Notes
Introduction
When, in the late 1910s, Ahmed Meah returned to Rangoon from attending the Calcutta Medical College, his mother, Ma Galay, expected her youngest son to help her manage the thriving family property business as his four siblings had done and marry the nice Muslim woman she had chosen for him. Ahmed did neither. He opened his own medical practice and eloped with Helen May, the Baptist nurse with whom he worked. Ma Galay never imagined that her ordinarily obliging son would defy her to marry a Christian, let alone the orphaned child of an Anglo father and a Karen mother. Her late husband, a Persian merchant and a syed—a descendant of the Prophet through Fatimah—who had served Burma’s last royal family, must be turning in his grave, she thought.
In truth, Ma Galay had more in common with Helen than she cared to admit, not least in her own mixed lineage and minority status as a Muslim Mon-Arab woman in a predominantly Buddhist Burman society. Nevertheless, and even though Helen converted to Islam, Ma Galay disowned Ahmed. Decades later, perhaps Helen considered doing the same to her daughter Rosie Hnin Yee when she married the Indian émigré and Christian convert Rajagopal Pondicherry Mohanarajan without the approval of her parents. But Helen did not. She of all people knew that their family descended from many generations of intermarriage and conversion. Rosie was following in the footsteps of her forebears.
Families with unruly ties and genealogies such as those of Ma Galay, Helen, and Rosie were prevalent in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Burma. Under British (1826–1942, 1945–1947) and Japanese (1942–1945) colonial rule, Burma became a destination for millions of people from other parts of Asia, from northwest India to Japan, turning the colonial capital Rangoon into one of the busiest ports for immigration in the world. They consisted of middling classes of professionals who worked for the government and private companies as clerks, accountants, doctors, and hospital assistants, as was the case for Helen’s father, Alexander Joseph Defries. They were also traders like Ahmed’s father, who belonged to a semiofficial merchant class that allied itself with the Burmese royal family or the British colonial administration—at times both—to act as the fiscal agents for the ruling, official class in return for patronage and concessions. Many among the fifteen million who left the Indian subcontinent for Burma between 1834 and 1930 were indentured “coolie” laborers who were employed in Burma’s rice fields, mills, rubber plantations, factories, and docks.1 During World War II, nearly three hundred thousand Japanese soldiers, imperial personnel, and conscripts from Japan’s colonies landed on Burmese soil. By contrast, during the entire British colonial period for which we have census data (1872–1941), there were fewer than sixty thousand Europeans in Burma.2
These immense human movements included women like Mohanarajan’s mother, Indalamar Padmavati Naidu, a young schoolteacher and widow who left Salem, India, for Rangoon with her nine children in search of a better life. For the first time in history, a steady stream of women from India, China, and Japan began migrating to Burma at the turn of the twentieth century. Historians have indeed maintained that this unprecedented rise in female migration from other parts of Asia sounded the death knell for intermarriage and assimilation in Southeast Asian societies. “When, around the turn of the century, female immigration took on significant proportions,” explained a pioneering scholar of overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, “an increasing number of immigrant men no longer found it necessary to bring culturally alien women into their homes.”3
Yet colonial labor and employment policies ensured that migration to Burma remained a male preserve. Few migrants could afford to pay their own passage, and most incurred debt prior to arrival in their destination, from formal indenture to informal debt in the form of advances for expenses from recruitment agents, labor brokers, employers, or relatives. The price of migration was pronounced for women, whose wages were depressed on the presumption that female labor was of inferior productivity and quality.4 Because women were ineligible for government employment (even though the policy of “sex disqualification,” as it was known, had been abolished in the metropole), they had limited prospect for upward mobility in employment. These conditions discouraged women from migrating and male migrant workers from bringing their spouses and children. As a consequence, the proportion of women born in the Indian subcontinent to their male counterpart steadily decreased over the years, from 1:4 in 1881 to 1:6 in 1911, hovering at the low ratio in subsequent decades (table 0.1). The ratio of China-born women to men increased but not more than 1:3 (in 1921). The only migrant population that bucked this trend was the Japanese. Japan-born women in Burma outnumbered their male counterpart until the decennial government census of 1931.
Disproportionately male, Asian migrants forged intimate relationships with Burmese women within and outside the legally and formally recognized institution of marriage. Over the course of the twentieth century, these relationships became flashpoints for far-reaching legislative reforms and Buddhist revivalist, feminist, and nationalist campaigns despite continual insistence by British authorities that the Burmese held neither religious nor legal objections to intermarriage. Mohanarajan’s arrival in Burma in the 1920s coincided with mounting questions in the judiciary, legislature, and popular press about whether to restrict the ability of Burmese women to intermarry or convert. By the time he was a student at Rangoon University, government and public opinion had reached a rare consensus: the intermarriage and conversion of Burmese women was an underlying cause of the major upheavals of the period, including the territorial and administrative separation of Burma from India in 1937 and the “anti-Indian riots” of 1938, the most spectacular incidence of communal violence in colonial Burma.
In a distinctly gendered dynamic, no attempts were made to govern the spousal or religious choice of Burmese men. Only in the case of Burmese women was intermarriage presumed to lead inexorably to conversion. Only in the case of Burmese women was intermarriage equated with treason. A Burmese woman, but not a Burmese man, who intermarried was considered an infidel and traitor who had betrayed her own religion, race, and nation. It has remained so ever since.
Combining archival research in Burmese, Japanese, and English sources with the family history of the Meah-Mohans, I explore how and why intermarriage and conversion turned into matters of imperial, national, and communal crisis that justified interdiction and violence. This is an unchronicled history that threatens prevailing paradigms that have structured understandings of intimacy under colonialism and how it ought to be studied. This book elucidates a history that has been obscured by the hegemony of métissage (or metijaze), the sexual and cultural mixing of Europeans and Indigenous peoples, in narratives of colonial encounters that have delimited intimacy as necessarily involving white, European subjects. InterAsian intimacies have been far more pivotal to the historical developments that have defined the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—colonialism, migration, racism, religious revivalism, feminism, and nationalism—than acknowledged by scholarship. The book illuminates the expansive range of intimate transactions and transgressions generated by shifting imperial political economies that mobilized people across far-flung spaces and the kinds of government schemes and organized movements that sought to control them. In so doing, I join scholars who have called attention to the history of obfuscated affinities among variously enslaved, colonized, indentured, and racialized people—Indigenous, Black, and Asian—brought into proximity by concurrent and intersecting processes of transatlantic and transpacific slave trade, European liberalism, settler colonialism, and Asian labor migration to the Americas.5
BORN IN INDIA | BORN IN CHINA | BORN IN JAPAN | BORN IN ENGLAND (INCL. WALES AND SCOTLAND) | POPULATION IN BURMA | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
MALE | FEMALE | MALE | FEMALE | MALE | FEMALE | MALE | FEMALE | MALE | FEMALE | |||||||||||
1881 | 146,883 | 35,865 | 10,449 | 865 | 5 | 6 | 4,415 | 324 | 1,991,005 | 1,745,766 | ||||||||||
1891 | 233,398 | 47,321 | 20,423 | 2,637 | 20 | 49 | 5,904 | 665 | 3,879,183 | 3,729,369 | ||||||||||
1901 | 354,061 | 61,892 | 38,063 | 5,265 | 24 | 76 | 4,876 | 563 | 5,282,408 | 5,081,205 | ||||||||||
1911 | 423,169 | 70,530 | 51,783 | 10,395 | 310 | 356 | 5,233 | 912 | 6,183,494 | 5,931,723 | ||||||||||
1921 | 486,799 | 85,953 | 76,301 | 26,043 | 223 | 226 | 4,498 | 2,606 | 6,735,518 | 6,433,588 | ||||||||||
1931 | 510,207 | 95,092 | 70,904 | 18,635 | 411 | 159 | 4,784 | 1,340 | 7,480,676 | 7,166,821 | ||||||||||
Source: Compiled from Census of British Burma, 1881, and Census of India, 1891–1931. | ||||||||||||||||||||
As my formulation “interAsian intimacies” signals, however, the foci of the book are not transoceanic connections but transregional ones. The primary destination for Asian migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not the Americas but Southeast Asia, a region that fell under European and US colonial rule in a piecemeal fashion starting in the sixteenth century. This regional mobility of Asians has been the focus of much recent scholarship on transnational histories of Asia that investigates flows and exchanges of an intermediate scale, smaller, multidirectional, and more continuous than the kind that have been the subject of the global scale and the East-West axis of analysis.6 InterAsian Intimacies stands in common cause with this emergent body of historical scholarship. But it shares neither its impulse to recuperate Asia as a cosmopolitan zone of connectivity nor its focus on the labor and capital of men at the expense of those of women.7 Rather, I am concerned with comprehending how interAsian intimacies made religious and racial difference matter and understanding how women like Ma Galay, Helen May, and Rosie, who found themselves at the center of this unfolding process, remade their lives and lifeworld.
Though frequently interpreted as correlating with religious and racial tolerance or indexing assimilation, intermarriage and conversion were, instead, precisely how people in Burma came to know and care about what it meant to be—or not to be—buddha batha bama amyo, “the Burmese Buddhist kind.” A distinctly twentieth-century nomenclature, it conjoined the term buddha batha (literally “the language of the Buddha”), which was itself a nineteenth-century addition to the Burmese lexicon, and the phrase bama amyo, meaning “Burman” or “Burmese lineage and race,” to name and delineate a Burmese Buddhist community of people ostensibly united by common heritage.8 Wielded by those who self-identified as “the Burmese Buddhist kind” not only as a reference to the religious and racial majority population in the country but as a synonym for “natives,” “sons of the soil,” and “insiders,” buddha batha bama amyo was as much an expression of “community” as of a form of knowledge and power.
The more legal, religious, and political authorities in Burma discussed the intermarriage and conversion of Burmese women, the more certain they became in their knowledge of what set the Burmese Buddhist apart from its constitutive others, the amyo gya (“other kinds”). This development, what I call “Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism,” was undergirded by a logic of reduction and conflation. On the one hand, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, and so forth were reduced to a set of fundamentals: a Muslim man could unilaterally divorce his wife while a Buddhist man could not; a Buddhist widow could remarry while a Hindu one could not; Buddhist children were entitled to inheritance regardless of sex while Confucians followed the rule of primogeniture; all amyo gya, of whatever religion, observed patrilineal kinship structures while bilateral descent was the norm among the Burmese Buddhist; and the former practiced endogamy and proscribed marriage across caste, clan, and sect while the latter imposed neither religious nor legal prohibition on exogamy.
On the other hand, the debates on intermarriage and conversion collapsed and confused religious affiliation, sexual desires, patriarchal rights, and legal status in a process, which Judith Surkis has termed the “corporealization of law,” that “wed together faith and family law, religion and sex.”9 Indian Muslim men were polygamous; Indian Hindu men were bigamous; Japanese and Chinese men alike had concubines, and for that matter, so did European men who kept mistresses. The difference was that the latter were committing adultery—a criminal act—whereas polygyny and concubinage were licensed by religious laws and customs among the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese. In fact, this was also the case among the Burmese Buddhist. By glossing over this inconvenient truth, Burmese Buddhist men were idealized as uniquely monogamous, companionate, and respectful of the conjugal rights of women while sexual and moral degeneracy were ascribed to the amyo gya. On this basis, Burmese Buddhist women were mandated to couple with Burmese Buddhist men and repudiate amyo gya husbands.
Importantly, it was interAsian intimacies, not the familiar religion, race, and gender coupling of European Christian men and Indigenous non-Christian women, that prompted lawsuits, legislative impasses, literary production, and media discourse. The most vociferous critics of intermarriage and conversion were not colonial authorities or European or Japanese expatriates but those who self-identified as buddha batha bama amyo. The amyo gya whom they most routinely accused of enticing young Burmese women to consent to sex, conversion, and concubinage under the cover of love were Indians, Chinese, and, during World War II and its immediate aftermath, the Japanese.
The persecution of the Rohingya, a minority Muslim ethnic group, as “Bengali terrorists” waging “love jihad,” an alleged conspiracy to forcibly convert unsuspecting women to Islam through rape and duplicitous marriage, is only the most recent iteration of this alarmist imagination of the Burmese Buddhist as an exceptional community perennially imperiled by degenerate foreigners. It has, now as in the past, served to authorize eugenicist projects aimed at consigning Others to second-class status in Burma and controlling the sexual and reproductive conduct of women in Burma. Put differently, interAsian marriage and conversion were the grounds upon which the intimate frontiers of the Burmese nation—its innermost sanctum and its most penetrable borders—were constituted.
Burma is not an exception. Those whose intimate lives and selves have been deemed public concerns across Southeast Asia have been by and large Asian Others: Muslims in the case of Buddhist majority nations, such as Thailand, as in Burma; Indian or Arab Muslims (as opposed to Malay Muslims) in the case of majority Muslim nations, such as Malaysia and Indonesia; the Chinese across the board; and the native-born descendants, of mixed heritage and otherwise, of these variously othered peoples. The fear of the intimate exploitation and violation of presumptively vulnerable women by these Asian Others and through intermarriage and conversion has allowed governments and nationalists in the region to subject their minoritized populations to both mundane and exceptional forms of violence and to politicize the sexual and reproductive choices of women under the guise of protecting them from Asian Others. All the while, they declare themselves liberal, multicultural societies that, unlike neighboring countries in South Asia and East Asia, oppress neither their women nor their racial and religious minorities.
This book offers a new framework for rethinking how we chart the history of belonging and how it was defined and demarcated in the crucible of imperialist and nationalist formations. The advantage of interAsian intimacies as a paradigm is not limited to the recovery of occluded histories of intimacy. Like intersectionality, such an interpretation allows scholars to scrutinize the shifting articulations of different registers of power—religion, race, lineage, and nation—that may appear to be fixed, stable, and discrete and yet are historically encompassed by the polysemic referent “Asian.” It calls into question the primacy of concepts and categories, such as creole, métis, and Eurasian, derived from histories of relationships centered on whiteness that haunt the scholarship on colonial intimacies. It challenges the scholar to unravel the Eurocentric bourgeois ideology of intimacy as sexual and romantic relationships in the “private” domain of the couple and to grasp the linkages and slippages between different forms of intimacy implied by the interwoven theories of intermarriage and conversion this book explores.
Métissage
The proliferation of studies of gender, intimacy, and colonialism began as a rejoinder by feminist historians to scholarship that wrote women out of the history of European empires.10 As their work has shown, the putatively private sexual, affective, and reproductive relations of European men with Indigenous women and, subsequently, métis, creole, or Eurasian native-born women formed the backbone of racist, heteropatriarchal regimes of domination in imperial and national contexts.11 According to what has become a standard interpretation, these women at first accrued wealth, prestige, and power in exchange for their intimate labor as brokers and companions who provided comforts of domesticity as well as access to markets, land, and networks of patronage to European men. This intimate infrastructure of early European colonial incursions followed an established pattern of “temporary marriages” in the case of southern Asia, especially its commercial centers, whereby an itinerant trader formed “a sexual relationship with a local woman who would act as his wife and commercial partner for as long as required.”12
This ancien régime of intermarriage and conversion—and cultural amalgamations, creole accommodations, and hybrid identities—met its demise in the era of “high” or “new” imperialism (c. 1870–1914), when more than 80 percent of the world came under the control of a handful of European imperial powers. It was not just the borders and boundaries of colonial territories that were redrawn at this time but the line between the colonizer and the colonized and the rules that governed relations across this divide.
The so-called problem of métissage authorized colonial and metropolitan governments to engage in these adjustments. Colonial policies restricting European women from residing in the colonies were relaxed; white mistresses and their white children displaced native-born women and Eurasian children. Even as those formerly deemed beyond the pale of “whiteness” like Jews, southern Europeans, or the Japanese achieved recognition as racially white, European women in the metropole and colony forfeited their national and civil status as European upon marriage to a man of a colonized or subject race. The 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act exemplified the government attempt to restrict métissage among British women. It deprived British women who married an “alien” of their British nationality.13 No such penalties were placed on British men.14
Even without such laws, British women were penalized for métissage. British officials, politicians, academics, and the press advised British women against marrying Asian or African men and demanded the enactment of anti-miscegenation laws similar to those in South Africa at the time. They censured British women in métissage as low-class and morally bereft and treated their children as social pariahs. Such women were understood to have abandoned their duty as the mothers of nations and, therefore, were unentitled to Britishness and citizenship.15 Paradoxically, the women who took up the call to serve as moral guardians of the British race, family, and nation were vilified by colonial officials as not only “the true bearers of racist beliefs but also hard-line operatives”16 who jealously policed contact between Europeans and colonized peoples. They were scapegoated for the racist intimate infrastructures of colonialism over which they had no control.
Meanwhile, Eurasians in the colonies were denied access to top-tier education, career opportunities, and membership in European-only churches and clubs, ensuring that that they had little choice but to form a class of second-order Europeans, perceived as inferior to “pure-bred” Europeans but superior to the native population. Not coincidentally, “Eurasian” was one of the rare categories of mixed or multiple affiliation used in the colonial census. It served as both a signifier and a reminder of the insurmountable difference between the ruler and the ruled. As children, Eurasians were removed from their native-born mothers and placed in orphanages for Eurasians or sent “back home” to the metropole to be raised in boarding schools and by their paternal relatives. High imperialism left in its wake broken families, mothers, and genealogies.17
Métissage did not erase so much as produce distinctions between colonizer and colonized. While construed as a threat to the colonial political and social order that endangered the religious, racial, and cultural integrity of presumptively primordial communities (e.g., European, white, Christian), métissage was the very phenomenon through which colonial and metropolitan governments improvised their tactics of domination and regulated the differential distribution of rights and responsibilities.
This narrative of the decline of métissage throughout European empires continues to be regarded as paradigmatic of the history of intermarriage and conversion under colonialism tout court, even in the context of Asia where métissage was numerically insignificant relative to interAsian intimacies. It is as though Asians were people without intimacy, except when they came into contact with European colonials and expatriates. This is a paradigm of colonial intercourse that unwittingly reproduces a possessive, imperialistic calculus of intimacy that constituted the bourgeois conjugal and domestic relations of the liberal individual as the only recognizable form of intimacy—and the property and privilege of Europeans—and ascribed to non-Europeans deficient or deviant forms of family, kinship, affect, and sexuality, thereby rationalizing their subordination.18 The tenacity of this colonial division and distribution of intimacy is such that successive works that have aimed at comparative, connective analysis of the “imperial politics of intimacies” have covered the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and US Empires but not the Japanese.19
The focus on European and US colonialisms to the exclusion of the Japanese Empire is reflective of a broader pattern in postcolonial studies. In the US and European academia, scholarship on the Japanese Empire has traditionally focused on its peculiarities as the only “non-Western” colonial power in the modern period. Put differently, Japanese colonialism has been analyzed primarily as an anomaly.20 And if postcolonial scholars have ignored Japan, then scholars of Japan and its empire have marginalized the study of Japan’s wartime imperial expansion to the borders of Burma and India, which entailed the most spectacular deployment of troops in Japanese history—an estimated over two million from Japan and another half million conscripts from other parts of Asia (mainly Taiwan and Korea).21 Even as they have uncovered the history of migration, intermarriage, and collaboration in and beyond Japan’s formal empire to include Pacific islands and North and South America, they have overlooked similar dynamics in the territory that Japan occupied during World War II.22 This oversight has further diminished the history of interAsian intimacies and impeded the analysis of the effects of multiple colonizations on intermarriage and conversion.
The historiographical fixation with métissage is striking for yet another reason. If the Japanese Empire has been the orphan of postcolonial studies, the British Empire—and namely British India, the “jewel of the crown”—has been its star attraction, comprising the lion’s share of theoretical and empirical studies of colonialism. Ironically, there are few subjects that have vexed historians of India more than Hindu-Muslim communalism, which, by all accounts, culminated in the bloody partition of India (into India and Pakistan) along religious lines in 1947 and its attendant phenomena of mass rape, abduction, and forced “recovery” of women on both sides of the geopolitical divide. As the scholarship on the history and legacy of the partition has revealed, the flashpoints for Hindu-Muslim communal agitation, throughout British colonial rule and long after the partition, were interfaith marriage and conversion, particularly of Hindu women of lower castes to Islam through seduction by the “lustful Muslim male.”23
In other words, while scholars of European empires, not least the British Empire, have studied métissage as foundational to imperialism and racism, scholars of India have turned a critical eye to Hindu-Muslim intermarriage and conversion to explain the advent of Hindutva (the Hindu right) and nationalism. The problem is not just that historians of European empires have been remiss to place undue emphasis on métissage at the expense of the equally, if not more, significant question of Hindu-Muslim marriage and conversion in the context of British India nor that the two bodies of scholarship—one on empire, métissage, and race and the other on nation, religion, caste, and Hindu-Muslim marriage and conversion—remain siloed. The issue, more importantly, is that interAsian marriage and conversion have been analyzed primarily as a vortex of antagonism rather than sites of intimacy.
Mobile Men and Local Helpmates
Meanwhile, the emergent paradigm of “inter-Asia” within the field of Asian studies, once partitioned into hermetically sealed subregions of East, South, Southeast, and Central Asia, has turned the spotlight on previously neglected movements and interactions that trespassed or transpired at the interstices of these artificial subregional divides.24 The main protagonists of histories produced in this vein are not European adventurers, traders, officials, and mercenaries but instead Asian men. Some are recognizable figures known for their globe-trotting intellectual and political peregrinations as well as their sympathies for pan-Asianist ideologies and movements: Okakura Tenshin, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sun Yat Sen to name a few.25 Others are laboring classes of “coolie” men upon whose backs European empires flourished. In between these classes of Asian migrants were the so-called merchants without empire, also primarily from India and China but as well from the Arabian peninsula. As owners of business, land, and capital, their wealth and power placed them well above the majority of the Indigenous population. But they were neither formal agents of empire nor metropolitan subjects. Despite some legislative representation as minority communities, they were politically disenfranchised people with little institutionalized access to the colonial and metropolitan governments on which they relied for protection and patronage.
Despite, or perhaps due to, its attention to mobile Asian men and Asian interactions, this emergent transregional history has maintained a surprisingly conventional understanding of intermarriage and conversion that does not stray far from that of métissage. Conceptualizing Asia as an interlinked cosmopolitan universe of connections and circulations, Prasenjit Duara observed that prior to the advent of colonialism and nationalism, politics and states did not dominate identity formations and societies had “soft boundaries, where individual community difference (say, in diet or deities) would not prevent large-scale and un-self-conscious borrowing in other respects.”26 This is not a novel vision of Asia but one that has long held sway over specialists of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. In their analyses, both geographies were crossroads of the world distinguished by their connectivity and conviviality; intermarriage, mixed births, conversion, and transgenderism were widespread practices that embodied the pluralistic practices and mentalities characteristic of the region and the readiness and fluidity with which state and society “localized” the foreign.27 It was the intensifying contact with “foreign men”—from across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, from Europe, Arabia, and Asia—during the age of expanding European empires and capital that explained the demise of this “strong current of localization.” The point is not that racism, religious fundamentalism, sexism, and homo- and transphobia were distinctly European Christian colonial afflictions, which is an argument about colonial rupture that has been made by scholars of the Americas before and after European colonization.28 Rather, Asian migrants too hailed brides from their “homeland” with the goal of reproducing self-sustaining communities in the colony as soon as the mobility revolution of the nineteenth century shrunk the distance between their national or religious “homelands” and “host” societies.29 For these men, no less than for European colonizers, intermarriage and conversion represented temporary institutions. They too disparaged “the bastardization of their culture and the distortion of family values, an explicit comment on the influence of local women,” and applied pressure on the latter to adopt the social and cultural norms and behaviors of their migrant husbands.30
InterAsian history mirrors the history of métissage and its myopia in another respect: it is a narrative about traveling men and their Indigenous helpmate that tethers native and native-born women to an imagined existence of domesticity. Women seldom appear as brokers of contact and change. As a new generation of historians have shown, however, women from China, Japan, and India from the highest to the lowest strata of society crisscrossed Asia during the so-called age of mobility revolution, and not just as an underclass of “unwilling” coolie laborers, prostitutes, servants, and bondmaids, as so often presumed.31
The women who have entered the picture as local wives are identified as “nodal points” at which “valuables such as houses and lands, and values such as lineage identification” accumulate.32 In a gendered division of labor, men are depicted as circulating across oceans and continents sowing seeds and spinning webs of exchange, debt, patronage, pilgrimage, and kinship, while women are relegated to the role of repository and reproducer, domesticating and nourishing what have been sown, spun, and propagated by men. Despite challenging scholars to think critically about the archives of mobility, interAsian history has continued to prioritize the empirically knowable world of men over the less easily recoverable and fathomable stories of female mobility, enterprise, empire building, and lineage making, such as those of Ma Galay and Helen May. In this respect, interAsian history has reinforced the tendency in histories of métissage to make mobility the property of colonizers and fix Indigenous women in both time and space as “the stationary object on whom intimacy is bestowed, visited, forced.”33
InterAsian Intimacies challenges the one-dimensional figure of the local helpmate and reimagines her as a historical agent not only enmeshed in family and affective ties but also versed in political, economic, and social speculations and manipulations. At the same time, it unsettles assumptions about the insularity of foreign men and the cosmopolitanism of natives to interrogate the part that both groups played in the history of interAsian conflicts.
Stories and Sources
The narrative follows the arc of the family history of Rosie Hnin Yee and Pondicherry Mohanarajan (henceforth Auntie Rosie and Uncle Mohan, see fig. 0.1), beginning with the stories of Auntie Rosie’s maternal and paternal grandparents, Di Di Diana Ogh and Alexander Joseph Defries, and Ma Galay and U Choe. Their experiences of intermarriage and conversion span the fall of the last Burmese monarchy, Burma’s administrative and territorial incorporation into the British Empire, the Japanese occupation of and retreat from Burma during World War II, and the first half century of Burmese independence. What makes their life stories and perspectives so important however is not just the diachronic view of interAsian intimacies that they afford but also the fact that they are a family of amyo gya who have been marginalized and stigmatized as foreigners over many generations.
Admittedly, they belonged to a section of the elite. U Choe was a royal serviceman, and Ma Galay socialized with royalty; in the aftermath of his death, she built a lucrative real estate empire in Rangoon. Their descendants attended premier schools, not just in colonial Burma and India but in metropolitan London. Uncle Mohan, who came from humble beginnings, went on to become the first cardiology specialist in Burma and a personal physician to Khin May Than, the third and favorite wife of the socialist military dictator Ne Win. None of this, however, minimizes the penalty of being amyo gya—Muslim, Christian, Indian, Arab, convert, and kabya (mixed).
FIGURE 0.1. Auntie Rosie and Uncle Mohan in Maymyo. Photo taken c. 1969. Courtesy of Dr. Hnin Yee and Mona Han.
The family stories that appear in this book were shared with me over the course of my lifetime, long before and after I began training as a historian, and in my relationship to the family as amyo, albeit what anthropologists and sociologists call a “fictive kin” who is not related by consanguinity, adoption, or marriage. Growing up in Burma, it was a weekly ritual to spend an evening and share a meal with Auntie Rosie, Uncle Mohan, and their children, relatives, and friends and listen to the grown-ups narrate legends of their ancestors—handed down to them by the matriarchs Di Di, Ma Galay, and Helen May, who outlived their husbands—and whisper their family secrets in the comfort and privacy of their home in Rangoon. Virtually every person who was party and privy to this storytelling was a woman.
This experience of homosocial, women-dictated creation of memory, meaning, and knowledge compelled me to grapple with the gap between the finished history of interAsian intimacies that have been chronicled in written records and government archives and the unfinished, living history told in families. It furthermore presented me with an unexpected personal confrontation with the problem of the archival and historiographical dispossession and disfiguration of women.
Generations of feminist scholars who have researched and written about the lives and histories of Black, Indigenous, enslaved, colonized, and indentured women have struggled with the formidable challenge of finding women in archives that systematically ignore them.34 Organizations led exclusively by men, Christian churches and colonial governments have left behind archives structured around the patriarch in which women appear as appendages to men. Little more than their partial name tends to be ascertainable through legal, administrative, or ecclesiastical records of marriage and family. For example, birth and baptism registers list the “Surname” and “Quality, trade, or profession” of the father, not the mother, thus ensuring a gendered, structural asymmetry in the recovery of family histories and intimate pasts. In colonial contexts, moreover, native and non-European women in particular were deemed unworthy of record keeping; when they do appear in official archives, they often do so as slaves, coolies, prostitutes, concubines, and orphans.
Feminist scholars of the last quarter century have taught us to reconsider where and in whom history resides and to stretch the definition of archives and sources. They have also challenged us to reclaim archival material for contrary purposes to creatively disorder official accounts and dominant narratives.35 In the absence of such endeavors, warns Insook Kwon, masculinist narratives, imperialist or nationalist, monopolize truth and sweep away colonized women’s realities.36
What is at stake therefore is not simply the due diligence of a historian: scour archives, consider multiple sources, scales, and angles of history, and so on and so forth, though these are all requisite modes of doing history that I adopt here. Rather, it is the recasting of history so that we do not continue to banish women like Ma Galay, Helen May, and Auntie Rosie to a state of unknowability or leave them vulnerable to “readings and misreadings of whoever chooses to make assumptions about them, however hostile or insulting their preconceptions may be.”37 It is in this insurgent spirit and modality of historical inquiry that I have turned to intergenerational storytelling. For the same reason, the reader will find me engaging in imaginative interpretations throughout the book. I deploy these discipline-crossing, genre-bending techniques to remember what the archive has obscured and history has devalued. What follows is my attempt to reimagine what it means and takes to do history.
The first half of the book tacks back and forth between the life stories of Auntie Rosie’s grandparents (chapter 1) and parents (chapter 3) and stories of mixed marriages, births, and families that appear in civil court records (chapters 2 and 4). Together, the four chapters illustrate how wives of migrant men crossed geopolitical, legal, and social boundaries to take charge of their fate and fortune and lead lives unconfined to the putatively feminine—and unchanging—domain of sex, domesticity, and reproduction.
British authorities continually ran up against relations that transgressed administrative classifications and legal jurisdictions and exposed the absurdities of government schemes to organize subjects into discrete religious and racial communities governable by their respective laws. They also found themselves trying—and tried by—lawsuits against Burmese women in such marriages and families, often initiated by their husbands and in-laws who contested the women’s claims to conjugal rights, children, and inheritance. Allying with the plaintiffs, colonial jurists ruled that intermarriage and conversion obliged a Burmese Buddhist woman to relinquish her rights to property and become a legal subordinate of her Chinese, Hindu, or Muslim husband. They pitted minority rights against indigenous rights along gender lines—as Chinese, Hindu, and Muslim patriarchs’ rights against Burmese Buddhist women’s rights—to routinely undercut women’s personhood and property and shore up patriarchal rights, all under the cover of protecting both the rights of religious minorities and women’s capacity to consent to intermarriage and conversion. InterAsian intimacies thus became the grounds for elaborating and consolidating—not dismantling—colonial presumptions about divisions in “Oriental” religions, races, laws, and families and the imperial authorization of patriarchy.
The remaining chapters move out of the courtroom into the court of public opinion to explore how intermarriage and conversion of Buddhist women became the locus of political agitation, legislative activism, collective violence, and national shame and imperial nostalgia, while also viewing the upheavals of the 1930s, World War II, and the Japanese occupation (1942–1945) through the prism of Auntie Rosie and Uncle Mohan. In the decades leading up to World War II, chapters 5 and 6 show, those who self-identified as “protectors” of the buddha batha bama amyo (“Burmese Buddhist kind”) launched a virulent legislative and press campaign aimed at restricting the ability of Burmese Buddhist women to intermarry or convert. They charged amyo gya (“other”) men with seducing unsuspecting Burmese Buddhist women into fraudulent marriages and involuntary conversions and enjoined Burmese Buddhist men to regain control over their women, heritage, and territory. They imagined the Burmese Buddhist as an exceptional amyo (“kind”) governed by enlightened norms that recognized women as autonomous rights-bearing individuals. The preservation and regeneration of this heritage required the emotional, sexual, and reproductive labor of Burmese Buddhist women, who were exhorted to couple with Burmese Buddhist men. Those who married amyo gya against this conjugal mandate were blamed for the degradation of the Burmese Buddhist amyo. A complex assemblage of claims, the idea of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism combined the judicial discourse on Burmese Buddhist law with ideas of degeneration and heredity, and love and marriage rooted in the pseudoscience of eugenics that linked racial difference with sexual deviance and in popular understandings of the Buddhist doctrines of karma and merit.
Intermarriage and conversion proved no less politically charged during the Japanese occupation of Burma, when interAsian marriage and family were upheld as models of pan-Asian solidarity. Chapters 7 and 8 engage with memories of women as students, teachers, translators, informants, and wives of occupiers who have been depicted in Burmese narratives of antifascist, anticolonial resistance as traitors and shameless mistresses of the Japanese, and in wartime and postwar Japanese accounts of the occupation as temptresses. Characterizing women as willful accomplices, both Burmese and Japanese narratives deny women the benefit of political calculus and patriotism they grant to occupied men who collaborated with the Japanese. They also obscure how new dynamics of power and patronage were enacted and managed through everyday relations of intimacy between Japanese occupiers and colonized women and conceal the complicity of the Burmese political and intellectual elites in routinizing gender and sexual exploitation. As these chapters demonstrate, interAsian intimacies remained under the Japanese perilous sites through which distinctions between colonizer and colonized—and among the colonized—were reconstituted and made to matter.
Even as I track shifts in perceptions, practices, and experiences of intermarriage and conversion and their political and social ramifications, I stress the persistence of the politics and prose of intimacy across colonialisms. The history of interAsian intimacies is best understood as not one of colonial rupture but one of a cumulative regulation and institutionalization of marriage, family, identity, and the body politic by and across different patriarchal regimes of domination.