E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
Collis Trials in Burma
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ISBN: 978-0-571-31011-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-31011-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Maurice Collis was born in 1889, the son of an Irish solicitor. He entered the Indian Civil Service in 1911 and was posted to Burma, rising to the position of district magistrate in Rangoon in 1929, where the independence of his judgments displeased his superiors who moved him to the position of Excise Commissioner. He returned to England in 1934. He wrote over twenty books, including volumes of autobiography, travel writing, novels, histories and three plays. He died in 1973.
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1. ALL SOULS
On a raw afternoon in December 1927 Geoffrey Faber and I set out from London for Oxford. In the suburbs a fog descended and it grew so thick that I had to stop the car. Geoffrey got out and walked in front, while I crept after him in bottom gear. With Oxford fifty miles away and darkness falling, this was an inadequate method of progression, but we continued doggedly, because to go back became as difficult as to go on. Our perseverance was rewarded, for in half an hour the fog thinned and Geoffrey embarked again. It was still not very safe—once a tree loomed in front of us and we avoided it by inches—but at six o’clock we crossed Magdalen Bridge and shortly afterwards drew up at the porch of All Souls College.
The porter told me I was to stay in Lionel Curtis’s rooms. Here was an odd turn, for Lionel Curtis was best known to members of the Indian Civil Service like myself as the reputed inventor of Indian Diarchy. For me to go up casually to Oxford with the Bursar of All Souls and be allotted the rooms of the man under whose constitution I had laboured for years gave me a sniff, as it were, of something to come, and as I followed the assistant porter through the draughty passages, I was sure the coincidence pointed a sequel.
The rooms themselves were bare enough, as ascetic as a monk’s cell, though a fire had been lit and in a corner gleamed the blue of some Persian tiles. I changed my clothes and went down to the Smoking Room.
Faber was waiting for me with a glass of sherry.
‘As it’s Saturday night a good many of the Fellows are dining in,’ he said, and added, ‘You’ll be interested to hear that Simon is coming. I must introduce you to him later on.’
That was it, then; I had felt there was something in the air—for Sir John Simon had just been appointed Chairman of the Parliamentary Commission, which was to visit India and Burma and make recommendations for a form of government more liberal than Lionel Curtis’s diarchy.
At dinner I was placed next a Fellow whom I used to know well as an undergraduate at Corpus. He was my year, and after the Honour Schools we had parted, he going on to an academic career in the university, while I had set out for Burma as a Civilian. It was a long time since then—sixteen years. Now in the panelled hall, hung with the portraits of scholars and divines, as I ate my well-cooked dinner, drank from fine glasses good wine, handled the old silver, I was oppressed by the contrast of my own existence, passed on remote sea shores where the wind sighed in the casuarina-trees or beside rivers which flowed through extravagant flowers. Perhaps I had done wrong to choose the active life, perhaps I should never have adventured beyond the cloister and the library.
‘You know,’ I said turning to my companion, ‘I once wanted to be a don.’
‘I remember,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t it Shaw-Stewart’s year that you sat for the All Souls Fellowship?’
‘Yes, I thought seriously then of the university.’
‘It might not have suited you; you were such a romantic. There are silences here, you know. You couldn’t have borne them.’
‘What happened to Shaw-Stewart?’
‘He was killed in the war.’
I had been lucky, then, to yield him my place. Had I entered the life of books and contemplation I should have been thrown by a contrary fate into an extreme of action. That I had sailed to Burma had probably saved my life.
‘You are going back soon, I suppose?’ he asked.
I told him that my leave was nearly up, that I was returning in February.
When dinner was over Geoffrey Faber introduced me to Sir John as an Indian Civilian on leave from Burma.
‘Burma, that’s Innes, isn’t it?’ he said in his objective way, naming the Governor, and went on to ask a number of questions.
‘We shan’t get round there till this time next year,’ he concluded. ‘Whereabouts will you be then?’
‘I can’t say, but perhaps we shall meet.’
He turned away to speak to someone else.
2. BESIDE THE IRRAWADDY
A little later I received a letter from the Burma Secretariat in Rangoon to say that on return from leave I was to take charge of the administration of the Sagaing district as Deputy Commissioner. I had been in Sagaing in 1912, and remembered it well as a country town in the heart of Upper Burma. The Irrawaddy went by it and adjacent were the old capitals, Ava and Mandalay. Sagaing, too, had once been a capital, and it had one claim to international interest—Yung-li, the last of the Great Ming, had lived there in 1660, as a fugitive from the Ch’ing. But it was a dead little place, and as I packed up I was by no means thrilled by the prospect ahead of me.
A month later I got out of the train on the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy and looked over the river to the Sagaing shore, a wide prospect in the splendid light. Behind the town with its mat and wooden houses was a cluster of yellow hills, on the top of each a golden pagoda, with monasteries in profusion on their lower slopes.
There, bathed in sunshine, secret and still, was Buddhist Burma. Coming upon it suddenly, after long leave in London, it seemed like a picture in an old book of travels. I was ferried across and soon stood under the tamarinds on the farther bank, speaking with those who had come to meet me.
One enters as through a door into such a life. The door closes behind and after a while one appears never to have been anywhere else. But at first all is strange. Though I had known Burma for so many years, passing through the door was just as strange as ever.
Setting about to get my focus, I found the place was in a state of expectancy. It seemed that an event of moment was impending. There was no secret about it; an official announcement had appeared. Sir Charles Innes, the Governor, was coming to inspect.
‘His Excellency will be here on March 14th,’ the Commissioner of the Division told me, when I called on him. ‘I depend on you to supervise the arrangements.’
I got my focus and threw myself into the work.
The Burmese are masters of the pavilion style of architecture and, as it was a pavilion they had to erect on the river bank for Sir Charles to step into from his boat, a delightful structure soon took shape. It was made of bamboo and coloured paper and was modelled on the main hall of the ‘Centre of the Universe’, as King Thibaw had called his palace at Mandalay. Laughing and spring-like, it rustled at the water’s edge, the spire strung with little flags. There was one trifle about it I did not appreciate. The paper roofs were printed to look like corrugated iron. That useful article had first been introduced by the Public Works department and the Burmese had learnt to use it instead of thatch. It was less inflammable and more lasting—that was how one excused the substitution. But now I perceived that it also had an aesthetic appeal to the Burmese. To do honour to His Excellency the carpenters roofed his pavilion with it, or rather, with a very close copy in paper.
Early on the appointed day everyone was in position, that is to say the officials and their wives, the Municipality and board members. The civil population was conspicuously absent, for the Government of Burma was an official government.
Sir Charles stepped ashore. He was a handsome man, with a very good address. They conducted him to the dais inside the pavilion and there invited him to sit down on the best chair Sagaing could provide—in the Empire style, to the best of my recollection. The President of the Municipality read a loyal address, to which His Excellency listened with a natural urbanity.
Outside, except for a few policemen, there was no-one in sight. The immense river went silently past and the flags on the pavilion flapped jauntily. One was afflicted by a vague sense of disharmony. Sir Charles himself could hardly have regarded the occasion as more than a piece of routine.
That was what diarchy looked like in 1928 in a country place.
Later, in the Commissioner’s drawing-room, I was introduced to Sir Charles. His cordial manner permitted me to forget that I was a Civilian more than ten years his junior. In almost a natural atmosphere we conversed as two Englishmen, to the amazement, I thought, of some of the onlookers.
The subject of the Simon Commission happened to crop up. Sir John had already landed in India, had seen the black flag and read ‘Simon, go back!’
‘Nothing like that could happen in Sagaing,’ said I, making conversation.
For a matter of fact it is not the Burmese way to be rude.
The Governor agreed. ‘Anyway, he isn’t landing here,’ he said.
I found something chilling in this remark. Sagaing was such an unimportant little place. Great events were pending; Burma after a long eclipse was going to have her chance; if she could gain London’s ear, her life would be changed. That Sir John Simon would not land even for a moment at Sagaing, cut one clean off from the chief interest of the day. Rather forlorn, I continued the conversation.
When it was time for Sir Charles to give someone else an innings he said to me very pleasantly: ‘Well, Collis, I hope you’ll like your new district.’
I replied: ‘Thank you, sir, I’m sure I shall,’ but I felt like a man condemned to exile.
I was too sensitive to the stir in the air to want to stay in Sagaing, and, curiously enough, I did not really believe that I should. Yet afterwards, when I considered the matter, when I reflected that the Governor himself did the postings, I did not see what...
