Community as a category of empire: ‘The work of community’ among Burmese Indians in Myanmar

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that ‘community' is a category that is inextricably bound up with the historical development of the British empire. It was in this context that modern social theory took root, including, eventually, publications on community in anthropology and sociology that profoundly influenced nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought and that continue to shape everyday understandings of the category within and beyond academia. I first elaborate what type of work the category ‘community' was intended to do in the British empire. I then introduce two key figures who were responsible for designing, distributing and implementing two contrasting imperial theories of community. Subsequently, I sketch the migratory history of the category following the ancestors of today's so-called ‘Burmese Indians' across the Bay of Bengal from India to Burma. The final part of the article presents the repercussions ‘community' has in contemporary Myanmar, drawing on recent legislation around ‘race and religion’ as well as my own ethnographic data from religious processions of ethno-religious minorities who find themselves in a subaltern position vis-à-vis the Buddhist majority population and an ethnonationalist state.KEYWORDS: MyanmarempireMuslimsHinduscommunalismcommunity AcknowledgmentsI wish to thank my interlocutors in Myanmar for the faith they bestowed in me, for trusting me to tell their stories and for accepting my family and me into your homes, mosques, and temples. I also thank Felix Girke for reading and commenting on this article as well as the anonymous reviewers and the editors of History and Anthropology for their constructive feedback.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Ethnographic fieldwork in Yangon took place between 2012 and 2020 (a total of 15 months). In addition to participant observation, I collected the life histories and genealogies of my main interlocutors, legal documentation, statistical information, and newspaper articles, and I followed all my interlocutors on social media. Moreover, I consulted colonial-era documents compiled by state officials and housed in the India Office Records, that is, the archives of the East India Company (1600–1858), the Board of Control (1784–1858), the India Office (1858–1947) and the Burma Office (1937–1948), nowadays all located in the British Library in London. I have profited from Mandy Sadan’s meticulously researched A Guide to Colonial Sources on Burma (Citation2008), in which she has compiled extensive lists of references from all four archives, with a specific focus on what she calls ‘minority histories’.2 These first encounters would always happen in the English language as people assumed that I would not be able to understand Burmese, being a ‘Westerner’. The noteworthy part is that the person would choose the first person plural (‘We are … ’) even when it was just the two of us speaking.3 I do not recapitulate the vast literature in anthropology and sociology on community per se. Many others before have done so. See, for example, Hillery (Citation1955), McMillan and Chavis (Citation1986), Brint (Citation2001), Creed (Citation2006), Esposito (Citation2010), Rosa et al. (Citation2010).4 While community structures the possibilities of how people are socially allowed to (inter-)act and how they can perceive sameness or difference vis-à-vis others, the category would remain meaningless – or would lose much of its naturalistic appeal – without the ongoing, subtler ways in which individuals exist themselves (drawing on Sartre (Citation(1943) 1992, 460) and by which they come to embody, experience and discursively forge a sense of we that does not rely on the category of community. It is beyond the frame of this article to delve into these practices of what I call we-formation and which I see in a dialectical and dynamic relation to the work of community. I develop the concept in detail in my book (Beyer Citation2023).5 For further literature on the different connotations of communalism in colonial and contemporary India and the relation to (village) communities see, for example, Chandra (Citation1984), Chatterjee (Citation1993), Gottschalk (Citation2012), Pandey (Citation1990), Prakash (Citation2002), Nandy (Citation1990, Citation(1983) 1991), Ray (Citation2003), Sinha (Citation2006).6 See also the work of Karuna Mantena (Citation2010).7 See also Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst’s (Citation2017) work on the racialization of religious identities in colonial India.8 The exact number of people who migrated across the Bay of Bengal to reach Burma cannot be accurately determined, as migrants regularly travelled back and forth (see Jaiswal Citation2014).9 See also Appadurai (Citation1998) on ‘enumerative strategies’ in India and Cohn (Citation1987) for an earlier analysis). On tain-yin-tha: see Cheesman (Citation2017, 467), de Mersan (Citation2016) and Robinne (Citation2019).10 See Carstens (Citation2018) on the new category Buddha-bha-tha-lu-myo (‘Buddhist ethnicity’).11 The list was published in the Myanma-language newspaper Workers’ Daily, 26 September 1990, 7.12 The colonial era personal status laws still in place in Myanmar today are The Trusts Act (India Act II) (1882), Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act. (1937), The Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Act. (1954), The Mussalman Wakf Validating Act. No 6. (1913), The Mussalman Wakf Act. No 42. (1923) and The Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act. (1939).13 Puja is Sanskrit for ‘reverence’ or ‘worship’ and describes an elaborate prayer ritual that is usually carried out inside the temple compound by the temple priests (pujari).14 Next to skin colour, clothing styles and body decorations are the local indicators that people attribute to a person as ‘Burmese Indian’ or as ‘Buddhist Bama’.15 The Burmese concept of bha-tha evolved only in the 19th century ‘in response to the encounter with Westerner’s conceptions of religion’ (Brac de la Perrière Citation2009, 187), whereas the Burmese thathana (from Pali sāsana), signifies a more fluid and encompassing Burmese Buddhicized social space that also includes spirit worship (see Brac de la Perrière Citation2017).