Golden Earth E-Book

Norman Lewis

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 503

Beschreibung

Despite communist incursions and tribal insurrection, Norman Lewis describes a land of breathtaking natural beauty peopled by the gentle Burmese. This is a country where Buddhist belief spares even the rats, where the Director of Prisons quotes Chaucer and where three-day theatrical shows are staged to celebrate a monk taking orders. Hitching lifts with the army and travelling merchants, Lewis is treated to hospitality wherever he stops in this war-torn land, and reveals a country where 'the condition of the soul replaces that of the stock market as a topic for polite conversation'.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Map

1 Rangoon

2 Preparations

3 Dramatic Entertainment

4 Excursion to the Deep South

5 Mergui

6 Conducted Tour

7 Burmese Gaol

8 To Mandalay

9 Kings and a Prince

10 Anawrahta’s Pagoda

11 By Lorry to Lashio

12 The Northern Shans

13 Protective Custody

14 Nam Hkam Bazaar

15 Circuit House, Bhamó

16 The Jade Country

17 Down the Irrawaddy

18 A Mild Alarm

19 Rangoon Express

20 Rival Parties

21 The Buffalo Dance

22 The Shwedagon

Index

About the Author

Copyright

Foreword

IN 1949, with the creation of the People’s Republic of China, that country became as remote and inaccessible as Tibet had been of old. I believed that this policy of self-isolation might spread to neighbouring countries and, having determined to see before I died something of the Far East, I went in 1950 to Indo-China, and covered a little of the area still open to travel in that fabulous country. In that year there was no slackening in the rate at which the Far Eastern lands were passing beyond the reach of the literary sightseer. Korea was scorched off the map, and if we were embroiled with China, said the observers, the flames of this conflagration might spread to Burma where Communist guerrillas were already firmly entrenched. One of two things would then happen: either the country would pass with China behind what had been called the Bamboo Curtain, or it would be defended by the West, as Korea had been defended, and with similar results. In either case the traditional Burma, with its archaic and charming way of life, would have vanished.

In a rational plan for seeing a little of the Eastern world these grave considerations seemed to me to entitle Burma to priority. Accordingly I flew there at the beginning of 1951.

CHAPTER 1

Rangoon

BURMA SPREAD as a dark stain into the midnight sea. Soon the inert grey of water lifted to the horizon, but the darkness that followed it was sprinkled with points of light. There was a bleared reflection from broad waterways of the wasting moon; the blinking of lamps strung out in lines, leading weblike to the centre of some unseen city; then the banal reality of that accepted wonder of the air-traveller’s world, the Shwedagon Pagoda by night. The moonlight was too weak to reveal the pagoda’s golden surfaces, and as it was late most of the artificial illumination had been switched off. What remained was a deserted fairground at midnight – a few trivial pendants of lights which sketched in, without revealing, the august shape.

At the airport, the bleak, palely lit buildings, where lines of passengers awaited their interrogation by innumerable officials, were decorated, as if by design, by groups of tiny, silk-clad, elfin creatures – unmistakably adult, since some nursed at the breast exquisite miniatures of themselves. And while the dreary procession of sleepwalkers dragged by from official to official, from bureau to bureau, the little silken groups sat comfortably apart, faces impeccably powdered, hair garlanded, hands in lap, watching us with unblinking eyes, no evidence of relish, and only the occasional ejaculation of a stream of betel. There seemed no answer to the riddle of their presence. They were there when first we staggered into the building and still there, squatting silent and motionless in unchanged positions, when, hours later, as it seemed, the bus took us away. Of Mingaladon Airport it could at least be said that it did not suffer from the cosmopolitan insipidity natural to airports. Here one was bathed in the essence of the country while waiting to pass through the formalities.

* * *

I awoke next morning feeling dazed and queasy. There had been an earthquake in the small hours – the first of any importance, the papers said, since that of 1931 – but although half awakened I had put the sensation down to a mild heart attack, or some manifestation of overtiredness, and immediately dropped off again. Now I was aroused once more by an unfamiliar clamour. Outside the window was a courtyard, and mynas were using it for their exercises, giving out shrill, bubbling cries, indistinguishable from the gurglings of those pipes which are filled with water and used to imitate bird-sounds. There were crows as well; fine, glossy, Asiatic specimens, not very large, but very sprightly, their shoulders splashed with a blue iridescence. They were extremely noisy in their affable crow-like way. Above their endless cawings could sometimes be heard a shrill kitten-like mew. This came from a kite perched on a wireless aerial. It was useless to hope for more sleep.

In any case, there was a knock on the door and a smart young Indian page appeared and handed me a card on which was printed, ‘U Maung Lat, Ex-Head Master’. Further enquiries from the boy produced nothing better than nods and smiles, so reluctantly I dressed and went down. U Maung Lat, who was sitting in the lounge, rose to greet me. He had the manner of a savant and was dressed conservatively, wearing a hand-tied turban, and the frayed jacket of the impecunious man of letters. Smiling gently, he produced a newspaper cutting which said that among the passengers to arrive on that morning’s plane had been the author Lewis Morgan. The police, he said, had been able, from their records, to direct him to my hotel. It is one of the accepted humiliations of the writer that, however simple his name, no one can ever get it right. In my travels in Indo-China I had been given an identification paper describing me as Louis Norman, writer, commissioned by Jonathan Cape Limited of Thirty Bedford Square. By a slow process of compression and corruption I finished this journey as Monsieur Thirsty Bedford; which, as the name and description had been recopied about twenty times, I did not think unreasonable. But on the present occasion, having written out my name  in full perhaps a dozen times within the past few hours, I found the distortion less pardonable.

However, U Maung Lat’s smile was irresistible. ‘Mr Morgan,’ he said, coming straight to the point, ‘I have decided my wish to place upon your shoulders the responsibility of publishing my treatise, amounting to ninety-four thousand words, on those three things for which Burma is of all countries the most famous.’ The three things, said my visitor, were snake charming, the playing of rattan football, and the destruction of the invading forces sent by a Ming Emperor of China. This, his lifetime’s work he said, had been accepted, during the Japanese occupation, by the Domei Agency, but, alas, through subsequent events beyond their control, they had been unable to fulfil their contract.

Many other new arrivals in Rangoon, I have no doubt, must have met this charming eccentric, but on me this delightful piece of oriental dottiness, gleaned from my first non-official contact in Burma, had a tonic effect. Immediately the irritations of the night before vanished. I was full of hope for the future.

* * *

Rangoon, even in temporary decline, is imperial and rectilinear. It was built by a people who refused compromise with the East, and has wide, straight, shadeless streets, with much solid bank-architecture of vaguely Grecian inspiration. In the town one is constantly being taken back to Leadenhall Street; while down on the Rangoon river-front the style is that of the London Customs House. Within these edifices, there is something ecclesiastical in the gleaming of dark woods and brass. In passing over these thresholds the voice is instinctively hushed. There is much façade and presence, little pretence at comfort, and no surrender to the climate. This was the Victorian coloniser’s response to the unsubstantial glories of Mandalay.

These massive columns now rise with shabby dignity from the tangle of scavenging dogs and sprawling, ragged bodies at their base. In recent years, the main thoroughfares, with such resolutely English names as Commissioner’s Road, have acquired a squalid incrustation of stalls and barracks, and through these European arteries now courses pure oriental blood. Down by the port it is an Indian settlement. Over to the west the Chinese have moved in with their outdoor theatres and joss-houses. The Burmese, in their own capital city, content themselves with the suburbs. Little has been done by the new authority to check the encroaching squalor. Side lanes are piled with stinking refuse which mounts up quicker than the dogs and crows can dispose of it. The covers have been taken off most of the drains and not replaced. Half-starved Indians lie dying in the sunshine. Occasionally insurgents cut off the town’s water supply. There are small annual epidemics of cholera and smallpox, and the incidence of bubonic plague is unlikely to decrease because the sewers of Rangoon swarm with rats, which it is irreligious, according to all Burmese and most Indians, to kill. Even when the rats have been caught alive in traps, to what end it is not clear, they have actually been released by the pious, who were ready to rise earlier than the rat-catchers, if spiritual merit could thereby be earned. Wherever there is a vacant space the authorities have allowed refugees to put up pestiferous shacks, which now flank in unbroken lines the country roads leading into Rangoon, the railway tracks, and the shores of the Royal Lake.

Amidst this fetor the Burmese masses live their festal and contemplative existences. Untouched by the decaying middens in which they live, they emerge into the sunshine immaculate and serene. The Burmese must be the best-dressed people in the world. There is no misery of the kind that manifests itself in rags and sores. In Buddhism there is a positive, tangible advantage – the acquisition of merit – to be obtained by works of charity. These are chalked up to the credit of the soul in subsequent existences. Unfortunately for the Indian immigrants this purchase of merit seems to apply somewhat less in the case of not-altogether-human foreigners.

* * *

It was Burma Union Day, one of the many public holidays when the Burmese are able to practise their aptitude for leisure in the many ingenious ways they have developed through the centuries. The streets of Rangoon, wallowing in sun, flashed and scintillated with strolling crowds, skirted in their best silk longyis. All places of public entertainment had been open since early morning. A cinema showing a Burmese film was advertising this by a full-scale orchestra, with drums, gongs and a squealing flute, set up outside on the pavement. But the Burmese were not exacting in the matter of entertainment and the products of Filmistan – the Indian Hollywood – were being patronised with equal enthusiasm. A production called ‘Ekthi-Larki’ had attracted long queues. It was a comedy; the posters said in English that ‘when you come out you cry, because so roaring is this film’. On the whole the Orient prefers straight drama in its films, and that as sensational and horrific as possible. Such productions are known here as se-ta, a Burmanisation of the word stunt. I later discovered that, of twenty-two films showing in Rangoon at that moment, eighteen were se-tas.

The Burmese cinema was, by the way, showing a South Sea Island affair; a Polynesian epic à la Hollywood; but orientalised to local taste. In the advertising stills the hero, a Burmese Johnny Weismuller, wore check shorts, a satin shirt and pearl-handled pistols. For some obscure reason he carried in one hand an Industry Year Book and Directory for 1934. The heroine wore a sarong, of the type Miss Dorothy Lamour has described as her contribution to culture, and a brassière. She was definitely Anglo-Burman with marked Aryan characteristics, thus strengthening my theory formed by previous observation in the Far East that standards of beauty eventually accommodate themselves to the ideals set by the real possessors of power. In other words: unless and until the balance of world power swings from West to East, urban Easterners will go on trying to look like American film actors and actresses; and, in the course of centuries, the process will probably be more or less completed by natural selection. I first formed this theory when I heard that (before recent events) Pekinese young ladies of fashion were building up a modish aquilinity of feature by having an ivory wedge inserted by plastic surgery along the bridge of the nose. A further operation was practised, according to my information, upon the upper eyelids, to abolish for the very wealthy the reproach of almond-shaped eyes.

The chief Western contribution of the moment to the entertainment of Rangoon film-goers, was ‘Anna and the King of Siam’, ‘enshrouding all the Glamour and Mystery of the East’. Glamour and Mystery! Can it be that only now, when for us Cathay and the Indies have been stripped of those shadowy attributes, Orientals themselves are beginning to be persuaded of their existence … just as the natives of the Isle of Capri and Old Monterrey have accepted with enthusiasm the songs composed in their honour in Brooklyn. In the case of Anna and the King, the film had not yet started, and a tight, neck-craning circle had formed round someone who was entertaining them. A picturesque mountebank demonstrating some traditional Eastern legerdemain? Not at all. Merely a machine which for eight annas engraved your name, while you waited, on the barrel of your fountain pen.

And so with all the rest of it. What was trashiest in the only half-understood West had been found most acceptable. The Russian Balalaika night club, where respectable Burmese business men submitted uneasily, for good form’s sake, to the fondling of Chinese hostesses and listened without appreciation to Jock d’Souza’s Super Hep Swingtette; the Impatient Virgins and Hard-Boiled Virgins on the bookstalls; the useless, illegally imported American cars, which it was unsafe to drive outside the town. These were no more than the greedily snatched-at symbols of prestige.

This undigested Westernism was much in evidence, too, in the national celebrations. For several hundred years Orientals have kept the West under close observation, hoping ultimately to extract the secret, to uncover the mechanism behind that mysterious supremacy in such matters as accurate clocks and automatic weapons. How was it that not even the benign interest of the Heavens, as shown by the most splendid of horoscopes, could protect a man against a Western bullet? The reason clearly lay in the effectiveness of the barbarians’ semi-magic rites and ceremonies; one of which, and a spectacular one, consisted of gathering in groups to practise stertorous, rhythmic breathing accompanied by the shamanistic jerking of arms and legs. Here then, in the public gardens of Bogyoke Square, was a deputation of ladies from the Karenni States, marching and countermarching, bending and stretching, holding their breath for enormous lengths of time, before, when on the verge of asphyxiation, expelling it in geyser-like eruptions. Having come under Burmese civilising influence, the Karen ladies had left at home their own splendid national costumes and appeared in Burmese blouses and longyis; the limit of Westernisation they could decently permit themselves.

The Chinese, stamped with the uniformity of national renaissance, had gone further and donned PT kit for the celebration. Lorry after lorry roared by filled with the young adherents of Mao Tse-tung, looking very purposeful in their blue outfits, and carefully graded, lorry by lorry, according to size.

Further down the street an open-air film show reproduced scenes from the previous year’s rejoicings. The Prime Minister of Burma, the honourable Thakin Nu, was shown feeding a large concourse of Buddhist monks. A Burmese prime minister feeds monks on public occasions in much the same way as the heads of other states, or their representatives, inspect troops. The procedure is intended to emphasise the spiritual and renunciatory basis of Burmese civilisation, and orthodox Burmese were as much shocked by the omission by the British Viceroy of this ancient and regal custom as by any other aspect of their loss of independence.

No effort is spared by the Burmese government to underline its devotion to non-materialistic ideals. A further scene showed the Prime Minister at the head of a solemn procession and carrying a tooth of the Buddha, which was being taken in state to a shrine in the Chin country. The tooth was probably a miraculous self-reproduction of one of the originals and duly authenticated as such by the Buddhist priesthood. Such miracles are extremely rare and thus the existing teeth continue to be valued by Buddhists beyond all price. In 1560 the Burmese king offered the modern equivalent of about a million pounds to the Portuguese for one they had looted from Ceylon, but the Portuguese turned down the offer, and destroyed the tooth as an idol.

The film show ended with secular light relief in the form of a selection of dances and ceremonies by remote tribespeople. They included an amiable drinking rite carried out by some Chins which involved the transfer, in a kind of Valentino kiss, of mouthfuls of rice-liquor from the men to the women of the tribe. The original supply of liquor was contained in beer-bottles, on which the labels had been carefully preserved. When all the participants had been warmed up by these preliminaries, they linked arms and broke into what looked like – and perhaps was – the Lambeth Walk.

* * *

Across the gardens where the well-conducted oriental revels were taking place, gleamed softly the inverted golden bell of the Sule Pagoda. The erection of this monument in the eighteenth century was a religious gesture on the part of Alaungpaya, one of the last great Burmese kings. Always an amateur of the grand manner, Alaungpaya’s human sacrifices were the best that could be procured; so that at the foundation of this pious institution the victim was a Talaing princeling, who was buried alive with extraordinary pomp. In this way he became the spirit-guardian of Rangoon, a minor god, who is shown in effigy simpering upon a golden throne, apparently unresentful of the process by which his divinity was acquired. The spire of the Sule Pagoda is plated with gold, furnished by the devout. It is approached by four covered stairways, with a minor temple, well constructed in corrugated iron, built over each entrance. These additions have been given at various times by leading merchants of the city, who have thereby acquired great merit and probably avoided numerous reincarnations. Some, according to the inscriptions, were Hindus, at least by origin, and may, as good business men, have considered the expense no more than a reasonable insurance risk.

The sanctity inherent in the pagoda begins at the first step leading from the street pavement up to the platform under which the sacred relics are buried. It also extends to the various shops built into the pagoda’s surrounding wall, some of them – including a lottery-ticket seller’s – being of a remarkably secular character. Before entering any of them, as well as before ascending the pagoda steps, the shoes must be removed. One of the shops was the publishing centre of a Buddhist mission and several short sermons in English were stuck on the window. These dealt with the technique of suppressing the lusts of the flesh. I was about to go in when I caught sight of the notice – familiar in Burma – ‘no foot-wearing’. Elsewhere about the pagoda (the Burmese have an affection for manufactured participles) umbrella-ing was forbidden. As I was struggling with my shoes a young man came from the back of the shop and asked me, in an Oxford accent and with the mild, well-bred manner of the dilettante shopkeeper, what he could do for me. I told him I should like to have some of his tracts and he said, ‘Why, of course,’ supposing, by the way, that I must be Mr Morgan. Admitting this, I said that it seemed odd to me that he should have guessed it and the young man replied that he knew all of the resident white population by sight, adding, with resignation, that he supposed his shop would have a curiosity value for a literary visitor. He was a well-known English Buddhist, and subsequently – Buddhist homilies being a noteworthy feature of Burmese journalism – I read and enjoyed several of his sermons in the Rangoon press.

CHAPTER 2

Preparations

I WANTED to leave Rangoon as soon as possible and to travel in the interior, covering before the arrival of the wet season, at the end of April, as much of the country as I could. My ignorance of conditions in Burma was quite extraordinary. This was partly due to an efficient censorship and the fact that foreign journalists do not usually leave Rangoon. The last occasion when Burmese affairs had been strongly featured in the British press had been in 1948, when the Karen insurgents had taken Mandalay and seemed to be about to overthrow the Burmese government. Since then interest had died down, and communiqués from the country had become more and more infrequent. In July 1949, the Prime Minister had announced that peace was attainable within one year. Having heard no more I assumed that it had been attained. At all events I imagined that Burma would be as peaceful as a Friesian dairy farm by comparison with Malaya, Indonesia or Indo-China.

When in December 1950 I saw the Burmese Ambassador to Britain to ask for permission to visit the country, my lack of information was such that I actually suggested that I might be allowed to enter Burma from Manipur in the north. With visions of a leisurely progression, in the Victorian manner, from the northern frontier to Tenasserim in the extreme south, I was prepared for austerities rather than hazards. The transport would be slow and primitive; in crowded, rickety buses and antique, but incredibly picturesque, river-steamers. Food and lodging would be no more than adequate, but always interesting. There would be many delays and minor miseries, but from these a retrospective pleasure could be distilled. This was the Burmese journey for which I was prepared in the imagination and it was for this that I had built up a reserve of philosophic tolerance. His Excellency U Ohn listened with indulgence to my suggested itinerary, and then suggested that it might be better to go to Rangoon first and make my further arrangements from there. This seemed to me a great waste of time as well as bad geographical organisation. However, I found the conversation deftly changed to poetry and art, from which, while lunch lasted, it was never allowed to deviate. Never was an ambassadorial decision conveyed with more diplomatic finesse.

* * *

My delusions about the possibilities and character of travel in Burma were stripped away, in regular stages, within thirty-six hours of my arrival. On the first morning I bought a newspaper and noted with slight surprise that a ferryboat crossing the river to a suburb of Rangoon had been held up by pirates and three members of the crew killed. Mention was made of a village, some twenty miles away, where the whole population had been carried off by insurgents. Serious fighting seemed to be going on, too, in various parts of the country as there were a few extremely vague reports about government troops capturing towns. Sometimes the towns were ‘recaptured’, which suggested a certain aggressive capacity on the part of whoever it was the troops were fighting. In this newspaper I made my first acquaintance with that familiar Anglo-Burmese verb, to dacoit. At ten o’clock on the previous night a private car had been dacoited in the outskirts of Rangoon itself.

Further doubts about the stability of the country were aroused by an account of the experiences of a Canadian friend, employed as a specialist by the Burmese government, who had just returned from a visit to Syriam. Syriam, five miles away, across the Rangoon river, was the scene of an ambitious and revolutionary governmental experiment in land reform and was obviously chosen because it was at Rangoon’s backdoor and therefore accessible at all times to the forces of law and order. My friend, however, had been accompanied by a formidable escort of infantry and had felt more like a Caribbean dictator than an adviser on statistical problems.

My final awakening to the true state of affairs came as a result of an interest in ornithology. A Burmese was squatting at the entrance to the Strand Hotel with a wicker cage containing half a dozen fine specimens of the Asiatic variety of the purple moorhen. They would eventually provide, he assured me, the basis of a curry. I asked where they had come from, and the man said that he had netted them in the swamps, not two miles away, across the river. The possibility of a refreshing spell of early-morning bird-watching immediately occurred to me. There would be other waders; certainly bitterns – perhaps ibises. Could he take me with him? The shake of the head was emphatic. An onlooker enlightened me. ‘Across the river, they will shoot you, and no one will hesitate to consider your fate. Be sure that on sighting your near approach they will shoot at you without delaying.’ It was a piece of sensationalism, a gross exaggeration, but it gave at least a hint of the sad condition of human security outside Rangoon.

* * *

Later that day I presented my letter of introduction to U Thant at the Secretariat. U Thant, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Information, saw no reason why I should not go wherever I wished. Later I found that as this was his first experience of a request to travel about the country, he was not quite sure of the official procedure to be followed. However, any doubts were veiled beneath more than even the normal measure of Burmese charm. There were regular air services to all the larger towns, he said hopefully. I replied that if I travelled by air, I should not see Burma. U Thant said that the railway service from Rangoon to Mandalay was working. It was perhaps a little inconvenient because of a break in the line. Proper arrangements were made to carry passengers across the gap in rail communications, either in lorries or bullock-carts, and if they were sometimes held up it was only to extract a kind of toll. That was to say, no violence was ever done. Where would I like to go first? Down to Mergui, I said. A coastal ship was leaving Rangoon in two days, and as such ships sailed at rather long intervals it seemed an opportunity which ought not to be missed. U Thant agreed: perhaps with relief. As long as you stayed on a ship you were out of harm’s way. And now, he said, he would pass me on to U Ba San, chief of the Special Branch police, dealing with foreigners, who would handle the mere formality of issuing a travel permit.

U Ba San’s cordiality, naturally enough in view of his office, was on a more limited scale. The permit for Mergui was made out, together with permission to go ashore when the ship put in at Moulmein on the way. Tavoy, he said, was quite out of the question, because the military situation there was uncertain. And at Mergui and Moulmein I must report immediately upon arrival to the District Commissioner and the Deputy Superintendent of Police. In the interests of my own safety, he said, I should not attempt to go outside the limits of either town. I then brought up the matter of my proposed visit to Mandalay and the Shan and Kachin States. To save any further call upon his time, could any permits required be issued there and then? U Ba San shook his head. The question of any further journeys could be gone into on my return from Mergui. But would such permits be forthcoming? I asked. U Ba San said he could promise nothing. I must understand that there were security problems involved. The authorities in the various districts would have to be warned of an impending visit to allow them sufficient time, of course, to facilitate my journey in every possible way.

After leaving U Ba San I visited the British Consulate where it was suggested that more might be discovered about travelling conditions in Burma by applying to one or two of the old English residents, particularly the executives of the big companies.

Following this advice I presented myself at the headquarters of the Burmah Oil Company. There was about this palatial building a mortuary stillness, in which might have echoed the lamentations of Hebrew prophets over mighty empires and enterprises doomed to decay. In this potential habitation of dragons and abode of owls I was received by an officer who told me that although he had been in Burma a number of years he had never managed to get to Mergui. He hoped to go one day, when he could find time. Meanwhile, he suggested, speaking as an ex-journalist, that if I wanted some journalistic copy – and sensational copy at that – I might try going up to Mandalay on one of the river-steamers that went there occasionally. As far as he knew, no European had done the trip since 1947. It might be a bit uncomfortable. Probably have to kip on deck and look after yourself for food. And then of course the boats were mortared and machine-gunned, but they kept too far from the shore for it to do much damage. On the whole, a pretty interesting trip, he thought. Lots of half-sunken craft all over the place, and always the chance of a hot reception when you tried to put in at a village which had changed hands since you called there last time.

In answer to my polite enquiries after the company’s fortunes and prospects, I was told that so far as their Burma interests went, they couldn’t be bleaker. The refineries had been destroyed in the war, and as for the pipeline, they once went to the trouble of counting the holes in a mile length of the pipe and found over a thousand of them. Couldn’t get a new pipeline because of the steel shortage and even if they could the insurgents would knock thousands of holes through it, as, if and when installed. Nowadays all they did was to extract just as much oil as they could sell in the area round the wells themselves. It was cheaper to bring it from Abadan to Rangoon than to ship it down the river. My informant mentioned that the Burmese government now demanded a half share in the enterprise, but as they hadn’t any money, the British government was being approached for a loan to finance the transaction. The cruelest cut of all, he said, was that they weren’t allowed to discharge any of their thousands of surplus employees.

CHAPTER 3

Dramatic Entertainment

THERE WAS A CLEAR DAY to spare before the ship left for Mergui, and having heard that at this time of the year traditional Burmese pwès were to be seen in the outer suburb of Kemmendine, I went up there next afternoon. Pwès are the dramatic entertainments inseparable from the many Burmese festivals, which to the Burmese are the most important things in life. No charge is made to watch these open-air performances. They are paid for by public subscription, or out of the generosity of some citizen who feels himself temporarily in funds and in this way acquires social prestige. The streets of Kemmendine seem to have been designed with public celebrations in mind. They are enormously wide and well shaded by trees. Usually two or more pwès, with their attendant sideshows of all kinds, are going on at a time.

I happened to arrive in Kemmendine just before the necessary religious preliminaries to the rejoicings which would begin that evening. Prominent families of the district had built pavilions along both sides of the streets; small garish pagodas, bedizened with a fairground decoration of gilded cardboard, spangles and mirror-glass. Here on carpets and at low tables friends would be entertained by feasting and music – chiefly from portable gramophones. The more pretentious pavilions contained potted trees laden with almond or peach blossom. At least, so it appeared until this inflorescence was submitted to close inspection, when the several thousand delicate blossoms proved to be made of paper. Such art, such ingenuity had gone into these creations that it was hard to believe that they were not, indeed, the vulgar and quite unacceptable real thing. There was another tree, too, a larger one, from which the unrefined foliage had been removed, and from the branches were suspended the gifts destined for the hundred and ten Buddhist monks who were the district’s spiritual advisers. All the presents – mostly aluminium cooking utensils – were contained in white paper bags which had been supplied, without charge, I was told, by a local firm in exchange for permission to print upon them the firm’s name, together with an appropriate text in somewhat smaller lettering.  

At three o’clock precisely, the ceremonial march of the holy men was due to take place. For this moment – the culmination of the year’s activities – the whole population was lined up, having that morning observed solemn fast. Not until their venerated guests had eaten would they break bread. Matrons, who had done their hair for the occasion in the most elaborate and matriarchal fashion, looked as if they were balancing shining cauldrons upon their heads. The faces of the young girls and children were faultless masks of white, complexion-protecting powdered bark. From each adult mouth protruded a ceremonial cheroot of enormous length, its barrel swathed in white or scarlet paper. There was a smart tattoo of gongs, a general hiss of excitement and respect, and the leader of the saintly procession came into view. A proud Burmese citizen at my elbow told me that enough had been collected in the neighbourhood to give each of the hundred and ten pongyis a present of fifty rupees. To the gong’s thudding the procession continued towards the Christmas tree with its burden of cooking pots. The distribution was made, the faces of both donors and recipients frozen by the solemnity of the occasion. After that the great moment had come when the possessors of pavilions could supplicate their spiritual lords to permit them to acquire merit by partaking of the food which had been prepared. Only when the unworldly stomachs had been filled would the family be entitled to clear up what was left.  

* * *

At nine o’clock in the evening the secular celebrations began. On a raised platform two clowns were giving a slapstick performance, which was funny enough – even when not a word of the dialogue could be understood. At regular intervals an actress came in and sang and danced. She was a tiny, doll-like creature with a face that was plain and even sullen in repose. But as soon as she began to dance she became transfigured. She had all the poise and fire of a Spanish flamenco dancer, plus the snakelike head and eye movements of an Indian. To this she added the Burmese speciality of thrusting out her arms in such extraordinary positions that they appeared to be dislocated at the elbows. As she leaped and cavorted she repeatedly kicked away from her prancing but invisible feet the long skirt and train of the ancient Burmese court-dress she wore – a difficult feat which has been incorporated into the formal movements of the dance. Sometimes the clowns joined in, dancing in mimicry of the actress, who, as soon as she had finished her piece, would suddenly relapse into a set pose, turn her back on the public, and squatting on her heels, make up her face or drink tea.

This performance would go on until one-thirty in the morning, when straight theatrical shows, lasting until dawn, would begin in other parts of the pwè-ground. For over four hours these clowns would pour out a stream of extempore wit and topical allusion, while the two or three actresses of the company would wriggle and leap. Only then would this typical pantomime audience have had their temporary fill of knockabout farce and be ready to face situation and plot.

* * *

The Burmese adore comedy and although the strait-laced classical plays of neighbouring countries have been introduced in the past, they are soon so completely transformed by buffoonery as to become unrecognisable. Thus the Ramayana, the play of Sanskrit origin, which runs to some sixty thousand verses and takes three days to present in an abbreviated form, could never survive in Burma. There is no action, and gesture is all-important; so much so that elaborate treatises have been written on the various gestures and their meaning. When the Burmese conquered Siam they may have felt some rankling sense of inferiority, as conquerors sometimes do, in the face of what they suspect to be the more polished culture of the defeated. Something of this kind, perhaps, led to an attempted transplantation of this elephantine divertissement. But it was quite unable to survive Burmese comic genius. Burmese parodists went eagerly to work on the Sanskrit gods and goddesses, who soon appeared as pie-slinging comedians. The ancient Burmese miracle plays suffered a similar fate, degenerating into pure farce. Actors had to be threatened with magical sanctions, in the form of death from supernaturally induced diarrhoea, to restrain them from actually introducing skits on religion into their performances.

Unlike their neighbours, the Siamese, the Javanese and the Cambodians, the Burmese have never had shadow plays. On the other hand, they have possessed since earliest times a well-developed and highly interesting puppet show. This, according to Dr Maung Htin Aung, the authority on Burmese drama, began to decay immediately after royal patronage was lost with the dethronement of the last Burmese king. In his work upon the Burmese theatre this authority says that when in 1921 a puppet performance was given at Pegu, English officials asked to be his father’s guests, for although they had been some years in Burma, they had never been able to find a puppet show. In those days there were only two companies left, and in 1936, says Dr Maung Htin Aung, the puppet show definitely ceased to exist.

In view of these findings by an expert I must count myself as exceptionally lucky – particularly after missing by a hair’s breadth in Cambodia, the year before, the last of the Cambodian ballets and shadow plays – to have stumbled quite accidentally on a full-scale puppet show of the type supposed to be extinct. The puppet show was being presented a few yards along the street from the clowns and dancers; that is to say about three miles from the centre of Rangoon.

During the day a large stage had been put up with a proper drop curtain, and for about an hour before the show started a full-scale orchestra had set to work to attract an audience. The instruments consisted of a heavily carved and gilded circular frame containing seventeen gongs of various diameters and another housing as many drums. There was a large and very decorative, boat-shaped xylophone, several big drums and several pairs of cymbals. The air was sketched in by a player upon a hnè – the Burmese flute terminating in a horn, which produces notes of a singularly penetrative quality. With goodwill and fair perseverance one can acquire a taste for this music, the keynote of which is unabashed vivacity.

Through the wide cracks in the makeshift stage-carpentry, the puppet-masters could be seen, engaged in prayer for some time before the show began. Presumably these prayers are to the thirty-seven nats, the gods of the ancient Burmese, to whom, Dr Maung Htin Aung says, they also make offerings of food – although I did not see this. When the curtain rose the senior puppet-master leaned over the low backdrop and sang to the audience a lengthy description of the drama to be presented. The curtain was then lowered, and when it was again raised, the stage was occupied by a puppet dressed as a peasant carrying a large sword, and a dragon of the Burmese or serpentine variety. After solo dances, followed by a vigorous combat, the dragon was defeated and, since to show the taking of life – even that of a mythological monster – would have been an impropriety, the Burmese St George mounted the dragon’s back and rode away. This curtain raiser was followed by a dance by two genial-looking giants and then a series of dances by various birds, a white horse and a monkey. Each of these performers had its signature tune which was crashed out by the orchestra whenever it made its appearance. The dances were extremely funny, the puppets being handled with amazing skill. In particular there was a kind of Disney stork, an animal of grotesque benevolence which opened and shut its bill and flapped its eyelids in time to the music. Everything that was essentially stork-like had been captured in this caricature. On the other hand, human puppets, when the intention was not comic, were manipulated with such fidelity to observed human postures and movements that spectators far back in the audience could easily have had the illusion that they were watching flesh-and-blood players.

After these animal interludes the main performance began, a traditional ‘royal play’ with the king himself, princes and princesses, the ministers and, of course, clowns. It is interesting that the semi-divine Burmese kings did not object to these stage representations of themselves, insisting only that the court dress, manners and customs shown should be correct in every detail. On the legitimate stage royal impersonations could not be carried to the length of wearing the golden shoes – supreme symbol of kingly authority – and breaches of this ordinance were, once again, supposed to be followed by supernatural retribution in the form of a mortal attack of diarrhoea.

Oriental crowds in a festive mood are remarkably docile. Nothing seems to disturb their poise, to unsettle their capacity for relaxation. They are prepared to compose themselves at short notice, to watch with utter absorption whatever is offered in the way of entertainment. They never find it necessary to convince themselves or others, by boisterous display, that they are having a good time. Movement is slow and languorous, the crowd’s internal currents intertwining with processional solemnity. Like that of some other Far Easterners, the training of the Burmese, however great their curiosity, does not permit them to stare at the extraordinary sight of a foreigner, or to betray any interest other than the discreetest of passing glances. There is no nudging, no muffled giggle, no turning of the head. No other Westerner was to be seen in this gay but decorous concourse; nor did I ever see one on the many subsequent occasions that I visited the pwès at Kemmendine. This seeming indifference was Burmese good-breeding. If I happened to be standing at the back of a crowd I could shortly expect a discreet tap on the arm and then an invitation by nods and gestures to make my way to the front. Once in a good position there would be no further overtures; but it was always possible, simply by looking puzzled, to get a description, in halting English, of what was going on. This, since the crosstalk of Burmese comedians is usually bawdy, would be bowdlerised in an attempt to befit it for Western ears. Accompanying actions sometimes made it difficult to impose this censorship. ‘See, the lady and the gentleman have gone away to the wood together. Beyond the stage you shall imagine a wood … now they are disturbed … suddenly they return.’ (A scream of laughter from the crowd.) ‘They think this is funny behaving because the lady and the gentleman wear now, without realisation, each other’s skirts. These jokes are to please the country people who are not serious. For us, too, they are vulgar.’

The Burman’s ready kindliness towards the stranger is remarkable, when it is remembered that through failure to spend a token period as a novice in a Buddhist monastery, the foreigner has never quite qualified as a human being. In the old days, indeed, the same auxiliary was applied to visitors from the non-Buddhist world as to pigs or buffaloes. Referring, for instance, to two foreigners, the Burman said, ‘two (animals) foreigners’. The contemporary attitude is one of secret compassion. The alien’s present incarnation has fallen only just short of success. Many acts of merit in previous existences have rescued him from rebirth as a cockroach or a pariah dog, and all that is now required to attain complete humanity is that final spark of enlightenment provided by the acceptance of the noble eightfold path. This may be accomplished in the very next existence.

The attitude of the Burmese Buddhist is, then, less exclusive and more encouraging than that of certain Christian sects, with their final damnation through lack of faith. All living things are perfectible in this muted, archaic Darwinism. Even that symbol of all the excellences, the white elephant, had probably passed in previous existences through the condition of an intestinal worm or a sewer rat, and could still return to them – as King Mindon ruled in a specific instance – through loss of accumulated merit, as a consequence of the trampling of a groom.

Clearly the Burmese recognised the virtue which had raised me from the protozoan slime. Observing my interest in the puppet show, one of the stage hands appeared and invited me back stage. There the puppet-masters took snacks with their families, or slept between acts. They had the grave, dedicated faces of a monkish order and were dressed with elaborate conservatism; turbans wrapped round the old-style bun of hair; longyis tied in front with a great, billowing prodigality of cloth. Their solemn and sacerdotal manner was in no way diminished by the horn-rimmed spectacles they wore. Puppets hung, in bunches like carrots, from the roof. Some of the more extravagantly decked-out specimens were detached and dangled for my admiration. One, stiff with gold thread and brocade, and with an acutely introspective expression, was introduced as ‘the Princess of Wales’.

I was allowed to stand and watch over the shoulders of the showmen at their business, noting that effective control of the puppets was not the only consideration. Their hands could be seen by the audience, and these as well as each separate finger had to be moved with prescribed rhythm and exact gesture, like those of a Sanskrit dancer.

As they were by far the best of the few poor examples of Burmese art I had yet seen, I wanted to buy a collection of puppets; but enquiries were met with evasion. The puppets were not to be bought anywhere. They were made specially to the order of the troupe. Where were they made? – Mandalay. (It was always the inaccessible Mandalay to which one was directed, in response to this kind of enquiry.) A few more feelers on the subject and I realised that I had been attempting to trespass in guild preserves, and that puppets were not to be had by outsiders.

When I left I was accompanied by the senior puppet-master to the most fanciful of the nearby pavilions, a pleasure-dome of glittering unsubstantiality, in which a party of upper-class Burmese sat on chairs, thus separated by distinguished discomfort from the mass of their mat-squatting countrymen. On a wicker table – an expensive and rickety European importation – in the pavilion’s centre had been placed a bowlful of sinister-looking liquid, its surface broken by lumps of black jelly. Seizing a glass, the senior puppet-master expertly wiped the rim with his fingers, plunged it into the bowl, and removing a gobbet which stuck to the outside edge, handed it to me. With severe hospitality he raised his glass in my direction before putting it to his lips. There was no avoiding this rite. Holding back the black frogspawn with my teeth I drank deeply of the warm, sweetish, iron-tasting liquid.

CHAPTER 4

Excursion to the Deep South

THE PROSPECT of a sea trip to Mergui by coastal steamer was something to exercise the imagination. I had memories of such rovings, vagrant and obscure of purpose, along the Arabian and Red Sea coasts. The ships had been wonderful, battered, old relics, full of nautical mannerisms and impregnated with the musk of exotic cargoes. They had been laid down in ports like Gdynia, with cabins built round the boiler-room in sensible preparation for arctic voyagings; and at the end of their lives, when long overdue for the scrap-heap, they had been picked up for a song by Arabs with sharp trading practices, renamed after one of the attributes of the Almighty, The Righteous or The Upright and relaunched upon Arabian seas. Such ships were usually skippered by empirical navigators, captains who lost themselves when out of sight of familiar coastal landmarks. They were as nearly useless as the vessels they sailed in; drank like fishes; went in for religious mania, or for spells of mild insanity in which they were liable to stalk the bridge in the nude. The passengers, too, fitted into the general picture; sword-bearing rulers of a corner of a desert, half-crazed lighthouse keepers, broken-down adventurers scraping a living in any dubious enterprise they could smell out. There was no better way to get to know the seamy side of the seafaring life.

From first impressions down by the landing stage, nothing could have looked more hopeful. The Rangoon river-shore was encrusted with deserted junks, showing a fine tangle of masts and archaic, demoded rigging, patched and variegated sails, defaced figureheads. At the water’s edge there was a desultory skirmishing of pariah dogs. A few ancient gharries were grouped for hire in the shade of the riverine trees, and as their drivers, white-bearded patriarchs, dreamed, bulbuls warbled softly in the branches above them. Somewhere a gong was being tapped intermittently, in the way that pianos are tinkled upon in English suburbs on fading Sunday afternoons. There was a lassitude in the air propitious to the embarkation upon a voyage to decaying southern ports.

I looked forward to days of enforced meditation, punctuated by meals taken with some garrulous old salt, delighted to have found so appreciative an audience for his fables. It was taken for granted that with the possible exception of a missionary, I should be the only European aboard, but I expected that at the Captain’s table I should meet a Chinese merchant on his way to the Mergui archipelago to negotiate for a cargo of edible birds’ nests.

From the first glimpse, however, the Menam discouraged further indulgence in dreams. It was larger and trimmer, I thought, than the Southern Burmese coastal trade justified. At the moment of my going aboard, a certain amount of fussy repainting was being done, but the smell of turpentine could not entirely overlay a boarding-house whiff of cooking greens. In the cabins there were notices about boat-drills, and others asking passengers to be punctual for ‘tiffin’. Dinner was due to be served immediately we sailed, and to nothing less than my dismay this was heralded by one of those tinkling shipboard airs, those witless Alpine glockenspiels, that are heard on transatlantic liners as a prelude to the mealtime interruption of boredom.

On reaching the dining saloon, I made, in the absence of a steward, for the nearest table, at which, although several very obviously English people were already seated, there were a number of vacant places. Before sitting down, I asked as a matter of courtesy, if the vacant places were not reserved. To this question there was no reply although I received several embarrassed looks. I therefore left this table and went and sat down at the next, which appeared to be occupied by, what I imagined from their dress to be, Anglo-Burmese. Apparently some allocation of places had already been made – and evidently on a basis of colour and race. The Menam was, in fact, a little enclave of diehard Englishry. It had been years since I visited a British colony, and I had forgotten what it was like. When Burma had gained its independence it had reasonably been made illegal to attempt to exclude Burmese on racial grounds from hotels and clubs in Rangoon. In the few days I had spent there I had come to take for granted, to accept without question or thought, the mingling of English, Burmese, Anglo-Burmese, and Chinese in the hotel bars, lounges and dining-rooms. And here, in the port of Rangoon was this floating redoubt of the old system. About the Menam there was none of the seedy, globe-trotting fellowship I had hoped for. When the dining saloon was full I saw that the English were seated – with internal social grading carefully maintained, no doubt – at several separate tables. Another had been reserved for a group of Australian Catholic missionaries. At another the pure Burmese had been isolated; while at mine the Anglo-Burmese were gathered together. Soon the ship’s wireless operator, an Anglo-Burman, joined us, being evidently excluded from the company of the white ship’s officers at meal times. Shortly after I had taken my seat, a steward appeared and came over to ask me if I would like to change my place; but as the Anglo-Burmese seemed not to object to my presence, I decided to stay where I was.

At the shipping office I had enquired hopefully about the cooking, remembering that on very small ships you can sometimes eat the adventurous food cooked in the crew’s galley. All the cooks, said the shipping clerk, were Chinese. But now I knew that my relief had been premature and the meaning of that whiff of greens was explained. Chinese cooks there were; but they had been compelled to adapt themselves to a new and strange culinary art – one in which specific gravity could matter more than flavour. ‘Thick or clear soup, sir?’ the steward murmured in my ear. After that came stewed meat with the boiled vegetables; then college pudding.

Fortunately we were too few and too divided for the traditional frolics to be arranged; but there were deck-quoits, and a library with a fair assortment of such titles as ‘Lay Her Among the Lilies’. The key was found and the volumes, bright with their dust-jacket promise of rape and murder, distributed against signature in the book. Meanwhile the flat-lands of the delta slipped past in the darkness, broken only by the wallowing passage of a junk, with lamps at its masthead, or a twinkle of illumination outlining the shape of a pagoda on the land.

I had come to be thankful for the social exclusiveness through which I found myself among the Anglo-Burmese. Hearing, with some surprise, that I was really interested in Burma, one of my fellow-diners asked if I would like to meet a Burman of some renown who was travelling in the ship, a fellow citizen of his who was returning to Moulmein after spending some time in hospital in Rangoon. This proved to be one of the most happy contacts I made in Burma.

I was presented to U Tun Win next morning, and found him seated at table, separating the flakes of his breakfast cereal as if they had been the leaves of an incunabulum. His small, frail, aged body was animated by an extraordinary alertness, and when I or anyone else produced some piece of politely empty small-talk, he would stop with upraised spoon or fork, intent and smiling dreamily as if in appreciation of good music. Whenever he put a question he would await the answer with the nervous impatience of a terrier on guard at a rabbit hole. Then he would repeat it aloud, very slowly, dissecting it clause by clause, as if subjecting it to the arguments of learned counsel, before passing with nods of approval, the verdict, ‘Good – yes, very good.’ He was prone to a materialistic oversimplification of human motives, which led him into a mistaken estimation of the reasons for the Anglo-Saxon passengers’ habit of arriving for their meals up to an hour later than the advertised time. ‘It is their habit to do this because they judge that in this way they can be served with superior food without arousing our unfavourable comment.’

U Tun Win was, indeed, a most delightful old man, an ex-barrister who possessed inexhaustible information about his country, and had also acquired the ability, rather uncommon in the Orient, to arrange his facts and conclusions in a logical, organised manner.

It was U Tun Win who went to the trouble of explaining the Land Nationalisation Act to me, a radical piece of land-reform, comparable with that carried out in China by Mao Tse-tung. Under this enactment any bona-fide landless cultivator will be given ten acres of land, which is the maximum it is believed that he can work efficiently by his own labour and with one yoke of oxen. Landowners are to be compensated by receiving an amount in cash equal to twelve times the annual tax they pay on the land relinquished. This measure, said U Tun Win, was really outright confiscation, because the amount of compensation was very small and would only be paid when the government was in a position to do so – and you knew what that meant. The maximum amount of land any bona-fide cultivator could hold – and he must work it himself, or with his family – was fifty acres (as compared with three hundred acres allowed in their land reforms by the government of Pakistan).

U Tun Win hastened to say that he could not approve of this measure which he regarded as little less than robbery. In defence of his opinion he quoted certain utterances of the Buddha which he interpreted, although I could not agree with him, as condoning the accumulation of property, and the capitalist order in general. U Tun Win was a Mon (as the Talaings of old are now called) and many of his people in the Tavoy, Moulmein and Mergui districts are in revolt against the government. They would be willing to unite with the Karens in the formation of an independent Mon-Karen State, he said. It was evident from what he told me that this State, if ever it came into being, would be reactionary by comparison with the Union of Burma, and that the land nationalisation measures would be abolished in Mon-Karen areas.

It is remarkable how intimate a part religion plays in the life and thought of the Burmese, when there is no attempt to canalise it into public observances restricted to one day in the week. U Tun Win attacked the Land Nationalisation Act because, quite sincerely, I believe, he considered it contrary to Buddhist teaching. Thakin Nu, the Prime Minister, found it necessary to invoke precisely the same religious authority when the bill was submitted to parliament. His speech on this occasion was nothing less than a lengthy sermon, with immense quotations from the Buddhist scriptures and a searching analysis from the religious point of view of the illusion of wealth. One can imagine the consternation, the exchange of embarrassed glances, if the present Prime Minister of Great Britain took it into his head to engage in a fervent advocation of primitive Christianity, including the quotation in extenso of the Sermon on the Mount, during, say, the debate on the Steel Nationalisation Act.