By Dr. Habib Siddiqui
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.”
