Phantoms of silenced pasts: Lessons for today from the forgotten history of Burmese Indians’ exodus from Burma

Abstract

This article explores the lives of Burmese Indians ‐ Indian minorities that had migrated to and subsequently settled in Colonial Burma but later repatriated or fled Burma between the 1930s and 1960s. The stories of Burmese Indians who once made up a noticeable minority in Burma are conspicuously under-represented from historical records of both India and Burma today. Due to this silencing, these stories have receded to the periphery of public memory and now survive as grandparents’ tales of immigration and folk memories. Furthermore, the invisibilization of these stories from the Burmese memory-scape has created a peculiar situation wherein not only is the Burmese Indians’ exodus disembedded from Burma’s wider history but the current ethnic tensions, particularly the violence against the Rohingya Muslims, is perceived as delinked from any anti-India rhetoric of the past. This article attempts to weave the Burmese Indians’ exodus into the larger historical trajectory of the state and read the Rohingya Muslims’ exodus as another illustration of Burma’s haunting legacy of dealing with the ethnically different ‘other’.