Jonathan Saha

Madness and the Making of a Colonial Order in Burma

In general, during the nineteenth century the British were indifferent to the condition of the insane in colonial Burma. This was most apparent in the Rangoon lunatic asylum, which was a neglected institution reformed reluctantly and episodically following internal crises of discipline and the occasional public scandal. However, whilst psychiatry was generally neglected, British officials did intervene when and where insanity threatened the colonial order. This occurred in the criminal courts where the presence of suspected lunatics was disruptive to the administration of justice. Insanity was also a problem for the colonial regime within the European community, where erratic behaviour was viewed as a threat to racial prestige. This paper shows how, despite its neglected status in Burma, psychiatric knowledge contributed to British understandings of Burman masculinity and to the maintenance of colonial norms of European behaviour.

The male state Colonialism, corruption and rape investigations in the Irrawaddy Delta c.1900

At the turn of the twentieth century British colonial officials imagined women in Burma to be distinctly more liberated than their sisters in other quarters of British India, but this posed a set of specific problems. The perceived influence women held over their husbands in official positions led to fears that they caused corruption. Women represented private interests infiltrating public duties. Thus the desired, normative subordinate colonial official was assertively masculine and in a position of authority over their female spouse. In this colonial desire there was a curious parallel with the everyday acts of misconduct committed by subordinate officials that was most apparent in rape investigations. Indigenous women faced great difficulties, even dangers, when seeking redress for crimes of gendered violence due to the machinations of subordinate state employees. High-ranking British officials demonstrated at best indifference, at worst suspicion, concerning women’s accusations. These everyday acts of subordinate officials were more important in gendering the colonial state than has been previously recognised.

The Male State

It does not take a deep psychoanalytic reading of Kipling’s Mandalay to reveal the slippage in his words between the desires of the British soldier and the broader drives of imperialism. There is a mutual gendering at work in the poem through which British imperial power is represented as masculine and colonised Burmese society as feminine.1 ‘Supi-yaw-lat’ was not only the soldier’s former Burmese lover, but she represented all of the exotic attractions of the East, inviting his kisses, and drawing him back to Mandalay with its ‘sunshine’, ‘palm trees’, and ‘spicy garlic smells’.2 Like Kipling, British officials also depicted Burmese society as feminine. For them, Burman men had been emasculated by the domestic dominance of Burman women.3 According to their writings, Burma needed male conquest in the form of British rule. This colonial literary device also had a material manifestation.4 The colonial state was performatively enacted as male through the everyday practices of subordinate officials as well as through formal bureaucratic rules. This gendering of the state was most apparent in the corruption and misconduct of subordinate officials. In everyday life, the state was manifested as masculine, and women were marginalised from both the formal and informal uses of state power.

Colonization, Criminalization and Complicity: Policing Gambling in Burma c 1880–1920

As Professor Ian Browns recent work on the colonial prison in British Burma has shown, the proportion of the population convicted of crimes was routinely and markedly higher than in any other province of British India. Part of the explanation for the exceptionally high figures may be the colonial criminalization of practices that were previously lawful. Gambling was one such activity that the British, at least according to their rhetoric, were intent on prohibiting as part of their ‘civilizing mission’. However, in practice colonial law was more ambiguous and equivocal. Government prosecutors and judges disputed the definition of gambling and struggled to differentiate it from other tolerated practices. Beyond these legal difficulties, individual British officials often found it necessary to turn a blind eye to gambling. On an everyday level, subordinate officials in the police and magistracy had an ambivalent relationship with gambling. Although empowered to suppress it, some chose to ignore its presence and others still were actively conniving with it. By studying how the British sought to control gambling in the colony at the turn of the twentieth century, this article seeks to restore the full complexity to the history of criminality in colonial Burma.

‘Uncivilized Practitioners’: Medical Subordinates, Medico-Legal Evidence and Misconduct in Colonial Burma, 1875–1907

Indian and Burmese medical subordinates were problematic figures for British colonial officials in Burma during the nineteenth century. They were intrinsic to their plans for furthering colonial medicine in the colony, at the expense of indigenous practices. Yet, at the same time, they were never under the complete control of British officials, often being accused of negligence, misconduct and outright corruption. In short, they were seen as a necessary evil. This article explores the role played by medical subordinates in colonial Burma, as well as the ambivalent British attitude towards them, by tracing the history of attempts to train them and by examining episodes of their misconduct, which was especially prominent in the production of medico-legal evidence. Focusing on these medical subordinates highlights the need for a historiographic rethink of the relationship between medicine and the colonial state. Medicine was not a tool of the colonial state, but a set of practices through which the state was performed.

Is it in India? Colonial Burma as a ‘problem’ in South Asian history

ABSTRACT Despite being governed as an integral part of the Indian Empire for over 50 years, it is commonplace for historians to consider Myanmar/Burma as a distinct entity beyond what is usually taken to be South Asia. This is a heuristic separation indulged by both scholars of colonial India and colonial Burma and is in part a legacy of the territorial assumptions of Area Studies. Recently new geographic frameworks – particularly the Indian Ocean, Eurasia and Zomia – have begun to undermine the basis of this artificial division. Building on these insights, this essay argues that the apparent distinctiveness of the Burmese experience of the Raj might be a useful problem for historians of colonial India to think with.

Whiteness, Masculinity and the Ambivalent Embodiment of ‘British Justice’ in Colonial Burma

Abstract When British judges in colonial South Asia attempted to perform their duties with detached objectivity they were also performatively enacting a particular construction of imperial white masculinity. This was an ambivalent embodied enactment. When the figure of the objective judge was confronted by critics as white and male, its claims to be objective were under threat. As a result of this ambivalence, it was an imperial white masculinity that could not name itself. Instead, it was a white masculinity constructed through a differentiation that was made with feminised, non-white bodies that were deemed partial.

Devious Documents: Corruption and Paperwork in Colonial Burma, c. 1900

Cecil Champain Lowis, the British judge whose novels chronicled official life in colonial Burma, was well aware of the tedium of paperwork.

The Career of Inspector Pakiri

The relationship between the colonial state and its subordinate employees was a complex one. Part of the complexity is neatly captured in Hobbes’s phrase, quoted in the epigraph above, that subordinate officials were ‘the matter thereof, and the artificer’ of the colonial state.1 In other words, subordinate officials were not only employed by the colonial state, but also they made the state. This was apparent in the banal sense that the vast majority of state employees were indigenous subordinate officials. British members of the Indian Civil Service made up a tiny minority of colonial state officials across British India.2 Additionally, the army in Burma contained indigenous Burmese soldiers and was predominantly made up of Indian subordinates.3 There would have been no colonial state but for its overwhelmingly Burmese and Indian subordinate employees. But the proposition that the colonial state was made by its subordinate officials also has a more sophisticated implication. Subordinate officials through their everyday acts performed and enacted the colonial state.4 Hobbes’s notion of the state being created through art is apt for characterising this role of subordinate officials in making the colonial state. There was a theatrical and creative aspect to subordinate officials’ everyday practices through which the colonial state was enacted. It is the nature of this performative enactment of the colonial state by subordinate officials that is being explored in this chapter.

Whiter than White

Almost all scholarly attempts to define colonial states rely, to varying degrees, on the existence of a division between the rulers and the ruled. For most post-colonial historians, this division in colonial Asia was marked primarily by conceptions of racial difference.1 This was apparent in many formal bureaucratic structures and employment practices in which certain powers and positions were reserved for white Europeans. But while this was usually an institutionalised bifurcation evident in the formal organisation of colonial states’ uppermost branches, it is less certain how this hierarchical racial division was experienced in everyday life.2 With subordinate officials, like Inspector Pakiri, evidently capable of subverting the authority of British superior officers and enacting the state for their own ends, it might legitimately be asked whether the white upper echelons of the colonial administration were relevant in everyday deltaic life at all. Were the daily personal politics of local government, as George Orwell evocatively characterised them, always ‘impervious to the European mind, a conspiracy behind the conspiracy, a plot within a plot’?3