Winston Churchill never visited Burma (Myanmar), but he had a family connection.

As Secretary of State for India in 1885, his father Lord Randolph Churchill (1849-1895) had pushed for the conquest of Upper Burma as a new year’s gift to Queen Victoria.

Churchill saw the annexation of Burma as his father’s only real lasting legacy as a politician (an ailing Lord Randolph even made a trip to Burma in 1895, wanting to see the province “which I annexed” before he died).

But how could the young Churchill have known that sixty years later he would be standing in the House of Commons to witness the separation of his father’s province from the British Empire forever?

Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was born in the era of high colonialism, when the “sun never set” on the British Empire, and Britain’s imperial writ seemed to span the globe.

He started his career as a military journalist and erstwhile soldier in Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa, experiences which he parlayed into a successful bid for Parliament in 1900.

Churchill was a diehard imperialist and a racist who believed that white people had an inherent superiority over the so-called “lesser” races of the world.

He notoriously called Gandhi a “half-naked fakir” and he held deplorable views on race.

Churchill came of age during a period that was also marked by widespread resistance to British rule by colonial peoples from India to Africa, and the Caribbean.

Far from supporting the anti-colonial cause, however, Churchill was indefatigable in squashing colonial dissent – first as Under Secretary of State for the Colonial Office, and later as Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Prime Minister.

He deployed the infamous paramilitary groups known as “black and tans” in Ireland in 1920, and he was Prime Minister during the violent suppression of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya in 1952, which involved the use of torture and concentration camps.

Defending his hardline approach, Churchill always argued that British rule promised a level of protection and development for colonial peoples that they would be unable to achieve for themselves.

But the case of Burma in World War Two would prove him wrong.

It was Churchill’s administration and not the Burmese who had failed to fortify Burma against the threat of Japanese invasion, and the country was quickly overrun by Japanese imperial troops in 1942.

(Burma had been the rice bowl of India, and in the absence of Burmese rice imports, Churchill’s decision to redirect the rice supplies of Bengal to the army (or in some cases simply destroy them in an effort to deny them to the advancing Japanese) resulted in the deaths of 2.1-3 million people during the Bengal Famine of 1943, and fueled support for Gandhi and the Quit India Movement, which Churchill saw as a mere “fifth column” undermining the British war effort).

The rapid loss of Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, and Burma to the Japanese and the near loss of northeastern India in 1942 was a deeply embarrassing episode for the Prime Minister.

The Japanese conquest of Burma proved how tenuous was the British Empire’s hold on her Eastern possessions, and how little the local populations had tried to fight for their “benevolent” colonial rulers.

The reconquest of Burma in 1945 also showed how well the Indian Army – which Churchill often disparaged – could fight.

Though Burma was reconquered under his watch, the country was never the same as it had been pre-1942. For instance, two thirds of Burma’s infrastructure was simply gone – destroyed by the retreating British and advancing Japanese.

Regular administration had fallen apart, and Communist and ethnic insurgencies were quickly gaining momentum.

Moreover, a Burmese Independence Army (BIA), which had been given training and support by the Japanese, was demanding full independence for the country posthaste.

In the meantime, Churchill’s Conservative Party had lost the general election in Britain in 1945.

The new Labour administration under Clement Attlee (1883-1967) recognized the difficulty of fighting colonial wars on a global scale and the need to focus on rebuilding a war-torn Britain (whose economy was heavily in debt to the Americans).

The principal leaders of the Burmese interim government – including a young BIA General Aung San (father of democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi) – met with Attlee in London in January, 1947 to negotiate self-government for Burma.

They agreed that Burma would receive complete and total independence (it would not even become part of the British Commonwealth).

It was in this context that Churchill rose to address the House of Commons on the eve of the Burma independence vote.

“It was said, in the days of the great Administration of Lord Chatham, that one had to get up very early in the morning in order not to miss some of the gains and accessions of territory which were then characteristic of our fortunes.”

“Now,” Churchill bemoaned, “the British Empire seems to be running off almost as fast as the American Loan.”

The crux of his speech was straightforward: Burma was not ready for self-government.

To his mind the whole affair had been rushed. The country was in shambles and Britain would be leaving Burma in questionable hands. Churchill called Aung San a “traitor rebel leader” who had sided with the Japanese and “whose hands were dyed with British blood and loyal Burmese blood”. He argued that Burma’s “hill tribes”, some of whom had supported Britain in the War, had not given their assent to independence, and he presaged a “bloody welter” that would break out between them and the ethnic Burmese when the British were gone.

Finally, the new Burmese government was to be a Socialist one set on nationalizing British industries, and “no effective provision has been made for compensation.” British commercial power would be damaged.

Instead, Churchill advocated a gradual shift to dominion status for Burma within the British Empire and not full independence.

He warned that the outcome of the vote would prove a great historical mistake: “I say this to the Government: You shall bear that burden. By your fruits you will be judged. We [Conservatives] shall have no part or lot in it.”

Churchill lost the vote – 288 in favor, 114 against — and Burma became independent on 4 January 1948.

In some respects, Churchill’s predictions were proven right. In 1949, Burma devolved into a widespread civil war between the Communists, ethnic insurgencies and the State — the very “bloody welter” he had foretold.

But he was also wrong in that Britain would likely have had to fight another war to keep Burma (a war which might’ve dragged on for years like Britain’s violent attempt to keep control of its colony in Malaya which lasted until 1957).

The Burmese government was not ready to accept Dominion status and British troops would’ve had to impose it by force. Also, the United States was keen for Britain to give up its colonial possessions, and at the time, they effectively controlled the pound sterling through the War Loan (a fact that they demonstrated when they began selling off their reserves during the Suez Crisis of 1956).

Renegade British officers also did not help the situation by helping to arm the various ethnic groups and potentially even the assassins who killed Aung San and his cabinet in July of 1947.

(By 1949, of the six Burmese ministers who had met Attlee in London in 1947, four were dead and two had resigned).

The situation was indeed dire.

Later on, in 1955, when Churchill was out of government and rapidly growing older, he met the first prime minister of an independent Burma, U Nu (1907-1995), in London.

Nu later wrote that “by that time Sir Winston had slowed down considerably. He walked with some difficulty and his gait, as he descended the stairs, was awkward and unsteady.”

“Sir Winston was also hard of hearing, which compelled U Nu to shout his words. As they sat at a table, there was a bottle of liquor on it. A single glass reposed beside, Sir Winston asked, “Where’s the glass for U Nu?”. 

The secretary told him U Nu [as a devout Buddhist] did not drink.

When they stood outside for photographs, Churchill suggested that they agree to “bury our old animosities” and U Nu accepted.

Within seven years, U Nu’s quasi-democratic government would be ousted in a pro-military coup that plunged Burma into sixty-odd years of dictatorship.

By 1965, Churchill was dead.

One thing was evident to everyone present that day: the Churchill family had played a major, if highly problematic, role in the history of modern Burma – one that has had reverberating consequences up until today.

As a foreigner living in Myanmar from 2016-2020, I became accustomed to greeting people with  one sparkling Burmese phrase: Mingala-ba!

My guidebook told me that it meant something akin to “auspiciousness unto you”. 

Everywhere I went, Burmese people used it too. In airports, hotels, restaurants, and cafés, the service staff would address me with an equally enthusiastic Mingala-ba and we were off to a running start.

But as I came to meet more and more Burmese people on a personal level, it quickly became apparent that they very rarely used this uber-formal greeting amongst themselves (in fact, it started to seem like a conspiracy to use it only with foreigners!).

Whenever I listened to them greet each other in the street, they usually said sa-pi-pi-la? (have you eaten?) or nay-kaun-yay-la? (how are you?) or bay-thwa-m’lo-lay (for what/where are you going?), or simply nothing at all.

Moreover, when I dug a little deeper into the history books, I learned that this surprisingly ubiquitous phrase was, in fact, like so many aspects of our cultures, a modern invention.

The anthropologist Gustaaf Houtman has written that, much like the Thai greeting Swa-dee-ka, the Burmese phrase Mingala-ba first emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, coined as a Burmese language equivalent to ‘hello’ or ‘how are you’ in English.

Before that, Burmese had no official greeting. 

More often than not, Burmese people would wish each other kyan-ma-ba-say “good health” or just say “Good Morning” in English.

Burmese-English language phrase books intended for the use of British colonial officers in the 19th century tend to list ma-ee-la?, ma-ba-ee-la? or kin-pya ma-yay-la? as the best Burmese equivalents for “how do you do?” alongside such useful phrases as “bring a brace of pistols” and “fetter the elephant and turn him out!.”

Mingala-ba, however, is nowhere to be found. 

So where do the phrase’s origins lie?

According to the scholar and journalist Bo Bo Lan Sin, new year’s day in Myanmar was traditionally celebrated by Buddhists as Mingala-aka-daw-nay or the “day of great auspiciousness” on which the Mangala Sutta, one of the Buddha’s most important teachings, would be read aloud.

But Bo Bo writes that leading up to Burmese independence from Britain in 1948, the reciting of the Mangala Sutta inspired a movement within Burmese-Buddhist society called the Mingala Movement.

This was part of a larger conservative Buddhist movement for the renovation of Buddhist values in the face of modernity and Western influence with roots in the Burmese nationalist uprisings of the 1930s. 

This movement was extremely successful, with Burmese prime minister U Nu attempting to make Buddhism the state religion in 1961.

(Myanmar is a majority Buddhist country, with some 90 percent of the country practicing Buddhism. But there are also Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Animists and representatives of numerous other faiths. There is still no state religion.)

In 1950, then-Secretary of the Railways, U Ba Than, and the lecturer, U Kyaw Htut, worked with the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) to spread the Mingala Movement throughout the country.

They lobbied for the Mangala Sutta to be taught in schools and raised money to send Buddhist preachers into remote rural regions.

U Ba Than believed that by getting the Mangala Sutta into the hands of people, he might heal the moral decay in Burmese society caused by colonialism and the war wounds of World War 2.

As such, the Buddhist nationalist adherents of the Mingala movement greeted each other by saying Mingala-ba or “auspiciousness unto you”, but the greeting took a long time to catch on in the rest of Myanmar.

The main catalyst for its spread was public education.

Bo Bo writes that starting with the nationalization of schools under Gen. Ne Win’s government in 1964, English greetings were done away with and the formal greeting Mingala-ba substituted in their place. Consequently, one can still hear classrooms of children in Myanmar resounding with a chorus of Mingala-ba’s to this day. 

This push to spread Buddhism and the Mingalaba greeting to the whole of Burma was aided by an official policy in the 1960s to teach the Burmese language in government schools (and not regional ethnic languages) and to reserve government jobs for ethnic Burmese.

The legacy of these twin policies of the Burmanization and Buddhification is evident today in the placement of Buddhist pagodas on prominent hilltops in ethnic areas and Burmese language road-signs in non-Burmese speaking regions.

In this way, the story of Mingalaba reminds us that even such fundamental cultural attributes as the way we say “hello” can be directly influenced by politics, religion and historical events.

Sources:

Gustaaf Houtman, Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics (1999).

Bo Bo Lan Sin, မင်္ဂလာနေ့ နဲ့ မင်္ဂလာပါအစ – BBC News မြန်မာ (2018).

U.S. War Department Burmese Phrase Book, March 10, 1944

Marlborough’s Burmese “Self-Taught” by R.F. St. A. St. John 1911

Vocabulary and Phrase Book in English and Burmese by Cephas Bennett (1886). 

In the early hours of the morning of February 1st, 2021 the Myanmar military (or Tatmadaw) detained the leader of the opposition party, Aung San Suu Kyi, the President, U Win Myint, and several of their chief advisors, as well as a number of chief ministers and regional parliamentary representatives in what is undoubtedly a coup d’etat. Ironically, as recently as yesterday, military spokesmen were criticizing international diplomats and media organizations for stoking fears of an imminent coup; but what they feared has indeed come to pass. Internet and phone communications with the country’s capital, Naypyitaw, were cut in the early hours of Sunday morning and tanks were seen on the roads in Naypyitaw and Yangon. The airport and the national TV station, MRTV, were surrounded, and the national news network has been showing army propaganda on loop. Ministers were arrested in their homes just as Parliament was set to reconvene on Monday. The military is alleging widespread voter fraud in the 2020 General Election, which Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) won by a landslide. Even though the Union Electoral Commission (UEC) in Myanmar has steadfastly denied that the election was biased, the military maintains that millions of fraudulent names were included in the election rolls, thus inflating the numbers. In response, Maj. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing has seized control of the country for one year, claiming a state of emergency. At times of particular political uncertainty such as these it can be useful to look to the past, and Myanmar’s history has had its fair share of political upheaval…

1947

Even before Myanmar gained independence from the British on Jan. 4, 1948, the young country experienced its first failed coup attempt when gunmen stormed the Minister’s Building in Yangon and killed Premier Aung San (Aung San Suu Kyi’s father) and six members of his interim government in a hail of bullets. The gunmen were hired by the ex-Premier, Galon U Saw, who purchased the machine guns from two British officers and hoped to seize power once Aung San was dead. Instead, U Saw was detained, tried and hung for treason. Today, Aung San, a war hero, is widely viewed as the father of the nation (and the military) and his death is considered a great lost opportunity for Myanmar as he was busy brokering peace between the government and the country’s many disparate armed ethnic groups when he was killed. The event has since been commemorated every year on July 19th as Martyr’s Day. 

1962 

After a number of years of civil war between the Myanmar government and various armed ethnic groups and a communist insurgency, the Myanmar military under the leadership of one of Aung San’s former comrades, General Ne Win, seized power from the civilian government in Yangon on March 2nd, 1962. This was the most significant coup in Myanmar’s 20th century history as the democratically-elected civilian government was replaced with one party rule under the direct control of the military’s Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP). Contrary to the impression of a “bloodless” coup promulgated in the international news media at the time, several ethnic minority leaders, including the Sawbwa of Yawnnghwe’s son, Sao Mye Thaik, and the Sawbwa of Hsipaw, Sao Kya Seng, were brutally murdered. In addition, student protesters were shot on the grounds of the University of Yangon. Then-Premier U Nu was arrested and later fled the country, seeking asylum in the United States and elsewhere. This event was the beginning of 26 years of military dictatorship in Myanmar and a dark political period for the country.

1988 

In August of 1988, thousands of people took to the streets in Myanmar to demonstrate against military rule. The previous year, Gen. Ne Win’s careless devaluation of the Myanmar currency — the kyat — had wiped out much of the middle class’s savings overnight and led to widespread unrest. Under pressure from his top brass, General Ne Win resigned in July, 1988, but he warned “if the army shoots it has no tradition of shooting into the air. It would shoot straight to hit.” In Yangon and Mandalay that summer the military responded to peaceful protests with these statements in mind — arresting hundreds of students and killing scores more (at the time it was alleged that the moat of the old palace in Mandalay had turned red with the blood of the student protesters). The military then proceeded to seize direct control of the country from the government through its State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). Despite the bloodshed, the growing movement for democracy gained a voice in the form of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was quickly detained and put under house arrest in 1989. 

2011

In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, Myanmar’s military government gave no impression of moving towards democratic reforms. But a growing economic opening-up since 1994, the advent of foreign investment and a sense that Myanmar was falling even further behind other Southeast Asian countries primed Myanmar people for political change. A sudden rise in the price of fuel sparked the so-called Saffron Revolution in 2007, during which the Buddhist monkhood in their saffron robes joined hands with pro-democracy protesters to denounce the military; the monks were brutally beaten. The next year Cyclone Nargis ravaged the country, killing over a hundred thousand people. Military dictator Than Shwe’s botched response to the crisis led to the creation of a new constitution that was meant to pave the way for democracy. Than Shwe’s ousting, a slew of reforms introduced by President Thein Sein’s government following 2011, and the democratic opposition NLD party’s first entrance into government in 2012, created a new image of Myanmar in the world as a rapidly democratizing, developing state.

2021

Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD party has since won two national elections, though under the 2008 Constitution the military still retains a veto power, with 25% of seats in Parliament retained for serving military officers. This is why yesterday’s coup was so surprising — the military does not need to win the election to maintain its grip on power. Nevertheless, the military announced that it will uphold the rule of law and the 2008 Constitution and “democratic norms” in the interest of the people. But those same people have had their fair share of unfulfilled political promises in recent years (from both sides). Moreover, the international optimism and investment that followed 2011 has since died out in the wake of 2017’s Rohingya Genocide — in which thousands of Muslims in the country’s eastern Rakhine state were killed or driven into Bangladesh — and Aung San Suu Kyi’s subsequent defense of her country’s response to the crisis at the Hague. COVID-19, moreover, has drastically damaged the country’s tourism industry and fighting has resumed between the military and a number of minority ethnic insurgencies in the North and West of the country. Throughout the past ten years, journalists have been imprisoned and minority groups have been marginalized. In this uncertain climate, a coup was perhaps more than likely, and in response the NLD has told its supporters to protest the move. In the past few hours, the Commander in Chief of the Myanmar military, Min Aung Hlaing, however, has announced that he will be taking over control of the country for a period of one year, claiming a state of emergency. He will likely demand another election, but the damage wrought by the coup to Myanmar’s fledgling democracy has already been done. Only time will tell what this new coup d’etat might bring…

Hello readers!

I haven’t been writing here because I’ve been writing over at Southeast Asia Globe and Myanmore Magazine (here are the links, there is a bit of overlap with some prior blog posts, but also a lot of new stuff – so go check it out!).

https://www.myanmore.com/author/christiangilberti/

https://southeastasiaglobe.com/the-race-to-yunnan-railway/

Today I’d like to talk about two monuments that represent, respectively, a bit of Britain in Burma, and a bit of Burma in Britain.

The first can be found down a narrow side-street in Yangon in the grounds of the St. John the Baptist Catholic Church. A large red pyramid of laterite rock, it is a monument to one Major J. Walker of the Madras Army, who died storming the stockade at Rangoon (Yangon) in the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824. It is likely that the tombstone was moved here from the English Cantonment Cemetery near Kandawgyi Lake when the Burmese military took over that site in the 1960s.

The First Anglo-Burmese War pitted the forces of the British East India Co. and their Indian allies against the mighty Burmese Empire which had just completed a period of great expansion, defeating the kingdoms of Assam, Manipur, Siam and Arakan in quick succession.

Burmese troops had been making incursions into British Bengal in the area of Chittagong and the “Honourable Company” simply could not abide this violation of its liberties any longer. The British landed at Rangoon and promptly attacked the Burmese forces, who put up a strong defense, but were ultimately defeated. The War would drag on until 1826 with the Treaty of Yandabo, in which the Konbaung kings were forced to cede the provinces of Arakan, Assam, Manipur and Tanintharyi to the British and pay an indemnity of 1 million pounds.

This was a Pyrrhic victory, however, as the fighting had already cost the British 5-13 million pounds,  precipitated economic collapse in India, and left behind 15,000 British and Indian dead. One of those casualties, no doubt, was the late Major Walker, aged 42 years at the time of his death.

His sacrifice to the Crown, and that of others, would be commemorated in similar monuments throughout Burma and India, literally inculcating the British victory onto the Burmese landscape. Within thirty years, Rangoon would fall into British hands and be completely re-designed in the manner of a European city to house a foreign population of Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Armenians and Jews, becoming barely recognizable in the process.

But just as Britain’s global conquest would have a lasting effect on the geography of Burma, scattering it with the physical markers of British dominion, so too would the influx of wealth from Burmese and other colonial possessions change the landscape of Britain, swelling the port cities, filling the coffers of the British landed gentry and resulting in a profusion of museums and monuments to the British imperial endeavor.

One of these monuments remains today on the North Terrace at Windsor Castle (the traditional home of the British royal family). It is a large bell from Mandalay that was seized by the British during the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885-6, flanked on either side by two French and Portuguese cannons, also taken from Mandalay. The British Empire was not above stealing and displaying such spoils of war and Burmese artefacts (thus purloined) fill the collections of museums throughout the country and the Western world today.

In the case of the bell at Windsor,  it originally hung in the Mandalarama Monastery in Aungmyethazan Township in Northeast Mandalay where it would have been rung three times by worshipers after venerating the image of the Buddha (once for the Buddha, once for his followers, and once for his teachings).

The bell has an interesting provenance. It was donated to the monastery by the Khampat Mingyi, one of the chief ministers of the Burmese Konbaung Dynasty (1752-1885), in 1878. The Khampat Mingyi was the leader of one of several warring factions in the hluttaw or parliament under King Thibaw, the last king of Burma (Source: U Sein Maung Oo, Kaun Laun Sar “The Book of Bells” quoted at The Learners with Thirst for Wisdom at https://www.facebook.com/groups/410766139274726/?multi_permalinks=622299881454683&ref=share).

Scandalously, the Khanpat Mingyi’s granddaughter Daing Khin Khin was at the centre of a plot to break Queen Supayalat’s notorious hold over her husband Thibaw. Thibaw’s closest confidant, Maung Maung Toke, introduced Daing Khin Khin to Thibaw hoping that the King would be smitten and take the beautiful seventeen year-old as his wife. Thibaw fell in love with her immediately, but upon hearing of her husband’s infidelity, Queen Supayalat flew into a rage and quickly neutralized Maung Maung Toke, Daing Khin Khin and her entire family’s influence. The 17 year-old Daing Khin Khin was later executed. Supayalat was in fact unusual in the history of Burmese royalty not for her tenacity, but for insisting that Thibaw limit himself to one queen – herself (Source: Sudha Shah, The King in Exile).

When the British marched into Mandalay in 1885 they stole much of the King’s jewels, gold and royal regalia, and ransacked the holy pagodas and monasteries. Among this loot must have been the Windsor bell as well as an additional three bells taken by the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers from the Atumashi Monastery and sent back to Britain. One of them is still on public display at Wrexham in Wales, another ended up at the Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum at Caernarfon Castle, and is not clear what happened to the third.

Many other specimens of Burmese art taken from Mandalay were displayed in museums, public squares and private collections throughout Britain, making the British public more knowledgeable about Burma, while at the same time reinforcing the bonds that tied Britain and Burma tightly together through the unequal logic of empire.

What does it mean for a country to become modern?

By “modern”, historians often mean a variety of different and conflicting things. “Modernity” might mean that a country is technologically advanced, that its economic system is based on trade or securities, or that it has a positive attitude towards democracy, women or human rights.

Oftentimes, it is simply just a shorthand for all the socio-cultural attitudes and norms associated with Western countries.

But in order for a “modern world” to exist, there has to be a “primitive world” out there somewhere. “Modernity” therefore is based on the highly questionable assumption that a place can be behind culturally or with respect to civilization; literally, it is the idea that time moves differently in different places, which we know not to be the case.

When they first came to Burma in the eighteenth-century, British commentators noted a number of ways in which the Burmese were ahead of their European brethren in terms of civilization. Burmese women, for instance, because of their visibility in the marketplace and relative freedom of marriage,  were supposed to have an elevated position above that of European women (nevermind that they spent much of their day cooking food to offer up to the large population of sedentary male monks). Moreover, Burmese society was supposed to have a high rate of literacy and tolerance due to the mollifying influence of the Buddhist religion (in spite of the fact that the bloody anti-Indian riots in Rangoon in 1938 began in a monastery).

The flip-side to this coin was, of course, the identification of a number of features that British administrators considered backward or primitive e.g. Burmese men’s supposed lack of industry, the high rate of alcoholism and crime in Burma, and the practice of polygamy. Many of these features were in fact by-products of colonization (Britain had taken away traditional systems of patronage, administration and policing and replaced them with a corrupt civil service bent on exacting as much cold hard cash from the people as possible) but the British preferred to gloss over this fact. Ultimately, they concluded that such a society deserved to be dominated by a stronger, more civilized power.

These ideas about the Burmese were colonial constructions and they have been perpetuated in novels, histories and guide books even up to the present. Cultural stereotypes, after all, are the bread and butter of the travel and entertainment industries. It is amazing to read over and over again, for instance, that the Burmese people are the nicest, most welcoming people on the planet, and then take a look at the New York Times coverage of the conflict in Rakhine state. Such double-edged generalizations were and continue to be a means of controlling and dehumanizing “developing” populations around the world.

In contrast to the one-sided images of Burmese people provided by British writers in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, we might instead attempt to look at the archive through Burmese eyes. This is often a difficult task as so much of the Burmese experience of colonization has been obscured by the dominance of the English language, the gaze of the European, and the process of inclusion and omission. But it is not impossible, and oftentimes Western historians are simply unwilling to do the work necessary to uncover the day-to-day experiences of the colonized (e.g. learning indigenous languages, going to local archives, taking oral tradition seriously, conducting interviews, or simply asking indigenous historians what they think about an issue).

I recognize that this can be hard – but even in Western archives there is a way to read against the grain. In this light, an album of photographs in the India Office Records at the British Library recently caught my eye. Penny Edwards talks about the importance of getting properly “stuck in” to an archive and of discovering things that you would otherwise never have known existed if you simply looked at an online catalogue. These “archival detours”, as she calls them, are where the magic happens, often providing the methodical historian with the opportunity to see their subject in a completely different light. Her advice is not unlike Robert Caro’s recent injunction to young journalists to “turn every page” – you never know what you might find.

In this case the album was titled “Burma Railways Collection: War Loan Special Train,” but it was not until I opened the box and brushed the dust off the cover that I realized the importance of what was inside. In 1918, the Burma Railways in collaboration with the Government of India organized a “War Loan Train” in order to convince the inhabitants of Burma to buy war bonds and support the British in their fight against the Germans in WW1.

The train traveled around the country and people could buy war bonds directly from its carriages. It was, according to chief clerk Ba Sein, “the first gigantic advertising campaign in the East through the medium of a railway.” The train was fitted out on either side with hand-painted ads urging the Burmese to “put your money in cash certificates” and to “be wise and follow Shrewd John’s example” under which was a picture of a happy-looking Asian man holding two war bond certificates.

Further cartoons, likely by the artist Hla Maung, claimed that war bonds were “burglar proof”, safer than “hoarding” cash, and that they were a sound investment leading to wealth (in this case signified by a man in shoes with a cigar and cane, and his wife in a silk shawl, carrying an umbrella).

What was most amazing, however, was the turn-out at the various stations throughout the country. As I flipped through the pictures, I saw crowd after crowd of Burmese people staring back at me; wives and husbands, mothers and children, local merchants, dancing troupes, boy scouts and eligible young debutantes. At each station they were thronging the train such that in one town the photographers Wagstaff and Co. noted “only about a quarter of those who were on the platform come into this photograph. All photos of crowds had to be taken from roof of carriages as crowds so dense could not fit a photo otherwise.”

The train was a huge success; the sale of war bonds reached 5,038,213 rupees (£49,542,411 in today’s money) – a staggering sum for the time and one that doubly underscores the contribution of colonial Burma to WW1. The endeavor was financed in part by the preeminent Chinese businessman in Burma, Lim Chin Tsong, a rubber and oil baron with an impressive mansion on Inya Lake in Rangoon.

Tsong was keen to ingratiate himself with the British and he even donated a transport ship, the HMAT A49 Seang Choon, to the war effort (he would later receive an OBE for his fundraising efforts during WW1). By the time he accompanied the train, however, Tsong was already heavily in debt (his house alone had cost him upwards of 2,000,000 rupees). He would soon try to corner the rice market, but, when the British government prevented the export of Burmese rice outside of India in 1921, he was ruined. He died soon afterwards.

Tsong’s philanthropy was matched by ordinary Burmese citizens throughout the country who took advantage of the train to buy war bonds. Why they did so is an interesting question that strikes at the heart of the Burmese engagement with empire, modernity, and the subsequent narrative of Burmese nationalism. In order to understand it, we have to look at the War Loan Train through Burmese eyes.

At the time, the government was guaranteeing a 5% interest rate on the bonds, a rate of return that David Lloyd George famously described as “penal”, and which would lead Britain to default on the loan in 1932. In fact, the entirety of the WW1 war loan was not paid back until 2015.

But it does not seem likely that Burmese investors were buying war bonds solely because they felt they were guaranteed a great rate of return (moreover, the bonds appear to have been capped at 10 rupees). The real explanation for the success of the train with Burmese people had more to do with their desire to compete with their neighbors and the perception that Burma was falling behind other countries (this perception exists up until today). We see people, young and old, treating the arrival of the War Loan Train as a day out and a chance to show off to the community.

The advertisements on the train also appealed to a sense of imperial pride among the population (at many stations Union Jacks were flown and there were banners reading God Save the King). Traditional tactics of fundraising (such as zat pwe orchestras, yein group dances and papier-mache mandats or stages) usually associated with pagoda festivals were re-purposed for the bond drive. People put on their very best clothing for the occasion and “the stations along the route of the train seem to have vied with one another as to which should best attract public attention to the train.”

The train was a spectacle — but not a spectacle of a foreign technologically-advanced power marching through a primitive land. Rather, it was yet another example of Burmese society adapting to suit its own image of itself as modern. Instead of what colonial commentators saw as lazy, alcoholic, poor, and crime-ridden areas, Burmese communities chose to present themselves all along the route as they really were — industrious, patriotic, fashionable, and wealthy. There was a world war on, and Burma, no doubt, wanted to do its part. The Burmese engagement with “modernity”, then, emerges less as a foreign innovation imposed on the Burmese from the top down, than as a local state of affairs, a renegotiation of old desires in new forms – to be looked at, to be respected, and, perhaps most importantly, to feel in connection with the rest of the world.

(Apologies for the low resolution pictures).

Another more tangible example of the many imperial connections between Scotland and Burma is the lighthouse at Alguada Reef, just off Cape Negrais in the Andaman Sea.

One of many British lighthouses in Burma, it was completed in 1865. The lighthouse stands 44 metres (144 ft.) tall and took 6 years to build because of its remote location.

The structure was originally designed by Scottish engineer Lieut-Col. Alexander Fraser (who also laid the original plan for the city of Rangoon), after a boat carrying 300 “coolie” laborers from Calcutta to Rangoon ship-wrecked on the reef in 1855. Only 11 men survived.

Then-Governor General of India, the Marquess Dalhousie, tasked Fraser with designing and building a light that would avoid further wrecks and be visible from 20 miles out at sea. Fraser made a tour of lighthouses on the Western coast of Scotland and England before submitting his plan.

He eventually settled on a design directly inspired by the Skerryvore Lighthouse in Scotland, which was built by engineer Alan Stevenson (uncle of Robert Louis Stevenson, of Treasure Island fame) in 1844, though Fraser altered it “to suit the requirements of an eastern climate.”

Building the light was especially difficult as construction was only possible during the Winter monsoon from Nov.-Apr. Moreover, storms frequently destroyed the work-site and, before a camp was built, it was impossible to stay on the island during high tide.

The granite for the tower came from 200 miles away in Callagouk (now Kalegauk Island) on the Tenasserim (Tanintharyi) Coast, and also from as far as Singapore. The workmen were convicts from the prison at Moulmein (Mawlamyaing), the contractors were from England, and the stonemasons were from Hong Kong.

When completed, the structure housed 2 European light-keepers, 5 local assistants, and a cook for seven months at a time – a lonely existence for such a long time out at sea.

Although its sister lighthouse Skerryvore is still operational, the site and tower at Alguada Reef are now closed. Nevertheless, they are still visible from satellite imagery available on the internet.

At the beginning of the twentieth-century Burmese students began arriving in Britain to study in growing numbers. Whereas in the nineteenth-century, Burmese students had been few and far between, by 1910 there were at least 80 students enrolled in British universities. Most were young men from wealthy backgrounds; some were studying law, whilst others were studying engineering or medicine. Many hoped to return to Burma as barristers, doctors and engineers, or to earn a coveted position as a magistrate in the British colonial government.

England was no doubt a new and scary place for these young scholars, and they faced many challenges including racism, financial difficulties and culture shock upon first arrival. But the range of Burmese student experiences cannot be boiled down to one generalized narrative of disillusionment with empire leading to greater nationalist sentiment when the student returned home to Burma. Often portrayed as either British stooges, or nationalist politicians in embryo, these early generations of foreign-educated Burmese politicians and intellectuals arrived in England for a variety of reasons – not all of which fit in with the prevailing narrative of the growth of Burmese nationalism.

First and foremost, Burmese students came to England seeking an education and a path for career advancement that was largely unavailable to them back home. The future Minister of Finance under Aung San’s government, U Tin Tut was one such student who attended Dulwich College and then went up to Cambridge, before being called to the English Bar. Tin Tut was familiar with British customs (he played rugby and wore club ties), but he was also keenly aware of the difficulties that Burmese students faced abroad.

In 1921, Tin Tut and two other students complained to the India Office about the situation of Burmese students in Britain. They argued that places should be set aside for Burmese candidates to study at Oxford and Cambridge (at the moment Burmese applicants were being placed at the bottom of the list of Indian applicants) and that funds should be allocated for the Burma Society’s club in London (located in a house in Hammersmith). Furthermore, they complained that if the quality of education were higher in India or Burma, Burmese students would not have to spend the money and time to come to England in the first place.

The rhetoric they used, however, was one of Burmese nationalism within the British Empire. Burmese students, they said, were ready and willing to engage in English social life (in comparison to Indians who sequestered themselves away) and gave “a favourable impression of themselves to the Englishmen they [came] in contact with”. Above all, the applicants were concerned with “the practical impossibility of attaining an appointment in an imperial service without an English education.” If better schools could not be had in Burma, the applicants were concerned with making it easier for more Burmese students to study in England. “The ideal age, for coming to England,” they wrote “is probably 15, when the boy has learnt to be a good Burman and is not too old to learn at public school the ideals of a good Englishman.”

Many well-educated Burmese, therefore, desired a part to play in the workings of Empire. They did not yet outwardly call for separation from Britain, and the focus of Tin Tut and other students at this point in time was not independence but rather to break the glass ceiling for Burmese civil servants (as Tut would later do by becoming the first Burmese officer in the Indian Civil Service).

An earlier generation of Burmese students had already returned home to hold high positions within the British Burma government. For example, Joseph Maung Gyi was educated at Oxford and then called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1911. He would return to Burma to work as a judge and then as the only Burmese acting governor in the history of the colony (he was also later knighted). The illustrious Prof. Pe Maung Tin gained his Bachelor of Letters at Oxford before returning to Burma as the only Burmese appointed to the commission to set up Rangoon University in 1918 (showing that not all Burmese students abroad were concerned with so-called “practical” degrees such as medicine or law).

Many Burmese, no doubt, took the opportunity of study in England to learn about the wider world. A Moulmein native, U Shwe Llay was sent by his wealthy father to Carshalton House School in Surrey as a boy. When he returned home he entered the family business, but clearly he was unable to rid himself of the travelling bug. In 1892 he escorted a German captain to the Siamese border earning the German Order of the White Eagle for his services and in 1906 he embarked upon a round-the-globe tour of England, India, America and Japan (20^th Century Impressions, 382). Burmese men returning home from abroad brought with them not only accolades and practical expertise, but also English habits such as wearing leather shoes, drinking whiskey, carrying canes and smoking cigarettes (as we see in the picture). More importantly, they became respected magistrates and businessmen within their communities.

Not all Burmese students, however, were as interested in playing the game by English rules. Some took the opportunity of studying in England to become involved in nationalist or revolutionary politics. Maung Oo Tin Kyaw originally arrived in England to study Political Science at the London School of Economics, but soon became involved with the British Communist Party, distributing revolutionary pamphlets to Indian workers on ships in the Port of London (Cities in Motion, 204). Scotland Yard caught wind of his dealings and proceeded to follow him, interrupt his mail, and freeze his accounts; all the while Kyaw protested that he was a British subject (he was) and that he was innocent (he wasn’t). Eventually the British government refused to renew his passport and sent him back home to Burma.

Alone in a foreign land, another unusual Burmese student turned to crime. The son of a wealthy magistrate in Prome (Pyay), U Ba Zan came to Britain as a student in 1910, but soon flunked out of school and quickly slid into debt. Within a year he had married a British girl named Monica, the daughter of the owner of the boarding house in which he was staying. He promised to live with her in Rangoon, but when she arrived he turned out to have a pre-existing marriage to a Burmese woman. Monica gave birth to a child at Rangoon General Hospital and then returned to England to live with her family. But upon discovering that Ba Zan had come back as well, she contacted the India Office in the hopes that they might compel him to pay alimony. At the same time, Ba Zan was arrested for stealing money out of his landlady’s purse and it became apparent that he had skipped out on several hotel bills throughout the south of England. The historical record stops there, though – and we are left with Ba Zan refusing to return to Burma, his father refusing to send him any money, and the India Office tearing its hair out over the matter.

Although unusual, this story perfectly encapsulates the stereotypical nightmare of British officials tasked with looking after Burmese students. Steeped in the racist anxiety of the times, British administrators were wringing their hands over the thought of young Burmese men, far away from home, sliding into sin. One E. Colson of the ICS published a pamphlet on precisely this subject in 1910 for the Burma Society in Rangoon, warning of the dangers that awaited young Burmese men in Britain. Colson lamented that, being non-Christian, Burmese students would be particularly susceptible to “public houses” and “dubious company” (the horror!). It seems that even some more conservative Burmese elders, such as one Maung Tin, concurred with the pamphlet’s contents (though he was likely more concerned about Burmese boys absorbing bad habits from the English, running into debt, or dishonoring their families).

There were also English administrators who expressed concern for Burmese students welfare, however, and the India Office Archive shows a long history of educators attempting to build hostels for foreign students who were being turned away from English boarding houses due to their race. Nevertheless, much of this charitable work can be boiled down to a concern that colonial students not become disaffected due to their inhospitable treatment in the metropole and return to their homelands in order to foment revolution. Too little was done, in this regard, too late.

What emerges from these stories, then, is that Burmese students’ experience of Britain in the early twentieth-century was an ambivalent one. Far away from home, they were faced for the first time with a whole new world of ideas, people, consumer goods, and experiences. They brought memories home with them and took advantage of the opportunities that Empire afforded them. But, at the same, their ambitions were often thwarted by racism and discrimination. Only later on in the 1930s, however, when it became apparent that Burma’s position within the Empire was no longer tenable, did many of these prominent Burmese switch their loyalties to the cause of Burmese independence.

Sources:

Arnold Wright. Twentieth Century Impressions of Burma (London, 1910).

The Case of U Ba Zan, a Burmese Student. British Library India Office Records. IOR/L/PJ/6/1115. File 3908.

“In Defence of Burmese Students in England, 1921”. U Tin Tut, Yew Lock and CC Po. British Library India Office Records. IOR/Q/10/2/31

E. Colson. “Arrangements for Burmese Students in England.” British Library India Office Records. ORW.1986.A.126.

Su Lin Lewis. Cities in Motion (Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 204.

As I wrote in my previous post on Myanmar Troops in WW1, large-scale Bamar enlistment in the British Indian army was not a common feature of colonial warfare in Burma.

The Indian army in Burma was mostly comprised of Indian troops with a smattering of ethnic minorities such as the Shan, Kachin, and Karen to round out the core.

Even after the separation of Burma from India in 1937, the number of ethnic Bamar serving in the new Burma Army was only 23 percent despite being 75 percent of the population of the colony (Mary Callahan, Making Enemies, p. 42).

In fact, the Burma Army stopped recruiting Bamar in 1927 altogether, and only started again in earnest when the exigencies of the Japanese Invasion in WW2 required them to do so.

Thereafter, only three battalions of the Burma Rifles contained Bamar troops – the 5^th, 6^th and 7^th – and the first two only contained one company apiece (The Burma Campaign).

Recently, however, Richard Duckett’s insightful blog The Special Operations Executive in Burma has unearthed records of 79 Bamar men who served in British SOE intelligence units during the war.

These were mostly farmers recruited by British officers in the field, who trained as soldiers in India and then parachuted back into Burma to fight the Japanese. There were also a few career soldiers such as Kyaw Ohn, who had completed seven years of army service by 1945, and Maung Shwe, who had served in the Burma Sappers and Miners.

A number of Bamar recruits distinguished themselves in the field, such as Maung Ba Aye, whom his commanding officer described as “a grand fellow, full of good humour, and eccentricity, and outstandingly brave.”

Among these recruits was also Thakin Ko Ko Gyi, a nationalist who succeeded in convincing the BIA forces at Mandalay to betray the Japanese.

Many Bamar soldiers worked on Operation Character, a guerilla operation against the Japanese in the Karen hills. Duckett writes: “Contrary to what is, perhaps, a common perception, many Burmans…formed the nucleus of Special Groups on Operation Character, demonstrating that Karen and Burman fought the Japanese together – and that Character was not only a Karen operation.”

Records like these highlight the Bamar military contribution to the Allied cause in WW2. Too often historians have portrayed the Bamar as either automatic collaborators with the Japanese or else as an invisible population pushed back and forth between two warring armies.

There is no doubt that many Bamar collaborated with the invading Japanese, including the nationalist leader Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, but life during wartime was never so simple as good guys vs. bad guys, black vs. white, especially for occupied peoples.

When caught in the middle of a conflict between empires with little concern for their safety or national self-determination, many Burmese people exercised their agency to choose sides like anyone in a similar situation might do.

And their contribution to history is poised to be lost. Thankfully, attempts have been made to track down and interview the veterans who fought on the Allied side, most notably for a new film from Grammar Productions entitled Forgotten Allies. But more needs to be done to catalog the experiences of veterans on both sides of the conflict as this generation quickly disappears.

Their stories are a reminder that the Burmese people were not always pawns in an imperial game, but that they actively sought to shape their own destiny and fulfill their own vision of what they wanted a post-war Burma to look like.

It was the morning of May 17^th, 1931 in Maymyo, Burma, and a riderless pony trotted into the compound of Syed Ali – the owner of the Maymyo Electric Supply Company – its saddle-back covered in blood.

Maymyo (now Pyin Oo Lwin), situated at the furthest edge of the Shan plateau, was the principal British hill-station in Burma, to which the colonial government in Rangoon decamped for three months during the hot season. Its manicured lawns and prim, trimmed-back rides recalled the English countryside. “The suggestion of a Surrey landscape is unescapable,” remarked one well-known traveller and plant-collector, “if only Surrey rejoiced in such a climate!”

It was down one such ride that morning that Captain Rawdon Briggs of the Royal Gurkha Rifles, having received a telephone call from Syed Ali’s house, led a search party of Gurkha soldiers, only to retire when night fell. The next day they were out early, and at 7:30 a.m. Briggs discovered a body some 200 yards from the path in the underbrush.

The corpse was that of Henry Treise Morshead, a well-known explorer, fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and director of the Survey of India’s Burma circle operations. Morshead was perhaps best known for his involvement in George Mallory’s 1921 and 1922 attempts to summit Everest, during which he lost three of his fingers to frostbite, and for discovering the source of the Dihang River in Tibet. Now he was lying dead on the forest floor in one of the remotest regions of Britain’s global empire with a bullet in his chest and one in his back. He had been shot at point blank range.

The timing of Morshead’s murder could not have been worse for the government in Rangoon. On the night of 22 December 1930, hundreds of miles to the South, a number of armed Burmese peasants, spurred on by the nationalist agitator and renowned medicine man Hsaya San, had attacked forestry officials near the town of Tharrawaddy. Within weeks the unrest spread like wild-fire throughout the rice-growing region of the Irrawaddy Delta and spilled onto the Shan plateau, mutating into a full-blown rebellion against British rule that would take the British two years to put down.

The Burmese grievances were real. The global depression sparked by the Wall Street crash of 1929 had ripped the bottom out of the rice market. In the resulting squeeze, the predominately Indian landlords and moneylenders who owned most of the agricultural land in the Delta were calling in their debts. At the same time, a movement for Burmese independence had been gaining ground since 1920, led by the GCBA (General Council of Burmese Associations) in the city and the wunthanu athins or “own race” associations in the countryside.

Ethnic tensions were high. The previous spring, a group of Indian stevedores had struck on the docks in Rangoon. Burmese workers had been called in as scabs, but when the company eventually reached an agreement with the Indian workers and called them back to work, the incoming Indians clashed with the outgoing Burmese. The resulting three days of anti-Indian riots cost hundreds of lives and left thousands wounded. The British police did nothing, and the army was not called out for three days.

This powder keg of racial, political, and economic animus was fueled by the perception among Burmese Buddhists that the arrival of a new chakravarti or universal ruler was nigh, someone who would revive the legacy of the Buddha’s teachings, his sasana, and raise Buddhism to its former glory as the state religion of Burma.

Nevertheless, British authorities were surprised by the speed and scale of the rebellion. Having put down several following their conquest of the country fifty-five years earlier, they believed they were dealing with a coup on the part of a pretender king to the Konbaung throne – the official government report talked of magic, bullet-proofing tattoos and a secret crowning ceremony involving a blood-pact.

In fact, for all his regal rhetoric, Hsaya San was not a pretender king, but a modern political leader, a district leader of the GCBA, and a well-known speechifier.

According to the historian Maitrii Aung-Thwin, the British were used to viewing rebellion in Burma through the lens of their own ideas about Burmese superstition, criminality, and “traditional” Burmese culture. The source of the rebellion, it turned out, was much simpler, and far more dangerous – it was general dislike of British rule. In the British magistrate and author Maurice Collis’s words, every “man and woman in Burma wanted to get rid of the English Government.” In this context the death of a well known British civil servant would have far-reaching consequences beyond Maymyo.

■

The Rangoon papers quickly caught wind of Henry Morshead’s death and began to speculate wildly as to the identity of the killer. The rebellion was still ongoing and dacoits – gangs of armed rebels – had been seen in the area of Maymyo the night before the murder. There had been other attacks. A few weeks earlier, an Indian man by the name of Ahmed Ali had attempted to kill a British forestry official named Heaney. The man was a disgruntled employee and he was agitated so he missed Heaney entirely and was quickly disarmed. Morshead had been present at the scene. Perhaps the murder was part of a larger plot against the British administration at Maymyo?

But the papers somewhat ironically (given his status as a senior British civil servant in a British colony) claimed that Morshead had no “obvious” enemies and was well-liked by all who knew him. The government began to conduct inquiries and quickly arrested two local inhabitants of Maymyo – a Gurkha and a Burmese man – neither of whom were named in the subsequent report.

The Gurkha admitted to having gone hunting in the vicinity of where the murder took place on the same day with a gun he had borrowed from the Burmese man. He said that he mistook Morshead for a stag and fired at him, hitting him in the back. But when he realized his mistake, and Morshead advanced on him to take the gun, it went off in his hand, hitting Morshead in the chest and killing him. The Gurkha even had a bruise on his head to suggest a struggle.

But the final report was ambiguous. It was determined that the Gurkha’s story could not have been true, because it was impossible to cover the distance between his house and the scene of the crime on foot in the time required by the sequence of events. Furthermore, it was determined that there was “no evidence to connect the attack with rebel activity,” even though dacoits had been seen in the area the night before.

Ultimately, Whitehall declared that “the case must remain a mystery.” The King and Queen expressed their condolences to the family via the deceased’s brother, the Royal librarian Sir Owen Morshead, and promised to ensure a pension which never really managed to materialize. Henry’s widowed wife, Evelyn, left for England with her five children, never to return to Burma or the scene of her husband’s death.

But Morshead’s murder was so upsetting to his children and the case left so clearly unresolved that his son, Ian Morshead embarked upon a journey to Burma in 1980 to revisit the scene of the crime and perhaps solve the mystery surrounding his father’s untimely death.

Arriving in Maymyo, a town he remembered well from his childhood, Ian called at the house he had grown up in and was soon dining with the man who held his father’s position in the now-independent Burma Forest Service. He walked the same streets he walked as a boy and followed the same woodland rides (now bullock tracks) to the place that the report said his father had been murdered – all the while looking for clues as to the circumstances of his death.

One thing stood out to Ian in the reporting of Henry’s death: the riderless horse returned to Syed Ali’s compound and not to Henry’s house. Looking through his father’s diaries, Ian realized that his father often looked after the horses of neighbors. From this he surmised that since the horse had returned to Syed Ali’s compound, it must have been Syed Ali’s horse. His father’s colleague Kenneth Mason confirmed that Henry often borrowed other people’s horses to train them. If the horse was indeed Syed Ali’s horse, then was it possible that Syed Ali had arranged the killing?

Ian asked his aunt Ruth – who had been living with her brother in Maymyo at the time – about Syed Ali and she said that her brother hated him. Morshead reportedly had a nasty temper and, as a regular old sahib, was quick to throw a book at his Burmese teacher or to discipline his servants. Ali was a prominent businessman in Maymyo and a member of the Freemasons. Morshead’s diary had him dining as guest of honor alongside Ali at the United Club Anniversary dinner only a few nights prior. Was it possible that one or the other of the men had held some sort of grudge?

As Ian walked the still tulip-lined lanes of Maymyo, a tip led him to the house of John Fenton, an Anglo-Burman who had worked for the forestry service during the period of his father’s death. When he arrived, he wrote, Fenton took one look at him and promptly sat down to write a statement.

The old man claimed that he had seen Syed Ali out riding one day with “a lady” related to Mr. Morshead and that he had heard a rumor at the time that Morshead had objected to Ali riding with his sister Ruth and that he had had it out for him. Soon after the murder, Fenton said, Ali left Maymyo – the implication being that he had been deported.

This added a whole new dimension to Morshead’s search and provided him with the twist to his book on the subject of his father’s death. Returning to England, Ian sought out his aunt Ruth who denied ever having met Syed Ali, but speculated that “your father must have made an enemy somehow.” Morshead chose to believe his aunt and did not pursue the matter any further.

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The death of many of the people involved in the case (including Ian in 2014) means that the time is right to shed new light on the question of Henry Morshead’s murder. Many of the writers of the history of British Burma were direct actors in the events they described and therefore their accounts deserve a re-analysis in the light of new approaches to imperial history and the history of the region.

New understandings of ethnic conflict, the growth of pre-colonial nationalist movements, gender relations in the colonial environment, and the relationship between the colonizer and colonized mean that we can now probe deeper than ever before into areas of the archive that might have seemed unimportant or sensitive to past historians.

Amorous relations between the races in Burma was a subject of much debate during the 1920s and 30s in elite circles. Of particular concern to Burmese and English commentators alike was the influx of Indian immigration to the country and marriages between Indian men and Burmese women. The resulting mixed population were known as zerbadis and were distinctly disliked by the Burmese. Moreover, relations between Asian men and European women were the subject of legislation on the part of the colonial government. In 1902, European bar-girls were banned in Rangoon and Calcutta out of fear that they might be dishonored by their Asian clients. Sex and race were one more way in which the imperial elite aimed to create what Ann Stoler has called “categories of difference”, that is ways to distinguish colonizer and colonized, and any slip-ups here – such as the illegitimate offspring of European men and Burmese women – were an embarrassment to the colonial order of things.

In this environment, perhaps the colonial government wanted to save Ruth the “embarrassment” of a further inquiry into her relationship with the Indian Syed Ali. Or maybe – in light of the recent attacks on Indians – they did not wish to probe the matter further for fear it might exacerbate pre-existing ethnic tensions.

Though it was ruled out at the time, it is still possible that the murder was politically-motivated. Under the 1929 Simon Commission, the Brits were busy readying Burma for political separation from India. A high-profile murder of a British civil servant in such a political climate might have bolstered the argument that Burma was not politically ready for separation, or that the safety of British officers in the country could not be insured without the help of the Indian Army.

Another possibility is that the murder was motivated by the intersection of politics and business interests. One of the major grievances of the Hsaya San rebels was that they were being denied access to forest products such as bamboo to build their houses, firewood to cook their food, and thanaka and cutch (one of the key ingredients in betel quids) to sell at market. In the years leading up to the rebellion, the number of forest-related “offences” – such as theft, arson, and illegal grazing – sky-rocketed alongside the general crime rate in Burma and forest officials were often targeted as some of the most visible agents of the colonial regime.

Morshead was not with the Forest Office, but he was Survey of India, the body which consulted the Forest Office on where to cut down and where to re-plant trees. He may have been seen as being “in league” with forestry officials and therefore have become a target. The Maymyo Electric Supply Company run by Syed Ali had originally struck a deal with the government for access to timber, but by 1932 was reducing its requirements. Perhaps Ali was mad at the Forest Office and so was resorting to other sources of power such as coal. Perhaps he sought revenge for some business disagreement? Or perhaps local residents had decided that Morshead was the next-worse thing to a forestry official and so he had to go?

We will likely never know for certain what transpired on that spring day in 1931, as so many of those involved seem to have been dead-set on covering up the truth. But what we do know is that the murder of Henry Morshead was not an isolated incident. Yes, his murder was odd in that dissatisfaction with the colonial regime was generally directed at the ethnic groups that performed the functionary roles of British power – the Indians, the Chin, Karen, Kachin and Shans. But at the same time it was indicative of some of the larger issues at play  – namely, ethnic conflict, state control, fears about inter-racial relationships, the fight over access to natural resources and the growth of Burmese nationalism on the whole – topics which remain relevant to the Rohingya Crisis and the Myanmar of today.

Sources:

Aung-Thwin, M. The Return of the Galon King: History, Law and Rebellion in Colonial Burma (University of Ohio Press, 2010).

Bryant, R.L. The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma 1824-1994 (University of Hawai’i Press, 1997).

Collis, M. Trials in Burma (Faber, 1937).

Morshead, I. The Life and Murder of Henry Morshead: A True Story from the Days of the Raj (Oleander Press, 1982).

Report on the Forest Administration of Burma Excluding the Federated Shan States (Rangoon, 1925; 1932; 1933).

Stoler, A. and Frederick Cooper. “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (University of California Press, 2007).

Wright, A. “Maintaining the Bar: Regulating European Barmaids in Colonial Calcutta and Rangoon,” in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 45 (2017).