Genealogy of a rebellion narrative: Law, ethnology and culture in colonial Burma

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 393-419

  Aung Thwin, Maitrii ^a  

^a NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE   (Singapore)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COLONIALISM; CULTURAL CONFLICT; CULTURAL HISTORY; ETHNIC CONFLICT; LEGISLATION;

ASIA; EURASIA; MYANMAR; SOUTHEAST ASIA;

EID: 33845243134     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: 14740680     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463403000407     Document Type: Review

References (123)

1. See, for example, Michael Adas, Prophets of rebellion: Millenarian protest movements against the European colonial order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979);
2. James C. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976);
3. Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and revolution: Popular movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979);
4. Emanuel Sarkisyanz, Buddhist backgrounds of the Burmese revolution (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1965);
5. and Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Millenarianism and peasant politics in Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
6. Ranajit Guha, Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983);
7. Ann Laura Stoler, '"Cold blood": Hierarchies of credibility and the politics of colonial narratives', Representations, 37 (1992): 151-89;
8. Anand A.Yang, Crime and criminality in British India (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985).
9. James C. Scott, Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985);
10. Michael Adas, 'Bandits, monks and pretender kings: Patterns of peasant resistance and protest in colonial Burma, 1826-1941', in Power and protest in the countryside: Studies of rural unrest in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, ed. Robert P. Weller and Scott E. Guggenheim (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982), pp. 75-105;
11. Contesting power; Resistance and everyday social relations in South Asia, ed. Douglas Haynes and Prakash Gyan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
12. History, memory, and the law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999);
13. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
14. Colonial subjects: Essays on the practical history of anthropology, ed. Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999);
15. and Tensions of empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
16. Nicholas B. Dirks, 'The crimes of colonialism: Anthropology and the textualization of India', in Pels and Salemink, eds., Colonial subjects, pp. 153-79.
17. See, for example, India Office Record archives (London), Government of Burma, L/PJ/6/2020, Burma Rebellion Files (BRF), Frames 448-55, Report on the rebellion in Burma up to 3rd May, 1931, command paper, 3900 (1931);
18. Frames 22-44, Origins and causes of the Burma rebellion 1930-1932 (1934)
19. (henceforth OCBR);
20. Frames 572-7, Report on recent rebellions in Burma, police document, 9 May 1931;
21. Frames 58-70, The rebellion in Burma, April 1931-March 1932;
22. Frames 661-77, Causes of the Tharrawaddy rebellion, 26 March 1931. All sources bearing an L/PJ/6 designation are from the BRF sections of the microfilm; specific frames will be indicated where relevant.
23. L/PJ/6/2020, Frame 792, Telegram, Government of India (Gil), Home Department (HD) to Secretary of State for India (S/SI), repeating Telegram from Government of Burma (G/B), 24 Dec. 1930.
24. L/PJ/6/2020, Frame 782, Telegram, G/I, HD to S/SI, repeating Telegram from G/B, 2 Jan. 1930. One of the earliest assessments of the rebellion, written a week after the rebellion first broke out, is in Frames 766-73, Letter No. C30, 29 Dec. 1930, G/B to G/I, HD.
25. L/PJ/6/2020, Frames 578-85, B. S. Carey, Hints for the guidance of civil officers in the event of outbreak of disturbances in Burma, first printed in 1914 and reprinted in 1931.
26. Quotations from B. S. Carey, Hints for the guidance of civil officers in the event of outbreak of disturbances in Burma, ibid., Frames 579-80;
27. Patricia Herbert's comments are in her important The Hsaya San rebellion 1930-1932 reappraised (Melbourne: Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), pp. 2-3.
28. See comments in The Hsaya San rebellion 1930-1932 reappraised, ibid, and notice the explicit references to Carey's minlaung motif in L/PJ/6/2020, Frames 766-73, Letter of 29 Dec. 1930;
29. Ralph Clarence Morris, Causes of the Tharrawaddy rebellion,
30. and OCBR.
31. Carey, Hints for tlie guidance.
32. See, for example, John F. Cady, A history of modern Burma (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1958);
33. Sarkisyanz, Buddhist backgrounds;
34. Harry Benda, 'Peasant movements in colonial Southeast Asia', Asian Studies, 3 (1965): 420-34,
35. reprinted in Harry Benda, Continuity and change in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972);
36. Scott, Moral economy,
37. Adas, Prophets of rebellion;
38. Herbert, Hsaya San rebellion;
39. Toshikatsu Ito, 'U Thuriya's rebellion: The anti-colonial uprising in late 19th century Lower Burma' (Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Department of Indochinese Studies, Burma Research Group, 1987), pp. 209-30;
40. and Parimal Ghosh, Brave men of the hills: Rebellion and resistance in Burma 1824-1932 (London: Hurst & Co., 2000).
41. The Saya San Rebellion is also discussed in Robert Taylor, The state in Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1987);
42. U Maung Maung, From sangha to laity: Nationalist movements of Burma, 1920-1940 (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1980);
43. Htin Aung, A history of Burma (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967);
44. and Albert D. Moscotti, British policy and the national movement in Burma (1917-1937) (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1974).
45. C. V. Warren, Burmese interlude (London: Skeffmgton & Son, 1937);
46. A. J. S. White, The Burma of 'AJ': Memoirs of A. J. S. White (London: BACSA, 1991);
47. Maurice Collis, Trials in Burma (London: Faber & Faber, 1938).
48. G. E. Harvey, British rule in Burma 1824-1942 (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), p. 73.
49. See Adas, Prophets of rebellion;
50. Sarkisyanz, Buddhist backgrounds;
51. and Ileto, Pasyon and revolution.
52. The ways in which the historiography of the Saya San Rebellion is a product of these counterinsurgency documents and the institutions that produced them are beyond the scope of this article and will be examined in a forthcoming essay. In brief, the report's contentions that the rebellion was planned, not spontaneous; political, not economic in origin; informed by superstition, not rationality; and traditional in character, as opposed to modern; all served as points of departure for commentators at the time and for scholars who followed. These series of binary framings were a major component in the discourse of the rebellion and certainly framed the tone and analysis found in the 1934 report.
53. 'Primary source' is used here to mean those sources which are most able to validate or confirm an event having occurred. For the purposes of this article, it will refer to documents, materials or witness testimony that can be reliably identified as having referred to the events for the first time, before any other source. It is acknowledged, however, that there is always a 'secondary' quality to most documents found in the archive and a 'secondary trace of historical discourse' - to quote Nicholas B. Dirks - to which these sources are almost always attached; see Dirks, 'Crimes of colonialism', p. 176.
54. Patricia Herbert's Hsaya San rebellion seeks to unravel the traditional colouring that has accompanied previous interpretations and to show how Western political forms of mobilisation, exemplified by the Galon Wuthanu Athin, demonstrate a 'modern' character to the uprising. The present article discusses and problematises the very narrative upon which her provocative study stands.
55. See L/PJ/6/2022, Judgment Summary, 29 Sept. 1931, Special Tribunal Case No. 5, 28 Sept. 1931, Frames 684-94;
56. Judgment Appeal No. 1121 of 1931, Special Tribunal Case No. 5, 29 Sept. 1931, Frames 649-64;
57. Judgement Order, Criminal Appeal No. 1121 of 1931, Special Tribunal Case No. 5, 11 Oct. 1931, Frames 665-83;
58. and Judgement Summary, Special Tribunal Case No. 1 of 1931, 28 Aug. 1931, Frames 755-90.
59. The decisions of the Tribunal set a precedent not only for 'future audiences', but for future historians as well; see Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, 'Writing history and registering memory in legal decisions and legal practices: An introduction', in Sarat and Kearns, eds., History, memory and the law, pp. 1-24.
60. The most complete record of the trial is in L/PJ/6/2022, Frames 669-83, Judgment Order, Criminal Appeal No. 1121 of 1931, Special Case No. 5, 11 Oct. 1931 (henceforth cited as 'Judgment Order'), from which these quotations are taken. Additional witness testimony included in the record but not discussed here relies on the admissibility of the items and testimony highlighted in this article. Specifically, I have chosen to skip the testimonies of several prosecution witnesses, as their depositions rest on the admissibility of a diary, to be examined below.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., Frames 669-70.
63. Ibid., Frame 679.
64. L/PJ/6/2022, Judgment Summary, Special Tribunal Case No. 5, King Emperor vs. Saya San, 28 Aug. 1931, 29 Sept. 1931, Frames 684-94.
65. Yet if one looks at the original document, the text also includes the term Thammada, which can mean 'president'. It is interesting that the official report, after having referred to this piece of evidence, excludes the term in its text. See also Patricia Herbert's comments regarding Saya San's use of this term in Hsaya San rebellion, p. 6.
66. There are some references to the galon (garuda)/naga symbol in Southeast Asian Buddhist literature, especially in reference to the legend of the Buddhist Saint Upago (Upagupta); see John Strong, The legend of Upagupta: Sanskrit Buddhism in Northern India and Southeast Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 183, 187-9, 191, 204.
67. Crown service members, soldiers, religious bondsmen, craftsmen and even those monks who failed their exams were said to receive a special tattoo during the Konbaung period (1752-1886); Michael Aung-Thwin, Pagan: Origins of modern Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1985), p. 90,
68. and The royal orders of Burma, A.D. 1598-1885, ed. Than Tun, vol. 5 (Kyoto: Kyoto University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1986).
69. See also James George Scott, The Burman: His life and notions (New York: Norton and Co., 1963 reprint), pp. 39-47.
70. Po Yon's testimony is in OCBR, p. 3;
71. Ba U's account of his remarks is in his My Burina: The autobiography of a president (New York: Taplinger, 1958), pp. 110-11. These statements cannot be confirmed in the Judgment Summaries related to the trial.
72. OCBR, p. 3 and L/PJ/6/2022, Frame 498, Memorandum, G/I to G/B, 25 May 1932. New Delhi officials commented in one case that 'the evidence on which they were convicted was mainly in regard to tattooing', revealing the extent to which the activity had been criminalised.
73. Judgment Order, L/PJ/6/2022, Frames 665-83, emphasis added.
74. OCBR, p. 3.
75. Judgment Order, Frame 653.
76. Ibid., Frame 654.
77. Ibid., Frames 670-1. Maurice Collis's description of the coronation ceremony in his Trials in Burma should not be considered seriously as a primary source for this particular event (as some scholars have done) since the author was not a witness to these events and may have based his description on official reports released before his departure from Burma in the spring of 1931. Collis even reveals that he examined a 'court judgment' as a basis for his description (p. 217).
78. Judgment Order, Frame 671.
79. Quotations from ibid., Frame 681. Consider, for those familiar with written Burmese, the proper method for writing 'walone' (a circle consonant representing the sound 'wa').
80. L/PJ/2022, Judgment Summary. For the Tribunal's examination,
81. see Judgment Order; Maung Ba's comments are in Frame 659, 29 Sept. 1931.
82. Patricia Herbert, who accepts the diary as being authentic, examined a copy published in Bandoola Journal
83. and noted that the use of third person (with a royal honorific) may indicate that Saya San was 'ambivalent' or even 'embarrassed' about using the normative traditional royal style (Hsayn San rebellion, p. 7). Her point is that his alleged royal characterisation may have been overemphasised.
84. Scholars, including the author, have only had access to Burmese-language reproductions of the diary (appearing in journals and newspapers) or translated versions found in British documents. Extracts of the diary were released by the colonial police and Criminal Investigation Department to local newspapers.
85. I borrow from Ileto, who suggests that the Filipino rebellion of 1896 was constructed by American educators as a history of the 'already happened' or as an echo of European history in an 'Oriental setting'; Reynaldo Ileto, Knowing America's colony: A hundred years from the Philippine War (Manoa: University of Hawaii Center for Philippine Studies, 1999).
86. Although the interpretation of the Saya San Rebellion seems to be a repetition of early Burmese revolts, it would be interesting to investigate whether other contexts such as the so-called Sepoy Mutiny or possibly the Moplah Rebellion (in southern India) might have informed British readings of the Burmese movements. Differing in emphasis, Henk Schulte Nordholt suggests that much of traditional Bali was invented by colonial administrators eager to 'find' Old Java in Southern Bali and projected many characteristics, such as imagined Hindu-Javanese legal principles, onto Balinese society, reflecting a similar production of culture through ethnology and administrative procedures; Henk Schulte Nordholt, 'The making of traditional Bali: Colonial ethnography and bureaucratic reproduction', in Pels and Salemink eds., Colonial subjects, pp. 241-81.
87. According to Herbert, Wunthanu Athin represented a qualitative break from the minlaung-inspired uprisings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in that the imagery-, tactics and messages they employed were not derived from pre-annexation traditions (Hsaya San rebellion).
88. Law was used in colonial Indonesia to interpret and construct culture as well. The 'adat law approach' used juridical concepts to record local customs and institutions. Schulte Nordholt, 'Making of traditional Bali' suggests that the legalist approach, which stressed formal rules and institutions, directed the focus of research as well as informed interpretations of change and continuity. Courts have been considered as archives in that their records serve 'as the materialisation of memory'; Sarat and Kearns, 'Writing history and registering memory', in Sarat and Kearns, eds., History, memory and the law, p. 13.
89. Edward W. Said, Culture and imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
90. L/PJ/6/2021, Frames 487-8, Minute Paper, Public and Judicial Department, 12 Feb. 1931.
91. L/PJ/6/2021, Frame 359, Secret Telegram, G/I HD to S/SI, 8 Jan. 1931 (11:45 am). On the background of the Bengali movement, see Note on the growth of the Bengal Revolutionary Movement in Burma from 1922 to 1930, L/PJ/6/2021, Frames 319-42.
92. L/PJ/6/2021, Frame 358, Secret Telegram, G/I HD to S/SI, 8 Jan. 1931 (12.00 p.m.). It is interesting to note that the two events were being simultaneously linked to the events in Tharrawaddy that occurred in late 1930. However, when the official story began to be more closely tied to Saya San, these particular events disappear from his involvement.
93. L/PJ/6/2021, Frame 360, Secret Telegram, G/I HD to S/SI, 8 Jan. 1931 (3.15p.m.). U Ottama (Oktama) was a monk who advocated that the monkhood be more involved in secular affairs, particularly in the livelihood of peasants;
94. his message was eventually taken up by the GCBA. See Taylor, State in Burma, pp. 182-3. The connection with Bose is mentioned in L/PJ/6/2021, Frame 358, Secret Telegram, G/I, HD to S/SI, 8 Jan. 1931 (2.30p.m.).
95. L/PJ/6/2021, Frames 300-1, Telegram, G/I HD to S/SI, 2 Feb. 1931. On U Oktama and Bose see, for example, Frames 350-1, Secret Telegram, G/I HD to S/SI, 11 Jan. 1931 (1 p.m.).
96. L/PJ/6/2021, Frames 275-8, Telegram, G/I HD to S/SI, 2 Feb. 1931 ('reason to believe');
97. Frames 343-4, W. Johnston (Legal Advisor, Docket, Public and Judicial Department), 11 Jan. 1931 ('stop the activity'). A brief summary of the history of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance can be found in Extracts from the Bengal Legislative Council and copy of the Ordinance, located in Frames 373-84.
98. The quotation is from L/PJ/6/2021, Frame 122, Extract from Burma Legislative Proceedings, 1931.We find a case of rebellion being connected to geography for the Shandong region of China; see Joseph W. Esherick, The origins of the Boxer Rebellion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 39.
99. L/PJ/6/2021, Frames 259-71, Extract from the Proceedings of Council Relating to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, 1931, meeting held on 14 Feb. 1931.
100. L/PJ/6/2021, Frame 128, Extract, Burma Legislative Council Proceedings, 1931.
101. Burma Legislative Council Proceedings, Ibid.
102. L/PJ/6/2021, Frames 501-2, Secret Telegram, G/I HD to S/SI repeating telegram from G/B, 27 Jan. 1931 (5.15 p.m.) ('revolutionaries');
103. Frame 314, Confidential Minute Paper, Public and Judicial Department, 5 Jan. 1931 ('out of date'). This comment by W. Johnston (a legal advisor) refers specifically to the report compiled by C. De Wellborne (Lt.-Colonel and Deputy-Inspector General of Police), entitled 'Note on the growth of the Bengal Revolutionary Movement in Burma from 1922 to 1930'. The vote is mentioned in Frame 148, Extract Burma Legislative Council Proceedings, 1931.
104. L/PJ/6/2021, Frames 491-2, Secret Telegram, G/I HD to S/SI, repeating telegram from G/B, 12 Feb. 1931.
105. L/PJ/6/2021, Frames 493-6, Extract from draft of Martial Law Ordinance, 12 Feb. 1931. Civil administrators were resistant to the idea of declaring Martial Law, to the consternation of senior military officials recently arrived from India. A discussion of tensions between the two groups in regard to the formation of counter-insurgency policy can be found in the memoir of a civil servant stationed in Thayetmyo: White, Burma of 'AJ'. These civil-military tensions were downplayed by London, as seen in a letter describing Whitehall's desire for 'Stewart' to offer a 'categorical denial' of any bickering between the two groups of officials in Burma;
106. L/PJ/6/2021, Frame 117, Letter to Sir Findlater Stewart, 19 Dec. 1931.
107. L/PJ/6/2021, Frame 652, Judgment Proceedings, Appeal No. 1121 of Special Case No. 5, 28 Aug. 1931, p. 4; emphasis added.
108. L/PJ/6/2021, Frame 495, Extract from Martial Law Ordinance, 12 Feb. 1931; emphasis added.
109. L/PJ/6/2021, Frame 547, Burma Emergency Ordinance Draft, Sections, 1 June 1931. The comment on charms and the Penal Code is in Frame 541, Secret Telegram, G/I, Home Secretary to S/SI, 9 June 1931.
110. L/PJ/6/2022, Frame 498, Memorandum G/I to G/B, 25 May 1932. On the 'Pongyis and other emissaries',
111. see Frames 573-4, Secret Telegram, G/I HD to S/SI, repeating telegram from G/B, 16 May 1931.
112. I adopt Johannes Fabian's approach of historicising the historical record by locating the 'praxis and processes' which produced the documents most closely tied to the official narrative: Johannes Fabian, Language and colonial power: The appropriation of Swahili in the former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 11.
113. Ranjit Guha, 'The prose of counter-insurgency', in Postcolonial discourses: An anthology, ed. Gregory Castle (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 71;
114. Dirks, 'Crimes of colonialism', pp. 157-8.
115. Warren, Burmese interlude
116. and Collis, Trials in Burma.
117. These very microfilms frame my own methodology as my project traces back the genealogy of the narrative in much the same way that the documents were presented. However, the interest in the narrative's heritage and its trial origins compelled me to 'jump' to the other reels, which eventually revealed the connection between the Tribunals and the Ordinances. For a guide to these materials, see Andrew Griffin, A brief guide to sources for the study of Burma in the India Office Records (London: India Office Library and Records, 1979).
118. In fact, Saya San's court statement reveals that one of the goals of the Galon Wunthanu Athin was to oppose the separation of India and Burma. The other two were to resist the use of excess force in the collection of taxes and to renew free use of forestry products;
119. Judgment Order, Frames 665-83.
120. Cady, History of modern Burma, pp. 284-6.
121. See for example, U Saw's pamphlet entitled The Burmese situation. A letter to W. Wedgwood Benn, July 1931, L/PJ/6/2020, Frames 304-24. On the cover was a provocative picture of decapitated heads of rebels that had been placed on public display. Before the Burma government was able to close down U Saw's press, several copies were circulated in New Delhi and London, which caused public outcry and an investigation of Rangoon's counter-insurgency policy.
122. These thoughts are based on Said's provocative comments in Culture and imperialism, pp. 303-26.
123. I am inspired by Nicholas B. Dirk's approach to a social history of modern India through an exploration of the colonial role in the historical construction of caste; see his Castes of mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).