The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  This is not to say that insurgencies will end. Many of them have slowed and stagnated into armed bands without public support; they struggle to keep their relevance while major groups have signed peace accords or are negotiating settlements, cognizant of public fatigue and the wearying toll that conflict has taken on their ranks and beliefs.

  Ethnic aspirations and questions of identity will remain. But peace can grow with the growth of political autonomy for ethnic groups, large and small, within a national framework, accompanied by access to markets, technology and better connectivity.

  In the search for peace, the peoples of the eastern Himalaya have spanned more than a thousand years in a lifetime.

  BURMA AND THE KIPLING MYSTIQUE

  Andrew Selth

  In the minds of many Westerners, Burma (now known as Myanmar) is still firmly attached to the bard of the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling. At the Governor’s Residence in Rangoon (Yangon), for example, there is a watering hole known as the Kipling Bar, where the hotel’s guests are invited to imbibe, along with their drinks, the atmosphere of the Raj. In its promotional literature, the Strand Hotel proudly (and inaccurately) boasts that Kipling once stayed there. A bestselling guide book states that the Pegu Club in Rangoon was where Kipling was inspired to write his famous poem, ‘Mandalay’. It was more likely an incident in Moulmein (Mawlamyine) that sparked Kipling’s muse, but this claim is repeated in a brochure produced by an organization dedicated to preserving Rangoon’s sadly neglected colonial buildings. In other places, and in other ways, Kipling is repeatedly invoked, giving the impression that the poet paid a lengthy visit to Burma and knew it well.

  Kipling wrote a number of poems and stories that featured Burma, but he only visited the then province of India for three days, and part of that time was spent at sea. In fact, he later wrote that his sojourn in Rangoon was ‘countable by hours’. Despite the claims of several writers, he never sailed on the Irrawaddy River, nor did he ever visit Mandalay.

  In his essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, the poet T.S. Eliot spoke of how, when a new literary work appeared, every existing work was somehow modified by it and the whole scene subtly rearranged. He was speaking purely of literature, and his comment can be applied to Kipling’s oeuvre, but the poem ‘Mandalay’ did this in another sense too. Despite all the critical comments that have appeared over the past 125 years or so, both the poem and its musical settings (usually published under the title ‘On the Road to Mandalay’) have been enormously influential. The poem irrevocably altered public perceptions of Burma and, by extension, Western notions of the ‘Far East’. In different ways, and to different degrees, its musical settings coloured almost all the popular songs and tunes about Asia that followed – and there were hundreds of them. As a survey of Burma-related compositions shows, Kipling’s images became fixed firmly in people’s minds and inspired dozens of composers and lyricists in the UK, the US, and elsewhere.

  It would be going too far to claim that ‘Mandalay’ alone was responsible for the outpouring of songs and tunes during the colonial period that related in some way to Burma. By 1890, when the poem first appeared in print, there was already a long association between the ‘Orient’ and Western music, much of which dwelt on relationships between Asian women and Western men. The poem not only appeared at the height of Britain’s imperial expansion, but it also coincided with a number of social movements in the UK and beyond, that had to do with questions of race, religion, and gender. In addition, soon after ‘Mandalay’ was published, the popular music industry underwent a radical transformation: technical advances in recording, marketing, and broadcasting led to the rapid globalization of Western music and the appearance of a mass culture that permeated most countries, including Burma. Assisted by all those developments, Kipling’s ‘Barrack-Room Ballad’ had a remarkable impact which is still being felt today.

  In literature too, the poem has long been a favourite of publishers and authors. If one dips into the websites of a few prominent online booksellers, they reveal around thirty works about Burma, with their main titles drawn directly from Kipling’s poem. In addition to several named The Road to Mandalay, they encompass variations such as The Road from Mandalay, Back to Mandalay, Red Roads to Mandalay, The Road Past Mandalay, and On the Back Road toMandalay. There are similar titles in French, German, and other languages. The publication dates of these works range from the early 20th century right through to the present day. The list includes novels, travelogues, autobiographies, histories, collections of poetry, science-fiction stories, and books of photographs. Also, ‘Mandalay’ has long been used to punctuate news stories about Burma in the mainstream media, and to illuminate longer works. This is in addition to a dozen or so feature films, documentaries, and travel movies, all named with the obvious intention of capitalizing on the popularity of Kipling’s poem, or at least the likelihood that its exotic and historical associations would be recognized and acknowledged.

  Once it became well known, the name ‘Mandalay’ acquired commercial value in other spheres. It was applied to condiments and cocktails, ships and streets, buildings and businesses. In 1907, for example, H.J. Heinz invested heavily in his Mandalay Sauce, which sought to replicate some of the ‘spicy garlic smells’ described by Kipling. A drink based on rum and fruit juice was dubbed ‘A Night in Old Mandalay’. There was even a children’s board game called ‘Mandalay’, released in 1960. It is stretching a point, but at one stage ‘Manderley’, believed by many to be a variant spelling of ‘Mandalay’, was reputed to be the most popular house name in the UK. In fact, the ubiquity of the name was more likely due to the popularity of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca (and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaption of the same name), in which ‘Manderley’ was the name of the fictional country estate owned by the main character. Even so, the opening line of the novel, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’, has been likened by some critics to the wish expressed by the British solider in Kipling’s iconic poem to return to Mandalay.

  During the colonial period, Burma never achieved quite the same status in the mind of the British public as Sax Rohmer’s ‘mysterious Orient’, or Walter de la Mare’s ‘heart-beguiling Araby’, but it became an easily recognizable reference point, representing exotic places far away, full of mystery and promise.This was particularly true of Mandalay. Like Timbuktu, Samarkand, and other semi-mythical places that captured the popular imagination of the West during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the old royal capital of Burma became a powerful symbol. After passing through the city in the 1920s, for example, W. Somerset Maugham observed:

  First of all Mandalay is a name. For there are places whose names from some accident of history or happy association have an independent magic and perhaps the wise man would never visit them, for the expectations they arouse can hardly be realized… Mandalay has its name; the falling cadence of the lovely word has gathered about itself the chiaroscuro of romance.

  Maugham felt that the very name ‘Mandalay’ ‘…informs the sensitive fancy’. To his mind, it was not possible for anyone to write it down ‘without a quickening of the pulse and at his heart the pain of unsatisfied desire’. Such was the power of its accumulated associations.The ‘magic’ described by Maugham was in large part derived from Kipling’s ballad, and helped shape the reception given to later musical compositions with Oriental themes.

  To use Nicoleta Medrea’s memorable phrase, during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Rudyard Kipling ‘colonized the imagination’ of the West. His ballad ‘Mandalay’ captured ‘the psychic energy of empire’. It became firmly fixed in popular culture and endured into the 21st century. It did not matter if accuracy suffered in the process. By the 1930s, the singer Peter Dawson (famous for his renditions of the song) was claiming that ‘No man knew or saw more, in and about India and Burma, than Rudyard Kipling’. During the Second World War, correspondents in Burma repeatedly invoked ‘Mandalay’ in stories, confident that their
readership would make the connection. After a visit to Burma in 1951, Norman Lewis wrote: ‘Mandalay. In the name there was a euphony which beckoned to the imagination.’ Hugh Tinker could have expanded the scope of his observation when he stated in 1957, ‘to the average Englishman Burma conjured up one poem and perhaps a short story by Kipling – Kipling, who spent three days in Burma.’ Writing in 2002, an American travel writer took a less generous view: ‘Rare is the book about Burma,’ he wrote, ‘that doesn’t gush the obligatory line or two of Kipling!’

  This complex amalgam of fact and fantasy, realism and romance in the public imagination of the West was nicely captured in 2004 by Emma Larkin. In her book Secret Histories, where she retraced George Orwell’s footsteps in Burma, she confessed to feeling something of the ‘independent magic’ of Mandalay:

  I always find it impossible to say the name ‘Mandalay’ out loud without having at least a small flutter of excitement. For many foreigners the name conjures up irresistible images of lost oriental kingdoms and tropical splendour. The unofficial Poet Laureate of British colonialism, Rudyard Kipling, is partly responsible for this, through his well-loved poem ‘Mandalay’.

  These sentiments are clearly widely held. As demonstrated by countless modern musicians, authors, film-makers, journalists, tour-company operators, hoteliers, and travel guides, Kipling’s ballad is widely recognized and still holds enormous appeal. It continues to evoke strong responses among all those who read the ballad or, more likely, hear it sung. As George Orwell once wrote:

  Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could not get any pleasure out of such lines as:

  ‘For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,

  ‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’

  MOON OVER BURMA

  A long way from home

  Tulsi Badrinath

  In time to come, Major Bhawander would hate the sixth of every March, that day in 1942 when misfortune in the shape of an Arisaka rifle knocked him unconscious, and the war – that was not his war, for a country that was not his own, in a land that was not India – stole from him his youth and innocence.

  As awareness spread through his slack body, the Major realized that he was tied to a tree deep in the Burmese jungle, a mass of glistening creepers and giant trees screening out the sky so he could not tell if it was still afternoon or evening. Something sharp was pricking his chest. Blue steel glinted. At the end of the long lethal blade – a Japanese soldier, hate aslant in his seed-like eyes.

  The guard aimed the bayonet at the Major’s groin with murderous force. In the split second before it plunged, he was ordered to stop. Not to be thwarted, he set about punching Bhawander in the head, opening up his scalp at the crown. The back of Bhawander’s head was wet, his shirt sticky. Knees drawn up to his chest, he could see his uniform turn dark in places, and then there was red in his eye.

  Another one joined in the beating, holding the Major’s legs straight. The stench of the two was overpowering – men who hadn’t bathed for weeks. Rotted-meat breath, caked sweat-piss-shit. He concentrated on the animal odour as the blows fell hard on his abdomen.

  At some point they left him, and he curled into himself. His wristwatch was gone, as were his sunglasses and pen. His laces were undone. Glancing from beneath his lashes, he counted seven other prisoners, all tied up. Just out of reach of the last man, who was from the Major’s unit, lay Bhawander’s revolver and binoculars in a pile of surrendered weaponry.

  Each time the Major inhaled, it hurt. Breathing shallowly, he concluded that it was his own bloody fault for having been taken prisoner. He had underestimated the Japanese.

  It was the outcome of boredom, really. The sort that afflicts a soldier in the middle of battle when everyone is on high alert, and the enemy close enough, but not within sight. Primed for action but having to wait … he found that difficult. And the rumours multiplied by the day.

  Singapore had fallen. The unthinkable had happened; the battlescape had shifted eastwards from Europe and North Africa to South-east Asia, making it truly a world at war. A tidal wave of Japanese aggression had swelled from the Pacific over a swathe of territories, gathering prize cities in its momentum: Hanoi, Haiphong, Saigon, Luzon, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Muar, and in February, Singapore.

  Recently, the Japanese, advancing stealthily from Thailand into thickly wooded Burma over routes that previously did not exist, had taken Moulmein and were as close as sixty miles from Pegu, to the north-east of Rangoon. If the British Indian army could not hold Pegu, then Rangoon – that doomed city already emptied of its civilians, but with vital access to the sea – would fall. With Rangoon under their control, the Japs would take the rest of Burma, the rice-rich fabled gem in the British imperial crown. They would cut off American supplies to China and surge north to the Indian and Chinese borders.

  The Major had had his worries. His regiment had no adequate knowledge of the terrain nor experience fighting against the Japanese, but worse, there was no efficient and decisive leadership at the higher levels. What had happened at Sittang a fortnight ago was disturbing. First the troops were strafed by friendly fire, then Major General Smyth blew up the bridge, stranding two brigades of the Indian army on the wrong side of the river at the mercy of the Japanese. It was rumoured that more than 5,000 men had died. It was only a matter of time before the Japs reached Rangoon and the British army’s divisional headquarters. From his desk there, he could see a stream of trucks transporting Indian sepoys last deployed in Egypt. Poor buggers, from desert to unknown jungle.

  The Major had decided to visit his men at Pegu, some 50 miles away, give them their mail and some supplies they had requested. Action, of any sort, was better than routine work and listening to a whole bunch of rumours.

  He had set off in a truck with six men and lots of ammunition for the battery he commanded. The muggy heat outside enveloped him, but as the breeze dried off the sweat on his neck and face, he began to feel better. They had reached Pegu in record time, even though there were rumours of skirmishes with the Japs further in the interior. An air raid the previous night had left huge craters and smoke furling out of ruined buildings. Despite the minor injuries they had suffered, his men were cheerful: they had brought down a Jap twin-engine bomber. It lay twisted in a paddy field, and a stream of local people ventured out to look at it, this demon with a big red dot fallen from the sky.

  At lunch, in the mess tent, Ferguson, the Major’s senior by a year, had pulled his leg. ‘My, spiffy as usual! One day your orderly will run out of spit and elbow grease!’ Bhawander had chuckled. He was known to be particular about his appearance. A special method involving fire and layers of polish on his boots ensured that they shone enamel-bright. It was a good lunch, despite the loud buzzing of flies in the mess tent. The roast pork was excellent and the potatoes browned crisp. Canned beer was aplenty. ‘Well, run along then,’ exclaimed Ferguson. ‘Don’t get too comfortable here!’

  In the afternoon, the Major had headed back to Rangoon. He had barely reached the outskirts of Pegu when he found a group of army trucks, jeeps and three Stuart ‘Honey’ tanks halted to one side of the road. There was a possibility that the Japanese were in the jungle ahead; their contact whistles had been heard. The other officers did not seem in a hurry to get moving. The Major had waited with them, smoking a cigarette and chatting half-heartedly. There was no movement, nothing to suggest the enemy was near. Rumours. He was sick of them. Hadn’t he travelled on this road just hours back and found it Jap-free? He ground the stub under his heel and decided to set off. The others waited, and when he had traversed a good hundred yards without mishap they followed him, the bunch of namby-pambies.

  Five minutes later he had seen men in the distance, scurrying across the road into the thick jungle. From their features, they seemed to be Burmans, or maybe even Gurkhas. Perhaps they knew something. He ordered his driver to stop th
e truck and strode down the road, peering in the foliage. Ram Pyare, his havildar, scuttled past the shrubs on the fringe. The other vehicles halted.

  ‘Hiyaaaahh!’ He heard a shriek that peeled open his nerves, already frayed from the air-raid sirens that blew at night. Some drill, an exercise by the Burma army? This was not the time to play games. A bunch of men charged out, bayonets fixed. Ram Pyare got it in the stomach, blood spurting high. Red star on the cap, the khaki flap … the enemy! Bhawander fumbled for his revolver and fired. The man fell. The Japs ran towards the army vehicles from which the soldiers were scrambling out in haste. Something hit the back of Bhawander’s head; it throbbed with pain. He raised his revolver, slow, too slow… Everything went black.

  Leaves and the overhead sun. His ankles in the grip of a Jap and his head thumping along the jungle track. Things tore at his scalp; he blanked out again. When he came to, he was slumped against a tree, arms tied behind. Two other prisoners, a subedar and a corporal, were moaning in distress. The lower half of the subedar’s right leg blown off; the other had only a bandage to keep the fragments of his face together. No first aid was provided. The Major felt waves of nausea rising.

  The officer in charge, the only one who spoke English there, came over to Major Bhawander. ‘You are lucky to be alive,’ he said. ‘You killed one of our officers and wounded another. His men wanted to kill you. What is your name?’

  Bhawander began to reply, but vomit gushed out of his mouth. The officer kept talking. ‘Why do you fight us?’ he asked. ‘We have no enmity with the Indians. We have come to help you.’ None of his questions had any strategic military angle.