CHAPTER 3 Religion, Race, and Personal Law

Scheming Like a Colonial State

Masquerading as immutable reality, the “inconceivability” of Muslims exercising the Buddhist law of inheritance was a legal conjecture that reflected the logic of colonial governance. Armed with such technologies as the census, maps, and cadastral surveys, and experts such as Oriental philologists, Indologists, and anthropologists, the British administration in Burma, as elsewhere, set about studying its new possession to govern it.¹⁰ The territory was surveyed, demarcated, and mapped out into geographical areas ascribed with topographical and ethnographical features. Its population was partitioned into discrete, delimited racial and religious groups that were governable by their respective religious law.

The decennial census report of 1891, the first to be taken after the incorporation of Upper Burma into British Burma, is a model specimen of this process of colonial bureaucratic learning and knowledge production. Maps of the province were accompanied by a detailed discussion of the natural division of the colony into low-lying river basins and alluvial plains (of Arakan, Tenasserim, the Irrawaddy delta, the Chindwin valley, etc.). According to the report, the physical environment of these fertile lowlands—grassy, swampy, forested, and temperate—manifested itself “somewhat strangely and yet very markedly in the difference between the complexion and physique of the dwellers of the delta and of the drier and hotter districts of the upper province.” People of the southern half of Burma were allegedly “fairer and stouter” than those farther north. Nevertheless, the report indicated, the Burmans in general “resemble[d] the mountaineers of the Himalayas,” spoke a language similar to Tibetan, and thus “belong[ed] to the same stock.”¹¹

People of Burma who descended from an “impure” or different “stock” included the Arakanese, who were said to “approximate more closely to Hindu and Musalman customs in secluding their women” and to be “cleverer and more persevering than the Burmese generally.” Shans were described as “Sinitic”: light in complexion and characterized by “a Chinese type of face,” namely, almond-shaped eyes. And owing to their habitat—“a mountainous region [where] the necessaries of life are not so easily obtained as in the fertile deltas of the Irrawaddy”—they were a “thrifty,” “independent,” and “restless” people. The “better class” among them also exhibited, the report added, “a cleanliness and comfort not found among Burmans of the same rank.” Birthplace, physical traits, and language were thus construed as indicative of the race of the inhabitants of the province, who were divided into major racial categories that mirrored the precolonial categories of lu myo: Burman (or Burmese), Talaing, Shan, Karen, Karenni, Chin, Kachin, Arakanese, and so on. In addition, the report identified five main categories of “immigrant” races: Chinese, Hindu castes, Mahomedan tribes (or “Musalman tribes”), Eurasians, and European nationalities (see table 3.1).¹²

As this pattern of racial differentiation suggests, the British administration relied on the category of religion, which they employed from the very first colonial census that included the province of Burma, to aggregate their subjects into separate categories of immigrant versus Indigenous populations. The census of 1881 had already declared that the Burmese were “all Buddhists.”¹³ The 1891 census repeated the determination that Buddhism was the prevailing religion in the colony, “not only of the Burmans, but of their kindred races.” The report claimed, “Its tolerance agrees with their easy-going good nature,” elaborating that the “tolerant” nature of Buddhism had enabled it to incorporate nat worship (animistic worship), the “creed of the people before the introduction of Buddhism.” The “tolerant” nature of Buddhism, combined with what the report described as the Burman “faculty of assimilating and absorbing the lesser tribes and nationalities with which they are brought into contact,” had allowed the Burmese race to propagate, “absorbing the wild hill tribes, and even some of the Indian settlers.”¹⁴

The report also emphasized, however, that “exotic” religions were making inroads among the Burmese; alongside “the Europeanizing force of the British rulers on the one hand, and the admixture of foreign Chinese and Indian blood on the other,” this development had apparently given rise to fears in the province that the Burmese race would gradually disappear if it did not cling to its religion and faculty of assimilation. According to the report, two “exotic” religions in particular had gained ground: Christianity and Islam. The former, it stated, was no longer “merely the religion of temporary settlers” and had “almost become the national religion of the Karens.” There was also noticeable increase in the number of people who returned themselves as “Mahomedan.” The report attributed this increase to “the influx of Chittagonian and Indian coolies, who every year in gradually increasing numbers flock down to work at the rice-mills in Akyab and Rangoon”—Chittagonian being a catch-all phrase used by the British to refer to people from the Chittagong division in Lower Bengal, bordering Arakan. It acknowledged however that the zerbadi were becoming “a recognizable portion of the inhabitants of Burma.” Unlike Islam and Christianity, Hinduism remained thoroughly “exotic,” the report concluded, and “show[ed] no signs of becoming a part of the religious life of the settled as opposed to the temporary inhabitants of the soil.” As if to explain this failure of Hinduism to take root in the country, the report pointed out that Hindus did not “take to cultivating the soil for themselves,” and the few that did “very often become Burmanized and adopt Burman names, and no longer remain Hindus in the strict sense of the term.”¹⁵

The category of “Chinese” should have thrown a wrench into this scheme to separate the population of Burma racially and religiously into indigenes and foreigners. Europeans were homogeneously identified as Christians. Indians were conflated with “Hindu castes” and “Mahomedan tribes.” But the Chinese were “nearly evenly divided between Buddhism and Nat-worship,” the census report stated, wasting no time to explain: “This is due to the fact that the Burmese enumerators refused to accept the Taoist [sic] Chinaman as a true Buddhist, and the return is a striking commentary on those writers who would class all Chinamen as Buddhists.”¹⁶ The report thus immediately squashed the conclusion suggested by the census returns: that the Chinese, though an “immigrant” race, shared the two religions that the British most closely associated with Burma. According to the report, those Chinese who were classified as nat worshippers were in fact Daoists. And those who identified as Buddhist were not Buddhist in the sense that the Burmese were Buddhist. Their brand of Buddhism had Daoist inflections that rendered it inauthentic in the eyes of the Burmese. The Chinese were foreign in race and religion after all.

This interpellation of Chinese Buddhist as Daoist or syncretized Buddhists posed a problem for the judicature that it could not resolve for decades to come: what “personal law” should apply to the Chinese in Burma.¹⁷ But it kept intact the administrative tethering of race, religion, and origin (immigrant vs. Indigenous). In this equation, religion, race, and origin status were co-constitutive. Religion mapped neatly onto race (and vice versa), and origin was made legible through religion and/or race. It made descriptions such as “Burmese Buddhist” or “Indian Hindu” appear tautological, while others such as “Hindu Burmese” or “Christian Burmese” were made to seem anomalous and questionable. It naturalized the division of the population in Burma into the category of either immigrants or natives and into the major “stocks” of Burmese, other “Asians” (i.e., Indian and Chinese), and European.¹⁸ It naturalized, too, the colonial political ideology of communalism that attributed to colonized subjects immutable, irreconcilable religious differences that purportedly served as the founding and organizing principles of community. Like despotism and tribalism, communalism was an essentialist concept “reserved for the analysis of social and political conflicts in the ‘backward’ parts of the colonial and post-colonial world.” It captured, allegedly, the inherent incapacity of primitive societies (in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) to overcome their religious bigotries to become modern, rational, secular nations like those in Europe and the United States.¹⁹ Yet another possible reason British jurists balked at the insistence by Muslim zebardi litigants and witnesses that they willingly turned to “Buddhist law”: because the testimony controverted the colonial idiom of communalism that constituted colonized populations as individuals and collectives governed by religious fanaticism.

Such classification schemes primed the colony for efficient, economical white minority rule. To this end, the peoples and terrains of the colony were constituted as standard types and quantifiable aggregates. Divided and subdivided along racial and religious lines, the colony’s population was assigned different productive potential, economic roles, and capitation taxes. The colonial government cataloged a variety of racial and religious minority groups—for example, Christian Karen, zerbadi, and Hindu—that, the British alleged, required protection (from the majority Burmese and Buddhists). The rhetoric of the judges who decided the 1905 case against the zerbadi appellants echoed this self-image of the British imperialists. It was their putative responsibility to save and free minorities like the zerbadi who had been oppressed by Burmese Buddhist society. The partitioning of the colony into ever smaller populations of minorities justified British colonial rule also by ensuring that no racial group achieved majority status; it thereby further consolidated British minority rule.²⁰

Colonial attempts at schematization were not intended to capture the complex reality of the colony or to affirm the plurality of different human individuals and collectivities they named, mapped, and counted. In this respect, the heteronormative logic of the census operation is revealing. In contradistinction to the variety of racial, religious, linguistic, occupational, and other categories that appeared in the census over the years, only two categories of sex were ever used: male and female. Civil condition was similarly classified using a binary (single vs. married), and the latter condition only applied to heterosexual marriages. And the basic unit of enumeration in the census, the household, could be headed only by men, or so it appears. Though census instructions made no such stipulations, the sample registers appended in census reports show that only adult men, as the head of household, were questioned by census takers. Only their responses—not those of their wives or other adult members of the household—required accounting.²¹ Presented as an objective, scientific process of surveying and reporting, bureaucratic learning was a simultaneously constitutive and regulatory process that constructed the very social identities and structures that it framed as preexisting and awaiting discovery.

In colonial times, as in precolonial times, political-economic considerations underwrote government attempts to classify, control, and manipulate society. But while the patronage model of politics under the Konbaung administration condoned overlapping, nested batha and lu myo affiliations, the colonial regime of white minority rule made bounded, exclusionary classifications imperative. The classifying mind of European colonial governments throughout Southeast Asia, as Benedict Anderson argued, rejected “multiple, politically ‘transvestite,’ blurred, or changing identifications.”²² An individual could claim to belong to one and only one racial, religious, and gender category.

The judiciary, separated from the executive branch of the colonial administration in Burma only in 1906, operated in a similar vein. British jurists might have imagined themselves enlightened, liberal sovereigns whose rule was not only just but also tolerant of religious and legal difference. In practice, they rejected the intricacies of actual lives and practices that either challenged the orthopraxy presumed in codified personal laws or defied the colonial ordering of society, as in the court case brought by zerbadi appellants. The administration was not about to let the Muslim zerbadi cross the line that they had drawn between Buddhists and Muslims.

The Curious Exception of the Zerbadi

As the category of zerbadi itself suggests, however, the British were open to recognizing certain kinds of mixed identifications. We have already seen in chapter 1 that Eurasians had become a target of government surveillance and discipline in British India. The zerbadi, which became a subgroup of the new umbrella category “Indo-Burman races” in 1921, was the only other nomenclature of mixed or multiple racial identification included in the colonial census from 1911 onward. While the colonial administration in Burma noted in the census of 1872 that the growing numbers of “the Indo-Burman and Chino-Burman” were worthy of attention, the decennial census of 1881 was the first “to obtain information concerning the persons of mixed race.”²³ Its first attempt returned sixteen different “principal mixed races of Burma,” whose total population came to 230,484 (table 3.2).²⁴ But the next census (of 1891) counted only five “mixed Asiatic races”—Shan-Burmese, Kamu-Karen, Shan-Chinese, Manipuri (Ponna), and Zerbadi—in addition to Eurasian.²⁵ The number of categories of mixed races steadily dwindled over the next several decades. By 1901, only three were included—Chinese-Shan, Zerbadi, and Eurasian—and by 1911, only Zerbadi and Anglo-Indian, which replaced Eurasian, remained.²⁶ What motivated the administration to recognize the zerbadi, a numerically negligible category of mixed race at a count of merely twenty-four when it first entered the census, while ignoring or eliminating others? (See table 3.3.)

Why, furthermore, did the administration employ the term “Indo-Burman,” as with zerbadi, only to refer to “the offspring of a Muhammadan native of India by a Burmese wife”?²⁷ The children of non-Muslim Indian men (or women) and Burmese women (or men) were never enumerated. The administration was inclined to highlight “the considerable amount of inter-marriage between Indian Muslims and females of the indigenous races of the province,” while downplaying the frequency of Indian Hindu-Burmese marriages.²⁸ Yet the number of male Hindu immigrants from India far exceeded that of their Muslim counterpart, and the sex ratio among Hindu and Muslim immigrant populations was comparably skewed (tables 3.4 and 3.5). And for many decades, the British acknowledged that the marriage of “surplus Hindu males” to Burmese women contributed to the sharp increase in the Hindu population in the colony. They also conceded that they faced “extreme difficulty” in forming an estimate of this population. “Most of the children of such unions are brought up as Burmans and as members of the Buddhist religion,” the report of the census of 1911 insisted, but added:

A small minority are brought up strictly as Hindus in the full sense of the term, fulfilling the three requirements necessary to constitute a true member of the Hindu community, namely, membership of a recognised Hindu caste, acknowledgement of the supremacy of the Brahmans, and veneration of the cow. But intermediate between these two classes of persons born of mixed Hindu and Burmese marriages, there is a large and indefinite number of persons who can only be defined by the contradictory term, “Casteless Hindus.”²⁹

The report recorded the population of this group of “casteless Hindus” of mixed parentage “who have not been brought up as Buddhists, nor as strict Hindus, but have adopted generally Hindu modes of life” as 99,707 strong, up by more than 40,000 since the previous census in 1901.³⁰ Significantly, the report considered it a major factor in the increase by over 100,000 of the Hindu population in Burma between 1901 and 1911.

The British did not enumerate the Sino-Burmese population in Burma either, not after 1901, the last census that included the category of “Chinese-Shan”; and by 1891, the census had dropped the category of “Burman-Chinese,” which returned a far higher population than the former in the census of 1881 (table 3.1). The colonial census reports repeatedly emphasized that the Chinese population “amalgamate with the Burmans far more readily than do the Natives of India.”³¹ The report for 1911 claimed, “The extreme disparity in the numbers of the sexes is accompanied by a large degree of intermarriage between the surplus Chinese males and the women of the Burmese race,” emphasizing that Chinese men were “markedly favored suitors” among “the women of all the races in the province.”³² If we are to believe the census reports, the Sino-Burmese population in Burma must have been considerable. Yet the colonial administration decided not to continue classifying or quantifying it. The reason for this, according to the report for 1891, was that any attempt to enumerate the Sino-Burmese would have been “very ineffectual” because they were “very jealous of being considered true Chinamen, and, as they dress and consider themselves as apart from the natives of the country.”³³

Far from idiosyncratic, colonial governments across Southeast Asia counted select “racial combinations” and enforced legally defined racial divides between Europeans (and Eurasians), “foreign Orientals,” and natives.³⁴ The category “Sino-Malay” never entered the census in British Malaya and the Straits Settlements. And neither did Malay vernacular terms, such as anak awak, that referred to the children of Siamese or Burmese fathers and Chinese or Baba (Straits-born Chinese) mothers.³⁵ In these British colonies and protectorates, the only classifications available for people of multiple or mixed racial identification were “Eurasian” and Jawi Peranakan, the Malay equivalent of zerbadi. As with the term zerbadi, the British administration employed Jawi Peranakan only to refer to the descendants of Indian Muslim fathers and Malay Muslim mothers. Yet, in their dictionary, published in 1894, the British colonial officers Hugh Clifford and Frank Swettenham defined Jawi Peranakan as “the name given by Malays to the offspring of a Malay and a native of India.”³⁶ In this instance, Islam was not an explicit part of the equation. Some thirty-six years later, though, C. A. Vlieland, the author of the 1931 census of British Malaya, remarked that while Europeans regarded the cognate Jawi Pekan as meaning “a mixture of Indian and Malay blood,” Malays “frequently applied [the term] to an Indian who has in fact no Malayan blood in his veins, but is a Muhammadan who has settled and married in Malaya.”³⁷ The category Jawi Peranakan was omitted altogether from the census by the twentieth century.

Similarly, in the Philippines, the legal category of the “Chinese mestizo” (mestizo de sangley)—created by the Spanish in 1760 to refer mainly to children of intermarriages between sangley (a term later changed to chino) fathers and indio (native) mothers—was abolished in the late 1880s.³⁸ With the notable exception of one census in South Sumatra that classified Arabs of mixed descent as “Arabieren (Peranakans),” there was no intermediary category whatsoever in the Dutch East Indies.³⁹ While in French Indochina, the colonial administration used the Vietnamese term Minh huong to refer to the Sino-Vietnamese.⁴⁰

In British Burma, however, the colonial administration also generated little data on cross-category marriages and births among the “indigenous racial groups.” Major categories such as “Shan-Burmese” disappeared after the 1891 census without explanation, although frequent references were made to “hybrid” Indigenous races.⁴¹ Census statements on “the extreme instability of racial distinctions” in Burma reveal not only that intermarriage among those described as Indigenous races were frequent but also that the census takers struggled to determine the race of the children of such unions, let alone measure the size of such populations. “Race in Burma,” the 1911 census report claimed, “is not a fixed definite phenomenon capable of presentation in a set of tabular statements.” It noted, with disquiet, that race in Burma “is vague and indeterminate, and in a stage of constant fluctuation,” and that racial identification “changed and transformed, separated and amalgamated, and members transfer[red] themselves from one to another with the greatest facility.” The tabulation of Indigenous races was “a presentation of a momentary phase of racial distribution” that did “not necessarily represent a distribution of the population into separate and mutually exclusive racial groups.”⁴²

In 1921, language was made the primary basis of classification of races of Burma (and only of Indigenous races), providing some “scientific basis” for what was at best a pseudoscientific endeavor. Predictably, it in no way solved the problem of indeterminacy that continued to trouble the census takers, who complained: “Some of the races or tribes in Burma change their language almost as often as they change their clothes.”⁴³ Such admissions belied the exacting terminologies and tabulations of difference that filled the voluminous pages of colonial censuses. “There is no reason to believe that figures of Hindus and Muslims are not correct,” the 1931 census confidently stated before adding the following explanation without a hint of irony: “The ordinary Burmese enumerator is not distinguished for his linguistic ability but he often knows sufficient Hindustani to be able to ask an Indian whether he is a Hindu-walla or a Musalaman; in other cases the services of an interpreter or a friend who knows Hindustani might be called in. In many cases it is possible to tell a man’s religion from his appearance.”⁴⁴ Colonial taxonomies and enumerations, derived from such self-assured yet dubious procedures, masked the coercive, ascriptive operation of the census. Race and religion alike were imposed references.

The aversion of colonial administrations toward in-between categories makes the British official recognition of the zerbadi/Indo-Burman all the more intriguing. This special interest in the zerbadi/Indo-Burman no doubt reflected the extent to which the British had naturalized Buddhism in Burma and alienated Islam. As other scholars have shown, the British discovery of Burma and Buddhism occurred concurrently and via their previous experience in India.⁴⁵ The moment of the British colonization of Burma coincided with unprecedented scholarly and popular interest in Buddhism among the British. Though Buddhism originated in India, it was rendered coterminous with Burma, representing not only the religion of the majority population but a natural match—a “tolerant” religion for a “tolerant” people among whom “caste was almost unknown,” as observed in the censuses. The colonial gaze naturalized and indigenized Buddhism in Burma.

The forging of “Hinduism,” “Buddhism,” and “Islam” via the British colonial administrative process of governing India and Burma as colonies also resulted in the construction of Islam as a foreign and aggressive religion. Hinduism was supposedly the indigenous religion of India and the foundation of Indian civilization. In India as in Burma, Islam and Muslims were “foreign elements.”⁴⁶ And the 1891 census, which claimed Hinduism to be the most persistently “exotic” religion in Burma, characterized the children of Hindu fathers and native women as more assimilable than the zerbadi because the former “usually adopt the religion of the mother” while the latter “usually became Muslims.”

Exemplifying this Orientalist construction of Islam, the government abolished the category of “Burmese Muslim,” of whom there were 6,872 according to the 1891 census, from the decennial census of 1901. In effect, the British excised “Burmese Muslim” from colonial administrative taxonomy. Many of the individuals who had previously returned their “religion” and/or “race” as “Burmese Muslim” were compelled to identify as zerbadi, which probably accounted for the sudden increase in the zerbadi population from a mere 24 to 20,423 within a decade (table 3.3). At the stroke of a pen, the British administration rendered Islam essentially foreign to Burma while characterizing Buddhism as thoroughly Burmese. What’s more, it turned Indian patrilineage into an intrinsic characteristic of Burmese Muslims and made illegible communities who considered themselves native Muslims with no ties—patrilineal or matrilineal—to India.⁴⁷

This alienation of Islam, as well as Hinduism, as a foreign religion occurred hand in hand with the othering of Indians as foreigners. The 1919 edition of The Annual Register, a popular British annual “review of public events at home and abroad,” reminded the reader that “in race, in culture, and in religion, the affinities of Burma are with Siam and China, not with India,” and rejected the idea of the continued administrative linking of Burma to India: “The political and administrative union of Hindustan and Burma was reasonable and convenient, so long as both were being governed from above by an irresponsible British autocracy. It would become most undesirable, if not quite impracticable, after the introduction of effective democratic elements, since the union would then involve the domination of Burma by an alien India.”⁴⁸ At roughly the same time, and in anticipation of the 1921 government census, Arakanese Buddhists from Akyab in Arakan, which had by then been ruled as a British colony for almost a century, asked to be distinguished from the yakaing kala (Arakanese kala) so that the latter did not appear in the “Arakanese” racial category.⁴⁹ And so it was: appearing as a subgroup of Indo-Burmans in the 1931 census was the category of “Arakan Mahomedans” defined as “the descendants of Arakanese women who have married Chittagonian Muslims.”⁵⁰

Just as the category Eurasians symbolized the imperial presumption that colonial difference and the racial inferiority of the colonized peoples could never be overcome, the zerbadi/Indo-Burman category signaled the belief among the British that the radical difference of Islam could never be assimilated in a society that they had essentialized as Buddhist. The zerbadi/Indo-Burmans were a people forever alien in “Buddhist Burma.”

Belonging beyond Categories: The New Burmas

The idea that Islam was intrinsically alien in Burma would have offended Ma Galay and U Choe, as well as their youngest child, Ahmed, and his wife, Helen May, the eldest daughter of Di Di and Defries.

Sometime in the late 1910s, Ahmed had returned from attending the Calcutta Medical College with not only a medical degree but also a new last name: Meah. His corresponding last name in Burmese was Mya. Auntie Rosie does not know why he chose to register for medical school under this name rather than Mohideen (or Mohiuddin). Ahmed might have selected Meah as an alternative spelling of Mir, a titular nomenclature of the sayyid according to the 1901 census of India.⁵¹ But if that had been the case, it seems peculiar that his children grew up unaware of his sayyid lineage. Another possible explanation is that Meah derived from miah sahib: an honorific that some men among the English-educated Muslim middle class of barristers, civil servants, college teachers, and doctors in Bengal at the turn of the twentieth century used to refer to themselves.⁵² If so, then Ahmed was emphasizing his identification with this emergent community of Muslim professionals rather than his connection to the sāda.

Ma Galay had expected that upon his return home with the status-enhancing medical degree, Ahmed would help her manage the thriving family business like his four siblings. She had also chosen a suitable Muslim bride—perhaps a sayyida—for Ahmed to marry. But Ahmed did neither. He started his own medical practice in Rangoon and eloped with Helen, who worked at his clinic.

Following in the footsteps of her mother, Helen had become a nurse, though it is unclear what role Di Di, who had passed away when her daughters were still teenagers, played in Helen’s career path. Nursing was not just one of the few professions open to women but a well-established one among Karen women in Burma (as discussed in chapter 1). Nurses were also in high demand.⁵³ It is not hard to imagine that Helen, who must have had to support herself and her sisters upon leaving the orphanage, found nursing a practical and practicable profession. She probably received training as a nurse at the Rangoon General Hospital, which offered two-year training courses for “indigenous women” (as opposed to three-year courses for European and Anglo-Indian women), or at the Lady Dufferin Hospital, which trained hundreds of women in nursing and midwifery.⁵⁴

When Helen met Ahmed, she was engaged to her first cousin and fellow Baptist Freddie. Aware that Ma Galay would not approve their relationship, Helen and Ahmed decided to run off to Mandalay to marry and start a new life. Fatigued from the travel, Ahmed suggested that they disembark at Pyinmana, located halfway between Mandalay and Rangoon and situated on the Rangoon–Mandalay main railway line, for a brief respite. They never proceeded to Mandalay, marrying in Pyinmana instead. This is how Auntie Rosie recounts her parents’ marriage. Her eldest daughter, Mona, heard a different story. Ahmed was equivocal about their courtship, not only because Helen was already engaged but also due to the disparaging views of his friends for whom Helen was not good enough: a ward of orphanages for Eurasians and “poor whites,” she was beneath someone of Ahmed’s pedigree and affluence. In his characteristically nonconfrontational style, Ahmed ran away to Mandalay rather than break off or commit to his relationship with Helen. In her typically confrontational style, Helen followed him. She kicked open the door to his apartment, grabbed him, and went in search in the middle of the night for a Muslim authority to officiate the marriage ceremony. Helen converted to Islam, and the couple signed a Muslim nuptial contract (nikah). In recounting this story to her grandchildren, Helen made one thing clear: she ran off with Ahmed, not the other way around.

News of the marriage shocked Dadi, who disowned Ahmed. Estranged from his family, Ahmed decided not to return to Rangoon. He and Helen settled down in Pyinmana, a place to which they had no prior connections. Using what was left of his inheritance, Ahmed bought a hilltop estate, consisting of three mansions and a view of Shan Kan (Lake Shan). Ahmed and Helen established the only medical clinic in town, the New Burma Medical Hall, after which the couple and their children came to be known locally as the “New Burmas.”⁵⁵

Was it the prospect of starting anew that inspired the couple to make Pyinmana their home? Compared to Rangoon, Pyinmana was a quiet, rustic town. Pyinmana was included for the first time in the British government census of 1891, which listed the population of the town as only 12,926.⁵⁶ At the time of annexation, most of the houses in the town, covering an area of about one square mile, “were surrounded by thick groves of plantains and other fruit trees” and “a dense belt of sugarcane and other high crops, through which it was difficult even for an elephant to make its way.” The town had “a fine municipal bazaar,” a courthouse, an American Baptist station, a hospital that could accommodate three dozen patients—though no residing government-appointed doctors—and a dispensary.⁵⁷

Pyinmana, however, was also a relatively prosperous and cosmopolitan town, located in one of the most valuable teak-producing areas in Burma. The lessee of the teak forests in the Pyinmana District (covering an area of 6,000 square miles) was none other than the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, the British-owned timber and trading firm fined in 1885 by King Thibaw of illegally exporting logs to avoid paying export duty owed to the Burmese state, which led to the Third Anglo-Burmese War and the annexation of Upper Burma. Even by official counting, Pyinmana was home to a large number of Muslims, Hindus, and Chinese, who together represented about a quarter of the total population by 1911.⁵⁸ The Muslim community in particular appears to have been well-established, if the lack of gender disparity among its population or the existence of a number of “Mahomedan” schools—six out of ten “lay” or nonmission schools in Pyinmana—is any indication.⁵⁹

Pyinmana experienced an agrocommercial boom right around the time Ahmed and Helen moved there. Regarded by some as one of the most promising agricultural areas in all of Burma, it became the site of the Pyinmana School of Agriculture, founded in 1923 by the American Baptist Reverend Brayton Case. A son of missionary parents, Case was born and raised in Burma.⁶⁰ He set up the school along the Hampton-Tuskegee idea of industrial education on two hundred acres of land granted by the British government, which also underwrote the operating costs of the school. The Hampton-Tuskegee model of education was developed after the US Civil War with the ideological program of “uplifting” African Americans, that is, to provide a “practical, industrial education” that taught the moral and manual skills deemed necessary for former slaves to become self-supporting in the impoverished South.⁶¹ Evangelicals such as Case viewed this style of “scientific” agricultural education as a way to “produce Christian men to whom the people of Burma will look and say, ‘I wish I could be a man like that. I wish my son could do what he can. I wish I had a God that blessed his people like that.’ ”⁶² Pyinmana also emerged as the headquarters for all the large trading and moneylending firms operating in central Burma to the south of Mandalay.⁶³ Consequently, its population increased by almost tenfold between the time of the first census and 1931: from 12,926 to 111,003.⁶⁴

As Pyinmana grew, so did the New Burma clan, as Ahmed and Helen had eleven children in quick succession. Pictured in the studio photo on the cover of this book are the eldest daughter and son, Kitty Khatiza Khin Sein (b. 1922), standing beside her aunt Cecilia, and Hardy Hardie Ne Win (b. 1924), sitting on his mother’s lap. Everyone is dressed stylishly for the studio photo. Ahmed has on a sport coat and a tie and Helen and Cecilia wear white Burmese blouse and silk longyi (sarong-like ankle skirt) and have their hair coiled into the customary chignon known as sadohn. Both children don a pair of black Mary Jane shoes with white socks, but Kitty sports a wool winter coat over a dress and a bonnet, while Hardy is fitted out in an embroidered velvet jacket over a pair of shorts and a gold-brocaded velvet kufi (Islamic prayer cap).

Seven other children lived to adulthood: Angela Aisha Khin Nyunt Yee (b. 1927), Jenny Noor Jehan Khin Set Yee (b. 1929), Rose Razia Hnin Yee (b. 1931), Trevor Rafi Pe Win (b. 1934), Duncan Shaffi Kyaw Win (b. 1935), Raymond Ali Jan Zaw Wynn (b. 1937), and Helen Fatima May Wynn (b. 1939) (see fig. 3.1). The New Burmas also included Helen’s sisters Cecilia and Juliet. Helen had taken them out of boarding schools upon her marriage and put them through medical school—no small feat considering the miniscule number of women who attended the Government Medical School at Rangoon in the 1920s. Last but not least, the New Burmas included cooks, nannies, and servants, many of them lifelong caregivers for the family. Helen and Ahmed spent the entire day at the clinic only to return home in the evenings. Neither performed household chores; neither went near the kitchen. Helen made only one exception. For Eid, she would make shai mai: also known as sayviah or sevyian, the sweet vermicelli served with fried cashews, coconut shreds, raisins, and milk was—and still is—the signature dish cooked for the holiday marking the end of Ramadan (the ninth month of the Islamic lunar year) and the breaking of the fast in Burma.

FIGURE 3.1. Auntie Rosie with her sister Jenny and their parents, Helen May Defries and Ahmed Mya Meah. The photo was taken in a studio in Rangoon in the 1950s in celebration of Rosie’s medical degree from Rangoon University and Jenny’s master’s degree in philosophy from Yale University. Courtesy of Dr. Hnin Yee and Mona Han.

Still, the labor of childrearing fell on the shoulders of women. Those who raised the brood of New Burmas—Daw Kha, Zainab, Daw Than, and, eventually, the eldest child, Kitty—were all women. And let us not forget the Catholic nuns. Once the children were old enough to start boarding school, about four years old, they were rarely home. Though their father was a son of a sayyid and their mother a Muslim convert, Auntie Rosie and her siblings were placed in the charge of the Italian or Irish sisters who ran the Catholic convents they attended.

Catholic nuns in Burma, as elsewhere, were known for their strict discipline and corporal punishments. As boarders, parents were only able to see their children over holidays. While Christian boarding schools and orphanages differed in their goals and ambitions, they shared the belief that native and Eurasian children should be raised in a purely Christian environment, removed from the influence of their natal families and communities; the institutions of the boarding school and orphanage were to function as the surrogate family for the children.⁶⁵ Symbolically, all children who attended mission schools were deprived of their given Burmese names (if they had one) by the Irish nuns who insisted on giving their students Anglo-Christian names that they could pronounce and remember.

A product of the Christian boarding school herself, Helen was well aware of the demands placed on the boarders and their families. Nevertheless, boarding was often the only way her children could attend the Catholic schools in such major cities as Rangoon and Mandalay that represented premier institutions for primary and secondary school education in Burma. Over the course of the nineteenth century, mission schools—run by Barnabite Roman Catholic missionaries, American Baptist missionaries, and the Anglican missionary group the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel—had gained a monopoly over Anglo-vernacular and English education. They dominated secondary and tertiary education and had cornered the market for female education as well. All of this was accomplished with the support of the colonial administration, which relied on the mission schools it aided via grants for the provision of English as well as secondary education, and the training of local English-speaking clerks and interpreters for the colonial administration and European trading firms.⁶⁶

Helen, as with her mother and sisters, was a beneficiary of the zealous efforts by missionaries to Christianize and civilize the natives. If her example is any indication, missionary efforts to instill Christian and Eurocentric conceptions of piety and feminine virtue in native women met with limited success. Helen converted to Islam and showed no interest in the art of homemaking or housekeeping. Hardly exceptional, she was representative of the many colonized men and women who repurposed their experience of Christian education in ways that the missionary teachers never intended. As more and more Burmese parents were able to afford to place their children in boarding schools, the number of boarding facilities in Burma increased from 132 in 1905 to 472 in in 1921.⁶⁷ These parents joined a growing cohort of colonial subjects the world over who, regardless of their religious affiliations, were enrolling their children in mission schools to take advantage of the promise of upward social mobility through education.

Pyinmana did have an Anglo-vernacular school and a mission school, which Auntie Rosie and her sister Jenny attended briefly. As a rule, however, Helen and Ahmed placed all of their children in Catholic mission schools away from home as boarders. Still, they had reservations. For a time, Helen placed Pusu, Jenny, Rosie, and Cecilia’s two sons (Reggie and Sunny) in the care of friends—a Burmese pastor and his wife, who had recently moved from Pyinmana to Toungoo—so that the children could attend St. Joseph’s Convent School in the city without boarding. The children were then placed as boarders for many years in St. John’s Convent in Rangoon, one of the most successful privately managed schools in the eyes of the government. Yet, again, Helen took the children out of boarding. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Helen entrusted them in the care of a Karen aunt who resided in Rangoon.

Interestingly, the children never lived with their paternal grandmother, Ma Galay, although she also lived in Rangoon. Long before Auntie Rosie began attending St. John’s, her parents and Ma Galay had reconciled. Her eldest sibling, Kitty, “practically grew up under the wings of Dadi,” recalls Kitty’s daughter Ma Kathy. The grandmother taught Kitty how to gamble! Apparently, Kitty was Ma Galay’s favorite grandchild, whom she loved to indulge. Constantly overruled by Ma Galay in her attempts to discipline Kitty, Helen perhaps decided to limit her visits to Rangoon to the holidays, when she would travel with the children to stay with Ma Galay.

We can only surmise the motivations behind Helen’s actions. However, one thing is certain: she was determined to keep her children as close to each other and to their kin as she could manage without compromising their education.

Auntie Rosie fondly remembers the few times each year that she returned home. Even now, she lights up when recalling the joy of reuniting with her elder siblings, who had likewise returned home for the holidays, and the excitement of meeting new additions to the family. “There was a new baby every time we returned to Pyinmana for the holidays,” she told me. Sometimes, the baby was her sibling; sometimes, a niece or nephew whom Helen and Cissie helped deliver. The children also delighted in the break from the daily routines of the Catholic convent and its austere culinary options. A scrumptious assortment of food awaited them at home: their favorites included common Burmese dishes, such as kyet a mit hin (chicken liver and gizzard curry), ga zun ywe kyaw (stir-fried morning glory), and pe hin (lentil soup). Other staples at the table were ngapi ye (fermented fish or shrimp sauce/paste) served with to zeya (raw/boiled dipping vegetables), chin ye hin (tangy soup), and rice: these were dishes that Helen required for herself at every meal.

A set of dishes were specially prepared also for Ahmed, who was on “the Hay diet.” For as long as Auntie Rosie could remember, her father was on the diet developed by the American physician William Howard Hay in the 1920s that prohibited the combined consumption of certain groups of food—namely, starches and proteins—during the same meal. Ahmed was a creature of habit. Every day he would eat toast, six egg yolks, vegetable stew, chapati or bread, salad, and flan for dessert. He did not eat meat, though in his eighties he ate one ounce of minced lamb in the form of a cutlet. He never ate rice. The cooks for the family catered to these eclectic dietary needs and wishes, in addition to preparing everything halal.

As is obvious from the names of the children or the typical meal of the New Burmas, theirs was a bewilderingly heterogeneous family. Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists; zerbadi, Karens, Burmans, and Eurasians; and Burmese, Urdu, and English speakers all lived together as one unit. Everyone ate halal, the men in the family went to the mosque for Eid, and Ahmed and Helen recited Muslim prayers. The children, however, were not taught Muslim prayers. They learned, instead, to recite Christian and Buddhist prayers from their aunt Cissie and the longtime servant affectionately called A May Than, or “Mother Than.” The New Burmas were a polyglot family, moving fluidly between different batha: language and religion. As the colonial census pointed out, people in Burma were known to “change their language almost as often as they change their clothes.” Many, like the New Burmas, were multilingual and availed themselves of different languages. “Religion” was clearly viewed as existing or functioning in a similar way. Like language, it was formative of one’s perception and experience of the world. And as with language, one could identify and express oneself through different religious idioms.

This versatility in batha, however, was too much for Helen’s liking at times. As the only general medical practitioner in town, Ahmed welcomed visits by traveling pongyis (Buddhist monks) who stopped by his home for medical consultations. These visits, which turned into philosophical ruminations on Buddhist scriptures, irritated Helen. “Why are you talking everyday anicca [impermanence], dukkha [suffering], and anattā [nonself]?” she would chastise Ahmed.⁶⁸ She even complained directly to the pongyis, letting them know that she had little tolerance for what she perceived, probably correctly, as their attempt to propagate the buddha batha.

Though both Ahmed and Helen were practicing Muslims, Helen was the more devout of the two. She was the only member of the family who observed the daily fast during Ramadan. In her old age, Helen hired a teacher to instruct her in reciting the Quran in both Arabic and Urdu. She also began covering her head during prayer, though she never wore a veil of any sort in public. Adhering to the doctrinally conservative view that the visitation of graves by women is prohibited by Islam, Helen refused to go to the cemetery where Ahmed and their daughter Jenny were buried.⁶⁹ Memories of Helen among her descendants thus paint a portrait of a self-consciously pious Muslim convert, albeit one that does not resemble the stereotypical image of the devout Muslim woman for whom the metonym is the veil. It is a portrait that troubles once again the idea that conversion in the context of intermarriage is purely pragmatic. Like other women converts we encountered in chapter 1 who demonstrated curiosity and conviction in the batha of their spouses, her conversion to Islam was more than just a means to an end. Did Helen feel pressure to model herself after the women in Ahmed’s family who, by all accounts, were “very religious”? In contrast, the Meahs have described none of Ma Galay’s sons as particularly religious. Perhaps Helen wanted to prove to Ma Galay, her sister-in-law, or to herself that she was a worthy wife and daughter-in-law, befitting a sayyid, despite her humble background and her status as a convert. Or to ensure that her descendants were not denied the prestige and status that came with being sayyid—that is, if they ever chose, unlike their father, to accentuate their prophetic lineage.

Yet neither Helen nor Ahmed raised the children to identify exclusively—even principally—as Muslim, according to Auntie Rosie. Their personal experiences as well as shared family histories of migration, intermarriage, and conversion may have inclined Ahmed and Helen to nurture pluralistic sensibilities in their children rather than accept the colonialist model of family and community—that is, as seeded and determined by putatively impenetrable religious boundaries. Or is it possible that Helen and Ahmed feared that overt performances of Muslimness might create problems for their children? As discussed above, the British had singled out the zerbadi and Muslims in general as “foreigners” in Burma. This may have been the reason the children were known by their Anglo-Christian names instead of their Muslim names. Such an interpretation, however, is not consonant with Auntie Rosie’s memories of Pyinmana. The local community never made her family feel like outsiders, she says. The residents of Pyinmana referred to her parents as “Mummy-gyi” (grandmother) and “Papa-gyi” (grandfather): terms of endearment and kinship. Auntie Rosie recounted many poignant stories that evoked the affection with which her parents were regarded in Pyinmana, but one stood out. Ahmed had gone to Rangoon for medical treatment, accompanied by Helen. Unbeknownst to the couple, word had spread in Pyinmana that Helen was returning with his body (i.e., his corpse). They arrived at the train station in Pyinmana, both in good health, to find that a large crowd of the town’s people had gathered to pay their respect.

There is no denying that the New Burmas were an extraordinary family. But as the following chapter shows, they were neither unusual nor unfamiliar relations in colonial Burma. Rather, they were quite typical of the many marriages and families that straddled administrative categories and legal boundaries, as court records of domestic disputes attest. The prevalence of such personal relations never moved the British administrators to revise their classification schemes or to acknowledge the problems immanent in their strategy of governance. Instead, colonial authorities persisted in enforcing the bureaucratic illogic and illusion of a religiously and racially segregated colonial society, rendering common forms of intimacy and subjectivity illicit. Their insistence on the validity of colonial schemes also entailed the fabrication of another powerful unreality: a Burmese woman who married a “foreigner” came into the fold of her husband, adopting his religious and legal status, while immigrant men (and their locally born sons), even those who were culturally assimilated, retained their own religious and legal personhood. On the basis of this fantasy and alibi, colonial officials rationalized their consolidation of a patriarchal legal regime of alienation.