Samrat Choudhury is an Assistant Editor with the Mumbai edition of Hindustan Times, and is currently working on his first novel for Penguin Books. He has reported on the Indian parliamentary elections and several state elections, covered the aftermath of the tsunami in Thailand and Sri Lanka, and presented seminar papers on Northeast India. This is his review of The River of Lost Footsteps. It was first published in Mint. He can be contacted through - samrat AT hindustantimes DOT com
A new Glass Palace chronicleThant Myint-U states his intentions right at the beginning of this book: it is, he says, intended as a guide to the Burmese past, “an introduction to a country whose current problems are increasingly known but whose colourful and vibrant history is almost entirely forgotten.” It is also an attempt to understand the present in light of the past and to bring history into the typically ahistorical analysis of the country’s current situation.
The story starts in 1885, with the last king of Burma on the throne. He is preparing for a war he knows he cannot win. The British army is advancing upon Mandalay, and his choices are limited. Egged on by his wife, Thibaw decides to make a last stand.
Among the proximate causes of his plight is a book by an explorer named Archibald Colquohoun called ‘Burma and the Burmans: Or, the Best Unopened Market in the World’. Colquohoun thinks removing the king will make Burma a friend of Britain’s, and open up a road to the limitless markets of China. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, is among those impressed by this argument.
Things go badly for the Burmese as expected, and the king ends up in exile in Ratnagiri on India’s Konkan coast. One of his daughters has an affair with the local durwan of the palace where the royal family is held, and becomes pregnant. And so, descendants of the last king of Burma are now somewhere in Mumbai, along with descendants of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s family.
It is a fascinating little anecdote, and one of many that bring the promised colour to what might have been a sedate study of Burma’s past. Like many other anecdotes in the book, it is one that relates Burma to India.
Through the country’s history, India emerges as a major influence, and only one of many in a world that was far more globalised than we tend to think. “All Burmese children are taught that their history begins at Tagaung…it was here that the Sakyan prince Abhiraja had arrived from the Middle Country of India and founded the country’s very first kingdom.” Elsewhere, the author notes that, “By the fourth century, many in the Irrawady Valley had converted to South India’s Buddhism, the single most important development in Burma’s long history.”
Fifteen centuries later, it was an incursion into India that led the imperial Burmese kingdom to its downfall. The Burmese king Alaungpaya had invaded and ravaged Manipur twice, in 1758 and 1764. The Burmese influence extended now to Assam. But there was another player in the field: the East India Company. When a succession struggle broke out in the Ahom kingdom in 1817, the Burmese sent in their army and installed their man on the throne. Four years later, they returned to conquer Assam and make it a province of Burma. They were on their way to capturing Cachar when the British declared war on them.
The war bled both sides for two years. In the end, the Burmese power was destroyed. Rangoon, Martaban and Tenasserim fell to the British. It was the beginning of the end of Burmese independence.
Myint-U’s ‘guide’ proceeds rapidly thereafter to the end of the Burmese monarchy in 1885, and the story of Thibaw’s fall with which the book opened. The second half of the book, which is about Burma from colonial times until now, begins thereafter.
The author appears to blame the collapse of the traditional order that followed the advent of colonialism for his country’s current plight. However, this view does not explain why India is not in the same condition, since the same events occurred here.
The narrative in this section is more interspersed with the author’s own family history. Thant Myint U is the grandson of U Thant, who was Secretary General of the United Nations for two terms from 1961-71. His guidebook here becomes part-memoir. Its anecdotes point to a clash of values between his grandfather and Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi. One of their first clashes, Myint-U writes, was on the subject of school uniforms. U Thant argued for fostering in children a sense of individuality, while Aung San held that the standardization of human life was both ‘inevitable and desirable.’ Aung San’s views soon carried the day.
The fork that Burma subsequently took towards authoritarianism has seen the country under military dictatorship for over forty years. Isolation and sanctions have had little impact upon the military regime in power.
Myint-U argues that the policy of isolation is counter-productive, and that the best way to improve the political situation in Burma is through greater trade and tourism. “Without isolation, the status quo will be impossible to sustain,” he writes.
His prescription differs as much from that of Aung San Suu Kyi’s supporters as U Thant’s did from Aung San’s.
Perhaps India’s foreign policy shift following Operations Leech and Golden Bird wasn’t so wrong, after all.
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