________________________ BULLETIN OF THE BURMA STUDIES GROUP _______________________ Burma Workshop (Atelier Birmanie), Université de Provence Marseille, France on June 18-20, 2009 Number 83 Spring 2009 Bulletin of the Burma Studies Group Southeast Asia Council Association for Asian Studies Number 83, Spring, 2009 Editor Ward Keeler Department of Anthropology University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712 email: [email protected] Assistant Editor Jake Carbine CONTENTS Franklin & Marshall ____________________________________ email: [email protected] Book Review Editor Introduction ................................................. 2 Leedom Lefferts Department of Anthropology A “Wicked Creeping:” The Chettiars Drew University in Burma...................................................... 2 Madison, NJ 07940-4000 email: [email protected] Burma Workshop, Université de Provence .................................................... 12 Subscription Manager Catherine Raymond Recent Dissertations on Burmese The Center for Burma Studies Topics ........................................................ 18 Northern Illinois University DeKalb, 60115-2853 Recent Publications of Note...................... 22 office: (815) 753-0512 fax: (815) 753-1776 The Nargis Library Recovery email: [email protected] Project ....................................................... 24 web: www.grad.niu.edu/burma Burma Studies Conference 2010, Subscriptions Call for Papers........................................... 25 Individuals and Institutions: $30 (Includes Journal of Burma Studies) Send checks, payable to The Center for Burma Studies, or email Beth Bjorneby at [email protected] (Visa and Mastercard accepted only). Next Issue Fall, 2009 (Submissions due October) ____________________________________ ____________________________________ Introduction A “Wicked Creeping:” ____________________________________ The Chettiars in Burma ____________________________________ Just as the months of the northern summer brought Burma into the news for unfortunate Reading through a copy of Cornell reasons last year, the same must be said for University’s Southeast Asia Program this year, as well. The current intermingling Bulletin last year, I was fascinated to read of legal proceedings and political Sean Turnell’s article about the Chettiars in machinations in Rangoon make the picture, Burma. It occurred to me that many readers never clear, particularly murky. Yet efforts of the BBSG would share my interest but to make sense of the present always benefit would not see it if they were not Cornell from greater awareness of the past. So it alumni. Sean and Thamora Fishel, who edits seems appropriate to devote much of this the SEAP Bulletin, have graciously granted issue to an article by Sean Turnell, reprinted us permission to reprint the article here. from Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program Bulletin, about the Chettiars in Burma. Sean, who is Associate Professor of Following this, I provide my informal log of Economics at Macquarie University in a very interesting, relatively small-scale but Sydney, is well-known to many of us, of highly enjoyable conference about Burma course. He spoke at last fall’s Burma Studies that took place at the Université de Provence Conference in DeKalb, and he is cited, in June. Put on by people who are helping quoted—and clearly greatly admired by— to organize the Burma Studies Conference to journalists and academics the world over for take place at the same location next July, the his impressive knowledge of Burma’s success of this year’s conference bodes very economic affairs and his ability to discuss well for next year’s larger endeavor. The the topic intelligibly. His book examining remainder of the issue provides information the history of Burma’s monetary and about recent dissertations concerning financial system, Fiery Dragons: Banks, Burma, some new publications about Moneylenders and Microfinance in Burma, Burma, efforts to help Burma’s libraries has just been published (2009) by the Nordic recover from the damage caused by Cyclone Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) Press. Nargis, and finally, the call for papers for —The Editor next year’s BSG conference. —The Editor The economic history of Burma contains a myriad of controversial themes, but none has been quite as divisive as the role of the Chettiars. A community of moneylenders indigenous to Southern India, the Chettiars operated throughout the Southeast Asian territories of the British Empire. They played a particularly prominent role in Burma, where they became the major 2 / Spring 2009 Bulletin of the Burma Studies Group providers of the capital that turned the Burma. Of course, for the full story one country into the ―rice-bowl‖ of the region. could hardly do better than to consult the Yet, the Chettiars were also vilified as vast array of primary sources on Burma held rapacious usurers whose real purpose was to by the marvelous Kroch Library at Cornell. seize the land of the Burmese cultivator. There are plenty of reasons to visit SEAP This accusation became widespread in the and Cornell – but this was excuse enough wake of the global depression of the 1930s, for me! during which paddy prices collapsed. This collapse, and the fact that the Chettiars The Chettiars in Burma applied British land-title law to enforce collateral pledges against their loans, The Chettiars came from the Chettinad tract brought about a substantial transfer of of what is now Tamil Nadu. A distinct sect Burma’s cultivable land into their hands. of the Vaisya (commercial) caste, the Demonized thereafter, the Chettiars fled Chettiars were originally salt traders who, Burma when the country fell to the Japanese sometime in the eighteenth century, became in 1942. They were never to return. more widely known as financiers and Effectively banished by successive Burmese facilitators for the trade in a range of governments, the Chettiars remain reviled commodities. By the early nineteenth figures in the country to the present day. century, however, finance had become the abiding specialization of the Chettiars, and In 2006 I spent my time at SEAP and they became famed lenders to India’s great Cornell (as a Visiting Fellow) completing a land-owning families (zaminders) and in book on Burma’s monetary and financial underwriting trade through the provision of history, in which the Chettiars have a hundis (more on that later). starring role. In the book, however, I deliver a ―not guilty‖ verdict with respect to the The first, substantial, expansion of the charges against the Chettiars. Applying Chettiars beyond their homeland was to modern economic theory to the issue, I (what was then) Ceylon, sometime in the found that the success of the Chettiars in second decade of the eighteenth century. Burma lay less in the high interest rates they The motivation seems to have been simply charged, than it did in patterns of internal the offer of higher returns on their capital– organization that provided solutions to the nearly double that which they could earn at inherent problems faced by financial home. Establishing links with European intermediaries. A proper functioning banks, they followed the British Empire into financial system could have provided better (what is now) Malaysia and Singapore, solutions perhaps for Burma’s long-term Indonesia, Thailand, as well as the former development, but Burma did not have such a French colonial territories of Vietnam, Laos system, then or now. Easy scapegoats for and Cambodia. Of all their overseas spheres what went wrong, I believe the Chettiars of operations, however, it was Burma that merit history’s better judgment. dominated. The tin, rubber, tea and opium trades of maritime Asia created a ready In what follows I offer something of a demand for Chettiar capital, but this was vignette into the story of the Chettiars in significantly overshadowed by the volume Bulletin of the Burma Studies Group Spring 2009 / 3 of credit demand, and the quality of the newly become interested in the country. collateral, that could be yielded from the This role was similar to that played by expanding ―rice frontier‖ of Burma. compradors elsewhere in Southeast Asia. It was celebrated thus by the Diwan Bahadur The first Chettiars arrived in Burma at the Murugappa Chettiar, the leading outset of British rule – in 1826 spokesperson for the Chettiars in Burma at a accompanying Indian troops and laborers government enquiry into their activities in following the first Anglo-Burmese war. It 1930: The banking concerns carrying on was, however, the opening of the Suez business on European lines did not and do Canal in 1869 and the passing of the Burma not care to run the risk of advancing money Land Act in 1876 that brought about the first to indigenous cultivators and traders; and it substantial movement of Chettiars into is left to the Chettiars to undertake the Burma. Cutting shipping times to and from financing of such classes, dealings with Europe by half, the opening of the Suez whom are naturally a source of heavy risks. Canal not only directly opened up European So far as banking business is concerned the markets to rice exports from Burma, it also Chettiar banker is the financial back-bone of stimulated demand for the commodity more the people…. generally in a region suddenly exposed to greatly expanded commercial opportunities. Chettiar Banking Operations Meanwhile the Burma Land Act revolutionized land tenure arrangements in The Chettiars carried out an extraordinarily Burma, essentially