The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (34 page)

My father’s family, from Mandalay, was not among those who headed south. At the time of annexation my great-great-grandfather Maha Mindin Kyawthu was a privy treasurer to King Thibaw, in charge of court records and valuables, one of many in the family whose entire lives were bound up in the inner world of the palace and the last of three generations of retainers and minor nobility that had served the Konbaung
baung family since the 1760s. He was in his fifties when Prendergast entered the city, and had achieved the special designation of
pyinnya-shi,
or pundit, meaning that he was learned in the Burmese and Pali classics and advised on matters of court ceremony and precedence. Like many others, he was traumatized by the abolition of the monarchy and the violent imposition of English rule. All the things he had studied and lived for no longer existed. His brother Maha Mindin Minkyaw Raza, in charge of the now-defunct royal armory, was in a similar position and in no mood to stay on at Fort Dufferin or anywhere else in the old capital. Seeking employment in the new Raj was out of the question. Instead the two brothers and their families moved back to their ancestral home, about a day’s carriage ride south, to the little sand-covered hamlets of Dabessway, to spend the rest of their days nostalgic for the old court and still dreaming of restoration.

This was a change of life and lifestyle repeated hundreds of times in those days, as the aristocracy and courtiers of Ava simply faded away into the dusty hinterland, a few court costumes never to be worn again and perhaps a photograph or two taken behind palace walls their only mementos of a vanished time.

Village life itself was also transformed. The old categories of
ahmudan
and
athi
, of who belonged to a founding family and who did not, of chiefs and their retainers, of the myriad regiments of royal servicemen and the many types of outcasts and slaves all dissolved into a new and undifferentiated pool of Burmese peasants. Salaried clerks and village headmen replaced the proud little courts of the hereditary gentry with their vermilion-painted gates and red and gold umbrellas. It had been a long time since the men of Upper Burma had been called away to distant wars, in Assam and Siam, but now families with generations of martial tradition were not even called up for guard duty at the palace. Buddhist monks also saw their role and status overturned. They had been the teachers of the country, and their monastic colleges had trained all the scholars of the royal court. The new government and Christian missionary schools had replaced them, undercutting for better or for worse the age-old tie between the Buddhist religion and education.
¹¹

Even things like ordinary dress and pastimes changed dramatically. Today some remark on how the Burmese maintain their native dress, in comparison, say, with their neighbors in Thailand. But today’s dress,
a unisex sarong or
longyi
for both men and women, worn formally with a white collarless shirt and short jacket for men and with a blouse for women, is a fairly new thing and a product of British times. No self-respecting man, at least in Upper Burma in the nineteenth century, would have been caught in public wearing a
longyi
. Then men wore long checkered
pasos
wrapped around their waists and then tucked under their legs, something like a dhoti in India, together with close-fitting white upper garments, or long coats. And women wore
tameins,
slit up the front to well above the knee, together with shoulderless and sleeveless bodices wrapped around the middle and short, tight jackets over.

All men also tattooed their bodies from their waists to their knees in an indigo dye, the intricate tattoos set closely together so that from a distance it seemed as if they were wearing tight blue trousers. This was now quickly becoming a thing of the past, though in some rural areas one could find old men tattooed in the traditional fashion until quite recently. Men in the old days also kept their hair uncut and tied up in a knot on the top of their heads, with white or colored pieces of cloth wrapped around. By the turn of the century hair was cut short, in the English way, and many (like my own great-grandfathers) sported mustaches in the European fashion of the times.

Old pastimes also disappeared. The pony races and boat races that had enlivened village life, not to mention the much more elaborate festivals and equestrian events of Ava and Mandalay, were gone, as were many (though not all) of the touring drama troupes once patronized by the great aristocrats of the land. In their place came Hollywood and later Bollywood films, football, and golf, the latter because of the large number of Scots who were making Burma their home. A good golf club remains de rigueur for any worthy Burmese town.

But the biggest change of all was the influx of new people, not just the British, who were never more than a tiny fraction of the population, but the Indians, who soon arrived by the millions.

THE LAST MUGHAL (AND OTHER NEWCOMERS FROM INDIA)

In a mirror of Thibaw’s exile to India’s Konkan coast, the last emperor of India, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was forced to live out his final years as a British prisoner in Burma. The Mutiny of 1857–58 had ended with
the destruction of the three-hundred-year-old Mughal court at Delhi. Though the rebellion had first begun among the native soldiers of the East India Company, it had spread across the northern plains, drawing in others unhappy with British rule. The rebels had appealed to the octogenarian Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar to lead them. When the tables turned and resistance to the British was crushed, the emperor and his family were taken away.

The old man had asked to be sent to Mecca. This was rejected. Many of the rebels had been sent to the sun-drenched Andaman Islands, but it was thought too dangerous to place him in close proximity to his erstwhile followers, and instead the ex-emperor was packed off to newly conquered Lower Burma, with the rest of the imperial family, including his son Prince Mirza Jawan Bakht, his grandson Prince Mirza Jamshed Bakht, Begum Zeenat Mahal, some ladies of the zenana, the Taj Mahal Begum (a second wife of the emperor’s), and dozens of attendants, including the young princes’ tutor, Hafiz Mohammed Ibrahim, traveling to Rangoon unceremoniously on a Mackinnon Mackenzie ship. Thus ended the career of the last monarch of the race of Timur and Genghis Khan.

In Rangoon, Bahadur Shah Zafar had few visitors. He was quite frail as well as sad, and his British captors had no interest in tempting him out of his isolation. Instead the ex-emperor, an accomplished Urdu poet and calligrapher, sat in his little house just to the south of the Shwedagon Pagoda, reflecting on the fate of his family and what he had heard about British reprisals in Delhi and elsewhere. Four years after arriving in Burma he was dead at age eighty-nine, having scribbled his own epitaph in the form of a ghazel: “How unlucky Zafar is! For his burial, he couldn’t get even two yards of earth, in my beloved country.” He was quickly interred in the same compound and in extreme secrecy in the hope that the exact location of his grave would never be known.

His descendants fared poorly, living on a meager government pension and otherwise ignored by the British Indian government. Prince Jawan Bahkt, the ex-emperor’s son, was banished to Moulmein, though he was sometimes allowed to come to Rangoon to visit his family and was a celebrity at the Rahim Baksh kebab shop downtown. When Allied forces retook Moulmein in August 1945, a very old Mughal prince, presumably one of Jawan Bahkt’s sons, came down from a hilltop house to collect his pension of twelve and a half annas.

Two other grandsons (from another of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s fortynine
children), Princes Jamshed Bakht and Sikander Bakht, were born and grew up in Rangoon, becoming friends with members of the large and prosperous Muslim families from Delhi and Surat who were living in the city at the time. Jamshed Bakht went on to study at the American Baptist–run Judson College. He married a Burmese woman, and their son Mirza Muhammad Bedar Bakht was among the many refugees who fled to Calcutta at the beginning of the Japanese occupation in 1942. He never returned, remaining there to work in a bread factory and dying in poverty; his widow is still there today, selling tea on the pavement at Calcutta’s Howrah Station.

The most unusual fate was perhaps that of the ex-emperor’s granddaughter Princess Ranauq Zamani Begum, who married an exiled Panthay prince (exiled after the failed Panthay Rebellion in Yunnan in the 1860s), mixing the lineages of Babur and Du Wenxiu, the erstwhile sultan of Dali. Others in the original entourage also settled in Rangoon, and in the heavily Muslim neighborhoods around the Surati Bazaar remain those who proudly claim descent from the retainers of the last Mughal.

The British hoped the emperor would be quickly forgotten. But today, nearly a century and a half later, Bahadur Shah Zafar is perhaps more celebrated than at any time since his capture by Captain Hodson at Humayun’s tomb. In 1991 the Burmese and Indian governments agreed to build a grand memorial for him at the site of his confinement, and as workmen were laying the foundations, they stumbled on the emperor’s hidden grave. A grand stairway now leads underground to his untouched tomb, covered in a green satin embroidered with gold peacock feathers. He is worshiped as a saint by many of the local Muslim community and the prime ministers of India and Pakistan come to pay their respects.

*

Bahadur Shah Zafar was not the first, and was certainly not the last, Indian to make his way to Burma during the years of the British occupation. He was perhaps the least willing. Millions of others made the passage voluntarily and often with great hopes for easy money or a better life. There had of course always been people moving between Burma and places across the Bay of Bengal. The country’s foundation story, as we have seen, was of an Indian prince, forced into exile, who established Burma’s first kingdom at Tagaung. Long before the 
British conquest scholars and merchants from India had settled at Rangoon, Mandalay, and elsewhere. But by the early twentieth century Indian migration had become a flood, changing the smaller country forever.
¹²

For many Indian families, Burma was the first America. It was the land of opportunity and new beginnings. Thousands of young men journeyed from Surat, Bombay, Lucknow, Karachi, Calcutta, Madras, and elsewhere to Akyab, Moulmein, and Rangoon to seek their fortune. Burma then offered more jobs and higher incomes, a dynamic economy, and a sort of frontier where anything was possible and lives could be remade.

Many were Nattukottai Chettyars from South India, Hindus well known (not just in Burma) for their financial dealings and business acumen. They were clever and hardworking. Their original home is a fairly dry and bleak area, not far from Madras, where poor agricultural conditions long ago forced the Chettyars to look to moneylending for a living. By the turn of the last century they had made their way out of India and had spread overseas to Ceylon, Java, and Malaya. And thousands had come to Burma, setting up shop all across the Tenasserim and the Irrawaddy Delta. In those days there was a wild scramble for land, and the task of clearing the land required a capital investment. Hardly any Burmese had money to spare, and the Chettyars stepped into the breach. They became the village moneylenders. In less than a generation many became rich.
¹³

Many also came from nearby Bengal. Muslim families from Chittagong, once the port of the Mrauk-U kings, moved en masse into the western townships of Arakan, and in the rest of the province Bengalis, both Hindus and Muslims, arrived as doctors, clerks, schoolteachers, and lawyers, forming an essential part of the new urban class.

Other Indians arrived under less favorable circumstances as coolies and seasonal workers, many from Orissa, a very poor province of India just opposite the bay from Arakan, as well as Tamils from the Madras Presidency. At the beginning of the last century Indians were arriving in Burma at the rate of no less than a quarter million people a year. The numbers rose steadily until, in the peak year of 1927, immigration reached 480,000 people, with Rangoon exceeding New York City as the greatest immigrant port in the world. This was out of a total population of only 13 million, the equivalent of the United Kingdom today
taking 2 million people a year. Some came only for a short time and returned home after making some money. But enough stayed so that each ten-year census showed a marked rise in the Indian-born proportion of the population.

In the early twentieth century Rangoon also became home to a vibrant Jewish community. Arabic-speaking Jews had been trading along the Burmese shore for centuries, but under British rule there was a much greater immigration of families, most ultimately from Baghdad and Isfahan, who had been living for a generation or more in India. The very first Jew known to settle in Burma was an officer in Alaungpaya’s army in the 1750s called Solomon Gabriel. By 1898 there was a big enough Jewish population in Rangoon to build the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue. A second synagogue was built in 1932, and by that time Rangoon had its own Zionist organization and even, briefly, a Jewish mayor, David Sophaer.

The Indian presence transformed daily life. In Rangoon, Indians made up over half the population, and nearly every city and town in the country became home to a significant pan-Indian minority, Tamils and Malwaris, Bengalis and Pathans, from street sweepers to big businessmen and government officials. Friendships and marriages between Burmese and Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, were common. By the early twentieth century Indian food (especially street fare like samosas), clothes (like today’s ubiquitous
longyi
), and entertainment (both music and films) were part and parcel of urban life for all Burmese.

Immigration is always contentious, in any country. And for a country as small as Burma, taking on board so many new people would have been difficult in the best of times. But for it to happen under alien rule was bound to lead to ill feeling and hostility. It led to a break, which had never existed before, between Burmese and Indians, and a Burmese racism that combined feelings of superiority with fear. Superiority because many of the Indians whom Burmese people came across were unskilled workers, menials and house servants, wretchedly poor and willing to do any job. Fear because of the sheer numbers but also the business acumen and success of so many.