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February 13 - February 18, 2024
Burma was born as a military occupation and grew up as a racial hierarchy.
For the British as for the Burmese, “European” was a racial category, never to be confused with Indians. The British in Burma referred to themselves as “European,” a category which included all the peoples of the British Isles (Scots were far and away the biggest single group, dominating trade) as well as Burma’s smattering of Germans, Swedes, Frenchmen, and other western Europeans.
Lower in status were the Indian, Chinese, and Burmese businessmen, landowners, professionals, and civil servants, who came from the more prosperous sections of their own societies.
Still, however rich or well bred, all were excluded on racial grounds from the upper echelons of Rangoon society;
Lowest of all were other non-European peoples, either immigrants from India or people from far-flung regions within Burma, who were seen as belonging to backward or inferior castes and tribes.
A key part of colonial race thinking was skin color.
Some, wanting more precision, turned to skull and other measurements.
Linguistics were also used to determine who was who.
They realized that Burmese was closely related to Tibetan; some local languages were incorporated into a “Tibeto-Burman” language family, others were not.
To some extent, the British were drawing on Burmese antecedents.
Almost all populations were placed in one of five overarching categories: Myanma, Shan, Mon, Kala, and Tayok. The first three are peoples in Burma. Kala, before the British conquest, meant Indian and other similar-looking people from the West. “Tayok” is a word likely derived from “Turk,” which by the 20th century referred to the Chinese.
One of the biggest immigrant groups were Pariahs (now usually spelled Paraiyar) from south India, a low caste who came to do menial work, especially in Rangoon.
Interracial sex and marriage blurred the lines further and created new tensions. In the Irrawaddy valley in pre-British times, marriage was an informal affair.
As D. D. Nanavati, a leading barrister in Bombay, wrote: “I have often heard people when talking of Burma ask with a snigger, ‘Oh isn’t that the place where you can marry for a month or two?’ ”16
By the early 20th century, Burma had a sizable population of people of recently mixed ancestry, including the highest percentage of “Eurasians” in the empire. Though most were of Scottish and Burmese descent, all were called Anglo-Burman or Anglo-Indian
Though identity was not as straightforward as some might have liked, it seemed clear to more or less everyone that Burma was not India and that the Burmese were not Indians. This was never questioned.
With this distinction came the need to classify the many different ethnic communities in Burma as either “indigenous” or not. The 1921 census decided: “Races which are associated particularly closely with Burma, even if the greater part of their people live elsewhere, have been regarded as Indigenous Races, and have been classified in fifteen Race-groups” (italics in original).
In this dichotomy, Burma’s Muslims were difficult to pin down. There were several, very different Muslim communities.
The most recent arrivals were the hundreds of thousands of Muslims, nearly all men, who came from across the subcontinent, from Bengal to the Afghan frontier, as part of the broader Indian migration.
Some Muslims, like the descendants of 17th-century Deccani cavalry (and their Burmese wives), had become “Burmese” in all but religion; others had just arrived and had no intention of staying long. Added
Categorizing the Muslims of Arakan—the site of 21st-century violence and the Rohingya exodus—proved particularly troublesome. For millennia people had moved across the Naf River as soldiers, pirates, traders, and slaves. To the north, most people spoke dialects of Bengali and were Muslim; to the south, most people spoke Arakanese, a dialect of Burmese, and were Buddhist.
When the British took Arakan in 1824, much of what is today northern Arakan (now called Rakhine) was depopulated. Arakanese refugees who had fled toward Chittagong during the Burmese occupation came back. Over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Muslims speaking the Chittagong dialect of Bengali came from north of the border as well.
The British never used the term “Rohingya.” It was the word some Muslims, especially in the north of Arakan, used to refer to themselves in their own Bengali-related language. It simply meant “of Rohang,” their name for Arakan. It implied that Arakan was their home. In the same way, people just across the border, speaking a mutally intelligible Bengali dialect, called themselves Chatgaya, “of Chittagong.”
Over the decades, violence would erupt in many forms and for different reasons. But the seeds of disagreement over who belonged and who did not were planted solidly, if somewhat absentmindedly, in colonial times.
THE FIRST MODERN Burmese political associations, formed in the 1910s, were content to politely petition the colonial masters. After the First World War came the first mass demonstrations for “home rule,” inspired by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress.
“Our race once reigned in all the countries you hold in India. Now the kala have come close up to us.”21 By kala, he meant both the British and the Indians. Both were part of a combined threat. British writers at the turn of the century suggested the same: “The [British] expeditions against Burma marked the renewal, after the repose of thousands of years, of the march of the Aryan eastwards.”22
When the Great Depression hit, commodity prices collapsed and villages found themselves unable to pay taxes or to repay loans to Indian bankers.
1930, the first Burmese–Indian riots in Rangoon left hundreds dead.
younger generation of politicians, men like Aung San, the father of future Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, banded together in new organizations such as the Dobama Asi-ayone (“We Burmans Association”).
In 1937, the British separated Burma from India, in response to a decades-old Burmese demand. This was India’s first and largely forgotten partition. And whereas the second partition, in 1947, created the nation of Pakistan on the basis of religious identity, this first partition created Burma within its modern borders on a basis of racial identity.
THE SOCIETY CREATED under British colonialism unwound in stages. In 1942, the Japanese invaded from the east, driving the British back to Assam. Half a million Indians fled. Tens of thousands died trying to reach India on foot. The Japanese also trained a Burma National Army led by young Thakins. Over the next three years, Burma became a giant battlefield involving over a million Japanese, British, Burmese, Indian, African, and Gurkha troops. Nearly every town was flattened by Japanese and Allied bombing. The economy was destroyed.
On January 4, 1948, Burma became formally independent as a republic outside the Commonwealth.
Arakan, which now bordered East Pakistan (soon to become Bangladesh), a militant outfit calling itself the Mujahid Party took up arms and called for a separate Muslim homeland. Then the Karen National Union rose in rebellion, demanding a breakaway republic for the Karen ethnic minority. The army, nearly half of which were British-trained Karens (a “martial race”), splintered. By 1949, Burma was a sea of rebels and bandits. At the height of the insurgency that year, Communist and Karen forces came within miles of Rangoon.
the 1950s, CIA-backed Chinese forces loyal to Chiang Kai-shek crossed the border from now Communist China, reigniting heavy fighting. The army grew into a battle-hardened machine.
On March 2, 1962, this battle-hardened machine seized power. Military administrations were then the norm across Asia: South Korea, Thailand, Pakistan, and Indonesia were all under army rule in the 1960s. But Burma’s was different: it sealed the country off from the world. The
By the 1970s, Burma had become a much simpler place, without luxury, stripped of its once cosmopolitan crowd, without landlords and fat cats—only farmers, soldiers,
But its political DNA still contained the ideas first formed in the days of Victorian Empire. They would mutate and find new life at the turn of the 21st century.
My grandfather, U Thant, had been Secretary-General of the United Nations in the 1960s and had just died from cancer.
The man at the head of government was General Ne Win. A tough-talking one-time postal clerk, Ne Win was trained by the Japanese during the war and had commanded the Burmese army since independence.
But he was also an army boss who set the country on a decidedly authoritarian and puritanical path, directing ruthless counterinsurgency campaigns, jailing any opposition, silencing a once-flourishing press, and banning a slew of entertainments he had once enjoyed himself, from beauty pageants to horse racing.
There are many reasons for Burma’s ills today, but the hollowing out of the education system alone explains much.
world, entirely becalmed, waiting for new life. The official ideology was a half-baked mélange of socialist, nationalist, and Buddhist ideas. For a while it seemed that the socialist agenda might dominate.
By the 1980s, the Revolutionary Council under General Ne Win gave way to a one-party constitutional set-up under President Ne Win. Burma looked like a Soviet-bloc socialist state.
But by the 1980s, the socialist experiment was not working. In the 1950s and 1960s, Burma’s economy had been more or less on a par with Thailand’s and not far behind South Korea’s. Rangoon was no less modern than Singapore and ahead of Bangkok. By the 1980s, Burma had fallen far behind.
the Elders, a new grouping that included Bishop Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, and Kofi Annan (who had just retired from the UN), probed for ways to become involved in Burma.
By early 2007, the Rangoon poor, mainly migrants from the countryside who had lost their land to army and crony capitalist confiscations, were desperate. Inflation was at an all-time high, shooting up nearly 50 percent over the course of twelve months. “Why is there severe malnutrition in this Garden of Eden? Because people are poor,”
A couple of days later, the ’88 Students Generation led a march down Rangoon’s main avenue. These were the youngsters who had led the nearly victorious 1988 uprising. Now in their forties, and released from prison only a couple of years before, they saw the political impasse between the junta and Aung San Suu Kyi and tried unsuccessfully to find a fresh way forward.
On September 5, far to the north in the dusty riverside town of Pakkoku, not far from Mandalay and home to dozens of Buddhist monasteries, hundreds of saffron- and crimson-clad monks organized a protest of their own, to show their support for the detained demonstrators in Rangoon.
Police beat three of the monks who took part in the protest. Word spread among Burma’s approximately 400,000 monks, and Buddhist leaders demanded an official apology from the government by September 17.
By September 22, thousands of shaven-headed monks, a sea of reddish hues, walked along Rangoon’s glistening, rain-swept avenues, chanting the Metta Sutta, an ancient discourse on compassion, which includes the lines: sabbe satta bhavantu skitatta [May all beings enjoy happiness and comfort] sukino va khemino hontu [May they feel safe and secure]
