by Harper, Tim
Other vivid fictional recreations of the Second World War sparked controversy. In 1954 the first English translation appeared of Pierre Boulle’s novel Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï. The French author, himself a former prisoner of the Japanese, depicted a group of British POWs being forced to build a bridge on the Burma–Siam railway. The fictional senior British officer, Colonel Nicholson, after a protracted and painful battle with his Japanese jailer about officers’ honour and dignity, becomes obsessed with the creation and perfection of the bridge, at the same time as British special forces are doing all they can to destroy it. At first sight it seemed an odd thing for a Frenchman to write a novel about the hidebound British military mentality, although his story undoubtedly served as a good illustration of the futility of war. But Boulle had worked on rubber plantations in Malaya before and after the war and had had ample opportunity to observe the waning British Empire at close hand. Or perhaps his novel represented a kind of transposition of his views on the glorious folly of de Lattre de Tassigny and the defenders of Dien Bien Phu to the British, whose decolonization in the region had been generally more circumspect and less bloody. In 1957, just after Britain and France’s occupation of the Suez Canal, the controversy about the book was revived by David Lean’s film version. The British public had long been sensitive about cinematographic portrayals of the Burma war and its aftermath. In 1945 a Warner Brothers’ film, Objective Burma!, which depicted Errol Flynn as an American paratrooper recapturing Burma without the benefit of a single British ally, had caused such offence in the United Kingdom that it was withdrawn from release until 1952. Now, the American financiers of the Lean film insisted on inserting a brave American individualist into a story carefully crafted by Boulle to juxtapose the honourable but purblind orthodoxy of ‘Colonel Nicholson’ with the unorthodox but ultimately futile heroics of ‘Major Warden’, the ‘Force 316’ agent. This was only a few years after the American General Joseph Stilwell’s dismissive and foul-mouthed reflections on the British war effort were made public and Lean’s film was given a very mixed reception in Britain. In retrospect, though, it was simply another marker on the road that transformed Britain from an imperial nation at war into a consumer society increasingly suspicious of class, deference and moral homilies.
It was not only the British who were stirred up by dramatic recreations of the Second World War. In 1955, the Hollywood film The Purple Plain reached Burma. It starred Gregory Peck and a young Burmese actress, Win Min Than, and told the story of a Canadian special operations executive soldier lost in the fastnesses of Burma during the latter stages of the war. Many Burmese were unimpressed. For one thing it had been shot in Ceylon (as had Lean’s film). But what they really objected to was its cultural crassness. One scene showed people wearing shoes in a pagoda; another showed a Burmese boy killing a lizard. This, it was said, was ‘a gross slander on the character of Burmese children’.62 Worst of all, the Peck character was seen sleeping beside the Burmese maiden, ‘without being married’. This ‘suggested that Burmese women were immoral’. Government censors debated whether to ban the film, but in the end it was released so that Burmese people could criticize it in full knowledge of its contents. The horrors and compromises of the Second World War were still fresh in the minds of both Asians and Europeans.
Memory changed over time; different themes would come to the fore at different periods, in ways that reflected how societies sought to fashion their public history. For Singapore, as its new prime minister Lee Kuan Yew argued in opening a memorial to civilians, in 1961, it was ‘through sharing such common experiences that the feeling of living and being one community is established’. In Malaysia, nationhood perhaps demanded that much be forgotten. Memories would often speak to contemporary anxieties.63 They were reawakened by the reappearance of the Japanese. Their presence in the region – as long-term residents – predated the war and the logic of Japanese interests drew them at a very early stage after it, and in exactly the strategic areas – Malayan iron mining, for example – in which they had made such a pronounced investment before 1941. In 1951 the wartime administrator of Singapore, Mamoru Shinozaki, returned to the island, or at least to its harbour, where, unable to land, he received guests on board a freighter. Later Shinozaki was to lead the way in confronting the past with a memoir, published in English in Singapore, of his wartime experiences: Syonan: My Story. It acknowledged the atrocities of the sook ching massacres, but also highlighted his role and his contribution to the welfare of Singapore’s people. These returns generated considerable anger in the Chinese press. But, with the encouragement of key figures such as Malcolm MacDonald, they persisted. In April 1952 the first senior Japanese to visit MacDonald arrived at Bukit Serene with a letter from the Japanese prime minister. The visitor was nervous. The cook at Bukit Serene wept – his parents and sister had been murdered by the Japanese in China – but, it was observed, he did his duty.64 By 1954 the flagship Japanese departmental store, Echigoya, where a pre-war generation of Asian clerks had bought their cheap office ducks and toys for their children, reopened, as did the Singapore Japanese Association, which had been such a prominent feature of the island’s social scene before the war. The old Japanese expatriate community began to return as ‘advisers’, often exploiting their wartime connections. Some still saw Malaya as their home, and a sense of rootedness began to return with the refoundation of the Japanese School.65 The economic consequences of this were immense. By 1972 Southeast Asian countries purchased nearly 12 per cent of total Japanese exports and supplied 16 per cent of total imports. By 1979, 35.4 per cent of Japan’s total manufacturing investment and 43 per cent of investment in mining was in Southeast Asia.66‘Even after the war’, one Japanese historian has observed, ‘many Japanese businessmen and entrepreneurs still thought of Indonesia as a sort of second Manchuria’.67 The old wartime battlefields and shrines in Singapore island – with the remains of both the Japanese war criminals and war victims, Kempeitai and conscript labourers – began to be visited in large numbers by a new and ubiquitous presence: the Japanese tourist.
A FLAWED INHERITANCE
If in 1955 people’s memories of the Second World War were still raw, with much suppressed or forgotten, the present was in some ways a disappointment of those dreams of independence which had entranced them a decade before. As India struggled with the problems of statehood, Nehru was personally in a more optimistic mood in 1955. It was only with the resurgence of severe economic difficulties in the late 1950s and the conflict with China in his last years that his outlook darkened. But in objective terms the problems that faced independent India remained vast. If famine did not reappear as frequently as it had under the Raj, the country’s food problems seemed no nearer solution and tens of millions continued to live in the direst poverty while the first flush of wealth from the new industrialization faded. Perhaps, indeed, Nehru’s very adherence to a Soviet model of gargantuan ‘socialist industry’ had worsened the poverty of the countryside. Political problems were equally pressing in New Delhi. Once the British left, India’s fractious politicians set about fighting over the spoils of office. The Punjab’s Sikhs and people in the south who did not speak Hindi, the new national language, vociferously demanded special status within the constitution. Refugees from East and West Pakistan had not been fully absorbed into India’s massive, ramshackle cities. On the frontiers, particularly in the northeast, militant groups such as the Nagas, who had been armed and radicalized by the war, continued to fight the central government in Delhi. India’s ‘most dangerous decades’ were looming.
India’s pre-eminent problem was the continuing fight with Pakistan over the Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state that Nehru had insisted in 1947 must belong to India. Both countries diverted vital resources to their armed forces, distorting development almost as much as military priorities had done under the Raj. The diplomatic stand-off led to sporadic armed clashes on the borders and, though it did not erode India’s resolutely civilian political order, the a
rmy became more and more visible in the politics of Pakistan. General Ayub Khan came to believe that he could do a better job than quarrelling politicians of bringing India to book over Kashmir and holding his fissiparous country together. Ironically, the legacy of Mahomed Ali Jinnah, that consummate political schemer and master artisan of constitutions and resolutions, was to be decades of military rule in Pakistan. Nowhere were the tensions which undermined the new, uncertain and divided state more evident than in East Pakistan, located at the apex of the former crescent of British Southeast Asia. The Bengali-speaking politicians of East Pakistan chafed under what they saw as the semi-colonial domination of their leaders in the western capital of Islamabad. Refugees continued to surge across the borders in both directions, Hindus to the west, Muslims to the east, creating new pools of privation in the poverty-stricken countryside and declining cities. Even on Pakistan’s and India’s most easterly frontier with Burma, conflicts between Muslim and Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim, separatists and centralizers continued to kill hundreds and terrorize remote villages.
Many of the acute problems that faced the new nations could be traced directly to the nature of British rule and the corroding, radicalizing effect of the Second World War. They represented the other face of freedom from the beaming crowds and proud processions on independence days. They were also testament to the continuing role of the great Western powers in Asia and the coming of age of the new leviathans, the USSR and China, which were determined to play their own Great Game for South and Southeast Asia. As Nehru leaned towards the USSR, shunned by the anti-communist USA, so the Soviet leadership flattered his wishes and the Soviet security services began to infiltrate the country. Communist China, for its part, fresh from its great success in bolstering Ho Chih Minh in Vietnam, began to play politics in Burma, Pakistan, and Indonesia, though it was impotent to affect the course of the war to the south in Malaya. The Cold War gave new life to old fantasies of imperial dominance. British anti-communism and American suspicion of India caused them tacitly to support the emerging ‘state of martial rule’ in Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, and the ‘softer’ authoritarianism of Malaysia and Singapore.
Britain and the USA retained the largest economic and political stakes in the region. Both countries still counted the new states as important partners in trade. Even though India, Pakistan and Burma had erected high tariff barriers against foreign goods, the whole organization of the world economy continued to put them at a massive disadvantage which would persist until the early twenty-first century. Writing from Changi jail in 1959, James Puthucheary, once again a detainee, penned a classic analysis: Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy. It argued that the British still dominated ‘commanding heights and much of the valleys’ of the Malayan economy, and that the British had removed much of the sting of this by bringing in Malay directors and Chinese investors. As is now acknowledged, ‘crony capitalism’ – the scourge of modern corporate Asia – cut its teeth in the British and Japanese periods.68 The imperial past still shaped borders. The exclusion of Singapore from the Malayan federation was to be briefly reversed in 1963, when, with North Borneo and Sarawak, it joined the Federation of Malaysia. Although this experiment was not predetermined to fail, the reasons for Singapore’s departure in 1965–the alarm of Malay elites that its volatile Chinese politics would upset the delicate balance of power on the peninsula – was foreshadowed by events in 1946 and 1947. The political compromises of the transfer of power were to unravel as ethnic tensions rose, and in 1969 Malaysia experienced race riots on a scale it had not seen since 1945. It would face the need for a second, deeper decolonization in which the state would affirm the centrality of the Malay language and culture and drive forward the ethnic distribution within the economy. In Singapore the new independent regime of the People’s Action Party would also have to seek new ways to reconstruct Singaporean society and shift the course of national development.
In Burma it was a combination of unending internal conflict and foreign intervention which led to the rise and seemingly endless rule of the military in a country which had once been one of the brightest hopes for Asian prosperity. Burma had all but become one of the first ‘failed states’, as piously categorized by Western political scientists. The wars of the minorities against Rangoon were again partly the legacy of colonial rule, even though the Labour government itself had decided that Burma must be kept together in order to repel Chinese influence. The British and Americans, of course, had never actively sought to bolster General Ne Win’s rise to power but, as in the case of Ayub Khan of Pakistan, Western politicians were relieved enough when non-communist strongmen came to control poor and conflict-ridden countries. It was not even that Ne Win and the other Burmese generals were entirely personae nongratae amongst the post-war Western leaders, despite the harsh words traded by both sides. Britain (and India) had helped to arm Burma in 1949 and 1950 when the government in Rangoon seemed about to fall to the Karen–communist alliance. Ne Win was more than once seen in the company of Malcolm MacDonald. He even dallied in the Commissioner General’s Malayan swimming pool. Thus it had ever been since the days of Thucydides the Athenian, that democracies at home consorted with dictators and became tyrannies abroad, though still cloaking their interests in the rhetoric of ‘spreading democracy’.
As they faced the future, not all the auguries for the crescent and its neighbours were so poor, of course. Independence had given a huge moral boost to the peoples of India, Pakistan and Burma. The sense of release from the grip of European colonialism was palpable, perhaps not least because it had shown some of its worst sides just before and during the early stages of the Second World War. Open racism, economic exploitation and neglect by the European powers reached their high point in the Depression and during the first phase of the war. After 1945 newly independent governments set limits to the privileges of European business in South and Southeast Asia, though nationalization proceeded quite slowly even in Burma. Still, reading the newspapers and memoirs of this period, it becomes apparent that fears for the future were mixed with a sense that the new nations possessed limitless capacity for growth and development. The stilted, sanctimonious yet aspiring language of the Bandung generation amply illustrates this. Even in the surviving enclaves of British government in the crescent, officials paid more attention to the improvement of the health and education of their remaining subjects. Malcolm MacDonald regarded his greatest act to have been the creation of the University of Malaya. A new, high-thinking and Christian imperialism seemed to be taking shape beneath a blanket of counter-insurgency and press censorship. In Malaya and Singapore at least, decolonization was seen as major success story, as their later prosperity seemed to affirm. Yet it must be remembered that the achievements of colonial rule, such as relatively stable and independent institutions of state, were not solely, or primarily, a colonial legacy. From the first collapse of colonial power in 1941 these institutions had been shaped by Asian initiative. In these tense and violent days of the mid 1950s the seeds of the Southeast Asian miracle were sown by Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs, Malay educationalists and returning Japanese businessmen. Now the new promise has spread to India and Vietnam while China reaps the rewards of its state-directed capitalism. Moreover, the darker underside of the colonial story has rarely been told. The maladministration and graft of the military administration; the wild and unchecked fury of white terror in the first years; the extra-judicial killings of young men and women; the grotesque atrocity exhibitions of the mutilated slain; the violence to family life and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers and labourers during resettlement; the insidious small tyrannies of a vast and largely unaccountable bureaucracy; the racism and arrogance of empire – all this must be set in the balance.
Merdeka was lived by an entire generation. But many people in what had been British Asia felt that it had not been realized wholly; that is in the cry of Tan Malaka for ‘one hundred per cent Merdeka’ that was raised in the Solo valley in late
1945 and taken up right across the region. The Merdeka that was achieved fell something short of this. The achievements of independence were substantial, but new regimes showed themselves willing to adopt the paternalistic methods of colonial rule, and they were eager to retain its authoritarian instruments. It was not always the case. In his constitutional talks for Singapore in April and May 1956, David Marshall rejected a formula for self-government which still gave the British control over internal security, and the power to suspend the constitution. He had become increasingly nervous at the continuing shadow of powers of detention without trial. He denounced the independence he was offered as a ‘three quarters rotten Merdeka’. But for all his clear-sightedness of what was at stake, Marshall paid dearly for not taking what was on offer. Within weeks he was swept out of office. In the longer term it was Lee Kuan Yew – the Fabian-inclined, Cambridge-educated lawyer –who was prepared to compromise with the British and their security state. It seemed that the democratic niceties of the formal transfer of power were not so important as knowing how to wield it effectively. For Marshall the liberal traditions of Western rule were worth fighting for. His ally in this, the charismatic radical Lim Chin Siong, saw the matter from the perspective of the popular movement for a New Democracy, to which he was heir. ‘The people ask for fundamental democratic rights’, Lim Chin Siong had thundered, in an early speech to the Legislative Council, ‘but what have they got? They have got only the freedom of firecrackers after seven o’clock in the evening. The people ask for bread and they have been given stones instead.’ At the heart of the issue was that so long as these discretionary powers hung over society – in whoever’s hands – Singapore would still be unfree, and Merdeka would be unrealized.69