by David Eimer
Taking on the Buddhist hierarchy is beyond anyone in Burma, a country where women might run shops and control household finances but are rarely seen in senior positions in business, as well as politics, and are almost invisible in the all-powerful military. Proportionally, young women are now the majority of students at universities, so there is hope for the future. But only around 7 per cent of the population goes on to higher education in Burma. And more young women than men leave school early to help support their parents, like the girls I met in the sweatshop in Hlaing Tharyar.
For now the best-known women in Burma are actresses, singers and television personalities, a trend that began in the 1930s when local movie stars like May Chin began to emerge. By the 1950s actresses such as Myint Myint Khin, Kyi Kyi Htay, Khin Yu May and Win Min Than, the first Burmese actress to star in a Hollywood movie when she played opposite Gregory Peck in The Purple Plain, were the queens of a decade viewed now as the high point of Burma’s film industry.
‘In the 1950s there were co-productions with India, Japan and Thailand, production values were high and the films were shown across Asia. It was the golden age of Burmese cinema,’ Swe Zin Htaik told me. The grand dame of local actresses, she introduced herself as ‘Grace’, the English name she sometimes uses, when she arrived right on time to our meeting in a Golden Valley restaurant. Elegant in a blouse and htamein, with gold jewellery around her wrists and neck and sunglasses atop her black hair, Grace was refreshingly unpretentious and happy to reminisce about her time as a movie star.
She appeared in 200 films between 1971 and 1991, testimony to the punishing shooting schedules imposed by Burma’s film-makers. ‘One year, I made twenty-four films,’ laughed Grace. ‘Sometimes I’d be shooting two or three films at the same time.’ She retired at just thirty-seven. ‘I felt isolated. Most directors, writers and producers were too close to the generals and I didn’t like that. So I stopped acting and went behind the camera and into NGO work.’
Grace was born when the golden age was in full swing. Studios like A1 survived the carnage of the Second World War better than most of Burma’s industries and were soon making films again. Even after independence their output remained fiercely patriotic. ‘The big genres in the 1950s were period action movies, family dramas and comedies. The period movies were mostly set in colonial times and were nationalist in tone,’ Grace recalled.
Growing up in Yangon, she haunted the city’s cinema row – a collection of movie palaces near Sule Pagoda in downtown. ‘There was the Palladium and the Globe, which showed Hollywood movies. They were air conditioned and very luxurious for the time. On the other side of the road, the cinemas showed Burmese and Indian movies. I used to like watching Hayley Mills in all those Disney movies. But the cinemas were nationalised in 1968, like everything else, and by 1970 they’d stopped showing Hollywood films.’
Just a few of the art deco theatres built in Yangon before and after the Second World War survive now. They have started showing foreign movies again, with Hollywood and Bollywood productions drawing the biggest crowds, but the refined atmosphere enjoyed by Grace in the 1950s is a very distant memory. My first visit to cinema row was to see the James Bond film Spectre. Movie-going is cheap in Burma, with tickets on sale for 2,000 kyat (£1.60), but 007 was a popular choice and touts outside were selling marked-up tickets to latecomers.
Inside, whole families ranging in age from babies to grandparents were present. There is no ratings system in Burma, so a five-year-old can watch a movie classified as an ‘18’ in the UK. Everyone had brought food along and when the action scenes stopped the sound of collective crunching drowned out the dialogue. By the time Bond had dispatched the villain the floor was ankle-deep in discarded chicken bones, bottles and packaging and the resident rats were stealthily probing the detritus.
Back in the early 1950s, though, the glow from the golden age of Burma’s movie industry helped light up Yangon, then in much need of some glamour. The city was pummelled during the war, its port and oil refineries destroyed by the British when they left, then heavily bombed after the Japanese occupied it. In May 1945 the Japanese pulled out, but not before randomly wrecking as much of downtown as they could, while leaving the bodies of locals hanging from lamp posts and lying in the streets as a grisly welcome for the arriving Allied soldiers.
The war inflicted more damage on Burma than any other nation in Asia, and the country has never really recovered economically from its impact. Around 80 per cent of Yangon had to be rebuilt after 1945, a figure mimicked by Mandalay. Other cities such as Meiktila and Myitkyina were completely destroyed, while roads, railways and bridges across the country were in ruins. With the amount of land for rice cut in half and the number of cattle reduced by two thirds, much of the population of inland Burma struggled to feed itself.
Rangoon was little more than a shanty town in 1945, a much larger version of the squatter neighbourhoods found in Hlaing Tharyar today, its residents sheltering where they could, while British and Indian soldiers took over the remaining buildings. When George MacDonald Fraser, the author of the Flashman novels, arrived with his platoon in June 1945, they slept on the marble floor of the local branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
Close to 100,000 soldiers from Britain and its imperial allies were killed, wounded or died of disease in Burma, the bloodiest theatre of the war for the UK. But any goodwill the British earned for ejecting the Japanese dissipated quickly. The colonists banned the use of the currency introduced by the Japanese, thus wiping out what savings people had managed to accumulate, while their efforts to introduce an executive council to rule the country ran into immediate opposition from Aung San and the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), the coalition he led.
From 1946 a campaign of disobedience began with a series of strikes and the AFPFL calling on people to refuse to pay rents or taxes. With the country awash with discarded weapons and the British struggling to impose any sort of order, crime and dacoity soared once again. Ritchie Gardiner, back in Rangoon four years after he fled the city ahead of the Japanese, took to sleeping with a shotgun under the pillows, much to the discomfort of his wife.
Gardiner had been as successful in wartime as he was in peace. Twice decorated for his bravery and leadership, he rose to be head of the Burma branch of Force 136, the Southeast Asian arm of the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine organisation dedicated to creating havoc behind enemy lines. Gardiner’s men parachuted into remote areas of the borderlands to link up with the Kachin and Karen minorities, launching hit and run raids on the Japanese, before disappearing back into the jungle and mountains.
Along the way Gardiner had clashed with Orde Wingate, the legendary commander of the Chindits, a force of soldiers who also operated deep inside Japanese-held territory. Gardiner had disagreed with the strategy of sending British troops who knew nothing of local conditions so far behind enemy lines, and he was borne out by the appalling casualties the Chindits suffered. When recruiting for Force 136 Gardiner sought men like himself, who had lived in Burma, knew the jungle and could speak the different languages.
His job in 1946 was to get Macgregor’s timber business underway again. But there would be no going back to the pre-war days of afternoon tea on well-watered lawns, nights at the Pegu Club and the easy exploitation of Burma’s resources. The war had changed everything, transforming Aung San from a mildly threatening nationalist agitator into the commander of an army and leader of a political party who had to be included in any negotiations about the country’s future.
Britain tried to delay granting Burma independence, offering dominion status within the empire first and then a plan leading to self-rule in 1953. But after a visit to London in early 1947 Aung San insisted the British depart within a year. There was no appetite in the UK for another fight in Burma so soon after the war and Aung San got his way. On 4 January 1948 Burma became independent. Ritchie Gardiner and his family left for Scotland, never to return.
Almost im
mediately Burma was at war again. Four months after independence, communist groups rose up against the AFPFL’s coalition government. It was led now by U Nu after Aung San’s assassination by a rival politician in July 1947, a stunning event that revealed how Burma’s nationalists were united only in their dislike of the British. The communist insurrection was followed soon after by the rebellion of the Karen, who had fought so effectively against the Japanese as part of Force 136. Their soldiers reached the suburbs of Yangon before being forced back.
Newly independent Burma was a mass of competing parties and organisations, all jockeying for position and power and unwilling to compromise. Ominously, Ne Win was appointed head of the Tatmadaw and then deputy prime minister in 1949. Just one year after independence and the military were already part of the political system, with U Nu dependent on the army’s support to survive. Struggling with a devastated economy, Burma had all the dice loaded against it; a barely functioning state whose huge structural problems were compounded by infighting and inefficiency.
Some people in Burma look back on the U Nu era with a nostalgic fondness now, a pleasant contrast to the junta years that followed. The 1950s is seen as a time when there was an unshackled press, a democratically elected government and a revival of the arts and literature. The reality was rather different. Today, the elections of 1951–2 and 1956 would not be viewed as free and fair, while the media was always at the mercy of politicians and the military. And if the capital was peaceful, much of the rest of the country was grappling with insurgents and dacoits.
But the movie industry was thriving, sprinkling its stardust over Yangon especially. It is hard to judge how good the films of the golden age were because, like much of Burma’s history, they exist now only as names and ageing, unreliable memories. Most are lost. The national film archive holds just twelve black and white movies, all in poor condition. When I first saw a Burmese film from the 1960s, the print was so scratched and faded that I might have been watching a 1920s silent.
‘A1 made over three hundred movies but hardly any of them have survived,’ Ko Myint told me. ‘We gave a lot of our films to the television channels when they started so they could show them, but they’re all gone now. They didn’t know how to store them properly.’ Nor is there anything left of A1’s studio, the twenty-five-acre complex sold off long ago. All that remains is the house Ko Myint’s great-grandfather built for the family, the lane it sits on named ‘A One’ in honour of Burma’s premier dream factory.
Technically, A1 gave up the ghost in 1983, but the studio had been struggling for years before then. ‘It was too hard to get anything made,’ said Ko Myint. ‘The junta didn’t like film people. They’d say, “We don’t want to see this kind of movie.” We couldn’t make horror movies at all because Ne Win didn’t like them. We had to submit our scripts to the censors. Worse, they held all the film stock. You couldn’t get film to shoot unless you had official permission.’
There was an air of decaying gentility inside Ko Myint’s once grand, now run-down, house, repairs neglected and the furniture ancient. Even the awards on display that A1 won over the years were dusty. Ko Myint was seventy, bald with bushy eyebrows. He had started appearing in A1 movies as a child, before moving behind the camera as an adult. ‘It was the family business, so it seemed natural to be in films,’ he said. ‘I feel sad when I look back at that time. I saw the golden age of Burmese cinema and now there’s nothing left of it.’
After the 1962 coup, Ne Win brought the movies under the junta’s control, all part of his scheme to build a utopian state via his masterplan, ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’. It was as much of a disaster for film-makers as it was for every other sector of the economy. ‘The movie industry isn’t like a factory making trucks,’ Grace told me. ‘Ne Win wanted all actors and directors to make propaganda and, of course, people didn’t want to see those movies so they didn’t go to the cinemas. We’re very good at silent punishment in Burma.’
Occasionally A1 fought back against the restrictions. In 1972 the studio made Journey to Pyay, a comedy about a one-day drive from Yangon to Pyay that turns into a ten-day road trip after repeated breakdowns. The censors hadn’t picked up that the movie was satirising the collapse of the economy under the junta’s mismanagement. But the generals understood the meaning when they saw it. ‘It was banned for two years and we got into trouble. But it was worth it,’ said Ko Myint.
Sanctions and shortages did as much to cripple Burma’s film studios as overbearing state control. ‘In the 1970s the industry was still pretty intact. But by the 1980s the lack of equipment and film was really affecting it,’ said Grace. ‘We’d have to wait six months for film sometimes. The government couldn’t afford to buy it and so everything started to switch to video.’ The much-delayed arrival of television in 1981 presented a new test and cinemas started to close. From a high of 450 in the 1950s, there are now around seventy across the country.
Movies are still made in Burma, but only a few are released theatrically. ‘I make comedies and horror movies. That’s all they want here,’ Thein Thut, Ko Myint’s older brother, told me. ‘I’ll shoot a feature, up to two hours long, in two weeks and edit it for a month. So from start to finish it takes two months maximum. The highest budget would be US$100,000, lower end is US$50–60,000. They go straight to DVD.’
Poor production values, stereotyped plots and actors who learn their trade on soap operas combine to make most current Burmese movies barely watchable, especially in the face of competition from Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters. It is Burma’s documentarians who offer the best hope for a revival of the country’s film industry, and a few are now venturing into independent movie-making. One day, Burmese movies may draw the crowds to Yangon’s cinema row again.
13
Astrology and the Abode of Kings
Ne Win’s grandiose plan to transform Burma – ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’ – had its genesis in the 1930s, when student nationalists were in thrall to Marxism. For Rangoon’s revolutionaries, capitalists and colonists were one and the same and both were enemies. Before he was assassinated, Aung San spoke of how Burma would never be dominated by capitalism again. He wanted a socialist nation where industries and infrastructure were nationalised. It was a popular vision. Leftist parties and communist insurgent groups provided the main opposition to U Nu’s AFPFL government throughout the 1950s.
Marxism’s appeal in the newly independent Burma prompted politicians and, later, the military to announce various programmes to create the ideal state, none of which came close to being realised. Dreams of nirvana, and a preference for looking to the future, have a natural resonance in a nation where the construction of new pagodas takes precedence over upgrading the roads. Burma is a place where the prime minister – U Nu – could announce to his cabinet that he was going to meditate for a month and was not to be disturbed, ‘Even if the whole country goes up in flames’.
Dealing with the detail that comes with governance was too much for U Nu. His administration’s efforts to resuscitate the economy misfired, hampered by the dreadful damage Burma had suffered in the Second World War, as well as the constant fighting with rebels. The inability to enact any meaningful economic reforms was a source of major frustration by 1960. ‘We’ve had twelve years of independence and what have our politicians given us? We still cannot manufacture even a needle,’ lamented Aung Gyi, Ne Win’s right-hand man at the time of the 1962 coup and, later, briefly the first chairman of the NLD.
U Nu’s politics blended socialism and Buddhist precepts. Unlike Aung San, who argued for a separation of politics and religion, U Nu was an ardent advocate of Buddhism, viewing it as a unifying force in a country divided politically and ethnically and pushing for it to be made the official state religion. But he maintained a belief in nat spirits, too. Literally ‘celestial beings’, the nats are a remnant of the animist faiths which held sway across much of Burma until Bagan’s kingdom became entwined with Buddhism and King Anawrahta s
tarted spreading the word as his empire expanded.
Nat shrines can be found in many villages in Burma, as well as in some urban neighbourhoods, and U Nu always paid his respects at them when he visited rural areas. It was a wise decision. The nat spirits are mischievous, often malevolent, genies who live in trees – nat shrines are invariably located under the spreading branches of banyan trees – and act as the local guardians. If they are not appeased with regular offerings, disaster is sure to follow.
Thousands of these spirits inhabit Burma, almost all of whom were once human before being anointed as nats after their deaths. They were no fans of the British, according to Henry Fielding-Hall. ‘All the nats seem to have been distressed at our arrival, to hate our presence, and earnestly to desire our absence. They are the spirits of the country and the people, and they cannot abide a foreign domination,’ he wrote in The Soul of a People.
Just as Buddhists make the pilgrimage to the Shwedagon, nat believers flock to Mount Popa every December for an annual celebration. An extinct volcanic plug that erupts out of the dry zone in central Burma, Popa is populated by bold monkeys and the thirty-seven most important nats. King Anawrahta conquered much of what is inland Burma today. But he couldn’t vanquish the nat spirits. Having failed to outlaw their worship, Anawrahta compromised, drawing up a list of thirty-seven official nats and enforcing a syncretistic merger with Buddhism.
While the nats have shared spiritual space with the Buddhist deities ever since the eleventh century ce, nat worship is scorned by many locals today, at least in public. ‘It’s only villagers who believe in nats,’ said Thida. ‘They think they have to give them gifts or something bad will happen.’ But given the prevalence of nat shrines across the country, plenty of people are clearly still wary of the capricious spirits.
After the 1962 coup U Nu’s homely, ineffective brand of government gave way to ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’, Ne Win’s authoritarian vision of the future. Cherry-picking Marxist economic theories and ruling under the Orwellian-sounding name of the ‘Revolutionary Council’, the junta declared all political opposition illegal and the universities and media were quickly placed under state control. Every sector of the economy was nationalised, while army-run committees oversaw all aspects of life.