To many Burmese and Rakhine Buddhists of today’s
Myanmar the existence of the non-Buddhist Rohingya people is mostly
seen as a direct result of Indian, or more particularly, Bengali
immigration during the post-1826 era of British occupation of the
territories.
To them, the Rohingya history starts with the
British occupation of Burma, dating back to 1826 after the First
Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-26 in which Arakan and Tenasserim came
under the East India Company, with its bases in Calcutta (today’s
Kolkata in West Bengal of India). The so-called Indian immigration to
Burma is intimately linked with the colonial administration’s
desire to transform Burma into a rice bowl for the British Empire.
In this paper an attempt is
made to reappraise the events during the British occupation of Burma
starting with its annexation of Arakan and its commercial
attractiveness which drew people from other parts of the region to
settle – mostly temporarily – there. The questionable influx of
Bengalis, or more particularly Chittagonians (from nearby Chittagong
District of British Bengal), to beef up the number of Arakanese
Muslims, especially, the Rohingyas of Burma is also examined from
available sources.
The First Anglo-Burmese War
This war, the first of the three wars fought between
the Burmese Empire (Kingdom of Ava) and the British in the 19th
century, dealt a crushing blow to the Burmese pride beginning the end
of their independence. The third Burmese Empire, founded by
Alaungpaya just over half a century ago, was crippled and forced to
pay an indemnity of one million pounds sterling, and sign a
commercial treaty. The British would make two more wars against a
crippled Burma, and swallow up the entire country by 1885.
The outcome of that war was a matter of great relief
for the surviving inhabitants of Arakan – Hindus, Muslims and
Buddhists, who were savagely persecuted during the long rule of
Bodawpaya (1780-1819), the fanatic, blood-thirsty Buddhist monarch
who had fathered 62 sons and 58 daughters by nearly 200 consorts.
Bodawpaya, like all fourth brothers in Burmese folklore, was an
eccentric and unpredictable figure who grew into a despot and a
tyrant. His blood-baths had secured his throne against his rivals and
had let to the mass exodus of the vanquished people. In Lower Burma
tens of thousands of Mons had fled to Siam (today’s Thailand). In
Arakan his invasion, led by his son in 1784, let to the massacre of
tens of thousands of Arakanese Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. He had
no respect for the past and had destroyed mosques and Muslim shrines
that once dotted the shorelines of Arakan. He claimed himself to be a
Future Buddha and proclaimed that all monks must wear their robes in
the orthodox manner. He ordered the study of the Buddhist scriptures
by all laymen and laywomen, and built pagodas and Buddhist
monasteries from exorbitant taxes and revenues he charged for such
pet projects.
Bodawpaya’s Burmese subjects looked upon him with
admiration and love, and occasionally amusement. But his Arakanese
subjects hated him. Speaking about the Burmese cruelty, historian
Harvey said that to break the spirit of the people, “they would
drive men, women and children into bamboo enclosures and burn them
alive by the hundreds.” This resulted in the depopulation of
minority groups such that “there are valleys where even today the
people have scarcely recovered their original numbers, and men still
speak with a shudder of ‘manar upadrap’ (the oppression of the
Burmese).”
During Bodawpaya’s tyrannical rule, some 200,000
Arakanese fled to Bengal (today’s Bangladesh). His forces enslaved
20,000 Arakanese – including 3,700 Muslims (known as the ‘Thum
Htaung Khunya (Three thousand seven hundred)’) – who were forced
to carry the Maha Muni statue to Amarapura. Thousands of Arakanese
were forced to widen a mountain pass to enable the statue to pass
through. When the Arakanese protested against Burmese persecution,
the Burmese army became more arrogant and started to deport them to
Burma for re-settlement there. When in 1785 Bodawpaya invaded Siam,
Arakanese levies were impressed for service in those expeditions.
Bodawpaya also built a number of temples, including
a large temple at Mingun on the opposite bank of the river above Ava.
He ordered enslaved Siamese and Arakanese craftsmen to work together
and cast a great bell for the temple. Mingun was infested with
mosquitoes and people working there were very prone to malaria
attack. Learning of the shortage of labor for king’s project, the
army in Arakan deported more Arakanese to Mingun. To pay for his
project, the king raised many taxes. Burdened by such taxes, many
inhabitants whispered, “When the pagoda (at Mingun) is completed,
the great king shall die.” As noted by Burmese historian Maung Htin
Aung, it was not a mere protest but a bitter curse.
Since its conquest and the removal of its great
image, Arakan had been restless, and the Burmese army did not dare
withdraw lest rebellion should break out. According to Aung, “After
ten years the Arakanese had suffered so much that even the presence
of the army could no longer intimidate them, and in 1794 they rose in
rebellion, led by one of their chiefs. The rebellion was easily
suppressed but the survivors crossed the frontier into British
territory (of Bengal).” The Burmese troops followed them and camped
inside Bengal, who were asked by a British force to withdraw.
Subsequently, an agreement was reached between the two sides in which
the Burmese would send a request in writing to the British
authorities for any such hot pursuits. Nevertheless, Arakanese rebels
became active again, esp. in 1799 when England was locked in battle
with Napoleon’s France. A Burmese force pursued them inside Bengal
where they were intervened by a small British force. The Burmese
commander, realizing that he had acted unwisely, withdrew into
Burmese territory, thus avoiding a general conflict. Lord Wellesley,
the English governor general was angry and refused a written request
from the Burmese military governor of Arakan for surrender of the
rebels.
In 1811 an Arakanese leader, Chin Byan, who had been
a refugee in Bengal, collected a force of refugees who had fled
Arakan, and Bengali sympathizers, armed with latest British weapons,
including cannons. He crossed into Arakan and attacked the Burmese
forces, and occupied the capital. He declared himself king and
appealed to the English governor general for assistance and
recognition, which was, however, rejected. Soon Chin Byan was
defeated by the Burmese forces, leading to his return to Bengal,
where his movement was closely watched and he was prevented from
crossing the frontier again.
With a long Anglo-Burmese frontier from Assam to
Bengal and rebel activities originating from English-held territories
and subsequent hot pursuits by the Burmese forces, it was only a
question of time when a full-fledged war between the two neighbors
would take place. Outside the Naaf River there was nothing to
demarcate the borders between the two territories. When Lord Amherst,
the governor general sent two officers to inspect the border area,
they were arrested by the Burmese forces. British troops then
occupied an island in the river, but the Burmese attacked and
overcame them.
Overconfident with victory, the Burmese marched into
Cachar in January 1824 and in the following March the British forces
declared war against the Burmese. Instead of fighting in hard
terrain, the British armada entered the harbor of Rangoon and took it
by surprise on May 11, 1824. Pursuing a scorched-earth policy, the
Burmese abandoned the city and instead chose to fortify positions
outside the city. By mid-December of that year, the Burmese had lost
23,000 of their forces to superior cannon power of the British.
General Maha Bandula who commanded the Burmese forces retreated to
Danubyu at the head of the Irrawaddy delta. On April 1, 1825 the
British launched a major attack and Bandula was killed by a mortar
shell. The demoralized Burmese forces abandoned Danubyu. On the same
day, Arakan also fell to the British forces. The British also took
Prome.
A Burmese peace mission came to discuss terms with
the British commander, but finding his demands too harsh they
returned to the capital. The British fought on until they reached
Yandabo, only fifty miles from Ava – the royal palace. The Burmese
authorities were then left with no choice but to accept an even more
cruel and harsh treaty on February 24, 1826. The territories of
Arakan and Tenasserim were ceded to British Bengal along with Manipur
and Asssam.
The new governor general Lord Dalhousie famously
said, “Among all the nations of the East, none is more arrogant in
its pretensions of superiority, and none more pertinacious in its
assertion of them, than the people of Burma.” With the humiliating
defeat in 1826, thus began the process of taming one of the most
arrogant of the nations!
While tens of thousands of Burmese forces died in
the war, the casualty on the British side, fought jointly by English
troops and Indian sepoys, was not small either. Some 15,000 were
killed, and the cost of war was estimated at thirteen million pounds
sterling, an enormous sum of money in those days. Burdened by
indemnity, which left the Kingdom of Ava bankrupt, it took two more
wars in 1852 and 1885 – much easier ones – to eventually swallow
up the crippled country in its entirety.
Arakan was devastated in the 40-year long Burmese
rule. Its capital city of Mrauk-U, once a highly cosmopolitan center,
had become almost desolate. The once thriving kingdom, per account
Mr. Paton who was the first British Controller of Civil Affairs in
Arakan in 1826, had only a hundred thousand inhabitants – 60,000
Magh Buddhists, 30,000 Rohingya Muslims and 10,000 Burman Buddhists
(remnants from the Burmese occupation era).
As noted by historian Robert Taylor, the
establishment of British rule in Arakan (and Tenasserim) evoked
little violent opposition after the surrender of king’s forces for
a number of reasons:
Arakan was not integrated administratively or
ethnically into the pre-colonial order, significant rebellion and
resistance had always persisted against the Burman rule, and being a
marginal territory a significant proportion of its people had fled
from one authority to another, who did not share either a religious
or ethnic identity with the monarchical state, and indeed, who had
little sense of loyalty or belonging to any state in the region. The
rapid agricultural and commercial expansion of the region also
greatly helped towards peaceful establishment of British colonial
rule in Arakan.
When the British occupied Arakan, the country was a
scarcely populated area. Consequently, formerly high-yield paddy
fields of the fertile Kaladan and Lemro river valleys germinated
nothing but wild plants for many years.
It is worth noting here that those valleys in the
pre-Burman colonization period used to be cultivated by Rohingya
Muslims and Hindus, whose forefathers were abducted from Bengal in
the 16th and 17th centuries by the Magh and Portuguese pirates to
work as slave labors.
Rice Cultivation, Indian Immigration and the
Chettiars
With the overthrow of a despised regime and the
emergence of a new friendlier administration promising an era of
prosperity and encouraging return of the refugees, the descendants of
some of those former refugees to British Bengal (today’s
Bangladesh) who had fled Bodawpaya’s persecution were lured back to
Arakan.
As noted elsewhere by this researcher and others,
the vast majority of these returnees, however, were Maghs and not the
Rohingya Muslims and Hindus who had settled permanently in more
prosperous southern parts of the Chittagong District and came to be
known as the Rohis by the local population. Likewise, most of the
Chakmas, many Marmas and other smaller tribes (and even many Maghs)
refused to go back to Arakan from Bengal. [The latter enjoy full
citizenship rights in Bangladesh.]
As the demand for rice increased – not just in
fertile deltas of Bengal and Burma, and the nearby territories of
Thailand and Malaysia but also in far away Europe, the British began
to develop Burma as the rice bowl for the British Empire.
As noted by Sean Turnell, a political economist,
Burma’s entry into the commercial imperatives of the British
Empire, the conversion of the Delta into rich paddy-producing land
initially required little capital. Britain’s great ‘exchange
banks’ took care of shipping, milling and other export-finance
needs, and up until the middle of the 19th century the amount of
capital required ‘on the ground’ in land preparation was slight.
In the early years of British rule in ‘Lower
Burma’ the growth in rice exports was founded on cheap and surplus
labor within cultivator families, and upon abundant land that
required little more than clearing. That is, in those early years of
British occupation, make-up labor from outside was not necessary to
grow rice in Burma.
In 1857, after the Sepoy Mutiny in India (or more
appropriately, India’s First War of Independence) was suppressed by
the British colonial government, the price of rice increased by some
25%. With the increase in rice price, land holdings were extended by
cutting down the mangrove forests and by draining swamps, which
required money. Thus came the Chettiars from Tamil Nadu to provide
the necessary loan for cultivating land, because the British banks
would not grant loans on mortgage of rice lands and the British
government did not consider it necessary to open land mortgage banks
or agricultural loan agencies. The Chettiar money-lenders charged an
interest rate that was considered to be exorbitant by vast majority
of the loan-seekers. In line with its policy of laissez faire the
British government did not attempt in any way to control the usurious
rates of interest.
Who are the Chettiars?
Sean Turnell provides some useful information which
is worth sharing here. The Chettiars (also spelled Chettyars), or
more properly the Nattukottai Chettiars, Hindus by faith, came from
the Chettinad tract of what is now Tamil Nadu. Chettinad was a
collection of 76 villages which, at the time of their activity in
Burma, stretched from Ramnad District and into Pudukottai State of
‘British’ India. The Chettiars were originally involved in salt
trading, but sometime in the 18th century they became more widely
known as financiers and facilitators for the trade in a range of
commodities. By the early 19th century finance had become the primary
specialization of the Chettiars, and they became famed lenders to
great land-owning families (zaminders) and in underwriting their
trade in grain through the provision of hundis and other indigenous
instruments. Of course, they became known to the British Imperial
authorities as bankers who had been ‘for centuries developing and
perfecting to a remarkable degree a system of indigenous banking’.
The first Chettiars seem to have arrived in Burma at
the outset of British rule – in 1826 accompanying Indian troops and
laborers in the train of the British campaign in Tenasserim during
the first of the three Anglo-Burmese wars. By 1880 the Chettiars had
fanned out throughout Burma and by the end of the century they had
become by far the ‘the most important factor in the agricultural
credit structure of Lower Burma’. By 1905 it was estimated that
there were 30 Chettiar offices in Burma. According to the Burma
Provincial Banking Inquiry Report (BPBE), the most dependable source
on the extent of Chettiar operations, this number had increased to
1,650 by 1930. Nearly every well-populated part of Lower Burma there
was a Chettiar within a day’s journey of every cultivator. They
essentially became the money lenders in the agricultural sector.
One example highlighted by the BPBE was in Prome,
where it was estimated ‘that Chettiars lend one-third of all the
crop loans directly and finance the Burman lenders to such an extant
that Chettiar money forms altogether two-thirds of all loans’. In
terms of functional distribution, Chettiar loans were overwhelmingly
employed in agriculture. Two-thirds of all Chettiar loans outstanding
in 1930 were held by agriculturalists, the remainder roughly
categorized as ‘trade’. Chettiar lending was secured against
collateral, and mostly against title to land.
The influx of paper money in the Burmese economy
brought in temporary laborers, coolies, clerks, mechanics, cooks,
etc. from the British Empire. (Even U.S. President Obama’s Kenyan
born Muslim grandfather served as a cook to a British officer in
Burma.) As we shall see below, most of those temporary workers did
not live longer than the cultivation-harvest period. The
Chittagonians who were even closer and costing the least money to
cross the Naaf River did not stay longer than required to finish such
tasks as planters and harvesters.
Burma has always been xenophobic, racist and
bigotry-ridden. But no other group was probably as much vilified as
the Hindu Chettiars were in the British colonial period. Sean Turnell
writes, “The economic history of Burma contains a number of
contentious themes, but none has been as divisive as the role of the
Chettiars. Celebrated as the crucial providers of the capital that
turned Burma into the ‘rice-bowl’ of the British Empire, this
community of moneylenders from Tamil Nadu were simultaneously
vilified as predatory usurers whose purpose was to seize the land of
the Burmese cultivator.
The truth, as in so many things, was more nuanced.
The Chettiars were the primary providers of capital to Burmese
cultivators through much of the colonial period, but the combination
of the collapse of paddy prices in the Great Depression, the Chettiar
insistence of land as collateral, and the imposition of British
land-title laws, did bring about a substantial transfer of Burma’s
cultivatable land into their hands. The Chettiars did not charge
especially high interest rates and, indeed, their rates were much
lower than indigenous moneylenders. Nor did the Chettiars set out to
become landlords, fearing that this would only antagonize the local
population and lead to reprisals against them. Their fears were
prescient, for in the end the Chettiars were expelled from Burma, in
the process losing the land they had acquired and much of their
capital.”
With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the
price of rice soared, which, led to more acreage for cultivation in
Lower Burma.
Chettiar success in Burma came to a terrible end
with the onset of the global Depression of the 1930s. Paddy prices
had been trending downwards across the latter half of the 1920s, but
they went into a steep decline in 1930 and remained at unremunerative
levels until after the Second World War.
The impact of the collapse in paddy prices was soon
felt amongst the cultivators of Burma’s lower delta, whose general
situation was summarized by Burma’s Commissioner of Settlement and
Land Records in his annual report to the Government for 1930-31: “The
year was one of extreme depression for agriculture in Burma.
The…agricultural economy had for many years had been based on the
assumption that the price of paddy would be Rs.150 or more per 100
baskets. The result was that contracts for wages were made and loans
were taken on the same scale as in previous years at the beginning of
this cultivating season. Consequently when the crop was harvested,
after the labour had been paid for at the rates agreed upon, and the
rents paid in kind at the old rates, the tenant though left with the
same share of produce, found its value reduced by half, and was
unable to repay his loan and often not even able to pay the
interest.”
It is worth mentioning here that a handful of
British farms entirely controlled the wholesale trade in rice, and
Indian and Chinese merchants controlled the retail trade. As noted by
Aung, the British farms agreed upon themselves not to buy any rice
until the harvesting season was long past and the new planting season
was approaching. The farmer, therefore, had no option but to sell the
rice at a lower price, and, thus, default on loan payments. Of
course, at the end of this cycle of distress were the Chettiars.
Unable to collect even interest payments on their loans, let alone
the principal, increasingly Chettiars came to foreclose on delinquent
borrowers and to seize the pledged collateral. For the most part this
was land. By 1936 they have become owners of 25% of land in the 13
Principal Rice-Growing Districts of Burma.
Exposed to the understandable anger of indigenous
cultivators and the demagoguery of Burmese nationalists of all
stripes, they became easy scapegoats not just for the current
economic distress, but the foreign domination of Burma’s economy.
According to historian Harvey, “Alien in appearance and habits, the
Chettyar was the butt of the Burmese cartoonist, he was depicted as
Public Enemy No.1, and the violence of the mob was directed against
him, a canalization, a projection of the people’s own faults and
failings on to a convenient victim.”
In the vernacular press the demonization of the
Chettiars soared to extreme heights, and they were accused of all
manner of barbarities well beyond a mere rapacity for land. Forgotten
there was the fact that the total Chettiar loans outstanding as at
1939 was £50 million, a figure, which according to Furnivall was
‘the equivalent of all British investments in Burma combined’.
According to Turnell, “The Japanese invasion of
Burma in 1942 brought with it many harrowing scenes, but few would
match that of the flight of the Diaspora of Indian merchants,
workers, administrators and financiers who had done much to transform
Burma in the colonial era.
Prominent amongst those fleeing the onslaught of the
Japanese, just as they had been prominent in the transformational
role played by Indians in Burma beforehand, were the Chettiars of
Tamil Nadu. Scapegoats then and now for the misfortunes that heralded
the breakdown of Burma’s colonial economy, the Chettiars were not
allowed to return to their lives and livelihoods following the
granting of Burma’s independence in 1948. Portrayed by British
colonial officials and Burmese nationalist politicians alike as
almost pantomime villains in Burma’s 20th century dramas, they left
the stage as unambiguous victims.”
To be continued…
Source KPN
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