The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  On 5 May 1930, just after eight o’clock in the morning, a great earthquake centered in the far north shook much of the country, killing as many as six thousand people and destroying the onetime capital of Pegu. The great pagoda there, housing relics of the Buddha himself, crumpled to the ground. A few months later another quake, this one followed by a tsunami, caused extensive damage to coastal areas. For many Burmese this was an omen that the end of British rule was near. But no one knew what would come next.

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

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

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

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

  But the Karens were much more open to Christian conversion. They had their own stories of a great flood and of a woman being created from the rib of a man. They also apparently had a tradition that messengers from across the seas would one day bring them “the lost book,” about as good an opening for European missionaries as one can imagine. By the late 1820s a number of Karens had joined the Baptist Church, and their numbers continued to grow, in particular in the Tenasserim and parts of the Irrawaddy Delta. The majority of Karen speakers were never Christian. Most were animists, practicing their own rituals and maintaining their old beliefs, and many, especially those who lived in the lowlands near the Burmese, had become Buddhists. But it was the Christian Karens who became the leaders of the community, including several who had been to university in America. Today about 6 percent of Burma is Christian, out of whom about half a million people are Karen Christians belonging to the Baptist Convention. In America, Judson’s work as the first Baptist missionary excited fellow church members and led to the formation of the first General Convention of Baptist Denominations in 1814.11

  Over the following century many Karens came to associate British rule and their cooperation with the British with a better life and future. In the months after Thibaw’s downfall, a special levy of Karen soldiers helped patrol the newly won territories, and it was Christian Karens who helped crush a sympathetic uprising in Lower Burma. From then on, large numbers of Karens were recruited into the army and military police. Karens had been instrumental in hunting down Saya San and his followers.

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

  “THE IRISH OF THE EAST”

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

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

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

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

  Like many of the others, Aung San, the man who would later lead the country to independence, came from a small-town and a middleclass family background.12 His grandfather was from a prominent gentry family in Upper Burma, with kinsmen in the royal service, including a minister under King Mindon. His father was a lawyer. Slight and unprepossessing, he had a hard-to-explain charisma that drew a loyal following even in his earliest days at university. His all-consuming passion was politics, and he was soon elected to the Executive Commission of the Student Union, then housed in a roomy whitewashed building on the edge of the campus. He said his heroes were Abraham Lincoln and the nineteenth-century Mexican nationalist leader Benito Juárez, and he spent hours memorizing the parliamentary speeches of Edmund Burke. He also became editor of the Student Union’s magazine. In February 1936 he had his first direct conflict with British authorities for refusing to reveal the name of the student who had written an inflammatory article about the university principal entitled “Hellhound at Large.” He was expelled, but this led to a university-wide student strike and the authorities backing down.

  Aung San struck many as an oddball, if a strangely attractive one. As a child he didn’t speak until he was eight, and as a teenager he often spent hours on his own, thinking and not responding at all to those around him. He seemed unconcerned about his appearance or dress, and his room at university was always a mess. For someone later known as a man of action, he also placed a great store on reading. He was a voracious reader.13 Through his reading he was drawn toward the extremist rhetoric of the day. One of his first battles, on the opinion pages of The World of Books, was with the up-and-coming political commentator U Thant, and the subject was school uniforms. The older man, then all of twenty-six, argued for fostering in children a sense of individuality, while Aung San wrote that the “standardization of human life” was both “inevitable and desirable” and questioned Thant’s sense of nationalism. With U Nu as an intermediary, they later became friends.14 But Aung San’s views soon carried the day.

  The Do Bama (We Burmans) Society, mainly a group of youngsters and a few off-mainstream politicians, was founded in 1935.15 Its members took the ironic style “Thakin,” meaning “lord” or “master” and generally used to address Europeans, in the same way as sahib in Hindi. They were contemptuous of middle-class politicians and middle-class life-styles and had as their creed to “live dangerously” and seek no personal advantage for nationalist ends. Many lived in poverty. One of their big attractions was their rousing and fairly belligerent song, which later became the national anthem. Many read Marxist literature and turned their energy toward organizing groups of mill workers and oil company employees, but this was only partly fruitful, as very few industrial workers were Burmese, most being Indian. Nietzsche was also a popular inspiration. Some, including perhaps the more clever ones, became Communists, and both a Burma Communist Party and Burma Socialist Party were formed in the years before the war. They were noticed, but barely, by the British authorities, the more established political leaders, and the public at large. They were schoolboys playing politics, marching up and down the street, conspiring in smoky tea shops over a tasty Indian snack, and arguing late at night about John Strachey’s Theory and Practice of Socialism in someone’s dingy dorm room, all while British officials and their wives were enjoying a long drink at the Pegu Club or watching a cricket match on the verandah of the Gymkhana. Who would have thought, as late as 1941, that in seven years’ time the Thakins would form Burma’s first independent government?

  Under the 1935 constitution, Burma had what looked a lot like a real government. This was an add-on to the 1935 India Act. As part of it Burma was separated from India, ending years of acrimonious debate, while being given as much home rule as any Indian province. There was a House of Representatives with 113 seats, including 12 reserved for ethnic Karen constituencies and 11 for business groups, mainly Scottish. There was also a 36-member Senate, designed as a conservative check, limited (through high-income eligibility rules) to well-to-do businessmen, professionals, landowners, and senior government officials. A cabinet headed by a prime minister was responsible to this new parliament. The governor retained authority over the Shan States and other hill areas as well as various emergency powers. This meant the British were still very much at the top, but there was reason to believe that influence and day-to-day decision making were finally shifting from a purely British officialdom to elected Burmese ministers.

  One of the newer faces was an up-and-coming barrister named Dr. Ba Maw. The son of one of Thibaw’s courtiers, Ba Maw was rumored to be of part-Armenian ancestry. A vain man who made showing off his good looks a lifelong pursuit, he designed his own clothes. Based on formal Burmese dress, they might be best described as retroconserva-tive with a twist, as might Ba Maw’s politics. He had gone up to Cambridge to read law at St. Catherine’s College but was then unceremoniously sent down after his tutors discovered that he had been secretly studying for the bar in London as well. By now a committed Anglophobe, he made his way to France, where he struggled to master French and then completed, with some difficulty, a doctorate in literature at Bordeaux.

  He had become well known in 1930 representing Saya San at his trial for sedition. It was a good opening for an aspiring nationalist politician, and Ba Maw was elected the first prime minister of Burma under the new constitution. His was to be a coalition government with a radical slant. His own party, the Sinyetha, or Poor Man’s Party, had campaigned on a populist ticket. Mimicking the rhetoric of the day, Dr. Ba Maw called for a program of people’s socialism, adapted to Burma’s national needs, attacking capitalists and promising to lower taxes. But his majority was dependent on the support of business and other conservative groups in the new legislative chamber. There would be a big divide between rhetoric and reality.16

  In this first Burmese experiment with democracy, politics was messy and violent. Because ultimate power was in the hands of the British governor and officialdom, the political parties inhabited a strange middle space between responsible government and theater. Over four years there were three coalition ministries, Ba Maw’s being ousted in 1940. It
was a sort of mimicry of what politics in an independent country might be like. Burma was still beset by growing economic and social problems. The economy was still in bad shape. Communal tensions flared up into violent riots, including new and bloody Muslim-Buddhist clashes in 1938. Crime rates remained severe. And the country’s leadership, such as it was, was either consumed by jockeying for ministerial posts or single-mindedly focused on a seemingly distant dream of independence. To the extent anyone had a platform for what an independent Burmese government would actually do, it was the left and the Communists in particular that provided most of the answers. These years also saw the rise of private militias. Surprisingly tolerated by the British authorities, these so-called pocket armies of key political leaders (Ba Maw had his own) were modeled on the Brownshirts and other fascist thugs in Central Europe and paraded up and down the streets of Rangoon, in khaki shorts, brandishing batons and intimidating onlookers. In all this, Britain was of course still in charge and still responsible, and more creative British attention might have improved matters. But with events in Europe, the British had other things to worry about.

  By 1938 an epidemic of school and university strikes had begun. And there was growing alignment between the younger Thakins and the All Burma Student Union. On 20 December students demanded the release of some imprisoned Thakin activists. The protest turned violent, and in the ensuing fighting, a policeman broke his club over the head of one of the demonstrators, who later died. The students had their first martyr. This led to more unrest, not just in Rangoon but elsewhere. In February 1939 troops at Mandalay opened fire to disperse thousands of students, Buddhist monks, and workers. Fourteen demonstrators were killed. A framework for Burmese politics for many decades was being set.