Golden Earth (29 page)

Over the top of the broken door could be seen the remains of a baronial folly in the Oriental style, a gabled, redbrick house, of which only the façade remained, flanked by two machicolated towers. In the other corner of the view was a pseudo-Renaissance building in the Portuguese style, to which had been added four Mogul turrets, and two towers terminating in onion-shaped cupolas. This, too, had been burned out.

As I stood at the door of the bathroom, while the water evaporated like alcohol from the skin, the whole panorama of the marshalling-yards came into view. There was a background of palms partially screening the ruined gothic and Asiatic fantasies, and a few trees with lacquered foliage, from which hung down black beans. Beneath the trees were long lines of goods-trucks, most of which would never run on their own wheels again;
and distributed about the yards were step-pyramids of railway sleepers, which were in constant demand to prop up temporary bridges. Along the tracks, and round these obstacles, sauntered parading crowds, the girls in longyis of bright silk, and carrying parasols, the men wearing
sun-helmets
which, being enamelled green and blue, looked like chamber-pots. A dozen Indian labourers were cooking their food, each, for fear of contamination, at a separate fire. There were two sounds, the occasional deep purring of a pagoda gong of rare quality, and the shrieking of kites in the sky. In this scene there were no clear, sharp colours. It was overlaid by yellow light, as if seen through a shop-window over which a sheet of yellow cellophane had been stretched to prevent the goods from fading. To me, coming out of the damp coolness of the bathroom, it was like plunging into warm milk.

Pyinmana had previously been the headquarters of Thakin Than Tun, leader of the White-Flag Communists. (Three months after I left they
re-entered
the town and fought a battle with Government troops in its streets). From this stronghold, which was later stormed by Government troops, he directed the insurrection which broke out on March 6th, 1948; it was the first of a series of revolts directed against the Socialist Government by a number of racial and political minorities. Of all the insurgent movements, that of the White-Flag Communists in
combination
with the Karen National Defence Organisation, was the most serious. It started off with a succession of victories. Towns were captured all over Burma, until finally, a year after the outbreak, Mandalay itself fell; and Rangoon, and the Government’s survival, were threatened. After this the tide slowly turned. The insurgents were beaten by shortage of ammunition, their internal divisions, and by the tenacity of the Government forces. Mandalay was recaptured shortly after its fall, and all the large towns in insurgent hands occupied one by one. The Karens withdrew into the mountainous area known as Karenni, lying between the towns of Loi Kaw, Papun and Thaton, while the Communists, the PVO, and the army mutineers took refuge in the small villages and the
jungles, where they still carry on their fight. The Communists appear slowly to be absorbing their competitors, with a consequent accretion of strength.

The Burmese insurrections have a formless and bewildering
complexity
that make them almost incomprehensible to the Westerner who has not studied their history on the spot. To an outsider the programmes of all the insurgent groups seem identical. They are all apparently of the extreme Left, and resolved to extirpate landlords and capitalists, permit freedom of worship, distribute the land to the peasants, and smash fascism. Each body accuses all the others of failing to respect these ideals, and all accuse the AFPFL (Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League) Government of being no more than a sham behind which the brutal exploitation of the country by foreign interests is permitted to continue.

Behind the façade of anti-Government ‘democratic-fronts’, and the barrage of allegation, one suspects on examining the facts a clash of power-hungry personalities, from which some have emerged defeated to become the relentless opponents of those who have reached the top. The departure of the British from Burma left a yawning vacuum of Governmental office to be filled, and offered in the army the prospect of immediate promotion for thousands of officers and men. Many were hurt in the scramble. As an illustration of the attitude of the disappointed place-hunter – and of the real motive behind a political coup – a better example could not be found than the two leaders of the army mutiny who, after announcing their intention of abolishing feudal landlordism, offered to surrender if they were guaranteed the portfolios of Defence and Home Affairs.

The PVOs (Peoples Voluntary Organisation) were originally the Burmese equivalent of the Maquis, formed after the war into this body in an attempt to keep its members under disciplined control while the process of postwar resettlement went on. The resettlement of the rank and file of peasants was a simple matter, but the officer-class, having tasted power, refused to return to the banality of its prewar existence, and quietly refilled the ranks as fast as they were emptied with any restless spirits who cared to join, irrespective of military or resistance services.
They then drew up their political programme, but since it had to be Leftist, and there was nothing they could think of to add to that of the Communists, or of the Government, they amalgamated these
programmes
, but dropped from one the expropriation of foreign concerns, and from the other, the land reforms. The PVOs revolted in July 1948, when the Communist insurrection was well under way, and for a time joined forces with them. Later they fought each other with particular ferocity, and the PVOs split into two groups, white and yellow, the whites remaining underground and the yellows joining the Government to fight their erstwhile comrades.

The formation of the Red-Flag Communist organisation, as an
offshoot
of the original Burma Communist Party, appears likewise to have been a matter of internal politics and of political rivalry between the two principal figures in the movement. Thakin Than Tun, who headed the party before the split occurred, served as a minister during the Japanese occupation, while Thakin Soe, leader of those who broke away, spent most of the war as an underground fighter. It was his contention that as the Communist Party was a party of struggle, only those fashioned by struggle could give correct leadership. He also accused Thakin Than Tun of misappropriation of party funds, and the latter retaliated by an attack on Thakin Soe’s morals, which were said to be lax even by the easiest of Burmese polygamistic standards. After the break each side gave priority over the other political tasks in hand to the other’s extermination. Thakin Soe, however, by the severity and ruthlessness of his methods has
continually
lost the support of the Burmese peasantry, while his White-Flag rivals by their relative mildness and strict discipline have extended their influence, and have even attracted middle-class cultivators – whom Thakin Soe would be inclined to extirpate as Kulaks – into their fold.

It is interesting to study the phrasing of the manifestos produced by these various parties. The language of political censure, monotonous and repetitive as it is at any time, is further enfeebled here by a very special Burmese problem. It seems that at some time, perhaps at the turn of the century, when the Fathers of the Western Left were relaxing with their families at the Berlin Tiergarten, they were much impressed by the
appearance, and by what they read of the habits, of certain animals; and on the basis of this composed a short lexicon of execration, which unfortunately their political inheritors in all parts of the world have taken over. In a Buddhist environment, however, such animals as hyenas, jackals and vultures, eaters of carrion-flesh, and not killers in their own right, occupy a highly honourable position. Much strain is therefore put upon the remaining clichés of political abuse. The Karens, who would probably be reactionary enough if ever they could seize power, call the present Government ‘collaborators and stooges’; the Burmese army is ineptly described as the ‘handmaid of the imperialists’; while the system is ‘dominated by adulterers, thieves, dacoits, self-seekers, and those who are extremely vicious’. The PVOs propose to wipe out ‘such opportunists as bad-hats, landlords, counter-revolutionaries and deviationists’ – deviationist having become here a meaningless term of abuse, since the PVOs subscribe to no Party-line. They themselves, in fact, are described as deviationists by the Communists, who accuse them in their manifesto entitled ‘Why we are fighting the PVO’ of ‘sucking deliciously’ the freshly spilt blood of fighters for freedom and democracy. Each party and movement reviles the others and the Government in power, as ‘fascists’ – another word from which the meaning has drained. All speak of the activities of their own side as an expression of that mystic entity, ‘the people’ – the people’s Government, or the people’s will.

To have completed this almost utter chaos, it would have been necessary only to introduce the warring religious factions, now endemic in Indo-China, but in Burma excluded by the universality of Buddhism. In the situation of this unfortunate country there is an element of grim Wellsian prediction come to fulfilment.

S
TANDING
on a high place in Pyinmana – the balcony of the
railwaymen
’s flats – and looking out across the derelict rolling-stock, the scorched brick and twisted girders, one saw a glitter of fire, an encrusted brilliance of towers and turrets, that arose shining over at the edge of the town. Even at a mile’s distance there was no doubt that this was some gaudy pretence, but of such a magnitude that a visit, even in this murderous sunshine, was not to be avoided.

Mr Nair agreed to come with me and, cautiously picking our way through the pools of shadow, we made towards this lustrous illusion, through mean lanes scavenged by dogs which disease had clipped into grotesque, poodle shapes. We found a field full of Chinese pavilions with streaming banners, joss-houses, pagodas with many-tiered roofs, Tartar tents, huge kiosks with façades of peacocks and dog-faced lions. It was a city that might have been built by an Imperial army encamped for a lengthy siege, and in it had been assembled all the glorious beginnings of fairground architecture and carnival floats. It was extraordinary what opulence had been achieved merely by the endless variegation of colours – mostly metallic – and decorative shapes with which every surface had been closely covered. In their erection of this dreamland of wood and paper, the people of Pyinmana seemed to have reacted in an understandable way to the drabness of civic reality. There was
something
defiant in its spurning of the realities. At night-time there would be theatrical shows, and boxers would dance in their corners before butting and clawing each other behind the peacock façades; but in the
meantime
, the place was deserted with the exception of a small crowd gathered at a booth in a corner to watch a nat-pwè.

The booth was roughly built of woven bamboo, its floor covered with matting. There was a shelf running round three sides, and on this the images of the thirty-seven nats squatted moodily. They were a poor collection of idols. Reflecting the fall in dramatic pitch of Burmese life, such godlike attributes as a dozen arms, each raised to flourish a sword, had disappeared, discarded in the nat evolution as something now as useless as the tail in humans. The convincing malevolence of some of the images to be seen in collections, carved in the days when the nats presided at human sacrifices, inspired spectacular dacoities and bullied kings, was missing here. These were the mean faces of black-marketeers, of usurers calculating percentages and premeditating foreclosure. Among the images was a gilded buffalo mask, also unimpressive as a work of art. The horns were entwined with leaves and sprigs of herbs.

At the moment of my arrival two stout, middle-aged Burmese women were weaving about in a dance in the cleared space before the images. The dance had no particular form; there were none of the symbolical hand or head movements imported from India into the South-East Asian dance, and none of the painfully learned acrobatics of the Burmese. These were the spontaneous gyrations of the devotees of a West-Indian revivalist cult, preceding, perhaps, an orgy of testifying. The shapeless robes went with the dance. There was an orchestra of drums, gongs, and a squealing hné; and its members, playing with a zest bordering on fury, kept the dancers in a continuous whirl. Before the dancers had set themselves in motion helpers had bustled round them carefully adjusting their turbans, but these immediately became untied, allowing their hair to stream from them like black comet tails. With eyes closed they collided with each other and went spinning away in new directions. Cheekbones and foreheads took on a polish of sweat; foam bespattered their chins. The women helpers dashed after them with bottles of beer, which the dancers sucked at sightlessly and showered back through mouths and nostrils. The audience remained strangely untouched by this frenzy. They laughed and chatted sociably, and gave the breast to their young babies. Although all were drably and poorly dressed by Burmese standards, there must have been some who were
socially important, because acolytes kept coming and presenting them with sprigs of greenery. Suddenly there was a stir of interest. The dancers, colliding once again, had fallen to the ground. Now they writhed on their stomachs towards the nat images, and having reached them remained to pray convulsively.

The priest was tall for a Burman, and I could not help fancying that he bore a facial resemblance to certain of the nats. There was an impudent self-possession about him. He was quite clearly a powerful person, a stork among the frogs. I was struck once again by the extraordinary similarity between professional counterparts of different races. I had seen this face, this confident and slightly contemptuous manner, in Haiti; but that time it had been a voodoo houngan. Before beginning his part of the ceremony the priest sent one of his assistants, who was importantly dressed in a threadbare British officer’s uniform, to tell me to remove my sandals, and not to take photographs when he danced. Although I was not actually inside the booth, and therefore technically showing no disrespect, I decided to acquiesce in the first demand, and to ignore the second, although with discretion.

Taking up a spray of leaves in each hand the priest went into an easy, swinging dance. He waved the leaves about as a Jamaican obeahman might have waved a pair of maracas. After a time he stopped and signalled gropingly, eyes closed, for the buffalo mask to be brought. At this the crowd stiffened. The amiable gossip died away. Spitting out their cheroots, the members of the orchestra struck out in a new, purposeful rhythm. The mask was handed to the priest by one of the fat dancers. She held it at arm’s length, and he took it from her, and keeping it about a foot from his face, began another stage of the dance. This consisted in mimicking the actions of a buffalo charging, turning away, charging again; directed at first one section, then another of the shrinking crowd. He then stopped, put on the mask, and immediately fell down. The drama of the moment was much heightened by the crash of drums and gongs. These barbaric and wonderfully timed musical effects jarred one for a hair-raising fraction of a second into a sensation of the reality in the performance.

The buffalo-priest lay writhing on the ground. At the end of the convulsion he raised himself painfully to his knees, and then charged, head down – with remarkable speed in view of his posture – into a group of children who fled screaming from the booth. He was restrained from following them, and from charging in other directions by the prayers, the entreaties, the strokings, of several of his female followers. Finally, quietened down, he was led, still on hands and knees, to a large
enamelled
basin, in which floated bananas and green herbs. Thus the ceremony culminated in the man’s making a ritual meal – of buffalo food. Pushing his face beneath the mask down into the bowl, he caught a banana in his teeth, and emerging, ate half of it complete with skin. After that, the buffalo mask was untied and put back on the shelf, and while the priest was led away into the background to recover, the female dancers prepared themselves once more to go into action.

What was the meaning of this ritual? Clearly the women were nat-
ka-daws
– spirit wives, and professional prophetesses, whom I had read all about in a little booklet on the subject, published in Burma. Nat-
ka-daws
prophesy publicly on such occasions, and by private arrangement on the payment of a small fee. It is a regular and recognised profession, of which there are so many members that it has been seriously suggested that they should be classified under their own occupational heading in the forthcoming census of Burma. They differ from spirit mediums in most other parts of the world in that they are considered as married to the insatiably polygamistic nats who possess them, and who through them convey their wishes and decisions to animistic Burmese humanity. Such a relationship usually begins with the nat falling in love with the woman. According to my Burmese authority, he visits her at night,
well-perfumed
and ‘dressed in up-to-date clothes’ (and one quails before the vision of a Mongolian folk-hero in an American-style, flowered
sports-shirt
and a plastic belt). When actually in possession of his lady-love, he can be expelled by a saya – an expert in white magic – or (in the Colonial days) by an officer of the Crown in full uniform. Nothing is said in the booklet about a nat’s reaction to Burmese republican officials. Normally, however, a woman’s relations or friends would not interfere, because,
just as possession by a lwa carries social prestige among the Haitian adherents of the voodoo cult, it is a paying proposition in the lower strata of Burmese society for a woman to become the bride of a nat.

The union is regularised at the bridegroom’s expense, with mystical entertainments on a lavish scale, the nat usually being represented by another wife, to whom the bride is solemnly given away by her parents or guardians. The occasion is one for rejoicing. The girl has been recognised by the powerful guild of nat-ka-daws as one of themselves. From that time on she earns an easy living by fortune-telling, or, if she decides to go into business, the capital is put up ‘by the nat’, that is to say by the wealthy and powerful association of his wives. Nat-ka-daws, owing to their prestige and power among their neighbours, prosper in all their enterprises. The principal drawback to this arrangement appears to be that a girl who has married a nat cannot remarry without his permission, which is rarely given. But a most fortunate aspect of the matter lies in the fact that the nats are said to prefer spiritual to physical charm, and that women whose lack of attractions has kept them single
are often married off in this way. The union is supposed to be far from platonic, and the nat’s visits, in incubus shape, are said to be more frequent than those of a normal husband.

Here as elsewhere the phenomenon of possession is accompanied, according to medical evidence, by some physical change; the heart’s action is increased, cheeks are flushed, respiration is shallow and of the thoracic type; the subject sweats profusely, reaches a kind of cataleptic state with complete insensibility to pain, and, when questions are answered, often replies in a masculine voice. These and other signs are closely observed by experts, who decide whether possession has taken place, and who are also able to decide by variations of manner and expression which nat is involved. It is particularly interesting that a
nat-ka
-daw when possessed by Shwe-Na-be, the dragon nat, writhes and wriggles in snakelike fashion, in exactly the same way as do devotees of the voodoo cult when possessed by dumballa, the West African
serpent-god
. After learning something of the nat-ka-daws, I now realised for the first time what the Jesuit Borri had meant when he had said, writing in the seventeenth century, that it was considered highly honourable in
Indo-China
to become the wife of the devil, and that such unions were much indulged in by upper-class Annamese women, who sometimes produced eggs as a result. It now seemed clear to me that at one time formal matches with the spirits were arranged by other Mongolian peoples than the Burmese, and that it might have been – and might still be in remote parts of the Indo-Chinese peninsula – a fairly widespread custom, linked up with the legendary oviparous kings.

It remains to offer a possible explanation of the buffalo dance, to hazard a guess at the legendary or even historical occasion that had inspired it – since other animistic ceremonies, and in particular the one at Taungbyon – re-enact in dramatic form some tragic story that has become ineradicably fixed in folk-memory. I had never heard of a buffalo-nat before, and it is certainly not included in the exclusive original circle of the Thirty-seven. The only explanation, therefore, that
I can offer is based upon the remark of an onlooker, who said that the ceremony commemorated the ravaging of the country in ancient times by a buffalo.

In my superficial studies of Burmese history, limited to what has been translated into English, I have been able to find only one noteworthy mention of a buffalo. This occurs in the description of the great King Anawhrata’s death. Although the Burmese kings in their lifetimes
conformed
sometimes to the prosaic pattern of history, as we understand it, the manner of their deaths – particularly that of Anawhrata – was often Arthurian. The king had been returning from a profitable expedition, during which he had built monasteries, dams, channels, reservoirs and canals, and was just entering the city gates of Pagan when a hunter approached to report that a wild buffalo called Çakkhupala was ravaging the countryside. On hearing this the king turned back, with the pious intention of ridding his people of this menace. He was surrounded by seven thousand ministers, and at the head of four armies, but, says the chronicle, ‘the moral karma of the king’s former acts was exhausted’. The
buffalo, which had been an enemy in a previous life, charged and reached over the back of the royal elephant, and gored the king to death. So the king’s ministers and his hosts, his queens, the fifty hump-backed women and the fifty bandy-legged women who served him wearing livery of gold, the women to sound tabors, the women-drummers, harpists and trumpeters, all broke up and scattered in confusion.

What are the facts that have been transmuted here into a dream? Did the nation, symbolised in the person of the king, undergo a tragic experience, suffering perhaps at this time – or even centuries earlier, since the annals are very confused – defeat at the hands of invaders whose totem was the buffalo? An interesting speculation. Burmese written history which speaks of a succession of 587,000 kings, and omitted from the records events which failed to conform to sacred predictions, is not necessarily more reliable than the legends of the people. But, at all events, it seemed likely that here was all that remained in the popular memory of an ancient tragedy, whatever it was: a piece of self-hypnotic
mumbo-jumbo
, and two fat women who believed themselves to be the brides of a demon.