The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  He was an undergraduate at Trinity Hall and found lodgings at Portugal Place, a tiny lane of white brick houses very close to the center of town. The other lodgers were English, and Ba U was the only Asian, and at first he excused the disdain they showed toward him as they were “members of the well-known ancient families of England.” But he grew increasingly agitated. He was made fun of in hall. “A senior student, named Seymour, came toward me, fixed a monocle in his right eye, and stared at me as if I were a being from another planet. The students who were standing nearby burst out laughing. I felt so insulted and humiliated that I wished I could have been swallowed up by the earth.” After continued provocations, he eventually confronted Seymour, grabbing him by his lapels and physically threatening him, and Seymour, apparently unused to having a colonial protest, quickly backed down. But Ba U was to have other problems.

  He was invited to dinner at the home of an English family and brought with him little gifts from home. But he was, in his own words, “flabbergasted” when the young daughter of the host asked him, “Do you all eat human flesh?” “My spirits fell. I could not answer the question straight away. I simply stared at the girl. What made me feel sad was that we should be placed in the same category as the African.” The mother tried to save the evening. “No, they are civilized, just like us, you’re thinking of the Africans.” Cheered by that clarification, Ba U then took the offensive, describing Burma’s conquests of Siam and telling the Cambridgeshire family that the Shwedagon Pagoda had been built twenty-four hundred years ago, “when some Europeans were still roaming about the forests.”

  Sensitive to discrimination and rejected by the mainstream of Cambridge student life, Ba U hoped that the Burma of his imagination was at least superior to what he knew of Africa and prehistoric Europe. He began to be political as well. There were other Burmese students in Cambridge in those days, actually more in those years than there would be at any time before or after, and they decided to form a group, the Burma-Cambridge University Club, one of the very first modern Burmese associations.

  In a room at King’s College, Ba U and about two dozen others met once a week or so, to debate topics like “The republican form of government is better than the monarchical form” and “Traffic in opium in Burma is harmful on both the morale and health of the people.” They spoke in English, rather than Burmese. Some of the club members also began debating a growing circle of other Asian students, from India, Ceylon, Siam, and Japan; but many were unhappy with their lives and what they understood as their prospects. One of them was Chan Tha, a young man from a well-known and very wealthy family who was reading law at Downing College. Over time the stresses and strains of living in England, the perceived slights and discrimination unnerved him. He began pacing up and down the corridor at his hall and muttering to himself. He said to Ba U, “I hate these damned white men. They treat us colored people like dirt and vermin.” Ba U told him that they needed to return to Burma and to lead their country to freedom; only then would the Burmese be treated with respect. But for the would-be Downing College lawyer, it was too late. One summer day Chan Tha went out to the seaside near New Forest, sat down on the beach, and put a bullet through his head. The law student left behind a note: “I am very unhappy because I shall never in this life reach the woolsack.”* Even for the Burmese of this class, with the money and position to attend university in England, who had the best chance of securing a good life under the colonial sun, British rule still seemed like a dead end, the choicest jobs within sight but beyond their grasp. For others the frustration was much greater.

  *

  At about eleven in the morning on Easter Monday 1916, in the middle of the Great War, hundreds of armed and determined men and women belonging to the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army set out to occupy key buildings in the middle of Dublin: the General Post Office, Boland’s Bakery, the Four Courts, Jacob’s Factory, the South Dublin Union, St. Stephen’s Green, and the College of Surgeons. Though their initial actions met with virtually no resistance (British intelligence having failed), the uprising was to last only a few days. The Post Office was the center of their resistance and was briefly declared the headquarters of the Irish provisional government.

  But Dublin Castle remained in British hands throughout, and over the coming days the British gathered reinforcements as well as intelligence about Irish strength and strategic positions. By 28 April the rebels, never numbering more than sixteen hundred, were facing upward of twenty thousand soldiers. The Post Office was cut off and then came under an enormous artillery barrage that left much of the city center in ruins. The uprising collapsed. It had not enjoyed any widespread popularity, but the British reprisals that followed, in particular the executions of Patrick Pearse and other nationalist leaders, increased sympathy for the militant cause. Three years later Sinn Fein declared an independent Irish government at Dublin. Sinn Fein was backed by the new Irish Republican Army, convinced that only violence would lead to change and led for a while by the youthful and charismatic Michael Collins. It was a guerrilla war this time, not an all-out insurrection like that in 1916, and included targeted assassinations against police and intelligence officers. By the end of 1920 London was ready to compromise. An Irish Free State was created in the southern part of the island, fully self-governing and with the status of a dominion, like Canada or Australia. Only the six counties in the north stayed part of the United Kingdom.

  The Burmese, for one, were fascinated. They, like many others, believed lieved that Sinn Fein had masterminded the action from the start, and from then till today Sinn Fein and the cause of Irish Republicanism remain high in the pantheon of Burmese nationalist thinking. The Burmese were looking in all directions for inspiration and guides to future action. The short-lived revolt of the pretender Maung Thant in 1909 was the next-to-last anti-British effort that looked backward for models and a restoration of monarchy as a goal.

  Around the same time that the Burma-Cambridge University Club was being formed, men of similar background and thinking were setting up political associations back home. In 1906 a Young Men’s Buddhist Association, mimicking the YMCA movement, was created and was led by the Arakanese Cambridge graduate and onetime London barrister U May Oung.4 But in general the Burmese were bored with lawyerly associations and polite petitions and wanted action, like the IRA. There was a pent-up hostility, waiting to boil over.5

  As the Bengal partition had helped give rise in India to more radical sentiments, for Burma the catalyst was the country’s exclusion from the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, coming as it did at the same time as the Irish uprising, the end of the First World War, and the beginnings of mass political mobilization in India under the leadership of the South Africa–returned lawyer Mohandas K. Gandhi. At a time when many Burmese were still hoping for the baby steps to self-government held out by the 1919 India Act, the Irish example seemed to hold the promise of a much quicker return to independence. This was a period of revolutionary change and rising expectations. In October 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution installed the new Soviet government, and everywhere in Europe the old order was falling to pieces. On 18 January 1918 President Woodrow Wilson of the United States had delivered his speech to Congress outlining his Fourteen Points for reconstructing Europe after the war. He called for the abolition of secret agreements, disarmament, and the right of national self-determination, and he championed the establishment of a League of Nations. The Burmese, for the first time since 1885, began to think that history was on their side.

  Virtually overnight politics went from placid to passionate. Monk-politicians soon came to the fore: men like U Ottama, another Arakanese, who had traveled widely in Asia and came back to Burma after becoming intimately familiar with the work of Gandhi’s Congress Party. Mass meetings were held in Rangoon with fiery speeches glorifying Burma’s past and calling for home rule. Monks and others vigorously began to protest the long-standing British habit of walking on pagoda platforms in their shoes and boots, someth
ing deeply inimical to Burmese custom, and for the first time the British gave way, not by taking off their shoes but by not going at all. Visitors from home were warned to boycott the pagodas.6 And most Western visitors complied, a notable exception being the aviatrix Amelia Earhart, who was on what was to be her final trip in 1937 and who was more than happy to take off her shoes and flout colonial convention.7

  In April 1919, at Amritsar in the Punjab, fifty soldiers under General Reginald Dyer fired 1,650 rounds of ammunition into a defenseless and trapped Indian crowd, leaving hundreds dead and unleashing a wave of protests, including a campaign of noncooperation with the new dyarchy constitution. It was Congress’s efforts to bring Burma into these protests that heralded the first cooperation between Indian and Burmese nationalists. Strikes were organized around the country, culminating in the university strike of December 1920, timed just days before the official opening of Rangoon University. Schoolteachers and students then also went on strike, and hundreds camped out at the base of the Shwedagon Pagoda, the very place where their grandchildren seven decades later would call for an end to military dictatorship.

  Rangoon also became a haven for Bengali radicals who had fled to the province in the wake of increasingly tight surveillance and repressive measures at home. Many had found work as clerks in government offices, and in Burma they founded branches of radical political parties willing to employ terrorist tactics to gain independence. Known to the British as “gentlemanly terrorists,” they were often from respectable middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds. By 1926 more than two dozen senior terrorist organizers had arrived and set up cells in Rangoon, Mandalay, and elsewhere, mixing with the young Burmese around them and providing another set of ideas to the nascent Burmese nationalist movement.8

  The men on the spot for the British Raj were neither particularly empathetic nor inspired in their response. Sir Harcourt Spencer Butler, who was governor until 1917, was an archetypical Indian civil servant, educated at Harrow and Balliol, Oxford, who began his career as an assistant collector and magistrate in the villages of North India. He had more than twenty-five years of India experience behind him but hardly knew Burma. His successor, Sir Charles Craddock, also had little Burma knowledge, being a former chief commissioner of the Central Provinces and having spent many formative years as a district officer in that part of the empire. They recommended only very limited changes in Burma’s constitutional setup. But the mass meetings continued, and in July 1919 a delegation of Burmese politicians went to London, to meet with journalists and Labour MPs and finally with Secretary of State for India Lord Montagu. Another delegation traveled the following year, with great fanfare and local media attention. All this coincided with the birth of the Burmese film industry. When one of the key delegates to London died soon after his return (of the Spanish flu), his funeral was beamed to jam-packed cinema audiences in every city and town.

  London’s own attention was elsewhere, with hundreds of thousands dead from the war and influenza, with labor strikes at home, and with Gandhi’s mammoth protests providing a much bigger headache than anything the Burmese could muster. In the end London gave in for want of alternative and little energy to deal creatively with the problem. By this time the political atmosphere in Burma had shifted amazingly quickly in the direction of violent revolutionary protest.

  *

  What the Burmese eventually got in the early 1920s by way of political reform was more than anyone would have expected or even dreamed of just a few years before, but it already fell far short of rising nationalist aspirations. There was a new dyarchy constitution very much along the lines of that of other Indian provinces, general elections (with voting rights for women as well), and a new Legislative Council. Roughly half the seats in the new council were elected from general constituencies, and the others were either appointed directly by the governor or elected by communal and business groups. But there wasn’t much enthusiasm, and only 7 percent chose to vote at all in a system that was largely discredited even before it started.

  All this applied only to the lowlands of the Irrawaddy Valley, together with Arakan and the Tenasserim. The governor continued to exercise direct rule over the Shan States as well as the Kachin and Chin hill areas, with more than 40 percent of the total area and about 15 percent of the population, where there were to be no reforms at all, no preparation for self-government. They were officially called the Excluded Areas or the Scheduled Areas and less generously as the Primitive Areas.

  In “Burma proper,” political mobilization continued, and new politicians, all hammering home on vague and patriotic themes, emerged to wow the crowds and attract ever-greater popular followings. Like Aung San Suu Kyi seventy years later, the debonair U Chit Hlaing, “the uncrowned king of Burma,” toured the country, as did many other political heroes now long forgotten. Some took seats in the Legislative Council while others shunned any cooperation with the authorities. But the rhetoric was the same: of independence and a restoration of a proud past, of a great army that was vanquished but would rise again, and a once conquering people that should reestablish its place among the nations of the East. Some politicians called on colonial authorities to recruit an ethnic Burmese army (led by British officers). Others demanded that Burma become a “unit among other races within the great British empire.”9

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

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

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

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

  THE ROAD TO POVERTY

  The Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929 sent an economic tidal wave around the world, decimating international commodity prices and sending the Burmese economy into a tailspin. For decades rice exports had grown by leaps and bounds, fueled by easy credit. It was the foundation on which Burma’s modern economy had been built. When U.S. imports declined precipitously, the American Depression was exported overseas. The price of rice plummeted while bank collapses in America and Europe raised the cost of money. Over the next three years the value of Burmese exports plunged by more than 50 percent. For many years government officials had fretted about the increasing indebtedness of farmers but had done little to address the problem. Now it was too late. As in many parts of the world, the coming Depression hit hardest those least able to cope. Hundreds of thousands of rural families became landless across the Irrawaddy Delta, the Tenasserim coastline, and elsewhere.10