The last king of Burma and the last emperor of India (2/2) The Last Mughal - William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple - The Last Mughal

Dalrymple describes the events surrounding the great uprising in India from an original perspective, which differs considerably from British historiography.

Bahadur Shah Zafar was the emperor or mughal of India in name, but all the power was with the British occupiers. After the mutiny in 1857-1858 he was exiled (forever disturbing the balance between Hindus and Muslims in India along the way) to Rangoon in Burma - now Yangon in Myanmar. There he died in 1862. He was buried as quickly as possible by the British in a secret place, not to create a place of pilgrimage for anti-British. His grave was rediscovered in 1991.

The location of his grave had been a secret for a long time. But the book gave some clues as to where it was, so now we wanted to look for it. The first step was to find a hotel in the part of the city where the grave should be. Theatre road now had a Burmese name, but our guess was it must have been near the National Theatre.

The second step was to inquire about the Shah's grave at the hotel reception. Five people pieced the answer together, and they even sketched us a map. It was a half-hour walk. Through the embassy area, with many vacant ministries. The capital was recently moved to a newly built city in the interior. The Russian embassy was an unprecedented fortress with high walls, lots of barbed wire, heavy security and fenced off streets.

When we arrived at the destination, we had to ask for the exact location. Five different people gave four opposite directions. But after fifteen more minutes we had found the right place.

A modest compound with small minarets; some halls ("established in cooperation with the Government of India"); three "graves" that looked like a made-up bed, for the Shah, his wife and his daughter-in-law. A little further on, where his real grave was found in 1990, a basement with another tomb.

There were some visitors who worshiped the deceased as saints (in the religious sense). It was lively and serene at the same time. The whole thing was simple but made quite an impression.

 Yangon, January 2008

The last emperor of India had been exiled to Burma. The last king of Burma had been exiled to India. I had now visited the last place of residence / grave of both. This makes history tangible.

PS Nowadays both places are easy to find on Google Maps and attract quite some foreign visitors.

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The last king of Burma and the last emperor of India (1/2) The Glass Palace - Amitav Ghosh

The British used to ban defeated and deposed rulers from their colonies to other countries. This way they prevented them from becoming a martyr who might inspire rebels.

The last king of Burma and the last emperor of India were exiled to each other's country, and I visited the last hometown / resting place of both. In both cases following instructions in a book in which they appear.

Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace

The Glass Palace is a beautiful novel against the historical background of Thebaw, the last king of Burma, and what became of his staff and acquaintances. The different storylines develop across India, Burma and Malaysia. I had already visited most of the places where the book is located: Mandalay, Rangoon, Calcutta, Penang and even the hidden archaeological excavations of Lembah Bujang.

Thebaw was deposed in 1885. He was exiled to Ratnagiri, a small town on the west coast of India, some 300 km south of Bombay - now Mumbai. A small palace was built for him. He died in 1916 and was buried in a walled part of the Christian cemetery.

So, the reason I visited Ratnagiri was to visit the king's palace. It was a lot more impressive than I expected: fairly large, three storeys, verandas and balcony, majestic, on a large compound. The outbuildings now house an archaeological or educational institute. The main building was empty. Grass grew through the cracks, roof tiles had snapped, windows were broken. The doors were locked. For a moment I considered breaking in, which would surely succeed with some force, but I rejected that.

I walked around the building a couple of times and found a staircase that took me to the rear balcony. One door there was not locked. That was a way inside. I wandered through the deserted halls and rooms, over the large wooden stairs and up to the front balcony, from where the king looked out over the mouth of the river and the bay. That was an important element in the book, and it was overwhelming I could enjoy the same view.

Opposite the palace, a stone staircase led down the hill. I walked down to a small settlement of shabby huts. I climbed back up and went looking for the Collector's Bungalow. The collector and his wife also played an important part in the book. This place was harder to find, everybody pointed me in a different direction. In the end it turned out to be a surprisingly simple retreat for what was at the time the district's most important British civil servant. At the bottom of the garden was indeed a place where you could sit and look over the river.

Ratnagiri, November 2004

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The Rohingya: A people hidden in the jungle

Visiting the Thai-Malaysian border

This was real jungle with lots of trees that sprouted up to 50 meters straight up to catch a little light where their crown expanded. Thick lianas and parasitic plants growing around it. Withered leaves of half a meter mixed with bright red leaves covered the ground.

The trail was held in place by shallow roots, except for a stretch that was washed down, where we had to climb. There the vines and roots came in handy to hold on to. Traces of wild boar, thorny rattan, large butterflies, loud high-pitched chirping of insects - the forest was full of them.

We walked along a path through the Thale Ban National Park in the far southwestern corner of Thailand. According to the sign this was an evermoist forest, almost but not quite as impenetrable as the tropical rain forest that we had seen further south in Malaysia. This was an inhospitable area of swamps, mountains and jungle. That's why we had crossed the border with a cargo boat on the Andaman Sea.

But now we were near the only land border in the region, a small road with little traffic and certainly no public transport. The last 20 kilometres we had hitch-hiked with a border guard in uniform, in a big pick-up truck on his way to work. The National Park was two kilometres from the border with nothing but jungle between.

It was shocking, but not unimaginable, when we read in the newspaper a few months later that exactly here they discovered secret refugee camps where Rohingyas had been detained, extorted by traffickers and left for dead.

The boat people, refugees

Thailand and Myanmar share a long border, and some 150.000 Karen have been stuck for 30 years in refugee camps just across the border in Thailand, 1500 kilometres to the north. They are now a major destination for cultural visits and volunteer work by Western tourists. In contrast the Rohingya from western Myanmar are virtually unknown. They are not accepted because their religion is different from the majority, the Buddhists. They cannot flee over the border with Thailand through the jungle, but need to sail across the Andaman Sea. Their goal is Malaysia, where Muslims are the majority. But often their boats land in southern Thailand, where on their way to Malaysia they fall into the hands of human traffickers.

At open sea, their boats were chased or towed away by the Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian coast guard. In May 2015 the case received so much international attention that Malaysia decided to allow them in temporarily.

Visiting Rakhine state

We were especially touched by this case since seven years ago we were in Rakhine, the Myanmar region where the Rohingya come from. For a short time the area was accessible when Myanmar was just beginning to be more open and the regime sought rapprochement with the opposition and the world. But soon a new domestic conflict was sought and found in this minority. Although they have lived in Rakhine for many generations or centuries, partly descendants of Persian and Arab traders, partly migrants within what was one British colony in the 19th century, they are now seen as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Looking back, it is astonishing that at that time we did not recognize the region as Islamic. Apparently they already had to keep a low profile. The streets of Sittwe were dominated by monks, nuns and temples. The scarce tourist did not bring prosperity to Mrauk U, which was clearly a dead poor corner of the country. Cell phones had no cover in Sittwe, Mrauk U did not even have a land line with the rest of the world.

Mrauk U was an ancient capital of a 16th century empire that stretched over parts of present Bangladesh (whose proximity was illustrated by imported cookies in the store) and the current Rakhine State. There were a lot of temples and pagodas of that time left, located half way between the village and the fields, sometimes dilapidated and overgrown. Again and again you'd see another temple on a hill or around the corner. The setting alone was stunning, but the chedis themselves were also beautiful.

We walked around, occasionally accompanied by groups of children who should have been at school. Further away from the village there were no more children shouting "bye bye" or calling after you, but vast fields and women who walked with baskets on their heads. There wasn't a meter of paved street, not a wall of stone. All was wood and bamboo and dirt yards.

A bizarre circle

This last paragraph of my 2008 travel diary, and the paragraph from my 2015 travel diary this piece started with, join a bizarre circle around two places that we visited in ignorance, and then briefly made the world news. Only to be forgotten again.

Amsterdam, May-July 2015, June 2016