Golden Earth (11 page)

Lunch consisted of various curries, served in the Burmese style with soup, which was supped throughout the meal. The Tok Galé servitors stood behind our chairs, fanning us vigorously, while we maintained a gently platitudinous conversation that was at once both oriental in flavour and curiously Victorian.

After lunch Tok Galé asked me if I would like to be presented to
distinguished neighbours of his, the last surviving members in direct descent of the Burmese royal family; children of King Mindon, by different queens, who, in accordance with custom, had married each other.

We found the Prince Pyinmana and the Princess Hta Hta Paya living in what is usually described, with grim understatement, as reduced circumstances. The Prince was much embarrassed because dacoits had broken into the house a fortnight before, and stolen all his clothes. Before I could be received, Tok Galé went home and came back with a jacket for the Prince to wear for the interview.

The old couple received us in their living room. They looked very fragile, and Tok Galé said that in recent years audiences had very rarely been granted. The villa, which might have been damaged by bombing, was in a state of advanced disrepair. Plaster was flaking from the walls, which had been repaired by sheets of asbestos and iron grilles. The only pieces of furniture were a few worn-out chairs.

Flanked by Tok Galé and myself, the Prince and Princess sat side by side on two of the broken chairs. They were waited upon by a female servant and her husband, who also served as interpreter. Coming into the royal presence from opposite directions, they shuffled along at a surprising speed on their knees and elbows, smoking large cheroots which were rarely out of their mouths. When a respectful proximity had been reached, they dropped into a comfortable kneeling position and awaited the royal commands with the benevolent patience of spaniels. Occasionally the interpreter leaned forward, took the cheroot out of his mouth, grasped the end of the Prince’s ear-trumpet, and bawled a translation of my remarks into it. Once, after shuffling backwards a short distance, he turned and made off to fetch some object of interest the Prince had called for, and on returning collected his baby which was shrieking in a back room, and came into sight still crawling, but this time on one elbow, the baby gathered in the other arm.

In vain I sought in these aged, placid faces some vestige of the magic presence of their ancestor Alaungpaya, the village headman, who had conquered the Burmese throne with followers armed only with cudgels,
driven the French from Syriam, spurned the English, waded in the blood of his enemies. It was generally acknowledged that fire streamed from Alaungpaya’s personal weapons; that, like the heroes of the Ramayana, he fought with fairy javelins and thunderbolts, and that wherever he stopped gorgeous birds and butterflies entered his dwelling. Here his race had come to an end, in these two feeble, affable old persons, subdued by resignation, and possessing no more than the normal dignity of old age.

Occasionally there was a shrewdness in the Prince’s expression, inherited from his father, as well as evidence of a sense of humour, inappropriate in a ruling monarch, but which now in lustreless adversity could be given its wings. He was one of four brothers who had escaped the famous massacre, having been considered too young and
unimportant
for the dignity of the red sack. Later, to avoid the possibility of any second thoughts, he had become a monk. He was clearly well prepared for certain standard questions; particularly when asked for his opinion of Queen Supayalat, commonly considered to have been Thibaw’s evil genius. Why did Queen Elizabeth have Mary Queen of Scots killed? asked the Prince, apropos of Supayalat’s Borgia-like methods with rivals. The Prince’s eyes were twinkling merrily; he was obviously enjoying himself, and had suddenly taken over from the interpreter, and relapsed into fluent English. It was clear that he liked to stagger his visitors over matters of Burmese high policy in the past. ‘Supayalat’, said the Prince firmly, ‘was as good as the average Burmese lady. If an ordinary woman comes across her rival in love, she’ll do everything she can. Supayalat had the power, that’s all.’

The Princess was the daughter of a Siamese lesser queen, and was also considered too insignificant for inclusion in the massacre. She was only fourteen when her mother took her by the hand and they went together out on to their balcony to watch the British troops march in. All she remembered of them was the shining helmets and the plumes. The Burmese, who had expected a sack and massacre of the traditional kind, were much amazed at the mildness of the soldiers.

On the whole the Prince and Princess seemed to regret the old colonial days. Perhaps this was natural because, since Burma had
become a free nation, their allowance had been reduced from eight hundred rupees each a month to four hundred rupees. The Prince also complained of the lack of intellectual nourishment these days, and asked me to try to send him a volume of Thomas Hood’s poems from England.

B
EFORE
coming to Mandalay it had been my intention to visit, if I could, the village of Taungbyon. Taungbyon lies only about twenty miles south of the capital, but I now realised that in the South-East Asia of today it might have become as inaccessible as Lhasa in the last century. This village was associated in about 1070 with Anawrahta's attempt to stamp out the indigenous Burmese religion of nat-worship. Anawrahta was a kind of minor Charlemagne of Buddhism. Conducting a crusade against the kingdom of Thaton he captured the unprecedented total of thirty-two white elephants, each of which was loaded with sacred books for the return to the capital. He also obtained by conquest or negotiation, the Buddha's collarbone, his frontlet bone and an authentic duplicate of the tooth of Kandy. As a result of these triumphs he was acclaimed the foremost champion of Buddhism of his day.

Anawrahta's method of combating the older faith was to order the destruction of the nat shrines found, at that time, in every house in Burma, and to limit the practice of the religion to one village only – Taungbyon. Here elaborate arrangements were made for the celebration of the rites. The site was inaugurated by a spectacular assassination. On the pretext that they had failed to contribute a brick apiece towards the building of a pagoda, the king's chief generals, the Shwepyi brothers, were executed by castration. Reading between the blurred lines of
history
, it may be supposed that the king was disappointed at the failure of their expedition to China which immediately preceded this event. Sent to obtain another Buddha tooth from the chief of Nanchao (Yunnan), they were fobbed off with a mere jade replica, which had been allowed by contact to absorb a trifling amount of virtue from the original. The
generals happened also to be popular heroes, victors of numerous
campaigns
undertaken to carry the light of religion into adjacent countries; and the king perhaps felt they had usurped some of the lustre that was rightly his alone. As twins, and the sons of a well-known ogress, it must have been clear that they had the makings of superior nats, and it only required such a piece of monstrous regal caprice as their murder to complete the process.

The Shwepyi brothers became the most popular and the second most powerful of all the members of the Burmese nat-pantheon. They are still worshipped at Taungbyon, with a corps of female mediums in attendance to transmit their oracles. Their annual festival is the most important of Burmese animistic ceremonies, and draws huge crowds from all parts of the country.

Since frequent reference to nats is unavoidable in any work dealing with Burma, I must attempt to define the nature of these powerful
supernatural
entities. The word is used in a loose, generic sense to cover all members – whether ghosts, ghouls, vampires, or merely lost and starving souls – of the spectral world. There were nats called into existence by an intellectual effort, such as Alaungpaya's gun nat. This modernistic demiurge was reverenced in the form of the king's first three-pounder, which, scented, coated with gold-leaf, and wrapped in silk, was propitiated with bottles of liquor. But besides this
déclassé
and miscellaneous ghostly riff-raff a category of sentient beings exists, having its own fairly elevated place in the Buddhist hierarchy of souls. These are the local tutelary spirits, whose worship preceded (and in the case of the Vietnamese, actually outlasted and replaced) Buddhism. Of these there are many thousands; although only thirty-seven, the indigenous Burmese gods, are adored – or rather, propitiated – on a national scale.

According to the cosmogony which the Burmese borrowed from India, there are eleven principal stages or levels of the ‘corporeal and generating' soul; four being unhappy, and seven happy. Unhappy souls are those confined in hell, or existing as miscellaneous ghosts, or
incarnated in animals. Until recently souls imprisoned in the bodies of foreigners were included in this last category. At the bottom of the scale of happiness come human beings, and immediately above them in the soul's evolution are located the true nats. The situation of a nat is preferable to that of the most fortunate human being, although it is still far removed from the felicity of the ultimate heavens. Nats, although exempt from the ills of humanity, are still subject to sensual passion, which sometimes leads them even to form unions with human beings. From such attachments – whether temporary or otherwise – arises the recognised class of nat-ka-daws – spirit mediums or wives – so numerous that it has been seriously suggested that in the forthcoming census of the population of Burma they should be described as a separate occupational class.

The land of the nats, then, is a kind of Mohammedan paradise, whose occupants are able to make the best, such as it is, of both worlds. With the soul's progress upwards, however, the intellectual pleasures begin to assert themselves, and the more typically human distractions to lose their appeal. Finally, after passage through numerous heavens, a formless and incorporeal state is attained when the soul, imagined as an immaterial sun, hovers on the threshold of Nirvana, a strange, archaic version of the Shavian Life-Force, the pure intellect functioning in the void.

From an examination of the attributes of the thirty-seven nats the influence of the thirty-three devas of the Hindus may be suspected; but it is also evident that their legends enshrine memories of Mongol heroes of great antiquity, some of them shared with the Thais, the Cambodians and even the Vietnamese, and the peoples of Southern China. The legends are confused and vary from district to district. U Shin Gyi, for example, the guardian spirit of Rangoon and the lower Irrawaddy, is there known as the greatest harpist of all time, who, having fatally charmed the sirens of the river, was drowned by them. In Northern Burma he is no more than the son of a king of Pagan, who was killed by a fall from a swing while at play. To enter this pantheon of the nats, a tragic death seems, above all, to have been essential. Many of the
thirty-seven
were kings while they lived, but no king who died comfortably in
his bed could enter this magic circle. This strange immortality was only to be achieved by touching in some unpredictable way a chord of popular imagination. Of an ancient tyrant's memory nothing remains but the legend of his perfidious handling of a blacksmith, who became the most powerful of all the nats and the guardian spirit of every Burmese house.

Those who became nats died by murder, of grief or fright, from snakebite, an overdose of opium or the unlucky smell of onions. Among their numbers was a general who took up cockfighting when he should have been leading the armies, and was buried to the waist and left to die. There was also a politician who, when the king's wrath turned against him, tried to get away on a marble elephant, which, however, he failed to vivify by well-tried magical methods. The Burmese people never forgot this picturesquely tragic episode. Nor were they able to forget the grotesque end of King Tabinshweti, the conqueror who united all Burma and left it at the height of its prosperity in the days when the Portuguese first entered the country. Tiring of the panoply of power, Tabinshweti took to drink and was finally assassinated. According to one tradition he was killed while seated upon a close stool, suffering from an attack of dysentery. Of this king nothing has come down to the Burmese man in the street but this one foolish fact. The marchings and the
counter-marchings
, the sack of towns and devastations of provinces, have all been forgotten. This founder of the Burmese Empire, this scourge of God, is now no more than a man who died ridiculously while on a lavatory-seat, a dysentery nat, who receives offerings of fruit and flowers from sufferers from that disease, and even used to be worshipped in effigy in the ludicrous posture in which he died.

This strange reversing process, that makes clowns of kings, and that in death takes ordinary unlucky mortals and places them in the ranks of the heroes, is no better exemplified than in the case of Nga Pyi, a messenger, a silly man, who while riding, about eight hundred years ago, a bearer of bad news, to the camp of his prince, dared to break his journey to sleep. For this delay he was executed, becoming the Spirit Rider of the White Horse, a national champion, a Burmese Santiago. White horse-puppets
are offered at his shrines all over Burma, and he has made frequent historical appearances like the Angels at Mons, brandishing his sword at the head of the armies, when the issue of the day has been in doubt. Lately he was reported in the Rangoon press to have been in action against the Karens.

Thus Burmese history is seen, dreamlike and inconsequent, in the popular imagination, just as the average Englishman remembers little of King Alfred but the story of the burnt cakes, and nothing of Robert the Bruce but his encounter with a spider.

My friend, Tok Galé, thought that a visit to Taungbyon could be arranged through the good offices of the Superintendent of Police; so when in accordance with my instructions I paid a routine call on this gentleman, the matter was mentioned.

The Superintendent was an Anglo-Burman, of a type frequently to be met with, which takes after the English father in an almost exaggerated way. This variation is tall and of military bearing, favours a close-clipped moustache, and possesses a bluff inhibition of manner to be found in England among minor executives of substantial insurance companies, or army officers of field rank. It seemed impossible that a tiny Burmese mother could have produced so stalwart a son as this.

Smiling shyly, the Superintendent held out a huge hand. There would be no trouble in going to Taungbyon. Absolutely no trouble, old boy. Lay on an escort just in case; but actually things were pretty quiet. Touch wood, and all that. The Superintendent was a man of few words, and one felt a habit of understatement might be concealed by these clipped and unemphatic utterances.

A large map of the Mandalay area covered half of the walls. It was patterned with interpenetrating colours, swirling contours and isolated blotches. By reference to the key I learned that Communists, either the ‘Red' or ‘White' Flag varieties, held the country immediately to the northeast, east and southeast of the city. The centre of Mandalay itself was described as ‘under effective Government administration', which,
however, did not extend to the suburbs, where administration was admitted to be ‘non-effective'. Across the Irrawaddy, to the west, the situation seemed to be vague, or ‘liquid' as the military euphemism usually puts it. This area was left uncoloured. To the north and south a hideous yellow stain was spreading, flecked here and there with a red rash of Communism. Here the ‘White' People's Volunteer Organisation held sway; the once patriotic force which had been raised to fight the Japanese, and then, with the war at an end, had refused to be disarmed, and turned to banditry. There were also, said the Superintendent
casually
, a few ‘Yellow' PVOs who, after surrendering to the government, had revolted again, and gone underground. In some sectors the PVOs were supposed to have accepted temporary Communist leadership, and in other places they were fighting them. There, where the map was striped so garishly, the ‘White' and ‘Red' Communists had united, dissolved their association and reunited again. The present situation was uncertain. The map-makers hadn't bothered to mark in a few villages held by army deserters, who might quite well by now have thrown in their lot with any of the other organisations.

So there it was, said the Superintendent, with a suspicion of boredom. A bit of a mess, and so on, and so forth, but nothing that couldn't be put right in the end. Taungbyon, I might have noticed, was deeply embedded in PVO territory; but nothing was to be thought of it. With a wave of the hand, the map and all it represented was dismissed. An escort would call for us at eight in the morning.

And at eight precisely the escort was there; but instead of the
cheroot-smoking
private I had expected, a three-ton lorry had arrived with a squad of tommy-gunners, and a Bren gun mounted on the roof. A spruce young lieutenant came over, saluted and clambered into the back of our jeep, and we were off. This display of force was in flagrant opposition to the advice I had always been given in Rangoon; never to travel with the police or the military. To do so, said my informants, was to run the risk of falling into an ambush, whereas by travelling alone or with unarmed
companions, one increased the possibility of robbery, but very much lessened that of sudden death.

Out through the southern suburbs of Mandalay we went, plunging and bucking painfully, through the dust curtain already raised by the thousand bullock carts of the morning. Away to the left lay the abandoned pagodas of Amarapura, glinting dragon's teeth sown thickly in a stony plain. In 1857 this capital city was deserted by order of King Mindon, because its luck was supposed to have become exhausted, and also because the king felt himself drawn towards the sacred Mandalay Hill, of which he had dreamed on two successive nights. In a few years all the lay buildings, constructed of wood, had mouldered away completely, and now only these gleaming cones remained.

Our road floundered on through the exhausted earth. This plain had endured ten kingdoms and a hundred generations, and now it was sapped and vanquished. We were encircled by a ghostly decrepitude, roads that lead to nowhere, canals holding pools of brilliant, stinking water, a few nat-haunted banyan trees, grotesque with old muscled trunks and bearded roots. A row of sickly flamboyants wept their blossoms into a swamp, in which a stork waded away, as if through blood, on our approach. Having taken the wrong road many times, we stopped to ask the way from a girl in a green silk longyi who had come down to a canal for water. As she dipped her petrol cans, first one then the other, into the slime, the whole stagnant expanse suddenly boiled into life as frogs went leaping and splashing away. Before turning back she cupped her hands and drank some water from one of her cans.