Indo-Burma Frontier and the Making of the Chin Hills

Empire and Resistance

Pum Khan Pau

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138384606
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000507454
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book examines the British colonial expansion in the so-called unadministered hill tracts of the Indo-Burma frontier and the change of colonial policy from non-intervention to intervention. The book begins with the end of the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26), which resulted in the British annexation of the North-Eastern Frontier of Bengal and the extension of its sway over the Arakan and Manipur frontiers, and closes with the separation of Burma from India in 1937. The volume documents the resistance of the indigenous hill peoples to colonial penetration; administrative policies such as disarmament; subjugation of the local chiefs under a colonial legal framework and its impact; standardisation of 'Chin' as an ethnic category for the fragmented tribes and sub-tribes; and the creation and consolidation of the Chin Hills District as a political entity to provide an extensive account of British relations with the indigenous Chin/Zo community from 1824 to 1935. By situating these within the larger context of British imperial policy, the book makes a critical analysis of the British approach towards the Indo-Burma frontier.

With its coverage of key archival sources and literature, this book will interest scholars and researchers in modern Indian history, military history, colonial history, British history, South Asian history and Southeast Asian history.

1
Situating the Indo-Burma frontier within the Larger Context of British Imperial Policy

The Indo-Burma frontier was home to numerous hill tribes who had been divided into several tribal chiefdoms¹ before the advent of the British. These areas seemed to have had little geopolitical or economic importance for the British until they annexed Upper Burma in the Third Anglo-Burmese War (1885–86). The war finally established British possessions on both sides of the Indo-Burma frontier, and therefore establishing direct communication between Bengal and Burma had become one of the immediate concerns of the British Indian Empire in the late nineteenth century. As a result, the next decade after the fall of Upper Burma witnessed British encounters with indigenous hill tribes of the Indo-Burma frontier. By the turn of the twentieth century indigenous resistance had been subdued and a new ‘Geo-body’ emerged, which not only left indigenous notion of space, geography and territory irrelevant but also reconfigured and expanded the British Indian Empire covering Burma and the hill tracts of the Indo-Burma frontier. The concept of the ‘Geo-body’, according to Thongchai Winnichakul, ‘refers to the political space defined by the colonial notions of sovereignty and boundaries’ (Winnichakul 1994: 16). Thus the real victim of the emergence of the ‘Geo-body’ was the indigenous cosmography and that this happened when the pre-modern and modern discourse collided, a phenomenon Winnichakul calls ‘politico-semiological operations’ (Ibid.: 18). However, the validity of the new ‘Geo-body’ was challenged, albeit with vested interest, by none other than British colonial officers in Burma who described the annexation of Burma as ‘the accident of propinquity’ (Furnivall 1948: 23), ‘a political accident’ (Craddock 1929: 126) or ‘the accident of contiguity’ (Donnison 1953: 72). In her recent work, Mary P. Callahan describes Burma a ‘territorial and administrative appendage to India’ (2005: 21). In 1937, when Burma was separated from India, it was largely a success of combined colonial-business interests who had lobbied hard with the argument, ‘The Burmans are so different from the peoples of India.… They come from a different stock, they speak a different language, their habits and customs and outlooks are different’ (Innes 1934: 194–5).

What is less known, if not forgotten, in this whole gamut of ‘annexation’ and ‘separation’ processes were the fate of the hill tribes of the Indo-Burma frontier. In the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26), the British not only ended Burmese dominance over the ‘North-Eastern Frontier of Bengal’² but also extended its sway over Arakan and Tenasserim; the second war made them masters of Lower Burma. But the annexation of Upper Burma in the third and final Anglo-Burmese War (1885–86) has been mistaken to be the completion of British ‘conquest of the whole country including the vast expanse of tribal hills areas all-round the frontier’ (Furnivall 1960: 5). Burma was conquered, indeed. But the hill tracts lying between the western border of the former Konbaung dynasty and Bengal remained independent or ‘unadministered’. A memorandum written by the chief secretary to the chief commissioner of Burma to the secretary to the Government of India in 1893 admitted the

hills were never brought under any sort of regular administration by the Burmese government; the Chiefs were practically independent; and it was therefore not considered that the absorption of Upper Burma into British India had involved the incorporation into the British empire of the Chin Hills.³

This book probes how the British Indian Empire had to confront stiff resistance from the indigenous Chin/Zo tribes of the Indo-Burma frontier for another ten years after its conquest of Burma before it was able to legally incorporate the hill tracts into the new ‘Geo-body’.

Encounters between the British Indian Empire and the indigenous hill tribes of the Indo-Burma frontier have become an important area of investigation among historians and scholars relatively recently. Sandwiched between the Brahmaputra Valley on the west and the Chindwin Valley on the east, the mountainous Indo-Burma frontier cannot be studied in isolation without situating it within the larger context of British expansion to the two river valleys situated on both sides of the frontier. While economic interest was often cited behind British expansion, the importance of geopolitical interest cannot be undermined. That the Indo-Burma frontier is strategically located at a crossroads since the precolonial period is an established fact. It had been a zone of transition for cultural and economic exchange between India and China via Burma that preceded the establishment of the British Empire.

Indo-Burma frontier at a crossroads

Indo-Burma frontier lay at a crossroads of India’s cultural and economic relations with Burma and China. Scholars identify three main overland trading networks that passed through the Indo-Burma frontier since early times. Two routes connected Assam and Yunnan via the Patkai range and Manipur through Burma, and another route from Bengal via the coastal road passing through Chittagong and Arakan Yoma to Szechuan in China (Star-gardt 1971; Gutman 1976; Cederlof 2014; Pemberton [1835] 2000). These routes, which linked China and India through Upper Burma, held key roles in the East India Company’s vision of its ‘North-Eastern Frontier’ in the early nineteenth century (Cederlof 2014: 84). However, strikingly enough, there is no mention of trade networks passing through the Chin-Lushai Hills, a colonial reference to the hill tracts predominantly settled by the Zo (Chin-Kuki-Lushai) people in the Indo-Burma frontier, except in the case of the southern route from Chittagong to Akyab that passed over the ridges to Buthidaung on the Mayu River, and to Paletwa on the upper Kaladan (now in the Chin state) which was in use from about the fourth to mid-seventh centuries (Gutman 1976: 5). In the mid-1870s, the Chittagong-Mandalay route was considered to be the ‘shortest and direct’ one for a possible connection between India and China (Iqbal 2015). These overland routes reflect the strategic importance of the Indo-Burma frontier as passageway between the Brahmaputra Valley and Chindwin Valley in the precolonial period.

Burma’s cultural relations with India had a long history. According to G. E. Harvey, ‘The Burmese are a Mongolian race, yet their traditions, instead of harking back to China, refer to India’ (1925: 6). In fact, Indo-Burma cultural and economic relationships in the precolonial period were found more prominently through the sea route, as Sunil S. Amrith argues in his Crossing the Bay of Bengal. He clearly underlines how ‘many forms of connection across the sea outlasted and outlived empires’ (2013: 4). To the English East India Company, which established its first factory at Syriam in 1647, Burma became strategically important for its economic interest in order to dominate the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean (Trager 1966: 12). While development in the Bay of Bengal is beyond the purview of this book, I shall focus on the expansion of the British in the ‘North-East Frontier of Bengal’ and beyond.

Empires in the ‘North-Eastern Frontier of Bengal’

R. G. Woodthorpe was perhaps the first to use the phrase ‘North-eastern frontier of India’ in 1873 ([1873] 1978: 3). A decade later, in 1884, Alexander Mackenzie refers to the ‘North-East Frontier of Bengal’, ‘sometimes to denote a boundary line, and sometimes more generally to describe a tract’. ‘In the latter sense’, he added, ‘it embraces the whole of the hill ranges north, east, and south of the Assam Valley, as well as the western slopes of the great mountain system lying between Bengal and independent Burma, with its outlying spurs and ridges’ ([1884] 2001: 1). It was the expansion of Ava (the capital of the Burmese empire) in the ‘North-East Frontier of Bengal’ in the early decades of the nineteenth century which not only threatened the existence of several kingdoms in the region but also posed a threat to the interest of the English East India Company. Therefore, it was a challenge for the British to confront Burmese domination in the ‘North-East Frontier of Bengal’. According to a Burmese scholar Thant Myint-U,

The main point of tension between Calcutta and Amarapura was to be Arakan. The second arena of contention was in the far north, in Manipur and in the Himalayan states of Assam, Jaintia and Cachar where Ava’s forward policy was meeting with growing British influence and concerns over the security of Bengal.

(2004: 17–18)

The First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26) not only marked the end of Burmese domination of the Brahmaputra Valley and the Barak Valley, but it also saw the establishment of British power in parts of the ‘North-Eastern Frontier of Bengal’ and annexation of Arakan and Tenasserim. For the Bengal Government, the ‘North-Eastern Frontier’ was the land that needs to be ‘secured’ from Burmese greed and from people lacking in entrepreneurship, and placed under British protection (Cederlof 2014: 73). Though Cederlof argues that while most historians view the British decision to advance beyond the market town and administrative centre of Sylhet as a reluctant one (Ibid.: 3), according to Amalendu Guha ‘the Raj appeared on the scene in the guise of saviours of the people … but it soon dawned on the people that the Raj had come to stay’ (1977: 2).

London and Calcutta initially viewed the provinces of Arakan and Tenasserim as a ‘politically and economically white elephant’; however, by 1830 they realised that strategy outweighed economy in Arakan, where British influence was to be maintained at all costs because Arakan commanded valuable control over the Bay of Bengal (Pollak 1929: 41). The Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852 made the British masters of Lower Burma even as they seek to consolidate their presence in the ‘North-East Frontier of Bengal’. At any rate, the annexation of Assam on one hand and Arakan on the other brought the British in close proximity to the Chin/Zo people of the Indo-Burma frontier.

From ‘informal’ to ‘formal’ empire in Burma

The British followed a policy of non-intervention in the ‘North-East Frontier’ and to defend the fledgling territories they had acquired from disturbances that used to come from the hills in the Indo-Burma frontier, they resorted to a ‘frontier defence’ policy by employing irregulars, militia and military, all of which later merged into Frontier Police. Frontier defence posts were established at strategic locations, which essentially became the colonial frontier manned and garrisoned by ‘local forces’ (Hussain 1986, 1992 b). While this policy continues in the ‘North-East Frontier’ till the late nineteenth century, British policy towards Burma was seriously under review in the second half of that century. The outcome was a change in its policy from an ‘informal’ to ‘formal’ empire in Burma which, however, becomes a subject of academic debate. Lord Randolph Churchill, the secretary of state for India, made it crystal clear the need to change policy towards Burma when he wrote to Lord Dufferin, the viceroy, that

the Government as a body are strongly in favour of annexation pure and simple [and] I think you will be forced into it by the difficulty of finding a suitable prince who would have any chance of maintaining himself or of giving any guarantees of value for good government.

(Myint-U 2004: 160)

In other words, London viewed the past 20 years as a failed test of ‘informal’ empire in Burma and thus wanted to switch over to ‘formal’ annexation in early 1880s – but why?

Victorian British expansion from ‘informal’ to ‘formal’ empire has been often seen through the model of Gallagher and Robinson’s ‘imperialism of free trade’ (1953). This model rests upon five propositions, one of which says the switch, from informal to formal empire, was normally the prerogative of the ‘official mind’. This model implies that the hyperactive formal empire building after 1880 was reactive or defensive, designed to protect old zones of influence rather than to seek out new ones (Webster 2000). However, P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins argue that Gallaghar and Robinson and their followers misunderstood the nature of the ‘official mind’, which was really the mouthpiece of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ (1993: 8–10, 45). The concept of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ embraces the ‘decision-makers’ who ran the imperial government from Whitehall and the ‘men on the spot’ who administered the possessions overseas (Dumet 1999: 9). Though Cain and Hopkins’s idea is also subjected to criticism, Anthony Webster follows it in the context of Burma and argues that the absorption of Burma into the British Empire was the result of gentlemanly capitalists at work (2000: 1005).

Webster cited two broad interpretations of the final conquest of Burma. The first emphasises the importance of ‘strategic/geopolitical’ considerations, as developed by D. K. Fieldhouse (1984), particularly the need to defend British India from the expansion of French imperial power on the eastern borders of the empire (Ibid.: 1009). Historians including J. S. Furnivall, D.G.E. Hall, John F. Cady, C. L. Keeton, and Fieldhouse all contended that it was news of the Franco-Burmese negotiations and the potential threat posed by a French-dominated kingdom to the security of British India which enabled British colonial officials to persuade the Government of London that absorption of Burma into the empire was an ‘unavoidable necessity’ (Ibid.: 1010). Fieldhouse’s view was supported by Charles Keeton, who argues that defence of the Indian Empire was the main motive for British intervention (1974: 337). Lieutenant-General Albert Fytche, chief commissioner of Burma (1867–81), said it was ‘highly prudent on Imperial grounds that we should be in a position to substitute a western ingress to China for the present seaboard approach, destined to be disproportionately shared, if not entirely absorbed by America’ (1878: 120). While agreeing with Fytche and cautioning the ‘hot haste’ of America to secure if possible the command of the Chinese market, Furnivall saw annexation from a wider standpoint as ‘an episode in the rivalry of Britain and France for supremacy in South-east Asia’ (1948: 68–70).

A counterargument to the above views came from Dorothy Woodman, Maung Htin Aung and D. P. Singhal, who dismissed the French threat but stressed an ‘economic explanation’. According to Woodman, the ‘French threat was much exaggerated.… The French were only too aware of the superiority of British military strength’ (1962: 226–7). This argument was in line with Michael Symes, the first diplomatic envoy of the lieutenant governor of Bengal, who found that French activities in Burma were negligible and that the Burmese had no plan of any sort to play the French against the British in the late eighteenth century (Aung 1965: 22). Toeing the same line, Maung Htin Aung dismissed the French threat and asserted the dominance of commercial considerations in the decision to intervene (1990; Singhal 1981). Recent work of R. Turrell on the case of the Burma ruby mines has also thrown new light on the nature of British commercial interest in Burma, as he argues, ‘Upper Burma was annexed for British commerce’ (1988: 161). In her recent study, Mary P. Callahan also voices a similar tune: ‘At best, the British built a skinny state, aimed at letting commerce flourish (which it did) and at making the colonial state pay for itself (which it never did) by taxation of land and some commerce’ (2005: 21).

Drawing largely from Robinson and Gallaghar’s argument that late Victorian annexationism was a defensive response to new dangers, John Darwin adds another aspect, saying ‘local crisis’ which threatened the informal predominance built up decades earlier was the reason behind British intervention (1997: 631). A more incisive picture on ‘local crisis’, in the context of Burma, was given by Burman historian Thant Myint-U. He says, ‘Yangon-based European firms saw no reason why the business-friendly environment of Lower Burma should not be extended to Mandalay and beyond’ (2004: 187–8). ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations and tables
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Situating the Indo-Burma frontier within the larger context of British imperial policy
• 2 Frontier policy: problem of the Arakan frontier
• 3 Manipur frontier: Kamhau-Sukte and Meitei relations
• 4 Colonial penetration: explorations, expeditions and resistance
• 5 Colonial policy backfired: disarmament and resistance
• 6 Administrative developments: ‘indirect rule’ and the making of colonial ‘agents’
• 7 The Chin Hills District: towards consolidation
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Appendices
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Bibliography
• Index