Category Archives: Southeast Asia

Orwell’s first year on the beat was a catastrophic one for the British police force in Burma. Retired civil servant J. K. Stanford wrote in his memoirs of that time, ‘Everyone had realized what an astounding assortment of malefactors – murderers, dacoits, thieves, robbers, house-breakers, forgers, coiners, blackmailers, and so on – each district possessed. They seemed to spring up like dragon’s teeth. Violent crime in Burma had risen at an alarming rate. Dacoity – defined as crime committed by roving gangs of more than five hooligans – had doubled in the last ten years, as had murder rates, giving Burma the dubious distinction of being the most violent corner of the Indian Empire. As one police report put it: ‘Murder stalks through the land with impunity.’ The sheer brutality of the crimes astounded British administrators. Dacoits raped women and girls as young as eleven, afterwards covering their victims in kerosene-soaked blankets and setting fire to them. There were descriptions of a dacoit king famous for crucifying his victims. The dead body of an Indian was found in a well with a bamboo stick forced up his anus. A monk was lured out of his dwellings to have his throat slit. A fisherman was hacked to death for his daily catch. ‘This year,’ said the police report for 1924, with considerable understatement, ‘has been a very difficult one for the Police.’

Burma’s unprecedented crime wave sent the police force into turmoil, and Orwell found himself right in the deep end. ‘Crime season,’ as the police called it, was between January and June, when the demands of agricultural labor were low. And this was exactly when Orwell began his first posting out in the field. The British police authorities set up countless committees to investigate the root causes of what one report called the ‘bestial savagery’ and to find out how best to deal with it. All police leave during crime season was revoked. Ninety British officers and 13,000 Burmese policemen had to oversee a land of some 13 million people. The Burmese policemen were underpaid and undertrained. Corruption was rampant among magistrates, and criminals were seldom convicted. It was a potentially disastrous situation.

The British authorities desperately searched for solutions. One committee denounced alcohol as a catalyst for murder. The ever present dani [nipa palm], which lined the rivers I had sailed through, could be distilled into a lethal brew, and toddy was attainable from any palm tree. The committee recommended total prohibition for Burmans. Another pointed to the demoralizing influence of the imported adventure movies – mostly violent depictions of America’s Wild West – that were doing the rounds on travelling cinematographs. One officer blamed the high rates of violence on the Delta’s infernal mosquitoes. And there were some, much more disturbing, diagnoses which referred to ‘the innate criminality of the Burmese character’. Only one report ventured to look at the impact of British intervention on Burmese culture: the way in which the British government had removed respected headmen and replaced them with its own bureaucratic counterparts. A Burmese police officer added ‘a minute of dissent’ to one report, pointing out that young Burmese boys now had to attend schools styled on the British educational system and were no longer able to go to the pongyi kyaung, or traditional monastic schools. He felt the government should have had the foresight to see that disabling the country’s centuries-old religious education system would lead to disaster. There is, he wrote, ‘no reason to assume it has come to such a stage that the Burmese people are less moral than any other nation’.

SOURCE: Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, by Emma Larkin (John Murray, 2005), pp. 71-72

In 1923, Orwell came [to Maymyo] for a week’s holiday with Roger Beadon, a fellow probationary assistant district superintendent undergoing police training in Mandalay. Beadon was later one of the few old Burma hands able to remember much about the writer’s time in Burma. It was in Maymyo that Beadon realized that Orwell was not a typical empire builder. He recalled that, though they both enjoyed the trip, Orwell remained aloof the whole time and limited his conversation to what Beadon termed commonplace remarks. ‘I realized that he and I had very little in common, I presumably being an extrovert, he an introvert, living in a world of his own: a rather shy, retiring intellectual.’

Everything in Orwell’s background, however, indicated that he was, almost literally, bred for the Empire. He came from a long line of colonial families. His father’s ancestors had owned Jamaican sugar plantations. His grandfather had been ordained as a deacon in Calcutta, later serving as a priest in Tasmania. And his father spent his entire career in the colonial service in India, overseeing the production of government opium crops. On his mother’s side, Orwell’s family had lived and worked as shipbuilders and teak-traders for three generations in Lower Burma. Orwell himself was born in Motihari, a small town in northern India, and first moved to England, with his mother, shortly before his second birthday. Yet, in Mandalay, Orwell acquired a reputation as someone who didn’t fit in. According to Beadon, Orwell was thought not to be ‘a good mixer’. Beadon described him as a man who was ‘sallow-faced, tall, thin, and gangling, whose clothes, no matter how well-cut, seemed to hang on him’. Beadon spent his time living it up at the Upper Burma Club, playing snooker and dancing, but Orwell ‘cared little for games, and seemed to be bored with the social and Club life’. He preferred to stay behind in his room at the mess, reading, spending most of his time alone – much like John Flory, who, in Burmese Days, ‘took to reading voraciously, and learned to live in books when life was tiresome’.

The social life of Mandalay and Maymyo, it seems, was too hedonistic for the young Orwell.

SOURCE: Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, by Emma Larkin (John Murray, 2005), pp. 42-43

Hla Htut sat reading a collection of Tolstoy’s short stories in a faded deckchair. I gave him my letter of introduction, from a mutual friend in Rangoon. He read it carefully, folded it up, and handed it back to me. With great solemnity he pulled a plastic stool from behind some boxes and offered me a seat. Then he leaned back in his chair, lit a slender cheroot, and confessed that he hates books.

Hla Htut is in his early thirties. He has placid, sculpted features and an easy, slow manner. Since his schooling was disrupted by the government’s frequent and haphazard closure of Burma’s universities, he never finished the bachelor’s degree he started in English literature. Instead, he began dealing in books. It isn’t that he hates all books, he clarified: he just hates Burmese books. In fact, Hla Htut has no time for any contemporary Burmese writing, be it novels, newspapers or magazines. ‘I don’t trust them. They always lie,’ he said….

Burma has always had a high literacy rate, thanks to a strong tradition of education instilled by the country’s Buddhist monasteries, and reading for pleasure became a widespread pastime under the British. After a few generations under the colonial education system and with the introduction of printing presses, Burmese writers began to write more for the masses rather than for the palace elite. An adventure story inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo was published in 1904 and is considered the first example of the novel in Burma. It was an instant hit, and a few years later novels and short stories written by Burmese writers were everywhere.

The Burmese, explained Hla Htut, had always been primed to love stories. All Burmese children were weaned on the Jataka stories, a collection of some 550 moral tales which described the many reincarnations of Prince Siddhartha before he achieved enlightenment as the Buddha. Prince Siddhartha appears in human and animal form wandering through the Buddhist cosmological landscape – a wonderland of celestial beings and forests filled with mythical beasts. Among other early favorites were H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle (the translator of the latter transformed Sherlock Holmes into the longyi-clad Sone Dauk Maung San Sha, or Detective Maung San Sha, and the sleuth’s famous Baker Street address became Bogalay Zay Street in Rangoon). A hundred years later, both Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle are still big sellers. Hla Htut puts it down to the oppressive political environment in which people live. ‘We Burmese, we need to escape. We don’t want to read non-fiction. We want only fiction and fantasy. We want to read about heroes – strong men, clever men.’

SOURCE: Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, by Emma Larkin (John Murray, 2005), pp. 26-28 (reviewed here and here)

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Burmese had built a reputation as one of the most militaristic of the peoples of southern Asia. They had sacked the Thai capital, caused grief to the Indian Mughals and had seen off the Chinese. In 1824, their great commander, Mahabandula, had sworn to bring the governor general of India back to Mandalay in silver fetters. Lord Amherst had not made that journey, however, and the Burmese had been sharply defeated in three major wars. The final one, in 1886, had seen the end of Burma’s independence and its last monarch packed off into exile near Bombay. After 1886, the British did not recruit ethnic Burmese into their forces, as they had the Sikhs of the Punjab when they were conquered fiercely to resist British occupation for much longer than the Sikhs. Later, all sorts of pseudo-anthropological arguments were used about their unfitness. Burmese Buddhists, the British said, regarded soldiers as beings ‘not very high on the human scale’ because they took life. They, like the Bengalis, were supposedly ‘effeminate’ and could not take extremes of heat and cold.

This was all nonsense, as some British officials realized. A small company of Burmese sappers had done exceptionally well in the Mesopotamian campaign during the First World War where it had been 125 degrees in the shade. They also took the cold of the North West Frontier uncomplainingly. The basic reason that the British did not maintain the slightly increased percentage of Burmese recruits after 1918 was that Indians and recruits from the Burmese minorities were cheaper. All this meant that the vast majority of ‘Burmese’ in outfits such as the Burma Rifles and the Burma Frontier Force were Kachins, Shans, Karens like Smith Dun, or else locally resident Indians and Gurkhas. There were hardly a thousand ethnic Burmese officers or NCOs under arms in 1940. This stored up huge problems for the British in the Second World War. When the Japanese offered young Burmese military training, they leapt at the opportunity. It was a matter of pride as well as politics. How could the Burmese be a people if they did not have an army?

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 82-83