The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (37 page)

6
.
Rangoon Times
, 3 January 1928; Pantanaw U Thant, “We Burmans,”
New Burma
, 8 September 1939.

7
. J. S. Furnivall,
Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948).

8
. Harvey,
History of Burma
, 85–86.

9
. On Thibaw in exile, see W. S. Desai,
Deposed King Thibaw of Burma in India
,
1885–1916
(Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1967).

10
. Norman Lewis,
Golden Earth: Travels in Burma
(London: Cape, 1952),  100.

11
. Kaung, “A Survey of the History of Education in Burma Before the British Conquest and After,”
Journal of the Burma Research Society
46:2 (1963), 1–124.

12
. N. R. Chakravarti,
The Indian Minority in Burma
(London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1971).

13
. Sean Turnell, “The Chettiars in Burma,”
Macquarie Economics Research Papers
, no. 12/2005 (July 2005). 

14
. Rudyard Kipling,
From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel
(1889), vol. 1, no. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1914).

15
. John Cady,
A History of Modern Burma
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958); F. S. V. Donnison,
Public Administration in Burma: A Study of Development During the British Connexion
(London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1953); G. E. Harvey,
British Rule in Burma, 1824–42
(London: Faber and Faber, 1946); A. Ireland,
The Province of Burma,
2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907).

16
. Bernard Crick,
George Orwell:
A Life
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), chapter 5.

17
. On the life of British civil servants in the later colonial period, see especially Maurice Collis,
Trials in Burma
(London: Faber, 1938) and Leslie Glass,
The Changing of the Kings:
Memories of Burma 1934–1949
(London: Owen, 1985).

18
. Alister McCrae,
Scots in Burma: Golden Times in a Golden Land
(Edinburgh: Kiscadale, 1990).

19
. On British life in Burma in colonial times, see B. R. Pearn,
A History of Rangoon
(Rangoon: American Baptist Mission Press, 1939); James George Scott,
Burma, A Handbook of Practical Information
(London: Daniel O’Conner, 1906).

20
. Noel F. Singer, Old Rangoon:
City of the Shwedagon
(Gartmore, Scotland: Kiscadale, 1995), 109.

21
. Maung Htin Aung, “George Orwell and Burma,” in
The World of George Orwell,
ed. Miriam Gross (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 26–27.

22
. H. Fielding Hall,
A People at School
(London: Macmillan, 1906), 22–23.

23
. Joseph Dautremer,
Burma Under British Rule,
trans. George Scott (London: T. F. Unwin, 1913), 78.

24
. Herbert Thirkell White,
A Civil Servant in Burma
(London: E. Arnold, 1913), 129.

25
. H. H. Risely and E. A. Gait, Census of India 1901, vol. 1, part 1 (General Report) (Calcutta: Government of India, 1903).

26
. Scott,
Burma: A Handbook of Practical Information,
61–62.

NINE

STUDYING IN THE AGE
OF EXTREMISM

Modern Burmese politics and Burmese nationalism come of age in the 1930s and a generation of anticolonial leaders are seduced by the militant ideologies of the time

S
oon after the Great Mutiny was crushed in 1858, the British government decided to establish direct rule over its Indian possessions. The East India Company, which had governed the expanding empire since its earliest beginnings in Surat and Madras more than two hundred years before, amassing fortunes and making war, was dissolved, and Company territory from Rawalpindi to Moulmein and seven hundred princely states from Kashmir to Cochin were transferred to the sovereign rule of Victoria as the new empress of India.

It was in the decade that followed that there emerged new Indian leadership, later with names like Gandhi and Nehru, that would eventually challenge colonial rule and show the way to independence. On a cool December day in 1885, just as the Burmese kingdom was about to be annexed to British India, seventy-three lawyers and educators and other professional men met in Bombay to found the Indian National Congress. They all were part of an up-and-coming well-to-do middle class and desired a better future for themselves in a new and modern India. The congress had no special ideology and no base of popular support and in the early years met simply to express support for the Raj and pass fairly harmless resolutions on nonthreatening issues, like civil service reform.

But things began heating up in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1905 the viceroy, Sir George Nathaniel Curzon, divided the province of Bengal for what he said were reasons of administrative efficiency, but this inflamed Bengali opinion makers, the most vocal and
politically articulate in the empire, who suspected a clear-cut divide-and-rule tactic. A cycle of unrest and repression followed. After a long period of relative quiet, Indian politics had lurched toward violence and less patient desires for self-government.

The British reacted in part with limited reform, reuniting Bengal and including more moderate Indians into the workings of the colonial administration, but also with what they regarded as a proper Oriental spectacle. At the end of 1911 the king-emperor, George V, visited the country for a grand durbar in the old Mughal seat of Delhi, appearing before a vast, gorgeously costumed and impeccably choreographed audience of eighty thousand princes and virtually every person of note in the Indian Empire, all there to pay obeisance to their sovereign in person. With a background of bespoke music by Sir Edward Elgar, Victoria’s grandson bestowed honors and titles on the assembled maharajas and nawabs, wearing a specially designed crown and acting his role as the heir to the House of Babur.

It was an opportune time to try to cement a degree of loyalty from the empire’s Indian subjects, for in three years the Indian Army, all voluntary, would be sent out to fight in every major theater of the First World War, suffering over forty thousand dead and sixty thousand wounded on battlefields from Flanders to Mesopotamia. This was an immense sacrifice and naturally made Indian politicians more confident in their demands for self-government. In December 1916, just after the battle of the Somme had left a million casualties and in the months before the Russian Revolution, a joint session of the Congress Party and its eventual foe, the Muslim League, met at Lucknow to demand constitutional change. A formal pact was agreed upon. The British felt compelled to respond, and the following summer the government in London announced a new policy of eventual home rule within the British Empire.

In 1919 Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu and the viceroy, Viscount Chelmsford, introduced legislation that gave considerable authority to partly elected provincial councils. It was a system called dyarchy. Some government departments like agriculture and education were placed under ministers responsible to these new councils. But others, including the really important ones like finance and home affairs (which controlled the police), were kept under officials appointed by the (usually British) governor.

For some in India this was far from satisfactory. But at least there was some change and some discussion of further reform. But one part of the Indian Empire was to be deliberately left out of the change process altogether: Burma. In British eyes Burma was “the most placid province in India,”
¹
and no political reform there was expected or required. The British Parliament’s joint committee on Indian constitutional reform said: “Burma is not India. Its people belong to another race in another stage of political development, and its problems are altogether different … The desire for elective institutions has not developed in Burma … the problems of political evolution of Burma must be left for separate and future consideration.”
²
It was to be a rude shock.

CAMBRIDGE, 1905

By the First World War a new generation of English-educated Burmese had grown up, uncertain of their place in the world and far less politically experienced than the professional classes in Bombay and Calcutta, but increasingly anxious not to be left behind. One of them was a young lawyer named Ba U, who would one day become president of independent Burma.
³

In 1905 Ba U, two of his cousins, and a friend were on their way to a new life as university students in England. They traveled on the SS
Herefordshire
, a plush passenger ship of the Bibby Line, which took them from Rangoon to Liverpool via Colombo, the Suez Canal, and Marseilles. But as soon as the big ship set sail and they left Burma for the first time, they were not happy; they felt they were being discriminated against. Alone among all the passengers, their cabins were at the aft of the steamer, next to the ship’s surgeon’s rooms and close to the lavatories. They protested to the chief steward, who laughed. At dinner they were given a little table in the corner and were served by a steward from Goa, while they noticed that all the white passengers were waited on by white stewards. They had tried to live up to English standards and had gone out of their way to find the best European tailor in Rangoon. But when the ship’s surgeon saw them for the first time in their new suits, he snickered as well. Their coats were too short, their trousers were too tight, and they had put on caps that were too small for their heads. “We looked liked dressed-up monkeys.” The tailor knew
they were just Burmese students and hadn’t bothered to do a proper job. It was the start of a difficult few years.

Ba U was a young man proud of his family background. He was descended from a princess of the old royal house through her son the lord of Henzada. Henzada had run afoul of court intrigues around the middle of the nineteenth century and had run away to British territory. Like many other aristocratic families at the time, Henzada and his children made the transition from grandees at Ava to members of a small but increasingly prosperous middle class. Ba U’s grandfather joined a Scottish rice-trading firm and married the daughter of another displaced nobleman. His father became a deputy commissioner, one of very few Burmese at the time to make it into the ranks of the official elite; his uncle was to be one of only four Burmese granted a king’s commission after the First World War. On his mother’s side, Ba U was part of an important local family that had, for generations, supplied magistrates and governors for the towns of the Irrawaddy Delta. He had gone to school in Maubin, next to Pantanaw, and then to University College, Rangoon, where he studied hard and won a place at Cambridge. It was his dream and his parents’ dream. To the extent that there was an Anglicized class expected to be loyal to the empire, Ba U was part of it.