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The Trouser People by Andrew Marshall
THE TROUSER PEOPLE, intriguingly subtitled The Quest for the Victorian footballer who made Burma play the Empire's game, is part of the burgeoning genre of cultural history: books that seek to enhance our understanding of history by uncovering the stories and other layers of the past that lie buried beneath the more familiar grand narratives of political history -- an approach which claims that the past is not as simple and well-defined as we would have it, but rather that the world not only is, but has always been, a fascinating and gorgeously complex place.
While all such quests are challenging, the one undertaken by ANDREW MARSHALL is especially so, for today's Myanmar, in which he seeks the Burma of one hundred years ago, is not interested in stories about the past apart from those which demonize its colonial rulers, who departed in 1948.
At the time, notes Marshall, this sprawling, resource-rich country -- having embraced democracy and feeling the heady sense of freedom from the British -- was tipped to become one of Southeast Asia's success stories. But today, after nearly four decades under the totalitarian yoke of an oppressive military junta (the only change in government since 1962 has come about, ironically, by the junta changing its own name to the Orwellian `the State Peace and Development Council'), Burma is "a sort of recess, a blind alley, a back reach", unfortunate both in its current plight and in that it has been sealed off from the rest of the world.
Although Asian myself, I discovered on coming to this book that Burma was virtually a blank in my imagination -- all I could remember was that its name had changed to Myanmar some time in the late 80s and that the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995, both things that one had to know in order to be equal to the challenges of history exams. Few large countries, observes Marshall, are so little known as this "land of fear".
Marshall, a British citizen who has been a journalist in Asia for ten years, could easily have written a book-version of an Amnesty International report, detailing the excesses of the military regime and the manner in which Burma's dazzling ethnic diversity is being systematically weeded out in an attempt to create a purely Burman nation -- the only word for this being, as Marshall says without flinching, genocide.
But Marshall's project is subtler, and so is likely to reach, and leave a profound impact on, an audience desensitized to reports of carnage and violence in these post-September 11 times. "Trouser People" was originally a term used in the 19th century by Burma's sarong-wearing population for the white colonialists -- none of whom were persuaded of the merits of local dressing.
The figure most instrumental in establishing British dominion over Burma, and the `Victorian footballer' referred to in the title, was Sir J. George Scott, a bluff, plain-speaking figure and an upstanding member of that now-extinct club of what are called natural imperialists, believers in the civilizing power of colonial rule and in the Raj as a moral force. Scott, like many other young British men in the high noon of empire, heard `the call of the East' and came to Mandalay in 1880 as correspondent for the London Daily News. Joining the imperial enterprise and immersing himself in Burmese culture in his three event-filled decades in the country, he wrote several works (including The Burman and the monumental five-volume Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States) that are still standard reading for anyone who wishes to visit the country. "In Burma I met an American gem dealer and a Canadian Red Cross worker," says Marshall when speaking of the information-laden Gazetteer, "who both swore by Scott's magnum opus".
Leading forays into what was for most part unknown territory, including the great Shan plateau, consisting of over thirty states ruled by hereditary Shan chieftains called saophas, Scott's task was to persuade these rulers to submit to British power in exchange for limited self-rule, the colonial term for this work being `pacification' (an eerie parallel of this currently in vogue in Burma today are the `ceasefires' between the government and the political commands of the various ethnic insurgencies).
This he did in the most flamboyant style, always seeking to persuade and win over the opposition rather than risk direct combat with his limited resources of men and artillery. Marshall is fully alive to the quixotic story of Burmese villagers being given "the deeply perplexing news, delivered by a short, bearded Scotsman wearing a pith helmet as big as a washbasin, that they were now subjects of a queen who lived over 6,000 miles away."
When faced with resistance, however, Scott plunged into battle with little regard for personal safety, priding himself on being equal to any challenge, and later recording cryptic descriptions of the battle in his diary. The entry after one bloody encounter reads: "Had some sandwiches, and then went on." In this manner, by the end of 1888 "the mission had succeeded in transforming some two or three millions of excited and rebellious Shans…into loyal subjects" (Marshall quotes The Times), no mean feat, evidently, for Scott was eventually knighted for his labours.
The more interesting angle to the story, of course, was that Scott was a keen footballer. (The implications of this are obvious for any one who has heard an Indian say that the British Empire's greatest gift to India was cricket.) Wherever the British went in the world, observes Marshall when speaking of football, they took football with them -- British railway engineers took the sport to Argentina, Scottish textile workers taught the Swedes, and even the Russians learnt it from English cotton-mill managers.
- And one day in 1878, George Scott strode onto the bumpy games field next to St. John's College… [an establishment set up by missionaries in Rangoon], punted a football through the blue afternoon sky, and the Burmese game was born.
Football is today Burma's national sport, but unfortunately the game, like many other aspects of the country, is in shambles. When I checked the FIFA world rankings I found Myanmar ranked 153rd. However, sport here, as always, has a greater relevance than is apparent just from the mere records of competition and standings. For the British in Scott's time, Marshall remarks -- and I think this is one of the ways in which cultural history, the sifting of the meanings of the same things for different people at different times, is important -- "football was a way of communicating ideas of fair play and respect for authority. For the Burmans, it was something else: a rare opportunity to thrash their colonial masters at their own game."
In the same way, league football in Burma today is abysmally bad because all the teams represent different government departments (the final of one game, remarks Marshall with a twinkle in his eye, was contested between the No. 323 Supply and Transport Battalion and the Defense Services Orthopaedic and Rehabilitation Hospital), but it is still very popular among the people because it represents the one place where group assemblages are allowed, and thus acts as a release for many pent-up frustrations.
The term `Trouser People' actually has a double meaning: it is also the word used by the Burmese people today as a bitter term for the military generals of the totalitarian regime, who are in effect foreign overlords seeking to pacify the country's large population of various ethnic minorities in exactly the same way as the British, and, if anything, through the use of even more brutal tactics.
In some ways, Marshall muses, it seems as if nothing has changed in Burma over the last hundred years. Marshall opens the book with a brief vignette detailing his meeting with some members of the Shan State Army (SSA), a group of insurgents fighting the junta, and devotes a large section in the second half of the book to what he has seen (posing, usually, as a tourist) of the repression of the Shan people, who are one of the largest of the country's many ethnic groups, but to his credit, he does not allow his book to become a partisan work calling for the overthrow of the regime -- rather, he only details both its obvious and its more subtle excesses, and lets the facts speak for themselves. Nor is this just a black, mind-chilling work, detailing the terrifying conditions inside a country sometimes referred to as a prison with 40 million inmates.
Despite the best efforts of the military dictatorship, Marshall finds, the people of Burma were "cultured, deeply eccentric and justly proud of their vibrant traditions," and it is this diversity and eccentricity that Marshall sets out to experience and describe. Few books I have read have contained so many fascinating stories, whether it is the account of the dacoit that Scott caught and executed, and whose body was later exhumed by locals, boiled into a broth, and sold at exorbitant prices as a potion for bravery (one phial was even offered to Scott, but he refused to fall for this, concluding instead in his diary, with great satisfaction, that the offender had been "very completely disposed of"), or Marshall's own hilarious experiences in negotiating an alien culture -- speaking of his growing skill in learning Burmese, he recounts how some of his friends once invited him to direct a local taxi-driver on "a fairly boozy night" out in Rangoon:
- So I leaned forward and casually told him to keep driving straight ahead. In fact, due to some crucial tonal imprecision in my delivery, I had actually invited the driver to mount me roughly from behind. But this was only explained to me an hour later, when my companions had finally stopped laughing.
Burma today is in the midst of -- and indeed, has been for a long time in the midst of -- what Aung Sang Suu Kyi has called "the second struggle for independence" (Marshall quotes her early in the book). However, as the last four decades have shown, this is not a task that can be easily achieved by disparate local movements in different parts of the country, and one can only hope that it is international pressure that can finally help undermine the military regime.
The main problem though, as channeled through the understanding of one of the more curious and fascinating characters in the book, Philip the Miracle Monk, is to find a means of gaining the attention of a `perpetually distracted world'. The great (almost Scott-like, shall one say?) enterprise displayed by the intrepid author in his travels in the "land of fear" means that this book is likely to play an important role in attracting that kind of attention.
- More reading about Burma: There are quite a few sites on the web dealing with Burma's history, culture and struggle against the military junta, but perhaps the fullest and most interesting account of the Burma of today is the site of the news magazine Irrawaddy (www.irrawaddy.org), a source mentioned by Marshall himself.
Chandrahas Choudhury
06/05/2002
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Chandrahas Choudhury is a final year Literature student at the University of Cambridge. |
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