Colonial Intimacies in Comparative Perspective: Intermarriage ......cultural milieu of the 1930s in...
Transcript of Colonial Intimacies in Comparative Perspective: Intermarriage ......cultural milieu of the 1930s in...
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Colonial Intimacies in Comparative Perspective:
Intermarriage, law and cultural difference in British Burma
Chie Ikeya
Rutgers University
Abstract
Since the pioneering work by Ann L. Stoler revealed that ―matters of intimacy‖ were
―matters of state,‖ there has been increased scholarly attention to colonial families,
domesticities and sexualities. Yet this flourishing area of inquiry remains limited by
its preoccupation with relations between European men and ―Native‖ women and
inattention to unions between locals and ―Oriental‖ or ―Asiatic‖ foreigners whose
mass migration was encouraged throughout the various European empires. This
paper examines comparatively these prevalent intimate encounters in British Burma
and shows important commonalities in the way that affective ties, family affairs and
anxieties about intermarriage were managed and confronted.
Introduction
In 1939, the recently established left-wing, nationalist Kyi Pwa Yei or ―Progress‖
press published what is probably the most extensive and elaborate Burmese-language
diatribe against intermarriage and miscegenation. The 350-page book Kabya
Pyatthana (The Half-Caste Problem) by U Pu Galay claimed that marriages between
Burmese women and Indian men, and the half-caste children of such unions,
threatened a spiraling destruction of the Burmese race and culture.1 For a country
described by historians and early European travelers as tolerant and even supportive
of mixed marriages, Kabya Pyatthana may seem like an aberration. Yet this polemic
against intermarriage and miscegenation was in fact representative of the socio-
cultural milieu of the 1930s in Burma, when intimate relations between Burmese
women and foreign men were widely denounced.2 As the British administration
noted in its report on the 1938 anti-Indian riot, one of the most intense and protracted
outbursts of communal violence in colonial Burma, ―one of the major sources of
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anxiety in the minds of a great number of Burmans was the question of the marriage
of their womenfolk with foreigners in general and with Indians in particular.‖3
Since the pioneering work by Ann L. Stoler revealed that ―matters of
intimacy‖—i.e., sex, sentiment, domestic arrangements and child rearing—were
―matters of state,‖4 there has been increased scholarly attention to colonial families,
domesticities and sexualities. Studies modeled on Stoler‘s have made significant
progress in querying the impact of colonialism on local understandings of gender,
racial and ethnic identities and relations.5 Yet, Stoleresque studies of the intimate
remain limited by their preoccupation with relations between European men and
―Native‖ women.6 Texts such as Kabya Pyatthana lead us to direct our attention
away from such relations and towards those between members of the local population
and the so-called Oriental or Asiatic foreigners whose mass migration was
encouraged throughout the various European empires. In colonies such as British
Burma, unions between local women and male migrants from China and South Asia
were far more prevalent than the former form of intermarriage, as evinced by the size
of ―half-caste‖ populations in Burma. At the turn of the twentieth century, for
example, there were 20,423 ―Indo-Burmans‖ and 9,974 Eurasians; by 1931, the
number of Indo-Burmans had increased almost ninefold (182,166), whereas that of
the Eurasians had only doubled (19,200).7
This article explores what these neglected forms of the intimate suggest about
colonial families and domesticities and the interplay between the macroeconomics of
colonialism and the affective economy of the household. Through an examination of
civil court cases and jurisprudential debates dealing with marriage, adultery, divorce,
inheritance and adoption, it investigates the two most common forms of transcultural
intimacies in colonial Burma—―Indo-Burmese‖ and ―Sino-Burmese‖—analyzing
them in a comparative framework that reveals differences and similarities with the
paradigmatic ―Eurasian‖ or ―Anglo-Indian‖ marriage. This comparative perspective
highlights important commonalities in the way that affective ties, family affairs and
anxieties about intermarriage were managed and confronted.
It goes without saying that my sources raise the vexed question of using court
records to study matters of intimacy. Documents produced under highly regulated
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circumstances of the courtroom give us only an incomplete and fragmentary picture
of the lives of the litigants and witnesses, even when the individual testimonies are
registered. Sally Engle Merry has shown that the everyday life seen through the lens
of juridical records is always ―mediated by the language of the law and the
perspective of their writers.‖8 In addition, only a selection of especially important
civil cases in the high court were compiled and published as law reports by the British
colonial administration in Burma. The preponderance of urban and comparatively
wealthy individuals, couples and families among civil cases recorded for posterity
may reflect the selective nature of colonial law reports.
Nevertheless, court records provide a rare window into the inner workings of
Indo- and Sino-Burmese domesticities. As with civil cases in colonial India,9 those
examined here underscore the creativity and resourcefulness of the plaintiffs,
defendants, appellants and their attorneys, who knowingly crafted narratives of
kinship ties and cultural affinity that they calculated were most likely to result in a
favorable outcome under plural legal jurisdiction—a legal system extended to Burma
upon its piecemeal incorporation into the British Raj starting in 1826.10
In a plural
legal order, cases related to family relations and religion were exempted from the civil
law of the state and were made subject to the ―personal law‖ of the individuals
involved in the dispute.11
Just as the British identified the indigenous religious
systems that would form the basis for laws of the family as Hindu and Muslim and
worked to codify them accordingly,12
the British in Burma identified Buddhism as the
indigenous religious system that would form the basis for laws of the family.13
The
indigenous dhammasat texts—extant in thousands of palm-leaf and paper manuscript
versions that attest to their popularity in precolonial Burma—were recognized as the
legal and ethical treatises that outlined appropriate Buddhist social practices and
methods of dispute settlement and the foundational sources of ―Burmese Buddhist
law.‖ Accordingly, in cases concerning marriage, divorce, inheritance and
succession, the courts administered the ―Burmese Buddhist law‖ in cases where the
parties were Buddhists, ―Mohammedan law‖ in cases where the parties were
Muslims, and ―Hindu law‖ where the parties were Hindus. Litigants often knew and
calibrated the attendant prerogatives and penalties of each law and opportunistically
and purposefully appealed to such notions of cultural difference as ―Chineseness,‖
―Burmeseness,‖ ―Hinduness,‖ and ―Muslimness‖ in an attempt to privilege an
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understanding of conjugality and family that most suited their needs at the time. In so
doing, plaintiffs and defendants inserted themselves into broader debates about
communal identity and its definition and boundaries. Their actions worked to both
throw into question and, simultaneously, concretize colonial categories of rule.
My use of the term ―Indo-Burmese‖ requires a brief explanation. The British
administration employed a similar term, ―Indo-Burman,‖ to refer namely to the
Burmese vernacular term zerbadee, the descendant of a Muslim father and a Burmese
Buddhist mother.14
Neither the term ―Indo-Burman‖ nor zerbadee was used to
include the offspring of non-Muslim Indian men and Burmese women, for which the
census did not provide a separate category. The category Sino-Burmese likewise
never entered the colonial census in Burma. The only classifications available for
people of multiple or mixed racial identification were ―Anglo-Indian‖ (which
replaced the original ―Eurasian‖) and ―Indo-Burman.‖ I apply a more capacious
meaning to the term ―Indo-Burmese‖ not only to attend to a wider range of affective
relations between Indian and Burmese men and women but also to reframe these
forms of the intimate as transcultural, rather than simply transreligious or transracial,
conjugalities and families.
Finally, it should also be noted that terms such as ―Indo-Burmese‖ and ―Sino-
Burmese‖ are not meant to presuppose the existence of fixed and separate cultural
formations. Underlying my approach to this category of difference is a view well
articulated by Sheldon Pollock that ―all culture is really transculture,‖ a continuous
process of historical transformation. The stories of transcultural intimacies that
unfold in the following pages call into question a conception of culture as an already
perfected, closed and stable repertoire of practices ―existing before and standing
outside the vagaries of historical process.‖15
They highlight the protean and
contingent character of cultural difference, which ambiguously fused categories of
class distinctions, lineage, nationality, social customs, habits and rituals with
emergent notions of religion and race, lending itself to deployment not only by
colonial authorities but also by colonized subjects in their respective endeavors to
legitimate gradations of power and disempowerment. They frustrate such categories
as ―Chinese,‖ ―Indian,‖ ―Burmese,‖ ―Hindu,‖ ―Muslim,‖ and ―Buddhist‖ imposed
upon the litigants by the colonial administrative machinery and throw into sharp relief
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the historicity, instability and amorphousness of these putatively unchanging and
unitary identities.
Bound by Law? Legal Pluralism and the Intermarriage Problem
In the decades following the British annexation of Lower Burma in 1850, men, and to
a much lesser extent women, came from the colonial metropole, British India and
Malaya, the Straits Settlements, as well as China, to fill the numerous administrative,
commercial, industrial and agricultural niches created by industrialization and the
expansion and elaboration of the infrastructure, the financial system and the capitalist
market economy in Burma. Integration into British India triggered a steady stream of
a diverse array of Bengali, Tamil and Telegu kala (Indian)16
and Hokkien, Cantonese
and Hakka tayoke (Chinese) clerks, traders, workers and laborers. The large influx of
male immigrants and the minuscule population of kala and tayoke women in Burma
led to a rapid growth in relations between foreign men and local women.17
Although,
as indicated above, census data do not provide information on the Sino-Burmese or
the greater Indo-Burmese population, there was no shortage of administrative—
especially judicial—documents attesting to the prevalence of these forms of
heterosexual coupling. For instance, the chief justice who ruled in a decisive case on
whether Burmese Buddhist law should apply to a Sino-Burmese marriage asserted
that ―it must not be lost sight of that Chinamen have come and settled in Burma in
growing numbers since the first occupation of the country‖ and ―more than any other
race they have inter-married and joined in the social and religious life of the people of
the country.‖18
While the administration claimed that the ―Burmese-Hindu marriage‖
was less widespread than the ―Burmese-Muslim marriage,‖ it‘s unclear precisely how
much less frequent the former form of intermarriage was, especially given that Indian
Hindu men in Burma far outnumbered Indian Muslim men in 1931 (see Table 1).19
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Indians classified by religion
Religion Actual population
Persons Males Females
Hindu 565,609 425,389 140,220
Muslim 396,594 271,514 125,080
Buddhist 12,600 9,778 2,822
Christian 30,135 18,015 12,120
Sikh 10,896 7,882 3,014
Others 1,991 1,333 658
Table 1 (Source: Census 1931, Report, 227)
Following the long-established practice of using intermarriage for the
acculturation—or Burmanization—of sojourners, Burmese women became the
anchors of the families of migrant men, the majority of whom arrived in Burma
effectively kinless and reliant upon locals for kinship in an alien society.20
Yet, the
critics of intermarriage argued, the combined effect of the large-scale importation of
foreign and mostly male labor and enactment of a plural legal system was the
emergence of an unusually pernicious kind of intermarriage that stripped Burmese
women of their customary rights as represented in the dhammasat texts. The
problem, as described during a Legislative Council meeting in 1927, was that under
the British colonial administration, the dhammasat texts no longer governed
marriages between Burmese women and foreign men:
Now a marriage with a Hindu was not valid because a caste Hindu
could not marry outside his caste; a marriage with a Moslem could not
be legally effected unless the Burman Buddhist woman became a
Moslem convert; even after such conversion, the Moslem husband
retained the right to marry as many as four wives and he had only to
pronounce the word Talak three times if he desired to divorce his
Burman wife or any other wife.21
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
In other words, women forfeited the benefits of the status of a married woman under
Burmese Buddhist law such as an equal share in the property acquired by a woman
and her husband during the marriage and joint custody of all the children in the event
of divorce.
An earlier case exemplifies this concern. In 1906, a Burmese woman who had
lived for sixteen years with a Hindu man as husband and wife by his own admission
found that she was not considered his lawful wife. The ―husband,‖ Doramoswami,
testified as follows:
Ma Shwe Me is my wife. I took her to wife about 16 years ago. She
and I had been living together since then. She bore me six children. I
do not eat with her, but I sleep with her. I cook my own food and eat
it.... I own paddy land, which is in my name and in that of Ma Shwe
Me. I gave her only 100 baskets of paddy and about Rs. 60 a year. I
also supply her children with clothes. No one gave her to me in
marriage. I had to woo her for about three months.22
However, he argued that they were not lawfully married because Ma Shwe Me was
not Hindu and therefore had no right to his property. The presiding judge concurred:
―I think it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Doramoswami is subject to
Hindu law, and that Ma Shwe Me is not his lawful wife.‖23
A 1929 case that upheld the legality of an Indo-Burmese marriage between
one Ma Chit May and a zerbadee man Dawood also demonstrates the precarious
position of the wife. Ma Chit May had eloped with Dawood and was converted to
Islam by a moulvi in the presence of Dawood‘s mother, Ma Shwe Baw, in order to
solemnize their marriage. The couple lived together as husband and wife for about
nine years and had two children who were raised Muslim. Upon Dawood‘s death,
however, Ma Shwe Baw claimed that her son was never lawfully married, his children
were illegitimate, and she, not Ma Chit May, was the rightful heir to her son‘s
possessions. The moulvi testified that he had not married the couple though he had
converted Ma Chit May. In explaining his ruling in favor of the widow, the presiding
judge emphasized the strong evidence of ―cohabitation and repute‖ in the case. While
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acknowledging that there were questions as to ―whether the formalities required by
Mohamedan Law for a valid marriage were observed,‖ he doubted ―the necessity for
insisting on these requirements when there was strong evidence of subsequent living
together as man and wife.‖24
Yet his decision also highlights the centrality of
conversion to the validity of the marriage. If not for her conversion, Ma Chit May
would have in all likelihood lost the case despite the admission by the very relatives
who challenged the legitimacy of the marriage ―that she behaved in every way as a
wife, that she was looked on as a wife by them, that her children were treated as
Dawood‘s children and that they had no complaint whatsoever to make as to her
conduct as wife.‖25
It is worth pointing out that conversion posed a challenge not only in the case
of the Muslim-Burmese but also the Christian-Burmese marriage. Though conversion
was not a requirement to effect a lawful marriage between a Christian and a Burmese
Buddhist individual, which could be contracted by civil contract before a registrar,
such marriages nevertheless took the conjugal relations outside the pale of Burmese
Buddhist law. For example, the Buddhist party in such marriages could not sue a
Christian spouse for divorce. Either way, the marriage meant civil death for the
woman in the eyes of Burmese Buddhist law. The Sino-Burmese marriage was
similarly problematic. While a union between a Burmese Buddhist and a Chinese
―Confucian‖ or ―Taoist‖ could be legally contracted without religious conversion, the
personal law of the parties determined inheritance and succession. Even in marriages
that involved Chinese Buddhist spouses, the court still held that Burmese and Chinese
Buddhism had little in common and that in so far as succession was concerned,
―Chinese customary law‖ or the Indian Succession Act—the so called rule of justice,
equity and good conscience—should apply.26
All of these forms of intermarriage had
the potential to, and did at times, infringe upon the rights of a Burmese Buddhist
woman.
The colonial plural legal system could work to the disadvantage of the Indian
or Chinese party as well. For instance, in 1892, a Muslim man, Mouna Maung Gale,
sued the lover of his Burmese wife Ma Pu for adultery. According to the plaintiff, Ma
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Pu was an observant Muslim whom he had married by offering money to the mosque
and giving matrimonial consent in the presence of witnesses:
Ma Pu had to live and eat according to our custom. We became
husband and wife by consent in the presence of witnesses without
performing marriage ceremony with the native lugyis [respected
elders]. I have four wives, two women of my race and two Burmese
women. On the occasion of my marriage with each of the four women
I had to put into the mosque Rs. 25 according to our custom.27
Despite the district magistrate‘s view that ―there were many respectable persons of
different races who lived together as man and wife‖ and ―the Government has issued
no notification that such marriages were not legal,‖28
Mouna Maung Gale ultimately
lost the case on the basis that Ma Pu had not converted to Islam and therefore was
never his lawful wife. Even in cases where conversion to Islam by the wife was
proven, it was not uncommon for the Muslim husband to find that he had lost all his
conjugal rights upon her apostasy.29
Apostasy was one among other matrimonial
strategies available to a woman seeking to reassert her traditional legal rights as a
Burmese woman.
However, we must not lose sight of the broader picture of Indo- and Sino-
Burmese marriages that emerges from the court records, which supports the statement
by the district magistrate in the case against Ma Pu that ―there were many respectable
persons of different races who lived together as man and wife‖ without the legality of
their unions being questioned. In practice, the enforcement of plural legal jurisdiction
was inconsistent and many judges modified the rule of personal law as they saw fit.
In a 1927 case that raised the issue of whether a Chinese Buddhist widow was entitled
to inherit all her deceased Chinese husband‘s property, the presiding judge pointed
out that whereas the Chinese customary law excludes a widow from inheritance when
there are surviving sons or daughters, ―the rule that the widow does not inherit has not
hitherto been adopted in the Courts in this country,‖ adding that in the most recent
ruling on the subject, the court found that the widow was entitled to a one-third share
of the deceased husband‘s estate.30
Similarly, judicial officials often chose to
recognize a marriage between a Buddhist and a Hindu rather than annul it and
bastardize its offspring, despite the prevailing theory that a marriage between a Hindu
and a Buddhist could not be legally contracted.31
The marriage of Seniyappa
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Anamalay, a Tamil migrant from Madras, and Ma Me, a Buddhist Burmese woman,
which came to the attention of the Chief Court of Lower Burma in 1906, is probably
typical of many an Indo-Burmese marriage. In describing their marriage of
approximately seventeen years, Seniyappa admitted that they had had no formal
marriage ceremony but had agreed to live together and did so until Ma Me passed
away, stressing that she cooked for him and they together went to Buddhist pagodas
to worship. While acknowledging that a Hindu cannot legally marry a Burmese
Buddhist woman, the chief justice who decided the case in the widower‘s favor
maintained that ―the frequency of permanent alliances between Tamil cultivators and
Burmese women in this province tends to show that Tamils of the lower orders do not
consider themselves bound by a rule of Hindu law which Hindus of the recognized
castes regards as one of the essentials of their religion and system.‖32
Although conversion was in principle a crucial element of some of the Indo-
Burmese marriages, the transformation was often more symbolic than substantive,
echoing the pattern of Sino-Malay marriages in British Malaya where Chinese men
became Muslims nominally for the purpose of marrying Muslim Malay women.33
In
one such case from 1875, all parties acknowledged that the Burmese wife Mi Shwe
Ywet ―never was anything else than a Buddhist, though to enable her husband to
marry her she did profess Mahomedanism,‖ emphasizing that the couple had also
been married by Burmese customs, i.e., the husband had asked permission of her
parents to marry her and provided bride price.34
By and large, civil cases involving mixed families challenge what Gauri
Viswanathan calls ―conversion as assimilation,‖ a presumption that conversion
entailed a comprehensive change of habits and customs,35
and call attention to the
transcultural character of their familial ties that defied fixed juridical notions of racial,
religious and cultural identities, communities and customs. Three cases, each
separated by roughly a decade, pertaining to succession or inheritance of Indo-
Burmese and Sino-Burmese families serve as telling examples.
Ma Le and Ma Me v. Maung Hlaing and Ma Mi (1905)
In February 1905, two zerbadee women filed an appeal against a decision by the
District Court of Mandalay that decided that Muslim law, not Burmese Buddhist law,
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should apply to Muslim zerbadees in so far as inheritance and succession were
concerned.36
The appellants argued that there was ―abundant evidence that outside
the Courts the Zerbadis [sic] voluntarily and habitually applied the Buddhist law in
cases of inheritances[,] that immemorial usage amounts to consent of the people who
are subject to the law.‖37
As evidence, the appellants presented the prior judgments of
Justice Richardson, a veteran judge in the civil court of Mandalay, showing that in
applying the Burmese Buddhist law to zerbadees in inheritance matters, the British
courts were following the practice not only of the Burmese courts but of the
zerbadees themselves. In addition, over a dozen witnesses were called to testify in
support of the claim that the Burmese Buddhist law was the invariable rule of
decision in inheritance cases among zerbadees in Mandalay. The witnesses included:
a mulla and long-time resident of Mandalay who testified that prior to and
immediately after the British annexation of Upper Burma, questions of inheritance
amongst the zerbadees were decided among themselves voluntarily as well as in the
courts according to the laws applicable to Burmese Buddhists; a Persian man who
stated that in the forty years that he lived in Mandalay, he had not once heard of a
zerbadee requesting the application of Muslim law; an elderly zerbadee and honorary
magistrate of Mandalay who explained that Muslim zerbadees did not strictly follow
the Burmese Buddhist law, thought they were guided by it and in general chose to
deal with matters of inheritance without going to the courts; a fifty-year-old zerbadee
lawyer and a Burmese Buddhist ex-official both of whom not only affirmed that cases
involving zerbadees were not decided according to Muslim law but also characterized
the zerbadee community as basically Burmese except for their religion; and a haji
who asserted that if zerbadees went to court, their inheritance cases were decided by
Buddhist law whereas if the division was made outside the court, ―it was neither
according to Buddhist or Mahomedan law, but just as was thought fit.‖38
In this case as in earlier civil cases concerning zerbadees, the court
acknowledged what it perceived to be the assimilation of the zerbadee population,
noting in particular that most zerbadees had Burmese names, spoke only Burmese and
dressed Burmese. The presiding judge even went so far as to compliment the lawyer
for the appellants for persuasively demonstrating that ―there is existing from time
immemorial a custom having the force of law, by which questions of inheritance and
succession affecting the Zerbadis of Mandalay have been decided by Buddhist law.‖39
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Nevertheless, he dismissed the appeal, concluding that this custom that had been
―forced on the Zerbadis by a despotic monarchy‖ that, unlike the just British
administration, refused to permit the application of any other law in courts.40
Ma Yait v. Chit Maung and Maung Chit Maung v. Ma Yait and another (1913–21)
In August 1921, the Privy Council heard two consolidated appeal cases from the
Chief Court of Lower Burma concerning the estate of a wealthy Indo-Burmese
merchant and respected member of Rangoon‘s elite circles, Ohn Ghine, who died in
1911.41
He had left a will appointing his wife Ma Yait and daughter Ma Noo as
trustees of his estate, but his son Chit Maung disputed this provision, contesting the
validity of the will on the basis that his father was Hindu. Had Hindu law been
applied to Ohn Ghine‘s estate, as requested by Chit Maung, Ma Yait and Ma Noo
would have been entitled only to maintenance—and only until (re)marriage—out of
the estate, which would have been handed over to one of Ohn Ghine‘s sons for
administration. The issue to be decided therefore was the religious status of Ohn
Ghine.
All parties involved agreed that Ohn Ghine was ―as much Burmese as Indian
by blood, and in dress, language and manner of life he was more Burmese than
Indian.‖42
He came from an Indo-Burmese family whose members professed to be
Hindus and yet also ―worshipped at the pagoda, fed the pongyis [monks] and
observed Buddhist fasts and festivals.‖43
No one denied that he could not be
considered an orthodox Hindu. But could Ohn Ghine be considered sufficiently
Hindu to warrant the application of Hindu law to his estate? The lawyer for Ma Yait
portrayed Ohn Ghine as primarily Buddhist, emphasizing that he had sent his sons to
a monastic school for Buddhist instruction, arranged the marriage of Chit Maung to a
Buddhist Burmese woman according to Burmese custom and took a leading role in
supporting a number of notable Buddhist projects. For example, in 1900, Ohn Ghine
sent a letter to the governor of Madras on behalf of his ―Buddhist Co-religionists,‖
requesting the return of certain Buddhist relics held at the Madras Museum to be
placed in a shrine that he was building in Rangoon. The following year, he gave an
address on behalf of the Buddhist community in Rangoon to the viceroy, Lord
Curzon, and went on a pilgrimage to the Buddhist temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic in
Kandy (Lanka) with fellow Burmese pilgrims.
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
As Justice Twomey argued, however, evidence presented by Chit Maung did
not show that his father, ―in spite of his liberality to Buddhist monks and his liking for
Buddhist prayers and practices,‖ had renounced his Hindu faith.44
Especially
important to Twomey was the fact that Ohn Ghine did not shinbyu his sons–that is,
sponsor the temporary ordination of his sons as monks—and continued his support of
the Hindu temple in Rangoon, serving as one of its trustees. Twomey also found
instructive that Ma Yait chose to observe Hindu rites at her husband‘s cremation—
though she had also invited Buddhist monks—and sent his ashes to Benares.
Nevertheless, the Privy Council determined that Ohn Ghine, as with the Indo-
Burmese community in general, could not be regarded as Hindu because of the fact
that his ―Hindu-ness‖ was so divergent from ―pure‖ Hinduism as to render him non-
Hindu.45
In the end, the Council decided that the Indian Succession Act should apply
to his estate.
Phan Tiyok v. Lim Kyin Kauk (1930)
The final case, involving all five judges of the Full Bench and a discussion of no less
than nineteen precedent cases over almost one hundred pages, settled the issue of
whether Burmese Buddhist law should govern succession to the estate of one Baw
War, a Buddhist Chinese who had been domiciled in Burma prior to his death in
1923. As Chief Justice Heald noted, the real contest was between his second wife Ma
Hnin Bu, with whom he had two sons and three daughters, and the daughter and son-
in-law of the deceased first wife. The two parties concurred that Baw War was a
Buddhist; the question was what kind of a Buddhist he was, Chinese or Burmese. Ma
Hnin Bu‘s children insisted that their father was a ―Chinese Buddhist‖—that is, a
Buddhist whose customs and practices were also profoundly shaped by
―Confucianism‖ and ―Taoism‖—and pleaded that the Chinese customary law be
applied to his estate, effectively granting administration of the estate to the two sons,
Lim Kyin Kauk and Lim Kyin Swi, and maintenance to the widow and daughters.
Ma Lwe and Phan Tiyok, the daughter and son-in-law from the first marriage, did not
dispute the claim that Baw War was a ―Chinese‖ and a Buddhist but argued for the
application of the Burmese Buddhist law, maintaining that her father routinely
performed many of the common forms of obtaining merit among Burmese Buddhists,
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such as sponsoring shinbyu ceremonies for the sons of other people, building zayats
(public rest-houses for pilgrims and travelers) and giving alms to monks and
monasteries. Ma Hnin Bu, in fact, did not contest much of Ma Lwe‘s testimony,
testifying that she had herself invited Burmese Buddhist monks to Baw War‘s
funeral.46
As in the forgoing Indo-Burmese case, rites and ceremonies mattered greatly
in establishing the ―true‖ religious identity and affiliation of the deceased. And as in
the forgoing case, the court could apparently only determine what Baw War was not;
just as Ohn Ghine had been declared ―not Hindu,‖ Baw War was proclaimed ―not
Burmese Buddhist.‖ ―The difficulty with the estates of Chinese [in Burma],‖ Justice
Heald propounded, ―arises from the fact that the Chinese seem to follow several
religions or so called religions at the same time, or that their religion is a mixture of
several religions, so that when they die their relatives are able to describe them as
belonging to that particular religion, out of the two or three or more which they
professed, which will give those relatives a share of a larger share in the estate.‖47
The court concluded that the Indian Succession Act, neither Burmese Buddhist law
nor Chinese customary law, should be applied.
Managing Transcultural Intimacies: Order, wealth and respectability
As these colonial courtroom dramas demonstrate, transcultural couples and families
opportunistically and adaptively reconfigured cultural elements to fashion new and
distinct configurations of practices, habits, rituals and hierarchies. These families
cannot be described as either ―Chinese,‖ ―Indian,‖ or ―Burmese,‖ ―Confucian,‖
―Hindu,‖ or ―Buddhist.‖ Indo-Burmese and Sino-Burmese alike developed their own
customs, however loosely defined and arranged, that diverged from colonially
determined notions of Hindu, Islamic, Chinese, or Burmese jurisprudence. This is not
to suggest that the attitude and approach of transcultural couples and families towards
communal identity and domestic affairs were laissez-faire. For instance, Justice
Heald in the Phan Tiyok v Lim Kyin Kauk case remarked, after reviewing the nineteen
precedent cases, that the Sino-Burmese had customs of their own and maintained a
distinctive socio-cultural organization. We cannot dismiss his assertion that the Sino-
Burmese ―have their own places of worship, which bear no resemblance to Buddhist
temples, and their own cemeteries,‖ and ―retain their own funeral ceremonies, and
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
particularly, wherever possible, their own peculiar coffins, their own funeral
processions and their own elaborate monuments or gravestones.‖48
While the judge
emphasized separateness of the Sino-Burmese community, minimizing the
community‘s transculturation—after all, the majority of the Sino-Burmese spoke only
Burmese and wore Burmese clothes—and ignoring the fact that the cases he cites
pertain exclusively to well-heeled Sino-Burmese families, it is undeniable that the
group developed a recognizably mixed cultural pattern, a situation that has been
abundantly documented among peranakan, baba, lukjin and other overseas, locally
born and mixed Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.49
The Indo-Burmese
similarly sought to give definition and order to their families and communities,
producing an assortment of conjoined Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist, and Indian and
Burmese practices and institutions.
In particular, the well-to-do classes of transcultural families developed
disciplinary techniques to regulate ―who bedded and who wedded with whom‖ and
manage the respectability and ―cultural competence‖ of the mixed offspring.50
The
preclusion of their own sons from shinbyu-ing appears to have been one of the most
common regulatory practices among the Indo-Burmese and Sino-Burmese alike, as
were endogamous marriages, especially for the sons but even for the daughters who
were encouraged to take India- or China-born husbands, possibly as a way to integrate
them into the Indo- and Sino-Burmese communities. Among the Sino-Chinese, it was
also not uncommon to send sons to China for education, perhaps as a mark of status
or with the goal of sinicizing them. As Lynn Pan succinctly notes in her discussion of
similar practices of re-sinicization among mixed Chinese populations in Southeast
Asia: ―Foreign they might be, but barbarian they would not.‖51
Indeed, these Asian
colonial subjects shared with Eurasian communities anxieties about the cultural
incompetence of their mixed families, in contrast to litigants representing Indo- and
Sino-Burmese families of less means who showed little concern for their socio-
cultural status or repute.
What was at stake, of course, was not only status but wealth and the uneasy
balancing of ―an economy of familial attachments‖ and ―an economy of familial
wealth.‖52
The three cases discussed above, as well as the dozens of precedent cases
relating to succession or inheritance of Indo-Burmese and Sino-Burmese families
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
reviewed during the process of adjudication, strongly indicate that the majority of
these legal battles were fought between female family members—usually the widow
and daughter(s)—who asked that the Burmese Buddhist law be applied to the estate of
the deceased, and male relations appealing to Hindu, Muslim or Chinese customary
law in attempting to claim the estate to the exclusion of the widow and daughter(s),
who were often their mother and sister(s). In other words, debates about which law
was to be applied in intestate succession were not about religious traditions or
communal identities per se but a gendered negotiation over the power and authority to
define familial bonds and control who had access to property and privilege and who
did not. Under colonial rule and law, the issue of foreigners‟ access to and control
over local land, labor and resources and men‟s access to and control over women‟s
land, labor and resources were intertwined.
Customs did nevertheless matter, not least because the burden of proof was
increasingly placed upon those arguing that the customary practice of the deceased
should override the ―personal law‖ of an individual, which was naturalized by the
legal authorities because it was determined, in theory, by one‘s professed religious
affiliation but in actuality, by his/her race and nationality. Even if the person in
question ―conformed more or less to Burman Buddhist practices in subscribing to
religious works and festivals,‖53
courts resisted delinking Indians from Hinduism
and/or Islam, the zerbadee from Islam and the Chinese from the tripartite ―Chinese
religion‖ of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. Unsurprisingly, rituals became
vitally important for the Burmese wives in transcultural domesticities who sought to
oversee overt performance of Burmese (and often Buddhist) rites and ceremonies
such as funerals, shinbyu-ing of male kinsmen (if not sons) and donations to the
sangha in such a way that they safeguarded their (and their children‘s) relative status
in the household and their likelihood of inheriting. There were no doubt other
matrimonial strategies, undocumented in the court records, that these women
developed in an effort to subvert a male-dominated colonial legal structure that had
gradually become less responsive towards their concerns and predicaments.
Conclusion
The critics of intermarriage in colonial Burma singled out the Indo-Burmese kind as a
particularly harmful form of intimate relations that reinforced political and economic
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
colonization with cultural and biological imperialism. This study has shown,
however, that the Indo-Burmese marriage shared much in common with other
transcultural colonial intimacies. Indo-Burmese, Sino-Burmese and even Anglo-
Burmese couples and families faced comparable difficulties as well as opportunities
as domesticities and affective units that defied easy categorization, endured similarly
gendered struggles over family wealth and resources, and adopted overlapping
strategies to these challenges. They all reinforce, to a certain extent, the familiar
argument that the British policy of non-interference towards its colonial subjects in
religious and familial matters and its recognition of personal laws ossified religious
and ethnic identities and eroded heterogeneous customs and cultures.54
Even in cases
of the Sino-Burmese marriage where colonial administrators admitted their ignorance
of what actually constituted Chinese customary rules and practices—unlike in the
case of the Indo-Burmese marriage where judges claimed mastery over the relevant
personal laws, i.e., Hindu, Muslim and Burmese Buddhist—the courts insisted on
imposing and codifying an essentialist understanding of Chinese customary law.55
The litigants, too, found that the most effective legal strategy for winning the contest
over who has the authority to govern the family and its fortunes was to invoke cultural
difference, consigning the involved parties to choose one religious, racial and/or
cultural identity over others. Colonizer and colonized unevenly coauthored a fiction
of discrete ―Burmese,‖ ―Indian,‖ and ―Chinese‖ communities that belied the sustained
transcultural engagements and interactions that cut across the allegedly hard and fast
boundaries that separated them.
At the same time, we must not place undue emphasis on the efficacy of law as
a technology of colonial governance. In Burma, as elsewhere, law played an
undeniably important role in the imperial project of managing difference.56
Yet its
influence on social distinctions and relations between and among different colonial
subjects was at best limited. Even when they availed themselves of the services of the
colonial courts—and it is clear that those who did were in the minority—it is doubtful
that their selves, subjectivities and lives were fundamentally remolded or refashioned
through legal representation. The impact of colonial judicial rulings on the lives of
the colonial subjects can also be gleamed from the way Burmese men and women
responded to the verdicts. A letter to the editor by a woman named Nyi Nyi in a 1938
issue of Ngan Hta Lawka, for example, expressed the author‘s disapproval of a
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
decision made by a judicial commissioner of Lower Burma. The commissioner had
handed down a sentence of fifteen days of ―rigorous imprisonment‖ to a husband who
struck his wife on the head with an ironwood club, cutting open her scalp. The
woman‘s offense was that she had failed to have food ready for her husband upon his
return home. Responding to the magistrate‘s remark that ―the chastisement of wives
should be effected by means of a small cane or bamboo, but in the present instance
the accused has transgressed the ordinary system of chastisement,‖ Nyi Nyi stated:
―In my opinion husbands have no right whatever to chastise their wives, even with
small canes or bamboos, and the magistrate must be careful to disabuse his own mind
of this most erroneous notion of a husband‘s privileges.‖57
She thus challenged the
judicial decision that, characteristically, took patriarchal dominance as the normative
family model and legitimized the patriarch‘s right and responsibility to put his house
and women in order.
In addition, through the protracted and intricate process of argumentation and
adjudication, litigants and judicial authorities alike were compelled to acknowledge
that the notion that an individual or a family unit necessarily had only one religious,
racial, or cultural identity was patently false. Whereas Anglo-Indian métissage raised
the question of whether and which local companions and mixed-race children of
British men should be given the benefits of European membership, intra-Asian
relations posed little threat to the racial and gender hierarchies central to the alleged
civilizational hierarchy of ―English‖ and native races and cultures. When it came to
the latter form of colonial domesticity, judicial officials were not reluctant to
entertain, in the words of Benedict Anderson, ―multiple, politically ‗transvestite,‘
blurred, or changing identifications‖58
even while nominally employing bounded,
determinate and exclusive classifications.
For correspondence: [email protected]. The research for this article was funded
by grants from the National University of Singapore. I gratefully acknowledge the
many insightful comments I received from various scholars at the first conference of
the Family & Colonialism Research Network, where I presented an early version of
this article. I wish to thank Esmé Cleall, Laura Ishiguro and Emily Manktelow, the
organizers of the conference, for their enthusiasm and support for my article. I wish to
also thank D. Christian Lammerts and the anonymous referee of the Journal of
Colonialism and Colonial History for their helpful suggestions and constructive
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
criticisms. Last but not least, this article has benefitted immensely from discussions
with Tamara Loos. All errors and omissions are my own.
Notes
In citing works in the notes, short titles have generally been used. Works frequently
cited have been identified by the following abbreviations:
Census 1921 Government of India, Census of India, 1921, Vol. 10,
Burma (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent,
Government Printing and Stationery, 1923)
Census 1931, Report Government of India, Census of India, 1931: Part One,
Report, Vol. 11, Burma (Rangoon: Office of the
Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery,
1933)
ILR Ran Indian Law Reports, Rangoon Series
LBR Lower Burma Rulings
UBR Upper Burma Rulings
1 U Pu Galay, Ka brā: prassanā (The half-caste problem) (Yangon: Kyi pwa yay,
1939). The word ―kabya,‖ in its most basic meaning, refers to people of mixed
ancestry. The etymology of the word, however, is uncertain.
2 Chie Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‗i Press, 2011), 118–42.
3 Riot Inquiry Committee, Interim Report of the Riot Inquiry Committee (Rangoon:
Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery), 1939, 28.
4 Ann L. Stoler, ―Making Empire Respectable: The politics of race and sexual
morality in 20th-century colonial cultures,‖ American Ethnologist 16/4 (November
1989): 634–60; Ann L. Stoler, ―Rethinking Colonial Categories: European
communities and the boundaries of rule,‖ Comparative Studies in Society and History
31/1 (January 1989): 134–61.
5 For a selective sample of this vast literature, see Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances
Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, gender, and family life in French and
Dutch colonialism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Adele Perry,
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
On the Edge of Empire: Gender, race, and the making of British Columbia, 1849–
1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Philippa Levine, Prostitution,
Race and Politics: Policing venereal disease in the British Empire (New York and
London: Routledge, 2003); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The
making of empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ann L. Stoler,
ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of intimacy in North American history
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and the two volumes co-edited by Tony
Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking colonial encounters
in world history (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) and Moving Subjects:
Gender, mobility, and intimacy in an age of global empire (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2009).
6 Tamara Loos, ―Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia,‖ American Historical
Review 114/5 (December 2009): 1314.
7 Census 1931, Report, 230–32; John C. Koop, The Eurasian Population in Burma
(New Haven: Yale University, Southeast Asia Studies, 1960), 22.
8 Sally E. Merry, Colonizing Hawai„i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 9.
9 See Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1999); Lauren Benton, ―Colonial Law and Cultural
Difference: Jurisdictional politics and the formation of the colonial state,‖
Comparative Studies in Society and History 41/3 (July 1999): 563–88; Rachel
Sturman, ―Property and Attachments: Defining autonomy and the claims of family in
nineteenth-century western India,‖ Comparative Studies in Society and History 47/3
(July 2005): 611–37; Ghosh, Sex and the Family; Chandra Mallampalli, Race,
Religion, and Law in Colonial India: Trials of an interracial family (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Nandini Chatterjee, ―Muslim or Christian?
Family quarrels and religious diagnosis in a colonial court,‖ American Historical
Review 117/4 (October 2012): 1101–22.
10 On legal pluralism in colonial empires, see Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial
Cultures: Legal regimes in world history, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambride
University Press, 2004), 7–12.
11 In Burma as elsewhere, the implementation of colonial law was not straightforward,
as the Indian Civil Service officer and scholar John S. Furnivall (1878–1960) has
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
shown in Colonial Policy and Practice: A comparative study of Burma and
Netherlands India (New York: New York University Press, 1956). In fact, a separate
judicial service—in addition to the position of judicial commissioner and a formal
Chief Court—was not established in British Burma until 1905–6. Yet Furnivall also
points out that by the 1890s, the practice of referring disputes for arbitration to the
local headman had declined significantly and decisions by a local headman, even
when ratified by a Burmese judge, were set aside by the judicial commissioner as
contrary to Burmese law, signifying the displacement of ―Burmese custom‖ by ―the
rule of law‖ (ibid., 29–33, 62–64, 71–77, 131–37).
12 Bernard S. Cohn, ―Law and the Colonial State in India,‖ in Colonialism and Its
Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Pres,
1996), 57–75.
13 This process of codifying Burmese Buddhist law was characterized by the same
tension that marked the process of codification in India: between emphasis on textual
tradition—premised on the notion that personal law could be understood by select
indigenous legal texts—versus ―customary practice‖—based on the observation that
actual social practices diverged from the dictates of those texts and exhibited
important regional and local variations. By the time of Burma‘s annexation, the
British had recognized, in theory, that custom should be treated as the most legitimate
source of law. Nevertheless, colonial authorities proceeded to identify the indigenous
dhammasat texts as the foundational sources of law in Burma. For an example of this
process of codification of Burmese Buddhist law, see U Gaung, Translation of “A
Digest of the Burmese Buddhist Law Concerning Inheritance and Marriage; Being a
Collection of Texts from Thirty-Six Dhammathats” (Rangoon: Office of the
Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, 1909) and John Jardine, trans.,
King Wagaru‟s Manu Dhammasattham: Text, translation and notes (Rangoon: Office
of the Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, 1934).
14 The term zerbadee entered the census in British Burma for the first time in 1891
when only 24 zerbadee were recorded (Census 1931, Report, 230–31).
15 Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, culture,
and power in premodern India (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009),
528, 533.
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
16
The word kala can also mean ―foreigners,‖ including the British and more generally
―Europeans.‖ But in the twentieth century, the word began to refer almost exclusively
to ―Indians,‖ and the word bo appeared instead as the common word used to denote
―European.‖
17 In 1931, approximately 72 percent of kala and 66 percent of tayoke were male. Of
the immigrant population from India, which constituted roughly eighty percent of the
total immigrant population in Burma, females represented only 18 and 16 percent in
1921 and 1931, respectively. Females accounted for 21 percent of the total immigrant
population from China and 32 percent of the total European immigrant population
(Census 1921, 90–91; Census 1931, Report, 60–63).
18 In Re Ma Yin Mya and one v. Tan Yauk Pu and two (1927) 5 ILR Ran, 406, 419.
19 Census 1931, Report, 211.
20 For a discussion of the use of marriage as a mechanism for acculturation and for the
cultivation of (political) allegiance in precolonial Burma, see Ikeya, Refiguring
Women.
21 Cited in Nalini R. Chakravarti, The Indian Minority in Burma: The rise and decline
of an immigrant community, with a foreword by Hugh Tinker (London: Oxford
University Press, 1971), 125.
22 Maung Man v. Doramo (1906) 3 LBR, 244, 244–45.
23 Ibid., 245.
24 Maung Kyi and others v. Ma Shwe Baw (1929) 7 ILR Ran, 777, 778, 781.
25 Ibid., 782.
26 Phan Tiyok v Lim Kyin Kauk (1930) 8 ILR Ran, 57; Tan Ma Shwe Zin v. Tan Ma
Ngwe Zin and others (1932) 10 ILR Ran, 97; Ma Sein Byu and another v. Khoo Soon
Thye and others (1933) 11 ILR Ran, 310.
27 Queen-Empress v. Nga Pale (1892), Printed Judgments, Lower Burma, 1893–1900,
608.
28 Ibid.
29 See, for example, Ma Saing vs. Kader Moideen (1901) in Aviet Agabeg, ed., Burma
Law Reports, vol. 8, pt. 1 (1902), 16–18; Kumal Sheriff v. Mi Shwe Ywet (1875),
Selected Judgments, Lower Burma, 1872–1892, 49–51; Ali Asghar v Mi Kra Hla U
(1916) 8 LBR, 461.
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
30
Maung Po Maung and One v. Ma Pyit Ya (alias) Ma Thein Tin (1927) 1 ILR Ran,
160, 168–69.
31 See, for example, WR Vanoogopaul v. R Kristnasawmy Muduliar alias Maung
Maung (1905) 3 LBR, 25.
32 S. Anamalay Pillay v. Po La (1906) 3 LBR, 228, 229.
33 Tan Chee Beng, The Baba of Melaka: Culture and identity of a Chinese Peranakan
community in Malaysia (Selangor Darul Ehsan: Pelanduk Publications, 1988).
34 Kumal Sheriff v. Mi Shwe Ywet (1875), Selected Judgments, Lower Burma, 1872–
1892, 49.
35 Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, modernity and belief (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998).
36 The judge in this case had followed a precedent set in 1895 in another case
concerning a zerbadee family. See Ahmed and another v. Ma Pwa (1895) UBR, 529,
cited in Chan-Toon, Leading Cases on Buddhist Law (Rangoon: Hanthawaddy Press,
1899), 382–88.
37 Ma Le and Ma Me v. Maung Hlaing and Ma Mi (1905) 2 UBR, 1, 1–2.
38 Ibid., 3–5.
39 Ibid., 1.
40 Ibid., 6.
41 Ma Yait v Maung Chit Maung, and Maung Chit Maung v Ma Yait and Another
(1921) 11 LBR, 155.
42 Ibid., 158.
43 Chit Maung v Ma Yait and Ma Noo (1913) 7 LBR, 362, 363.
44 Ma Yait v Maung Chit Maung, and Maung Chit Maung v Ma Yait and Another,
158.
45 Ibid., 157–59,162.
46 Phan Tiyok v Lim Kyin Kauk, 60–61.
47 Ibid., 64.
48 Phan Tiyok v Lim Kyin Kauk, 117.
49 Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A history of the Chinese diaspora (New
York: Kodansha America, 1994); Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others:
Emigration in modern times (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); John
Clammer, Straits Chinese Society (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1980) and
© 2013 Chie Ikeya and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Diaspora and Identity: The sociology of culture in Southeast Asia (Selangor Darul
Ehsan, Malaysia: Pelanduk, 2002); Anthony Reid, ed., Sojourners and Settlers:
Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin,
1996); Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic
Press, 1991); Tan, Baba of Melaka.
50 Stoler, ―Making Empire Respectable,‖ 636–37.
51 Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 157.
52 Ghosh, Sex and the Family, 132.
53 Kyin Wet v Ma Gyok (1918), 9 LBR, 179, 76, referenced in Phan Tiyok v Lim Kyin
Kauk.
54 Cohn, ―Law and the Colonial State in India‖; Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind:
Colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001); Ghosh, Sex and the Family, 170-205.
55 For the protracted jurisprudential debate on the proper adjudication of Sino-
Burmese marriages and what constituted Chinese customary law, see Hong Ku and
Hock Kung v. Ma Thin (1881) Selected Judgments, Lower Burma, 1872–1892, 135–
45; In Re Ma Yin Mya and one v. Tan Yauk Pu and two; Phan Tiyok v Lim Kyin Kauk;
Tan Ma Shwe Zin v. Tan Ma Ngwe Zin and others; and Hla Aung, ―Sino-Burmese
Marriages and Conflict of Laws,‖ The Burma Law Institute Journal 1/1 (Autumn
1958): 25–55.
56 For a comparative history of the central role that legal orders and notions of
difference played in global imperial formations between 1400 and 1900, see Benton,
Law and Colonial Cultures.
57 Nyi Nyi, ―Correspondence,‖ Ngan hta lawka (The world of books) 24/158 (March
1938): 56.
58 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and spread
of nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso 1991), 166.