CHAPTER 2 Mobility and Marital Assimilation

Margins of Acceptability

After Ngwe Ya completed his studies in Atodra, Rahim Rasool expected his multilingual, India-educated son to help him with his business, just as Ma Galay did. Unlike Ahmed, Ngwe Ya did just that upon his return to Burma. But like Ahmed, he promptly married against the wishes of his parents. It is unclear what infuriated Rahim Rasool: that the woman Ngwe Ya married was a servant in his (Rahim Rasool’s) employ; that she was a widow, two years older than his son, who already had two children from a former relationship; that she was Buddhist and did not convert to Islam upon marriage to his son; or that Ngwe Ya could not be persuaded to give up his Buddhist wife and return to India with his mother, who had come rushing to intervene. If we are to believe the allegations made against Ngwe Ya by his relatives, Ngwe Ya not only failed to convert his wife but had himself undergone conversion—or rather, reversion—to Buddhism upon marriage. Though Rahim Rasool never severed his ties with Ngwe Ya, he took calculated measures to disinherit the man he once considered his son. He requested the local district court to declare that Ngwe Ya was not his son and excluded the latter from his will entirely.

Ngwe Ya had clearly crossed a line. But what line had he transgressed? For the purposes of the legal battle over Rahim Rasool’s estate, the plaintiff, Ngwe Ya, and the defendants, Rahim Rasool’s second wife and his daughters with Ngwe Bwint, debated the nature of his trespass as a matter of religion, defending and disavowing affective and material family ties on this basis. Ngwe Ya testified to the authenticity of his conversion and biography as a devoted Muslim son and therefore a legitimate and deserving heir. The defendants asserted that Ngwe Ya had willfully abandoned his Muslim family and identity. But if the issue indeed was Ngwe Ya’s alleged apostasy or failure to convert his wife to Islam, then how did Rahim Rasool interpret this behavior: as evidence of deficient piety, filiality, or manliness? Perhaps all of the above.

In another story of familial strife involving adoption, intermarriage, and conversion, a zerbadi woman married a pathi kala to the objection of her adoptive Bamar parents. According to the court record, Ma Ye, “a Burmese lady of considerable fortune,” and her husband, Ko On, adopted in 1858 the two zerbadi daughters of her cousin Ma Ku and Ebrahim Cassim Chayanglia.¹⁵ Ma Ye had a close relationship to the two girls and their mother from long before the adoption, serving as a protege of sorts for Ma Ku, who was in financial straits and whose husband was an absent husband and father. Ma Ku worked for Ma Ye at one point and gave birth to her younger daughter, Me Gale, under Ma Ye’s roof. These circumstances, plus the fact that Ma Ye and Ko On were childless, resulted in the adoption of Ma Ku’s daughters, who were named heirs to the estate of the wealthy couple. What the court record does not tell us is if there were other motives behind the adoption. Perhaps it was just a charitable act by an affluent matriarch intent on helping her struggling relative. Though perhaps the adoption, Ma Ye hoped, would bring Ma Ku back into the fold and ensure that her zerbadi daughters grew up Buddhist.

We do know that the girls were raised Buddhist and that Ma Ye objected to Me Gale’s elopement with Ismail Lotia and conversion to Islam when she was eighteen years old. The marriage suggests that Me Gale was not dissociated from the pathi kala community in Moulmein, to which her father belonged, as a result of her adoption by a Bamar couple. And against the disapproval of her adoptive mother, Me Gale married a pathi kala just as her birth mother had. In time Ma Ye condoned the marriage and accepted Ismail as her son-in-law, giving him employment and renting a house for the couple and their three children. When Ismail passed away in 1884, Me Gale and her three children moved back in with Ma Ye and Ko On.

Both stories convey anxiety over intermarriage and conversion, even among people who were themselves party to such relationships, raising the questions of what they signified to the persons directly affected by the intimate relationships, and how it was perceived by the broader society. These are difficult questions to answer not least because of the scarcity of historical sources that would allow us to do so from the perspective of the individuals in the relationships.

Nevertheless, historians have interpreted them as evidence of the negative impact of intensified diasporic interactions on intermarriage and the pluralistic sensibilities, creole practices, and hybrid identities associated with it. According to this line of explanation, Rahim Rasool’s disapproval of the marriage of Ngwe Ya to a Buddhist woman who failed to convert to Islam; the marriage of Me Gale to Ismail Lotia; and the division of inheritance arranged by the aforementioned bigamous Choa Chuan Ghiock prior to his death, which subordinated his Burmese wife and Sino-Burmese children to his “Chinese” family in Singapore, all signified a development from within migrant populations that became less amenable to “localization” and less accepting of intermarriage. Some historians attribute the preference for endogamous marriage over intermarriage to a growing insularity or concern with purity among migrants.¹⁶ Others interpret the shift as a strategy of kinship organization by migrants seeking to build ties with major political and economic players, less and less of whom came from Indigenous populations as European colonial expansion and consolidation proceeded.¹⁷ Both explanatory frameworks emphasize, like the historical narrative of métissage, the increased population of women in the colonies who shared the languages, lineages, and ritual activities of migrant men, either because they were themselves migrants from the “homeland,” daughters of intermarriages, or, like Rahim Rasool’s daughter, had been sent “home” for education. Both presume that native attitudes toward migrants and intermarriage remained more or less accommodating or that any changes they may have undergone were immaterial.

The notion that Burmese society is by tradition accepting of intermarriage and conversion has represented a prominent feature and ingrained assumption of European discourse on Burma. For centuries, British adventurers, envoys, and colonial officers narrated with fascination what they portrayed as the Burmese openness to intermarriage. In the popular travelogue A New Account of the East Indies (1727), the Scottish merchant captain Alexander Hamilton described Burmese women as “very fond of marrying with Europeans” and “obedient and obliging wives” who became indispensable commercial partners to their husbands.¹⁸ Writing in the 1790s, Michael Symes, the British embassy to the court of Ava, also made frequent references to the liberality with which the Burmese encouraged men “of whatever climate or complexion” to marry Burmese women “and consider themselves as natives of the country”:

They are sensible that the strength of an empire consists in its population; and that a prince is great and powerful, more from the number of his subjects, than from the extent of his territory: hence the politic indulgence that the Birman government grants to every sect freely to exercise its religious rites: they tolerate alike the Pagan and the Jew, the Mussulman or Christian, the disciples of Confucius, or the worshippers of fire; the children of whom, born of a Birman woman, equally become subjects of the state, and are entitled to the same protection and privileges, as if they had sprung from a line of Birman ancestry.¹⁹

Like Hamilton, Symes emphasized that Burmese women were known to be faithful wives of foreigners, even those who “come to pass a temporary residence amongst them.”²⁰ Written approximately a century later, the travelogue of Colonel Fitz William Thomas Pollok, who served in the British imperial army, differed only slightly from those of Symes in its description of Burmese women and their relations with foreign men: “Burmese women and girls are free to visit European families; a bevy of girls will not hesitate to visit even a bachelor, just to show themselves off and their ornaments, and perhaps to attract an admirer, for these little women have no objection to accept a kala (a foreigner) as a husband according to their laws and customs—and very good wives they make, too.”²¹ As Pollok’s contemporary and aforementioned Conservator of Forests John Nisbet explained, such unions were “not degrading” to a Burmese woman, “and after its dissolution she frequently marrie[d] well, without a taint of immorality besmirching her reputation on account of such previous union.”²²

An 1875 divorce trial in the Special Court of Lower Burma offers another late nineteenth-century account of how intermarriage—between Muslim migrants and Burmese women in this case—were regarded, though from the perspective of the two most powerful colonial jurists in British Burma: the judicial commissioner and the recorder. The former had jurisdiction over the territory outside Rangoon and the latter over Rangoon and all criminal cases in any part of Burma where the accused were European subjects. The judicial commissioner and the recorder occasionally convened the Special Court of Lower Burma, which, until 1900, was the court of appeal for Rangoon and Moulmein, the two most important cities in Lower Burma. On this occasion, Judges Wilkinson (recorder) and Quinton (judicial commissioner) came together in May 1875 to review an application for divorce by Mi Shwe Ywet from her husband, Kumal Sheriff. The characterization by the two judges of marriages between “Mahomedans from other countries” and Burmese women is worth quoting at length:

In a country like this, where a large number of Mahomedans from other countries have taken up their residence, and in very many cases their permanent abode, and where the natives have no race prejudices against alliances with foreigners, and whose religion offers no impediment to such, we find these mixed marriages everywhere existing among them, which have been duly celebrated according to Mahomedan rites; the wife having previously renounced her own religion and embraced that of her husband. Such an alliance is not regarded by either party as one of a temporary character, or in any way partaking of concubinage such as the liaisons that at one time prevailed here between Europeans and the women of the country, but as a formal and a binding marriage. It only requires a short experience of this country to know that these marriages are regarded amongst the Mahomedan community as being of as binding a character, and as conferring on the wife as honorable a position in the family, as if she had been of Mahomedan descent; for she holds the same position as the husband’s other wife does if he happens to have another. The offspring likewise of these marriages are brought up in the Mahomedan faith, and are acknowledged by their father as his legitimate children, and, at his death, share in his property as such.²³

The opinion of the judges confirmed the widespread practice of intermarriage as a “binding” and “honorable” institution. On the other hand, it challenged the view of intermarriage, held by contemporary British observers like Yule (the envoy to Amarapura), as an effective, often comprehensive means of assimilating migrant men. The judges emphasized, instead, how intermarriage served to “convert the Burmese wife” who “renounced her own religion and embraced that of her husband.” Ironically, Mi Shwe Ywet had appealed for a divorce on the basis that she “never was anything else than a Buddhist, though to enable her husband to marry her she did profess Mahomedanism.”²⁴ She testified that she and Kumal had also been married by Burmese customs, the latter having asked the permission of her parents to marry her and provided bride price. The judges even acknowledged that they doubted that conversion in “all cases, or even in many,” was “the result of conviction of the truth of the religion embraced.” The point is that intermarriage, according to the judges, was common in Burma, not because it served an assimilative function but because the Burmese had neither “race prejudices” nor “religious impediments” against it.

The assessment of Muslim-Buddhist intermarriages by the judges were challenged by the census report of 1911. In his discussion of “Burmese marriage customs,” the superintendent of the census, C. Morgan Webb, stated that “the prohibited degrees of marriage among the Burmese are few,” and “marriage restrictions, so fundamental in a country where caste prohibitions are supreme, are of comparative unimportance where caste is almost unknown.” He described marriage in Burma as a “purely secular” affair, nothing more than “a civil contract dissolvable by either party practically at will.” He also claimed however that “the country opinion is strongly held with regard to the admixture of the Indian and Burmese races” while “the fusion of Chinese and Burmese strains is generally considered to be a most advantageous racial combination” that “improved the indigenous racial stock.”²⁵ The report thus confirmed the idea that there were no “religious impediments” but contradicted the notion that there were no “racial prejudices.”

These British discourses about intermarriage, spread across centuries, were unevenly sexist, Orientalist, and racist. The accounts by Hamilton, Symes, Pollok, and Nisbet othered intermarriage in Burma as beyond the pale of Christian, Anglo-Saxon ideas and ideals of marriage premised on the separation into opposite and oppositional realms emotional, sexual attachments and material, economic exchange. They exoticized and eroticized Burmese women as desiring carnal knowledge of foreign men—a familiar trope of the native female in Anglo-European narratives about colonial adventures and conquests. In their fantastical narrations, Burmese women beckoned penetration by “men of whatever climate or complexion.”²⁶ Such discourses of intermarriage in Burma closely mirrored European fetishization of the institution of the “harem.” European men and women were desperate to know the very institution they condemned as the inner sanctum of Oriental sexual excess.²⁷

The commentaries on intermarriage by Judges Wilkinson and Quinton and the census superintendent Webb were devoid of such Orientalist tropes. Still, they served to reproduce colonial difference. For one, they represented intermarriage as something that colonial subjects, not imperial agents, did (or imperial agents no longer did, according to Judges Wilkinson and Quinton). Webb additionally perceived marriage in Burma as bereft of the sacrality of the Christian institution of marriage—a “purely secular affair” as he put it—and, as such, easy to enter and easy to exit. The “secular” and “contractual” nature of marriage practices among the Burmese, not the sexuality of Burmese women, accounted for the prevalence of intermarriage in Burma.

While described as “the country opinion,” Webb’s assessment of the “admixture” of Chinese, Indian, and Burmese races also betrayed a eugenicist belief that a scientific process of racial mixing, sterilization, and segregation could produce more desirable human breeds and ultimately eliminate inferior, less desirable ones. The pseudoscience of race and eugenics had been on the ascendancy among scientists, policymakers, and administrators in Britain and its empire.²⁸ The likes of Webb endorsed “the Chinese-Burmese admixture” as a form of positive eugenics, that is, of cultivating superior human traits and regenerating the Burmese race. But they disapproved “the admixture of the Indian and Burmese races” as productive of “a degraded and demoralized race,” in the words of G. F. Arnold, the financial and revenue secretary to the government of Burma in 1908.²⁹

Neither Webb nor Arnold explained the logic behind this disparate assessment, which may have struck them as self-evident. According to the decennial census of 1881 for British Burma, the first that tried “to obtain information concerning the persons of mixed race,” there were three classes of mixed races: “the crosses between the indigenous races or those which, though not indigenous, are cognate with those that are”; “the crosses between indigenous and Indian races”; and “the crosses between the indigenous or Indian and the European races.”³⁰ The so-called Chinese-Burmese admixture belonged to the second category, crosses between cognate races, while the “Indo-Burman” represented a crossing of putatively unrelated races. By implication, even more dangerous was the third category of mixed races: those that crossed the so-called white and yellow or brown races.

Despite its discrepancies, this colonial discourse on intermarriage in Burma was surprisingly consistent in some key respects. It portrayed intermarriage as a prevalent and sanctioned practice against which there were neither religious nor legal objections. It emphasized the permanent nature of intermarriage, insisting that it was binding, if not always abiding, and that the woman party to the relationship was regarded as a legitimate wife. It did not question the authenticity and validity of intermarriage. And there was agreement on the transformative power and potential of intermarriage that were manifested in the putative assimilation of migrant men, conversion of Burmese women, and the racial regeneration and degeneration of the Burmese.

What is significant about these claims about intermarriage in Burma is not their veracity but what they reveal about the mentality of the men making the claims. Yet the consistency with which they were rehearsed turned the British colonial discourse on the Burmese tradition of intermarriage into received wisdom that even historians have treated as a close approximation—if not an unmediated reflection—of the historical reality.³¹ It is not at all clear however that Burmese society placed “no impediments” to intermarriage or that there were no social and legal consequences for intermarrying and converting.

Burmese Buddhist Law of Marriage

The opinion among British colonial officials that there were no “race prejudices” or “religious impediments” against intermarriage among the Burmese stemmed from their understanding of “Burmese Buddhist law,” to which they also referred as “Burmese Buddhist customary law.” Their understanding of this law, in turn, was based on their interpretation of a small group of the indigenous dhammasat (“treatise on dhamma” or “instructions of dhamma”) texts available in English translation. Extant in thousands of palm-leaf and paper manuscript versions, they were widely circulating legal texts that outlined rules related to matters such as inheritance, marriage, contract, theft, and assault and prescribed methods of dispute settlement. They existed alongside other corpuses of law that might be described as “Burmese Buddhist” that sometimes overlapped and conflicted: namely, the vinaya, or monastic law, whose jurisdiction was limited to the sangha (monastic community), and rajasat, or royal law, enacted by kings and ministers.³² Upon colonization of Burma, the British identified the dhammasat genre of legal literature as the basis of “Buddhist law” that would govern disputes concerning “succession, inheritance, marriage or caste, or any religious usage or institution” among Buddhists in the colony.

Legal reforms represented a cornerstone of the self-professedly liberal British Empire, whose stated mission was to replace the tyrannical “rule of men” with the just and equitable “rule of law.”³³ British imperial governance was supposed to protect the rights of autonomous individuals from being infringed upon by the rights of the family or community or suppressed by despotic monarchs. It would guarantee the liberty of individuals, most notably the individual right to private property, thus paving the way for a capitalist economic system of market freedom and equality. Whereas the “rule of law” was to prevail in the so-called public sphere of money, market, and politics, the very first governor general of India, Warren Hastings, decided against establishing a standard body of territorial civil law that applied to all imperial subjects. Presented as a concession to the laws of the colonized, he exempted from imperial intervention the so-called personal realm of marriage and family. He mandated that the family and religious affairs of the subjects of the British Raj should be governed by their “personal laws,” formulated as laws that applied only to members of particular religious community.³⁴ Under this legal dispensation, the civil courts administered the “Burmese Buddhist law” in cases where the parties were Buddhist, “Muhammadan law” in cases where the parties were Muslim, “Hindu law” where the parties were Hindu, and “Chinese customary law” where the parties were Chinese.

The tensions and deceptions that marked the process of codifying “Hindu law” and “Muhammadan law” were mirrored by the British administrative curation of “Burmese Buddhist law.” British legal authorities recognized that actual social practices often diverged from the dictates of textual law and exhibited important regional and local variations. Yet they sidestepped the variety of written law and the plurality of interpretations held by Burmese jurists and scholars. According to the aforementioned ICS officer and scholar Furnivall, the practice of referring disputes for arbitration to the local thugyi (village headman) had declined significantly by the 1890s, and decisions by a thugyi, even when ratified by a Burmese judge, were set aside by the judicial commissioner as contrary to Burmese law, signifying the displacement of custom by “the rule of law.”³⁵

Having chosen the dhammasat texts as the foundational sources of law in Burma, they engaged narrowly with this legal corpus. They relied on the Manu kyay dhammasat, the only example available to them in English translation, as representative of “Burmese Buddhist law” when in fact it was “a never very popular, late eighteenth-century compendium.”³⁶ Imperial deference to local laws, in the British Raj as in other contemporary European colonies, not only concealed significant areas of ignorance and uncertainty among colonial authorities in their knowledge of various “personal laws” but also masked the high degree to which ostensibly local laws were products of the colonial administration.³⁷

An exemplary artifact of this process of colonial knowledge appropriation was A Digest of the Burmese Buddhist Law concerning Inheritance and Marriage; being a collection of texts from thirty-six Dhammathats, composed and arranged under the supervision of the Hon’ble U Gaung, C.S.I. ex-Kinwun Mingyi (1899).³⁸ Translated into English in 1909, it formed the basis on which the British made authoritative statements about “Burmese Buddhist” marriage laws. A perusal of this urtext reveals a resounding silence on the subject of intermarriage and conversion, at least as the British would have recognized them: as marriage between spouses of different race or religion and change in one’s religious identification. Accordingly, British colonial authorities claimed with confidence that “the prohibited degrees of marriage among the Burmese are few.”³⁹

Yet the language of the dhammasat leaves no doubt that individuals in matrimony were expected to uphold and propagate the thathana (Pali: sasana), or the teachings of the Buddha. The Ketuja dhammasat, for instance, instructs a wife to abandon and separate from her husband if he “does not follow sīla (in Buddhism, virtue, morality, or right conduct) and has no shame in doing unmeritorious acts,” while the Manu kyay dhammasat lists, among the eight kinds of husbands a wife may vituperate, “a husband who neither knows nor venerates the Three Gems [Buddha, dharma, sangha].” Similarly, a “good wife,” according to the Vinicchayarāsi dhammasat, was enjoined to revere and venerate not only her parents and parents-in-law but also monks.⁴⁰ Just as elite representatives of such religions as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism defended their religion as the only true religion, so too did monks and ministers in Burma see the teaching of the Buddha as the only truly right—and therefore superior—view. Thus, an 1872 text compiled by an interior minister at the courts of Mindon and Thibaw that provided a brief survey of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism warned that “those people who stay outside of thathana have not destroyed the wrong views even if they venerate Myanma (i.e., Burman) monks, listen to Myanma sermons, observe uposatha days, make donations, and build monasteries and rest houses.”⁴¹ Evidently, there were people with “wrong views” who were “passing” as followers of the Buddha, raising concerns about the state of the preservation and propagation of the thathana.

Such designations of “falling outside of the thathana” or “having wrong views,” Alexey Kirichenko points out, were not only religious; they “were as often applied to members of other ethnic groups, both indigenous and foreign.”⁴² The sangha itself was divided and hierarchized on the basis of lu myo—for example, Burman, Mon, Shan, Manipuri, Northern Thai—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Burman monastic group held monopoly over appointments to the monastic hierarchy developed by the crown.

The penultimate king of Burma, Mindon, like his contemporary Siamese counterpart King Mongkut, is remembered as “an enlightened monarch” whose reign oversaw modernist reforms. Historians have highlighted how Mindon, known as an exceptionally devout patron of the thathana, gifted land and teak for the construction of mosques in Mandalay for his pathi subjects, and sponsored a lodge, or waqf house, in Mecca to facilitate their pilgrimage or hajj.⁴³ He welcomed migrant men from near and far even to high ministerial posts and the inner circles of the royal family. Rather than promulgate new laws to govern the marriage and family of such individuals, he left untouched an 1807 royal order, or amein daw, that granted pathi kala and ponna (Brahmin)⁴⁴ leaders the authority to adjudicate matters concerning their respective communities.⁴⁵ This echoed the practice of the Mughal administration in India, which left non-Muslim communities to administer their own laws to their own members through their own specialists.⁴⁶ Only on the eve of the British annexation of Upper Burma did King Thibaw form a “department of joint court” for the purpose of hearing cases concerning the “pathi, tayôk, and kala lu myo gya residing in Mandalay.”⁴⁷

Konbaung kings such as Mindon liked to idealize themselves not as the leader of a particular community but as cakkavatti—world conqueror who preserved the thathana and prepared the world for the coming of the next buddha—who ruled over a diverse population, akin to the contemporaneous Mughal, Qing, and Ottoman Empires. They patronized and protected people of linguistic, confessional, and ritual heterogeneity, some of whom were originally clients or dependents of another sovereign patron, who swore allegiance to the Burmese king. As though to instantiate this political vision and boast about the vast and heterogenous domain under its rule, the royal administration compiled lists of 101 categories of more or less discrete lu myo who supposedly inhabited the Burmese naing ngan daw, the country or sphere of influence under the Burmese sovereign.⁴⁸ This type of patron-client political dispensation was also premised, Victor Lieberman argues, on a conception of political legitimacy in which “authority derived from the power and charisma of the patron, and because each of his clients was tied to him by separate personal bonds, there was no need for a common identity among followers.”⁴⁹ Shared rituals, language, literature, music, arts, dress, diet, and so on—whether we call this “culture” or “ethnicity”—neither determined nor guaranteed allegiance and political solidarity.

But Mindon, as with his predecessors, forbade his pathi subjects from engaging in activities and behaviors that openly or directly contravened the thathana, such as the slaughter of animals, which the pathi in the country might have viewed as an important ritual of Eid. Mindon may have treated his pathi subjects with tolerance or even benevolence. But he also expected them to uphold, at least publicly, the supremacy of the thathana. Indeed, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a period of integration and assimilation for Burma as elsewhere in Asia and Europe, which experienced the expansion of metropolitan cultures and a domination of a “core ethnicity” that claimed a privileged relationship to religious truth.⁵⁰ Even as royal clienteles remained multiethnic, Lieberman notes, “by 1770 Burmese completely dominated the court, and to local people and foreign visitors alike the empire had become identified, indeed synonymous, with its northern core ethnicity.”⁵¹

Lieberman cautions against equating the ascendancy of “Burman ethnicity and Theravada orthodoxy” under the Konbaung administration with the formation of a dominant, supralocal subjectivity. He argues instead that the instrumental appropriation of practices and habits associated with the political center served as visible emblems of loyalty, especially during periods of conflict and crisis—warfare, famine—that yoked the welfare of heterogeneous local communities to that of the political center.⁵² Even so, government attempts “to make culture and political authority congruent,” said to be uncharacteristic of “pre-nationalist” Asia, had gained ground in Burma long before the era of nationalism.⁵³

Placed in this context of growing Burman and Buddhist hegemony in the centuries leading up to British colonialism, the absence of legal and religious interdictions on marriage among people of different lu myo takes on significances that colonial officers and historians alike have overlooked. The context also recasts the family disputes over Ngwe Ya’s marriage to a Buddhist woman and alleged reversion to Buddhism, and Me Gale’s elopement with Ismail and conversion to Islam. The lack of prohibitions against intermarriage (of certain kinds) is best understood as indicative not of a culture of pluralism and tolerance but rather of a modality of social control that brought “outsiders” or “strangers” into a web of personal and political bonds of patronage and obligation, subjecting them to existing structures of hierarchy. What the British envoy Symes described as the custom of encouraging migrant men to “marry Birman wives, and consider themselves as natives of the country” is better analyzed as a process of subjecting migrants and those who putatively held “the wrong view” to the rule of the Konbaung administration and the teachings of the Buddha.

This explains why the Konbaung government did not prohibit migrant men from marrying native women but barred them from relocating with their wife and children—a regulation that was a recurrent matter of dispute between the government and the British colonial administration in their early dealings.⁵⁴ Such rules and regulations were not, as scholarship on Burma has tended to emphasize, merely measures intended to secure wealth in people, the fiscal foundation of the administration.⁵⁵ Burmese kingdoms were long plagued by the battle against runaways and rebels who switched patron rulers, became monks, or sold themselves into slavery to reduce their service and tax obligations and otherwise evade government attempts to manage their lives.⁵⁶ According to this interpretation, royal orders and pyat sa (legal decisions) regulating intermarriage among people who belonged to different categories of commoners—each owing different kinds of services and taxes to the king and his local representatives or to monasteries and private patrons—were motivated by fiscal priorities. Their overriding objective was to limit mobility between service and tax groups that undermined service and tax extraction.⁵⁷ Yet Konbaung kings measured their success by their ability not only to control wealth in people but also to propagate the thathana. It was one thing for subjects of the British Empire to enter into Burmese territory, marry Burmese women, and “consider themselves as natives of the country,” as Symes put it. For them to leave with their Burmese wives and children and convert them into subjects of another sovereign or to “the wrong view” was quite another matter. The same concern prompted rulers in neighboring Siam to go so far as to issue a law condemning Mon and Thai subjects who gave their daughters to English, Dutch, Javanese, and Malay men, making them liable to a range of punishments, from confiscation of property to execution.⁵⁸

Compliance and Defiance

From the vantage point of the social and political elites and authorities in Konbaung Burma, intermarriage was not just a sign but also a technique of subjection, expected to make loyal, productive subjects out of migrants. To be sure, the pathi, kala, and tayôk of Upper Burma spoke Burmese and wore Burmese dress even as they composed in other languages, had non-Burmese names, and worshipped at the mosque, as one British colonial authority after another observed. Such practices of simultaneous multiple affiliations, however, were created in a milieu that assumed the predominance of the Bamar and the thathana. This was an assumption and ideology that many migrants accommodated and exploited; the social dynamic that anthropologists have conceptualized as “situational ethnicity,” wherein a person emphasizes or deemphasizes particular cultural, ethnic, or other communal affiliations and allegiances depending on the context (i.e., different ethnicities for different situations), is well-documented in Burma. At the same time, there were Karens, Chins, and other migrants in Upper Burma who, even as subjects of the Burmese king, refused to accept the supremacy of the Bamar and the thathana.⁵⁹

It is striking that both of Aunti Rosie’s grandmothers, the Karen Baptist Di Di and the Muslim zerbadi Ma Galay, married men who shared their batha. In their eyes, the act of marrying a pathi or Christian migrant may have signified an intimate act of disobedience in the tradition of James Scott’s “everyday forms of resistance”: quiet, subtle, and mundane forms of defiance of efforts at social control and subjection by Buddhists and the Bamar.⁶⁰ The same explanation might be applied to the decision by Me Gale to marry a pathi kala like her father against the wishes of her Buddhist adoptive parents or, for that matter, the insistence by Rahim Rasool and Ngwe Bwint that their son Ngwe Ya marry a fellow Muslim, convert or otherwise. If so, then endogamy and conversion (to Islam or Christianity) were attempts to put marriage into the service of minority communities.

There is yet another possibility. Perhaps Me Gale did not see her marriage to Ismail as an act of dissidence or betrayal of her adoptive parents or as a shift in her allegiance from Buddhism to Islam and from the Bamar to the pathi kala. Ngwe Ya too may not have predicted that his marriage to a Buddhist woman would result in the accusation by his family that he had left the Muslim fold. And if he did not prevail upon his wife to convert to Islam, as his relatives charged during the trial, even at the risk of disinheritance by his family and even as he remained himself Muslim, then perhaps we ought to understand Ngwe Ya’s actions as a form of noncompliance with either the social pressure of the majority Buddhist to embrace the thathana or his family’s expectations of endogamy and conversion.

These family dramas bring into sharp focus both female agency in conversion (of themselves or their family and relations) and the challenges posed to family relations by intermarriage and conversion. Both have been marginalized by the historiographic preoccupation with the readiness of states and societies in Southeast Asia to accept and accommodate migrants. Tellingly, a study that specifically examines the difficulties faced by Indigenous—and predominantly Muslim—women who married Chinese migrants in the Dutch East Indies does not once raise the question of conversion or religion.⁶¹ This reflects the prevailing popularity of the idea that Chinese migrants in Southeast Asia became Muslim or Christian only and nominally for the purpose of marrying Muslim Malay and Christian Filipina women.⁶²

In keeping with the growing consensus in the voluminous literature on conversion, this utilitarian explanation of conversion challenges the once common assumption that conversion entailed a complete and irreversible obliteration of preexisting convictions and social ties. Incidentally, migrant men were hardly exceptional in converting for pragmatic reasons. The aforementioned story in which Mi Shwe Ywet filed for divorce from her Muslim husband, claiming that she professed to be Muslim in order to consecrate their marriage even as she remained Buddhist, is just one among many such cases that populate the colonial legal archive, as we see in chapter 3. Still, such legal narratives do not tell us what repercussions, if any, this very expectation that Mi Shwe Ywet “profess” to be Muslim had on the marriage itself or her social and familial relations.

In addition, the abundance of such examples of “pragmatic” conversions, as Barbara Andaya warns, should not lead us to underestimate female perceptions of conversion as a way of advancing their spiritual ambition and reputation or, I would add, to dismiss the meaning and effect of conversion via intermarriage upon migrant men.⁶³ As the stories of family conflicts explored above reveal, conversion in the context of intermarriage was not a mere formality, a symbolic identification with no real consequence. Ngwe Bwint, as far as we know, shared her husband’s expectation that their son marry a Muslim woman. The refusal by Ngwe Ya’s wife to convert to Islam and, possibly, his “reversion” to Buddhism under her influence resulted in his disinheritance. In her testimony, Ma Thai confessed to have had little understanding of the “kala customs” of marriage ceremony, as she put it, that she underwent to wed Abdul Hadee. Yet she also expressed interest in learning about them and in going to the mosque. Even in cases of intermarriage without conversion—or none that the British colonial civil court recognized as conversion—such as that of Seniyappa and Ma Me, who remained Hindu and Buddhist, respectively, their long marital life crossed religious conventions and communities. Ma Me accompanied her spouse to the Hindu temple, and Seniyappa went with her to the pagoda to worship. Intermarriage and conversion were not simple matters in Burma prior to the twentieth century. These intimate acts were already imbued with potent social, spiritual, and political implications. For both British and Burmese governments, and migrants and natives, intermarriage and conversion represented powerful institutions of transformation and transgression.