Golden Earth (3 page)

Clearly the Burmese recognised the virtue which had raised me from the protozoan slime. Observing my interest in the puppet show, one of the stage hands appeared and invited me back stage. There the
puppet-masters
took snacks with their families, or slept between acts. They had the grave, dedicated faces of a monkish order and were dressed with elaborate conservatism; turbans wrapped round the old-style bun of hair; longyis tied in front with a great, billowing prodigality of cloth. Their solemn and sacerdotal manner was in no way diminished by the horn-rimmed spectacles they wore. Puppets hung, in bunches like carrots, from the roof. Some of the more extravagantly decked-out specimens were detached and dangled for my admiration. One, stiff with gold thread and brocade, and with an acutely introspective expression, was introduced as ‘the Princess of Wales’.

I was allowed to stand and watch over the shoulders of the showmen at their business, noting that effective control of the puppets was not the only consideration. Their hands could be seen by the audience, and these as well as each separate finger had to be moved with prescribed rhythm and exact gesture, like those of a Sanskrit dancer.

As they were by far the best of the few poor examples of Burmese art I had yet seen, I wanted to buy a collection of puppets; but enquiries were met with evasion. The puppets were not to be bought anywhere. They were made specially to the order of the troupe. Where were they made? – Mandalay. (It was always the inaccessible Mandalay to which one was directed, in response to this kind of enquiry.) A few more feelers on the subject and I realised that I had been attempting to trespass in guild preserves, and that puppets were not to be had by outsiders.

When I left I was accompanied by the senior puppet-master to the most fanciful of the nearby pavilions, a pleasure-dome of glittering unsubstantiality, in which a party of upper-class Burmese sat on chairs, thus separated by distinguished discomfort from the mass of their
mat-squatting
countrymen. On a wicker table – an expensive and rickety
European importation – in the pavilion’s centre had been placed a bowlful of sinister-looking liquid, its surface broken by lumps of black jelly. Seizing a glass, the senior puppet-master expertly wiped the rim with his fingers, plunged it into the bowl, and removing a gobbet which stuck to the outside edge, handed it to me. With severe hospitality he raised his glass in my direction before putting it to his lips. There was no avoiding this rite. Holding back the black frogspawn with my teeth I drank deeply of the warm, sweetish, iron-tasting liquid.

T
HE PROSPECT
of a sea trip to Mergui by coastal steamer was something to exercise the imagination. I had memories of such rovings, vagrant and obscure of purpose, along the Arabian and Red Sea coasts. The ships had been wonderful, battered, old relics, full of nautical mannerisms and impregnated with the musk of exotic cargoes. They had been laid down in ports like Gdynia, with cabins built round the
boiler-room
in sensible preparation for arctic voyagings; and at the end of their lives, when long overdue for the scrap-heap, they had been picked up for a song by Arabs with sharp trading practices, renamed after one of the attributes of the Almighty,
The Righteous
or
The Upright
and relaunched upon Arabian seas. Such ships were usually skippered by empirical navigators, captains who lost themselves when out of sight of familiar coastal landmarks. They were as nearly useless as the vessels they sailed in; drank like fishes; went in for religious mania, or for spells of mild insanity in which they were liable to stalk the bridge in the nude. The passengers, too, fitted into the general picture; sword-bearing rulers of a corner of a desert, half-crazed lighthouse keepers, broken-down adventurers
scraping
a living in any dubious enterprise they could smell out. There was no better way to get to know the seamy side of the seafaring life.

From first impressions down by the landing stage, nothing could have looked more hopeful. The Rangoon river-shore was encrusted with deserted junks, showing a fine tangle of masts and archaic, demoded rigging, patched and variegated sails, defaced figureheads. At the water’s edge there was a desultory skirmishing of pariah dogs. A few ancient gharries were grouped for hire in the shade of the riverine trees, and as their drivers, white-bearded patriarchs, dreamed, bulbuls warbled softly
in the branches above them. Somewhere a gong was being tapped intermittently, in the way that pianos are tinkled upon in English suburbs on fading Sunday afternoons. There was a lassitude in the air propitious to the embarkation upon a voyage to decaying southern ports.

I looked forward to days of enforced meditation, punctuated by meals taken with some garrulous old salt, delighted to have found so appreciative an audience for his fables. It was taken for granted that with the possible exception of a missionary, I should be the only European aboard, but I expected that at the Captain’s table I should meet a Chinese merchant on his way to the Mergui archipelago to negotiate for a cargo of edible birds’ nests.

From the first glimpse, however, the
Menam
discouraged further indulgence in dreams. It was larger and trimmer, I thought, than the Southern Burmese coastal trade justified. At the moment of my going aboard, a certain amount of fussy repainting was being done, but the smell of turpentine could not entirely overlay a boarding-house whiff of cooking greens. In the cabins there were notices about boat-drills, and others asking passengers to be punctual for ‘tiffin’. Dinner was due to be served immediately we sailed, and to nothing less than my dismay this was heralded by one of those tinkling shipboard airs, those witless Alpine glockenspiels, that are heard on transatlantic liners as a prelude to the mealtime interruption of boredom.

On reaching the dining saloon, I made, in the absence of a steward, for the nearest table, at which, although several very obviously English people were already seated, there were a number of vacant places. Before sitting down, I asked as a matter of courtesy, if the vacant places were not reserved. To this question there was no reply although I received several embarrassed looks. I therefore left this table and went and sat down at the next, which appeared to be occupied by, what I imagined from their dress to be, Anglo-Burmese. Apparently some allocation of places had already been made – and evidently on a basis of colour and race. The
Menam
was, in fact, a little enclave of diehard Englishry. It had been years since I visited a British colony, and I had forgotten what it was like. When
Burma had gained its independence it had reasonably been made illegal to attempt to exclude Burmese on racial grounds from hotels and clubs in Rangoon. In the few days I had spent there I had come to take for granted, to accept without question or thought, the mingling of English, Burmese, Anglo-Burmese, and Chinese in the hotel bars, lounges and dining-rooms. And here, in the port of Rangoon was this floating
redoubt
of the old system. About the
Menam
there was none of the seedy, globe-trotting fellowship I had hoped for. When the dining saloon was full I saw that the English were seated – with internal social grading carefully maintained, no doubt – at several separate tables. Another had been reserved for a group of Australian Catholic missionaries. At another the pure Burmese had been isolated; while at mine the Anglo-Burmese were gathered together. Soon the ship’s wireless operator, an Anglo-Burman, joined us, being evidently excluded from the company of the white ship’s officers at meal times. Shortly after I had taken my seat, a steward appeared and came over to ask me if I would like to change my place; but as the Anglo-Burmese seemed not to object to my presence, I decided to stay where I was.

At the shipping office I had enquired hopefully about the cooking, remembering that on very small ships you can sometimes eat the adventurous food cooked in the crew’s galley. All the cooks, said the shipping clerk, were Chinese. But now I knew that my relief had been premature and the meaning of that whiff of greens was explained. Chinese cooks there were; but they had been compelled to adapt themselves to a new and strange culinary art – one in which specific gravity could matter more than flavour. ‘Thick or clear soup, sir?’ the steward murmured in my ear. After that came stewed meat with the boiled vegetables; then college pudding.

Fortunately we were too few and too divided for the traditional frolics to be arranged; but there were deck-quoits, and a library with a fair assortment of such titles as ‘Lay Her Among the Lilies’. The key was found and the volumes, bright with their dust-jacket promise of rape and murder, distributed against signature in the book. Meanwhile the
flat-lands
of the delta slipped past in the darkness, broken only by the
wallowing passage of a junk, with lamps at its masthead, or a twinkle of illumination outlining the shape of a pagoda on the land.

I had come to be thankful for the social exclusiveness through which I found myself among the Anglo-Burmese. Hearing, with some surprise, that I was really interested in Burma, one of my fellow-diners asked if I would like to meet a Burman of some renown who was travelling in the ship, a fellow citizen of his who was returning to Moulmein after spending some time in hospital in Rangoon. This proved to be one of the most happy contacts I made in Burma.

I was presented to U Tun Win next morning, and found him seated at table, separating the flakes of his breakfast cereal as if they had been the leaves of an incunabulum. His small, frail, aged body was animated by an extraordinary alertness, and when I or anyone else produced some piece of politely empty small-talk, he would stop with upraised spoon or fork, intent and smiling dreamily as if in appreciation of good music. Whenever he put a question he would await the answer with the nervous impatience of a terrier on guard at a rabbit hole. Then he would repeat it aloud, very slowly, dissecting it clause by clause, as if subjecting it to the arguments of learned counsel, before passing with nods of approval, the verdict, ‘Good – yes, very good.’ He was prone to a materialistic oversimplification of human motives, which led him into a mistaken estimation of the reasons for the Anglo-Saxon passengers’ habit of arriving for their meals up to an hour later than the advertised time. ‘It is their habit to do this because they judge that in this way they can be served with superior food without arousing our unfavourable comment.’

U Tun Win was, indeed, a most delightful old man, an ex-barrister who possessed inexhaustible information about his country, and had also acquired the ability, rather uncommon in the Orient, to arrange his facts and conclusions in a logical, organised manner.

It was U Tun Win who went to the trouble of explaining the Land Nationalisation Act to me, a radical piece of land-reform, comparable with that carried out in China by Mao Tse-tung. Under this enactment any bona-fide landless cultivator will be given ten acres of land, which is
the maximum it is believed that he can work efficiently by his own labour and with one yoke of oxen. Landowners are to be compensated by receiving an amount in cash equal to twelve times the annual tax they pay on the land relinquished. This measure, said U Tun Win, was really outright confiscation, because the amount of compensation was very small and would only be paid when the government was in a position to do so – and you knew what that meant. The maximum amount of land any bona-fide cultivator could hold – and he must work it himself, or with his family – was fifty acres (as compared with three hundred acres allowed in their land reforms by the government of Pakistan).

U Tun Win hastened to say that he could not approve of this measure which he regarded as little less than robbery. In defence of his opinion he quoted certain utterances of the Buddha which he interpreted, although I could not agree with him, as condoning the accumulation of property, and the capitalist order in general. U Tun Win was a Mon (as the Talaings of old are now called) and many of his people in the Tavoy, Moulmein and Mergui districts are in revolt against the government. They would be willing to unite with the Karens in the formation of an independent Mon-Karen State, he said. It was evident from what he told me that this State, if ever it came into being, would be reactionary by comparison with the Union of Burma, and that the land nationalisation measures would be abolished in Mon-Karen areas.

It is remarkable how intimate a part religion plays in the life and thought of the Burmese, when there is no attempt to canalise it into public observances restricted to one day in the week. U Tun Win attacked the Land Nationalisation Act because, quite sincerely, I believe, he considered it contrary to Buddhist teaching. Thakin Nu, the Prime Minister, found it necessary to invoke precisely the same religious authority when the bill was submitted to parliament. His speech on this occasion was nothing less than a lengthy sermon, with immense quotations from the Buddhist scriptures and a searching analysis from the religious point of view of the illusion of wealth. One can imagine the consternation, the exchange of embarrassed glances, if the present Prime Minister of Great Britain took it into his head to engage in a fervent advocation of primitive Christianity,
including the quotation
in extenso
of the Sermon on the Mount, during, say, the debate on the Steel Nationalisation Act.

However, much as U Tun Win could not agree with the action that had been taken, he agreed that something drastic had to be done. Following in the footsteps of the English, a horde of hereditary Indian moneylenders – the Chettyars – came to Burma. With centuries of moneylending technique behind them, they found the Burmese an easy prey. Agents were sent into villages to induce Burmese farmers to accept loans. Enchanted at the prospect of being able to give parties and pay for pwès out of harvests they had yet to reap, the farmers rushed to take the money at two per cent
per month.
By 1945 sixty per cent of the petty rice lands of Southern Burma had fallen by foreclosure into the hands of the Chettyars, who had increased their capital ten times since their arrival in the country. The Indian community, as a whole, owned two-thirds of Burmese agricultural land. The interests of the Chettyars were purely financial, and as the weight of custom prevented them from leaving their traditional avocation and becoming farmers, they let the lands to the highest bidder, but without security of lease. This rack-renting brought about a steady decline in the fertility of the soil, because the tenant farmer, who could not be sure of keeping his land for more than a season, took no pains to improve it, and did not even trouble to keep the bunds (water-retaining dykes) in repair. Land at Moulmein, said U Tun Win, which in the time of their forefathers had yielded sixty bags of paddy per acre, was now down to a yield of twenty-five. What was worse, free and comparatively prosperous Burmese farmers had been turned into a landless agricultural proletariat, from whose ranks the bandit and insurgent forces were readily recruited. ‘Thus, if property is not given to those without property much misery is caused,’ said the Buddha, in the Çakkravatti Sermon.

Still, U Tun Win would not go so far as confiscation. What should be done, he said, was to compel landowners by law to improve their land, and only if they failed to do this should the land be resumed by the government. You would get the land all the same, he said (with the suspicion of a wink), because nothing would ever make the Chettyars
work, and they would have to go. But there would be no outright injustice, no flagrant conflict with religious principle.

The morning was lustrous. We were about half a mile off shore, approaching Moulmein, and the sun gleamed on a landscape brilliant with the fresh greens of marshy vegetation. There was a narrow coastal plain, with oxen feeding in the grass down by the many creeks that intersected it. Gondola-like sampans were moored at the mouths of inlets, their double sterns painted in red, white and orange geometrical shapes. Inland four junks in line, showing only the burnt umber
triangular
fins of their sails, passed shark-like along some unseen waterway. An occasional tall tree among the luminous serration of water palms by the shore was silhouetted against a soft, watercolour smear of hills. From each hill’s summit protruded the white nipple of a pagoda. Butterflies came floating out to the ship; the sombrely splendid ones of the South-East Asian forests. Blown up against the deck-houses and derricks they were held there for an instant, flattened as if for exhibition, before fluttering away.