Ba Maw and the Independence of Burma1
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• First published in Durham University journal, vol. 63 (1970), pp. 1-1 5 2 Studies in the Japanese Occupation of South-East Asia, 1942-5, I: Ba Maw and the Independence of Burma 1 'W hen you boarded the ship at Marseilles,' wrote Maurice Collis, recalling his first trip to Burma in 1912 as a very junior member of the Indian Civil Service, 'you entered the mercantile world. Most of the passengers were merchants or their employees ... Their aim, as of the countless merchant adventurers who had preceded them from the first days of the East India Company, was to buy cheap in Asia and sell dear in Europe. As it was rarely necessary for these people to know the Burmese language, they were ignorant of it and so had never spoken to a Burman except in English or Hindustani . Their prejudices were very marked, their opinions jejune, but they felt themselves to be the most patriotic of men, for their lives were devoted, not, like the Indian Civilians, to giving the Burmese a sound administration . but to conducting to London the stream of profits, on which the very existence of England depended. To meet these men in a body on the Rangoon boat was suddenly to be made aware of the reason why the government was sending me to Burma. For years I had worked at my books, acquiring a liberal education, as the phrase is, which had predisposed me to regard with interest and sympathy the Burmese, their life and notions. Not a word had been said to suggest that from the British point of view such interests and sympathies, admirable in themselves no doubt, were of small moment, and that I had really been sent to help keep all clear for a maximum trade. ,2 An American oil driller at Yenangyaung once said the same thing to U Pu, a member of Ba Maw's Freedom Bloc in the pre-war Burmese legislature:3 'You will get your independence ... when your country ceases to produce a single drop of earth-oil and when there is not a single teak in your forests and when your paddy fields have become barren. These British have come out to Burma just to make money.'4 At least, so it seemed until the late 1930s when another opportunity presented itself: the liberation of Burma through collusion with Japanese military expansionism in East Asia. Dr. Ba Maw's autobiography is the fullest account of this process, from the inside. He was the major political figure in Burma from 1937 until the end of the war, and he is quite clear in his own mind that Burma owes its 10 BA MAW AND THE INDEPENDENCE OF BURMA independence to the Japanese Army. In spite of this, he is well aware that that army was infinitely more oppressive than the various modes of British presence in the 1930s, and Japan's major achievement, the creation of the Burmese National Army, was a dubious one for Burma's future, in that it put a premium on the intervention of the military in politics which has bedevilled Burmese affairs ever since. A once martial nation, whose raids were known and feared from Bangkok to Assam in the early nineteenth century, the Burmese later found themselves unable to resist British pressures and saw their country taken from them piecemeal. As the result of complicated tractations over Assam and the Arakan with the East India Company, the British invaded Lower Burma and took Rangoon in 1824. An expensive campaign ended with the Treaty of Yandabo (1826) by which the Burmese ceded Assam, Arakan and Tenasserim and agreed to cease interfering in Indian affairs, but kept three ports at Rangoon, Martaban and Bassein. These were seized in the war of 1852, when the province ofPegu was annexed and put under the commissionership of Phayre, a historian and linguist who wrote the first history of Burma in English in 1883. Phayre led a mission to the court of Ava to make peace in 1855, but the Burmese refused to sign a general treaty. The three annexed divisions became the province of British Burma (under India) in 1862. Both for its own trade and for the possibility of a western entry into China (a railway from Burma to Shanghai was mooted in the 1880s) the country was gradually opened up to British commerce. In 1885 the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation was accused by King Thibaw of over-exploitation of its timber rights in the Nenggyan teak forests of Upper Burma, and a Burmese court fined the company £150,000. The British Government requested Thibaw to allow the matter to be taken to arbitration, but he refused. It is supposed that he wanted to transfer the concessions to the French, who had already reached the western boundaries of Tonkin and were casting eyes on North Burma and Siam. When Thibaw refused arbitration, the British army took Mandalay in November 1885 and deposed him. Upper Burma was finally annexed on 1 January 1886, though guerrilla resistance did not end until 1891. From then until Saya San's rebellion in 1930, as Professor Hall points out, Burma was 'the Cinderella of the Indian Provinces', but British rule did produce 'internal peace such as no previous period could show, a high degree of prosperity and a substantial increase in population,.5 The system of dyarchy (supposedly Iionel Curtis's brain child) by which the administration was divided into halves, one controlled by councillors responsible to a provincial governor, and the other by ministers responsible to a provincial council (Government of India Act, 1919), was extended from India to Burma, excluding the Shan States, Karenni and the Tribal Hills. Burma was ruled by a Governor and an Executive Council with two members in charge of what were described as 'Reserved Subjects' (defence, law and order, finance) and two Ministers in charge of 'Transferred Subjects' (education, public health, forests, excise). Unlike the members in charge of Reserved Subjects these two Ministers were responsible to a Legislative Council of 103 members, 79 of whom were elected on a franchise granted to householders (male or female) at the then astonishing minimum age of eighteen. But the removal of finance from the purview of the elected members made the legislature a sham as far as the Burmese were concerned and extreme nationalists refused to take part in the Council's proceedings. Burma was separated from India by the 1935 Government of Burma Act, though many Burmese opposed this at the time from suspicion that support given to it by the British civil servants and business interests indicated that severance of the political connection with India would prejudice Burma's constitutional and economic progress. On 1 April 1937 the Act came into force, bringing Burma directly under 11 .