The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma

FOUR. Adjudicating Rebellion: The Trial of Saya San

Chapter 4 ADJUDICATING REBELLION The Trial of Saya San Armed with new legislative and judicial powers, Rangoon officials began to apply their newly secured administrative capabilities toward framing and implementing counter-insurgency policy and strategy. The appointment of a Special Rebellion Tribunal, among several other initiatives, followed closely the blueprint outlined in the Rebellion Trial Ordinance and revealed how administrators would utilize these powers to identify, arrest, and process those suspected of taking part in the rebellion. Through new legal procedures, judicial categories , and trial settings that were specifically reserved for accused rebels, detainees were legally connected to the profiles of Burmese resistance fighters found in turn-of-the century gazetteers and manuals . As discussed in the previous chapter, the most striking of caricatures adopted by administrative officials was the minlaung (incipient king) model, a theory that explained peasant uprisings through the image of a pretender-king who would periodically attract followers that believed that he would restore the monarchy and the religion. Judicial officials soon appropriated this idea involving notions of Burmese kingship and linked them to the specific events of 1930–31, codifying the rebellion’s connection to the minlaung theory through law’s authoritative structures. Counter-insurgency jurisprudence would play a crucial role in the construction of the Saya San Rebellion by producing a tighter narrative of events that consolidated divergent instances of political expression into a single, coherent resistance narrative . Law would be instrumental in producing an evidential record Adjudicating Rebellion 107 that would anchor Saya San’s eventual place within the Rebellion Ethnology and Burmese history. Just as rebellion legislation was conceptualized for and applicable to the entire province of Burma, so too did the series of trials have the effect of rendering the rebellion along those same spatial, cultural, and administrative lines. The specific form and scope of emergencypowers legislation reiterated and operated upon the legal perception that the series of local outbreaks were—as official reports were also insisting—elements of a single, coherently organized, and centrally controlled rebellion. From the start, this framework not only linked various uprisings conceptually, but it enabled colonial judicial officers to accentuate the legal contours of the state by merging and associating particular districts within a geography of rebellion. The province was restructured on the basis of whether or not particular districts were “affected” by the rebellion. The appointment of a special rebellion commissioner, whose purpose was to coordinate counterinsurgency policy between the military and the civil service, oversaw the new administrative landscape that was defined by the threat of rebellion. Finally, directives underlying the all-encompassing reach of the Special Rebellion Tribunal made it possible to present local (and arguably independent) acts of resistance and political expression as chapters within a much larger metanarrative of rebellion, which smoothed over instances that contradicted, diverged, or departed entirely from the dominant narrative. Administrative priorities and counter-insurgency policies (expressed through law) produced the categories , language, and conceptual structures that presented the series of uprisings, disturbances, outbreaks, protests and gatherings as a single, all-encompassing rebellion. Government lawyers and the Special Tribunal influenced the understanding of the rebellion through their efforts to demonstrate and establish legal coherency among the series of trials between the years 1930 and 1932. The infusion of judicial rhetoric to identify, decode, and translate the meaning of uprisings transformed how knowledge about the rebellion would be retained while initiating the terms through which all subsequent discussions of the movements 108 Chapter 4 would take place. Predictably, the creation of an official evidential record, the deliberation of issues in an adversarial context, and the registering of this process through specific legal-documentation projects rendered the rebellion into a particular form that reflected this system of knowledge construction. Trial judgments of suspected rebels (such as the case against Aung Hla in the previous chapter) set the legal precedence for subsequent trials, reinforcing both the authority and continuity of the Tribunal’s findings while expanding the application of Carey’s minlaung framework to explain the criminal nature of village associations. Moreover, by designating the series of outbreaks collectively as “the Burma Rebellion,” by appointing a special court to adjudicate transgressions against the State, and by declaring Saya San as the sole “face” behind the various resistance movements, government officials were able to apply counter-insurgency strategies that reconstituted their administrative and...