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

SIX. Interpreting Rebellion: Binary Structures and Colonial Remains

Chapter 6 INTERPRETING REBELLION Binary Structures and Colonial Remains The publishing of The Origins and Causes of the Burma Rebellion (1930–1932) and its eventual distribution to relevant government libraries and offices marked for all intents and purposes the administrative end of the Rebellion.1 To Rangoon officials, the process of compiling the report satisfied requests from Parliament to account for the Rebellion financially, justified the implementation of counterinsurgency policies, and provided the opportunity to demonstrate the ability to understand (and therefore control) the communities and cultures within Burmese society. The report also provided closure and coherency by bringing together the findings of several official documents into a single text—unifying the various events, individuals, and geographical contexts into a containable and manageable narrative. In a deft move, the series of disparate and uncoordinated uprisings that were regarded by colonial administrators as a threat to the very existence of British Burma were recast as a single rebellion, reinforcing the province’s conceptual, territorial, and historical boundaries. Just as maps visually created new cultural, psychological, and historical spaces through which new forms of identity were marked, so too did reports such as The Origins and Causes of the Burma Rebellion (1930– 1932) delineate a particular epistemological terrain upon which legitimacy and authority of the colonial administration in Burma were articulated.2 Interpreting Rebellion 161 Yet the act of publishing the report also pointed to an important stage within the historiography of the Rebellion as its inclusion into what would be categorized as the Burma Rebellion General File authorized the contents as “history” and marked its status as a “source” in the archive. In an administrative context, the document operated as the final assessment of the Rebellion, a text that signaled closure for officials in London and in New Delhi. If considered within the context of post-Rebellion scholarship however, the report was the foundational source upon which subsequent interpretations were made. The Origins and Causes of the Burma Rebellion (1930–1932) was thus a history at the interstices, to borrow from Thonchai Winichakul— only in this context it did not demarcate a space between encounters, between national identity and history, or between cultural processes, but between the epistemological contexts of the colonial administrator and the scholar.3 As will be discussed in the following sections, the report acted to affirm the Rebellion Ethnology, representing its final manifestation within the context of the Burma Rebellion General File while also functioning as the founding source for a generation of scholars studying Saya San. Scholar Officials The earliest Western references to the Saya San Rebellion outside official records were the published memoirs of administrators that were stationed in Burma during the early 193os. These authors describe the Rebellion as it had affected them, which more often than not had little to do with the sequence of events associated with Saya San. However, writers such as Gwynn (1934), C. V. Warren (1937), Maurice Collis (1938), and A. J. White (reprinted 1991), skillfully inserted their own experiences into the well-known official narrative giving the reader a blend of personal and secondhand knowledge. Although these writers were not attempting to write a formal history of the Rebellion, they might be associated with the construction of Saya San in that they adopted both the narrative and the interpretative posture of the final blue-book report, which articulated official administrative findings on the events in question.4 By emphasizing 162 Chapter 6 the use of amulet-wearing, oath-taking, tattooing, and the rituals surrounding the supposed coronation ceremony of Saya San, these observers reinforced the ethnographic character of the Rebellion, an understanding of events that reflected British images of Burmese cultural history. As postcolonial scholars have observed in a wide variety of historical contexts, indigenous populations were often rendered in official documentation as being forever informed by timeless cultural restrictions that left them incapable of understanding European modes of political expression and unable to articulate dissent in a manner other than revolt. Thus, the character of rebellion in British Burma (expressed through its exotic nature) was at a fundamental level conceived along dichotomous lines—modern/traditional, rational /irrational, static/progressive, secular/religious, and Europe/Asia. Professional historians who consulted these published volumes not only continued to interpret the Rebellion within this binary framing, but they would erroneously cite these works as primary sources...