The Lady and the Peacock Read Free Page A

Empire, as the foreigners introduced systems and ideas that improved living standards for many, more and more middle-class and ruling-class subjects would become, to a greater or lesser degree, complicit with the rulers. The pain of subjugation softened with the passing of generations, as the native elite was absorbed into the “steel frame” of the empire, the bureaucratic superstructure that kept the whole enterprise ticking over. That helps to explain why, in some quarters, one can still find nostalgia for the Raj, right across the subcontinent.
    But the Burmese experience was very different. 6 It started very late: Lower Burma, centered on Rangoon, was seized during the first Anglo-Burmese War in 1824, and was rapidly denatured as the British threw open the gates. Within a couple of decades Burmese residents found themselves a minority in their own city, bystanders to its transformation. In the north, Burmese kings still ruled: a tradition sanctified, guided and held in check by the
sangha
, the organization of Buddhist monks which had underpinned the nation’s spiritual and political life since the eleventh century, retaining that role through innumerable wars and several changes of dynasty.
    But in 1885 the British finished the job, storming Mandalay, the last seat of the kings, sacking the palace, burning much of the ancient library and sending King Thibaw and his queen Supayalat into exile in western India. They brought the whole kingdom into the Indian system, governing it from the Viceroy’s palace in Calcutta, and supplementing or replacing the local rulers who had been the king’s allies with British administrators. They brought in tens of thousands of troops to suppress the rebellions that kept breaking out, until the Pax Britannica prevailed across the country.
    But by the time Burma had been subdued, the Indians across the border were themselves becoming restless. The Indian National Congress had been founded in 1885, the year the Burmese monarchy was abolished, and rapidly became the focus for Indian hopes of self-government. The First World War weakened the empire dramatically. The arrival of Mohandas Gandhi from South Africa gave Congress a leader of unique charisma and creativity, and the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in 1919 brought home the fact that British rule was a confidence trick, with hundreds of millions of Indians kept in check by a threat of force that the few thousand British in residence could never carry out effectively.
    Across the Naga Hills, the Burmese drank the fresh ignominy of beingcolonial subjects to colonial subjects. Peasants tilling the paddy fields were trapped into debt by the Indian moneylenders who fanned out across the country. In Rangoon, foreign shopkeepers and businessmen grew rich exploiting the naïve natives. With the abolition of the monarchy, things fell apart. In lower Burma the British had refused to accept the authority of the
thathanabaing
, the senior monk authorized by the king to maintain the discipline and guide the teachings of the country’s hundreds of thousands of monks, and in his absence local Buddhist sanghas lost their direction. 7 Then, sixty years later, King Thibaw was exiled and the monarchy destroyed. It was the coup de grâce.
    The first nationalist stirrings in Burma came out of Buddhism and the Buddhist clergy. Traditionally, soon after dawn each morning, in every town and village in the land, monks in their maroon robes would tramp in file through the lanes, their big lacquer bowls extended for alms. They were the potent local symbols of a moral, theological and political system that had governed people’s lives throughout Burmese history and which, according to their belief system, gave them their best hope of nirvana. The monks enshrined and sanctified the authority of the Buddhist king, and the people, by giving the monks alms, and by inscribing their own sons in the monastery when they were