Bertil Lintner on Burma

Tell us about Andrew Marshall’s The Trouser People.

A great book. It’s an interesting mix of tracking this Victorian footballer, Sir George Scott, who wrote a lot about Burma, and an exploration of contemporary Burma.  Scott was one of the few colonials who really seemed to understand Burma and be interested in Burmese culture and history. He wrote under a Burmese pseudonym, Shway Yoe. This refers to a comical figure the Burmese portray when they have festivals. Under that pseudonym Scott wrote many books about Burma which people actually thought were written by a Burmese, such was the depth and understanding in them. He also introduced football, and it is still extremely popular in Burma.

So the Trouser People are the British?

In Aung San Suu Kyi’s speeches around 1988-89 she used symbolism that was very easy to understand. She was addressing villagers and country people and needed to be able to reach them. She referred to the soldiers as trouser people, because they wear trousers not longis (sarongs) like most Burmese do. The trouser people was also the Burmese name for the British during colonial times. She just pointed out that they had trouser oppressors in the past and now they have another bunch of trouser people oppressing them now: the military. She called her struggle for democracy the second struggle for independence.

Apart from trousers and football, was there anything good about the colonial period, as far as Burma is concerned?

The British did introduce modern education and a parliamentarian style of government, which didn’t really succeed. Burma was fairly well developed in comparison to other countries in the region and they had a high literacy rate. But actually, due to monastic education for both girls and boys, they had a very high literacy rate even before the British came.

I was wondering how these present trouser people compare to the Burmese of the last dynasty. Are the military just crypto-colonials or can they really lay claim to some legacy?

Until Aung San Suu Kyi returned in 1988, her father Aung San was the official national hero. He stood for Unity in Diversity: all the nationalities in Burma should live together, there should be no discrimination etc. In 1989, after the military had crushed the uprising and reasserted power, they reinterpreted the whole concept of Burma. They changed the name to Myanmar claiming that Myanmar meant not only the Burmese but all the other ethnic groups as well. That is linguistically and historically incorrect. Aung San had discussed this back in the 1930s and concluded that Myanmar is just the name for the Mandalay kingdom and that Burma was the name for the country. In fact there is no name, nor has there ever been, that covers the country and all the ethnic groups, not until the British came and established the colony. The legacy of Aung San’s Unity in Diversity was replaced by this new Unity concept of Myanmar: one nation, one people, one language. Aung San, as national symbol, was pushed to the background. In the new capital in Nayipyidaw they have erected these huge statues of medieval warrior kings, they represent the new Burma that the military would like to see. There is some irony here, the problem with these kings is that they were excellent warriors and conquerors, but once they had taken territory they didn’t know how to rule it. They never built up any administration, and institutions so the Burmese empires collapsed when the kings died. Burma today is very much the same, they are trying to conquer these ethnic areas by force but they don’t know how to govern properly. The medieval kings are not very good role models for the state.

Emma Larkin’s Finding George Orwell in Burma is also something of a political travelogue. How does her approach differ from Andrew Marshall’s?

I think the main difference between Andrew’s and Emma’s books is that Andrew, who is a very gifted writer, makes places and events come alive; Emma makes people she meets come alive. She is more down-to-earth, probably because she speaks the language.

Emma’s book was partly inspired by a Burmese joke about Orwell. Did you ever come across this in your own experience?

The Burmese are quite aware of Orwell and his Burmese Days is quite famous there. The old joke in Burma is: ‘Have you read Burmese Days?’ ‘Yeah, it’s good but Orwell actually wrote a Burmese trilogy. The first was Burmese Days, about the colonial period, the second was Animal Farm, about the Burmese road to socialism and the third, 1984, about the present regime.’

Both Andrew Marshall and Emma Larkin seized on an interesting concept – if you want to make Burma interesting to the rest of the world you have to find a westerner who is part of the story.

There is something else that I find curious – this romantic attachment that Burma seems to inspire. Emma Larkin attributes it in part to the legacy of Kipling’s poem Mandalay. What do you make of this?

It probably stems from this colonial myth about Burma, that it was this golden country in South East Asia, not as big and frightening as India but still accessible because it was a colony. It has the ring of eastern romanticism, with Kipling, the pagodas, the temple bells, and the beautiful women in their sarongs, etc. I must say that this is the silly part to a certain extent. I do find that many people who have spent time there become captivated with the place for a variety of reasons. I used to get letters from old British and American soldiers who were there during the Second World War. Some of the best memories of their lives were of that time in Burma.

Two of the books on your list, The River of Lost Footsteps and The Land of the Green Ghosts, are written by Burmese authors, the first being the grandson of a late UN Secretary General, U Thant.