The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (31 page)

PANTANAW

S
ometime during the cold weather of 1909–1910 a young man in a small town not far from Mandalay came to acquire a reputation for feats of magic. It was rumored that he could disappear at will or become invulnerable to bullets and bayonets. He soon developed a spirited following, and this, together with his newfound fame and the encouragement of others, emboldened him to raise a standard of rebellion against the English occupiers and lay claim to the vacant Konbaung throne.

His rebellion was not to last long or to have much impact, except perhaps in the imagination of some of his countrymen. It came nearly a generation after the guerrilla campaigns of the post-Thibaw years and so seemed anachronistic, a throwback to an unsettling past. He and his little gang of coconspirators first attacked a nearby British police post, killing a couple of Sikh constables, and then rampaged for a while up and down a narrow strip on both sides of the Mu River. The predictable response was quick in coming. The rebellion was crushed, the royalist band was rounded up, and the magical young man himself, his powers having evidently left him, was sentenced to death and hanged in the courtyard of a British jail.
¹

Around the same time, and many hundreds of miles to the south, at the little town of Pantanaw, a well-to-do couple decided to name their
first son Thant, the name of the erstwhile pretender. It was not an obvious choice. The new father, U Po Hnit, then in his late thirties, was the very picture of a loyal subject and part and parcel of the up-and-coming class of Anglophone professionals and businessmen benefiting most from British rule. As a teenager he had been sent to university in Calcutta and had returned some years later to take up a coveted job with the provincial civil service. This was in the early 1890s, only a few years after Thibaw’s overthrow and the violent suppression of Upper Burma resistance. What role he played, if any, in support of the colonial authorities is not known. But he was posted at Yamethin, well within the boundaries of the old kingdom, and he would have been part of the new and unloved British Raj.
²

U Po Hnit was my great-grandfather (on my mother’s side), and he left the service only two years after joining. Perhaps he didn’t like the work or perhaps he had qualms about serving the foreign occupation so directly. Either way, his decision had been made easier by the helping hand of his rich uncle U Shwe Khin, Pantanaw’s leading businessman and landowner. Po Hnit’s father had died fairly young, and his uncle had looked after him, paying for his expensive Calcutta education. Whatever disappointment the older man might have had about his adopted son’s leaving the prestigious ranks of the colonial administration, he was now happy to bring him into the family firm.

Pantanaw stands at the heart of the delta, where the great river slowly branches out into hundreds of tributaries, a vast level expanse of light green paddy fields, just inland from the warm and salty air of the Indian Ocean. It is all new land, created over the past few centuries from the silting of the Irrawaddy, and covered in an incredibly rich stiff yellow clay, so rich that rice was grown broadcast without any need for transplantation. Tobacco and chilies are planted along the many little waterways. In the summertime, monstrous downpours drench everything in sight, and the weather is almost unrelentingly hot and humid. It was a place of some distinction. The town had once been very rich from fishing and trading in fish, and though this industry was now in decline (because of the silting up of the Pantanaw canal), it was still prosperous and growing fast. And it was in the jungles nearby that the king Tabinshweti had met his death while pursuing a white elephant, having lost his mind to drink during the heyday of the Portuguese adventurers.

For several hundred years the people of Pantanaw spoke Mon, the
language of Pegu, until sometime after the civil wars of the eighteenth century. This had been the language of most of the delta until revolt and repression drove tens of thousands of people from their homes, many to the east toward Siam. It was then that new settlers, Burmese speakers, came from the north, and these were largely royal servicemen looking for a better life. They were hereditary rowers of the king’s boats and were led by their chiefs. According to local tradition, they came from the riverbanks around Pagan and Nyaung-U and arrived shortly after Alaungpaya’s conquest of the area in 1757. They came in great teak vessels of forty oarsmen each and settled not only in Pantanaw but in many of the surrounding towns as well.

They brought with them their
sandala
slaves, outcasts who dealt in death and burial. Within living memory there was a cluster of bamboo huts on the road leading to the main monastery, and all the people living there were believed to have descended from these original slaves of Pagan. Several hundred yards farther on, just to the north of the monastery itself, there is a wasteland, today overgrown with weeds, with a small cleared area around a huge fallen tree. It was here, say the townspeople, that an infamous dacoit in the earliest days of settlement was finally captured and tied to the tree before being stabbed to death. There are no Mon-speaking people left, though many who claim some Mon ancestry remain. But the pagoda of the town is seven hundred years old, long predating the Burmese conquest, and was built, according to folklore, by a visiting Singhalese prince, heartbroken after an ill-fated love affair with the daughter of a local Mon lord. They say his treasure, in gold, silver, amber, and jade, is still buried in the
tabana
within.

Though there were few, if any, Mon speakers left in the area, the Burmese at the turn of the last century were far from the only inhabitants of Pantanaw and the surrounding country. The majority of people in the surrounding villages were Karens, who spoke an entirely different language from Burmese and who had begun converting to Christianity in large numbers under the influence of American Baptist missionaries. Many had arrived recently as well, from the hill areas farther east in Burma. And there were also new arrivals of Indian descent, both Hindu and Muslim, including the first big wave of Chettyar moneylenders from the Coromandel coast.
³
Overall, the population had increased dramatically, and the town itself was then home to more than five thousand people.

This was true in much of the Irrawaddy Delta, which was transformed during these years.
⁴
Hundreds of thousands of acres of jungle, swamps, and marshes with pythons and crocodiles and wild elephants were cleared to create the world’s number one rice-growing region. In the old days there was no export market for rice as the Burmese kings, worried about famine, had expressly forbidden any external trade; instead any surplus from the delta was shipped north up the river to the more arid parts of the country, where rice was often scarce. But the British had no such concerns. Rangoon’s port facilities were rapidly expanded, and by the late 1850s rice production in the delta was expanding at an already phenomenal pace, made possible in part by waves of immigrants, like the boatmen from Pagan, coming down from the old kingdom to the north.

In the fifteen years up to 1860 the amount of land devoted to rice cultivation more than tripled to 1,350,000 acres. The American Civil War of 1861–65, which cut off the supply of rice to Europe from the Carolinas, fueled yet more demand for the Burmese crop. In 1869 the Suez Canal linked the Indian Ocean directly with the Mediterranean, drastically cutting the travel time between India and Europe and creating a permanent European market for Burmese rice. Rice was now the country’s cash crop and by far the most important source of Burma’s foreign earnings, replacing nearly all other important industry in the Irrawaddy Delta and in much of the rest of the province as well. In the twentieth century it fed the growing population of Calcutta as well as Indian plantation workers in the Straits Settlements. By 1930 no less than twelve million acres of land in Burma were devoted to rice, and out of a total production of nearly five million tons, two and a half million—worth over half a billion U.S. dollars today—were sold abroad. The Irrawaddy Delta had become a colonial society, with few links to the past, new immigrants, and, for a while at least, an air of economic optimism.

*

Po Hnit’s own family was very much one of these colonial families, with almost no ties to the old kingdom, and from a mixed background, with both Muslim and Buddhist forebears. His grandfather had come to Pantanaw from Akyab in Arakan. A merchant who had done well in the early years of British rule, he had decided to seek his fortune in the delta. Though the town was prosperous, it was prosperous by the standards
of the time. It had no electricity in 1909, and the only means of transport to neighboring towns or to Rangoon was by steamer or on land (in dry weather only) by bullock cart.

Po Hnit must have been something of an oddity as the only English speaker in Pantanaw. He had seen something of the rest of the world and now tried to keep a part of it. He built up a library of several hundred English books, no mean feat in a place as humid and moldy as the Irrawaddy Delta, and subscribed to no less than three English newspapers as well as weekly journals, sent down through the steamer service from Calcutta. He also received a copy of the Burmese-language newspaper
The Sun
, a politically influential paper of which he was an early backer and shareholder. In those days it was possible in a small isolated Burmese town to feel part of international learning and discussions in a way that wouldn’t be possible later, perhaps not even with the advent of satellite TV (which Pantanaw still doesn’t have).

He remained a bachelor for quite some time, settling down only in 1906, after he met and married Nan Thaung, a much younger woman (he was thirty-five and she was twenty-three), and together they had four sons in rapid succession. He traveled often to Rangoon and even took his beautiful young bride on a sort of belated honeymoon to India in 1907. They lived in a big two-story teak house set in a garden of jasmine, mango, and guava trees and under the shade of a giant tamarind. Grown fat and prosperous-looking, Po Hnit was doing well, helping manage his uncle Shwe Khin’s diverse businesses and owning over a hundred acres of his own farmland as well as five houses around Pantanaw. He came to be seen not only as the rich and now-aging Shwe Khin’s adopted son but as his natural successor. But others were making other arrangements.

In June 1922, just as the first of the monsoon rains came pouring down, the uncle, U Shwe Khin, died suddenly, apparently of a heart attack. Po Hnit’s eldest son, Thant (my grandfather), was thirteen at the time, and years later he remembered the old man’s gatekeeper knocking on the door at four in the morning with the news of Shwe Khin’s death. Po Hnit rushed over to Shwe Khin’s house, just a few doors down, only to find, to his great surprise, that his uncle had been dead since eleven the night before. Shwe Khin’s wife had stashed away somewhere all the valuables in the house, including a fortune in diamonds as well as thousands of British pound sterling notes stuffed into empty
tins of Huntley & Palmer’s Golden Puff biscuits, a teatime favorite throughout the country. The diamonds and the cash alone were said to be worth at least a million rupees, the equivalent of perhaps ten million pounds today (about eighteen and a half million U.S. dollars).
⁵
The old lady had no children of her own. She did, however, have relatives.

The next day old Shwe Khin’s unexpected death and the strange and suspicious behavior of his widow were the talk of the town. Friends of my great-grandfather began asking him why she waited so long to send him word of the heart attack and why she had removed all the valuables from the house. She of course denied that any valuables were missing. But when Po Hnit opened the two fireproof safes in the house (to which he had the keys), they were empty. A close friend of Po Hnit’s had told him that just the week before he had sold some emeralds and diamonds to Shwe Khin.

The truth was not long in coming. Everyone in town (at least in my family’s telling of the story) had seen Po Hnit as Shwe Khin’s adopted son. In Burma, though, even under British rule, there was no practice of legal adoption or of leaving behind a will, and there were no legal documents to substantiate Po Hnit’s relationship with his uncle or his rights to any of the family money or business. A few days later my great-grandfather was told that all the valuables and money had been given to a nephew of the widow. She was determined to keep everything and make sure that Po Hnit received not a rupee of the estate.

Po Hnit went to his solicitors in Rangoon at once and on their advice formally requested a part of Shwe Khin’s estate. The lawyers told him that his chances were good and that he should be able to inherit at least some of his uncle’s wealth. A strong legal case was prepared. Weeks and months passed, and eventually the matter was brought up before a district magistrate the following April. There was confidence it would be settled soon and fairly.

Then, just as the court proceedings were starting, and things looked as if they would go Po Hnit’s way, he was suddenly stricken with a mysterious illness. My grandfather remembered his perspiring profusely. There was no proper hospital nearby, only a small ten-bed clinic, and the resident Indian doctor had no diagnosis. Within days Po Hnit was dead.

My great-grandmother Nan Thaung was left with no husband and four sons, aged four to fourteen, and a messy legal case on her hands. Her lawyers told her to press on. She wasn’t sure; after all, she still had
the houses and land her husband had owned himself. But Shwe Khin’s widow now upped the stakes and served my great-grandmother notice for recovery of a huge sum of money allegedly lent to Po Hnit by Shwe Khin the year before. Nan Thaung felt compelled to continue.