Epilogue

16 NOVEMBER 2015 (SEATTLE, WASHINGTON).

Ma Mona and I are sitting in the dining room of the apartment that she shares with her mother. We have just finished feasting on an elaborate meal that Ma Mona has prepared to celebrate our reunion. Auntie Rosie has retired to her bedroom. It is getting late but Ma Mona and I have much to catch up on. Our conversation turns to the persecution of the Rohingya since 2012, which has since been declared a genocide, and the ascendancy of the monastic nationalist movement Ma Ba Tha (Association to Protect Nation and Buddhism) and their “Buy Buddhist” and “Marry Buddhist” campaigns targeting Muslims and more generally those labeled kala. Just two months before my trip to Seattle, Ma Ba Tha had won its most notable victory to date: the passing of four controversial laws euphemistically known as “National Race and Religion Protection Laws,” including a revised version of the Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Act (1954), first debated in the legislature in 1927 and finally enacted seven years after Burma declared independence from Britain in 1948. The laws collectively restrict interfaith marriages by requiring non-Buddhist men to obtain permission from the Buddhist woman’s parents and local authorities.

In response, Ma Mona recounts the “religious fluidity” (her description) that characterized her family and upbringing in Burma. This is when I learn that Uncle Mohan was baptized at the age of forty and became a devoted member of the Immanuel Baptist Church in Rangoon. All his brothers converted from Hinduism, as it turned out. Sundram, who joined the army at a young age and spent much of his life in the company of Burmese soldiers, became Buddhist. Like Uncle Mohan, Bodi joined the Baptist church, while Seena converted to Catholicism even as he shared a life-long companionship with a Hindu widow.

After her marriage to Uncle Mohan in June 1961, Auntie Rosie began reading the bible and reciting Christian prayers, though she did not get baptized until she was fifty-two years of age. “Good, he is a famous cardiologist!” Ahmed Meah reportedly remarked upon hearing news of the marriage. At the time, Uncle Mohan was a professor and Auntie Rosie an assistant surgeon at the Institute of Medicine 1, the premier medical school in Burma (fig. E.1).

FIGURE E.1. Uncle Mohan. Photo taken in the 1960s. Courtesy of Dr. Hnin Yee and Mona Han.

Helen May did not share the enthusiasm—not on account of his religion nor his Indian descent but rather his age. He was forty-five years old, fifteen years Auntie Rosie’s senior. But Helen May relented, just as she had with many of her children. Few followed her wishes or expectations for marriage. The eldest, Kitty, returned from Delhi, where she was a medical school student, to Pyinmana without her degree but with a husband and with child—Helen and Ahmed’s first grandchild, whom Helen helped deliver in 1947. When the eldest son, Hardy, was posted to Mandalay as a civil assistant surgeon, he had a Muslim girlfriend, a medical student and Auntie Rosie’s classmate, whom his family believed would soon become his wife. Instead, he fell in love with a Karen Christian doctor eight years his senior and married her. Helen May and Ahmed heard about the marriage only after the fact from a servant they had sent with Hardy to Mandalay who dutifully reported the news to the parents via telegram. Hardy remained Muslim until the eve of his death when he converted to Christianity. But he and his wife Priscilla raised their two children Christian.

The marriage of the youngest child, Nyi Ma Lay (“little sister” in Burmese), also shocked Helen May. An ophthalmologist, she had been posted to Taunggyi. A family acquaintance in Pyinmana knew of a relative traveling to Taunggyi and asked Helen May if she wished to send something along to Nyi Ma Lay. Helen May sent her daughter a house for her cat with a young man, Maung Maung. Not long after, she received news that Nyi Ma Lay had married Maung Maung. “For a measly pet house, I gave away my dear daughter,” Helen May bemoaned. Nyi Ma Lay became Buddhist, like her husband.

The history of intermarriage and conversion thus persisted among the Meah-Mohan family. “We celebrated every single religion in Burma,” Ma Mona recalled ever so wistfully. For waso, the month marking the beginning of the Buddhist lent, they would perform sun kywe and thin gan kat—the ceremonial offering of food and robes to monks—at Nyi Ma Lay’s house. For Christmas, everyone gathered at Auntie Rosie and Uncle Mohan’s, while Mummy-gyi and Papa-gyi held grand celebrations for Eid at their home. Everyone attended the baptisms of the children, Ma Mona points out. She can still visualize all her relatives sitting in the pew.

Ma Mona’s memories of interfaith attachments in postcolonial Burma, like Auntie Rosie’s recollections of the anti-Indian riots and the Japanese occupation, refused to naturalize antagonism or disavow intimacies in the face of violence and incitement to estrangement. A subtle but clear gesture of refusal, she insisted that mixed families and individuals formed through migration, conversion, and intermarriage such as hers have never been strangers in Burma. She rejected the circumscribed meaning of Burmese kinship propagated by the likes of Ma Ba Tha that conflate Burma with Buddhism.

Such stories of belonging across boundaries illuminate the unruly ties and complex subjectivities that constitute reality for so many and yet are so hard to capture in studies. They confound neat historical narratives and periodizations that proclaim the demise of precolonial cultures of pluralism, localization, and hybrid identities with the onslaught of colonialism, World War II, and finally postcolonial nationalism, which sealed the process of the “unmixing” of people already underway. The stories of the Meah-Mohans highlight instead the discontinuous yet persistent record of interAsian intimacies across the long twentieth century, which I have explored in the book.

They also serve as powerful reminders of the normative nature of ideas of the Burmese Buddhist amyo that have become taken-for-granted truths: that Burma is fundamentally a Buddhist country and the Burmese Buddhist an exceptional and endangered species of uniquely just, tolerant, and liberal people who have no history of sex, caste, racial, and religious discrimination; that the Burmese Buddhists are therefore worthy of universal admiration and protection from intermarriage, conversion, and “degeneration.” This logic, which I have termed Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism, rationalizes fears and suspicions of the so-called amyo gya and the “impure” Burmese, such as the zerbadi and kabya. It furthermore normalizes the conjugal mandate that Burmese Buddhist women repudiate intermarriage and conversion and marry Burmese Buddhist men to preserve and regenerate their unique lineage and heritage.

As is often the case with national mythologies—of Japanese racial homogeneity or US exceptionalism, for example—no amount of evidence of the fallacies of such assertions diminishes their power. Proponents of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism neither hide nor deny the persistent history of migration, intermarriage, and conversion in Burma, as the book has shown. They willingly admit that most Burmese are in one way or another mixed. This has not lessened the appeal of the Manichean myth of a sin sit (pure, genuine) Burmese community whose survival demands vigilant regulation and segregation of the “impure,” “other” Burmese.

The Meah-Mohan family are all too familiar with such forbidding imaginations of the Burmese body politic and their material, embodied effects. The year after Auntie Rosie and Uncle Mohan married, General Ne Win ousted the democratically elected prime minister U Nu to take power in a military coup, remaining the country’s socialist dictator until 1988. His revolutionary ideology of “Burmese Way to Socialism,” which justified the nationalization of industry, agriculture, and foreign trade, resulted in the forced “repatriation” of an estimated three hundred thousand people of “Indian origin” between 1962 and 1965. Their properties and businesses in Burma were seized. Families such as Uncle Mohan’s were partitioned. Sundram and Mohan became citizens of Burma, while their brothers Seena and Bodi became Indian citizens.

Uncle Mohan could have left Burma. He had earned enough from his service in the Burma Army Medical Corp to finance his postgraduate studies in London, where he trained with Paul Hamilton Wood, a leading scholar in the emerging field of cardiology. He turned down a position as a consultant physician in England and returned to Burma to establish the practice of cardiology in the country—only to find himself transferred to Mandalay University, a move that amounted to a demotion. Uncle Mohan believed that he would not have been transferred back to Rangoon in 1965 if not for the intervention of Ne Win’s wife, Khin May Than (better known as Kitty Ba Than), who, requiring heart care, became his patron. Yet, even as the personal physician to the favorite wife of the country’s dictator, Uncle Mohan faced professional discrimination from the Burmese medical establishment that refused to promote him—respected as the top cardiologist in the country but penalized as kala. It was a bitter experience his children too endured as they became distinguished students and scholars in their own right in a society that alternately embraced them as exemplary Burmese citizens and denigrated them as kala kabya.

The twin remembrance of interAsian belonging and alienation is crucial for documenting the resilience of interAsian intimacies in the face of repeated injunctions and threats of violence, and for other reasons as well. As the book has demonstrated, interAsian intimacies have represented a major locus for the production of difference. They are therefore key to elucidating how colonized subjects theorized difference and improvised new regimes of knowledge, power, and desire spawned through but not determined by colonial agendas. Only by interrogating the intimate grounds and routes of social reproduction that have made difference matter can we effectively comprehend interAsian violence and its gendered dynamics and ramifications.

The study of interAsian intimacies also reclaims intimacy from the continued Anglo- and Euro-centrism of postcolonial studies in which the intimate lives and lifeworld of Asians merit analysis only when they interact with white subjects. Colonial political economies mobilized people across far-flung spaces, bringing into close contact Asian migrants and Indigenous populations. In Burma, as elsewhere, such connections among colonized subjects have been negatively referenced in public records and archives: as offenses under the law and sources of social ill, moral panic, and political turmoil that require prohibition and suppression, all implying fears and fantasies of mobility and mixing across categories. In scholarship, theories of communalism and the so-called plural society—in which people of different races and religions exist as proximate yet separate communities without ever forging a common sense of belonging—have dominated interpretations of interAsian relations in colonial and postcolonial Asia.

In the foregoing pages, I have endeavored to chart the history of interAsian relations beyond such “negative references” of anxieties and apprehensions. This work has compelled me to reconsider the possibilities and limitations of archival excavation, family history, and multigenerational storytelling and explore unchronicled struggles and experiments in self-fashioning and world making across boundaries of belonging. Little known figures at the margins of history, such as Ma Galay, Di Di, Helen May, Auntie Rosie, and Uncle Mohan, have much to teach historians about the ingenious ways that people have confronted shifting bodies of knowledge, relationships of power, and terms of social existence to sustain intimacies many find unthinkable. With the help of their knowledge of existing and relating otherwise, we too may reimagine and remake intimacies—past, present, and future.