Collis: Lords of the Sunset

Just finished reading Maurice Collis "Lords of the Sunset". Fascinating book describing the tour that Collis made of the Shan States in 1937. Much of the area he visited is off-limits to travelers these days (the famous falls at Nam Pang. The Shan heartland between Taungyii and Lashio along the Nam Pang river. The hill states (except for Twang Peng) on the north western edge of the Shan States (Namkham, Mong Mit). Almost the entire length of the Salween river in the Shan States. The towns that you can visit, like Hsipaw and Namshan, seem to have been far more vibrant in the days of yore than they are today.

One observation about Collis is that he had an eye for the ladies. A bachelor, living in Kent in the 1930s, he probably was not getting, to put it crudely, any. His book is full about observations about the eyes, the charms, the smiles, the beauty, and the characters of the various Mahadevis and Princesses that he met along the way. Very little about the Sawbwas themselves (except for how wonderful they were). And all those photographs ... Still, an excellent read, one that makes me want to pack my bag and head for the falls at Nam Pang!

Blackness

Hunting for a reference to something that I remembered reading as a child, that Merle Oberon damaged her skin by excessive use of 'Fair and Lovely', a skin whitening cream popular in India, I googled my way to this blog about a New York mother who was shocked at the blackness of her adopted Indian daughter's skin color (does every emotion, however crass, make its way into the public domain these days?). Interestingly, I happened to be reading this:

The doctor was a blackish Indian, about twenty-five years old. None of us now, of course, suffers from colour prejudice--it is so low brow--but I must confess that it was rather a shock to see so dark an Indian in this Shan interior, and when I looked at his little wife, the Karen, colour prejudice did not seem so far-fetched. ........... I looked at her husband again. He must be a nice man if she was so happy. But it was hard to believe it on account of his appearance, though Rossiter told me afterwards that he had an admirable character.

This from Maurice Collis (Lords of the sunset: A tour in the Shan States, New York, Dodd Mead and Company, 1958) after he has repeatedly self-congratulated himself on how, unlike the other English in India, he could treat the Indians as equals. What is it about the blackness of the Doctor's skin that so shocked Collis in the 1930s? And, how could someone in the cosmopolitan twenty first century be surprised or shocked by black skin?

No answers. Just thought I'd share this. Meanwhile, my millions of readers, any ideas on a reference that shows that Merle Oberon destroyed her skin by using whitening creams?

Lonely Planet Myanmar (Burma) or Publish and be Damned

So, what's with the LP Myanmar guide book anyway. Very comprehensive in its listings but full of moralistic platitudes about whether one should visit or not. Perhaps it should be titled 'how to not let your money get into the sweaty hands of the Tatmadaw'. LP refuses to list government owned hotels (often naming them so that you don't end up there by mistake) and by including an extensive chapter on the history of the military and on its dubious nature.

Let's forget about the implicit assumption that underlies the "should you go" section in the guide. That the average LP reader is unaware of the sad record of the Burmese military junta and is too lazy to do the spadework himself or herself. Focus instead on the weakness of the listing government owned hotel to not let your money get into the hands of the junta. The reality on the ground is very different. Every business in Burma that touches a tourist has some connection with the government. The nature of the connection may vary from bribes to low level functionaries to get and keep licenses to the cohabitative behavior of the multi-millionaires who run large businesses. Simply stated, a dollar revenue business cannot exist in Burma without some kickback to the Tatmadaw. One hotel owner explained the financial structure of his business, license fees, bribes to officials, etc. and his contention was that, in the best of times, 60% of his dollar revenue goes to the government. It is next to impossible, and possibly dangerous, to hide any of this revenue. At the higher end, hotels like Traders and airlines like Air Bagan are owned by drug lords (often ex rebels now in cahoots with the government). Millions of dollars flow from these "private" businesses to the military; directly and indirectly keeping the junta in power. Why it is ok to list Traders but not the Thiripyitsaya Sakura Hotel in Bagan is not at all clear. Is it somehow better to split your money between the government and a drug baron than to give all of it to the government? What about all the government run ferries? LP recommends the Mandalay Bagan ferry, the Myitkyina-Bhamo-Mandalay ferry, the Pathein ferry, all demanding high dollar amounts from tourists. (In an interesting twist, the junta privatized the Mandalay-Bagan express ferry and the price went up from $16 to $25. My guess is that the government probably gets a little more than it got before and some other baddie gets the rest of your money. You, poor tourist, are more out of pocket than before.)

Sadly, it would seem that LP is trying to have its cake and eat it too by publishing a guidebook for Burma and then hedging about the morality of going or not going. All you get as a result is a trivilization of history, a bunch of platitudes, an incomplete guidebook, and more revenue for LP. A truly principled publisher would either:

1. Not publish a guidebook at all.

2. Publish a comprehensive guidebook with full listings and no moralistic claptrap. Full listings would include reviews of government run hotels.

3. Publish a guidebook that restricts itself to describing the historical and cultural background of the sights but has no business listings whatsoever. This would probably be the best of the three alternatives.

For a good review of the weaknesses of the LP approach, see Publish and Be Damned from the Irrawaddy Times.

The Raj: See How They Died

You have to feel sorry for some of these Raj rulers. Stuck in an unhealthy climate, harried by mosquitos that seemed to leave the locals alone, felled by cholera and other strange tropical diseases, they had to be tough. I've walked through so many Raj cemeteries in India and Burma and so many of them died young, quite sad in its own way. Here I am flipping through the Register of European Deaths and Burials for Burma. Published by BACSA, flipping through is quite instructive. A few random entries:

"Died in 1928 of illness from the delayed effects of an un-healed wound." (Maymyo). Un-healed wound?

"In loving memory of Edward, infant son of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Moss of Shwegyin." (Maymyo). Poor baby. And, it certainly is odd that the Moss's identify themselves as being from Shwegyin.

"GLENDINNING The Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation Ltd. Joined the Corporation in about 1881. Died of Cholera in 1882. Presumed buried in Prome." (Prome Cemetery) Didn't take long for the East to get him! And, apparently the poor man's body is still awol.

And, what about this poor guy:
"OREN The Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation Ltd. Joined the corporation in about 1882/82. A Swede or Norwegian. Killed by dacoits. No further details." (Paungde cemetery) Nationality unknown, details of death unknown. Presumably there are Orens out there who have no idea that they have an ancestor who was killed by dacoits in far away Burma.

"Sacred to the memory of Captain John Swinton Browne, deeply regretted, who departed this life, aged 29 on the 5th of May 1834. ... said to have died of bilious fever." If that doesn't signify that the poor man's doctor had no clue what disease he was dealing with, nothing will.

"In loving memory of the infant son of Captain & Mrs F.L. Orman, 10th Gurkha Rifles, Born Maymyo 19th April 1908 died Maymyo 23rd April 1908." (Maymyo) The poor kid. I wouldn't want anyone to undergo childbirth in Burma today and one can only imagine the odds of survival in 1908.

Why, you might ask, this macabre passtime. I was looking for some information on half a headstone that I found in Maymyo (Pwin u Lwin) when I was there a few months ago. If I read this headstone correctly, a hefty chunk of the family of the Wingate's perished at around the same time and curiousity as to what killed them got the better of me. Unfortunately, this headstone is missing from the register.

.....also of John Bruce
Who died at Maymyo on the 16th July 1900
aged 10 months
Infant children of
John Bruce and Isabel Wingate

BACSA publishes registers recording known deaths and burials on the Indian Sub-Continent and in Burma.

The Trouser People

The quintessential colonial book on Burma is The Burman: His Life and Notions by Shwe Yoe a nom-de-plume of Sir George Scott a British colonialist in Burma. That book was written in 1894 and remains a standard source for understanding the Burmese people of the late 19th century (you can read it for free here). Of course, since Scott was British, albeit one who could speak several languages of Burma, we'll never really know what life in Burma was like, but you get what you get ...

The Trouser People: A Story of Burma In the Shadow of the Empire by Andrew Marshall follows the travels of George Scott in Burma. The book is interesting partly because his writing is interesting and full of humor, partly because he goes where no one else goes (the Wa State), but mostly because it is shocking that opium is being grown and drugs manufactured in the Shan and Wa States with impunity. The junta is known to be cynical (and more than a little crazy) but such large scale abdication of their responsibility is horrendous. The casual visitor to Burma, me on more than one occasion, sees a poor country with a despotic government, hears a few stories of the Karen being "cleansed," mostly from journalists who cannot visit Burma, sees evidence of forced labor in road-building projects, but the scale of the criminal enterprise that passes for government in that country is well hidden.

Burma

Burma is not a country that most people think about every day, or even every year. Rarely in the news, off the radar screens, one never hears about it, except perhaps as a passing mention in the odd State of the Union Address (was that bizarre or what!). What most people know about it can be summarized by the words backward and dictatorship. If probed, they may add that it is a small country somewhere in South East Asia occupied by the monolithic "Burmese" people. The reality is, of course, that the country is quite large and far from monolithic. It is populated by a diverse range of ethnic groups with distinct cultures that speak languages that don't even share the same root (some are Indo-European, some share Southern China origins, some, like the Wa are unclassifiable). Sort of like a problematic version of India.

My fascination with Burma began about 35 years ago. I was visiting my father at his Air Force base in North Eastern India for the summer holidays. I already knew something about Burma, my (maternal) grandfather had been stationed in Rangoon during the end of the Second World War and was full of stories about that country, about the Stilwell Road, about the epic battle to re-take Burma from the Japanese. The battle in Europe was a cakewalk in comparison. One day, while I was visiting him, announced that we should go for a drive along the Stilwell Road. We drove in an Air Force jeep up to the Ledo border and there I could see Burma. There was a well paved road and a border checkpost on the Indian side but, on the Burmese side, there was no checkpost, no guard, nobody. And, the "man a mile," Stilwell Road had been swallowed up by the jungle. I don't know what it was about the contrast but my little boy heart wanted to know more about what was going on across that border.

Of course, it is not easy to know what is actually going on across that border. Books on Burma are few and far between and that has always been the case. A colonial backwater, few British civilians and soldiers wrote about Burma, and most books are out of print. After the 1962 coup, the whole country disappeared into a black hole from which it is only now returning. Still, I read everything I could find. For a long time it was next to impossible to get a visa to visit. But, visit I did. On my first visit, I was interviewed on three separate occasions by head of the mission, suspicious, I suppose, of my motives in visiting. On a more recent visit, I walked into the London embassy and walked out with a visa, no questions asked, thanks to the desperate need that the junta has for hard currency. What I found was a complicated country, in some ways stuck in a time warp but in other ways as savvy as the savviest Silicon Valley entreprenuer. It is hard to get a read on Burma by visiting Burma because one sees so little of the country and only what the junta wants you to see.

So, books about Burma. More to come ....

This Blog!

I read. I read a lot. Almost everything I read is connected with South Asia in some way or the other. Because Burmese history is so tied up with Indian history, think British Raj, I include Burma in South Asia. This blog is all about my meandering thoughts about the books I am reading, with thoughts on film and art thrown in for good measure.

Saouq is the Burmese word for book.