CHAPTER 6 The Conditions of Belonging

Degeneracy of the Heart

Published on the front page of the Mandalay Thuriya (The Mandalay sun), the sister paper of Thuriya, “Defend Our Amyo and Lineage” warned of the disastrous consequences of varṇa saṅkara.⁹ A concept that appears in the Hindu dharmaśāstras, it means “the mixing of the varnas” and is often translated as “caste confusion” or “caste pollution.” The article was written in the form of a nissaya: an interphrasal translation of a Pali text followed by a more elaborate vernacular gloss by the translator. Found in many parts of Southeast Asia, nissaya often function more as commentarial texts than as simple translations of Pali source texts, allowing the author to give edifying sermons on Buddhist teachings.¹⁰ In this instance, the two-stanza Pali verse that the author translated was an excerpt from the Nītimañjarī (c. 1494 CE), a collection of versified moral maxims, written in Sanskrit and accompanied by a commentary that cited from the Hindu Vedic scriptures.¹¹ The Pali verse with which the article opened, therefore, was itself a translation from Sanskrit into Pali. Few readers would have discerned this fact because the author, Shwe Mann Thi, did not explain the origins of the Pali verses.

It is also unlikely that the author of the article in the Mandalay Thuriya was one “Shwe Mann Thi.” That must have been the nom de plume used by the famous scholar monk and writer Ledi Pandita U Maung Gyi (1878–1939), whose Pali and Burmese translation of the Nītimañjarī was published posthumously in 1956, with a foreword dated 3 September 1920.¹² Not coincidentally, the Pali translation of the verses from the Nītimañjarī quoted at the beginning of the 1932 Mandalay Thuriya article match verbatim those in the 1956 publication.¹³ Just as importantly, Ledi Pandita U Maung Gyi regularly employed the nissaya style in writing the popular “young ladies” column in the monthly Dagon Magazine (1920–1948), the first illustrated magazine in the country, for which he served as the editor.¹⁴ Nissaya was a writing technique and “women” a subject he had helped popularize in the vernacular popular press.

The author began by observing that according to the pa tan (paṭṭhāna in Pali), or the canonical Buddhist treatise that examines the law of cause and effect, women are the root of causal relations. “If a Burmese woman marries a man of other amyo,” he explained, “then the amyo of her children and grandchildren has been ruined.” He lamented that there were “countless cases of women who mix with others,” corrupting the Burmese amyo. “The more women desire to marry men of other religion and lineage,” he warned, “the graver the damage to the amyo and the dhamma.”¹⁵

He instructed the “good men” of Burma that it was their duty to deter “the evil custom” among foreigners of converting their Burmese Buddhist wives. It was also the duty of good Burmese men and elders “to guide and discipline young Burmese women to only marry our men whose intentions towards our women are kind and honorable, not driven by their obsession with wealth and riches.” The author next did what few other critics of intermarriage did at the time, directly reprimanding Burmese women who married foreigners:

Women, too, should not be so short-sighted as to think that all is well if, in this lifetime, they can enjoy a life of riches. Such women will never escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and their children and grandchildren will also be polluted and lost forever. So, the entire (Burmese) amyo should abstain from marrying foreigners. Like learning to avoid poison that kills immediately, like steering clear of poisonous snakes, let us keep away [from varṇa saṅkara].¹⁶

Conspicuously, Shwe Mann Thi did not bring up the often-cited issue of “legal disability.” Instead, he dwelled on the importance of right intentions and compassion as the foundation of marriage. Marriages of opportunism based on ignorance, greed, and—on the part of the amyo gya husband—zealotry, varṇa saṅkara was a product of ill intentions and, as such, destined to reproduce harm: the breeding of polluted offspring and the degeneration of the teachings and laws of the Buddha.

The author conveyed these messages using basic Buddhist cosmological ideas that would have been readily comprehensible to the Burmese readership. That desire is the root cause of the cycle of rebirth and suffering and that unwholesome volition results in the rebirth into lower statuses are both ubiquitous precepts among Buddhists in Burma. If marriages between Burmese Buddhist women and foreigners were outcomes of wrong motivations, as the author claimed, then the marriages were bound to cause more suffering. Seeded by demeritorious deeds, the descendants of intermarriage were poisoned fruits fated to be born into lives of misery.

This discussion of varṇa saṅkara, while underwritten by the Buddhist notion of karma and suffering, shared much in common with the eugenic, hereditarian view of degeneracy. Both associated immorality with othered races and religions, as well as the poor, and construed them as peoples in whom inhered undesirable characteristics, such as greed, malevolence, dishonesty, and delusion. Both claimed that degenerates passed on immoral tendencies to their descendants. In many ways, Shwe Mann Thi characterized varṇa saṅkara in the same way that miscegenation was defined and treated. His plea to “protect the amyo and lineage of the Burmese people” from the ravages of intermarriage smacked of European colonial and white supremacist cries to protect the honor of white women—whom they stereotyped as victims of lascivious “black,” “brown,” and “yellow” men—and hence the purity and virility of the white race. Yet it was not inferior genes but rather ill will that made intermarriage ruinous. Foreign men, the author insinuated, never married Burmese women with the right intentions. Their descendants inherited the moral failings of their parents.

His notions of varṇa saṅkara were also modernist. Like Mya Sein’s speeches and interviews, “Defend Our Amyo and Lineage” drew heavily on an emergent liberal discourse of modern marriage. One of the most influential intellectuals behind this development in Burma was a close friend and former disciple of Ledi Pandita U Maung Gyi, P. Moe Nin (1883–1940). A Catholic convert and apostate, journalist, educator, and sexologist, Moe Nin is venerated as one of the founding fathers of modern Burmese literature and considered the most prolific writer of the colonial period. His numerous “treatises on love and matrimonial affairs” were authored with the professed goal of freeing sex and love from “irrational” customs and legitimizing a new model of intimacy and family: one that revolved around the heterosexual couple and privileged the husband-wife bond over that of the parent-child, and emotion, choice, and individualism over social obligation.¹⁷ Echoing modernist debates about the conjugal family globally, Moe Nin idealized “the companionate love marriage,” forged between two autonomous, equal individuals of the opposite sex, as the epitome of liberty and social progress.¹⁸ He contrasted it to the presumptively traditional arranged marriage—with or without the consent of the individuals getting married—in which personal desire was subordinated to family’s demands.

It is within this novel formulation of love and marriage that relationships of Burmese women to foreigners were disparaged. Casual unions inspired by base motives and brokered by unscrupulous relatives and go-betweens, they were the antithesis of true love and modern marriage. Intermarriage became a powerful trope that more than enabled the Burmese Buddhist to constitute themselves as an exceptional amyo distinguished and bound by lineage, religion, and a pure heart. Akin to what scholars have described as “dogma-line racism,” “cultural racism,” or “emotional nationalism,” this logic configured difference according to sentiment and cast the amyo gya as predisposed toward malicious, treacherous, and overzealous behavior.¹⁹

Pathologizing the amyo gya in this manner—that is, as people with degenerate hearts—allowed the promotion of avowedly liberal expressions and alignments of desire while setting clear limits to them. In his corpus on love and marriage, Moe Nin set out to liberate individuals from an oppressive class-based hierarchy and morality that policed love between the rich and the poor, and the elite and the underprivileged. Excluded from this vision of intimate emancipation, however, were those who loved and married across religion and race (or within sex/gender). The modern ideology of love marriage in 1930s Burma empowered individual choice and the heterosexual conjugal couple as the foundation of the family. But it simultaneously subjected both the individual and the couple to the eugenicist expectation that Burmese Buddhist women make Burmese Buddhist men and the propagation of the Burmese Buddhist amyo the object of their devotion.

A well-known literary artifact exemplifying this curtailment of modern love and marriage was authored by the Marxist writer and Dobama Asi Ayone member Thein Pe Myint (1914–1978). Published in 1933, “Khin Myo Chit” is an archetypical tale of the coming of age of the male protagonist: a woman dies for her man, and the man learns to renounce his attachment to her to give his life to his community and country. The title, which is a feminine Burmese name that literally translates as “friend [who] loves [her] kind,” alludes to the heroine of the short story, Khin Htway, a Burmese Muslim schoolteacher. She agonizes over her relationship with Htein Lwin, a young Burmese Buddhist anticolonial revolutionary. Their love for one another, she is convinced, calls into question Htein Lwin’s loyalty to Burmese Buddhists and undermines his nationalist credentials. She resolves to end their relationship and rebuffs Htein Lwin’s endeavor to see her. The decision wreaks havoc on her body, which wastes away under the unbearable weight of a broken heart. In her dying words, Khin Htway implores Htein Lwin to be strong if he loves her—to not succumb to grief as she will—and carry through with his struggle to deliver Burma from colonial rule. For him to see Burma a free and prosperous country, she says, would make her suffering worthwhile.²⁰

Unlike Shwe Mann Thi and councilmen such as Kya Gaing and Ba Than, who placed in the hands of “good Burmese men and elders” the charge of saving Burmese women and, thus, the Burmese amyo from deterioration, Thein Pe Myint, like San Youn in “Khin Aye Kyi,” portrayed young Burmese women as the true gatekeepers of the Burmese Buddhist community. It is the female protagonist Khin Htway who demonstrates true love and right intentions. Significantly, she was Bamar: a religious Other (batha gya) but not a racial Other (lu myo gya). The patriotic female Khin Htway had to be Burmese, for the amyo gya were incapable of true love. Only a Bamar Muslim woman understood that she was a crippling burden on a Burmese Buddhist man.

“Khin Myo Chit” imputed to Khin Htway a parasitic existence and an innate degeneracy. She lives off her host (Htein Lwin) without whom she cannot survive. Htein Lwin, in contrast, can finally thrive without Khin Htway, who is presumed to be incapable of reinvigorating the community of Burmese Buddhists. The story implied that true love and happiness for Htein Lwin resides in a relationship with a Burmese Buddhist woman who can be his helpmate and nurture future Burmese Buddhists. It left only one choice for a Burmese Muslim woman who loved a Burmese Buddhist: self-abnegation. This was a cruel romanticization and absolution of the eugenicist logic of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism that construed Burmese Muslims as a threat to the health of the body politic, whose reproductive bodies needed to be controlled. By depicting Khin Htway’s death as enlightened, willful suicide, the story insinuated that Burmese Muslim women like Khin Htway accepted their conditional belonging in the Burmese body politic—as bodies requiring containment.

This fantasy of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism as a partnership between the selfless myo chit woman and the remasculinized myo chit man was typical of the younger generation of writers and activists like Thein Pe Myint. The lawyer Ba Bwa, in an article entitled “Are we going to neglect the women?” published in the popular monthly youth magazine Kyi Pwa Ye (Progress magazine), went so far as to proclaim young, educated women the only group capable of dealing with “the oppression and debasement” of Burmese women.²¹

Ba Bwa predictably attributed the state of Burmese women to their relations with lu myo gya, who, he claimed, had humiliated the country, coming and going as they liked, taking Burmese women as they liked. Like so many critics of intermarriage before him, he maintained that most women “sadly fell into the hands of lu myo gya” out of desperation, not out of mettā (loving-kindness) and cetana (generosity). The majority were destitute, prostitutes, or victims of immoral matchmakers. “Some Burmese women are bought off their parents and guardians by lu myo gya for a mere 25 to 50 rupees,” he elaborated.²² He bemoaned that no laws had been promulgated to protect these wretched women, no organization had been established to advocate on their behalf, and no outspoken critics of this deplorable state of affairs had emerged, in a complete dismissal of the fact that women’s organizations were among the first to take up this role. In a slight to the older generation of Burmese lawmakers as well as women reformers, he blamed the old guard for failing Burmese women and called on the rising group of university-educated women to take the lead, in cooperation with youth organizations, to better the lot of Burmese women. Yet, even as he assigned to women the important role of national leaders, Ba Bwa spoke on behalf of Burmese women.

The “Indian’s Mistress”

The suffering Burmese Buddhist wife of amyo gya, the ostensible subject of national concern, was spoken for and spoken about by anybody but herself. In this respect, the sensationalist legislative debates about her were strikingly like those that had taken place across colonial Asia around the same time. From British India to Japanese Taiwan, social reformers campaigned for and legislators deliberated intervening in or outlawing such “customs” as child marriage, widow immolation, and female infanticide. In response, politicians and religious authorities of mostly middle- or upper-class backgrounds evoked the imminent extinction of their putatively ancient communities to sanctify their authority over women and to limit government interventions into communal affairs.²³ Yet the suffering wives and widows themselves were consulted neither by the government nor even the reformists for their opinion.

So it was in Burma too. Not one woman was brought into the legislature to speak about her experience or views of intermarriage. All the while, the male-dominated legislature—and all male until 1929 when Hnin Mya was elected—raised a hue and cry over the suffering of Burmese women married to amyo gya. Not one of the countless articles that were putatively based on firsthand knowledge of the women examined the concerns of the women on their own terms. Such was the case of “An Indian’s Mistress” (“Kala gadaw”), an account about one Burmese wife of an Indian man.

Penned by the student activist, writer, and education reformer Po Kyar (1891–1942), the article purports to be a reportage based on the author’s unexpected encounter with a childhood friend, May Mya, on his way to the port city of Sittwe in western Burma.²⁴ On board the boat to Sittwe, he meets a couple he takes to be Indian. The husband, who is fluent in Burmese, explains that he moved from India to Burma nine years ago. Po Kyar soon discovers to his surprise that the wife of the Indian man, whom he mistook to also be Indian, is a Burmese convert to Islam and a native of his hometown with whom he had gone to school.

Upon learning that her Muslim husband is a halal butcher, Po Kyar asks May Mya if she herself also slaughters animals, an activity regarded as a demeritorious act that contravened the teachings of the Buddha. Seen through his eyes, May Mya is an unrepentant convert and kala gadaw. She explains to Po Kyar that in the hopes of bettering their lot, Burmese women, even those already married to Burmese men, were flocking to Indian Muslim men. The revelation confirms Po Kyar’s worst fear: women like May Mya were not so much wives as “mistresses” who prostituted not only their bodies but their beliefs for material benefits. “This is what it has come to,” Po Kyar remarks, horrified by what has become of his childhood friend.²⁵ He returns to Rangoon convinced that May Mya has transformed beyond recognition—she is no longer recognizably Burmese—and beyond salvation. But the story takes a proverbial turn when May Mya arrives at his doorstep: battered, disheveled, and beseeching redemption.

Such narratives objectified the Burmese Muslim woman as a suffering captive who needed to be saved, turning her into an object of pity and redemption. The kala gadaw embodied the deleterious effects of Burma’s attachment to India under British colonial rule, beckoning rescue and “reversion” to Buddhism. Such narratives also evoked the imminent danger to Burmese Buddhist women posed by the forced marriage, so to speak, of Burma to India and the urgency of securing a divorce.

As we have seen in the previous chapters, civil court records from colonial Burma were littered with women whose words and actions belie the caricature of the suffering kala gadaw: women who refused to relinquish control over the properties and businesses they jointly owned with their husbands; women who convinced or compelled their amyo gya husbands and kabya children to observe Buddhist rituals; women who “Burmanized,” as it were, their amyo gya husbands even as they themselves assimilated the dietary, sumptuary, and childrearing practices of their partners; women who “reverted” to Buddhism to get out of marriages and families they found onerous; and women who had lovers and abandoned their amyo gya husbands. These women were not the gullible, meek victims they were imagined to be.

Though we have already examined a large sample of court narratives of intermarriage and conversion, it is worth revisiting the legal archive here to look at a marriage dispute that involved a young kala gadaw and had all the trademarks of the stereotyped Indian-Burmese marriage. Ma Enda (alias Mi Nafizunissa) was barely fifteen years old when she married Bodi Rahiman in 1909, who was ten years her senior. During their brief marriage of sixteen months, Bodi abused Ma Enda emotionally and physically; he then abandoned her, leaving her in the care of her mother. Ma Enda had had enough, and she pronounced talaq three times in a gesture of repudiation and ended their marriage. He promptly sued for the restitution of his conjugal rights.

Despite her youth, Ma Enda had obtained a prenuptial contract, perhaps at the counsel of her mother to whom she was close. The written agreement, signed by Bodi, provided that he “should not use any indecent, reproachful or abusive language” to Ma Enda nor “assault or pain her in other ways.”²⁶ It furthermore stipulated that Bodi live with Ma Enda at her father’s house for three years and, subsequently, at a place of her choice. It continued: “If I violate anyone [sic] of the aforementioned terms, then she will have full power to leave me forever, to give three talaks [sic] (irrevocable divorce) to herself and to take a second husband; I delegate my authority of divorce to her; at that time or afterward whenever she will take another husband, I shall have no claim upon her.”²⁷ Bodi breached all three of the conditions laid out in the contract. The record of the trial shows that Ma Enda’s mother frequently complained of Bodi’s abusive behavior to Jumigrudin, a moulvi and a relative of her son-in-law, and that Bodi admitted to Jumigrudin that he had struck his wife. On the actual occasion of the divorce, immediately following a physical assault by Bodi, Ma Enda’s mother sent for Jumigrudin and assembled a group of elders at her house so that her daughter could formally and in the witness of elders and the moulvi accuse Bodi of ill-treatment and exercise “the triple talak [sic].”²⁸

Cases such as this no doubt informed the views of those who chronicled rising cases of the suffering kala gadaw. Yet, in depicting the women as naive “girls” in need of rescue, they concealed what was in fact a far more complex reality: while women like Ma Enda were indeed ill-treated by their husbands, they were also resourceful and assertive. They refused to acquiesce in their own victimization and protested inside and outside of the courtroom, even if their protestations fell on the deaf ears of the male local, community, and government authorities.

In the face of such women who turned out to be more enterprising than either the colonial masters or the Burmese lawmakers described them to be—or their husbands and partners wished them to be—Burmese Buddhist politicians, reformers, and intellectuals, like the British jurists we encountered in chapter 4, refused to acknowledge the women’s cognizance and agency. The kala gadaw, as with other spouses of amyo gya men, were caricatured as helpless victims who married and converted against their will and against their better judgment. To concede that such women confronted the challenges posed by their intimate relations, including problems of misogyny and domestic violence, would have contradicted the key tenets of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism: that the intermarriage and conversion of Burmese Buddhist women ineluctably robbed the women of their rights, individuality, and independence and, hence, that Burmese Buddhist women needed to be saved.

Separation and Conditional Inclusion

On 26 July 1938, approximately fifteen months after Burma separated from India, a mass meeting of some ten thousand attendees took place at the Shwedagon Pagoda, occasioned by the republication of Dispute between a Moulvi and a Yogi (Moulvi yogi aw wada sadan). First printed in 1931, the book was written by a school master, Shwe Pyi, as a refutation of a pamphlet containing “passages highly offensive to Islam” that had been published by a man who had had an argument with Moulvi Hassan Shah of Mingala Mosque in Mandalay. When reprinted in 1938, it was denounced by major news outlets as an “insult to Buddhism” and by the British administration as “deplorable.”²⁹

The meeting at the Shwedagon Pagoda had been organized by the General Council of the Thathana Mamaka Young Sanghas Association, a political firebrand even among the many conservative organizations of pongyi that had sprung up in the country. On the day before the meeting, Thuriya published in the name of a member of the Thathana Mamaka Association an article that the Riot Inquiry Committee, tasked by the governor of Burma with conducting an enquiry into the meeting and its aftermath, described as “a general attack, over the name of U Paduma, upon all foreigners in Burma.” An English translation of the opening passage of the article was included in the final report of the committee:

It has been known to the world that Burma is a Buddhist country. Peoples professing other religions come to Burma the country of the Buddhist without hindrance, and as they have been eating the flesh and sucking the life-blood of the Burmese, the whole of the Burmese nation not being able to bear, has raised a cry and clamoured [sic] many years since, and they are aware of it. But they without paying any heed insulted the Burmese Buddhist by seducing Burmese Buddhist women to become their wives, causing dissension in order to create such communities as Dobama Muslim—We Burmese Muslim.³⁰

The tone of the meeting itself, according to the final report, “developed in a crescendo of vituperation and abuse against Muslims in general,” with one pongyi after another giving violent speeches that “dwelt upon the Burmese-Muslim marriage question.”³¹ The resolutions passed at the meeting called on the government to immediately punish Shwe Pyi and enforce the Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Bill. An iteration of the legislative proposal debated in 1927, the bill mandated that the Burmese Buddhist law apply to all questions relating to marriage, divorce, succession, inheritance, and the ownership of property of “a woman belonging to any of the indigenous races of Burma, who professes the Buddhist faith,” regardless of the religious status of her spouse.³² The protesters in attendance warned that government failure to act would result in steps taken “to treat the Muslims as enemy No. 1 who insult the Buddhist community and their religion and to bring about the extermination of the Muslims and the extinction of their religion and language.”³³

Those gathered for the meeting then descended from the platforms of Shwedagon Pagoda, shouting, “Kala, kala, assault them, assault them!” “Flaming torch, flaming torch, burn, burn!” “Burmese women who marry kala, are husbands so scarce in Burma?”³⁴ They marched to Rangoon’s main market, Soortee Bara Bazaar, and attacked those they identified as kala. The armed assaults and the looting spread throughout Burma, extending into September 1938.

The quantitative data produced by the Riot Inquiry Committee indicated that the Burmese were mostly on the offensive, and the victims of the riots were disproportionately Muslim: 139 Muslims, 25 Hindus, and 17 Burmese were killed; 512 Muslims, 199 Hindus, and 145 Burmese were injured.³⁵ However, the rioters did not spare Hindus, “Tamil Christians,” “Bengali Buddhist,” and zerbadi, or Chinese, Anglo-Indian, European, and Japanese persons and properties.³⁶ According to the president of the Burma British Association at the time, the rioters “exhorted Burmans to get rid of the aliens.”³⁷

While the British administration described the riots as “anti-Indian,” the Burmese adopted their own name for the event: kala-bama taik pwe (Indo-Burman conflict). The expression was the title of a popular pamphlet that had sold 75,000 copies within two months of its publication immediately after the riots. The pamphlet was written by Thein Pe Myint, whom we met above.³⁸ He had authored a satirical novel called The Modern Monk (Tet pon gyi) just one year prior that had outraged the sangha.³⁹ Then came Indo-Burman Conflict, which saved his reputation as a rising political writer and leader. Presented as a clear-eyed analysis of the causes of the “Indo-Burman conflict,” the pamphlet placed the blame squarely at the feet of its victims. Thein Pe Myint lamented that the Indian migrants of today, unlike those of olden days, considered Burma their colony and grazing ground and denigrated as mere mistresses the Burmese women with whom they became intimate, even after the women had abandoned Buddhism. “The Indians never take into consideration the interests of the Burmese,” he repeatedly noted.⁴⁰ As might be expected of a Marxist, Thein Pe Myint distinguished between “capitalist” Indians and “poor ordinary Indians,” pointing out that the average Indian who came to Burma was not the real enemy of the Burmese people. Nevertheless, he argued, it was reasonable that the Burmese had come to resent all Indians. The 1938 riots represented the logical culmination of long-suppressed, righteous indignation with the behavior of Indians.⁴¹

The Riot Inquiry Committee confirmed Thein Pe Myint’s description of Burmese “resentment” against Indians in general and their relationships with Burmese women specifically. “It became evident to us that one of the major sources of anxiety in the minds of a great number of Burmans was the question of the marriage of their womenfolk with foreigners in general and with Indians in particular,” its interim report read.⁴² However, and despite acknowledging that intermarriage was a “social problem” about which the Burmese felt strongly, the committee concluded in its final report that intermarriage, as with Shwe Pyi’s book, was not the underlying cause of the riots. It was merely fodder exploited by Burmese politicians, pongyi, and the press.⁴³ One of the many passages in which the committee laid out its charge against the press is worth quoting in its entirety:

We have in the interim volume of the Report shown the extent to which an immature and irresponsible vernacular press in Burma has, in our opinion, contributed to the creation, before and after the separation of India from Burma, of a communal problem between Indians and Burmans which was wholly foreign to the history of the country and to the traditional tolerance of the Burman character. We think that a wanton wedge of prejudice was, for political ends, driven between the two peoples living side by side in Burma—without any thought either of the real interests of Burma itself, of the contribution India has in the past made to the creation of modern Burma or to the future peace and prosperity of the country in which both Burmans and Indians will live as British subjects. This insane propaganda against Indians was allowed to go on. And, though we both sympathize and approve of a spirit of healthy nationalism as a sign of progress, we must condemn the deliberate and unnecessary destruction of the good relations between Indians and Burmans in Burma for which we think this press has been largely responsible.⁴⁴

Propaganda by the press, politicians, and pongyi: it whipped Burmese people into a communal frenzy uncharacteristic of the “traditional tolerance of the Burman character.”

The determination by the Riot Inquiry Committee that neither Shwe Pyi’s book nor intermarriage were the real cause of the riots did not absolve Mahomed Hashim Patail, who financed the reprinting of the book in 1936, and his Burmese wife (and Muslim convert) from incrimination. The committee found the contents of Dispute between a Moulvi and a Yogi altogether uninspired and took interest in how it came to the attention of the public. Who was it that retrieved this pedestrian work from obscurity and shepherded it into republication? The unlikely culprit was M. H. Patail and his wife, or so the committee conjectured. M. H. Patail had obtained several dozen copies of the book in Mandalay and, having been “so taken” with the book, distributed them among his friends and relations in Rangoon. But M. H. Patail, who could not read Burmese, maintained that he never knew the contents of the book. “That is manifestly absurd and we cannot believe it,” the committee objected on the basis that his Burmese wife did read Burmese and “most probably read” the book.⁴⁵ The committee thus insinuated that it was she who translated for M. H. Patail the substance of the book. Did she confirm this hypothesis? Did she encourage Patail to reprint the book? The committee, which appears to have interviewed every other person of interest, did not obtain a statement from her. It never even named her in the final report, which refers to her as “the Burmese lady” or “the Burmese-speaking wife” of M. H. Patail. By neglecting to hear her side of the story, the committee coded into their report the presumptive consent and culpability of the Burmese wife. The committee committed the very offense it accused Burmese politicians, monks, and the press of perpetrating: scapegoating the Indian and his Burmese wife. What’s more, the British liberal imperialists used—yet again—the Burmese wife as their alibi for allying with their minority subjects and, furthermore, calling into question the capacity of the Burmese Buddhist to self-govern immediately after it attained a modicum of administrative independence from British India.

As the 1938 riots suggest, the separation of Burma from India in 1937 had done little to put to rest the acrimony over intermarriage and conversion. On the one-year anniversary of the riots, Kyi Pwa Ye ran an article entitled “One amyo thami’s lecture,” with a subtitle “Bewarned those who give daughters to foreigners in marriage.” It was authored notably and putatively by a woman who called herself “the mother of Burmese amyo thami.”⁴⁶ The Burmese word amyo thami is an interesting locution that became popular only in the early decades of the twentieth century.⁴⁷ It is used commonly today as a polite term for a woman or a wife (just like its male counterpart amyo tha is used to mean “man” or “husband”). Etymologically, however, the term is a compound of amyo and thami (daughter) and literally means “amyo’s daughter.” As such, it is more accurately translated as “kinswoman,” “womenfolk,” or “fellow countrywoman.” It does more than reference kinship ties or ancestry; it draws a boundary between an in- and out-group.

The author asked her fellow amyo thami—if the article was indeed written by an amyo thami—to quit marrying men of other religions and races, whether Indian, Chinese, or European, because the amyo thami can either destroy or propagate “our amyo, batha, and thathana.”⁴⁸ She claimed that while many Burmese women entered into such marriages, one never came across Burmese men married to women of other batha and lu myo. She found this situation deeply embarrassing: Indian, Chinese, and English women protected their race and religion by abstaining from intermarriage while Burmese women ruined their amyo and batha, producing children who were “impure” Burmese.

The author then recounted a story of impoverished villagers who were propositioned by an Indian government clerk for their young daughter in marriage. The daughter, who was working as a servant at the time, protested, declaring that she would rather be a slave to a Burmese Buddhist master than marry a man of another religion and race. Seeing that her parents were ready to give her away in marriage to the Indian clerk to escape poverty, she asked her employer to intervene. The employer urged her parents to ask the Indian proposer if he would become Buddhist upon marrying their daughter. They did, only to be told flatly by the Indian suitor that he would not; he added that their daughter would have to worship the kho da (god) of Islam, as he did.⁴⁹ Upon hearing this, the employer admonished the parents: “Do you see how faithful Indians are to their religion? You, on the other hand, are not at all attached to yours. If your daughter marries an Indian, not only will your religion but also your grandchildren will be ruined. Such marriages produce impure breeds and bottom feeders.”⁵⁰ In conclusion, the author reiterated that Indian, Chinese, and English women safeguarded their religion and race by shunning intermarriage. She exhorted Burmese women to follow suit: “Do not allow your batha and amyo to be destroyed.” She signed off with a prayer: “May Burmese amyo thami be freed from the grasps of racial and religious others.”⁵¹

The kala gadaw thus remained an object of public feelings and opinions in the postseparation period. Discussions about intermarriage and conversion in the vernacular press did, however, make a pivot to the so-called problem of the Burmese who were not sin sit (pure, genuine). This subtle discursive shift entailed a sharpened focus on the kabya, in general, and on the zerbadi in particular.

Exemplifying this affective redirection was The Problem of the Mixed (Kabya pyatthana), also published the year after the 1938 riots. Arguably the most extensive vernacular polemic against the kabya, the 158-page book was authored by Pu Galay, an editor for Kyi pwa ye (Progress) Press. U Hla (1910–1982), who had cofounded the press with his wife and fellow writer Daw Amar (1915–2008), had commissioned Pu Galay to write the book.⁵² “Some kabya treat Burma as not their own, as though they do not belong, which results in a real loss for the country,” wrote U Hla in his foreword to the book by way of explaining the need for its publication.⁵³ By “some kabya,” he had in mind the zerbadi or, as Pu Galay put it, kabya descending from Burmese women and Indian Muslim men. The gender-race-religion pairing of Burmese Buddhist women and Indian Muslim men reinforced the patrilineal definition of zerbadi and Indo-Burman adopted by the colonial administration. One of the most revered kings in Burmese history, Kyansittha (r. 1084–1112), who also happened to be a son of an Indian princess, was therefore not zerbadi because he was the son of a Burmese father, according to Pu Galay. Indeed, he wrote approvingly of such marriages between Burmese men and Indian princesses while ignoring the royal gifting of Burmese princesses to Indian men.⁵⁴

U Hla defended the focus of the book by explaining that it was “impossible to cover all aspects of the kabya problem in one book” and that he intended it as volume 1 of what would become a two-volume tome.⁵⁵ The second volume never materialized.

In his opening passages, Pu Galay conceded that “a person who is not mixed is truly rare” and that all human beings were kabya in one way or another. What he, like U Hla, found unnerving was that the zerbadi was Burmese in neither thwe (blood) nor seik (heart). “It’s worse to be kabya in heart than to be kabya in body,” he declared, insisting that “every person who lives and dies in Burma ought to share one blood, one heart, with Burmese people.”⁵⁶ The remainder of the book chronicled the reputedly corrupt seik of the zerbadi. It painted an unflattering picture of the early history of zerbadis: as fugitives of the Mughal Empire and criminals executed for their transgression of the royal order by King Alaungpaya (r. 1752–1760) prohibiting cattle slaughter. Unworthy subjects they were, but Burmese kings bestowed upon them royal titles out of benevolence, stressed Pu Galay.

The British colonialists then arrived, Pu Galay continued, bringing with them “hordes” of Indians and upending the historically harmonious relations between zerbadi, kabya, and the Burmese.⁵⁷ His description of this more recent and populous group of zerbadis emphasized their kinship and affinity with the Burmese: they dressed like the Burmese, they went by Burmese names, and they spoke Burmese. He detailed, with express sympathy, the struggle of the zerbadi to make Burmese, not Urdu, the language of instruction in Islamic schools in the country. “Burmese Muslims are Burmese countrymen, born to people of the Burmese race and in the land of Burma,” he asserted and blamed Indian Muslims for what he portrayed as the underdevelopment of the Burmese Muslim, that is, their lack of competence in either Burmese or English because of the dominance of Urdu in the madrasas.⁵⁸

Pu Galay did not otherwise demonstrate compassion for his subject. The rest of the book elaborated on the chasm between the “pure and genuine” Burmese and the Burmese Muslims. The list of accusations against the latter ran long: they coerced Burmese women into conversion; they married multiple women and repudiated them; by agitating for constitutional representation, they had played right into the hands of the British, serving as pawns in the colonial game of divide and conquer; they had forsaken their own Burmese people to side with the British, only to find that they had alienated themselves as a community that was “neither Indian nor Burmese.”⁵⁹

The book ended with one last example of the so-called kabya problem: the failed attempts to legislate marriages between Burmese women and foreigners until 1939, when a bill governing the marriage of Buddhist women in Burma to non-Buddhist men was finally approved. The Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Act was scheduled to come into force in April 1940. The act was reproduced in full in the book as its final chapter.

The act required a Buddhist woman who intended to marry a non-Buddhist man to file a notice of intent with the registrar, usually a village headman or a magistrate, fourteen days in advance of the marriage—a procedure intended to allow any person with objections to the marriage to file a complaint with the registrar. It additionally instructed the registrar to publicize the intent to marry “by affixing a copy thereof at some conspicuous place in his office” and notify the parent or guardian, in cases where one of the parties were under twenty years of age and the (ex?) husband “if the woman had already married a man.”⁶⁰ There was only one member of parliament who voted against this act, Pu Galay observed: the zerbadi barrister and councilman Mirza Mohamed Rafi.⁶¹ A native of Burma who had campaigned against separation from India, he was, to Pu Galay, living proof that the zerbadi, though Burmese in body, suffered from a seditious heart. Their inclusion in the Burmese body politic demanded constant vigilance.

In the aftermath of the separation of Burma from India, proponents of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism targeted with ever more precision those they constituted as “impure” Burmese and enemies within. Their objective was not the exclusion of these constituencies from Burma but their conditional inclusion as internal others and second-class Burmese.

The Entangled History of Colonialism, Communalism, and Nationalism

The 1938 riots did not constitute an aberration so much as a spectacular manifestation of the public outrage over intermarriage and conversion that characterized Burma in the decades leading up to World War II. Burma was not unique in this regard. In India, Hindu-Muslim violence resulted from panic over Hindu women, especially widows of lower castes, who were imagined to be satiating their sexual urges with Muslim men as prostitutes, mistresses, wives, and converts and, thus, allowing “violent and virile” Muslims to use Hindu wombs to produce Muslim progeny.⁶² In French Indochina, intermarriage between Indian or Chinese men and Vietnamese women drew strong objections that the women were little more than concubines for the men.⁶³ Halfway across the world in North America, Asian migrants became targets of race riots, accused of endangering white, working-class manhood and white racial purity by preying upon unsuspecting white women and men. By 1931, twenty-one of the fifty states in the United States had enacted anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting the marriage of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Malay, and South Asian men with white women.⁶⁴ In these disparate contexts, transgressive sex and marriage stoked anxieties about “alien” Asian men that normalized the surveillance, deportation, and lynching of the othered men and inaugurated social and political campaigns, as well as legal reforms, in the name of “protecting” women.

The panic over intermarriage and conversion in Burma likewise elicited and rationalized the regulation of interAsian intimacies and women’s bodies. Fantasies of the suffering Burmese wife of an amyo gya also played a pivotal role in the imagination of the Burmese Buddhist amyo: a community governed by exceptionally just laws and liberal sensibilities, and, therefore, worthy of preservation and protection from conversion, miscegenation, and degeneration. Much existing scholarship on nationalism has underscored the ongoing affective investment that is required in making a political community. As Naoki Sakai has argued, feelings, not ideas, constitute the nation.⁶⁵ The feelings of belonging to a particular imagined community, furthermore, are often cultivated by gendered, sexualized imaginations of injury by foreigners and intruders. As I have shown, the Burmese wife of an amyo gya served as a potent object of emotions that generated moving feelings of indignation, rage, and pity and stirred people toward or against each other.

An analysis of the ideological and affective work performed by the so-called intermarriage problem illuminates the embodied, intersectional nature of the co-constitution of self and Other in the making of nations.⁶⁶ At the same time, it unsettles established historical interpretations that reduce the violent developments of the 1930s, specifically, and the intellectual production and sociopolitical activism of the interwar period, generally, to a story about nationalism. One explanatory model, exemplified by the passage from the final report of the Riot Inquiry Committee cited above, construes the riots as the interruption of nationalism: in a blatant act of political opportunism, politicians, pongyi, and the press exploited the question of intermarriage and conversion to drive “a wedge of prejudice” between Indians and Burmese, giving rise to a “communal problem” that was “wholly foreign to the history of the country and to the traditional tolerance of the Burman character.” The Burmese, who had developed “a spirit of healthy nationalism,” were orchestrated into collective violence by politicians, monks, and the press. The incipient nationalism of the Burmese was thus derailed.

This was a colonial argument that conveniently justified continued British colonization at the precise moment that Burma took a step toward self-rule in the form of constitutional separation from India. The 1938 riots served as evidence that the Burmese, despite their “tolerance,” had yet to learn to handle religious differences as a modern, rational, and secular nation should. Writing decades later, the ICS officer and scholar Furnivall put a different spin on this argument in his theorization of colonial Burmese society as a “plural society.” By “plural society,” he meant an ethnically and socioeconomically segregated society made up of atomized communities—namely, European, Indian, Chinese, and Burmese—that “had nothing in common but the economic motive, the desire for material advantage.”⁶⁷ This fractious society was held together only by dint of British colonial rule. In making this argument, Furnivall indicted British colonialism; the problem of communalism was not a natural outgrowth of primordial allegiances but a monstrous creation of British colonial policies that made society in British Burma incapable of nationalism. These narratives share with each other and with subsequent theories of nationalism, including those by the political theorist Benedict Anderson, an oppositional conceptualization of nationalism and communalism: nationalism is a progressive form of collective belonging while communalism is regressive.⁶⁸

This view is shared by scholars who explain mass mobilizations in interwar Burma through the optic of religious revivalism and cultural nationalism. According to them, the awakening of myo chit seik (love and devotion for one’s amyo) launched the Burmese into defensive action. The so-called problem of intermarriage was the most grotesque evidence of British colonial tactics of domination: intermarriage, once a symbol of the tolerance and pluralism of Burmese society, had been transmogrified into an instrument of a covert warfare of conversion and dispossession under the auspices of plural legal jurisdiction. Burmese nationalists campaigned for the Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Bill and the boycott of intermarriage altogether to counteract the colonial deformation of marriage under colonialism. Religion, law, and marriage were sites of colonial incursion, and they became sites of anticolonial resistance.

These narratives of the triumphant or floundering march of nationalism instill a misleading Manichean opposition between communalism and nationalism, on the one hand, and colonialism and nationalism, on the other.⁶⁹ They obscure the intertwinement of these presumptively adversarial formations and ignore the logic of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism undergirding the political agitation, legislative activism, and collective violence around intermarriage and conversion in interwar Burma. As I have shown in the previous chapters, the colonial ordering of Burma into discrete and irreconcilable religious, racial, and legal communities was an administrative sleight of hand. In reality, the longings and belongings of colonized subjects traversed communal divides in prolific ways. The ideology of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism hailed Burmese Buddhists to not only disavow but also to lay waste to these real, unimagined intimacies on the basis that the Burmese Buddhist amyo constituted an endangered progressive force whose survival hung in the balance.

In an important study of Chinese feminism, Tani E. Barlow has demonstrated how founding national feminists in China as elsewhere during the 1920s and 1930s “engaged international biosocial, evolutionary, and revolutionary thinking both as nationalists and despite nationalism.”⁷⁰ In it, she calls attention to the unfinished work of explicating the conceptual roots of modern projects of emancipation in “cryptoscientific arguments about racial difference and race improvement.”⁷¹ In interwar Burma, too, expressly progressive social and political movements—nationalist, feminist, and Marxist—collided with social-scientific explanations for the well-being of a community, society, or nation that tied biology to the social and the political.

I have often been asked if the ascendancy of militant Burmese Buddhist nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s was not a tragic yet also logical corollary of British colonialism. Communal difference and violence, like the anti-Indian riots of 1930 and 1938, were endemic to imperialist, capitalist modes of accumulation, to be sure. They helped ensure that immigrants and minorities led perilous lives, perpetually at the mercy of the colonial masters who ruled under the pretense of a just, benevolent, and representative government. The British secured not only ready access to migrant labor, expertise, and capital that lubricated the colonial economy but also compliance and allegiance from those they rendered aliens and minorities. The British had a vested interest in routinizing conflicts that would deter intercommunal alliances.⁷²

Yet communalism cannot be explained away as a colonial strategy of domination. The theories of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism that emerged in interwar Burma were all forged in the crucible of colonial transformations. But they were ideas and practices put into play by Burmese Buddhists who professed to be the apotheosis of tolerance and benevolence.

The Labor of Remembering Violence

The reader might be wondering about the conspicuous absence of the New Burmas from this chapter. That I have waited until this late juncture to address this absence may reflect the difficulty with which I have grappled in deciding how to discuss the family’s memories of interwar Burma.

When I decided to embark upon this study, the question of how a family shaped by multiple generations of intermarriage and conversion such as the New Burmas experienced and remembered the violence of the interwar period was foremost on my mind. I prepared myself for what I presumed was a certain eventuality of stories of pain and loss. But such stories never materialized. The New Burmas do not recall being subjects of aggression in Pyinmana during the period or any other. They maintain that they came out of the 1938 riots unscathed, though we know that recurrent attacks on the zerbadi population in the town occurred, including an incident in which armed pongyis took revenge on behalf of a young monk who had been assaulted by zerbadis by attacking the houses of zerbadi residents.⁷³

Ma Galay, the New Burmas, and their friends and relatives could not have been unaffected by the violence aimed directly at kabya, zerbadi, and batha gya people just like them. Did they fear for their lives and livelihood? Did Ma Galay’s business suffer? What I found equally perplexing was the memory void left by Auntie Rosie’s future husband, Pondicherry Mohanarajan, who came of age in interwar Burma. How is it possible that he had so little to say about the anti-Indian violence of the period?

In some ways, there is nothing astonishing about this. For as long as I knew him, Dr. Mohan, as he was referred to, was a man of few words. He rarely talked about himself. It was not until the eve of his passing in February 2005, and occasioned by a visit by his niece from afar, that he recounted to his daughters Mona and May his childhood. As Mona recalls, her father disclosed more about his early life in one evening than he had in his entire life. She had her theories of why this had been the case. Shame, especially on behalf of his children who were stigmatized for being kala kabya, was one likely reason. Perhaps he believed that his ties to India could one day jeopardize his status as a citizen of the country.

He may also have been embarrassed of his humble beginnings. His father, a school headmaster in Salem, India, died young, leaving behind a widow and nine children. Unable to make ends meet on her income as a schoolteacher, his mother, Indalamar Padmavati Naidu, set sail, sometime before 1921, to Rangoon with her children to join her brother. The family crammed into a small apartment in downtown Rangoon, and Indalamar found work teaching at the Reddiar School in East Rangoon. Founded by the wealthy businessman Raja Ramanathan Reddiar, it was one of three schools run by and meant for Hindus.⁷⁴ But before long, tragedy struck the family again. First, Indalamar succumbed to heart disease. When a heart attack finally took her after a long hospitalization, leaving her older children to raise the little ones, Mohan was only six years old. Then, his oldest sister passed away, leaving her son Henry, then aged five, without a mother or a father.

Uncle Mohan’s recollection of his life as an orphan is reminiscent of the archetypical rags-to-riches story of self-helping immigrants. Everyone worked hard and scraped together every penny. Seena, the oldest brother, found work with the Burma Forest Department to support the family, and Purushotham started a bookstore, Standard Literature Co. The younger siblings had their own household duties. Every morning, Mohan awoke before sunrise and before the others and took the one shilling left on the counter to buy milk and coffee beans. He ground the beans using a mortar and pestle and prepared coffee for the older siblings before beginning the long trek to school on foot because he could not afford the bus fare. Neither could he afford to buy lunch. His only sustenance during the day was the single be a gyaw (yellow split pea fritter) that he bought with a penny on his way home from school.

Uncle Mohan’s life story is as punctuated by the theme of self-reliance as it is shot through with the grace of others. Perhaps because he had been orphaned, perhaps because his mother had worked for the school, or perhaps because he was studious, Uncle Mohan received a scholarship to attend Reddiar. By the time he graduated from Reddiar, he was convinced that medicine was his calling. He dreamed of finding a cure for ailments of the heart—the kind that tormented and took away his mother and sister. But his family lacked the means to support further studies. Seena had in fact told him that he needed to find a job and should not expect to continue studying. Uncle Mohan resisted. He asked for a meeting with the dean of Rangoon University and persuaded him to grant him a scholarship for two years of intermediate studies. His sister Champi sold the only item of substantial monetary value in her possession—gold bangles intended as her dowry—so he could purchase books. When he finished his intermediate studies, the dean of the Medical College awarded him yet another scholarship.

This bare-bones outline of Uncle Mohan’s youth was framed by the unanticipated generosities and opportunities that enabled a lowly immigrant orphan to become Burma’s first and foremost cardiologist. Missing from it were references to the discriminations and terrors people like him and his family endured. It is hard not to respond with skepticism to his memory of coming of age in interwar Rangoon. Uncle Mohan was fourteen years old during the uprisings and riots of 1930–1931 and a twenty-two-year-old fourth-year medical student at Rangoon University, just one year shy of obtaining his medical degree (MBBS), at the time of the 1938 riots. As such, he witnessed the anti-Indian riots and saw how Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism mobilized the urban youth and shaped student politics.

One famous example was the University Boycott of 1936 in which between six hundred and eight hundred university students went on a strike to denounce what they believed to be a continued non-Burmese control of higher education that systematically prohibited the access of Burmese students to modern education. Uncle Mohan personified just what the boycotters were protesting: the preference given to the non-Burmese in higher education. At the same time, one of the main organizers and leaders of the boycott was M. A. Raschid (1912–1978), a zerbadi university student a few years Uncle Mohan’s senior.⁷⁵ An active member of the Rangoon University Muslim Students Association, Raschid was elected the first general secretary of the Rangoon University Students’ Union (RUSU), founded in 1931. A close friend of student leaders U Nu and Aung San, who would later become, respectively, the first democratically elected prime minister of Burma and a nationalist martyr, Raschid replaced U Nu as the president of RUSU in 1936. In the aftermath of the boycott, Raschid was elected to serve as the first student representative on the Rangoon University’s University Council, formed as part of the deal reached by the university and the student protesters. Also in 1936, Raschid cofounded with Aung San the All Burma Students Union, intended as an umbrella organization that would unite the entire student population—university, high school, and middle school—in Burma, and was elected its first president.⁷⁶

Raschid’s successful student political career might have been cause for optimism. Yet Uncle Mohan also saw the hostile disputes that erupted over whether Raschid deserved to be at the helm of student organization and mobilization. When Raschid ran for the presidency of RUSU in 1932, he faced backlash from peers who objected to having two consecutive “kala” presidents, the first, Kyaw Khin, having been a Rakhine Muslim. It was Aung San who apparently kept in check the dissenters who sought to discredit Raschid.⁷⁷ Even a popular, bona fide myo chit like Raschid needed his powerful Burmese Buddhist ally to come to his defense. The fate of Raschid might have reminded Uncle Mohan, if he needed any reminding, that he, like Raschid, was a stranger within and that even Raschid could not escape the stereotyped expectation of the model minority: to know his place—beneath the Burmese Buddhist, that is—and to be compliant and unthreatening.

But Uncle Mohan did not dwell on such pasts. Do such lapses in memory speak to the routinization of violence in interwar Burma? Patricia Hill Collins points out that the routinized nature of violent micro-interactions in the form of “words, ideas and images conveyed through the media, curricula and everyday social practices” legitimize and make invisible violence against less powerful groups, so much so that people “have difficulty in identifying routinized violence as violence at all.”⁷⁸ Both Uncle Mohan and the New Burmas may have escaped extreme acts of violence. But they could not have avoided mundane exercises of power, not least their subjection to the degrading epithets and images of the kala, kabya, and zerbadi. Such everyday forms of violence, as systematic and damaging as they were, may have become normalized.

Another possibility is that the anti-amyo gya sentiment evident in the media and in legislative politics did not reflect life on the ground. This seems to have been the opinion of P. D. Patel, a longtime lawyer and Rangoon resident who wrote a ten-page memorandum to the Indian Statutory Commission (discussed in chapter 5) offering his unsolicited input on the separation of Burma from India.

The England-educated Parsi lawyer had arrived in Rangoon in 1908 when he was thirty-three years of age.⁷⁹ Patel had lived in Insein, a predominantly Karen suburb of Rangoon, with his “native born” wife and children. He did not furnish further details of his wife or children. It is possible that she, too, was Parsi, though it seems more likely that she was Karen, given his “adoption” (his word) of Insein, a Karen stronghold, as his hometown: a district he represented as president of the Insein Municipal Committee (1912–1925). He had apparently also served as the secretary of the Rangoon Trades Association for twelve years (1913–1925).

Patel described himself as an Indian native who had made Burma his home. He expected to be buried in the country, and he was (in 1961, in the Parsi burial ground).⁸⁰ “I have always maintained friendship with the people of the country and to the best of my ability I have always helped them,” he averred.⁸¹ Yet, and as the memorandum indicated, he had serious grievances against “the Burmans.” He claimed to be a “victim of intrigue on part of certain Burmans,” as a result of which he was removed from the position of president of the Insein Municipal Committee in December 1925, after more than a decade of service.⁸² He feared that the interests of the minority communities, such as Indians, Chinese, and Karen, would be sidelined if left to the ethnic majority Burmans. He accused the Burmans of blindly voting only for Buddhists and Burmans, instead of for the most qualified electoral candidates (such as himself). And he warned of “the suicidal plan” among some Burmese politicians “of kicking all non-Burmans on every occasion and at every opportunity.”⁸³ Yet he immediately qualified this statement:

A Burman as a whole is friendly to non-Burmans. That is my experience from my visits in the districts. But there are a few educated Burmans who in season and out of season think it their duty to shout loudly that Burma is for Burmans only. Fortunately, it is a small section but at the same time it requires checking and the only way it can be checked is that communal representation must be preserved so that the rights of the minority are not easily trampled upon.⁸⁴

The memorandum written by leading members of Indian communities in Burma (and discussed in chapter 5) similarly suggested that only a minority of the Burmese participated in anti-Indian agitation. The signatories clarified that “the fear of being swamped by Indians” was stoked “by the utterances of responsible high officials and others” and represented “the cry of the small but vociferous section of the Burmese community against the Indian community.”⁸⁵ Nevertheless, and as such memorandums reveal, the demand for “Burma for Burmans” was increasingly “vociferous.”

Or the reader might perceive the forgetting of violence as the failings of the historian, that is, my failure to break the silence. Indeed, like many scholars before me who have written on violence, I have found unearthing the unspoken a complicated task that raises questions of care and respect for those who have, unlike myself, had to continually redeem lives and reoccupy spaces marked by destruction. What is accomplished by my asking Auntie Rosie and her children to bespeak injury and loss? What am I asking in prevailing upon them to evidence pain and suffering rather than strength and healing? Many scholars have observed that evasions of memories of traumatic events such as wars, mass murder, rape, slavery, and torture can serve as a process of self-preservation—a refusal to relive physical, psychological, and emotional violence that gets in the way of overcoming the past.⁸⁶ Or, perhaps, Uncle Mohan, as with Ma Galay, Ahmed, and Helen, had not forgotten at all. But they were not going to define their lives and legacies in terms of their victimization.

“From the perspective of those who have suffered privations of various sorts,” Indrani Chatterjee remarks, “sanctuary, friendship, the restoration of dignity were the key goals of political aspiration.”⁸⁷ Reflecting on the “focused remembering” of India’s partition by her parents and grandparents, Chatterjee recalls:

All that I was told as a child in the sixties and seventies was that suffering was the one constant fact of all forms of life, and that it was necessary to work to alleviate others’ pain and suffering rather than to dwell on one’s own.… When stories were told of the remembered village, they invoked a world of friendships, a happy past. When stories of the departures from homelands were recounted, the persons mentioned were not the persecutors but those who helped them survive, those who gave them sanctuary.⁸⁸

Spectacular acts of violence are hard to forget. They lend themselves to historical recording. They generate abundant press coverage and administrative documentation. Quotidian acts of care, on the other hand, are hard to remember. They neither constitute news nor make the headlines nor enter archives. They lend themselves to collective historical amnesia. Yet they can be more memorable—and more important to commit to memory—than violence.

This was also the case of the New Burmas and Uncle Mohan. The only memory of the 1938 riots that Ahmed and Helen shared with Auntie Rosie was of their experience of distributing sacks of rice among the townspeople. Their memory coalesced around this prosaic work of living in and repairing a fractured community. As Veena Das points out, what is required in reinhabiting a world that has been devastated is not for ghostly pasts to be exorcized but for everyday life not to be expelled.⁸⁹ This delicate work of memory embodies the intimate effects and burdens of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism. Perhaps so did Uncle Mohan’s decision in 1939 to volunteer for the Burma Army Medical Corps, a colonial army of volunteers that would be deployed, imminently, during World War II (fig. 6.1). Rather than flee to India, as did Mya Sein and Raschid along with some nine hundred thousand Indians from Burma, including his own siblings, Uncle Mohan stayed to defend the country.

FIGURE 6.1. Uncle Mohan with a fellow army medic. Photo taken in 1946. Courtesy of Dr. Hnin Yee and Mona Han.

His wartime efforts and experiences, as with so many aspects of his life, represent a mystery. His wife and children know little about it, except that he was deployed as a medic in Kohima in northeast India. Fought between March and July 1944, the Battles of Kohima and neighboring Imphal between the Allied forces and the Japanese are regarded as among the most grueling—and in retrospect the most reckless—wartime military operations of the war and a turning point in the British campaign to retake Burma. Among his small collection of prized memorabilia were a katana (sword) he received from a Japanese army medic who had also been posted in Kohima, four medals that he was awarded for his gallantry and distinguished service during the war, and a page from a British government gazette listing his awards and his final rank: captain. We know that these material objects held particular significance for Uncle Mohan because they were among the personal possessions that he had taken with him when he and Auntie Rosie traveled in 1999 from Burma to Seattle, where two of their children lived, for what they expected would be a temporary visit. They still had a home in Rangoon to which they planned to return. Indeed, Uncle Mohan had been adamant that he would die in Burma, rebuffing his children’s pleas to relocate to the United States so that they could look after their aging parents. The children eventually, and with great difficulty, managed to convince Uncle Mohan and Auntie Rosie to remain in the United States. But when he left Burma in 1999, he had no idea that he would never set foot in the country again. As such, the fact that he took with him the katana, war medals, and gazette clipping is instructive of what they meant to him. He viewed them as a testament to his life and achievements and an important legacy he wished for his children to inherit.

What the medals also tell us is that Uncle Mohan had risked his life and shown exceptional courage. Did he feel compelled to prove his fidelity to an amyo that viewed him as an interloper? To show that there were indeed kala men who would choose Burma over India and whose heart was as pure and genuine as the seik of the “real” Burmese? His explanation for joining the army, recounted by Auntie Rosie, was typically pithy: he owed his life to the country that had given him the chance to become something. He was repaying his debt, a no bo (milk price), so to speak. And through this filial act of reciprocation, he claimed his right to belong.