The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (39 page)

It was this last demand that would become a hot topic. The British had viewed dyarchy as a ten-year experiment for India and had long planned for a commission to propose the next steps. In 1927 a commission was appointed a bit ahead of schedule under the chairmanship of the Liberal member of Parliament Sir John Simon. The commission traveled around India and visited Burma in 1929. This was when a much bigger drama was playing out across the Indian subcontinent. The Indian National Congress under Mahatma Gandhi had launched a new round of civil disobedience campaigns in the early 1930s, and Gandhi himself had been arrested. Under pressure, the British government convened all-party talks in London; Burma was included as an afterthought. U May Oung, the London barrister who had founded the YMBA, had already passed away but was ably succeeded as one of the province’s chief representatives by his daughter Daw Mya Sein, who gave speeches all around the British Isles and did much to raise the profile of a fairly unknown and exotic corner of the empire. Battle lines were being drawn up between the Congress Party under Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and the Muslim League under Mohammed Ali Jinnah, later the founder of Pakistan. But for the Burmese, there was one overarching question: whether or not to remain part of India.

Very few Burmese wanted anything other than separation from India and for Burma to become its own country. But could they trust the British? India was speeding ahead toward home rule. Wouldn’t separation from India mean only that Burma would become a colony like

Ceylon or Hong Kong with little hope of future freedom? Wasn’t it worth it to stay on the Indian bandwagon? Burmese politicians were deeply divided, and for years, like today, differences over tactics preempted or postponed any real debate on the substantive and often pressing issues of public policy.

In 1935 a Government of India and Burma Act, which devolved considerable autonomy to the provincial level, was approved by the British Parliament. All subjects were in the hands of ministers who were individually and collectively responsible to their almost entirely elected legislative assemblies. Chief ministers headed the governments of each province, though the appointed governors retained “emergency powers.” At the center in Delhi, British control remained more obvious. The hereditary princes and their sometimes extensive domains remained outside the system. India would become a dominion within the British Empire—like Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Newfoundland—and was even given a seat at the League of Nations. Burma was at the same time formally separated from India, ending years of debate, and given a comparable or even slightly more advanced constitution. Not everyone was pleased. This was still far from self-government. And ambitions were running far ahead of anything the British were ready to offer.

THE ROAD TO POVERTY

The Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929 sent an economic tidal wave around the world, decimating international commodity prices and sending the Burmese economy into a tailspin. For decades rice exports had grown by leaps and bounds, fueled by easy credit. It was the foundation on which Burma’s modern economy had been built. When U.S. imports declined precipitously, the American Depression was exported overseas. The price of rice plummeted while bank collapses in America and Europe raised the cost of money. Over the next three years the value of Burmese exports plunged by more than 50 percent. For many years government officials had fretted about the increasing indebtedness of farmers but had done little to address the problem. Now it was too late. As in many parts of the world, the coming Depression hit hardest those least able to cope. Hundreds of thousands of
rural families became landless across the Irrawaddy Delta, the Tenasserim coastline, and elsewhere.
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On 5 May 1930, just after eight o’clock in the morning, a great earthquake centered in the far north shook much of the country, killing as many as six thousand people and destroying the onetime capital of Pegu. The great pagoda there, housing relics of the Buddha himself, crumpled to the ground. A few months later another quake, this one followed by a tsunami, caused extensive damage to coastal areas. For many Burmese this was an omen that the end of British rule was near. But no one knew what would come next.

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On 22 December that same year a traveling mendicant named Saya San declared himself king of Burma in a jungle clearing in the Tharrawaddy District not far from Rangoon, launching his rebellion at the specially chosen and auspicious time of 11:33 p.m. He styled himself the Thupannaka Galon Raja, and a broad white umbrella was held over his head as he took possession of the various marks of royalty in a ceremony modeled exactly on those of the extinguished Court of Ava. The day before, the acting governor, the innovatively named Sir Joseph Augustus Maung Gyi, had refused even to consider a petition from impoverished farmers in the area who had been pleading for a reduction in the year’s taxes. The rebel army, originally several hundred strong with about thirty firearms among them, eventually grew to upward of three thousand men. It was a passionate, desperate revolt and was not put down until the spring of 1932. In the United States,
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
was playing four times a week on radios across the country while in Burma magicians egged on the tattooed supporters of this kingly pretender. By June 1931 the government had to deploy over eight thousand troops, and by that summer, seven new battalions, six Indian and one British, had been added. Saya San was eventually forced to flee north of Mandalay, where he hid for a while in a monastery. He was captured while making his way to the Shan hills, convicted of treason, and hanged sometime after the rains.

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Old-style revolt wasn’t the only product of hard times. Earlier that year Burma’s pluralistic society had taken a disturbing turn toward longterm
ethnic conflict. A labor dispute between striking Indian dockworkers and Burmese strikebreakers, with taunts about race and women, had turned bloody, escalating quickly into an all-out assault by mobs of Burmese against any and all Indians in the poorer quarters of downtown Rangoon. It was a massacre, and hundreds, perhaps more, of ethnic Indian civilians were killed. Worse might have followed, from renewed Burmese attacks or from Indian reprisals, had it not been for the deployment of the Cameron Highlanders of the Rangoon garrison, their machine guns mounted and made ready along Fraser and Dalhousie streets. These were the first but not the last Burmese-Indian riots. In 1938 another round of attacks left up to two hundred people dead and over a thousand wounded. This time the spark was set by a Muslim-authored book allegedly hostile to Buddhism.
The Sun
newspaper, once respectable, was now taken over by the firebrand politician U Saw, who used the daily to inflame local opinion. For two weeks law and order broke down in parts of the capital city.

An anti-Indian character was now deeply etched into ethnic Burmese nationalism, with disastrous consequences in the years to come. But there was another local and rival nationalism that developed during these years as well, the nationalism of the Karens.

Many of the Karens, one of the country’s largest minority peoples, had converted to Christianity as a result of the efforts of American Baptist missionaries in the nineteenth century. The first missionary was Adoniram Judson of Malden, Massachusetts, who arrived by ship from New York in 1812. A man of hardy constitution, he spent most of the next four decades in Burma, surviving two successive wives (and marrying a third), two children, and a brutal eighteen-month imprisonment at the hands of the Burmese king during the First Anglo-Burmese War. Other eager and earnest Americans soon followed, and Judson later wrote the first English-Burmese dictionary, still in use. There was never much success with the Burmese. The first convert was in 1819, a full six years after Judson’s arrival. His attempts to influence the court were even less successful. On his first trip to Amarapura he had taken a beautifully bound and wrapped Bible together with a brief summary of Christianity in Burmese; the king, Bagyidaw, a somewhat doctrinaire Buddhist, read the first couple of lines of the summary and then tossed it back.

But the Karens were much more open to Christian conversion.
They had their own stories of a great flood and of a woman being created from the rib of a man. They also apparently had a tradition that messengers from across the seas would one day bring them “the lost book,” about as good an opening for European missionaries as one can imagine. By the late 1820s a number of Karens had joined the Baptist Church, and their numbers continued to grow, in particular in the Tenasserim and parts of the Irrawaddy Delta. The majority of Karen speakers were never Christian. Most were animists, practicing their own rituals and maintaining their old beliefs, and many, especially those who lived in the lowlands near the Burmese, had become Buddhists. But it was the Christian Karens who became the leaders of the community, including several who had been to university in America. Today about 6 percent of Burma is Christian, out of whom about half a million people are Karen Christians belonging to the Baptist Convention. In America, Judson’s work as the first Baptist missionary excited fellow church members and led to the formation of the first General Convention of Baptist Denominations in 1814.
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Over the following century many Karens came to associate British rule and their cooperation with the British with a better life and future. In the months after Thibaw’s downfall, a special levy of Karen soldiers helped patrol the newly won territories, and it was Christian Karens who helped crush a sympathetic uprising in Lower Burma. From then on, large numbers of Karens were recruited into the army and military police. Karens had been instrumental in hunting down Saya San and his followers.

Once Burmese nationalists began pushing for home rule, Karens (about 7 percent of the total population of the province) countered with their own demands for separate electorates and reserved seats in the new Legislative Council. The leader of the Karen National Association in the 1920s was the Albany Medical College–educated Dr. San C. Po, and he insisted that his people would never receive a fair deal under Burmese rule. Even before the Muslim League began its call for a separate Pakistan, San C. Po was calling on London to set aside all of the Tenasserim as a Karen state. As between Burmese and Indians, relations between Burmese and Karens, however confrontational at times, was tempered by many personal connections and friendships. Day to day there was as much interaction as ever, and mixed marriages were (and are) common. But the seeds of later conflict were being laid, with
a militant ethnic Burmese nationalism taking center stage, nearly half the country excluded from ongoing constitutional reforms, a rival Karen nationalism calling for a separate state, the Indians seen increasingly as foreigners, and the minds of British policy makers, as usual, focused elsewhere.

“
THE IRISH OF THE EAST”

As one looks back from the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is remarkable how Burmese politics has been the preserve of a handful of men who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. In a way, the history of Burma in the twentieth century can be told as the history of this group of men (and a very few women), many of them friends or at least at university at the same time in the dark years before the Pacific war. My grandfather U Thant, the first and longtime postindependence prime minister U Nu, the Burma Army commander and later dictator general Ne Win, the martyred hero of the independence movement Aung San, the leader of the Communist insurrection Than Tun, and many others—government ministers and opposition politicians, army officers and their guerrilla counterparts—nearly all were at Rangoon University at the same time.

They were not the only ones at the university in those days. They were not even the better students. The better students had come from the more expensive boarding schools like St. John’s in Rangoon and gone on to become barristers, magistrates, university lecturers, and civil servants. It was the boys from what were called the Anglo-vernacular schools and the nationalist schools that found their way into the history books, boys from small-town middle-class families, the sons of successful shopkeepers and rice mill owners, who rejected the high-status and well-paid careers ahead of them and instead chose the path of politics.

Or as some might say, the high-status and well-paid careers rejected them. Few of the future politicians were destined for the highest marks and the best jobs. In the 1930s at Rangoon University, 40 percent of those who qualified for the B.A. examinations regularly failed to pass. Their school training did little to stimulate a sense of loyalty to the Raj and yet at the same time disconnected them from their families and backgrounds. Rangoon University had opened their eyes to the bigger
world, given them the time and place to read and think and debate, and then made them realize that in this British Burma only a few doors led to success.

Many were also swept up into the political world around them. Sinn Fein was a perennial favorite, but Irish republicanism was hardly going to offer an answer to all of Burma’s woes. India was the obvious place to look, and the Indian National Congress would prove a great influence. But its pacifist tendencies and Hindu religious overtones did not excite the young students in the way that Michael Collins and the Irish Republican Army had excited an earlier generation. Excitement led in other directions. In the 1930s almost all Europe was moving toward authoritarian government. The Fascists had been in power in Italy for a decade, and on 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler was officially sworn into office as Germany’s new chancellor. By 1939 Spanish republicans were defeated after a long and hard-fought war against General Francisco Franco. And communism, as personified by Joseph Stalin, seemed a genuine blueprint of what was to come and one that could be adopted in the non-Western world. For the Burmese students it was hard to see parliamentary democracy and slow constitutional reform as the wave of the future.