Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [223]
Later the DC laid a wreath at the local martyrs’ memorial that commemorated the assassinated Aung San and his colleagues. Sports events and cart races followed. Perhaps the low-key mood reflected people’s fears for the future. In this area the communists almost immediately started a movement for the non-payment of taxes, sending small armed bands to terrorize the better-off residents and levy their own punitive wealth taxes. The administration responded by forming village defence groups, a tactic that was to become common down the whole length of the crescent from the Indian border as far as Singapore. To Balwant Singh’s disgust, officials also instituted a policy of burning villages whose inhabitants were suspected of collaboration with the communists and forcibly relocating others away from the influence of the insurgents.5
The Burmese indeed awaited independence with hope and trepidation. At this point, hope prevailed. John Furnivall, the 71-year-old left-wing agrarian expert, was the only former British official invited to return to the country as an adviser. A Fabian socialist and practising Christian who had briefly toyed with Buddhism, Furnivall had written a number of books that denounced ‘colonial capitalism’ and indicted the British for exacerbating ethnic differences in Southeast Asia.6 In the 1930s Furnivall had got to know Nu and the other nationalist leaders while he helped to run a socialist bookshop in Rangoon. Later he worked with the government in exile at Simla, advising on the reconstruction of Burma, but he was always fiercely critical of Dorman-Smith, whom he accused of promoting the return of British firms to exploit the Burmese.7 Coming back to Burma after nearly a decade, Furnivall was struck by the changes in Rangoon: ‘Rangoon is no longer an Indian city’, he wrote.8 Burmese, not Indians, now predominated among Rangoon dock workers. The Chinese, too, were more or less invisible as they had adopted traditional Burmese dress during the war. But at the same time traditional Burmese costumes were giving way to new fashions for the aspiring new nation. People wore trilby hats and pith helmets, once a symbol of the white rulers, rather than Burmese turbans.9 Many women were to be seen on the streets in battle dress or the dull green longyis of the People’s Volunteer Organization (PVOs).
Furnivall was also struck by the popular celebrations accompanying independence. Shortly after his return he went to a dramatic performance, a pyazat: ‘It ended with a scene depicting a free people dancing in a rain of gold and silver. That was a dream in which almost everyone indulged.’10 In this drama, ‘the peasants and artisans triumphed over capitalism and imperialism’.11 Many of the monks sweeping the platform of the now glistening and restored Shwedagon pagoda believed equally firmly that a new age of dharma, or spiritual virtue, had arrived. State and religion were about to be united again. They knew that this cosmic event was to be celebrated at a ceremony at which Nu, their reluctant prime minister, would distribute great quantities of food and gifts to the serried ranks of saffron-robed monks at the pagoda. Celebrations lit up the streets in Rangoon. In Mandalay, the half burnt-out city was beginning to rise again; ugly concrete blocks sprang up from the ashes of the pretty wooden shophouses. Burmese traders looked forward to inheriting everything left by departed Indian magnates. Burmese peasants rejoiced at the prospect of the cancellation of their loans from the resented Chettiyar moneylenders. Edgy young soldiers and militiamen, toting their rifles on the streets and taking a cut from passing buses and taxis, confidently expected that the new government would expand