The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (36 page)

*

There was also always a clear distinction between the Burmese and peoples in other parts of the Indian Empire, the Indians. Kipling, who actually only spent part of one day in Burma and never went anywhere near Mandalay, was far from the only one to emphasize a difference. H. Fielding Hall, a onetime civil servant, wrote in his tellingly titled
A People at School:

In India, I think the most pervading impression that one receives is of its immense sadness. The people seem always to be fighting against starvation, which is very near. The thin cattle, the starved dogs, the skinny fowls, the whole hard landscape is imbued with the same tragedy of life … There is an oppression, a weight, as if life were a weariness and a disillusion terribly spent trying to hold at arm’s length disease and want and death … In Burma all is different. The people seem young. They are never old. Life comes to them always as a pleasant thing. It is worth living. It is to be passed through with a laugh and jest, not to be taken too seriously. The people seem all happy, all well to do, as if the wants of life were easily fulfilled.
²²

Other Europeans picked up the same theme. Said the visiting Frenchman Joseph Dautremer:

The Burman neither flatters nor cringes. He is usually very lively and overflowing with high spirits, full of banter and quizzicality. He is never cast down by bad luck and never overcome by abundant riches; sometimes he heaps together a fortune, but it is not a common occurrence, for he lives from day to day and takes very little care for the future. He has no idea either of discipline or perseverance, but he is very whimsical and very independent. His character does not fit him for regular and permanent work, and he will even give up the wages which are due to him if he gets tired of his place and thinks he would like to take up something else.
²³

By the early twentieth century past images of Burma, of a corrupt and brutal Oriental tyranny, bound up in ageless custom, had given way to a lighter, less serious picture of a childlike and happy people, not particularly hardworking or well disciplined but with many attractive qualities and a welcome sense of individuality and independence. There was not really a counterpart to the hated Bengali babu or to the romanticized virile fighters of the Khyber Pass. To some extent the British looked backward for the sort of Burman they liked, someone like Maung Hlwa, Thibaw’s governor of Ava—“an official of the good old Upper Burma type. Not overeducated, without delicate scruples, of proven courage, with boundless personal influence”—someone they could work with and who wouldn’t make much of a fuss. But these kind of men, they thought, were now few to be found.
²⁴

All these interpretations of the Burmese character are important because they’ve proved long-lasting and have deeply influenced Burmese self-perceptions. For the British it meant that Burma was not a very important place and that there were few serious policy choices to be made. A benign neglect was no bad thing. More than half a century after they were made, General Ne Win and his Revolutionary Council used the same characterizations to make the argument that the Burmese were not suited for democratic government and that for all the good things about them, they needed to learn discipline and teamwork. Life came too easily to the Burmese, and they had to work harder, learn
to do things for themselves; they didn’t need to be too educated but had to be tough. Though there may be other, more local roots of this thinking, the colonial influence is the most obvious. Some British observers called Burma the Cinderella Province, beautiful and ignored compared with its sisters, Madras, Bengal, and Bombay, a Cinderella perhaps for whom the shoe never fitted.

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The British did not have only the Burmese to think about. The borders of the province were drawn without clear criteria and were more or less accidents of Anglo-Burmese history and the three wars of the nineteenth century. More or less all of the old kingdom was incorporated into the new province of British Burma. But British Burma also included other areas that had never been part of royal administration. These were mainly the highlands that surrounded the Irrawaddy Valley, one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world, home to hundreds of languages and mutually unintelligible dialects and to an array of often proudly independent cultures, each nestled in its own little mountain niche. Not surprisingly, it’s these very areas that have been the primary site of the country’s armed conflict for the past forty years.

The various parts of the country were administered separately, less of a divide-and-rule policy and more of a cheap and easy policy. After Thibaw’s overthrow the men on the spot found that the low country (the Burmese areas) was traditionally ruled by hereditary chiefs, but that the authority of these chiefs had weakened in recent times and that in any case many were actively leading the resistance against them. They would be of little use, and their power and position were broken within a generation. In the highlands, though, and in particular in the Shan hills to the east, there were hereditary chiefs of a different nature—the
sawbwas
—who were much less directly ruled from the Court of Ava and were still very much in charge of their own domains. The cheap and easy thing to do was to keep them in place, organize them properly, and simply let them carry on as before, provided they accepted British suzerainty and the occasional guidance of the superintendent of the Shan States, based at a little hill station nearby.

Different still were the various peoples of the mountain regions. The Kachins, for example, were a medley of people who lived in the far
north, just below the Himalayan range. They were never part of the Burmese government system and in the late nineteenth century had taken to raiding and looting frontier towns like Bhamo along the China border. They eventually accepted British overlordship, and American missionaries converted nearly all to one form of Christianity or another.

The few British army men and officials who spent time in the hills liked the people they found, perhaps not surprisingly as they were usually outdoor types happy not to have desk-bound jobs. They decided that the Kachins and others were “martial races” along the lines of the Gurkhas in Nepal or the Pathans of the North-West Frontier and good soldier material. Though the Kachins and other upland groups were only a tiny fraction of the population (perhaps 2 percent), they became the majority of the army in Burma. In this scheme the Burmese themselves, the people who had actually conquered by fire and sword half the Southeast Asian mainland, were seen as not martial enough and left out. It was a policy choice that rankled deeply in the Burmese imagination, eating away at their sense of pride and turning the idea of a Burmese army into a central element of the nationalist dream.

It was the British also who began to think carefully about where the Burmese “came from” and how they were related to other peoples. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the heyday of race theory. Ethnology was born as a colonial enterprise, and there were energetic attempts to categorize the peoples of the empire and understand how ancient migrations and more recent history might have led to their current conditions and characteristics. Though there were genuine attempts at science, much was also a way to show how the English were on top. Some ideas did not seem to have much supportive evidence at all. In the 1901 Census, for example, an essay by one Dr. Mc-Namara, entitled “Origins and Character of the Burmese People,” proposed a common ethnic origin of the Irish and Burmese, through Cornish tin miners who had sailed east.
²⁵

Other ideas, more long-lasting, were based on existing Burmese notions of race and caste. The scholars and pundits of the Court of Ava had over time produced numerous systems for classifying the people of the world, with five overarching classes, each with its own subclasses: the Burmese themselves; the Chinese; the Mons; the Shans or Thais; and the
kalas
. The
kala
traditionally referred to all the peoples to the west—the Indians, Persians, Arabs, Europeans, and so forth. The
British picked up some of these ideas and merged them with the new study of comparative languages.

By the turn of the century the idea of language families had become well known and well accepted. The eighteenth-century Calcutta judge and polymath Sir William Jones, who had mastered thirteen languages and knew twenty-seven others “reasonably well,” had long ago proposed an Indo-European language family, one that connected many living Indian and European languages, including English, with Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek and traced them all to a common, now dead, source. Now all the languages of the world were being clumped together into families, with the idea that they derived from a single protolanguage that had become fractured and dispersed through ancient and modern migrations. Burmese and Arakanese were placed within the Tibeto-Burman family, whereas Mon, the language of Pegu, was considered entirely separate and related to Cambodian. Shan and its near relatives Thai and Lao were also set apart, and in this way the notion developed that all the various peoples of Burma were of different origins and came to the country at different times. Language and ethnicity became closely linked.

The British also liked the idea of chaotic and sweeping migrations, in the manner of the barbarian hordes of the Dark Ages, having peopled Burma in aeons past. According to Sir James Scott, in his authoritative
Burma: A Handbook of Practical Information
, “there poured swarm after swarm of Indo-Chinese invaders, crowding down from North-western China, from Tibet, the Pamirs, and from Mongolia, following the course of the great rivers … the first invading horde was that of the Mon-Hkmer [
sic
] sub-family. These were followed by the Tibeto-Burmans who drove their predecessors before them—many up into the hills … Upon these warring bands there came down finally the peoples of the Siamese-Chinese sub-family—the Karens and the Tai, or Shans—who crushed and thrust and wedged themselves in where they might.” The practical handbook continued: under British rule “bands are still poured from the teeming loins of the frozen north,” but “they are marshaled like the orderly queue entering a public meeting.”
²⁶

These are ideas now firmly rooted in people’s imaginations; I remember visiting in 1989 a rebel camp belonging to the Mon National Liberation Army and being told how the Mons were a “Mon-Khmer” people, entirely different from the Burmese. For the Burmese it tended
to increase their sense of difference from other groups in the country and perhaps make harder the emergence of a single national identity.

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So what did all this mean? Thibaw’s court had vanished, and there was no going back to the old ways. The old aristocracy had quit government service, content for now to harbor quietly its resentments and frustrations while merging every day into ordinary village life. In places like Pantanaw, many benefited from the peace and prosperity of early colonial times, anxious only to enter the new and dynamic modernity showcased for them in Rangoon. But the new and dynamic modernity was resolutely alien, uncompromisingly British at the top and with an assortment of Indian communities, energetic and entrepreneurial, creating the country’s new urban class. Soon a powerful ethnic nationalism, based narrowly on the idea of a Buddhist and Burmese-speaking people, one that saw little need to accommodate minority peoples, took root. At the center of this nationalism would be a desire for a new martial spirit.

Notes – 8: TRANSITIONS

1
. Paul Edmonds,
Peacocks and Pagodas
(London: George Routledge and Sons, 1924), 96–100.

2
. On U Thant, I have relied largely on family oral history as well as an unpublished autobiographical paper written shortly before his death in 1974; see also Thant,
View from the UN: The Memoirs of U Thant
(1978; repr., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2005); as well as June Bingham,
U Thant: The Search for Peace
(New York: Knopf, 1966); Ramses Nassif,
U Thant in New York
1961–71:
A Portrait
of the Third UN Secretary-General
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Kaba Sein Tin,
Nyeinchanyay Bithuka U Thant
(Rangoon: Tagaung Press, 1967); Brian Urquhart,
A Life in War and Peace
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987), chapters 15 and 16.

3
.
Imperial Gazetteer of India
19 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 403.

4
. Michael Adas,
The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change
on an Asian Rice Frontier
, 1852–1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).

5
. There is no accepted way of determining today’s value of old money; different methods will arrive at different conclusions, in this case from just over three million pounds to more than twenty-three million pounds. See Lawrence H. Officer, “What Is Its Relative Value in UK Pounds?”
Economic History Services
, 30 October 2004, http://www.eh.net.