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In Burma, December was a dangerous month. The Karen delta towns had been the scene of the fiercest claims for a separate state. Here some Karens had declared independence at the very time in January 1948 when Burma was celebrating its own freedom. By the summer, as Karen forces moved north towards Rangoon, there were once again communal murders in the villages. Attempts were made to arrange a ceasefire and several of the delta towns were handed back to the Rangoon government at one point. But the conflict was out of control. Later in the year the government attempted to disband the remaining ‘loyal’ Karen battalions of the army, fearing they too would mutiny. On Christmas Eve 1948, Burmese irregulars threw hand grenades into a Karen church where people were celebrating the festival. The fleeing congregation was shot down or bayoneted.81 The insurgent Karen forces now went on the offensive, digging in at Insein, close to the capital, even after they failed to take Rangoon itself. They sang as they marched: ‘Death and Life are in God’s hands. Hey, why should we fear the Burmese?’82 Increasingly, Karen officers in the regular army joined their insurgent brothers or collaborated with them privately. Massacre and counter-massacre spread across the delta region as ‘ethnic cleansing’ began. Meanwhile Rangoon civilians took day trips out to the front where the army allowed them to take pot shots at the Karen fighters for one rupee a bullet. Boys’ Day in Burma had become a vicious dogfight. The only hope, as Furnivall put it, was that ‘it is not that the rebels are strong, but the Government is weak’.83

INDIA RECEDES, INDIA REBORN

In early 1948 the independent government of India had sent saplings from a leafy descendant of the tree in Bodh Gaya, under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment, to celebrate Burma’s own independence. Yet no more than Burma were India and Pakistan dancing in streams of gold and silver during that cold weather. Scarcely had the communal massacres died away than tension between the two dominions began to increase on the borders of the disputed state of Kashmir. Scarcely had Nehru written his first New Year message as prime minister than the aged Gandhi was shot to death by a right-wing Hindu assassin after his daily prayer meeting in Delhi. John de Chazal, one of the remaining and now increasingly disillusioned British police officials, remembered the outpouring of grief in his distant part of south India when an urn of Gandhi’s ashes arrived there to be scattered, symbolizing the unity of the nation. Mourning was so intense that it reminded him of family stories of Queen Victoria’s funeral. As the ashes were consigned to sacred rivers and lakes across India and even sent to Burma to be scattered on the Irrawaddy among crowds of mourning Indians and Burmese,84 ‘drums beat all night and men and boys shouted “Gandhi-ji ki jai; Gandhi-ji ki jai [victory to Gandhi!]” till they were hoarse’.85 The remaining British officials and military men already knew their days in the subcontinent were numbered, some feeling that their lives’ work had been for nothing. Their authority now in rapid decline, they scattered across the empire. Some went to commercial jobs in Britain, Canada or Australasia; others entered the Nigerian or Kenyan civil service or police. For them, the long tradition of the Raj came to an end with regret and resentment.

It was not only British India but also the wider British Indian empire, from the Arabian seas to the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal, that came to an end. The year 1948 saw Indian power recede from Burma for the first time in 130 years. One of the most venerated public places in Mandalay, particularly in the year of independence when enemies were pressing in on all sides, was the pagoda that held the great image of Buddha Mahamuni. This had been taken from the kingdom of Manipur on the Burma–India border in the late eighteenth century when the Burmese