The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (35 page)

It also did something else. With the fall of the kingdom the number of people living in Mandalay declined considerably, and Rangoon became the preeminent city and the only really modern city in the country. And in Rangoon as well as in many of the larger towns—Akyab,
Bassein, Moulmein—the Indian immigrants became a majority of the population. More important, they constituted what was new in society. They occupied most professional jobs and formed the urban working class. The Burmese no longer had their kings and princes, soldiers and officials. And now they would not be the commissioners and judges, the businessmen and bankers, or even the shopkeepers and factory workers. What had been urban and cosmopolitan in old Burma had vanished. And what was modern in the new Burma was alien. When the British quit and the Indians were forced to go, only village Burma would remain.

THE CINDERELLA PROVINCE

Personally I love the Burman with the blind favouritism born of first impression. When I die I will be a Burman, with twenty yards of real King’s silk, that has been made in Mandalay, about my body, and a succession of cigarettes between my lips. I will wave the cigarette to emphasise my conversation, which shall be full of jest and repartee, and I will always walk about with a pretty almond-coloured girl who shall laugh and jest too, as a young maiden ought. She shall not pull a sari over her head when a man looks at her and glare suggestively from behind it, nor shall she tramp behind me when I walk: for these are the customs of India. She shall look all the world between the eyes, in honesty and good fellowship, and I will teach her not to defile her pretty mouth with chopped tobacco in a cabbage leaf, but to inhale good cigarettes of Egypt’s best brand.

—Rudyard Kipling
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For the British, Burma was always a backwater. There was really no plan for annexation or for what should happen after annexation, and once the 1885 general elections were done and over and Randolph Churchill moved on to other things, Burma faded as quickly from public view as it had emerged, a few more articles in
The Illustrated London
News
, an occasional report of the continuing insurgency, and then little more until the Japanese took Singapore, and Burma lay on Tojo’s march to Delhi.

It was never a place where great family fortunes or political careers were made. No one really remembers Fytche, Pharye, Sladen, Butler,
or Dorman-Smith, not in Burma or in Britain. With changes in street names (Fytche Square is now Bandula Square), no one is even curious about who these men might have been. The only English person connected with Burma who is well known and whose connection with Burma is well known is Eric Blair (later George Orwell). While India evokes names like Hastings and Clive and images of bejeweled maharajas and Merchant Ivory costumes, Burma, through Orwell, is most poignantly remembered as a bad experience.

Burma was first and foremost a province of India. It was governed in the normal British Indian way, with a governor at the top and then a hierarchy of divisional commissioners, district deputy commissioners, and subdivisional officers running the countryside, in their pith helmets and sand-colored suits, dispensing justice and administering taxes from the verandahs of their teak bungalows or from little foldout tables under the shade of a big banyan tree. The British Indian legal system was grafted onto Burmese law, and at the secretariat in Rangoon, British officials and their Bengali clerks ensured that the rules and regulations of the empire were met and that a correct and steady flow of paper reached their superiors in Calcutta and at the India Office in Westminster.
¹⁵

Many of the men who came out to fill official positions came out for an Indian career and often wound up in Burma accidentally or as a second choice. One of the few who chose Burma was George Orwell, who signed up for the Indian Imperial Police in 1922 and placed Burma as the top of his preferred places to serve. He said it was because he had relatives there (his family had a long history in Burma, and his grandmother and an aunt were still living in Moulmein).
¹⁶
But in general Burma was quite low on the pecking order, and a career begun in Burma never led to the senior echelons of the Writers Building or a seat on the Viceroy’s Council in Calcutta. One imagines disappointed young men fresh out of public school and then Cambridge or Oxford, having chosen a life in India (or having tried for the Diplomatic Service or Home Civil Service and failed) being told that no, they wouldn’t be going to the India of their imagination, to the North-West Frontier or the little villages along the Ganges, but to Burma, an entirely different country really and one hardly known back home.
¹⁷

The exception were the merchants, mainly Scots, for whom Burma became a sort of home over several generations. By the 1880s the Scots were settling in for a comfortable stay and quickly built up a number of
very successful firms. William Wallace of Edinburgh set up the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation in 1863 and employed nearly two thousand elephants in the late nineteenth century as part of the company’s very profitable logging business. George James Swan of Perthshire established the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, which dominated inland Burmese transport, and William Strang Steel of Glasgow’s Steel Brothers made a fortune from the country’s rice trade. The similarly Scottish-owned Burmah Oil Company had its headquarters in Glasgow and around the turn of the century had monopolized the fast-growing oil production in Upper Burma. From their profits Burmah Oil later went on to create the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, better known under its present name, British Petroleum.
¹⁸

By the early twentieth century the mix of British officials and businessmen and the growing tide of professionals, merchants, and ordinary workers from across the Indian Empire (including Burma) had made Rangoon a fairly vibrant and cosmopolitan, if workmanlike, city, surely not with the intellectual or cultural flair of contemporary Bombay or Calcutta, but a city that could still compare well with most others in the Far East.
¹⁹
There were hotels like the Strand, considered one of the best in Asia, banks like Lloyds, travel agents like Thomas Cook, department stores like Rowe and Co., offering the most up-to-date goods straight from London, and nightclubs like the Silver Grill, owned by the Armenian restaurateur Peter Aratoon, complete with 1940s crooners and black-tied waitstaff, and destined to be a favorite of American airmen in the months before the war.

Rangoon even became connected by air. In 1933 Imperial Airways began flying its new Armstrong Whitworth AW15 Atalanta planes directly from London to Akyab as well as to Rangoon, as part of a much longer route all the way to Sydney. Described as “the fastest and most luxurious aircraft designed and produced for the tropics, with ample room for passengers to walk about and chat and to enjoy refreshments,” the little propeller planes dramatically cut travel time from the U.K. to Burma by more than two weeks. It still took ten days (!) with all the stops (London, Paris, Basel, Genoa … Baghdad, Basra …), but at least Rangoon was firmly on the map.

Rangoon society, meaning Rangoon European society, centered, as everywhere in the empire, on the clubs. And “European” was a term used in colonial settings in a racial sense and used in contrast with
“Indian” or “Burmese.” There were several clubs, and the three most exclusive were the Pegu Club, the Rangoon Gymkhana, and the Rangoon Boat Club, all in leafy surrondings, with manicured lawns and liveried Indian servants. The Pegu Club even gave the world one of its favorite cocktails in the 1920s and 1930s, made with gin, Cointreau, lime juice, and bitters on crushed ice. The membership was confined almost entirely to senior officials, army officers, and leading businessmen, and the Pegu Club at least never allowed a single Burmese to join.

When I was young and had no sense

In far-off Mandalay

I lost my heart to a Burmese girl

As lovely as the day.

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,

Her teeth were ivory;

I said, “For twenty silver pieces,

Maiden, sleep with me.”

She looked at me, so pure, so sad,

The loveliest thing alive,

And in her lisping, virgin voice,

Stood out for twenty-five.

                    —George Orwell, 1925

And there was the issue of Burmese women. Burma had a reputation for “rest and recreation,” and the preponderance of British Residents there kept Burmese mistresses. In 1890 there was a halfhearted attempt to end this practice, and the chief commissioner, Sir Charles Crosthwaite, sent out a confidential circular calling for an end to these relationships. That weekend at the Rangoon Turf Club, one horse was named CCCC (for the Chief Commissioner’s Confidential Circular), and another Physiological Necessity. Sir Charles later admitted that “what cannot be done in England ought to be equally impossible in Burma.”
²⁰

The habit of taking mistresses became a sore point in relations between the British and the Burmese. It also gave rise to a quite substantial number of people of mixed ancestry; by some accounts the Eurasian or “Anglo-Burmese” population in British Burma was equal in size to the “Anglo-Indian” population in all the other Indian provinces
put together. Many went into government service, in particular the police, and Anglo-Burmans largely ran the railways. The end of the British rule led also to their sudden demise, like so many other communities, with thousands migrating to Australia and elsewhere in the Commonwealth, though some stayed on, taking Burmese names and largely assimilating into the majority community.

Another sore point was simple racism and the day-to-day treatment of Burmese (and other non-Europeans) by the British Resident in the country. There were never that many British people in Burma, many less than, say, in Malaya, as a portion of the population, and the ordinary person would probably live his or her life without ever coming across an authentic representative of the Raj. For some who did, the experience was pleasant enough, and there were indeed friendships and marriages across the racial divide. But what seems much more common was at least the sense of ill-treatment and humiliation, not simply from the fact of living under foreign occupation but through everything from perceived slights to outright brutality.

It could be a small thing. For my grandfather U Thant, a person who grew up with a deep admiration for English culture, one incident stood out in his memory. He was in his early twenties and sitting on a bench in Rangoon waiting for a ferry to take him back to Pantanaw. Neatly dressed and minding his own business, he felt the tap of a cane on his shoulder. He turned around and saw an elderly Englishman and his wife. The man said nothing, though the wife seemed a little embarrassed. My grandfather got up and left. He didn’t say a word, not then and not to anyone for decades. But it stuck in his mind. For U Tin Tut, a graduate of Cambridge, a senior civil servant, and an officer in the First World War, it was an episode at the Gymkhana Club in 1924. The club was unable to field fifteen for a rugby match. Knowing that Tin Tut was a good player and under pressure from the governor to open its doors a little wider, the team asked if he would mind playing. He was happy to and played well. But afterward he was told in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to shower with the rest of the team.
²¹
Twenty years later Tin Tut happily threw in his lot with the young nationalists determined to end colonial rule.

All of the profit making and the comfortable expat careers relied on a modicum of law and order, and for this the British rulers created an ironfisted web of police, surveillance systems, courts, jails, beatings and
whippings, and, as a last resort, the British and Indian armies. Despite this, even in the heyday of the Raj, say, in the 1910s and 1920s, the country was never really settled. There were dacoits, or armed gangs of men, attacking villages and robbing travelers, and the province was notorious for danger and lawlessness. By the 1930s its rate for thefts alone was nearly four times that of the average for India. In 1940, of a population of around ten million, there were over seven hundred murders, comparable to the homicide rate of a major American city in the 1990s. There were differing interpretations for why this happened. Some Burmese believed it had to do with the decline of monastic education and related ethical training. Others blamed the sudden breakdown of traditional social structures, the lack of colonial legitimacy, or the effects of the sudden immigration of hundreds of thousands of people, including those with criminal backgrounds. For most British it all meant that the Burmese really were in no position, at least for now, to govern themselves. British rule might have its problems, but to paraphrase Monty Python, “Who else could run a place like this?”