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By Root 4403 0

POWs they now held who could be assigned tasks previously reserved for the meanest Indian coolie. The authorities hurriedly tried to improve Rangoon’s conservancy department, which had no more than a handful of sweepers to cleanse the latrines of hundreds of thousands of dwellings. House owners were exhorted to collect and properly dispose of rubbish rather than throw it into the shattered drainage system. There was an ever-present danger of disease. Slowly the city began to creep back to a basic level of normality. The Rangoon Liberator of 27 September carried a letter redolent of the sweet old days of trysts in the shade of the Sule pagoda: to ‘H. H. Princess of Magnolia. My most sincere apologies for the indiscreet note – pray remember memories of Radio – darling, forgive me – meet me at the “MARINA” – always awaiting you there – “S.”’9 Perhaps this was a plant by the secret services to improve morale. More convincing was the advertisement of Tong Hin Co. of 705–7 Dalhousie Square announcing a lottery. The prizes included ‘a piece of silk for making Lady’s Shanghai dress’ and a bottle of hair cream and a box of face powder, all rare commodities in the battered metropolis. Alarmingly, the Lightning Chemical Institute of 314 U Wisara Road announced in the same issue: ‘The old order has changed. Our Lightning Brand gin helped to bring in the new.’10

Within days new strains began to emerge. People had been prepared to bear privations in the months following the city’s liberation, but now the world war was supposedly over they began to wonder why they were still dressed in rags, why prices were rising and why new supplies of cloth and other essential commodities had not been brought in.11 Someone should wave a magic wand and put things back to where they had been in 1942. There was disgruntlement about the employment policies of the civil affairs secretariat set up by the military administration. Many Burmese complained that former Burmese members of the middle and lower civil service had not been reemployed. Instead, ‘second-rate’ Anglo-Burmans, Anglo-Indians and Indians, who had been hangers-on at Simla, where the Burmese government had been in exile during the war, were flooding back into the country.12 On the other hand, the British seemed remarkably careless in screening those few Burmese who did regain government employment. Only four Burmese officers who were known to have been particularly active collaborators with the Japanese had been refused employment and those who had not collaborated were enraged that in many cases the sins of the occupation had apparently been washed away. All this fed into a wider disaffection about pay scales and ranking in the new order. Worse, individual civil servants found themselves caught between a resentful people and an administration determined to get back on top with punitive measures.

Balwant Singh, a young Burmese-born Sikh, observed all this first hand. He had joined the Burma civil service in 1942 and had survived the war working on the railways, having first learned basic Japanese. In 1945 he rejoined the civil service and became assistant to a Burmese township officer. He found himself forcing rigid price and commodity controls upon an uncomprehending population, and was often shocked by the harsh sentences his superiors handed out for breaches of them. Even forced labour continued after the Japanese occupation: ‘Life was full of hardship in a country now being occupied for the second time and for people struggling to survive under conditions of chaos. It was bewildering for men such as me who were new to the administration.’13

Another man who resumed a job interrupted by war was the medical missionary Gordon S. Seagrave. He had been born in Burma but educated in the United States and his ancestors included some of the earliest American missionaries in Asia, who had arrived in Burma before the first Anglo-Burmese war of 1824–6. ‘Dr Cigarette’, as he was affectionately known to local people because of his chainsmoking, had worked among the Kachin people of the far northeast