Brave Men of the Hills (Resistance and Rebellion in Burma, 1825 - 1932)

An important piece of research. The author has made a significantly new contribution to our understanding of the Burmese popular response to the imposition of British colonial administrative and economic systems between 1825 and 1932. [...] The book will be of interest to all historians of South East Asia and of peasant revolts.' (Professor R.H. Taylor, author of The State in Burma).

Burma was conquered by Britain in the course of three wars fought in 1825, 1852, and 1885, and colonial rule was to last till 1948 when Burma regained its lost independence. Throughout this period there were several armed uprisings against foreign rule and its social and economic ramifications. In Brave Men of the Hills Parimal Ghosh explores how peasant militancy was first generated and then crystallized into an open challenge to the colonial state. He focuses on two types of uprisings: the nineteenth-century resistance which followed the three wars of conquest, and Saya San's revolt of 1930. Rather than seeing such Burmese responses as being the symptom of a colonial 'pacification' process, he argues that they were organic expressions of momentum of resistance originating among a grassroots peasant base.

PARIMAL GHOSH is Reader in History at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Calcutta.

Burma was conquered by the British in the course of three wars fought in 1825, 1852, and 1885. The First War led to the occupation of Tenasserim and Arakan, the Second War to that of Pegu and Martaban; the Third War resulted in the incorporation of the remaining part of Burma into the British empire and the liquidation of the Burmese monarchy. British rule lasted in Burma till January 1948, when Burma regained its lost independence. Throughout this period, there were armed uprisings in Burma against foreign rule and its social and economic ramifications. This book is concerned with the study of two different types of uprisings: (a) the nineteenth-century resistance which followed upon the three wars of conquest; and (b) the revolt led by Saya San in 1930-2.

Generally speaking, scholars working on Burma have been some-what neglectful of the struggle in the nineteenth century. The usual approach, largely influenced by the colonial outlook, has been to consider this phase in terms of a 'pacification' process; in other words, as a process in which the critical role was ascribed to the colonial power, a process which ended with the establishment of the colonial order, defeating anarchy and restoring peace. Little attention has been paid to the specific nature of the resistance put up by the people, and to what lay behind the disorganization and the anarchic face that it presented.

In earlier textbooks, for instance, in D.G.E. Hall's Burma (London, 1950), there is hardly any reference to the entire episode of the nineteenth-century resistance. In some other works, only the concluding years of the struggle, following the Third War, received some attention. John F. Cady in his A History of Modern Burma (New York, 1958), for example, barely touches upon the resistance after the Second War, while devoting some attention to the years after the Third. But there again Cady's argument ran along very familiar colonial grooves: 'disbanded soldiers, lacking rations and pay, eventually turned to lawlessness'.'

Cady, of course, admits that by mid-1886 a full-fledged rebellion was nonetheless spreading all over the country.2At the same time, within his very inadequate handling of the subject, Cady was aware of the peculiar structure of the struggle. He writes of the role played by the Myothugyis in the post-1852 years:

Like the relations between the feudal barons of Europe's Middle Ages, their feuding prior to 1852 was the curse of the countryside. Many of them became after 1852, heads of marauding dacoit bands whose persistent depredations were extremely difficult to counter.

While we may not agree wholly with the first part of the statement, there is no question that Cady, with that comparison, was quite rightly hinting at a feature that characterized pre-British Burma, viz., the virtual autonomy of the locality. But more on this later.

In more recent times Ni Ni Myint's Burma's Struggle Against British Imperialism, 1885-1895 (Rangoon, 1983), has made a notable contribution to the historiography of the subject. As a work of military history, tracing in detail the movements and counter-movements of the resistance fighters and British army, it offers substantial documentation. However, the emphasis on the crucial position of the monarchy in the mental and physical world of the Burmese people, and on the sense of shock that resulted from its brutal elimination, as key elements in the rising, amounts to some-what a simplified explanation. Also, the period selected for the book conveys the suggestion that the resistance started only with the abolition of the monarchy after the Third War. In point of fact, resistance in some form or other persisted ever since British victory in the First War.

Comparatively, the revolt of 1930-2 has drawn attention from scholars. Again, while Hall ignores it, Cady's treatment, among other things, pivots around the basic assumption that Saya San, whatever else he might have been, was not quite a twentieth-century man: indeed, with his claim to royalty and use of magic, Saya San harked back to pre-modern times. Of much greater importance have been the suggestions of later scholars. Emanuel Sarkisyanz, in his extremely important Buddhist Background of the Burmese Revolution (The Hague, 1965), tried to understand the rebellion in terms of folk expectations and Buddhist beliefs. Saya San's assumption of royal authority, and for that matter, similar pretensions of some other Burmese rebel leaders, was understood as expressions of a deep-rooted value structure. The Buddhist belief that the Maitreya should arrive at the end of a time cycle to restore Dhamma and the well-being of the people thus appears to have inspired many an aspirant to political power in times of popular discontent. On the other hand, James C. Scott's understanding in his The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence (New Haven, 1976), hinges on a more generalized view of what the southeast Asian peasant considered to be a just economic order, and how a denial of his right to it spurred him to rebellion. The matter of the peasants' traditional mentality is more in play in Michael Adas' Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements Against the European Colonial Order (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1979), in which Saya San's revolt is viewed as an example of peasant millenarianism. As Adas sees it, while the context of the rising was set by the changes consequent upon the imposition of colonial rule, Saya San himself, as a person and as a leader, maybe still understood as a prophet. But even as Adas beautifully exposes the subtle interplay between the modern setting, as defined by commercial agriculture and an unfeeling colonial state, and millenarian tendencies, somewhere in the course of it the figure of the Saya San gets clouded over and mystified.

This is precisely why Patricia Herbert's arguments in her essay-'The Hsaya San Rebellion (1930-32) Reappraised' (Working Paper No. 27, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, undated), become so important. Sarkisyanz, Scott, and Adas, all in a way have stressed certain long-enduring tendencies within the Burmese peasant community as the more necessary elements for an understanding of Saya San. This naturally has given a somewhat lopsided appearance to the revolt. Patricia Herbert, on the other hand, forcefully argues for studying it in the context of contemporary Burmese politics. She insists that while the colonial authorities overplayed the magical and mysterious elements in Saya San's actions, the revolt was not the product of traditional Burma, but of the political momentum built up during the 1920s at the grassroots level. Saya San, though indigenous, therefore did not represent the last gasp of traditional Burma.

What still remains unexplored in its entirety is the actual process whereby peasant militancy was first generated and then crystallized into an open challenge to the colonial state.