Fighting on all Fronts (44 page)

Entering the 19th century as the rulers of the territory now known as Burma, much of contemporary Thailand and north eastern India, the Third
Burmese Empire ruled by the Konbaung Dynasty was ill-placed in the age of emerging western imperialism. Located right on the border between British ruled India and expanding French colonialism in Southeast Asia, the millennium-old Burmese kingdom was bound to become a component in the classic age of imperialism in one way or another.

Three wars were fought between dynastic Burma and British India during the 19th century. By the time of the second war, which ended in the 1850s, Burma was already
de facto
subjected to British rule, while the third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885 merely accomplished the formality of annexing the remnants of the Burmese kingdom. The pronouncements of the last king, Thibaw, who mobilised his army promising to defeat the British, conquer their country and convert them to the true religion of Theravada Buddhism, only served as pathetic bluster at the beginning of the road that would lead to the end of his kingdom. Promises of French aid never materialised, and Thibaw and his family ended up in exile in India while the British took over administration of their new province.
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Like India, Burma was a territory that was deeply divided by ethnicity and territory. If the Russian Empire had been “the prison house of nations”, pre-conquest Burma could perhaps be called at least a “garden shed of nations”. While the plurality of people at the centre of the country were from the dominant Bamar group,
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the majority of the eastern half of the country come from the Karen and Shan groups. In the north and north east Burmese territory becomes a bewildering patchwork of tribes and ethnicities with their own customs and long-established ways of life.
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Burma had always had strong trading links with China that had left a significant Chinese community in the eventual colonial centre of Rangoon/Yangon, and British rule brought with it significant numbers of Indians as administrators and coolies.

The British were prepared to use both existing divisions and those they established in order to rule Burma, which from its conquest until the 1930s was administered as a province of the Raj. Unlike India, however, Burma had a long and recent history of union, and the dominant Bamar had a recent memory of ruling over the area as a united kingdom.
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Both the existing divisions in Burmese society and the proto-national consciousness of the Bamar are factors that must be taken into consideration as we review Burma’s wartime history.

The British had gobbled Burma up in no small part because it helped to secure the Indian crown jewel against the nearby French possessions of Indochina. Just as it became politically dependent on colonised India in the form of a joint colonial administration, Burma also became
economically subordinate to India as the main provider of rice to feed the subcontinent. Hence its economy entered the modern era as a periphery to a periphery.
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Intensive capitalist development did not take place in Burma even to the limited extent that it had started to in India. The place of the “rice bowl of India” in the global economy was decidedly marginal, and although rice production suffered a profound crisis with the Depression of the 1930s, the effects of this on countryside producers were highly varied and mitigated through a variety of strategies.
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The pacification of rural Burma was for the British authorities a never-ending job. Even where they would have preferred not to go, for example into the northern territory of the Wa people, known for their practice of head-hunting, their legendary filthiness and copious consumption of alcohol and opium, British forces felt they had to establish their authority to seal off the area from the influence of the French and Chinese, and because any future problems with their rule had to be dealt with pre-emptively.
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Meanwhile, they also had to deal with the occasionally rebellious mood of the Shan states, which had been divided between Britain, France and Thailand and whose leaders constantly attempted to play one off against the other.
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British colonial policemen in Burma, the Indian soldiers they commanded and the eventual recruits to the British army from the Karen and other native groups constantly felt themselves on the precipice of rebellion even in the most peaceful of times. George Orwell, who served for several years as a colonial official in towns on the river deltas of lower Burma, expressed this feeling when he complained of being hated by the vast majority of the people:

As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so… In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
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We should not have too much sympathy for the policeman Orwell who, as a British representative trapped by the expectations of the subject Burmese, felt himself an “absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind” him. Nevertheless, his viewpoint turned out to be prescient when the river districts he had policed rose in rebellion under a religious leader three years after he resigned his commission and
returned to England. The Saya San rebellion was only the climax of a series of rural rebellions that had taken place since the British conquest. Saya San, a traditional Buddhist healer, roused the countryside of Insein and Tharawaddy in revolt as pretender to the vacant Konbuang throne. The rebellion was commanded by a man who proclaimed himself “Glorious King of the Winged Creatures” and urged his followers into massacres armed with spears, crossbows and swords.
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Nevertheless, it was a rebellion that took two years and thousands of Indian troops to subdue.

In the first decades of the 20th century Burma had only made halting steps in the direction of modernity. Still ruled as a province of India, it was among the most backward of British possessions. However, it was not guarded against the winds of change from the outside world, especially those of anti-colonial resistance. British rule would bring together explosive ingredients that would catapult Burma to the forefront of anti-colonial struggles, and, within the native educated elite it sought to help rule the country, it would help create the men who could lead this process.

The earliest expression of nationalist consciousness in British-ruled Burma took the form of associations of elite Bamars aiming to protect their culture, especially Buddhism, which they saw as being under attack by American and British missionaries who were engaged in proselytising, especially among Burma’s ethnic minorities. The Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) was founded in 1906 by English-educated barrister U May Oung, who with other moderates set himself the aim of promoting and defending Buddhism and the glories of classical Bamar civilisation. Though inspiration is frequently cited in the British YMCA, this organisation was just as much the outgrowth of the monastic culture of Burma as foreign influence.
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Like the men who had founded the Indian National Congress in 1885, the members of the YMBA had aims that were mostly non-political, and hoped merely to increase Bamar influence within the colonial administration.

But also like the Congress, the moderate, gentlemanly and pro-colonial stance of the YMBA would be challenged in ways that forced the organisation to reinvent itself in order to express its people’s aspirations. It transformed itself into the General Council of Burmese Associations (GCBA) in 1919, the year its members began to lead protests demanding that the British respect the Buddhist temples by removing their shoes
and demanding due reverence to holy images.
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Though the GCBA was displaced in the 1930s, it would be the crucible for many cadres of the later nationalist movement.

Developments under British rule and in the rest of the world were bringing to fruition the conditions that could foster a more militant nationalism that would take its cue from the anti-colonial present rather than Burma’s illustrious monarchic past. Central among these was the developing antagonism between the Bamar and Indians who had been brought to Burma by British rule. The colonial capital of Rangoon, though in the centre of the Bamar homeland, was dominated by foreigners among whom the Indians were the most conspicuous at the top as administrators, in the middle as soldiers, and at the bottom as labourers. The British relied on these Indians to run the most important functions in colonial Burma, a responsibility which was increasingly taken amiss and served to radicalise young men of the emerging middle class.

In 1930, on cue with the Saya San rebellion, race riots between Indians and Bamar rocked the capital city. The immediate cause was a labour dispute over jobs being given preferentially to Indians, a source of strife that continued throughout the 1930s. Out of this strife emerged the Dobama Asiayone (We Burmans Association). Dobama quickly grew into the vanguard of militant Bamar nationalism. Its members were largely students at Rangoon University who had sworn loyalty to the cause of the Burmese race and were known as “Thakin” (master). This was a calculated provocation to the British, who were addressed as “thakin” in Burma just as they were addressed as “sahib” in India. Two young Thakins, U Nu and Aung San, led the nationalist cause. In 1936, when they were both expelled from university for printing anti-British tracts, their supporters went on strike and won their reinstatement in addition to the firing of the chauvinist rector.
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Thakins led all the major disturbances against British rule during the 1930s, from boycotting the colonial elections to organising unions of Bamar workers. A number of these campaigns came together in the “1300 Revolution,” in 1938, named after the year in the Burmese calendar. The Thakins were supremely confident in their ability to lead their people forward to freedom, especially after disturbances in the mid-1930s led the British to give Burma its own administration separate from that of India.

The prominent nationalists of this decade were Bamar almost to a man, and saw their own patriotism as being consonant with that of the whole territory of Burma that the old monarchy had once ruled. Their ideology developed, as with all nationalisms, in the form of a highly
eclectic mix of influences from home and abroad. Arguably the most important among these was Bamar racial pride. A Dobama song, a version of which would later become the national anthem of Burma, went:

…Be brave, be brave, like a true Burman,

Burma, Burma for us Burmans.

Act and behave like Masters,

For Burmans are a race of Masters…

For so long as the world will last,

Burma is ours, Burma is ours.

This is our country, this our land,

This our country till the end.
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Along with racial pride, the Bamar people were influenced by a bewildering mixture of foreign ideologies. The activists who had joined the GCBA in the 1920s hoping for militant action against British rule had been fascinated with Ireland’s Easter Rising in 1916, and many continued to look to Sinn Féin as a successful example of anti-colonial resistance.
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Others found in the new government of Mustafa Kemal in Turkey an exemplar of the national strength and unity they desired. The racial pride that had been bred into early Bamar nationalism also accorded well with the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, who seemed to some to show that nationalist revival was best accomplished through strong leadership rather than attention to the welfare of democracy.
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Right wing and left wing trends within Thakin thought were not so much in competition as collaboration, as both were part of the mélange of foreign ideologies that Bamar intellectuals reached out to for inspiration for the economic and political revival they felt their country desperately needed. As with all colonial peoples, the Burmese had heard of and taken inspiration from the October Revolution in Russia. Many Thakins as anti-colonial intellectuals in the 1930s looked to the Soviet Union as a model for economic transformation and revival, as they felt its experiences of being a backward country were similar to their own. Texts such as Lenin’s
Imperialism
and the Comintern’s documents on the Popular Front began to circulate in Burmese through the agency of the Red Dragon Club, which aimed to distribute popular Marxist pamphlets and the works of Thakins aiming to analyse Burma’s conditions through a Marxist lens.
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In 1939 the Indian communist Narendra Dutt brought together Aung San, Ba Hein, Soe Hla Pe, and others to form the first communist cell in Burma.
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Other influences were closer to home. Collaboration between Burmese and Indian nationalists led to Aung San and others attending the 1939 Ramgarh meeting of the Congress Party, when Subhas Chandra Bose was elected to its presidency on a militant platform of wartime resistance to British rule.
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Ba Maw, who was elected to head the colonial ministry in Burma that year, was so impressed by Bose that he named the new party he formed with Thakin collaboration the Freedom Bloc after Bose’s Forward Bloc. Indian nationalism in the forms of Gandhism, Bose’s militant anti-colonialism, and Nehru’s democratic socialism would be key reference points for Burma’s leaders throughout the war. Like Bose and other Indian leaders, many of the Thakins were inspired by Japan’s rise in the east following its defeat of Russia in 1905, though they were divided on their views of the Japanese occupation of China. The question of attitudes to Japan would obviously be a key area of contention.