CHAPTER 1 Making Kin and Remaking Worlds

Becoming Anglo-Indian, Karen, Baptist

The decline of the De Fries was not a unique tale. Throughout the nineteenth century as direct imperial rule by the British government replaced company rule, Catholic Eurasians such as the De Fries found themselves ostracized by Eurasians of British descent, who were predominantly Protestant. Perhaps it was the desire to be accepted into British Eurasian circles that prompted some members of the De Fries family to join St. Mary’s Church, the oldest Anglican church in Madras. But most did not. Not even Albert and Adriana, Alexander Joseph’s parents, who adopted the new Anglicized spelling of their surname: “Defries.”

Anglo-Indians also lost many privileges they once enjoyed. Superior employment opportunities, such as the ICS, that offered the highest income, prestige, and chance for promotion were staffed by European men educated and recruited in Britain. Men of European descent educated in India were excluded from such careers and deemed fit only for subordinate levels of the public services and private European commercial sectors, particularly those connected with transportation, communication, and engineering, where they worked in a restricted managerial capacity. In the late nineteenth century, the colonial administration circumscribed even further its preferential treatment of Anglo-Indians in response to Indian nationalist demands for greater participation in state sectors. These obstacles to socioeconomic and career advancement resulted in the proletarianization of the majority of the 100,000 or so Eurasians and close to half of the 150,000 or so Europeans in India by the turn of the century. They were labeled “poor whites” or referred to euphemistically as “domiciled Europeans.” Workhouses and homes for “vagrant” whites were created with the goal of segregating and disciplining poor Europeans, who threatened to tarnish the illusion of white racial superiority.¹⁴

If we are to believe a 120-page “Burma brochure” on Eurasians and Anglo-Indians published in Rangoon in 1910, the idea that Eurasians and Anglo-Indians were inferior Europeans affiliated with but subordinate to the ruling elites prevailed among these communities in Burma. Authored by R. E. Culley, who identified himself as “one of the community,” the text was presented as a guide for the comprehensive reform—mental, spiritual, physical, social, political, and economic—of the Eurasian community in Burma. He conceded that “there is apparently some ground for justification of the prejudice entertained by Europeans against fraternizing with the Eurasian” and discussed at length the innumerable “defects” alleged to be characteristic of Eurasians, including idleness, intemperance, untruthfulness, rudeness, early marriage, and “broken or baby English.” While lamenting that Eurasians had been “disowned” by “vain” Europeans, he hoped that by throwing light on what was “wrong or defective in the character of the Eurasian community,” he could help the community “take active as well as effective steps to rectify what is amiss, or make good what is lacking.”¹⁵

If Alexander Joseph Defries had hoped to escape the unenviable fate of Eurasians and Anglo-Indians in Madras by crossing the Bay of Bengal to the frontier colony of Burma, then he was probably disappointed. But we do not know what motivated him to move to Burma, when no one else in his extensive family appears to have made the journey. Or when he arrived in Burma, for that matter. What we do know is that Di Di Diana Ogh met him sometime before 1900, when their eldest daughter, Helen May, was born.

One of fourteen children of Shwe Maung Ogh, Di Di belonged to a large Karen family—a categorization Auntie Rosie was quick to correct. Actually, she explained, the Oghs were “not pure Karen.” The prevailing theory among the Oghs is that they are also of Armenian or Portuguese descent. In the seventeenth century, Armenians established themselves in port cities, such as Syriam and Pegu, whence they brokered trade with Madras and competed and communed with other traveling mercantile groups, including the Portuguese.¹⁶ It is not at all implausible that one or more of Di Di’s ancestors hailed from these entrepôt communities or their descendants and that Di Di shared with Defries a mestiza lineage.

One of the main lu myo, or “kinds of people,” in Burma, the Karen have come to be known for large-scale conversion to Christianity by American Baptist missionaries in the nineteenth century, although the majority of Karen to this day identify as Buddhist. Nevertheless, Christianity spread rapidly among the Karen after the arrival of Adoniram Judson, the founder of the American Baptist Mission (ABM) in Burma, in 1813, making the country the location of the United States’ very first Protestant foreign mission. ABM envisioned the Karen as a special group, “a lost tribe whose oral traditions and customs had originated from Hebrew,” in the words of the most well-known missionary among the Karen, Rev. Francis Mason. Within two decades of the first recorded Baptist conversion in Burma in 1819, ABM had gained 1,244 converts among Karens (compared to only 186 Burmans). By mid-nineteenth century, ABM claimed a Karen following of 7,750 strong (compared to 267 Burmans); by 1910, this number had increased to 54,799 (out of a total of 70,396 in Burma).¹⁷ The Oghs were among these Karen converts who had joined the American Baptist church in large numbers in the second half of the nineteenth century.

One of the main reasons for the success of ABM among Karens, as opposed to the Burmans, was its enthusiastic support for literacy and education. It was the American Baptist missionary Jonathan Wade (1798–1872) who created the Sgaw and Pwo Karen scripts in the 1830s–1850s by adapting the Burmese script, thus turning Karen into a written language and promoting it as a medium of teaching and preaching. The establishment of the two-script system by ABM resulted in the conventional understanding of “Karen” as reference to a language or a people comprising two major subgroups, the Sgaw and Pwo.¹⁸ ABM also educated Karen women who, the missionaries hoped, would help their husbands, children, and relatives remain or become upstanding Christians. It ran schools specifically for girls that provided instruction in nursing, midwifery, and the domestic sciences, in addition to reading and writing.

The impact of ABM education on the training of Karen women evangelists or on the expansion of the population of Karen converts is debatable.¹⁹ Its effect on the professionalization of Karen women, however, is clear. Karen women came to be known as the most outstanding nurses in Burma.²⁰ They dominated nursing, the first and only profession aside from teaching open to educated women, European or Asian, in colonial Burma, where, as elsewhere in the British Empire, women were ineligible for government employment. Di Di was one such woman.

But Di Di belonged not just to the first generation of nurses trained in Burma. She must have been among the first women in Burma to be employed by the government, for she was a nurse at the General Hospital in Mandalay, where she met Alexander Joseph Defries, who worked as an assistant hospital steward. It is doubtful that Di Di would have easily given up the coveted position of a nurse in a government hospital, which might explain why she appears to have remained in Mandalay while Alexander Joseph left for Rangoon, where he died in 1908. Not long thereafter, Di Di gave birth to their youngest daughter, Emma. Emma does not appear on the record of the baptism of her elder daughters Helen May, Cecilia Elizabeth, and Juliet Gabriel at Christ Church in Mandalay in September 1910. Her exclusion was not an oversight; she was adopted during her infancy by an English couple who lived in Rangoon.

Auntie Rosie does not know why her aunt was given up for adoption. She imagines that her grandmother, widowed with four young daughters, must have had few choices. Di Di also decided to send her other daughters to Anglican orphanages that provided free education, room, and board to the “poor and destitute” children of European fathers and Burmese mothers whose fathers had either died or deserted them. Shortly after the baptism in September 1910, Di Di moved to Rangoon where she worked as a nurse for a Japanese doctor or dentist. There, she placed all her daughters in the care of others: Emma with the English couple, the Campbells, and the eldest three with the Bishop Strachan Home for Girls, one of two orphanages for Eurasian girls in Burma run by Christian missionaries and the only one under the management of the Anglican church.²¹

In British India (of which Burma was a province until 1937), as in other neighboring European colonies such as Indochina, a Eurasian child who lacked a European father due to death, abandonment, or neglect was considered orphaned, regardless of whether the child had a surviving mother or if the mother, as in the case of Di Di, remained in contact with the child.²² Orphanages such as the Bishop Strachan Home for Girls and its brother institution the Diocesan Orphanage for European and Eurasian Boys at St. John’s College were established with the belief that Eurasian children, in the words of their founder Dr. John E. Marks, “cannot be allowed to grow up as Burmese Buddhists.”²³

As with boarding schools, training homes, and correctional facilities established throughout European colonial empires, orphanages formed an imperial system of uprooting and institutionalizing Eurasian and Indigenous children with the goal of assimilating them. The wards of these institutions were baptized, given Christian names, compelled to learn the colonial language—whether it was English, French, or Dutch—and were forbidden from speaking vernacular languages. They followed a regimented program of basic education, Christian schooling, and hard labor and received harsh corporeal punishments for rebellious behavior.²⁴ Couching their coercive practices of assimilation in a language of benevolence, agents and supporters of child removal portrayed orphanages and homes as institutions for the redemption of mixed-race children who needed protection from their native families and cultural influences. “Left to their Burmese mothers, they could not speak English and were dressed either entirely or for the most part as natives and very poorly provided for,” Dr. Marks wrote in his memoir as he recalled his motivation for starting the two Anglican diocesan orphanages in Rangoon. “To rescue them and give them Christian teaching and a good secular education,” he explained, “seemed to be a work of charity as well as of necessity.”²⁵

Doris Sarah Easton, who moved from England to Mandalay in 1915 to become the first headmistress of St. Mary’s School for Eurasian Girls, sympathized with her Eurasian students, who were scorned and ostracized by the English expatriates in the city. Yet she shared their condescension toward Eurasians, describing her Eurasian charges, for instance, as “very devoid of brains” in her diary. In December 1917, she wrote that her fiancé, Arthur Percy Morris, then headmaster of the Government School of Engineering in Insein, was “rather down” because a Eurasian headmaster had joined the school, and under his watch, the students had “got slack,” having lost all the discipline that Morris had instilled in them.²⁶

Orphanages for Eurasians had a reputation for villainizing native women in particular. The European and American missionary men and women who ran the orphanages resorted to Orientalist stereotypes of colonized women; their mixed-race children were the unfortunate consequences of their loose morals, not of the European or Eurasian fathers of the children. In other words, Eurasian children needed to be shielded as early as possible from the pernicious influences of their native mothers.²⁷ Nevertheless, many native women placed their children in the care of the very institutions that maligned them because they offered vocational training in such fields as nursing and teaching that prepared the charges for the limited occupations open to women at the time. Take, for example, the Eurasian Home for Destitute Boys in Rangoon, which served a relatively mixed student population in spite of its name: about half of the twenty-nine students who studied at the home as day pupils were female, as were an additional six boarders. Though the primary goal of the home was to cultivate “the Christian character” of the students, its course offerings included English-language instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and grammar.²⁸ The combination of English-language instruction—what came to be known as Anglo-vernacular education—and female education, however rudimentary the curriculum may have been, represented a rare opportunity for the colonized population. Even as late as the 1870s, Buddhist monastic schools remained the main and, for most people in Burma, the only provider of education, and they offered neither English-language nor female instruction. As such, there were advantages to be gained from the British imperial order that penalized Eurasians as second-order Europeans.

Di Di’s intentions and desires, her thoughts and feelings, are beyond our grasp. Try as we might, we cannot know them with any certainty. That said, I believe that she baptized her daughters Helen, Juliet, and Cecilia at the Anglican Christ Church in Mandalay with the objective of placing them in the sole Anglican orphanage for Eurasian girls in Burma. I imagine that Di Di made this decision on the basis that as boarders at the Anglican orphanage, her daughters would receive admission into the schools run by the Anglicans, such as St. Mary’s School for Girls in Rangoon, reputed to be among the leading educational institutions in Burma at the time and the best school for girls.²⁹ Di Di was raised Baptist, and her late husband was Catholic. Yet she sent her daughters neither to, say, the Roman Catholic Mission St. Joseph’s Convent in Mandalay nor the American Baptist Mission Eurasian Home for Girls in Moulmein. By placing her daughters in the care of an orphanage, Di Di capitalized on the promise and the potential of paternalistic imperial rhetoric to better the lot of her Eurasian children.

Becoming Muslim, Zerbadi, Sayyid

We know even less about Auntie Rosie’s paternal grandfather, Shwe Kyeik Kat U Choe, than about Alexander Joseph Defries. While it is possible to mine the vast collection of ecclesiastical returns in the archives of the British India Office to map out the genealogy of ordinary European or Eurasian Christians like Alexander Joseph, no such accessible archive exists for a Muslim individual such as U Choe. To make matters worse, historic Muslim cemeteries in Mandalay were razed by the Burmese government during the 1990s to make space for a large-scale urban development program, destroying thousands of gravestones engraved with epitaphs and biographical information. So we must rely on family memory and local histories of Mandalay and, in particular, of the pathi communities in and near the erstwhile capital with which U Choe was affiliated.

Often glossed as “Muslim,” the etymology of pathi remains unsettled. The most straightforward and, in my opinion, the most plausible possibility is that pathi originated in the Persian word pārsī for “Persian.” But the most popular theory, found in the famous Hobson-Jobson dictionary of “Anglo-Indian words and phrases,” is that pathi is a corruption of Farsi: the modern Persian language, which had become a regional lingua franca in the aftermath of its adoption in India, at the end of the sixteenth century, as the official language of the Mughal bureaucracy; as such, it means “Farsi speaker.” A much less known theory is that pathi derived from the Tamil word palli for “mosque,” thus referring to those who worship at the mosque.³⁰ The former theory highlights the role that Persianized elites played as transregional conduits of Islamic practices and institutions; the latter underscores the centrality to this process of the later but far larger group of Tamil migrants. Classified by the British colonial administration as a Tamil-speaking “Musalman tribe” and characteristically “migratory” people, “Tamil” merchants, financiers, and laborers constituted one of the principal migrant groups from southern India to British Burma.³¹

The term pathi was often combined with kala, meaning “Westerners” or those coming from beyond the western and northwestern limits of Burmese imperial authority, who were, therefore, presumed to be subjects of other sovereigns (or possibly people not under the rule of any sovereign). Historians of Burma, especially of the colonial and postcolonial period, have tended to translate kala as “Indian” or “Muslim.” During the interwar period, and as we see in chapters 5 and 6, “Indian” indeed became the predominant meaning of the word; it took on a pejorative, racialized sense, used to characterize various “dark” or “brown races” of the Indian subcontinent and, to a lesser extent, those of the Arabian Peninsula. But for centuries and for most of its long history of usage, kala was a generic category with no such geographic or ethnolinguistic specificity.³² Nineteenth-century British administrative documents—from the first Anglo-Burmese treaty (1826), signed in the wake of the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826), to the 1891 government census of Burma, the first to be taken after the third and final Anglo-Burmese War (1885) and the British annexation of Upper Burma³³—confirmed the use of kala as a reference to “every race of India proper, of Western Asia, and of Europe,” in the words of Henry Yule, the secretary to the 1855 mission to Burma from the (British) government of India.³⁴

This apparent conflation of “every race of India proper, of Western Asia, and of Europe” irked the British. Yule claimed that the Burmese “misapplied” kala to “the English and other Westerns who have come from India to Burma.” Sir Albert Fytche, the chief commissioner of British Burma during 1867–1871, similarly explained that “the Burmese mixed up English and all Europeans with the natives of India in one common appellation of Kuláh or western foreigners” and that it was only after the First Anglo-Burmese War that the Burmese “learnt to distinguish the more prominent of the nations lying west of them.”³⁵ Perhaps they were insulted that the very term referring to populations they considered inferior, such as Muslims and British colonial subjects in India, also applied to them. In all likelihood, the distinction between kala byu (white kala) and kala,³⁶ and the appearance of the word bo in the colonial period as the common parlance to denote the English or Europeans, was initiated or popularized by the British in an attempt to demarcate a clear boundary between themselves—the so-called more prominent of Western nations—and their subject peoples.

Yet the Burmese did distinguish among the kala, just not in the same racialized ways that the British deemed necessary. They used it in conjunction with such qualifiers as pathi to distinguish Farsi-speaking, mosque-going, or “Persian” kala like U Choe, from, say, English-speaking, churchgoing kala like Alexander Joseph Defries. And by the time Yule set foot in Amarapura, the capital of the Konbaung Empire at the time, there had developed a diverse pathi kala community (see fig. 1.2):

Some families believe themselves to have been settled in Burma for five or six hundred years; other are descended from Mussulmans of India or Western Asia, whom chance or trade has brought hither as voluntary emigrants in later years; others from Mahomedans of Aracan, of Munnipoor, and perhaps of Kachár, forcibly deported by the Burmans during their inroads into those countries. But all having intermarried with the natives they are undistinguishable at sight from other Burmans, except those whose family migration is of late date, and who possess, it struck me, a very peculiar and distinct physiognomy.³⁷

Yule had been informed by “a respectable Indian Mussulman” that there were some twenty thousand such families in the area. But he proposed an estimate of eight thousand to nine thousand as “a better guess at their numbers.”³⁸

According to family lore, U Choe was a distinguished pathi who supplied high-quality fabric to the royal court of King Mindon (r. 1852–1878). For his service to the royal household, he was given the title Shwe Kyeik Kat (golden sequin). Auntie Rosie recalls her grandmother Ma Galay reminiscing about the days when she accompanied her husband to the palace, where he would roll out bales of cloth and carpet for the princesses to purchase, and she would play with the royal princesses. Judging by such family tales and by his title, he must have been a member of the Shwe Kyeik Kat royal service group under the Shwe Daik Wun (office of “gold store,” king’s personal treasury).³⁹

FIGURE 1.2. A mosque at Amarapura (1855). A photo by Linnaeus Tripe, an officer from the Madras Infantry and the official photographer for the British diplomatic mission to Burma in 1855, with a view looking toward the ornately embellished minaret of a mosque at Amarapura in Burma. Reference: Photo 61/1(52). By permission of the British Library.

U Choe also had a Muslim name: Mohiuddin (or Mohideen). The name was probably an Urdu rendition of the Arabic name Muhyi al-din (also Muhyi id-din) meaning “renewer” or “reviver” of Islam. It was during the burial proceedings of her parents and, subsequently, her sister Jenny (Muslim name Noor Jehan) that Auntie Rosie learned that they were sayyid: descendants of the Prophet through Fatima.⁴⁰ A green cloth cover was placed upon the coffins of her father and sister to signify their sayyid lineage. Though green is generally understood as the color of Islam—it is believed to have been the favorite color of the Prophet Muhammad and heaven is described in the Quran as a place where people wear garments of fine green silk—it has also functioned as a distinctive sign of the sāda (plural for sayyid). As nobility, their sartorial practices were regulated since the early periods of Islam, and one requirement was that they appear in green to ensure that they were recognizable to the public. Under some governments, such as the Ottoman, only sāda were permitted to wear green turbans.⁴¹ Though Muslim, Auntie Rosie’s mother, Helen, was denied this badge of distinction.

As with Defries, we do not know precisely when U Choe set foot in Burma—or from where, for that matter. That he was a speaker of Urdu, a Persianized form of the main North Indian vernacular that, along with Bengali and English, replaced Farsi as the bureaucratic language in the 1830s in India under the direction of the East India Company, might be taken as indication that he had spent a substantial amount of time in India prior to arrival in Burma. Neither the fact that he was pathi nor that he was sayyid helps us confirm, refine, or refute this speculation. Since the sixteenth century, Persianized merchants, scholars, literati, and artists had made inroads into the inner circles of royal households across polities around the Bay of Bengal as intermediaries who connected regional rulers to the mercantile network of the Indian Ocean. Such men may or may not have been of Persian descent, but they had adopted certain Islamic cultural forms and practices and knew Farsi.⁴² The sixteenth century also marked the beginning of the Hadrami immigration from Hadramawt, in present-day Yemen, to the Indian Ocean littoral and the Malay Archipelago, which continued through the nineteenth century.⁴³ Arriving on Arab merchant ships plying between the ports of the Persian Gulf, Bay of Bengal, Strait of Malacca, and the Spice Islands (in the Moluccas), these “highly-mobile, mixed-blood, [and] polyglot” scholars and entrepreneurs made the Indian Ocean “the oyster in which they cultivated the pearls of wealth.”⁴⁴ The Hadrami sāda stood out among them, achieving significant social and political influence based on their exceptional status as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

By the nineteenth century, Persianized and sayyid men from both near and far had woven themselves into the fabric of courtly life in Burma. They included the likes of the Bengali Muslim poet Arakan Abdul Hakim, a.k.a. Pay Taloo, who served as Pagan Myo Wun (governor of Pagan) under King Bagyidaw (also known as Sagaing Min, r. 1819–1837); Sayyid Ahmed Abdul Rahman of Manipur, who was a royal interpreter under King Bagyidaw, King Tharawaddy (also known as Shwebo Min, r. 1837–1846), and Pagan Min (r. 1846–1853); Mullah Ibrahim, who moved from Surat in western India with his brothers Hashim, Kasim, and Mohamed to supply silk, velvet, satin, and other imported goods to the royal court and was appointed akauk wun (officer of tax collection) by King Tharawaddy in return for his service; and Mohamed Noor, a.k.a. Shwe Paw, who was tasked by King Mindon to build a lodge in Mecca for hajj pilgrims from Burma, no doubt as a reward or in exchange for his profitable export business of precious stones to Mecca from Mogoke, known for its high-grade rubies.⁴⁵

Through intermarriage, these men and their wives gave rise to settlements of pathi who were described by the aforementioned emissary Yule as thoroughly assimilated. “They wear the Burman dress, speak the Burman language, and are Burmese in nearly all their habits,” he noted, adding that “every indigenous Mussulman” had two names, one Burmese and the other Muslim: “As a son of Islam he is probably Abdul Kureem; but as a native of Burma, and for all practical purposes, he is Moung-yo or Shwepo.”⁴⁶

As such naming practices reveal, the pathi in Burma fashioned themselves as multiply affiliated people who occupied a distinct niche. Typically characterized as lowland agricultural polities, Burmese empires nevertheless depended on the import and export tariffs, precious metals, and luxury gifts yielded by long-distance trade “to manipulate political patronage, embellish the royal capital, and finance both domestic and mercenary armies.”⁴⁷ The pathi were critical to this transregional trade and represented what historians of the overseas Chinese have termed bureaucratic capitalists: a semiofficial merchant class that allies itself with princes and nobles to act as the fiscal agents for the ruling, official class in return for royal patronage and concessions.⁴⁸

Chinese, or tayôk, as they were called in Burmese, were also important bureaucratic capitalists in Burma. Hokkien and Cantonese merchants from the southeastern Chinese provinces of Fujian and Guangdong plied the coasts of Burma while Yunnanese silk, cotton, tea, and jade merchants helped broker the overland caravan trade. By the eighteenth century, the Yangwentun Xiaoyin (A little ballad of Yangwentun) served as a Yunnan–Burma travel and moral guide for young men journeying from western Yunnan to Mandalay and its surrounding area via Bhamo. The ballad reminded (the reader) to not abandon his attachment to his Chinese “homeland,” to return home within “one year or two, and at most three to four years,” and to refrain from taking a Burmese wife. But Yunnanese traders, like their pathi kala counterparts, often settled in Burma, married Burmese women (even if they also had Chinese wives), and had Yunnanese-Burmese children. And they became an increasingly influential commercial and social presence in and near the capital cities of Amarapura and Mandalay.⁴⁹

The piecemeal British colonization of Burma in the nineteenth century made bureaucratic capitalists like U Choe—and marriages like his to Ma Galay—more, not less, vital to the political economy in Upper Burma. In the decades following the British annexation of Lower Burma in 1852, the colony developed a highly specialized single-product export economy focused on rice, eventually becoming the world’s leading rice producer and exporter. The Konbaung administration in Upper Burma responded to this unprecedented commercialization of rice agriculture in British Lower Burma through economic diversification, exporting such items as cattle, teak timber, petroleum, jade, rubies, cotton, and silk textiles. Pathi and tayôk traders played an outsized role in this expanding external trade. The former group specialized in trade with the court. Its ties to merchants abroad and access to British companies and cheaper credit gave it the upper hand in the import-export trade.⁵⁰ Yunnanese, Hokkien, and Cantonese merchants focused on private trade, with the latter two groups moving from the coastal areas in Lower Burma into Upper Burma to take advantage of their familiarity with the English language and British commercial practices, as well as their connection with the South China Sea trading network.⁵¹

Meanwhile, European traders and firms struggled to establish themselves in Mandalay or elsewhere in Upper Burma. They could not compete against the multilingual pathi and tayôk with their knowledge of extensive regional trade networks as well as the royal household. Once annexed, Upper Burma, which, like Lower Burma, was governed as part of the British Raj, did promise opportunity to British subjects such as Defries from metropole and colony. But even the colonial government-related employment sector was not the exclusive domain of British men. The middling class of professionals who worked for the government and private companies, such as clerks, accountants, doctors, and hospital assistants, were more likely to be Bengali migrant men.⁵²

In other words, Asian merchants were not only the most numerous but also the most powerful commercial brokers for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Intermarriage and the social reproduction of intermediary communities were shared features of pathi and tayôk adventurer-traders within the mercantile world of Burma and southern Asia. The trade relations and networks that they forged were inseparable from the marriage and kinship relations they established.

Like these Asian intermediaries, and like Alexander Joseph Defries, U Choe married in Burma. Actually, he married two women who were sisters. His first marriage resulted in two children. Upon the death of his first wife, he married her younger sister, Ma Galay. She was fifteen years old when she married her erstwhile brother-in-law.

To Auntie Rosie’s knowledge, Ma Galay, better known by her grandchildren by the Urdu term for paternal grandmother “Dadi,” was a zerbadi of Mon and Arab descent. Zerbadi, which is probably a corruption of the Persian word zīr-bād meaning “below the wind,” entered the Burma census for the first time in 1891 as a category of race referring to “the offspring of a Muhammadan native of India by a Burmese wife.”⁵³ But the term did not always reference Muslim Indian patrilineage. John Nisbet, the Conservator of Forests in British Burma from 1895 until 1900, defined zerbadi as “the children of Indian and Burmese unions,” as did his fellow British colonial officer R. Grant Brown.⁵⁴ The Burmese category pathi kala was not a reference specifically to Muslims from India, and as such, it seems likely that in common usage zerbadi had a more capacious meaning that included descendants of pathi kala born in Burma.

One might reasonably speculate that Ma Galay and her forebears hailed from Siam or the coastal towns stretching from the Gulf of Martaban down the Tenasserim littoral where Mon speakers were historically most populous and Arab merchant ships frequently stopped. Was she herself a sayyida? Sayyida are not known to have immigrated like their male counterparts. But she might have been born to a sayyid and a Mon woman, known as muwallad. This is quite possible in light of her marriage to U Choe who was a sayyid. And not because sayyid men were inclined to marry women within the sāda community but rather because a sayyida, unlike a sayyid, could not pass on her tie to the Prophet Muhammad if she married a man who was neither a sayyid or sharif (descendant of the Prophet through Hasan, the older son of Fatima).⁵⁵ The success of the diasporic sāda, which consisted of male immigrants for most of its history, depended not only on its prophetic genealogy but this rule of patrilineage.

We have no idea if the sāda in Burma in the nineteenth century observed such marriage and kinship prohibitions for there exists no scholarship on the subject. But it offers an explanation for why Ma Galay married U Choe after her elder sister passed away. More than just an example of a sororate marriage, that is, remarriage of a widower to his late wife’s sister as a form of control over the property, labor, sexuality, and fertility of the widower, it might have served as a means to consolidate and perpetuate her sayyid lineage.

Feminist scholars have cautioned that kinship transactions in women by and between men, and even by women, are rarely beneficial for the women who are exchanged. The story of Ma Galay helps capture the complexities of such practices that treated women as objects of political and economic transaction.⁵⁶ She was young when she married U Choe. Aged only fifteen, she was already a mother of two children by her departed sister. To debate what choice or agency she had in the matter would be an exercise in absurdity. Her choices were overdetermined.

But U Choe was a known quantity. If Ma Galay was expected to marry a sayyid, then she may have preferred to marry one who was not just prosperous and well-connected but had also proved himself to be virile. Recall that U Choe already had two daughters from his previous marriage, whose ability to perpetuate their prophetic ancestry was encumbered by their gender; only marriage to a sayyid or a sharif would ensure that their sayyid status would be passed down to the next generation. If Ma Galay married U Choe and bore him sons, she would seal the patrilineal transmission of his pedigree—and perhaps also hers. Put differently, the marriage gave her a chance to become a sayyid maker. It may have been her marriage to U Choe and subsequent birth of sons with him that propelled her ascendancy as a powerful matriarch.

Ma Galay’s life in Mandalay and as a wife is opaque to her descendants. In contrast, their memory of her as a widow in Rangoon is vivid. After U Choe passed away, Ma Galay relocated with her children to Rangoon, where she oversaw a lucrative business in financing and urban real estate. In addition, Ma Galay possessed considerable land in Syriam across the Bago River from Rangoon that she rented out, joining the small rank of landlords—an overwhelming percentage of whom were “nonresident” moneylenders and businessmen—who owned an increasing portion of land and properties in the Irrawaddy delta. This was a region that had transformed into the world’s leading producer and exporter of rice (see map 2).

While pushing for the rapid expansion of the rice economy in its new colony, the British administration did little to regulate land tenure and tenancy, placing no restrictions on the transfer of agricultural land to nonagriculturalists. The increase in rice cultivation and the price of paddy, combined with the laissez-faire government practice, turned land into an attractive investment, fueled land grabbing, and precipitated mass expropriation of land from cultivators as well as an unsustainable hike in rent in the delta. Already by the early 1900s, almost one-fifth of the occupied land in the thirteen principal rice-growing districts of Lower Burma had passed into the hands of predominantly nonresident nonagriculturists. Within a decade, the number increased to nearly one-quarter and continued to increase thereafter.⁵⁷ As the annual report of the British administration for 1911–1912 emphasized, areas contiguous to Rangoon such as Syriam were particularly affected by this phenomenon. The report also pointed out that “a large portion of the non-resident owners were of non-Burman nationality and had thus no interest in their land or tenants save the extortion of as large an income as possible from them.”⁵⁸

The longtime ICS officer and scholar John S. Furnivall lamented that “the greatest achievement in the history of Burma”—that is, “the reclamation by Burmese enterprise of ten million acres of swamp and jungle”—ended tragically with “a picture of imposing Government offices and business houses in Rangoon, and gilded chettyar temples in Tanjore, while in the rice districts, the source of almost all this wealth, nearly half of the land is owned by foreigners, and a landless people can show little for their labour but their debts, and, for about half the year, most of them are unable to find work or wages.”⁵⁹ The grievous agrarian conditions of Lower Burma would come to a head in the 1930s as the world descended into an economic depression. Burma would erupt in the largest peasant uprising in Burmese history—the Saya San Rebellion of 1930–1932—and in anti-Indian riots expressing widespread anger with the British administration’s deregulation of land, as we explore in chapter 5.

For the privileged class of landlords such as Ma Galay, however, and for the time being, business was good. All but one of her five children lived off the rent they collected from the buildings and paddy fields they owned in Rangoon and Syriam. She paid for Ahmed, the youngest child and the only one to be formally educated, to attend the Calcutta Medical College, a premier medical school considered the birthplace of modern medical education in India. For leisure, the family sailed up and down the Irrawaddy River between Rangoon and Mandalay on the boat they owned, playing cards on the long journeys to and fro.

Would Furnivall have considered Ma Galay one of the “foreigners,” as he put it, who had turned large populations of the Burmese into a landless, indebted people? Can we accurately apply to Ma Galay the administration’s assessment of the nonagriculturalist, non-Burman absentee landlord as having “no interest in their land or tenants save the extortion of as large an income as possible from them”? Perhaps her tenants were not so badly off. Though a noncultivator and a “non-Burman,” she had regular contact with her tenants over the years. Or so Auntie Rosie thinks. She remembers that every year, her grandmother’s tenants brought paddy and produce from their land as either offerings, rent, or both.

At the same time, Ma Galay was a shrewd and exacting entrepreneur. For example, she gave out inheritance to all five of her children well before her death and demanded, from each of them, no bo. Literally “breast price” or “milk price,” the Burmese phrase refers to the unrepayable debt children owe their mother for her embodied labor of pregnancy, birth, and nurturing. The notion of “milk debt” is not unique to Burma. It is a common cultural trope for filial duty found across Asia that establishes a mother’s right to her children and a moral obligation for children to care and support their mother, especially in old age.⁶⁰ Ma Galay also made Ahmed pay her back the cost associated with his medical training in Calcutta. Significantly, Ahmed still had sufficient inheritance left to purchase multiple properties, including a lakefront estate in central Burma upon marriage, and defray the cost of educating his many children in Burma and England.

Such financial success must have required sharp business acumen on the part of Ma Galay. Her Arab connections may have given her a commercial edge; the turn of the twentieth century marked a shift in economic activities of Arabs in the region, a growing number of whom became providers of credit secured on urban property.⁶¹ The land and properties she owned might also have been acquired with or by U Choe or by her affinal relatives. Such possibilities notwithstanding, that a young widow like her managed to thrive as a landlord remains remarkable in light of the predominance of men in the world of speculative land investment. Her competitors included the chettiar financiers from South India, the single most important moneylending community in Burma referenced by Furnivall in the above excerpt.⁶² A powerful group that dominated networks of finance across the Bay of Bengal, the chettiars have become central characters in histories of commerce, capitalism, and colonialism in Burma and, more broadly, southern Asia. Ma Galay’s life story serves as a useful and necessary reminder of the crucial role that women and their cunning and capital—not only migrant men and money—played in the far-reaching socioeconomic transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Reimagining the Local Wife

The scorned mistresses and orphaned children of European colonial masters are familiar figures in the history of métissage. They are central to the plot of George Orwell’s first and semiautobiographical novel, Burmese Days (1934), arguably the most well-known English-language novel about colonial Burma. Himself an Anglo-Indian raised primarily in England, Orwell was born in India to an ICS officer and a French-English mother who had grown up in Moulmein. Orwell joined the imperial police service in Burma in 1921 and remained there until 1927. He drew on these personal and familial experiences in writing Burmese Days.

The novel follows the story of John Flory, a middle-aged English timber merchant living in a Burmese outpost, and his embattled attempt to escape his life of discontent: with his job, his relationship with his Burmese mistress Ma Hla May, the local expatriate community, and British imperialism. An opportunity presents itself when a most eligible English bachelorette, Elizabeth Lackersteen, arrives in town. Flory recognizes that she is a “heartless” individual who shares none of his own sympathies for the natives and disaffections with the British. Yet Flory pursues Elizabeth, seeing marriage to her as his only salvation.

The two Eurasian characters in the novel, Francis and Samuel, are described as “thin and weedy and cringing,” and generally lowly, groveling, and incapable creatures—not fully human but too human to treat as animals. Shunned by the European expatriates, they live off the charity of the Burmese. At the end of the novel, Francis and Samuel drag Ma Hla May out of a church where she has just accused Flory, in front of his European compatriots, including Elizabeth, of abandoning her “like a pariah dog” after their long and clandestine relationship. Described as “perhaps the first useful deed of their lives,” Francis and Samuel redeem themselves by banishing the native mistress.⁶³ In the end, Ma Hla May personifies not only the native mistress but as well the native mother spurned by her own blood.

The life stories of Di Di and Ma Galay capture how misleading and demeaning is this image of “the Burmese mistress.” Even if Defries had refused or hesitated to recognize Di Di as his wife and Helen May, Juliet, and Cecilia as his daughters, and even if he had abandoned Di Di and their children in Mandalay and left for Rangoon, there is little resemblance between the complex, spirited life of Di Di and the caricatured, abject character of Ma Hla May. Both Di Di and Ma Galay led intrepid lives unconfined to the putatively feminine domain of sex, domesticity, and reproduction, attaining a level of socioeconomic mobility that defied the odds. Such women call into question the scholarly emphasis to date on the large-scale transregional movements of men and challenge us to reconceive the pitiable historical figure of the “native wife” as a dynamic subject who moved in between and across multiple languages, lineages, and confessions.

The life stories of U Choe and Defries too unsettle how we have come to understand nineteenth-century changes in patterns of mobility. The single most outstanding aspect of migration in nineteenth-century Asia was the unprecedented mass migration of mostly young, laboring men from China and India who, historians have maintained, had no intention of settling in their destinations, unlike their predecessors. If migration during the age of sail slowed movement enough to give rise to settlement, intermarriage, conversion, and creolized societies, the age of steam made them obsolete and less appealing to migrant men. The premature deaths of Defries and U Choe make it impossible to know if they considered themselves sojourners and their respective marriage “temporary” with the expectation that they would eventually depart from Burma. The fact is that they both lived out their lives in Burma and formed enduring intimate relationships in the country.

Were their stories representative of the multitude of migrants from different echelons of society who set foot in Burma and married Burmese women? They were certainly not atypical, as revealed by stories of intermarriage and conversion that have entered the British colonial legal archive, to which we now turn.