Ghosts of Empire (30 page)

The racial attitudes of the British were not based on any scientific reasoning. British imperialists were not systematic racists like the Nazis. The racism and social ostracism were reflected in crude ways such as by ‘colour bars' at clubs, where only Europeans could join or be served. U Tin Tut's experience in one incident showed the petty humiliations sometimes inflicted on the natives. U Tin Tut had been educated in England at Dulwich College and Cambridge before the First World War. In the early 1920s, the Gymkhana Club at Rangoon were playing their only opponents, the garrison, at rugby football. The garrison were unable to find fifteen Europeans to make up their team, so they asked U Tin Tut to play for them. Having been commissioned into the army during the Great War and later being called to the London Bar, he was now a civil servant in Burma. More importantly, from the garrison's point of view, he had played scrum-half for Cambridge and Dulwich. During the game, everyone acknowledged that he was the best player. Afterwards, U Tin Tut was refused the use of the showers on the grounds that only Europeans could use the clubhouse.
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The humiliations and resentments were keenly felt by Burmese Buddhist priests, who had never fully reconciled themselves to the foreign rule of the English. Against this background of resentment and an unshakeable belief in supernatural forces, there emerged one of the strangest episodes in the history of the British Empire. At about 11.30 in the morning on 28 October 1930, Saya San, a relatively obscure former Buddhist monk in his early forties, was proclaimed king of Burma. He wore the royal clothes prescribed by ancient usage, and the gem-studded shoes; he carried a gem-encrusted sword; his retinue carried white umbrellas. Two months later, the new self-styled King of Burma entered his palace in Tharrawaddy, a town in Lower Burma, where he had a lavish breakfast with his five queens
in the presence of his four ministers. The purpose of the breakfast would become apparent. Saya San was there to declare war on the British. From his ruby-studded banyan-wood lion throne, he exclaimed, ‘In the name of Our Lord, and for the Church's greater glory I, Thupannaka Galon Raja, declare war upon the heathen English who have enslaved us.'

Thus began what a contemporary British civil servant observing the events described as ‘one of the most extraordinary spectacles of the twentieth century'. In the words of the official British government report, Saya San's rebellion ‘was undoubtedly organized to overthrow the existing Government by force of arms'. In the eyes of Maurice Collis, the British official, the scene was medieval. Collis was a brilliant Oxford Modern History graduate from the years just before 1914, which, to many Oxford-educated survivors of the First World War, seemed like a golden age. As an official serving in Burma in his mid-forties, he had perhaps failed to live up to his original promise. ‘Was it a pageant . . . an historical play, some reconstruction of the twelfth century?' he asked. The Saya San rebellion would take nearly two years to suppress. The rebels, enthused by the ever-potent mixture of nationalism and religion, were largely peasants who believed in ghosts and spirits, and they killed a Mr V. H. T. Fields-Clarke of the Imperial Forest Service so that his spirit would fight on their side. In subsequent battles, the Burmese peasants fervently believed that his ghost was striding in their ranks against his former employers, the British.

Saya San's rebellion stemmed from many causes, yet at its core was the peasants' ‘national dislike of a foreign government'. In Collis's liberal analysis, every ‘man and woman in Burma wanted to get rid of the English Government'. They wanted this not because the ‘English' were particularly ‘oppressive or lacking in good qualities', but because they were ‘pro-English instead of being pro-Burman'.
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Collis's use of the term ‘English' is characteristic in that the terms ‘English' and ‘British' were used interchangeably in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The Burmese peasants, the followers of Saya San, believed in the power of the mind over the body. The mind, according to Buddhist ideas, could make the body invulnerable to violence and pain. Magic, it was widely thought, could be used to great effect in the fight against British imperialism. By the proper use of pills, oils, chants and cabbalistic signs, the
Burmese peasant soldier, so he believed, would have an infallible protection against the weapons of the white man. All over the country, brave Burmese peasant warriors charged against machine guns chanting magical formulas or holding amulets, or in their credulity they would point to aeroplanes in the sky in the vain expectation that these would come crashing down.
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From the very beginning, Saya San's rebellion was nationalist in inspiration. The symbolism of the coronation, the ritualistic declaration of war and the role of the Buddhist clergy all pointed to this interpretation. One of Saya San's lieutenants, who called himself the ‘Holy Lion', put the matter plainly: ‘Burma is meant only for Burmans; but the heretics took away King Thibaw by force and robbed him of Burma.' It was interesting that the Holy Lion mentioned King Thibaw, who had been removed forty-six years before and had now been dead for over fifteen. The heretics, the Holy Lion continued, ‘have ruined our race and our religion and now have the effrontery to call us rebels. The heathen English are the rebels. We have never robbed another's country.'

The nationalist motive, in the context of the 1930s, was modern, but the means by which the Burmese peasants sought to realize their ambitions was ancient. Shwé Yon, the ‘Great Doctor', assured the peasants that the amulets they wore would make them ‘sword- and gun-proof'. The Great Doctor also gave them a gong, which he said ‘has magic power. Wish for what you want and sound this gong. When you meet Government troops, sound it and they will be stupefied.' All this excitement proved too much for Collis, a liberal intellectual, educated in the best traditions of Rugby and Oxford. The ‘East can be too exotic', he wrote. ‘There comes a time when one longs for the buttercups and the hedges of May. I sailed for home on 30th April 1931.'
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The Burmese rebels did not have this option, as they were fighting an uneven contest for their independence. Their motives were patriotic, even if their methods were crude and ineffectual.

The Saya San rebellion spread to about twelve of the forty districts of British Burma. Saya San himself continued to be the charismatic figurehead of this little-known and now almost forgotten uprising. Among his followers, the priest-king was believed to be invulnerable and even invisible. Belief in magic was so strong that, if a tattooed comrade was injured or killed by the white man's bullets, the fault obviously lay with the bad
design of the tattoo, and not with the actual bullets. Any failure, as far as the Burmese peasant warriors were aware, was caused by bad magic, not by the uselessness of magic itself. The British, perhaps unsurprisingly, managed to rise above the magic charms of the Burmese priesthood and imposed order on Burma by means of their military forces. In eighteen months, 3,000 rebels were killed or wounded. Perhaps 9,000 more were captured and arrested; 350 were tried and convicted, of whom about 130 were hanged. British troops had to be brought from India.
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Saya San himself, it is said, went to the scaffold with his head erect. He was, as could only be expected, covered in tattoos from head to foot. He was hanged, along with other rebel leaders, in November 1931.
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The Saya San rebellion was driven by a powerful mixture of nationalist fervour and religious enthusiasm. The average Burmese still thought in terms of the revival or restoration of the monarchy. A king was, to many Burmese, the only suitable substitute for British rule. Saya San was a
pongyi
, a Buddhist monk, who had been involved in nationalist plots throughout the 1920s. His rebellion showed considerable skill in organization and propaganda, and his brief success revealed a constant thread in Britain's association with Burma. From the beginning of British rule, there had been a shift away from traditional symbols of authority, but, although the Burmese monarchy had been destroyed, the people of Burma still remained almost mystically attached to the idea of kingship. The nationalist movement, even in the 1930s, harked back to the quasi-mythical and romantic world of Burmese priests and kings. The rebellion of 1930–1 also showed the powerful sway that nationalism held over the peasants who linked their patriotic pride to the ‘military and political achievements of Burmese kings and generals'.
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While Saya San and his adherents had posed no real threat to the British administration in Burma, the Second World War constituted a far greater threat. The Japanese, by their occupation of large parts of the British Empire in South-east Asia, hastened the end of that empire. The fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 was a massive blow to British pride and prestige: Churchill famously called it ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history'.
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Yet the Japanese troops had actually launched bombing raids on Burmese territory on 9 December 1941, only two days
after the Pearl Harbor attack, and long before the capture of Singapore. As one member of the Indian Civil Service, himself a veteran of the British army in France in the First World War, remembered, ‘Rangoon's Christmas present from Nippon duly arrived in the shape of eighty bombers and twenty fighters.' The year 1941 ended with a massive exodus from Rangoon. The effect of ‘the Christmas present from Nippon', the bombing raids, was to terrify the city. There followed the general dispersal of ‘half a million people', ‘three-fifths of whom were Indians'. One of the consequences of British involvement with Burma had been a large immigration of Indian workers. Without them, activity in the port of Rangoon ‘came to a full stop'.

The ordinary course of life in Rangoon had been rudely interrupted. ‘Public transport had ceased to function'; shops were shut; trade was at a standstill. The decision to get out of Burma was taken by General Sir Harold Alexander, the General Officer Commanding, who said years later to one of the British civil servants who had escaped from Rangoon, ‘Quite simply, as I realized the Japs were in danger of cutting our line of retreat unless we moved fast out of Rangoon, there was the likelihood of another Singapore. Hence the decision to press the button and get out.' The departure from Rangoon was planned and orderly, in so far as these things ever can be. The city was blown up, in line with ‘carefully prepared plans'. The power station and telegraph buildings were principal targets of controlled explosions. For those fleeing the city it was ‘an eerie drive back through the deserted streets of Rangoon's suburbs'. The Japanese enemy was on the move. ‘At any moment turning a corner one expected a burst of Jap machine gun fire from advance parties moving in to the capture of a great city.' To those fleeing Rangoon, the city itself was a sad and unforgettable sight. The power station was now ablaze; the warehouses in the port were charred and blackened shells; the telephone exchange and the telegraph office had collapsed in smoke and ruins.
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Most British eyewitness accounts agree that the fall of Rangoon and the Japanese occupation of Burma inflicted an ‘acute jolt' on the Burmese way of life, as well as a blow to British prestige.
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Rangoon itself finally fell into Japanese hands on 7 March 1942. Its fall had been a typical example of British imperial overstretch, as it was ‘not possible for the British to be strong
in South East Asia while fighting a desperate battle for survival in the West'. The government of Burma was ‘deeply humiliated by the way in which the civil authorities had been unceremoniously bundled out'. The fighting, not least in central Burma for control of the oilfields, had left devastation. The ‘only safe assumption that could be made', observed Arthur Bruce, was that the scene, if the British returned, would be ‘one of nearly total ruin so far as the industrial economy of the country was concerned'.
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The speedy collapse of British power in Burma had ‘given Burmese officials confidence'. The cause of Burmese nationalism, which had been espoused by Thibaw and Saya San, was inadvertently promoted by the partial collapse of British power in South-east Asia in the face of Japan, which was, in the racial thinking of the time, an Asiatic power. The exit of British officials in 1942 created a space in the administration which the Burmese, under their Japanese overlords, began to fill. To the newly empowered Burmese, ‘there was no good reason why, after the war, they should not continue to administer the country', which they were ‘confident of their ability to do successfully'.
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Despite this new confidence, the Burmese suffered many ordeals under the Japanese occupation. It is true that the Japanese granted Burma independence in August 1943, but the new entity was a puppet state of Japan, recognized only by Japan and its Second World War allies, and the Japanese continued to force indigenous Burmese to work on the notorious Burma–Siam railway, where the daily death rate has been estimated to be ‘as high as 80,000 in one day'.
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As the Second World War entered its final stages at the end of 1944, Burma was the scene of a successful British military campaign undertaken by Lieutenant General Sir William Slim's Fourteenth Army, which finally captured Rangoon on 3 May 1945.
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By the end of the Japanese occupation, Burma had changed to an extent which members of the British expatriate community immediately acknowleged when they returned in 1945. A professor of history at Rangoon University, B. R. Pearn, commented that Burma ‘had suffered more from the effects of war than any other part of South-East Asia'. In Rangoon itself, ‘economic life was at a standstill; no trams or buses were running; the water and sewage systems were out of action'. Burma had essentially been contended for twice: in 1942 the country had been fought over from south to north; in 1944–5 it
had been fought over again, this time from north to south, in a campaign that comprised the ‘biggest land operations conducted against the Japanese in any theatre' of the war. The collapse of the rice trade, Burma's most important export crop, had reduced the country to a very straitened condition. Before the war, Burma had been the biggest exporter of rice in the world, sending abroad more than 3 million tons a year, half of which went to India. India was so dependent on rice from Burma that the loss of this source of rice proved to be an aggravating factor in the appalling famine in Bengal in 1943, in which it is estimated that 3 million people died.
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