Notes
CHAPTER 5 Burmese Buddhist Exceptionalism
In intimate social intercourse, the determining factors are intermarriage, interdining, and the visiting together of temples and churches. These factors are absent in the social intercourse of Burmans with Indians, while they are present in that of Burmans with Europeans and Anglo-Indians. A Burman is seldom admitted into a mosque or a Hindu temple, and much less to an Indian religious function, while all pagodas and Buddhist religious functions are open to all the nationalities of the world.
—Taw Sein Ko, “Burmans and Indians” (1913)
“In social matters, it is true, that Burmans and Indians are wide apart,” was what the Cambridge-educated civil servant and Orientalist Taw Sein Ko had to say when asked by the Royal Commission on Public Services in India (1913) to comment on the “impression that Burmans have a prejudice against Indians.”1 According to him, the Burmese perceived Indians to be an unsociable kind who shunned gracious attempts by the Burmese Buddhist to create relationships of exchange, reciprocity, and conviviality through offerings of food (“interdining”), women (“intermarriage”), and rituals (“religious functions”).
Himself a Sino-Burmese, his assessment of the state of Burmese-Indian “social intercourse” was likely informed by his unfavorable opinion about Indians. It is no secret that he described the Chinese as more tolerant than “Mohammedans and Hindus.”2 The son of a Hokkien merchant and a Shan princess, he climbed up the ranks of the ICS to become an influential political intermediary and translator between the British, Burmese, and the Chinese. He no doubt saw himself as an epitome of the compatibility of the Chinese and the Burmese and the success of Sino-Burmese relations.
Yet his opinion about Indians in Burma was not uncommon at the time. It became more prevalent in the subsequent decade, as indicated by the speeches Mohandas K. Gandhi gave during his two-week visit to Burma in 1929.3 In one, he admonished migrant Indians for failing to share the lot of the Burmese and urged that they check their “habit” of “causing harm” to their hosts.4 In a confidential report on Burma presented at the All India Congress Committee on 27 March 1929, Gandhi explained that there was, “in the growing national consciousness, resentment against Indians carrying on intercourse with Burmese women without any formal marriage.”5 And in a letter addressed to “Gujaratis Resident in Burma,” written after his return to India, he again brought up the issue of marriage among Burmese women and Indian men:
My feeling is that the Indians have been taking advantage of the innocence of these simple women. The educated people of Burma do not approve of the conduct of the Indians with regard to their women. It would not pain them if Indians married Burmese girls with proper ceremony, but I could see they intensely dislike those who merely indulge in their sexual urge. Indians ought to keep their conduct in this matter above board.6
Such complaints about “the conduct of the Indians with regard to [Burmese] women” circulated widely in the 1920s amid a geopolitical campaign for the administrative separation of Burma from India. In one typical example published in Thuriya Magazine (The Sun Magazine), a pioneering Burmese-language magazine that was known for its criticisms of the British administration, a cartoon demeaned an assorted group of male foreigners—a Muslim Indian wearing a fez, a Sikh Indian wearing a turban, and two Chinese wearing the queue, among others—as mosquitoes sucking the blood out of “Mother Burma” under the watchful eyes of the British colonial master hovering above them (fig. 5.1).7
Memorandums pleading for separation flooded the newspapers in the wake of a visit by the Indian Statutory Commission in January 1929 to assess the possibility of constitutional reforms.8 They denounced the suffering of “the sons of the soil” in the face of the unchecked tide of “an innumerable number of the poorer Indians, of an alien faith, or a foreign race.”9 Cheap Indian labor, they complained, had displaced Burmese labor, while Indian financiers came to Burma only to “return to their homes carrying away with them large sums of money.”10 One memorandum likened Burma to “a milch cow” that was being milked dry by “a clever Indian milkman” and warned that the continued connection of Burma with India—“what with their very meagre and frugal style of living,” “their low standard of civilization in matters of social life and ideals and outlook so opposed to those of the Burmese people,” and “their caste system so repugnant to the Burmese people”—could only mean “ruin and starvation to the Burmese people.”11
What Taw Sein Ko neglected to point out, and what Gandhi failed to recognize, was that amyo gya (Others) in general, not only Indians, were accused of abusing the hospitality of the Burmese. Thus, in their frequent expression of discontent with the amyo gya, the popular magazine Myanmar Alin (The Light of Burma) spared not one category of amyo gya from criticism. Also, while confirming Taw Sein Ko’s claim about the widening chasm between Burmese and Indians, these publications disagreed on one crucial point. The problem was not that there was no intermarriage between these groups—there was too much of it, in fact—but that sexual intimacy did not translate into social intimacy.
FIGURE 5.1. “Mother Burma”: a cartoon in Thuriya Magazine, September 1926. Source: Thuriya Magazine, September 1926, 100.
An editorial published in February 1912 with the English title “National Deterioration” and the Burmese subtitle “The deterioration of the Burmese” expounded on these concerns. The foreigners of today were an ungracious group that prevailed upon the Burmese to abandon their own amyo by adopting the dress and habits of outsiders, it complained. It lamented, furthermore, that the marriage of Burmese women to these “foreign guests” no longer helped assimilate the men because the children were absorbed into the amyo of the father rather than the amyo of the mother. “Burma welcomes the arrival of foreign men, giving them ready access to Burmese women who marry English men, Chinese men, and Indian men,” but, it protested, “the reverse is not the case.”12 “Burmese men are not granted the same degree of mobility—they are not admitted into other countries—and have no access to foreign women. As such, people of other religion, race, and nationality can propagate their kind through intermarriage while Burmese men are denied the opportunity to similarly regenerate our own kind through intermarriage.”13 In sum, the Burmese amyo was degenerating due to the arrival of unassimilable “foreign guests” who jealously guarded their patrilineage.
Boycott Foreign Husbands!
The countless commentaries on the amyo gya in Burma published at the time followed a similar script that culminated in the condemnation of the inequitable taking of “our women” by alien men. Amyo gya were not satisfied with dispossessing the Burmese of their land, natural resources, and businesses; they also took possession of Burmese women while denying Burmese men access to “their women.” Amyo gya men thereby robbed the Burmese of the means of economic production and social reproduction. Under foreign occupation and incursion, the Burmese deteriorated not only into precarious proletariats—“groveling squatters in our own country,”14 as one article put it—but also into a castrated amyo whose women became the property of amyo gya patriarchs.
The outcry over the amyo gya spilled out into the streets as the pioneering women’s organizations of the country made “the problem of intermarriage” their cause célèbre. The opening salvo was fired on 11 July 1921 during a demonstration against the imprisonment of U Ottama (1879–1939). The first pongyi to be jailed by the British, the Arakanese monk was the most famous member of the General Council of Burmese Associations (GCBA, f. 1911), the largest political organization in British Burma. He was also a protégé of the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA, f. 1908), an organization formed by England-educated Burmese civil servants who were outspoken critics of the Christian missionary-dominated system of government education, holding it accountable for “Burman decay,” namely, the diminished knowledge of the teachings of the Buddha (thathana) and “pride of race” among the Burmese. Upon his return to Burma in 1918 from a long stint in India, where he forged a close relationship with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, and a global tour that included stops in China, the United States, Egypt, and Japan, he emerged as a conduit for elite urban-centered sociopolitical formations such as the YMBA and the GCBA to connect with rural audiences. He came to be known as the “Gandhi of Burma” for mobilizing mass support for nonviolent anticolonial boycotts of imported products that were inspired by Gandhi’s swadeshi (Indigenous goods) movement in India.
Though memorialized as one of Burma’s earliest national martyrs, what Ottama preached about, mainly, was the deterioration of the Burmese Buddhist amyo under British colonial rule.15 “Out of taxes paid by Buddhists,” he argued, in calling for the boycott of government taxes, “missionaries of an alien religion are being paid and fed and provided for while the monk is being deprived of his natural living.”16 He exhorted young pongyi to leave their monasteries to defend the thathana against the threat of British colonialism. The young monastic followers of Ottama, in turn, propelled the rapid growth of village-level wunthanu athin (religion and lineage protection societies) and their women-led, sister associations, wunthanu konmaryi athin (young women’s religion and lineage protection societies).17
In fact, Ottama arguably had more in common with contemporaneous Buddhist and Hindu ideologues such as Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) and Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) than Burmese nationalists.18 We know that he was in contact with Tilak, who was imprisoned at the Central Jail in Mandalay from 1908 until 1914 as a political prisoner in exile, and likely also crossed paths with Dharmapala, who visited Burma on many occasions. The former valorized the “Hindu past” in India and deplored the material and spiritual devastation of Hindus under non-Hindu “foreign” rulers (i.e., Muslims and the British), while the latter, the man most closely associated with Buddhist revivalism and nationalism in Lanka, was preoccupied with the state of Buddhist dispensation under colonial rule.19
And like his Buddhist and Hindu contemporaries, Ottama instrumentalized the vernacular press to propagate his messages, which resulted in his arrest in 1921 on the charge of inciting “disaffection”: the British colonial parlance for sedition. His offense? He had published a letter addressed to the then lieutenant governor of Burma, Reginald Craddock, in Thuriya, his favorite medium of publication run by the YMBA and GCBA founder and ally Ba Pe. Entitled “Craddock, go home!,” the letter attacked what Ottama and many other politicians in the country perceived as a miserly proposal for constitutional reform by Craddock, one under which all power continued to reside with the office of the governor.
His imprisonment by the British administration triggered public protests attended by not only young pongyi but also his large following among women. According to one estimate, provided by a lawyer from Pyinmana to the British authorities, around forty thousand women had come together at one point to decry the trial of Ottama.20 It might have been at this precise gathering of women in support of Ottama, or perhaps at another. Either way, members of wunthanu konmaryi athin began appealing to Burmese Buddhist women to quit marrying amyo gya.
Two other women’s organizations mounted similar calls to boycott amyo gya husbands: the Young Women’s Buddhist Association (YWBA) and the Burmese Women’s Association (BWA). Like the wunthanu konmaryi athin, they were formed as the women’s organs of the YMBA and the GCBA, respectively, and formulated their mission as the preservation of the Burmese Buddhist amyo. They pleaded with Burmese Buddhist women to boycott amyo gya husbands, framing the conjugal boycott as an integral strategy in the broader campaign of noncooperation with the British. One of the first organized actions of the members of these women’s associations was to condemn the use of imported clothes and textiles and to wear blouses made of pinni (light brown, homespun cotton) and longyi with local yaw designs originating in the western hill tracts of Burma.21 The conjugal boycott of amyo gya men reinforced such embodied acts of resistance.
In addition, the BWA, whose three-hundred-some members had extensive personal and professional ties to Burmese lawmakers serving in the legislature, demanded legislative action on intermarriage. They appealed, in the name of the Burmese Buddhist amyo, for legal reforms that would prevent a Burmese Buddhist woman from forfeiting her spousal and property rights through her marriage to an amyo gya.
These women-organized agitations intensely politicized the female body as the embodiment of self-determination. In a sharp historical reversal, the body of the lay Buddhist female displaced the male body of the monk—who must renounce all carnal temptations, especially food, alcohol, and sex—as the primary focus of disciplinary control and asceticism. Inspired by the Gandhian swaraj (self-rule) movement and its emphasis on renunciatory bodily practice such as celibacy, vegetarianism, fasting, and the wearing of khadi (homespun cloth), women emerged as the primary target of this method of achieving self-government in Burma as in India.22 Gandhi had in fact urged his women followers to renounce marriage altogether and devote themselves to the swaraj cause. “Religion and lineage protection societies” in Burma too envisioned the virgin bodies of Burmese women, untouched by foreign goods and men, as the bastion of Burmese sovereignty.
Unsurprisingly, when the all-male Legislative Council finally debated, in 1927, a proposal for marriage reform, it was a motion for the “Application of Dhammathats to Marriages between Burmese Women and Foreigners.” Po Hla, the councilman behind the motion, explained the need for the reform as follows:
When a woman of Burma marries a foreigner and the marriage is contracted under the Burma Buddhist Dhammathats, the marriage is not valid. The marriage has to be contracted under the laws of their husbands who are foreigners. The women of Burma are therefore in a peculiar position quite different from their sisters of other countries. And this is a grievance not only to the women who marry foreigners but also to their children begotten by such union. For example, if a Chinaman marries a Burmese Buddhist woman and if he dies one day his wife has no right to his estate, although many children may have been born[,] because she is a woman. The sons only are entitled to the estate. If there are daughters, they also have no claim. Why? Because the Chinese Customary Law is applied.23
U Pu, the next Burmese councilman to speak, reassured his peers that the proponents of the motion had “no desire [for] the foreigners to leave the country.” “Let those who come here without their partners marry the women of our country but let the Dhammathats prevail,” he pleaded, adding:
A Hindu must be born a Hindu. Conversion will not mend matters. The marriage of a Hindu man with our Burmese woman is not valid although there may be a dozen issues. This is how we suffer. Again a Burmese woman must be a Mahomedan convert when she marries a Mahomedan. After her conversion to Mahomedanism, her husband can claim the liberty of marrying as many as four wives. In case the husband desires to divorce a Burmese wife, he has to pronounce the talak three times and thereupon she has to run away from the house.24
Councilman Kya Gaing declared that many Burmese lawyers like himself frequently encountered such cases of “legal disability” when Burmese women discovered, upon the death of their foreign husbands, that their children were illegitimate and that they had “forfeited the rights which their sisters, who married in their own religion, enjoy.”25 One councilman after another stressed that this was a far cry from the precolonial days when the dhammasat governed the marital affairs of all Burmese subjects. They agreed that the situation had reached a tipping point, threatening the “extinction” of the Burmese nation. “Besides taking our country and our property (they) take our sisters,” U Pu decried, pointing out that fighting over constitutional changes would prove futile if the Burmese nation was to “become half-caste by gradual extinction.”26
The lone Burmese councilman to oppose the motion, Kyaw Dun, did so not because he disagreed with these characterizations of intermarriage but rather out of his conviction that the legislature ought to prevent the practice altogether rather than pass resolutions that “amount[ed] to encouraging Burmese girls to marry foreigners.” He inveighed against such marriages, proclaiming that there was no greater mistake than “for a woman to choose a wrong husband and flout her own religion.”27
Many of the concerns that the Burmese legislators raised were legal conundrums to which British jurists were quite sensitive, as shown in chapter 4. Because the councilmen were themselves lawyers with knowledge of the ambiguities and conflicts internal to the colonial system of personal law, they framed their grievances about intermarriage as a problem of “legal disability” for the Burmese Buddhist wives and their children. Yet, and as councilman Tun Win expounded, the point was “to protect the Burmese women and children begotten by marriage with foreigners, and [emphasis added] also to preserve the Burmese nation and the Buddhist religion.”28
The solution that the Burmese legislators urged was correspondingly legalistic: a more extensive application of Buddhist law that would supersede the personal laws of amyo gya. This would restore to Burmese women their rights to family and property of which they had been robbed through a patriarchal alliance among amyo gya men. While the proposed solution challenged the judicial edifice of British colonial rule, the justifications for the solution summoned staple Orientalist tropes of marriage and family: propensity for polygyny and unilateral repudiation (talaq) by Muslim husbands, preference for sons among the Chinese, and aversion to polygyny among the Burmese. It also reinforced the British characterization of intermarriage as the outmarriage of the Burmese wife, thereby reifying the legal fiction that underpinned the colonial legal system: that the subject population in Burma was made up of discrete and irreconcilable religious and racial communities. The coming together of these disparate communities necessitated the degeneration of the Burmese Buddhist amyo.
The assertion that intermarriage was leading to the “extinction” of the Burmese Buddhist amyo also appropriated the pseudoscience of eugenics that viewed reproduction and conjugal sexuality as important public—and national—concerns. In the first decades of the twentieth century, eugenics emerged globally as a scientific pursuit as heated debates over degeneracy and population decline took place.29 At the International Eugenics Congresses in 1912, 1921, and 1932, eugenics experts claimed that there were biological explanations to social disparities and that a selective breeding of the finest human traits would improve “the human race.” Influenced by eugenics, campaigns to uplift the working class out of poverty and emancipate women from involuntary motherhood and social inequity expanded. Emancipatory movements—whether emancipation of women, proletariats, or nations—across the world engaged racist theories of evolution and progress that tied biology to the social and the political.30
Perhaps the Burmese legislators found inspiration in the aggressive rhetoric against “half-castes” and “racial amalgamation” that the British used to denounce the sexual relations of British women and non-British men. Certainly, they deployed that very same rhetoric in their condemnations of intermarriage in Burma. At the same time, they introduced novel elements to an otherwise familiar cocktail of colonial imageries. Councilmen alleged that the very men who wore Burmese dress, professed to be Hindu and Buddhist, and married Burmese women objected to the marriage of their daughters to a Burmese Buddhist. “So it is the case with Chinamen,” Tun Win complained:
When a Chinaman takes a Burmese girl we do not object. We are tolerant people. But when a Burman boy happens to take one of the Chinese girls begotten by the Burmese lady, then they raise a hue and cry, and the boy is taken to Court. As a lawyer I have defended many cases of kidnapping. The girl may have attained the age of 16 or more, but the Chinese father will press his prosecution for kidnapping. And a Mahomedan too is the same.31
Though formulated as a critique of the possessiveness of foreign men, the common refrain that Burmese men were denied access to “their” women while foreign men took “our sisters” was about Burmese men’s envious desire to possess women. While attempting to legislate against marriage between amyo gya men and Burmese women, the councilmen saw no irony in the fact that one of several wives of a fellow legislator, the Arakanese Paw Tun, was an American, Sarah Elizabeth Jewett. Paw Tun was unscathed, as was the celebrated Arakanese barrister and legal expert Chan Toon (1867–1904), who returned to Burma from London with an Irish wife, Mabel Mary Agnes Cosgrove. If we are to trust Cosgrove’s memoir of their marriage, published as a novel the year after the death of her husband, England-educated Burmese men like Chan Toon and the English expatriate community alike viewed the marriage of a white woman to a native, even a rich and decorated one like Chan Toon, as an honor and “a triumph” for the latter. In retrospect, Cosgrove had little doubt that Chan Toon, in marrying her, “had been far-seeing[,] and calculating on many advantages to accrue”; for him, the marriage was a way “to mix on terms of equality with the English people” and “a step so far in advance of anything hitherto”—even his scholarly and professional achievements.32
This characterization of Chan Toon by Cosgrove may have been exaggerated. She made no secret of her resentment toward him and what she portrayed as a wretched and abusive marriage. But the fact is that Burmese councilmen attempted to impose legal constraints on “marriages between Burmese women and foreigners” but not on those between Burmese men and foreigners. It confirms that they sought to reconstitute—not reject—the sexual double standard of European empires that promised white men unhampered access to the bodies and properties of women of subject races while systematically denying colonized men (and white women) the same privileges. From their perspective, the vitality of the Burmese Buddhist amyo was intertwined with the virility of Burmese Buddhist men.
While mounted in the name of saving Burmese Buddhist women and their rights to family and property, the motion to bring intermarriage into the jurisdiction of Burmese Buddhist law was an attempt at Burmese Buddhist remasculinization and regeneration. Besides proposing to bring marriage, family, and property under the authority of the male-dominated government, the Burmese legislators sought to police the sexual and moral conduct of Burmese women. As such, it is not ironic that their critique of colonial law turned out to be anything but empowering for the women. In the narratives of the legislators, the Burmese wife of a foreigner was not just an obliging wife (as characterized by British jurists). She was an unsuspecting “girl” who was duped into a fraudulent marriage, too young to understand the “great mistake” she made in choosing “a wrong husband” and “flouting her own religion.” Burmese legislators ascribed to the women an incapacity to think for themselves and laid the grounds for denying Burmese women the right to consent to intermarriage and conversion.
Bargaining with Patriarchy
What priorities drove women’s organizations that proclaimed to champion Burmese women to ally with politicians who, in the name of the Buddhist Burmese amyo, sought to restrict the ability of women to control their intimate lives? The speeches of early women organizers and leaders in Burma have not been recorded for posterity to my knowledge. In general, the political activism of women in Burma has been deemed unworthy of documentation in government archives and chronicles of the nation. How the women envisioned their role and purpose as wunthanu agents has been assigned little historical value. What has mattered is the simple fact that they rallied behind their men and amyo. However, the speeches of one prominent member of the BWA who was known and beloved by the British and the Burmese political elites for her advocacy of Burmese women’s rights have survived. Her name was Mya Sein (1904–1988), and she emerged as the face of the international campaign against intermarriage among Burmese Buddhist women.
Often referred to as “Miss May Oung” by the British, Mya Sein was the daughter of a well-known Arakanese couple, Thein Mya and May Oung. The latter was a famous attorney, judge, and ICS officer who, as home member on the Legislative Council (1924–1926), held one of the highest government positions open to Burmese people in British Burma. He was a founding member and president of the YMBA and a vociferous Buddhist revivalist. To him, to be a Burman was to be Buddhist, and the “lack of national feeling” that plagued the Burmese would be remedied only by a return to the teachings of the Buddha.33 Though regarded by some scholars as personifying the “dawn of nationalism in Burma,”34 May Oung’s invocation of “national feeling” should not lead us to underestimate the thoroughly transnational scope and orientation of his sociopolitical affiliations and activities, like those of Ottama and, for that matter, his aunt Mya May. Mya May was a patron of the International Buddhist Society who financed and accompanied Buddhist missions to England, France, and Germany. She also sponsored and participated in a range of local efforts to revive Buddhism, beginning with the establishment of the Empress Victoria Buddhist Boys’ and Girls’ Schools in Burma, appointing May Oung the headmaster of the former.35 Their shared conviction in the urgency of reviving the thathana played no small part in Mya May’s arrangement of the marriage of her niece Thein Mya and May Oung.
Mya Sein followed in her father’s footsteps. She earned a master’s degree from St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University, in 1927 and a diploma in education in 1928. She returned to Burma to become a superintendent of a girls’ high school and a leading figure in several women’s organizations, serving as the secretary of the BWA.
In 1931, Mya Sein was presented with two opportunities to expound on her views on the international stage. The first, taking place in January in Lahore, was the All-Asian Women’s Conference. Organized by leading feminists in India, it gathered thirty-five delegates and over one hundred visitors from across Asia to “promote the consciousness of unity among women of Asia” and “take stock of the qualities of Oriental civilization so as to preserve them for national and world service,” among other objectives.36 The second, the Burma Round Table Conference (27 November 1931–12 January 1932) in London, represented the culmination of a series of commissions and conferences that were convened by the British government to assess constitutional reforms in India and Burma. The conclusion reached at the first Round Table Conference (12 November 1930–19 January 1931) was that Burma, like India, would be given a greater degree of self-government under revised constitutional structures and, in addition, would gain separation from India. In the aftermath of this conclusion, a separate Round Table Conference for Burma was called, with twenty-six delegates from Burma in attendance, for the purpose of deliberating the outlines of a constitution for a self-governing Burma separated from India.
What distinguished these two conferences was not just the nature of the occasions and the publicity that the latter generated but also their timing. The conferences occurred shortly after the world plunged into the catastrophic economic crisis known as the Great Depression (1929–1939), catapulting an unprecedented number of Burmese people into lives of unemployment, poverty, and indebtedness.37 It precipitated the largest peasant uprising in Burmese history, aimed at the expulsion of the British, that lasted for two years starting in December 1930 and left nearly 1,700 dead.38 In urban areas, labor strikes and race riots ensued. What the colonial administration called the anti-Indian riots of 1930—and, later, “the first anti-Indian riots”—began as a scuffle between the 2,000 some Indian migrant dockworkers who were on a strike for a wage increase and the group of Burmese laborers who had been brought in as strike breakers; it left at least 120 people, mostly Indian, dead.39 This was followed by the anti-Chinese riots of January 1931: an altercation between a Cantonese noodle hawker and a Burmese customer turned into a weeklong rampage in Rangoon and nearby towns that forced Chinese residents to flee Rangoon.40
Amid this turmoil, the Dobama Asi Ayone (“We Burmese” or “Our Burmans” Association), modeled after the Irish nationalist Sinn Féin Party (“We Ourselves” or “Ourselves Alone” Party in Irish), published a manifesto inciting “self-respecting” Burmese people to be “unruly” (maik). Founded in 1930, Dobama Asi Ayone represented a new generation of young, urban, left-leaning intellectuals and activists who titled themselves thakin (master) to symbolize their goal of returning Burma to its rightful masters, the Burmese. From its inception, the group discouraged kabya Burmese from identifying as a foreign people and “pure” (sin sit) Burmese from admiring the foreign.41 The manifesto, however, carried a decidedly adversarial, anti-Indian message. It repeatedly invoked “the Indian foreign guests who insulted the Burmese masters of the house,” referring to the Indian dockworkers who fought with the Burmese strikebreakers in the 1930 riots. It claimed, with sarcasm, that the Burmese should be grateful toward Indians because “their insulting us made us discern with clarity our abjection.” “Don’t hate the Indians,” the manifesto urged, advocating that what was needed was for the Burmese “to love one another more.”42 This was no endorsement of nonviolence. Instead, the manifesto issued a clarion call to the Burmese to stop being gracious and obliging and start disobeying and rebelling. “It is time to get offensive. It is time to be truly maik. Let us be maik.”43
Such was the backdrop against which Mya Sein spoke as a representative of Burma, which may explain her bullish comments at the All-Asian Women’s Conference. Throughout the conference, its organizers and attendees referenced Burmese and other “Buddhist” women (namely, Sri Lankan) as exceptional Asian women, unencumbered by “Oriental defects” and far ahead of not only other women of Asia but also of the “Occident.” The adulation for Burmese women was to be expected. The organizers of the conference had long lauded Burmese women as the Oriental model of womanhood to be emulated. In her capacity as the joint secretary of the Women’s Indian Association and the editor of the association’s monthly journal, Woman’s Duty (Stri Dharma), the Irish theosophist-feminist Margaret Cousins (1878–1954) described Burmese women as “possibly the freest women in the East, taken all around,” unfettered by either “caste system, purdah nor early marriage.”44 She praised Burma as a country that had “long given to her daughters social equality and liberty.”45 The Hindi writer, editor, and political activist Rameshwari Nehru (1886–1966), who was a fellow organizer of the conference, published numerous accounts of Burmese women in the Hindi monthly Women’s Mirror (Stri Darpan), which she edited, describing the Burmese wife as “a true friend and companion of her husband.”46
Feminists such as Cousins and Nehru did not blindly appropriate colonial constructions of Burmese women discussed in the previous chapter. They drew on self-images of Burmese Buddhist womanhood crafted and circulated by women like Mya Sein’s great aunt Mya May. A 1903 essay titled “The Women of Burma” that she contributed to the inaugural issue of the quarterly journal Buddhism, the official publication of the International Buddhist Society, offers an early example. In it, she wrote that it was because of the teachings of the Buddha that “unlike other Oriental women,” the Burmese woman “is free and happy.”47 It was the reason “that in all the details of life—in the holding of property, in trade, in marriage, in divorce, in right to the children she has borne—she is everywhere regarded, not as the subordinate, the chattel and the slave of man, but as his loved co-worker, his dear companion in the work and play of life.” “There are but few Burmese women, even in the villages,” she added, “who are unable to read and write.”48
Her comment about female education betrays the conceit of such congratulatory images of Burmese women. When she founded the Empress Victoria Buddhist Girls’ School in 1897, it was the only Buddhist school for girls in Rangoon, serving a student population of sixty.49 According to the government census of 1901, only 4.4 percent of the Buddhist female population in Burma were literate compared with 41 percent of the corresponding male population. After a decade, this figure only increased to 6 percent.50 Mya May could not have been unaware of the deficiency of female education in much of Burma.
The Burmese delegates to the All-Asian Women’s Conference perpetuated such misleading portrayals of Burmese women. Mya Shwe, the first to speak and an educator like Mya Sein, informed the attendees that Burmese women possessed rights equal to men and “mostly led lives economically independent of their husbands.”51 During the session titled “Motherhood, Polygamy and Traffic in Women,” she claimed that “the public opinion” was so strongly against polygamy in Burma that there were “very few cases where a man really has the courage to marry more than one wife.” And she told the audience that the last Burmese monarch had only one wife, “who evidently ruled him well.”52 Both assertions were deceptive: women in Burma continued to sue their Buddhist husbands in court for keeping additional wives or cohabiting with other women, and the last king of Burma, Thibaw, had multiple wives.53
Mya Sein, the Burmese delegate who had the most speaking time, also downplayed challenges confronting women in Burma. Medical care for women and children was inadequate, she acknowledged, but insisted that they did not suffer from “civilizational defects” apparent in other parts of Asia.54 “The Burmese Buddhist woman,” she observed, “is a joint owner of property with her husband” and is “virtually the head of the family and sometimes its sole support.”55 Yet, she stressed, “if a Burmese Buddhist woman married a Mahommedan, Hindu, or a Christian, she loses her rights, such as joint ownership of property, preferential right to inherit, divorce.” Emphasizing that mixed marriages had placed Burmese women “in a highly disadvantageous position,” she concluded that if women of different religions held equal rights, then “we would not need to pass any rules to protect the women of any one country.”56 Far from finding common cause, Mya Sein disparaged her “Oriental sisters” whose subordinate status to men enabled the degradation of Burmese women. If only amyo gya women were more like Burmese Buddhist women, then there would be no need for legislations “to protect” women in Burma. “Oriental sisters,” like their male counterparts, were a liability for Burmese Buddhist women.
Mya Sein was more circumspect in her comments at the Burma Round Table Conference, which she kept brief, perhaps on account of that fact that her attendance as the only woman delegate had been contested right up until the eve of the conference. The British administration in Burma had proposed that the more senior Mya May, not Mya Sein, be the lone woman delegate in her capacity as the vice president of the BWA. However, Mya May insisted that Mya Sein accompany her to participate in the conference as a delegate. When her wishes were rebutted, she threatened to organize a boycott of the conference by the entire Burmese delegation. Only on the eve of the conference did the male Burmese delegates, who included friends of the late May Oung (who had passed away in 1926), request that Mya Sein be permitted to participate in the conference as their only woman delegate.57 She was a token presence.
In her speech, Mya Sein stressed that women in Burma held “from time immemorial” a high social, economic, and political position: “We inherit equally with our brothers, and we have rights to our own property. Marriage in Burma is a civil contract, and I think that in no other country in the world do a man and his wife live in such equal partnership as in Burma.”58 In an interview with London’s Daily Herald immediately after the roundtable conference, published under the title “The Land of Happy Marriage,” Mya Sein elaborated on her argument about the equality of marital relations in Burma (fig. 5.2). Less than a month later, the interview was reproduced in toto in Burmese in Thuriya under a different title: “Burmese Women and Marriage” (“Myanmar amyo thami mya hnit ein daung hmu”).59 She described marriage in Burma as “a perfect partnership” based on “absolute equality,” “common consent,” “joint earning,” and “joint inheritance,” resulting in “no feelings of sex superiority or jealousy.” “Another factor that helps to promote matrimonial happiness,” she pointed out, was that under the Buddhist law, wills were not valid: “For example, should a wife, who has property of her own, die before her husband he inherits as a matter of course, and the same law prevails should the husband be the one to die first.” Acknowledging that even Burma was “not a matrimonial utopia,” Mya Sein added that when marital complications arose, a husband and wife could “obtain a divorce in the same way as they married—by mutual consent.” She was quick to insist, however, that divorce was a rarity in Burma because there were “so many contented married couples for the reasons I have explained.”60
Mya Sein thus equated marriage in Burma with the modern companionate marriage ideal, premised on individual consent, desire, and satisfaction rather than duty, obligation, and a procreative mandate. She next asserted that the “perfect equality upon which our happy partnerships are based” reflected the broader culture of sex equality in the country. “The Burmese woman has no inferiority complex, because there is no sex exclusion,” she proclaimed and continued: “We are responsible for our own actions and therefore, when married, we are not just someone’s husband or someone’s wife.” She reassured the reader that this individuality and independence of Burmese women did not make them “less home-loving,” just ideal companions.61
Mya Sein, like her aunt Mya May, constructed a mythical figure of the Burmese Buddhist woman, presumed to be happier and freer than “any other Oriental woman.” In her hands, Burmese Buddhist women were no longer real women with real problems such as illiteracy and marital unhappiness. They were an icon of the Burmese Buddhist amyo. In so doing, Mya Sein sacralized the conflation of Burmese women with Buddhism. The reason the Burmese woman was such a rare specimen of the female sex, one that knew no “inferiority complex” nor “sex exclusion,” was Buddhism, she posited. All women of Burma, regardless of their batha, had benefitted from the unparalleled liberty and equality made possible by the operation of Burmese Buddhist law. Without this sacred gift, a Burmese woman was a secondary sex condemned to a life of inferiority and subordination. Equally sacrosanct was the duty of Burmese women to safeguard this heritage and its transmission to future generations of Burmese women—that is, through marriage to fellow Burmese Buddhist men and abstinence from intermarriage and conversion.
FIGURE 5.2. “The Land of Happy Marriage”: Mya Sein’s interview with the Daily Herald. Source: Daily Herald, 7 December 1931, 8. By permission of the Daily Herald.
It is possible to read Mya Sein’s speech as a geopolitical strategy intended to appeal to the British imperialist ideology of saving native women from Oriental patriarchal oppression. I have myself suggested this line of interpretation in the past, arguing that Burmese nationalists justified their demand for self-rule on the basis that Burmese women needed to be saved from foreign men.62 The refusal by the British government to grant Burma constitutional independence, even as it characterized the colony as essentially incompatible with India, turned the intermarriage and conversion of Burmese Buddhist women into a metonym for the colonial subjugation of Burma as an appendage of British India. The iconized Burmese Buddhist woman allowed the imagination of India as contiguous to Burma but civilizationally distant and, indeed, opposite, and thus requiring separation.
There were good reasons for thinking that the British might be receptive to this alarmist discourse. The British themselves held up the Burmese woman as the rights-bearing autonomous individual idealized by the British political discourse of liberalism. Whether or not the British helped the Burmese to save their women and their propertied rights from Indian patriarchs was a test of Britain’s (and the British Empire’s) stated commitment to liberalism and the protection of individual rights.
I no longer find this reading satisfactory. Mya Sein was not simply challenging the British to honor their purported liberal imperial mission. Like her privileged Burmese Buddhist kinsmen who populated the legislature and political parties, Mya Sein reiterated the notion that “the high status” of Burmese women was in danger of destruction by intermarriage and conversion to push a conservative agenda: the centralization of power in the hands of the Burmese Buddhist amyo just as Burma inched closer to achieving some measure of self-governance. What Mya Sein championed was not the egalitarian “caste-less” society that British colonial officers imagined Burma to be but a social hierarchy premised on religious Others. And in the name of protecting women, she proclaimed the Burmese Buddhist reproductive coupling the only legitimate object of desire for Burmese women. This was the price Burmese women would have to pay to defend their legal rights to family and property against the patriarchal rights of minorities.
Such tethering of the interests of women to those of community and nation in colonial contexts have rarely empowered women.63 At the same time, feminist scholarship on women in right-wing movements such as Hindutva and the Ku Klux Klan has shown that women—even colonized women, even “anti-feminist” women—have empowered themselves as daughters, wives, and mothers of the nation, leveraging these positions to bargain with patriarchal authorities.64 In other words, we should not presume that women like Mya Sein were passive followers of chauvinistic projects, as British colonial officials were known to do.
A case in point was the 1927 demonstration by members of the BWA in support of women’s right to vote and to stand for parliamentary elections. It was co-organized by three BWA members: Mya Sein, Sarah Elizabeth Jewett (the aforementioned American wife of the councilman Paw Tun), and San Youn (1887–1950), popularly known as “Independent Daw San” after her Independent Weekly.65 On the morning of 3 February 1927, the three women led more than a hundred women on to the premises of the Rangoon Municipal Hall and the Legislative Council to show support for a proposal to abolish “the sex-disqualification clause” that prohibited women from running for parliamentary posts. According to Mya Sein, the women demonstrators were all aware that the British construed any attempt by Burmese women to be elected to the council as nationalist. But she insisted that the demonstrators objected to the sex-disqualification clause primarily as feminists.66 What prompted the demonstration was the concurrent struggle in England and India by women to remove sex disqualification on voting and attaining legislative posts and, more immediately, the appointment earlier in the year of Dr. Muthulaksmi Reddi (1886–1968) to the Madras Legislative Council as the first councilwoman in British India.67
The British may have dismissed Burmese women agitators as pawns of their men. But a considerable number of Burmese councilmen must have been convinced that the women would not simply do their bidding if elected to the legislature—enough to produce a coalition of otherwise ideologically opposed councilmen who voted against the motion, defeating it 46 to 31.68 The fact that San Youn was among those shepherding the demonstration, as well as the agenda of the BWA, might have contributed to this belief. She had founded the Independent Weekly just two years prior to the demonstration, right after her second and abusive marriage ended in divorce. The name of the paper, San Youn explained, was inspired by the Irish nationalist paper the Irish Independent and signified her desire for Burma’s freedom as well as her “determination to never return to the shackled life of a salaried worker or a married woman.”69 This rejection of colonization, wage labor, and matrimony as analogous forms of exploitation and oppression presented a stinging critique of marriage. Mirroring her quest for independence, San Youn singlehandedly ran the paper, not only authoring the editorials, headline news, and all its various columns but also managing the day-to-day operations of the press.
San Youn and Mya Sein collaborated as leaders of the BWA. Their activism centered similarly on Burmese Buddhist women. In fact, San Youn made her literary debut with a prize-winning semiautobiographical story, published under the pseudonym “a Burmese Buddhist woman” (buddha batha myanmar ma). Entitled “Khin Aye Kyi” after its Burmese Buddhist heroine, the short story chronicled Khin Aye Kyi’s life of unwavering devotion to the teaching of Burmese language and literature, the propagation of the thathana, and the education of women.70 Like Mya Sein, she failed to publicly reckon with the discriminations immanent in her privileges as a “a Burmese Buddhist woman” and her championing of women as defenders of amyo, batha, and thathana. However, San Youn took a much less sanguine stance than Mya Sein on the state of women in Burma, arguing that female education was a matter of liberating and advancing the Burmese nation. Significantly, and as I have shown elsewhere, from the moment she stepped onto the public stage with the publication of “Khin Aye Kyi,” San Youn urged the people of Burma to trust their women.71 Her message was consistent and resolute: do not deny Burmese Buddhist girls and women the opportunity for education out of fear that government and mission schools would turn them into Christians or degenerate Buddhists; if given the chance, Burmese Buddhist women will prove, like Khin Aye Kyi and herself (who had graduated from a mission school), that they are more than capable of serving as the backbone of the Burmese Buddhist amyo. Her message to and about Burmese Buddhist women diverged markedly from that of the Burmese councilmen.
Through their collaboration with each other and with fellow wunthanu men, women like San Youn, Mya Sein, and Mya May sought to inscribe their own agenda onto visions of the Burmese Buddhist amyo. That they referred to Burmese Buddhist women as not only possessing legal rights to property but also heads of household is revealing. After all, the “head of household,” presumed by the British to be the father or husband, was the paradigmatic rights-bearing, property-owning, political individual. The idealization of Burmese Buddhist women as rights-bearing, property-owning “heads of household” was an attempt to guarantee for the women the right to be recognized as enfranchised individuals whose voice and vote counted. Such women were rewriting the script of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism, refusing to allow it to be monopolized by men.
Their activism also made possible an unprecedented public discussion of “women’s rights” as such. The legislative debate over the application of Burmese Buddhist law to marriages between Burmese women and foreigners resulted in the drafting, in the same year, of the so-called Buddhist Marriage and Divorce Bill (1927): a uniform set of laws that would govern marriage and divorce among all Buddhists in the whole of Burma. The bill spelled out the conditions under which marriage, divorce, and division of joint property could be legally effected among Buddhists. The direct result of the conjugal boycott campaign, therefore, was a piece of legislation that would, when enacted, regulate marriage not between a Buddhist woman and a non-Buddhist man but among Buddhists. It enumerated the rights of Buddhist women—to divorce, property ownership, inheritance, and succession—married to Buddhists, not to “foreigners.”
The bill introduced a number of unprecedented provisions for legally effecting marriage and divorce. It outlawed polygamy and recognized monogamy as the rule among Buddhists in Burma for the first time. “This,” the bill reasoned, “in view of the fact that polygamy is distinctly in disfavour [sic] and very rarely practiced, is not in reality a serious departure from the present law.”72 Yet, back in 1882, the British judge and legal scholar—and, at the time, the judicial commissioner of British Burma—John Jardine declared in one of his authoritative circulars to judges and magistrates that polygamy was condoned “by the Dhammathat as well as by established custom of Buddhists in British Burma.”73 While he subsequently, in 1914, described the Burmese as having become a “monogamous race,”74 a survey of case law across the first few decades of the twentieth century indicates that polygyny was neither rare nor even discouraged among the Burmese.75 And in all of these cases, the presiding judges upheld the idea “that the Buddhist Law recognized polygamy and that a Buddhist might marry at the same time two or more women all of whom have the status of a wife and not that of a concubine.”76
The bill also recognized adultery and cruelty as grounds for divorce despite conceding that “the dhammathats are most nebulous about what matrimonial faults would entail divorce.”77 These provisions were sufficiently interventionist to beget a backlash from self-described Buddhist authorities. Within months of the drafting of the bill, the president of the Rangoon-based Burma Buddhist Mission sent a letter to the secretary to the government of Burma protesting the bill as a ploy to impose on Burma the Christian ideology and practice of monogamy, “a sugar-coated pill in Christianity prepared for the Buddhists to swallow,” as he put it.78 The bill did not become law. And it would take more than a decade for it to be debated again in the legislature.
As the quote above objecting to the Buddhist Marriage and Divorce Bill as “a sugar-coated pill in Christianity” suggests, women leaders and organizers like San Youn and Mya Sein walked a tightrope. Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism gave them an opportunity to bargain with patriarchal authorities, both British and Burmese, to advance social reforms that would have otherwise gained little traction, such as female education, franchise, and political representation; protection of women’s spousal rights; and domestic violence. Doing so made them susceptible to denigration by the British as pawns of Burmese men and denunciations by the Burmese Buddhist as stooges of Christian invaders and other amyo gya. On account of their gender, the women could never shake off the suspicion that their decisions were unduly influenced by others. The double bind of continually reaffirming, on the one hand, their allegiance to Burmese men and amyo and, on the other, their credibility as advocates of social and political change for women, no doubt strained and constrained their ability to forge solidarities with amyo gya women activists as the example of the All-Asian Women’s Conference illustrates. Their promotion of the ideology of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism made them bona fide nationalists, but it cursed their collaboration with amyo gya women.