese were Buddhist, one possibility was the royal family of Sikkim, the tiny Himalayan state sandwiched between Nepal and Bhutan. The people were allied to the Tibetans and were Mahayana Buddhists. Close enough, the British must have thought. The crown prince of Sikkim, the future Chogyal, was approached. He agreed to meet with the two elder daughters. In the end he found them unsuitable, saying that their English was not fluent.

And then there was a scandal during the hot weather of 1906. The first princess became pregnant with the child of the Indian
durwan,
the gatekeeper. He was already married and with a family of his own. Everyone was shocked. But in the end it seems the British were more shocked than the Burmese. Thibaw and Supayalat soon reconciled themselves to the situation, and their first granddaughter became their new focus of attention. She was nicknamed Baisu.

Then something happened that the royal couple could not accept. The second princess, always known for being strong-willed, fell in love with a man named Khin Maung Gyi. He was Burmese and had served as a minor official at Mandalay. Here Thibaw drew the line. The father and daughter had a row. The second princess then left, to the house of Mrs. Head, the wife of the British district collector. When Thibaw heard what had happened, he ordered his car and driver to fetch the wayward princess. When the driver and the Model T Ford returned a while later, with no princess, the erstwhile king of Burma had a heart attack. Within weeks the last of the Konbaung monarchs was dead.

Thibaw was only fifty-six years old when he died in 1916. His death was barely noted at home, except within ever-shrinking aristocratic circles
at Mandalay. One wonders what would have happened if Thibaw had led a healthier life. At the start of the Second World War he would have been eighty-one. Would he have become a king under the Japanese? Would he have outlasted the British and become the first head of state of a newly independent Burma in 1948, sending his permanent representative to the new United Nations at New York?

What did happen was that with the end of the Great War the British relaxed their grip and allowed the various Burmese royals in India to return to Burma, though not to Mandalay itself. The first princess stayed behind with her little daughter, Baisu, and slowly fell into poverty. Baisu herself married and had a sizable family, with several children and grandchildren, moved to the city, and merged into the great urban poor of Bombay’s slums. She was still alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century, then in her late nineties, and journalists who went to visit her spoke of her generosity and kind manners, a little picture of Thibaw and Supayalat tacked onto the wall of her shack and a hint of Upper Burman features being the only thing to distinguish her from her neighbors.

The fate of the second princess is something of a mystery. Her siblings (with whom she had no contact after her elopement) say that she and Khin Maung Gyi had no children. Apparently, the couple wound up at the hill station of Kalimpong, near Darjeeling, and bought a dairy farm, where they lived out the rest of their lives in the cool pines-cented air of the Himalayan foothills.

Supayalat returned with her two younger daughters and took a house on Churchill Road, a winding, tree-lined road in one of the better residential areas in Rangoon, named for Lord Randolph Churchill, the man who had overthrown her husband thirty years before.

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Other royals were also exiled. British policy was to uproot the monarchy entirely and to ensure that the clan of Alaungpaya would never again be a political force in Burma. Dozens were sent far to the south, to Tavoy and Moulmein, and dozens of others were forced to go to India, where they were scattered in different cities and towns.

The prince of Limbin, for example, was exiled to Calcutta in 1887 and then to Allahabad along the Ganges River, a big bustling city and the birthplace of Jawaharlal Nehru, the future prime minister of India.
Rudyard Kipling was then a traveling correspondent for the
Allahabad Pioneer
. Limbin was one of thirty-five children of Mindon’s brother the prince of Kanaung. For a short while he had led his own rebellion in Burma, heading an alliance of dissident Shan chiefs; but he hadn’t played his cards very well and ended up in India, like his cousin the exking, together with his wife and ten children.

His youngest daughter, Princess Ma Lat, was born in Allahabad in October 1894. She was sent to a good school there, learned to speak English fluently, and grew up to be by all accounts a beautiful and well-educated woman. When she was sixteen, she was introduced to the crown prince of Prussia, Wilhelm, who had stopped in Allahabad as part of his grand tour of India. As a close relative of King George’s he was treated to many glitzy receptions, beginning in Ceylon and carrying on through much of the subcontinent. They had met at the Allahabad Club, where Limbin was a member. Afterward the crown prince (and future lover of Mata Hari) said that Ma Lat was the most striking woman he had met on his Eastern tour. With her charm and good looks, it was perhaps no surprise that another royal fell desperately in love with her—the heir apparent of Nepal, Prithvi Bir Bikram Shah Devand—and the two planned for possible marriage. But the story goes that the oligarchy of Nepal was set against the marriage from the start because Ma Lat was Buddhist, and soon the Nepalese prince died, aged thirty-six, some say by poison.

Only after independence were the royals allowed back to Mandalay. And there many of their descendants still live, in their own little society, often only their neighbors and close friends and descendants of some of the old aristocratic families aware at all of their ancestry. Thibaw’s grandson told me that they had formed two organizations, a royal council for the immediate royal family (Thibaw’s family), which he chaired, and a broader association for all those of royal lineage. But by the 1950s few actual princes and princesses were left, only their children and grandchildren, who, without special pensions or legal status, had become indistinguishable from the general population.

Some survived for a long time. The prince of Pyinmana, a son of Mindon’s and half brother of Thibaw’s, lived in Mandalay until his death in 1956, with his wife, a princess and a descendant of captured Siamese royalty. They had been fourteen when Prendergast’s troops had marched into their homes, and they remembered going out onto
the balcony to watch the British soldiers in their shining helmets and plumes. But both were resigned that the days of their family were long gone by. To the writer Norman Lewis, who visited them in the 1950s, the prince complained only about the lack of reading material and asked for a volume of Thomas Hood’s poems from England.
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The prince of Pyinmana had been considered by the Japanese as a possible puppet during their occupation of the country during the Second World War; Pyinmana would have become like Henry “The Last Emperor” Pu Yi, for whom the Japanese created a new state in Manchuria. But it never happened, and the royal family sunk into oblivion. There was never a strong monarchist movement, and the nationalists were keen to look elsewhere for their inspiration, abroad and not to the defeated and somewhat sad House of Alaungpaya. There would be no turning back. But where to look for inspiration? The break with centuries of tradition had been so stark. How should the future be imagined?

FROM KINGDOM TO COLONY

Within fifty years of Thibaw’s overthrow, not only were memories of royal government fading fast, but the society that had grown up over hundreds of years under kingly authority had been aggressively transformed. In Upper Burma, in the old royal domains, the traditional order had crumbled altogether with the capture of the king and the dismantling of his court. Mindon’s reforms had begun the process, and in the countryside the gentry chiefs had steadily lost influence to new moneymen and court appointees. Many, especially those from the old crown service class, had seen their special status fading away and had headed south to British territory. Altogether hundreds of thousands of people in the late 1800s had packed up to make new lives in the Irrawaddy Delta, in the greatest single migration in Burmese history.