• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4520 0

military assistance. The Treasury was less happy about finding the money for a large loan which Nu and some of the cabinet were contemplating. Would this not be throwing good money after bad, given that Burma’s acute balance of payments problem was itself the result of the ill-advised leftist measures that had been undertaken a year or more before? There were some signs, the old hands recognized, that the Burmese leadership was now moderating its policies. R. B. Pearn, a former professor in Rangoon University, had often taken a dim view of the Burmese capacity to organize things. His gibe that the Burmese were a ‘primitive people’, made six years before among the peaks of Simla, had provoked a scornful comment from Tin Tut about the second-class Oxbridge graduates who found jobs in Burma. Now Pearn was a member of the Foreign Office research department and secretly gloated over the difficulties of another old bête noire of his, J. S. Furnivall.

Early in 1949 Furnivall gave a lecture in Rangoon which the Foreign Office interpreted as a coded warning to Nu to take a more positive line towards Attlee’s government and foreign capital. Furnivall told his audience that the country’s problems were psychological first, economic second and only thirdly financial. The vision of ‘a free people dancing in a rain of gold and silver’ which he had seen at that pyazat or dramatic performance twelve months or more before was the real problem.9 People had expected independence immediately to improve their standard of living. When it led instead to a financial crisis and severe restrictions on the import of hard-currency consumer goods, they looked around for someone to blame. People said that everything was the fault of Churchill and Dorman-Smith skulking menancingly in London; or it was the fault of foreign capitalists whose grip on Burmese resources was still ferocious; or it was the enemy in their midst, the Christians, the Karens or the Anglo-Burmese. Furnivall’s analysis, intelligent but too little and too late, then toppled over into academic wishful thinking.10 He outlined a plan for Burma which involved military-agricultural colonies expanding rice cultivation along the lines of nineteenth-century Dutch Java, an area of scholarly interest for him. He thought that a foreign financial expert, probably not British, should be allowed to run the economics ministry, while foreign troops might be brought in to secure internal order. On reading this, Pearn wrote acidly that Furnivall was ‘as woolly-minded as ever’.11 No Burmese government could possibly bring in foreign troops and survive.

In retrospect, Furnivall’s speech did in fact mark something of a turning point. Over the next few months Nu edged closer to Western interests and moderated his government’s leftist economic policies. A new charter was approved which allowed foreign companies to operate in the country for up to ten years, with the reasonable expectation that they would be able to make profits and repatriate a proportion of them. The land nationalization policy was loosened; it was anyway beginning to create large numbers of small private owners – a new rural elite, rather than the peasant co-operative that had been envisaged. The government made strenuous efforts to meet the requirements that the British Treasury had hedged around the offer of a large sterling loan. Insofar as they gave a thought to Burmese matters amid labour unrest, sterling crises and the onward march of international communism, Attlee and Cripps, who was now Chancellor of the Exchequer, began to take a rosier view of the Burmese government.

Britain was, at least physically, distant from Burma’s problems, but the Republic of India had inherited that acute sense of menace about the security of its borders which had long plagued the British Raj. As if to symbolize this, Jawaharlal Nehru lived in Parliament Street, New Delhi, in the very house that had once been occupied by the commander-in-chief of the old colonial army. Nehru’s moments for reflection were few in the early months of 1949, though the