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The Journal of

Burma Studies

Volume 10

2005/06

Featuring Articles by:

Alexandra Green

Chie Ikeya

Yin Ker

Jacques P. Leider



THE JOURNAL OF BURMA STUDIESV 10

2005/06

President, Burma Studies GroupF. K. Lehman

General EditorCatherine Raymond

Center for Burma Studies, Northern Illinois University

Issue EditorChristopher A. Miller

Production EditorCaroline Quinlan

Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University

Editorial AssistanceSarah Belkarz

Liz Poppens DeniusPatrick A. McCormick

Alicia Turner

Design and TypesetingColleen Anderson

SubscriptionsBeth Bjorneby

© 2006 Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University,

DeKalb, Illinois USA

ISSN # 1094-799X



The Journal of Burma Studies is an annual scholarly journal jointly sponsored by the Burma Studies Group (Association

for Asian Studies), the Center for Burma Studies (NorthernIllinois University), and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies(Northern Illinois University).

Articles are refereed by professional peers. Original scholarlymanuscripts should be sent to: Editor, Center for SoutheastAsian Studies, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115.E-mail: [email protected].

Subscriptions are $16 per volume delivered book rate (airmail,add $9 per volume). Members of the Burma Studies Groupreceive the journal as part of their $30 annual membership.Send check or money order in U.S. dollars drawn on a U.S.

bank made out to Northern Illinois University to the Center forBurma Studies, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115.Major credit cards accepted. Subscriptions / E-mail: bbjorn@

niu.edu; tel: (815) 753-0512; fax: (815) 753-1776. Back issues / E-mail: [email protected]; tel: (815) 756-1981; fax: (815) 753-1776.

For abstracts of previously published articles, visitThe Journal of BurmaStudies Web site: hp://www.grad.niu.edu/Burma/publications.htm.

The Journal of Burma Studies is abstracted or indexed in the

following: America: History and Life; Bibliography of Asian Studies;Historical Abstracts; MLA International Bibliography.



THE JOURNAL OF BURMA STUDIES V 10

2005/06

A

DEEP CHANGE? 1B W P f

Ev N CAlexandra Green

THE ‘TRAD ITIO NAL’ HIG H STATUS OF 51

WOMEN IN BURMA:A H RChie Ikeya

MODERN BURMESE PAINTING 83ACCORDING TO BAGYI AUNG SOEYin Ker

SPEC IALI STS FOR RITU AL, 159

MAGIC, AND D EVOTION: T C B (Punna)f K K (1752–1885)Jacques P. Leider



Contributors

Alexandra Green is curator of Asian art and acting museumdirector at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. She has anMA and PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies,University of London. In addition to researching the Denisoncollection of Burmese textiles and Buddhist material, she hasfocused upon eighteenth-century wall paintings in Burma, andis the author of several articles on the topic. Other publications

include Burma: Art and Archaeology published by the BritishMuseum Press in 2002. Current research interests includea nineteenth-century Burmese manuscript in the Denisoncollection and foreign inuences upon murals in Burma. Shemay be reached at [email protected].

Chie Ikeya is a visiting assistant professor in the Departmentof History at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester,

Massachuses. She investigates the fundamental links between social and economic change, colonial representationsof women, nationalist discourse, and the development ofreforms and protest movements on behalf of women andagainst gender-based discrimination. Additionally, Ikeyadocuments gender-specic relations of power in pre-colonialBurma through a survey of unpublished Burmese legal textsand court records from the nineteenth century, and evaluates

the impact of British and Japanese imperialism on local ideasand practices. She may be reached at [email protected].

Yin Ker was trained in art history at the University ofParis-Sorbonne and at the Institut National des Langueset Civilisations Orientales (Paris). Currently in Asia, she isfurthering her understanding of twentieth-century art inBurma/Myanmar and the region, with particular interest in

the construction of art, the artist, and art history, as well asmodern and contemporary visual arts of Buddhist inspiration.She assists in tutoring arts of Asia at the Nanyang Technological



University, and oversees the collection of modern Burmese artat the Singapore Art Museum. She may be reached at

[email protected].

Jacques P. Leider is an historian and research scholar at theEcole Française d’Extrême-Orient/EFEO (Paris). Since 2002, hehas been head of the EFEO Centre in Yangon (Myanmar/Burma)where he initiated a project to collect and digitize Arakanesepalm-leaf manuscripts and stone inscriptions. For many years,his research focus has been the history and historiography

of the Buddhist kingdom of Mrauk U. In line with the EFEOtradition of studying native non-canonical Buddhist texts andtraditions, his recent research has dealt with the social life ofthe monkhood. Leider teaches in his native Luxembourg andat Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He may be reachedat [email protected].



52 Journal of Burma Studies, Volume 10

Chie Ikeya

and East Asia that have been inextricably intertwined withand determined by norms and practices such as sati , purdah ,

polygyny, concubinage, and foot-binding, claims about thefreedom and independence of women in Southeast Asia havegured prominently in the revisionist aempt by scholars to(re)center a marginalized Southeast Asia (Reynolds 1995). Weare reminded of Michael Adas’ Machines as the Measure of Men ,which examines how Europeans and Americans came to viewscientic and technological accomplishments as distinctivemeasures of European superiority and as the most meaningful

means to gauge the abilities of non-Western peoples: a model inwhich Southeast Asians are disregarded, devalued, and placed

below “Indian” and “Chinese” people who have historicallydemonstrated an aptitude in science and technology throughtheir inventions (Adas 1989:4–5). The “traditional” high statusof women in Southeast Asia has served to constitute anddene the cultural and historical specicity of the SoutheastAsian region and to contest the superiority of South Asian,

East Asian, and Western cultures.Historians and anthropologists of Southeast Asiatoday generally concur that claims about the purportedstatus of women in the region are oversimplied and highlyproblematic.1 They question the (Eurocentric) premise onwhich such claims hinge—that women’s economic and legalpower is the most important factor in determining relations ofpower and prestige—and point to the need for contextualized

and historicized studies of gender in the region (Atkinsonand Errington 1990:7). Academic scholarship about Burma,however, has been slow to address this problem of the status ofwomen (Mills 2000). Despite the fact that postcolonial scholars

1 Recent scholarship points out that high status, often documented as a resilient,underlying social structure or culture of Southeast Asia, in fact derived from earlycolonialists’ observation that women in Southeast Asia have been active agents inthe economic sphere by tradition. This colonial perspective disregarded the fact thatdespite the high status, freedom, and independence of Burmese women, male domi-nance and leadership was, at least ritualistically or ceremonially, accepted in Burmeseculture. See critical discussions of the concept of Southeast Asian women’s “relativeSee critical discussions of the concept of Southeast Asian women’s “relativeautonomy” and “high status” in Wolters (1999:170) and Andaya (2000:1–26).–26).26).



Journal of Burma Studies, Volume 10 53

The ‘Traditional’High Status of Women in Burma

of Burma by and large have failed to examine the historicalpasts of women in Burma, contemporary studies of Burmese

society perpetuate the discourse of the “traditional” status ofwomen which, as Barbara Andaya aptly points out, “carrywith them implicit messages of gender equality, economicindependence, etc., and invoke a kind of golden age whenwomen were dierent from men ‘but in no way inferior’”(Andaya 2000:6).

This article examines the discursive formation of the“traditional” high status of women in colonial Burma during the

rst half of the twentieth century and contributes to the largerproject of re-conceptualizing naturalized and essentializedunderstanding of Southeast Asia and its knowledge eld. Itlooks at the varied and multivalent ways that the “high status”of women circulated and operated in ocial and popular,and colonial and nationalist discourses on universal surage,political reforms, and intermarriage (primarily between aBuddhist Burmese woman and an “Indian” man), and it

argues that the Burmese female prototype was formed andunderstood in opposition to the likewise “traditional” inferiorstatus of her racialized other: the “Indian woman.” It showsthat representations of the “traditionally” progressive Burmesewoman constituted a key political strategy on both sides of thecolonial struggle that was fashioned and utilized by colonizingand colonized women and men in unequal relations of powerto justify and de-legitimize colonial rule. The genealogical

investigation into this gender-specic cultural stereotypecomplicates ideas of gender relations and hierarchies in Burmaand challenges the persistent practice of enshrining monolithiccultural stereotypes as essential components of Burmese, andmore broadly Southeast Asian, histories and identities.




Chie Ikeya

T ‘F’ ‘I’ B W BI: I the Eyes f the Clizer

Uerly unlike their miserableMohamedan and Hindoo sisters, they[women in Burma] enjoy absoluteliberty—a liberty of which, if rumorprove true, they make ample use.(Gascoigne 1896:43)

A [Burmese] girl does not change hername when she marries, nor does shewear any sign of marriage, such as aring. Her name is always the same, andthere is nothing to a stranger to denotewhether she be married or not, of whosewife she is; and she keeps her propertyas her own. Marriage does not confer

upon her husband any power over hiswife’s property, either what she bringswith her, what she earns, or what sheinherits subsequently; it all remains herown, as does his remain his own.(Hall 1898:189)

It has often been said that the women

do most of the hard work of the country.But this is not because they are theslaves of their husbands, as amongsavage warlike races. On the contrary,they occupy a position of independenceand responsibility, and it is precisely thissense of responsibility, added to maternallove for their ospring, that makes themwork hard when the husband fails to dohis share. (Brown 1911:216)





Historians of Burma have tended to disregard the conspicuouspaucity of thorough historical studies of the place of women and

gender in pre-colonial or colonial Burma, and more broadly inthe Buddhist region of Southeast Asia (i.e., mainland SoutheastAsia and neighboring Sri Lanka).2 What lile scholars do knowabout the history of gender relations in Burma indicates thatpractices favorable to women have existed side by side withsexist and even misogynistic ideas and customs concerningwomen. Although women in Burma had for a long time aninuential presence in the economic sphere, as in other pre-

modern Southeast Asian societies, the active role of womenas economic agents—the very aribute that gave women theirautonomy and power—subordinated them to men religiously,politically, ritualistically, and ceremonially. Economic prowessenabled women to undertake merit-making activities such asmaking donations to pagodas, but at the same time the worldlysphere of commerce, prot-seeking, and monetary aairs wasdeemed spiritually polluting (Atkinson and Errington 1990;

Kawanami n.d.; Spiro 1997). Additional regulations that applyto female members of Theravada Buddhist societies—such asthe exclusion of women from the sangha since the thirteenthcentury and the shorter history of Buddhist nuns—havecontributed to perceptions of women as occupying a secondaryposition to men (Kawanami 2000; Khaing 1984; Mendelson1975).3

Narrative depictions of women in Buddhist literature,

furthermore, have delivered both positive and negativeportrayals of women. If women have gured in Buddhistliterature as devoted followers of the Buddha, donors,renunciants, and teachers who played a signicant role

2 For a succinct and useful review of the state of Buddhist Studies in Southeast Asiaand Sri Lanka, see the introductory chapter in Blackburn (2001:3–22) and Andaya(2002).3 Buddhist nuns or thila-shins do exist in Burma to this day but they have not been rec-ognized ocially as part of the sangha since the thirteenth century. However, that the

prevailing practice of Theravada Buddhism in contemporary Burma excluded womenfrom being ordained as monks and from joining the sangha hardly changes the factthat women actively participated in and contributed immensely to the operation ofthe monastic and the Buddhist community in Burma as both lay women and nuns.




Chie Ikeya

in the development and spread of Buddhism, Buddhisthagiographies have also cast the women in the role of impure

temptresses charged with keeping men from aaining nibbana (Bartholomeusz 1994; Blackstone 1998; Dharmasena 1991;Wilson 1996). It is hardly surprising that Mi Mi Khaing, thefemale author of The World of Burmese Women (Khaing 1984),(Khaing 1984),recognized unanimously by Burma experts as the foundationalscholarly work on Burmese women, has asserted that womenwere believed to be spiritually inferior to men despite thehigh status that Burmese women allegedly enjoyed: “There

is no doubt in our minds. Spiritually, a man is higher than awoman. This is just not an abstract idea belonging to religiousphilosophy. Conviction of it enter[s] our very bones” (16).(16)..Gendered practices and representations both favorable andunfavorable to women have thus informed the place of womenand men in Burmese society and delineated the boundaries offemininity and masculinity.

Yet, the twentieth century saw positive portrayals

of women in Burma become increasingly pronounced inaccounts of Burmese society by observers both men andwomen, colonizer and colonized. Christian missionaries,colonial administrators, and European travelers commentedon what they perceived as an exceptional liberty of Burmesewomen. British representatives of cosmopolitan women’sassociations pointed to the freedom of women in Burma intheir struggle to enfranchise women in the colonies. Burmese

and Indian nationalist leaders drew aention to the high statusof women in Burma to discredit the British colonial projectand its professed goal of implementing needed social reforms.They focused their critique in particular on the British policyof raising the status of women in the colonies.

Tinzar Lwyn has shown in her analysis of colonialdiscourses on Burmese women that Christian missionariesand colonial ocials alike “wrote in amazement of Burmesewomen’s perceived equality with men and their relativefreedom and independence” (Lwyn 1994:64). A “handbook”on Burma long recognized as the standard authority on the





country and wrien by Sir George Sco, a late nineteenth-century British ocer in Burma, oers one of the most striking

examples of this Orientalist perception of women in Burma.The following passage is taken from a subsection entitled“National Character,” in which Sco aempts to outline aBurmese national identity by comparing and contrastingwomen in Japan and in Burma:

Both are frank, and unaected, andhave a charming artlessness, but the

Burmese woman is far ahead of her lordin the maer of business capacity by theway in which she rules the householdwithout outwardly seeming to exerciseany authority. The Japanese wife treatsher husband as an idol, the Burmese asa comrade. (1906:77)

Harold Fielding Hall, another late nineteenth-century Britishocer in Burma writing at the turn of the century, claims thata Burmese woman, unlike a European or an Indian woman,“has been bound by no ties” (Hall 1898:173). He elaborates:

You see, she [a Burmese woman] hashad to ght her own way; for the samelaws that made woman lower than man

in Europe compensated her to a certainextent by protection and guidance. InBurma she has been neither connednor guided. In Europe and India for verylong the idea was to make woman a hot-house plant, to see that no rough windsstruck her, that no injuries overtook her.In Burma she has had to look out forherself: she has had freedom to cometo grief as well as to come to strength.(173)





acquired or inherited by her either before or after marriage. She is usually

a partner in her husband’s business,and as such as just as much right to signfor the rm as he; but she may have a

business of her own, with the proceedsof which he cannot interfere. Even inmaers in which she has no part, she isusually consulted before an importantstep is taken. . . . (1911:217)

Based on this selective comparative view, colonizersdetermined that Burmese women possessed remarkablefreedom, independence, and equality with men. Thus, wheninternational women’s associations pressed the Britishgovernment to enfranchise women in Burma, they justiedtheir demand on the basis that women in Burma had propertyrights. For instance, a leer to the Secretary of State forIndia, India Oce, dated December 20, 1933, from the Equal

Citizenship and the British Commonwealth League—anassociation whose professed goals were to secure equality ofliberties and opportunities between men and women in theBritish Commonwealth nations—reads:

On behalf of the women of the Empire,we urge you to forward the views ofthe women of Burma, and extend thefranchise to the wives of men qualied

as property owners in the same waythat wives in this country are qualied.This is essentially just in regard toBurmese women, since, according toBurmese law and custom, wives arein fact joint owners of the property. Todistinguish between the joint holders

by enfranchising one only is an obviousinjustice. (League 1933)5

5 The International Alliance of Women for Surage and Equal Citizenship (AllianceInternationale Pour Le Surage et L’Action Civique et Politique des Femmes) simi-larly wrote to the Secretary of India urging that “the franchise to be exercised by




Chie Ikeya

The Burmese “tradition” of gender equality was thussignicantly shaped by the country’s incorporation into the

British empire, which privileged the view of Burmese societyand culture through the lens of the British empire instead ofthrough the lens of other Buddhist or neighboring SoutheastAsian societies where women possessed comparable maritaland property rights.

This is not to suggest that colonizers painted images ofperfect women in Burma. If Orientalist representations of sati and purdah served to legitimize colonialism, in Burma, it was

what Christian missionaries characterized as the excessivelyfree and therefore unrestrained and unrened behavior ofindigenous, non-Christian (i.e., Buddhist) women that servedas the raison d’être of the Anglo-American civilizing mission.6 Colonial ocials similarly placed emphasis on the low literacyrate of women and the high infant mortality rate in Burma andportrayed colonial rule—in particular, colonial educationalreforms—as an antidote to the lack of education and child-

rearing skills of women in Burma.7

In the eyes of somecolonizers, women in Burma, while free and autonomous, stillneeded to be cultivated. Nonetheless, the perception that Burmese societywas free of customs oppressive to women became themost compelling and certainly the most enduring popularrepresentation of Burmese society in the rst few decadesof the twentieth century. Take, for example, the following

passage from a 1914 survey of thirty interviewees—consisting of Burmese and English university professors,Christian missionaries, and government ocials—

owners of property should be on the basis of the vote of both husband and wife as weunderstand that in Burmese law they are joint owners” (Citizenship 1933).6 Scholarship on colonial discourses of women that have emerged in the context ofSouth Asian, subaltern, and feminist studies—and in particular, studies of the prac-tices of sati and purdah , commonly translated as widow-burning and the wearing ofveil—have revealed that Orientalist representations of “traditions” and “customs” in

the colonies that allegedly repressed women served to legitimize the colonial civiliz-ing mission. See Said (1978) and Mani (1998).7 See an examination of colonial discourses on reforms pertaining to female educationin the author’s doctoral dissertation (Ikeya 2006:61–94).





conducted by the Christian Literature Society,8 whichsummarizes the interviewees’ opinions regarding the

position of women in Burma:

The women of Burma are said to enjoyalready many of the privileges for whichtheir Western sisters are clamoring. . .. It is probably true to say that whilstthe position assigned to women inBuddhism is low, yet in practice the

women of Burma have made a place forthemselves which is certainly unique inthe East; and in some ways in advanceof that in the West—if not actually, atleast relatively, to the position of men.(Saunder 1914:63)

According to the interviewees, women in Burma were more

privileged and more “advanced” than women in other partsof the world, including the West.

II: I the Eyes f the ClizedThis view of women in Burma was by no means conned toChristian or British colonizers. Take, for instance, an article byU Ka, entitled “Muslim Women” (Muslim Amyothamimya),in the April 1936 New Year’s edition of Myanmar Alin in which

the author contrasts women in Burma with Muslim women.U Ka begins with a lengthy exposition on purdah , which hedescribes as “a Muslim custom of hiding women at home”(Ka1938:42) for the sake of preventing them from tempting Muslimmen to be lustful and immoral. He then outlines the variousways that a Muslim woman is allegedly deprived of numerousprivileges. He claims that while she is virtually locked up at

8 The survey was conducted on the impact of modern conditions on the state ofBuddhism in contemporary Burma and published as Modern Buddhism in Burma:Being an Epitome of Information Received from Missionaries, Ocials, and Others (Saunder1914).




Chie Ikeya

home to perform domestic duties, when there is a war, she mustaccompany men to nurse the injured. “What is this belief,”

deplores U Ka, “that a Muslim woman should undertake aHajj when she is prohibited from entering a mosque?”(45).9 He adds that Muslim women in Burma cannot read religioustexts, newspapers, or anything wrien in English (43–45). UKa contrasts the desolate account he has presented of the lifeof a Muslim woman with the uplifting portrayal of Buddhistwomen in Burma:

Young Buddhist women graduate with[sic] bachelor and master degrees. Theyrun companies and stores. They becomedoctors, administrators, teachers,municipal representatives, and editorsfor newspapers and magazines. (52)

Not only Burmese social critics but also British Indian subjects

who traveled to Burma reinforced the view that women inBurma occupied a higher social position than that of women inIndia. One of the pioneering leaders of nationalism, democracy,and non-violent political resistance in India, LokamanyaTilak,10 for instance, referred to the social condition of womenin Burma in speeches he gave in India after his visit to Burmain 1899:

All the reforms like absence of castedivision, freedom of religion, educationof women, late marriages, widowremarriage, system of divorce, onwhich some good people of India arein the habit of harping ad nauseam asconstituting a condition precedent to

9 An annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the fth of the “Five Pillars of Islam,” stipulates that

every able-bodied Muslim who can aord to do so is obliged to make the pilgrimageto Mecca at least once in a lifetime.10 For information on Lokamanya B. G. Tilak, see Gopal (1956) and Chousalkar(1990).





the introduction of political reformsin India, had already been in actual

practice in the province of Burma. . . .It is borne in upon us by the situationof the Sinhalese and the Burmese thatthe opinion of some wise person aboutthe indispensability of social reform fornational or industrial advancement ofour country is entirely wrong. . . . SomeEuropean writers have sought to advise

us to bring about social reform as apreparation for political reform. But it ishuman nature that this piece of preceptshould stand suspect till we see with ourown eyes what kind of political reformis given to Burma which is socially ina position to deserve it. (Chousalkar1990:214)

What is interesting about the passage is that Tilak drawsaention to the British refusal to grant political reform toBurma in spite of the socially advanced status of the Burmesefemale. In India, nationalists saw the British colonization ofBurma, despite the high status of women in Burmese society,as proof that British colonial rule merely deployed the“oppressive” treatment of women in India as a justication for

refusing to grant India political reforms. The “high status” ofthe Burmese female, in other words, played a key role in thepolitical maneuvers of nationalists in India.

By the 1930s, the high status of women served as anessential political strategy of nationalist movements not onlyin India but also in Burma. The image of the exceptionallyliberated Burmese women, positioned in contrast to thetraditionally repressed women in India, was repeatedlycited as evidence of the country’s legitimate demand foradministrative reforms. Exemplary of this political strategy,the Secretary of the Burmese Women’s Association, Daw Mya




Chie Ikeya

Sein, put forward the case for extending the reforms grantedto India in 1910 but denied to Burma as follows at the Burma

Round Table Conference in 1931:

The women of Burma occupy a positionof freedom and independence notaained in other provinces. Sociallythere is practical equality between thesexes. Purdha is unknown; women taketheir full share with men in the economic

life of their country and the percentageof literates among women is far higherthan elsewhere.11

Given the fact that the British colonial discourse of a civilizingmission used the conditions of women in the colonies asan index for measuring the quality of a civilization, it is nosurprise that nationalists highlighted the egalitarian nature

of gender relations in Burma. The high status of the Burmesefemale exposed the illegitimacy of British colonial rule.By citing the high status of the Burmese female as

evidence of the country’s legitimate demand for sovereignty,nationalists reinforced their claim to self-rule and/orindependence. At the same time, they questioned both thesuperior status of the colonizing women and the colonizers’conceptualizations of masculinity and femininity. Take, for

instance, the following statement by Daw Khin Myint in a talkentitled “Englishmen as Seen by Burmese Women”:

11 This quote, from minutes of proceedings at the Round Table Conference, whichDaw Mya Sein aended as the only female member of the Burma delegation, is citedin Khaing (1984:156).





Englishmen respect their women, but hewill not entrust his pay envelope wholly

or solely to her charge. Not so in Burma.The Burmese woman knows how tomake money and how to keep it. She seesto it that she is appointed “Chancellor ofher husband’s exchequer” and keeperof the “Family Purse.”12

The high status of women in Burma had become established

as a resilient Burmese national tradition and Daw Khin Myintdrew on this tradition as a strategic move in her struggle tonegotiate prevailing, unequal relations of power.

Insofar as the high status of women in Burma symbolizeda serious challenge to the legitimacy of British colonial ruleand civilizing mission, the maintenance of this symbolictradition gured as an imperative element of the anti-colonialstruggle in Burma. An editorial in the 1936 New Year’s edition

of New Light of Myanmar titled “Some of Burma’s Problems,”thus, urged women in Burma to pursue professional careersfor the sake of their “traditional” high status. In the editorial,the editor calls on Burmese women to not fall behind womenin other countries—namely the West, China, Japan, Turkey,Persia, Egypt, and other “uncolonized” countries presumablyon the fast track to modernization—who were joining thearmed and police forces, taking up professions as mechanics,

journalists, doctors and nurses, teachers, lawyers, and judges.“Burmese women,” he says, “are you going to let your time-honored reputation as exceptionally liberated women of theEast be ruined?”(New Light of Myanmar 1936:9).

In fact, by the late 1930s, the preferred tactic of anti-colonialists in Burma involved accentuating not the high statusof women in Burma per se, but rather its loss under colonialrule. The next section examines the role that the threatenedloss of the “time-honored” high status of a Burmese woman

12 The talk, given at a meeting of the Rotary Club of Rangoon, was printed in Ngan HtaLawka magazine (Myint 1937:542).




Chie Ikeya

played in Burmese nationalist discourses by looking atcensorious discussions about a type of intermarriage that I

refer to as the “Indo-Burmese” marriage: a marriage betweena Burmese Buddhist woman and an “Indian” man thatcirculated in the Burmese media in the 1930s (I will elaborateon what the term “Indian” meant in 1930s’ Burmese discoursein the following section). These representations, in the formof editorials, commentaries, and cartoons that ranged fromsarcastic to derogatory, depicted Indian men as racially inferiorminions of the British colonizers and accused Burmese women

who married such men of transgressing essential Burmesecultural boundaries and sacricing the freedom safeguarded

by “traditional” Burmese society. The section shows that thegure of the miscegenating Burmese female, who had becomethe target of critics who sought to illustrate to the Burmese publicthe pernicious eects of colonial rule on the Burmese race andreligion, was essential to and constitutive of the conceptualizationof the Burmese nation-state and national identity.

T Tb ‘I-B’ mBoth inter-faith marriage and marriage between a Burmesewoman and a non-indigenous man have represented commonpractices since at least the nineteenth century, and Burmascholars have noted that such unions were even encouraged bythe local population (Thant 2001:244).13 In the 1920s, however,government ocials, politicians, writers, and intellectuals

began to discuss a marriage between a Burmese Buddhistwoman and an “Indian” man as a morally and culturallyreprehensible practice that purportedly threatened the socio-cultural oppression of women in Burma.14

13 According to John C. Koop’sAccording to John C. Koop’s John C. Koop’s The Eurasian Population in Burma , the children ofBurmese women and European men rst appeared in Burma as early as the sixteenthcentury in the maritime districts of Mergui, Tavoy, Martaban, Pegu, and Akyab, whereearly Portuguese traders, explorers, and navigators seled (1960:17–20).14 “Intermarriage” in fact emerged as a socio-cultural problem in Burma as early as

1870, when the British administration issued circulars prohibiting European ocialsfrom conjugal liaisons with indigenous women. In Burma, as in other Europeancolonies in Southeast Asia, intimate relations between colonized women and colo-nizing men—and the progeny of such unions—were considered harmful to “white





The terms “Indian” (kala)15 and “Indo-Burmese” needa brief explanation. As it was disseminated in the Burmese

media in the 1920s and 1930s, the term “Indian” referredmainly, though not necessarily, to a Hindu or a Muslim fromthe Indian subcontinent. “Indian” in the context of the Indo-Burmese marriage furthermore signied the group of mostlymale, immigrant and/or seasonal traders, workers, andlaborers from the Indian subcontinent who came to Burmain the thousands to work in Burma’s paddy elds, rice mills,factories, and docks. Far from being a homogeneous lot, the

group of Indian immigrants included a diverse array of peoplefrom Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, Sikh, and other religious

backgrounds: Cheiar moneylenders from Tamil Nadu, sailorsand boatmen from Chiagong, coolies from Telegu, andBengali durwans (guards), dhobies (laundry washers), tailors,and barbers. The colonial government and companies hiredupper-caste Bengalis as clerks and Tamils from Madras usually

became household servants (Burma 1928:3–12).

The term “Indian” did not reect the heterogeneity ofthis group, however, and stereotyped immigrants from theIndian subcontinent as lower-class and lower-caste Muslimand Hindu men and women, typically of skin color darkerthan that of the indigenous races of Burma.16 Figure 1 shows a

prestige” and to white minority rule founded upon carefully classied racial hier -archies (Edwards 2002; Stoler 2002; Taylor 1983). Burmese critics, likewise, voicedtheir concern over the exploitative nature of relations between European men and

Burmese women and they claimed that under colonial rule, socio-economic disparityhad become an increasingly dominant determining factor in marriage. At the sametime, however, the Burmese public regarded relations with European men as meansof accessing power, status, and socio-economic advancement and tended to nd aEuro-Burmese union far less objectionable than an Indo-Burmese one (Ikeya 2006).15 The word kala can also mean “foreigners,” including the British and more generally“Europeans.” But in the twentieth century, the word began to refer almost exclusivelyto “Indians” and the word bo , whatever its original meaning (which is associated withthe military ranking of a general), appeared instead as the common word used todenote “British,” “White,” or “European.”16 A thorough discussion of the “indigenous races” of Burma is beyond the scope of

this article. Suce it to say that the colonial administration used linguistic dierenceas the primary marker of race. Accordingly, the majority of people in colonial Burmawere classied as “Burmese Buddhists” while others in the indigenous populationwere divided into minority groups (e.g., Chin, Mon, Kachin, Karen, Kayah, Arakan,




Chie Ikeya

cigaree advertisement, featured in a 1937 issue of a leadingnewspaper, that sheds light on how the Burmese print media

portrayed “Indians” in Burma; the Burmese men in the ad (theshoe-wearing cigaree smokers) represent college students,one of whom has just returned from a trip upcountry duringan academic break and there, is accompanied by a (shoeless)Indian coolie carrying his luggage.

I employ the term “Indo-Burmese marriage” insteadof “Burmese-Muslim marriage,” the term the Britishadministration used, because the laer description doesn’t

accurately capture the racial or, rather, interracial aspect ofthe intermarriage in question. As the following discussion willshow, “Burmese-Muslim marriage” is a misleading descriptionof the unions that became the target of public castigation; criticsoften conated “Indian” and “Muslim” in their discussions ofintermarriage, but they directed their criticism consistently ata Burmese woman’s marriage to an “Indian” man rather thana Muslim man per se.

The Indo-Burmese marriage rst emerged as a public

concern in the early 1920s as an agenda of the leading women’snationalist organization, Wunthanu Konmaryi Athin (hereafterreferred to as Konmaryi), a subsidiary branch of the GeneralCouncil of Burmese Associations (GCBA).17 The rst publicdenunciation of Indo-Burmese marriages by the Konmaryitook place on July 11, 1921 at a demonstration organized by theGCBA to protest the imprisonment of U Oama, a nationalistmonk and a leading member of the GCBA known as “the

Gandhi of Burma.”

18

Addressing those who were gatheredand Shan). For a succinct discussion of the distinctly twentieth-century divide betweenthe “Burmese” and the “minorities,” see Thant Myint U’s analysis of the developmentof ethnic cleavages among those seen as “foreign” and those seen as “native,” andamong the “native races” themselves (2001:243–44).17 When the Konmaryi was founded on November 16, 1919, it was an elite women’sorganization with approximately 300 members led by an executive commiee of o-cials’ wives and prosperous women entrepreneurs, chiey bazaar traders, whose chiefcommitment was to support the nationalist eorts of Burmese men (Maw 1999:51–55;Mu 1981:7–30; Nyin 1976:17–21).

18 U Oama was famous for his inammatory anti-colonial speeches, which he gavethroughout small towns and villages in Burma. The colonial government arrestedhim for one of these speeches, tried him for sedition, and sentenced him to eighteenmonths imprisonment—the rst time in colonial Burmese history that a prison term





at a park in downtown Rangoon for the protest, Konmaryi

members declared that Burmese women should not marrymen of a religious faith other than Buddhism (Gale 1939:128).19 The purported problem underlying Indo-Burmese marriagesconcerned the loss by the woman of her Buddhist spousalrights, especially those pertaining to divorce and inheritance,through the marriage. The colonial administration summarizedthe problem as follows:

First, it is said that a Burmese Buddhistwoman who has contracted an alliance

was handed out for making a political speech. The GCBA organized a day of mourn-ing for U Oama on 11 July 1921, accompanied by a public demonstration at theBandoola Park (Mu 1981:27–28). For brief biographies of U Oama, see Mendelson(1975:199–206) and Maung (1980:14–16).19 The word kabya , in its most basic meaning, refers to people of mixed ancestry. Theetymology of the word, however, is uncertain. Some argue that kabya is a derivativeof the word kaq-pa , which refers to a person who has taken up residence, temporarily

or permanently, in a locality that is not his native place. Kaq-pa also means parasite.Others claim that kabya derived from the word kwe-bya , which means to be dividedor to become various, a word especially applicable to living beings ( Judson’s Burmese-English Dictionary 1953:174–250; Myanmar-Engleik Abeidan 1993:4, 22; Gale 1939:7).

Fig. 1: Advertiseet f Pl CigareesSrce: Thuriya (The S), Jaary 22, 1937





second, that the woman had no subsisting marriage tie; andthird, that the marriage was solemnized and recorded by

the registrar or the village headman. If the couple cohabitedwithout marriage and without being registered thus, thewoman or her parents, guardians, and siblings, could informthe village registrar of it, at which time both parties were to besummoned and urged to legalize the union. If the man refusedto legalize the union, a suit for breach of promise to marryor for seduction could be brought against him. If the unionwas legalized, Burmese customary law applied to all maers

related to divorce, inheritance, succession and ownership ofproperties. In addition, any child born before legalization ofthe union also gained “legitimate” status.21

The bill, however, failed to pass until 1939, and theKonmaryi’s public criticism had failed to muster a popularfollowing until the late 1930s when resolutions dealing withthe Burmese-Muslim marriage appeared as an importantagenda at nationalist meetings throughout the country.22 The

colonial state in fact cited the Burmese-Muslim marriage asone chief cause of a series of anti-Indian riots—referred to asthe “1938 Burma Riots”—that broke out in Rangoon on July26, 1938.23

The riots began when a mass meeting of BurmeseBuddhist monks and laymen at the Shwe Dagon Pagodaturned into a violent assault on Indians. The meeting, chaired

by a respected Buddhist monk, had been organized to protest

against an anti-Buddhist book by a Maung Shwe Hpi that21 The 1927 draft outlawed polygamy, recognized adultery and cruelty as matrimo-nial faults to justify divorce, and dened divorce to be the only means (aside fromdeath) of breaking marital ties, thus safeguarding against hasty divorces. As Daw MiMi Khaing points out, however, Burmese customary law still failed to apply to mar-riages involving Buddhist women and non-Buddhist men (1984:42–43).22 The Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Act (Burma Act XXIV, 1939)came into eect on April 1, 1939 (Burma Act XXIV 1939:15–24).23 Varying historical accounts explain the anti-Indian riots by placing emphasis onthe intensication of anti-colonialist sentiments, the economic crisis triggered by the

Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Burmese public’s heightened awareness ofethnicity. For various historical narratives of riots and the Burmese-Muslim marriagequestion, see Riot Inquiry Commiee (1939), Adas (1974), Furnivall (1991), Gravers(1999), Singh (1980), and Yegar (1972).




Chie Ikeya

was rst published seven years earlier and then republished afew months prior to the riots. Those gathered for the meeting

marched to the Soortee Bara Bazaar and upon arrival at the bazaar, began throwing stones and aacking Indians. Thepolice stepped in, as a result of which a monk was injured byan Indian policeman. Similar riots spread throughout Burmaimmediately following the unrest at the bazaar, protractinginto September 1938 and resulting in 220 dead and 926 injured.The British administration aributed the riots to several otherfactors besides Maung Shwe Hpi’s book, including the 1930s

economic depression, the sensationalist and inammatorycoverage of the riots by the popular press, and intermarriage

between Buddhist Burmese women and Indian men. The reportunderscored the link between Indo-Burmese marriages andthe riots, asserting that in the majority of organized protestsagainst Maung Shwe Hpi’s book, the marriage question wasraised although it bore no actual relation to the book. “It

became evident to us,” states the Riot Inquiry Interim Report ,

“that one of the major sources of anxiety in the minds of agreat number of [Burmese] was the question of the marriage oftheir womenfolk with foreigners in general and with Indiansin particular”(Commiee 1939).

Newspaper articles published in the wake of the riotsindicate that an Indo-Burmese marriage was perceived notonly as the woman’s decline in status but furthermore as herviolent physical oppression. A report published April 21, 1939,

in the Toetetyei (The Advance Monthly), entitled “Burmesewomen meet with troubles,” gave an account of a Burmesewoman, Ma May Myit, who married an Indian man aboutfourteen years earlier. According to the report, Ma May Myitwas taken to India by her husband in November 1938. Uponher arrival, she found herself ill-treated at the hands of herhusband and his rst wife before she was ultimately kickedout of the house. Ma May Myit went to Calcua where shefound Burmese residents who nanced her passage back toBurma (Toetetyei April 29, 1939).

A Burmese woman who married a Muslim not only





dragged herself down, but more generally, she denigratedBurmese society at large. An article in the November 27,

1938, issue of Seq-Than Journal (Ten Million), published underthe heading, “Burmese women who took Indians,” blamedBurmese wives of Indian Muslims for ruining Burma’s “raceand religion”:

You Burmese women who fail tosafeguard your own race, after you havemarried an Indian[,] your daughter

whom you have begoen by such a tietakes an Indian as her husband. As foryour son, he becomes a half-caste andtries to get a pure Burmese woman. Notonly you but your future generationalso is those who are responsible for theruination of the race.

The July 25, 1938, issue of Thuriya featured an article thataccused immigrants to Burma who professed other religionsof “seducing Burmese Buddhist women to become theirwives, causing dissension in order to create such communitiesas Dobama Muslim (We Burmese Muslim).”24 The criticsof Burmese women’s liaisons with Muslims echoed thecolonialist Darwinian discourse on racial degeneration. ABurmese woman was destined to damage Burmese culture

because she had to adopt her husband’s religion and custom.She thus destroyed her amyo (Amjio;): i.e., her race, ancesorsand kin, religion, and culture.25 The author of Kabya Pyahana(The Half-Caste Problem), published in 1939, summed up thediscourse against the Burmese-Muslim marriage: “A Burmesewoman who marries [an Indian Muslim man] hurts both heramyo and her cultural heritage”(Gale 1939:126). A Burmese(Gale 1939:126). A BurmeseA Burmese

24 The passage from the leer, wrien and published in Burmese in the July 25 issue

of Thuriya, was cited in English translation in Commiee (1939:11).(1939:11).25 The word amyo is often translated into English as “race,” although race is only oneof its meanings. The word also means “kind” or “species,” and refers to a person’slineage, heredity, family, relative, and class..




Chie Ikeya

woman’s degenerative intercourse with an Indian—portrayedas inherently inclined to perpetuate the oppressive treatment

of women customary in Hindu and Muslim societies—threatened a spiraling destruction of Burmese society (8).

The gure of the miscegenating Burmese female whohad abandoned her “high status” thus provided an outlet for aracialized and sexualized critique of the impact of colonial ruleon Burmese society. By discussing Indo-Burmese marriages asdemeaning and harmful to the prestige of Burmese womenand the Burmese amyo , critics indirectly accused the British

colonial state and its middlemen, the Indians, of oppressingBurmese people. On the other hand, by claiming that theBurmese public was concerned chiey with marriages betweenBurmese Buddhist women and Indian Muslim men, the Britishsought to elide the fact that their economic and immigrationpolicies resulted in the disenfranchisement of the indigenouspopulation, a result that Burmese people felt particularlyacutely as a consequence of the 1930s’ economic depression.

The colonizer and the colonized in Burma alike deployedracialized and sexualized senses of belonging and exclusionwhich converged on the bodies of Burmese women.

The “high status” still functioned as an essentialpolitical strategy, but in the context of the late 1930s, it servedthe interests of those who sought to refract a conceptualizationof the Burmese nation-state through the Burmese female whohad betrayed her amyo. In the discourses of the Indo-Burmese

marriage, the women functioned as objects of reection. In heranalysis of literary conventions used in Buddhist hagiographicliterature, Liz Wilson argues that the function of women whoappear in Buddhist narratives is often as objects of meditationthat lead to the edication of the male subjects who observethe women:

In a broad cross-section of hagiographicliterature, male protagonists becomeArahats, or “worthy ones,” throughviewing dead, dying, or disgured





female bodies. By viewing women asobject lessons on the folly of desire,

the men in these narratives therebyachieve the state of spiritual liberationthat is characterized by the eradicationof desire and thereby become worthyof veneration and emulation. (Wilson1996:3–4)

In the castigating public discussion of a Burmese woman’s

relations to “Indian” men, male protagonists becamenationalists or nationalist heroes through viewing women asobject lessons on the folly of desire for the colonial and the“foreign.” The gure of the intermarrying and miscegenatingBurmese female who racially and culturally degraded herpeople by geing into bed (literally) with the “minions” of theBritish colonizers served to edify a singular conceptualizationof the Burmese nation-state. Just as there was no civilized,

free, and independent traditional Burmese female without theuncivilized, oppressed, “Indian” and female “Other,” there wasno sovereign and self-respecting Burmese nation without theunpatriotic, miscegenating, and degraded Burmese female.

CThe “tradition” of gender equality and high status of wom-en in Burma developed as a result of the multi-dimensionaland multiply motivated representational practices by coloniz-ing and colonized women and men who co-authored essen-tially and powerfully gendered and racialized discourses ofcolonialism, modernization, and nationalism. Christian mis-sionaries and colonial ocials cited the “traditional” freedomof women in Burma in their eort to justify colonialism. If inBritish India the oppression of women served as the justi-cation for the colonizers’ civilizing mission, the untamed anduncultivated freedom of women in Burma legitimized colo-nial rule. Women’s associations, both local and cosmopolitan,advocated for women’s enfranchisement on the basis that




Chie Ikeya

women’s surage was in keeping with Burmese “tradition.”Nationalists and social critics in India drew aention to the

British colonization of Burma, despite the high status of womenin Burmese society, as proof that the “oppressive” treatmentof women in India was a mere excuse for the continued coloni-zation of India. Members of the Burmese political, intellectual,and social elite referenced the “high status” as a testament totheir rightful claim to decolonization and self-rule. They like-wise aunted the “high status” to contest the superiority ofthe colonizing society, race, and culture.

My analysis of the political ecacy of the concept ofBurmese women as having “high status” and its varied uses

by everyone but Burmese women themselves has also shownthat in colonial Burma, as in other European colonies, impe-rial authority and national identity were expressed not only inracialized but also gendered terms. “Burmese women” devel-oped into a privileged idiom through which disparate socialgroups in colonial Burma interpreted, debated, appropriated,

resisted, and otherwise engaged with new relations of powerand social inequalities created by processes of colonialism andmodernization. Both as a heuristic category and as actual his-torical agents, the “Burmese women” examined in this study,such as the traditionally progressive woman and the miscege-nating woman, articulated and gave shape to emergent cos-mopolitan ideas of social reform, race, and nation-state.

Finally, my examination of the construction of gen-

dered discourses has allowed us to begin deconstructing gen-der-specic cultural stereotypes that have dened and con-stituted knowledge about Burma. A critical history of Burma,however, is in need of another kind of scholarly intervention: acareful documentation of gender-specic relations of power inBurma on the eve of colonialism, modernization, and national-ism. The relative paucity of studies on gender and more broad-ly “tradition” in pre-colonial Burma seriously undermines anyaempt to evaluate the signicance of colonial modernity orto assess processes of historical change. By interrogating theideas, images, practices, and institutions that informed nor-





mative notions of femininity in colonial Burma, we will be bet-ter positioned to question the ways that these gendered ideas

have historically delineated the boundaries among women,culture and “tradition” in Burma.

R

P S

newspapers ad agazies

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