278. Partition: India’s Break With Burma (Part 1)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durumpal. I have to say this is a very special episode of Empire because those of you who listen regularly will know that I have some kind of anaphylactic shock when we have more than one Dalrymple. I mean, you know, there's a splattering of Dalrymples throughout this podcast because William seems to be related to everyone. But I could not be more delighted today because we have one of my favorite Dalrymples. It's not William, it's you, Sam Dalrymple, historian and also we should say son of the other Dalrymple. Dalrymple, but you're here because you've written this masterful first book.

1:07Can I just say it makes me sick with envy that this is your first book, Sam Dalrymple. It's, I mean, astonishing. I find it irritating too, if it's any comfort. Do you know, I've said to your father that if this were a Greek tragedy, you ought to be hiding in a cave. Seriously, these things don't go well. I know. So this is the beautiful, beautiful book. It's called Shattered Lands, Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. It is a beautiful cover for what is an enormously informative book. And it's, I don't know, William, about you, but you're closer to the author than I am. However, I thought I was closer to this subject than it turns out that I am, because it doesn't just talk about partition in terms of India and Pakistan, which we think we know very well, but it's about five partitions that have shaped the world.

1:57I think everyone in India was very taken aback by this too, because partition is always something talked about in the singular. And everyone knows the story of 1947. And of course, we've dealt with it before on the podcast, these tragic tales of people moving from one country to the other in long lines of bullet carts, and then terrible scuffles and bloodshed and massacres which follow. But Sam's book has the idea that there are five partitions, which took everybody in India by surprise. And as a result, I'm very irritated to see that it's gone to number one in the Indian chance and knocked me down to number five.

2:33Zoomed past him, Sam. You zoomed past him. And can I just say, that made me laugh a little bit, but delighted for you. Also for me, but delighted for you, Sam. Now, first of all, this is a brilliant story, but I did at one point want to hit myself over the head with your very heavy tone thinking, have I got concussion already? And am I reading this right? So first of all, tell us the alien story because it's such a good one. So yeah, thank you for having me. So the book begins almost 100 years ago today, when the BBC first tries to make contact with aliens. And it's, I think, New Year's Day 1928.

3:11And I was actually looking through the archives for a report, which was the first time the Indian National Congress had declared its aim as full national independence from Britain. And this I thought would be front page story, number one thing in the newspaper. But of course, it was actually kind of at the bottom right hand corner of page one. And the main story that day was that the BBC tried to contact extraterrestrials. And they say kind of, hello, all stars and nebulae, have our recordings reached you yet? And there's a terrible silence. I know, it's wonderful. Can I read it in a BBC voice?

3:44Because you've reproduced it. A greeting to all friendly planets circling with us on the everlasting tour. Have our waves reached you yet? I mean, it will be done in that kind of sinister tone as well. Wouldn't it have been in the more 1920s BBC speaking? A greeting to all friendly planets circling with us on the everlasting tour. Have our waves reached you yet? Yes, I think that's probably right. And that's probably why they haven't contacted us. Because, you know, that sounds slightly stalky. Would you contact someone who talked like that? Stalky, creepy. He follows up with reply if you please.

4:16Yes, reply if you please. It's such a fantastic story. But why do you think that it relegated actually a story of great importance, as it turns out? India finally deciding, you know what, we don't want this idea of diarchy. We're not going to share anything with you. Just get out. Get out, get out, get out. Why was that such a small story at the time? Well, I think no one really conceived how quickly this whole thing would fall apart. Reading it, it's a bit like the Titanic. It's too big to fail. And as late as the 20s, I think that the Indian Empire was so integral to Britain's self-image, in some sense, that no one could imagine a world where just 25 years later, it wasn't part of the British Empire anymore.

4:59Sam, maybe you could just give us a picture of the full extent of the British Indian Empire at this point, because I think we're all aware of the rough shape of the British Empire. But the Indian Empire, as it was called, in other words, the bits that were ruled from Calcutta, used the rupee, issued Indian passports. What was the geographical extent of that? Because your theory is that it was much larger than we all believe. So, yeah, at this moment, when the BBC is trying to contact aliens, when the British Empire is too large to fail, India stretches from modern day Yemen to modern day Burma.

5:36It encompasses 12 modern nation states rather than just the India-Pakistan that I think we so often imagine It was a patchwork empire, but it was a single colony, essentially, that encompassed the largest population on the planet and included the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian populations on the planet And as well as the directly ruled British India, you also had princely states like Jaipur and Hyderabad but also various princely kingdoms like Dubai and Kuwait, which survive to the present day. Sam, just go through those 12 very quickly, just so that we get the idea of the full extent, because it is surprising.

6:16So it includes modern-day Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Burma. It's a much larger story than we tend to remember, and it's five partitions over just 50 years that create the borders that we know today. And I mean, you know, when people talk about the jewel in the crown, these are the facets of that jewel. I mean, people only think about the front facing surface of India, Pakistan as they are now, but there is a lot more to it. And we're starting today by talking about Burma, now known as Myanmar. First of all, just explain exactly where Burma is for those who aren't familiar and don't have Sure.

6:59So Burma is to the east of India, wedged between India and Thailand, and it's kind of just south of China. And in the 1930s, it was one of the richest, most prosperous, most cosmopolitan places on the planet, what Singapore is today, I guess. But thanks to the government looking inwards and pulling Burma outside of the international community, military rule, crankdowns on human rights, the Rohingya genocide, it's been so alienated from the world that its history has been largely forgotten. Just go into that a bit more, Sam. You say that it was incredibly prosperous, in fact, the richest place in the Raj per capita.

7:39Where was that money coming from? Because we do not associate Burma with wealth. We think of it as a marginal country these days with problems with generals and arresting Aung San Suu Kyi and so on. Why was Burma so rich at this point? So there is this fascinating little document that was found by Sunil Amrit that says in 1933, the immigration authorities of the Raj write that until recently, Rangoon was second only to New York City as an immigration and emigration port in the world, but now it is number one. So it had overtaken New York and the Burmese dream had essentially overtaken the American dream as the place that migrants wanted to go.

8:19It was thanks to oil wealth discovered, Burma oil. You also had the Irrawaddy Fertilla Company. Burma oil was the ancestor of BP, is that right? Yeah. So it's one of the earlier oil conglomerates in the region and was essentially the Raj oil conglomerate. So it is a magnet for those who want to make their fortune. I mean, what is life like in Burma? Is it different to life living in India, let's say? I mean, you know, freedoms that are enjoyed, powers that are shared between, you know, the British ruling class and the native population. So again, it was India, and this is what we've got to kind of wrap our heads around.

8:56This wasn't just a separate colony. It was India's easternmost colony and was India's richest and largest province for over 100 years. And life was pretty similar, except more cosmopolitan. And crucially for a lot of people, caste was less of a thing there because it was Buddhist. And so you get a lot of Dalits, groups formerly designated as untouchable, migrating across the sea to escape caste. and women seem to often be treated better. And so a lot of women who want to make a name for themselves will migrate there. Sam, do we have any figures for the population in Burma, which we would now call Indian?

9:33You've always written in this book about the number of Chetiyas, who are these Tamil money-lending castes who buy up great chunks of Burma. What was the figures of the number of non-ethnic Burmese who went across? So it changes over time, but by the 30s, there is no doubt that Rangoon is basically an Indian city. And when Tagore, the Nobel laureate, arrives in Rangoon in the 20s, he talks about it essentially being a city run by double colonialism. You've both got the Brits there, but you've also got Indian merchants and bankers who often refuse to hire Burmese locals in favour of their kind of brethren from across the Bay of Bengal.

10:15So you'll get kind of Bengali shipping magnets only wanting to hire Bengalis. or you'll have Tamil bankers only hiring Tamils. And so increasingly, what you begin to get is a debate that rings oddly similar to the debates that surround Brexit. You get, should we remain part of this massive economic union? Is immigration a force for good and making our culture more cosmopolitan? Or is it reducing the economic heft of the indigenous population? And there's a huge maelstrom in the politics, and it very much divides Burma down the middle. rather than it being a simple, yes, obviously, we're not Indian.

10:53It's far more complicated. And in the coming years, we'll culminate in what I call the first partition of India, and set into motion a series of dominoes that would lead to the Bengal famine, one of the largest refugee crises of the 20th century. The creation of Pakistan is very, very much inspired, in a sense, by Burma's separation, and leads to one of the longest ongoing civil wars in history. You said that, look, don't get this all in a muddle. Burma was very much part of India. It was for the British, but did the Burmese feel that way too? I mean, what did they think? And you've just highlighted the fact that there was a sort of ruling class of Indians who favoured their own.

11:31So what did Burmese people, ethnically Burmese, if one can use that phrase, think of themselves and their place in the Raj? So this extraordinary figure called Mahatma Ottoma exists. And he is the biggest politician in Burma in the 1920s. He's a kind of acolyte of Gandhi's, and he's this kind of short Buddhist monk with large ears, a scar on his forehead, and is named Mahatma in honour of his similarities to Gandhi, essentially. Now, for almost the entirety of his career as Burma's most important politician, initially he's a member of the Indian National Congress, although later leaves, and spends half of his life campaigning for Burma to remain a part of India, saying basically that Burma is India's easternmost province because Buddha was an Indian.

12:23Is that the logic? The link with Buddhism is an important part of the story. It's an important part, but he also feels that there is no natural border. So there is no time in history before the 1930s that the border that we now see had existed. There are Burmese empires that stretch into modern Bengal, and there are Bengali empires that stretch well into modern Burma. You have a quote in your book, Sam, which I'll read out. Burma refuses to be a helot on her own sword. This is Mahatma Utama speaking. To be cut off from her age-long associations. Geographically, she is of India rather than of any other country.

12:59Burma's demand is for her rightful place as an honoured and equal partner in the coming All India Federation. So what's fascinating is how much this speech makes him fall out with Gandhi. Because as far as Gandhi's concerned, the Indian nation state that he wants to form is that of what he calls Bharat, this sacred Hindu geography that dates back to the ancient Hindu epics of the Mahabharata, etc. And he sees this is the basis of Indian nationhood. And crucially, this epic does not mention Burma and it does not mention the Arab states. And so Gandhi and several other Indian nationalists throughout the 20s are actively campaigning to separate off the Arabian and Burmese sections of the Raj.

13:46Right. And he goes as far as to say, I have no doubt in my mind that Burma cannot form part of India under Swaraj, Swaraj being the word for self-rule. So that must make the people of Burma and particularly Mahatma Ottoma, who shares a name but not much else at this point with his mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, feel isolated and fearful about the future. Precisely. And it becomes an increasing divide in the country. There's an anti-British rebellion that breaks out around this time called the Sayasan Rebellion. And in the aftermath of this, it very much divides people down the middle because during this rebellion, it's often Indian troops who are sent to suppress the rebellion.

14:28And so a lot of the public start seeing Indians as the enemy because they're the ones who brought in guns to Burma, whereas other people will say that, no, we're all under colonialism together, essentially. And so the solution, as far as the Brits see it, is to send in the Simon Commission. Simon, go home! The big cry of Simon, go home from Indian nationalists. They hated it so much. It was a complete sort of flag around which nationalists of different colours gathered to say, we're not having this. We're not having you decide our constitution and decide what shape we are. It's one of those quotes that everybody from an Indian background knows and no one in this country does.

15:06And if you go to Deshoom, the restaurant, any of their branches, they have large placards saying, Simon, go home all over the walls. I always wonder what kind of ordinary Brits who don't know their Indian 1940s independence history think when they see that. Or indeed my husband who's called Simon, if I take him there. What does he think of it? Well, I haven't taken him yet, Sam. But just explain why the Simon Commission stirred up such strong feelings and Simon go home, Simon go back with such a clarion call. So this is a group of seven men, crucially, including a young Clement Atlee, who will later grant independence to India and Burma.

15:46But it's seven Brits, all white, no Indians involved, who were appointed to suggest a new constitution for India and debate whether or not Burma should be separated. And as far as Indians saw it, the fact that not a single Indian had been put on the committee to create a new constitution was just outright racist. And even Indians who liked the empire, but thought, you know, we want equal rights within a joint union, even they are beginning to turn against Britain at this point. There was still talk at this point of dominion status, wasn't it? Like Canada or New Zealand or Australia, that one of the early ideas in the 20s still was to give India this sort of independence, but within a British Commonwealth.

16:30And this was going one stage further, saying no, we want complete independence. There's a remarkable sense that around the 20s, there's a complete debate about whether or not independence should be a thing at all. And a lot of Indians are looking towards the Roman Empire and saying Rome, I think around 200 AD, had granted equal citizenship to everyone across Rome. So suddenly Philip the Arab could become a Roman emperor. And they were basically arguing that that's maybe what we should have, that sort of system. But by the time that the Simon Commission is created, and it's an all-white jury of people who've largely never been to India, this is a kind of a breaking point.

17:06Sam, one of the things I remember when you were doing research, you came back from the archives astonished by how racist Clement Attlee was and how sort of naive, because we often think of him in this country as this more liberal figure who breaks with Churchill and grants India independence. But you said his letters were sort of almost Victorian in their racial attitudes. Yeah. So he writes to his brother, Tom, that Rangoon's pagodas were rather the jolly being all gilded, but he refused to visit any of them due to sundry quarrels about removing shoes. And then he goes on to say that the Burmans are very cheery looking folk, rather Japanese, but with an unfortunate propensity to murder.

17:43So this is the kind of attitude that he's got when he's visiting. This is not uncommon for people serving the Raj or even people visiting on behalf of, you know, great commission set up in London and Westminster, that they feel the need to classify Indians. And I've seen it before. I mean, I've seen it with the former lieutenant governor of Punjab who just goes through every racial and ethnic group, every tribal community, and gives two lines about what is wrong with them, what is congenitally wrong with these people. They dance too much. They laugh too much. They're a bit thievy. They're a bit rapey.

18:17They're a bit violent. And it reads like some kind of biological specimen list. But that kind of antipathy is returned in kind because when the Simon Commission, with its seven white members, some of whom have never been to India, as you pointed out, are touring around, they are referred to as the seven dwarfs. I mean, people have no respect for what they're doing in the local community. There is resentment, not just at the top, but from top to bottom. And that's what's so unusual about the Simon Go Back, Simon Go Home movement, is that it started maybe from the top, but it spread to grassroots and then bounced back up again.

18:50It was very unifying. Yeah. And crucially, the commissioners arrive in Rangoon by sea. They don't travel by land, and so they don't see how one land turns into the next. And so by the time they arrive in Rangoon, they spend about a couple of days there and decide, yes, it should be separated because it feels a bit different, essentially. And quite a lot of them have been reading Kipling and deciding that, oh, he makes it sound really different too. And it's this remarkably unread group of seven men who then push forward the idea that Burma should be made into a separate colony. And so it is. So on April Fool's Day, 1937, a new border is created, which follows no known pre-existing border.

19:34It follows the ceasefire line of an earlier British-Burmese war, and so cuts through communities like the Nagas or the Rohingya population. What was the reaction in Burma? Was there a sense that many people welcomed this, or was there a difference? How did it go down, the news that Burma was to become a separate colony? So there was actually immediately an election and anti-separationists win the election. So they don't want to be separate. They want to be part of India still. They want to be part of India still. But crucially, the Great Depression, which begins around this time, you know, the great economic recession of the 1930s that in Europe is kind of, you know, giving credence to fascism etc this leads to all of the tamil bankers the chetiyas seizing up assets because when people default on their loans the the chetiyas go in and take up their land so that something ridiculous like in the course of seven years tamil bankers seize a quarter of all burmese land and it's this that begins to turn burmese popular opinion towards that maybe separation is a good thing and maybe we can do something about this sam i remember reading in the book that one of the Chetiyar bankers justifies their seizure of so much Burmese land by saying, but we built the railways.

20:52So you have the Indians. Literally. What's the context of that quote? When it seems absolutely certain that Burma is going to be separated, going to be partitioned off from the Indian empire, all of the Indian businesses that have put so much money into Burma are now horrified that they're going to lose all their assets. And you get, a huge protest that, you know, we civilised Burma, we built their railways. And it's a very eerily similar response from what the British will say to India decades later. And where do they draw the partition line? How do they do it? Because famously, the man who draws the partition between India and Pakistan, what was the quote?

21:29He's never been east of Rome and never set foot in India before. Who draws the line and where do they do the demarcation? Well, so this is what's ridiculous. They don't. so there's um what what what so the border that uh had existed between burma province and the rest of india automatically becomes a new international border but no one's ever been there and so if you go today to nagaland along the india burmese border people talk about the burma border arriving in the 60s because they had no idea that they lived on a border for the first three decades that it wasn't in existence. It was completely open.

22:09People could wander back and forwards. So literally, where there was no border, where people had no idea that they were living on a threshold, what designs and barbed wire go up? What does it look like? And what does it feel like to these people who didn't realise that they were in such a geopolitical hotspot? So it kind of doesn't. So for at least the first few years, there's no British outposts there. There's no border guards. Life continues as normal. And it'll just be three decades later that a bunch of officials will suddenly arrive in these villages and say, oh, you've been living on a border for the last three decades, please move your houses.

22:42So it's less the border that changes things, so much as the rise of xenophobia. So in the wake of separation, racial relations worsen beyond anyone's imagination. And the man at the centre of this is a guy called U So. He's a Hitler enthusiast who essentially transforms anti-Indian xenophobia into a political ideology. He is this kind of absolutely charming man with a way of wrapping British officials around his little finger. And despite frequent boasts about his nine maternal uncles having quite literally got away with murder, he spends all the years before separation lauding Hitler's treatment of the Jews as a role model for what Burma should do with its immigrants in his newspaper, the Thuria.

23:28And he then seems to join the secretive society called the Black Dragon Society when he visits Tokyo. And he returns to Burma incredibly rich with all this new funding from the Japanese. And this secret society had encouraged the annexation of Korea, the encroachment of Chinese territory, and basically been pushing for Japan to become an imperial power in its own right. And Sam, to try and see this through his eyes for a minute. What's attracting him about Japan? Japan is the successful Asian power which has created its own empire. Is that what he likes about it? Exactly. It's proof that Asians can rule the world.

24:06What China is in a sense today, this idea of a super successful new Asian economy which is taking over everything. Asian tigers with their paws on everything. This is what he would have seen in Japan in the 1940s. It's not just that he loves Japanese militarism, or maybe it's that too. Exactly. Well, it's both. He praises them as the only Asiatic people to become a great world power. And in response to this, he gets a free car from them. But so awash with money, he founds a political party called Mulechit, literally the love of race party, and creates his own counterpart to Mussolini's brown shirts.

24:40and will in the succeeding years after separation, after the first partition of India, will transform anti-Indian xenophobia to the point that almost all of India's population is forced into exile. This begins just two years after separation in 1939, when he distributes a letter, a pamphlet, which is all about Burmese and Muslims having a debate about which religion, Buddhism or Islam, is better. And Islam wins. And he gets this distributed to all of the monasteries in Rangoon and basically tries to start an anti-Muslim and anti-Indian race riot. And it's literally known as the Burmese Kristallnacht.

25:24Gosh, and the parallels of this stretch into the here and now, or am I reading too much into it, that kind of anti-immigration rhetoric that was so espoused. Ironically, let me just leave in a newspaper called The Sun at the time, that stretches into the here and now with the attitudes and the kind of rhetoric that's used against the Rohingya population. I've heard similar things about, these are not Burmese. Even famously from Aung San Suu Kyi herself was known to make those sort of speeches. 100%. But this is sort of the kind of thing that U Saw was putting in his pamphlets back in the 30s. Yeah.

26:00I mean, it's no surprise that U Saw is the person who first designates the Rohingya population as non-indigenous to Burma and in need of expulsion. It's him who starts that and sets into motion a ball that will roll down into the modern Rohingya genocide. So just first of all, for our benefit, who are the Rohingya? And forget about his argument for a moment, but what is their claim to being Burmese and how long have they been there? And just give us a little bit of a potted history of their situation. Sure. So they are a group that has been in what's now Burma for hundreds of years. They are definitely there through many empires in Burma's history, but they speak a language that is distantly related to Bengali, the language of modern Bangladesh and Eastern India.