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By Root 4522 0

of many different communities were debating, arguing, dividing and reconciling in the name of freedom and unity. It was a moment – in the face of the competing pull of communal politics – when a popular multiracial nationalism seemed a real possibility, and, in retrospect, an historic missed opportunity, perhaps.141 The PUTERA–AMCJA did not collapse through division or disillusionment. Despite the withdrawal of the towkays, in late 1947 the morale of its leaders was high. Its fate was decided for it when it became caught in the crossfire of the looming confrontation between the British and the MCP. But this would not be solely a conflict between imperialism and its enemies. Across Asia a second conflict was looming, a war that would be fought to neutralize the central political legacy of the first. In the Japanese war, a new generation had formed popular movements that threatened to overturn prewar hierarchies. In the intoxicating air of the post-war spring, Asia’s pemuda had seized the streets and villages, filled them with their propaganda and stood up against imperialism and feudalism. But now, in free Asia and colonial Asia, this fresh-won freedom – of youth, of women, of workers – had to contend with the re-establishment of more conservative, patriarchal forms of authority. Bosses, landlords and bureaucrats would attempt to claw back some of the ground they had lost; 1948 would be a year of confrontation.

9

1948: A Bloody Dawn

BOYS’ DAY IN BURMA

Shortly before dawn on 4 January 1948 dozens of diplomats prised themselves from their beds and proceeded to don official clothing and regalia. Burma’s independence and exit from the Commonwealth had finally come to pass. Terrified by the memory of the assassination of Aung San, Burma’s youthful leaders had consulted numerous astrologers. They had insisted that the date should be moved from 6 to 4 January and that the proclamation itself should take place at precisely 4 o’clock in the morning to take advantage of a favourable conjunction of the stars. Later that day Thakin Nu gave a speech setting out his high hopes for the new republic. He traced the history of Burma, from its great medieval past through the humiliations of British rule and Japanese invasion. The spirit of Aung San was heavy in the air; he had made ‘the last sacrifice on the altar of freedom’.1 True to tradition in the Buddhist world, the new country’s president announced a purge of Burma’s religious establishment to match the prime minister’s political revolution. ‘Evil practices’ such as ‘caste, begging, pagoda and monastery slavery’ would be abolished.2 The new national flag fluttered incongruously over the neo-Gothic government house in Rangoon, where a few years earlier, as Burma fell to the Japanese, Reginald Dorman-Smith had roamed amid what he saw as the jeering portraits of his predecessors. A significant number of men and women born before 1885 had lived to see their nation free again.

That evening in Delhi Dorman-Smith’s bête noire, Mountbatten, held one of his ceremonious Governor General’s spectacles. He presented to the Burmese ambassador a table that had belonged to the last independent ruler of Burma, King Thibaw. General Bucher, now commander-in-chief of the Indian Army, was unimpressed by the item, which, he wrote, ‘looked not unlike a very superior wash stand’.3 He also cringed when the orderly making the presentation, ‘dressed in a costume which resembled that nowadays worn by attendants at Bertram Mills Circus’, became entangled in his spurs. Yet Mountbatten, with his eye for ornamental symbolism, had not failed to mark the final severing of the imperial link between India and Burma.

Out in the Shan hills of eastern Burma, where Balwant Singh, the district magistrate of Indian descent, was now posted, the ceremonies were more prosaic. Balwant Singh felt a thrill of anticipation as the Union Flag was lowered and the Burmese flag went up in that chilly early morning. Yet, he remembered,

somehow our ceremony seemed mundane and the newly liberated citizenry unconcerned. When