Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

Neither the Prince nor my aunt ever returned to Burma, but my father, who had visited them there, went back once. The year was 1945, and he was an officer serving in the Allied Fourteenth Army. As the Allied forces advanced on Rangoon from the north, my father found himself both amazed and appalled by the scale of the destruction around him. The British had adopted a scorched-earth policy when they withdrew from Burma in 1942, demolishing bridges, setting fire to oil fields, and blocking the Irrawaddy's navigation channels with scuttled ships. Three years later, the retreating Japanese had reciprocated, destroying all that was left of Burma's infrastructure. "When buffaloes fight," goes a Burmese proverb, "the grass gets trampled." By the end of the war, after two bitterly fought campaigns, Burma was a devastated country.

My father found Rangoon virtually unrecognizable, but on making his way to Spark Street he discovered that the temple had survived, and he was able to trace a few distant relatives who had remained in the neighborhood. They would have starved, they told him later, but for the army rations he steered their way.

On the evening of my visit, the temple was all but empty: a handful of elderly men were seated around a table in the neon-lit hall. I went up to them and earned a warm welcome by mentioning the Prince's family name. Soon, as I sat with them at the table, the conversation turned to prewar Burma, and I found myself listening to echoes of the Prince's voice, intoning the very same words: "A golden land, the richest country in Asia, the envy of its neighbors, the kindest, most hospitable people on earth — even now, when everything is so scarce…"

How did it all go wrong? I asked. Fifty years earlier, Burma had been the most developed country in the region, with an impressive agricultural surplus and a superabundance of natural resources — oil, timber, minerals. It had had an important petroleum industry, a highly educated population, almost universal adult literacy, a lively independent press, a rich literary culture, and a framework of democratic institutions. Now it was one of the most impoverished countries in the world's fastest-developing region, one of the United Nations' ten least developed nations on earth, and a byword for repression, xenophobia, and civil abuse. How could any country travel so far back so fast?

The man seated next to me tapped my arm. He was well over seventy, a thin, upright man with a thatch of white hair. I shall call him Mr. Bose. Mr. Bose led me to the temple's entrance and pointed across the street to the dark, unlit compound of the Secretariat Building, a sprawling complex of decaying red brick offices built by the British at the turn of the century. "Do you see that veranda there?" he said, pointing to one on a second-floor walkway. "That was where Burma's future ended. Do you see that door? It leads to the room where General Aung San was assassinated, on July 19, 1947. I was just down the corridor — I saw his body lying there."

I had often heard my father speak of General Aung San; he had met him once at an army barracks in Rangoon during the war. General Aung San had said very little — he was famously a man of few words — but he had made a powerful impression on everyone present. He was twenty-nine years old at the time, a strikingly good-looking young man, with high cheekbones, a receding hairline, and a good-humored twinkle in his eye.

Despite his youth, Aung San was the country's acknowledged leader, the hero of its independence movement. A few years before, as a young student-politician, he had fled from British-ruled Burma and received military training from the Japanese. He was instrumental in organizing a militia of Burmese nationals in Thailand. In 1942 he marched back across the border at the head of the Burma Independence Army, accompanying the invading Japanese forces. Later, increasingly distrustful of the Japanese, he and his soldiers switched loyalties and joined the Allies. At the end of the war, it was widely believed that General Aung San would assume Burma's leadership once the British granted the country its independence, in 1948.

Aung San was by birth a Burman and thus a member of the country's largest ethnic group. The Burmans are predominantly Buddhist and form two-thirds of the country's population. There are four sizable minorities — the Karen, the Rakhine, the Shan, and the Mon — and many smaller groups. Some are Buddhist and are linked with the people of neighboring Thailand. Others, such as the Kachin, the Karen, and the Karenni, include Christians, mainly from families that were converted by American Baptist missionaries in the nineteenth century. And in the west there is also a substantial Muslim population.

What these different minorities have had in common, historically, is a fear of being dominated by the Burmans. Aung San, uniquely, was able to transcend this historical mistrust of Burman politicians. It probably helped that he was married to a Christian, Daw Khin Kyi, although he himself was a Buddhist.

In April 1947, Burma's colonial administration held elections to choose the government that would assume power when the country became independent. Aung San led his party, the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, to a resounding electoral victory. He was thirty-two; he had been married nearly five years and had fathered three children. The youngest, Suu Kyi, was two years old.

The events of July 19, 1947, were fresh in Mr. Bose's memory, kept alive by years of telling and retelling. He was then working as a clerical superintendent in the colonial administration. His job required him to sit at a desk in a large hall, overseeing a team of clerks. General Aung San and his kitchen cabinet were meeting in a room down the corridor; Mr. Bose knew that room well, for he often delivered files there.

Mr. Bose was sitting at his desk at ten-fifteen on the morning of July 19 when he heard an earsplitting noise. He looked up to find himself staring at a roomful of startled clerks. Then he heard feet thudding along the corridor and down the stairs. It took a moment before he realized that the earsplitting noise had been gunfire. By the time Mr. Bose reached the door, a crowd had gathered there. The room was full of smoke. Standing on tiptoe, he counted nine bodies inside, some sprawled on the floor, some slumped over a table. Six members of the cabinet had died with General Aung San. They were among the country's most respected politicians and included some of its most important minority leaders. Mr. Bose looked down and saw a thin trickle of blood winding past his feet.

Mr. Bose learned that a group of men dressed in battle fatigues had driven into the Secretariat compound in two jeeps, through the entrance on Dalhousie Street. They had run directly to the cabinet room, carrying guns; they had known exactly where to go. The soldiers ran back the way they had come, jumped into their jeeps, and drove away through the same gate. That was the last that was ever heard of them, although several suspects were rounded up and a right-wing politician was later charged with the assassination and hanged.

This is the end, Mr. Bose thought as he stood in the corridor, looking into the bloody room. Nothing will ever be the same again.

"Can you imagine the consequences in India or China if this had happened to Nehru and his cabinet or to Mao and the politburo?" Mr. Bose said to me. "That's something you have to remember when you think of Burma."

The new Union of Burma attained its independence on schedule, in January 1948. U Nu, a trusted friend of Aung San's who had assumed the leadership of the party after the general's assassination, was sworn in as Burma's first prime minister.

Three months later civil war broke out, with a vast Communist uprising. Serious ethnic insurgencies started the following year, when a group of Karen soldiers seized an armory on the outskirts of Rangoon and dug themselves in against government troops. Two Karen regiments of the Burma Army then mutinied, and they were soon joined by a regiment of Kachins.