Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (26 page)

In the sixteenth century, China and India together formed half the world’s economy. Within a generation, this could be the case again. And no one in principle was against more trade, more economic interaction between the two rising giants. A very likely scenario is not war or heightened animosity, but growing commercial and people-to-people ties. In 2010, Burma and China reached an agreement to rebuild the old Stilwell Road, originally built by African-American soldiers during the Second World War, linking Ruili to India’s Northeast. Nearly all trade between China and India today is by sea. But it is unclear what will happen if and when Beijing’s and Kunming’s development plans materialize and China’s southwest, with its new oil and gas pipelines, high-speed trains and mass tourism, becomes only a day’s drive away from India’s eastern edge. China is already transforming Burma. What will the effect of more open borders be on India? From Delhi I went first to Calcutta, almost a thousand miles away, and from there up to the far-away states of the Indian Northeast and the very fringes of the Indian republic.

Two hundred years ago, British India had a different kind of Look East policy. From its earliest coastal enclaves, the British East India Company had expanded its domains and was fast becoming the dominant power on the subcontinent, governing all of south India as well as Bengal. The capital was then Calcutta, which was in the process of becoming a great imperial metropolis, the second city of the British Empire, and a vibrant commercial and intellectual centre. And it was from Calcutta that the British would defeat the Maratha Confederacy and the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab, overthrow the last of the Mughal rulers, and establish a hold on all India that would last until just after World War Two.

India was the centrepiece of British imperial might. And keeping this prize possession safe meant guarding its frontiers. To the west the frontier was Afghanistan, never directly ruled by the British but kept in check through a series of (sometimes very messy) interventions. By the 1830s, a scheming and aggressive Russia was well entrenched in Central Asia, and blocking Russian moves southward, into Afghanistan, became a British imperial preoccupation. Further to the west were the sea lanes that connected India to England, and, once the Suez Canal was built in the 1860s, the protection of these sea lanes meant securing control of Aden (in today’s Yemen) as well as Egypt, which was occupied in 1880. After World War One, British Indian forces even took over Mesopotamia, remaking that once Ottoman province into the Hashemite kingdom of Iraq.

And looking east meant control of the sea lanes and this meant control of the Straits of Malacca. Beyond were the lucrative markets of eastern China, with the British port of Hong Kong. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars the British had seized Singapore and they soon extended their rule up the Malay Peninsula, from Johore to Penang. Looking east also meant dealing with the troublesome kingdom of Burma. In the early part of the nineteenth century the last Burmese dynasty–the Konbaung–were at the peak of their power. They had crushed their Siamese foes and even successfully resisted four Manchu Chinese invasions. They were extremely self-assured, pushing westward, annexing the little kingdoms of Arakan and Manipur and then the much larger one of Assam, along the Brahmaputra River. The Burmese were hemming in Bengal. This was something the East India Company could not accept and three Anglo-Burmese Wars would follow. By 1860, only the British flag flew all round the Bay of Bengal. The Indian Ocean had become a British Indian lake.

This Indian Ocean world was centred on Calcutta, and its passing is perhaps the single most important development of twentieth-century Asia, rivalled only by the communist revolution in China and the emergence of America as a Pacific power. And with its passing there has surfaced a much more broken landscape, strewn with many little wars and ethnic conflicts, a former empire that is today not one but four independent nations, adjacent to a China that is bigger than ever.

I had planned to go to Calcutta during my trip around India in the mid-1990s but never made it. I was exhausted from many weeks on the road (with a backpack and tight budget) and after studying bus maps and railway timetables (I was then in south India) and worried about the monsoon rains, hopped on a plane instead from Bangalore to Delhi, and flew back to England where I was then living. When I finally arrived more than twelve years later I was keen to see the city I had read and thought about for so long.

I had expected the grand British-era buildings, the crowds, the poverty, the few new office towers and modern hotels. What I hadn’t expected, however, was how much Calcutta resembled Rangoon. It wasn’t just a slight resemblance. At times Calcutta seemed almost identical, not to Rangoon as a whole, but to downtown Rangoon, the part of Rangoon that had been built during the Raj. The street life was the same down to the smallest details: the little shops selling cheap clothes and tattered books, the vendors hawking single cigarettes and cut fruit, the ill-nourished-looking men in their light blue checked cotton
lungis
(just like the one I am wearing now as I write this), the vats of steaming curry and rice, the potholes, the dirt and humidity, the crumbling yellowish façades, ill-made signs in both English and in a squiggly local alphabet, here and there verandas with flowering plants. Whereas Delhi and nearby cities in Rajasthan and the Punjab were alien to me, Calcutta was instantly familiar. The faces were different, but not entirely, as there were so many people of Bengali descent or mixed Indian descent in Rangoon. Calcutta, I realized, had clearly been the ‘mother ship’, the model on which downtown Rangoon was based. I felt very much at home.

There was little in the way of recent construction. There was the hotel where I was staying, a cavernous business hotel on the out skirts of town, and towards the centre there was the new ‘South City Shopping Mall’, with a state-of-the-art multiplex cinema, international chains like Marks and Spencer, Nike and Body Shop, and restaurants featuring Thai and Chinese food. But I saw few other China-style developments, only billboards over head advertising housing estates, presumably in the suburbs, with immaculate homes and gardens, a Singapore-style life that seemed a world apart from the grimy street life below.

Calcutta is the capital of West Bengal, a densely populated state, about the size of Massachusetts, with over eighty million people (including fifteen million in and around Calcutta). The city spreads south to north along the Hooghly River and the sea is not far away. Arakan in Burma, where the Chinese pipeline to Yunnan will originate, is less than 400 miles down the coast.

Calcutta ceased being the capital of British India in 1912, but for decades afterwards still remained a key Asian hub for business and education. Even in the 1950s and early 1960s West Bengal was second only to Bombay as the country’s most industrialized region. But by the 1970s Calcutta was clearly in decline. There was little new investment, services were strained, and many middle-class professionals began leaving for other cities in India, or overseas, including and especially to the US. Around the same time, there was a mass influx of poor people from newly independent Bangladesh next door, also extremely densely populated. Calcutta was plagued by power shortages and labour unrest. The ‘Left Front’, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), came to power and has been in office ever since, making it the longest-running democratically elected communist government in the world. It has not been a particularly radical communist government, but it has also not been particularly pro-business. In 1985 Rajiv Gandhi referred to Calcutta as a ‘dying city’. More recently, there have been efforts at reform, but in general West Bengal has not experienced anything like the economic growth and dynamism of states further west. Its infrastructure is poor and few companies see the investment climate as very friendly. In October 2008 the industrial giant Tata withdrew plans for a $350 million plant near Calcutta following agitation by the opposition parties claiming to represent the interests of farmers in the area.

There is also the threat of the Maoists, stronger in the states just to the west of Bengal, but increasingly active within West Bengal itself. In June 2009, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the Maoists the ‘greatest threat to India’s internal security’. And in February 2010, the Maoists brazenly attacked a police camp in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district, leaving twenty-four officers dead. In May the same year the Maoists derailed a Bombay-bound train outside Calcutta, which was then hit by a freight train; seventy-six people were killed and over 200 injured.

These stories briefly made the international headlines, but in general, for one of the biggest cities on the planet, Calcutta is not that much in the news. Looking through the
New York Times
, one of the very few recent articles I could find was a story from 2006, reporting on the death of a tortoise at the Calcutta Zoo. This giant Aldabra tortoise was believed, amazingly, to be no less than 255 years old. It was one of four brought by British seamen from the Seychelles islands in the mid-eighteenth century, and had been presented as a gift to Lord Robert Clive of the East India Company. Clive had died in 1774 but the tortoise had lived on, for a very long time.

During my few days there I took many long walks and was able to enjoy several meals of delicious Bengali food–fish and prawn dishes and rice–eaten, as in Burma, with one’s right hand. And during these meals there were discussions about the old British-era Zamindari mansions in the north of the city, 1950s politicians like U Nu and Krishna Menon, tiger conservation, Oxbridge historians, and the year’s monsoon. This was all very familiar. The homes I was invited to reminded me exactly of the slightly mildewed homes of the upper middle class in Rangoon, with the overhead punkahs and attentive servants, the overstuffed bookcases and black and white photographs, and curry-smells from unseen kitchens.

And in remembering Rangoon, I thought of Calcutta as the path not taken. Calcutta was a centre of a democracy, its politics untidy and hotly contested, with an elite still connected to its past. It was not much more prosperous materially than Rangoon, but far richer intellectually, and enjoyed a political freedom long denied its smaller sister city. When I was there a rally of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was making its way through one of the main streets, with busloads of men and women from the countryside waving red hammer and sickle flags heading to the
maidan
to hear speeches, air their grievances and chant slogans.

I imagined the Pegu Club in Rangoon (once a colonial bastion, long derelict and on the verge of being demolished) like the Bengal Club today, a somewhat shabby watering-hole offering not-very-expensive rooms for the night, a library and a barber-shop, a place for the visiting Vice Chancellor of Cambridge to give a speech and meet with local alumni. Whereas the Burma Research Society, founded by the former Indian Civil Servant and later Cambridge sociologist J. S. Furnivall, is long gone, the Asiatic Society, founded by the linguist William Jones (and once home to the only museum in Asia), is still there, with a modern wing recently added. The buildings of the Raj were maintained and beautiful. Government House, now Raj Bhawan and the residence and office of the West Bengal governor, is modelled on Kedleston Hall, the ancestral home of Marquess Curzon. Government House in Rangoon has been torn down. The Writer’s Building, once the headquarters of the East India Company, is now the seat of the West Bengal government. The similarly grand Secretariat in Rangoon is empty and forlorn, in 2010 up for sale to the highest bidder. In Calcutta there is the Victoria Memorial, really an enormous white marble museum to the British Empire, complete with a giant statue of the queen, whilst in Rangoon every street name has been scrubbed of any possible colonial legacy. I had no sense that the people of Calcutta were any more enamoured of British times than those in Rangoon, but with democracy had maintained a certain confidence that allowed them to accept and build on the past.

Calcutta was also a place with old family ties. The exact history is a little obscure but one of my great-grandfathers studied in Calcutta as a young man in the 1880s. Some in my family say that he was partly of Indian descent himself, and that his grandfather had arrived in Burma’s Irrawaddy delta thirty years or so before from Arakan, the part of Burma closest to Bengal. He was a Muslim and his family were then prominent landowners; after university he spent some time working as a colonial civil servant, before returning to the delta to help run the family business. In those days Calcutta was not very far away from Rangoon. A steamer service (the Calcutta and Burmah Steam Navigation Company) ran from Calcutta through the Irrawaddy delta to Rangoon and then on to Penang and Singapore, and this was his intellectual life-line to the world. He could order books from Calcutta bookshops and subscribe to newspapers and magazines. And when he married my great-grandmother in 1905, it was to the capital of the British Raj that he took her on their honeymoon.

My great-grandfather was far from unusual in his ties to Calcutta. Both Burma and Bengal were provinces of British India and Bengal was the province closest to Burma geographically and the province with which Burma had the closest relationship. Hundreds of Burmese students studied at schools in Calcutta and in the nearby hill station of Darjeeling, and many stayed on for university. More importantly, there was a significant migration of Bengalis to Burma in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some were casual labourers, especially in the area near the present-day Burma–Bangladesh border, but a large number were businessmen, civil servants and professionals. There were many Bengali teachers in Burma as well as lecturers and professors at Rangoon University and several generations of Burmese grew up speaking English with a Bengali-influenced accent. Calcutta was also the place from which many other communities established themselves in British Burma, including those of the Marwari and Jewish merchants who prospered in Rangoon. And there were journalists and writers, like Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, one of the most popular Bengali novelists of the early twentieth century, who lived in Rangoon in the 1930s, worked as a clerk in the Public Works Department, and there began writing the books that are unknown today in Burma but are still favourites in Bengal.

This was a time when important political figures routinely travelled from India to Burma. Mahatma Gandhi was a repeat visitor. He first came to Rangoon in 1902 (when he was living in Cape Town), writing afterwards of his sadness at seeing Indians teaming up with British merchants at the expense of the Burmese. (He also remarked: ‘The freedom and energy of the Burmese women charmed just as the indolence of the men pained me.’) He came again in 1915 and in 1929, and on both these occasions stayed with an old friend from London student days, Dr P. J. Mehta, the scion of a rich diamond-trading family, then settled in Rangoon, who had founded the Burma Provincial Congress Committee, the first overtly political organization in Burma. Gandhi toured the country and gave speeches to big crowds wherever he went. Burmese nationalists had been very influenced by the rise of Indian nationalism and Burmese students and activists, especially those on the radical fringe of anti-colonial politics, joined resident Indians in cheering the visiting Congress leader. In Mandalay he reminded people of Lokmanya Tilak’s incarceration in Mandalay jail twenty years before. Tilak had been a hard-line political figure (and the author of a wonderful book called
The Arctic Home of the Vedas
, postulating that the Aryan people originated at the North Pole 10,000 years ago), locked up by the British for sedition. ‘It was Tilak who gave India the mantra of
swaraj
[self-rule],’ Gandhi told the mixed Burmese–Indian crowd. ‘In India it is a common saying that the way to
swaraj
passes through Mandalay.’